DÉTOURS VERS LES FUTURS

A certain conception of the future seemed outdated, rooted in the past of modernist culture: the future conceived as a point situated on the temporal horizon of a necessary and inevitable line of progress. This future as goal, as end, as telos, and as an ideal that could be drawn in advance—even if this ideal had to await the advance of history and the mobilization of the forces necessary to accelerate its advent against other antagonistic forces—this teleological future, then, is also the time of the modern Western utopia. For a long time, this utopia endured as a horizon within the field of art, even as, in other spheres, particularly political ones, the idea of the revolutionary avant-garde had faded away. Yet even the “progress” of art, and the struggles between tendencies and movements to fulfill its meaning, eventually folded back in on itself into an institutional game that essentially projects itself onto the calendar, paced by biennials. Everywhere, the teleological conception of the future thus seemed to have been switched off with the end of the “grand narratives” described by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition, plunging us into the presentism of information flows and networks.
And yet this linear future has been switched back on, reactivated like a spectral image or like the zombie of History, continuing its march in a straight line, emaciated and stripped of its humanist promise, but equipped with the machines of techno-capitalism: the calculated horizon of ecological catastrophe and the algorithmic nightmare of the end of the human mind, two manifestations of a kind of hypermodern future projected ahead like a horror film, acclimatizing us, amid wars and extreme climatic events, to a new rendition of the grand tragic narrative of terrestrial life.
How can we resist this future of the living dead? The critique of modernity had turned toward the resources of cyclical time, the time of tradition, often interpreted in reductive ways, the time of return that reassures and stabilizes roles and identities. It is another movement that will interest us in this seminar: that of the detour, the deviation, the narrative that escapes the dominant story, and cultures and forms of thought (popular culture, science fiction, speculative philosophy, anthropology, etc.) that divert and transform perspectives. This detour also takes the form of experiences and works that make the existence of other possibilities palpable, here and now, including through alternative uses of artificial intelligence technologies. In a sense, the aim will be to “queer” the future in order to pluralize it, drawing in particular on the propositions and work of the seminar’s participants. In this way, we would like to contribute to rethinking “futurity,” to borrow the concept developed by philosopher Frédéric Neyrat (University of Wisconsin–Madison), with whom we will collaborate on a reflection on “counter-futures,” with the aim, in particular, of producing a special issue of the online journal Alienocene together with the seminar’s participants.