Visions of the Future

This essay analyzes two contemporary video artworks—one by the Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour and one by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana—in an attempt to better comprehend contemporary visions of the future in the arts of this region. I focus on the chronotope of Temple Mount, or al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf, as a study case that assembles many of the most essential themes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the future of the land is contemplated through the ways in which this indivisible holy site can be shared by the two nations. Through a reading of the two artworks and their commonalities—both suggest dispossession, relocation, and commodification as alternatives to the current conflicted situation—I ask whether these works exit their own cultural and political zeitgeist and therefore open up new possibilities or whether they are, rather, exemplary of our times, in which we find a growing tendency to depict the future as hopeless.

Sami Berdugo’s poetics exposes a unique concept of time. It is a time that can be described as rhizomatic. Unlike space, time can be described as rhizomatic not merely in terms of its divergence into multiple paths but also in terms of being arrested, floating with no apparent progress in any direction. Berdugo’s time is not the linear time we are accustomed to think in but rather, to borrow Bakhtin’s term, a chronotope: it is more a fusion of spacetime or body-in-space than a linear progress. This essay describes immigrants’ time as the Other, the time that cannot be properly measured, the time that refuses advancement. It is also the great Other threatening the immigrants themselves and their sense of freedom.

Narrative gives meaning to the passage of time by organizing it into a structured whole. The Western structure of temporality traditionally implied teleology, or what Frank Kermode called “a sense of ending.” For the last two thousand years, narratives of the future employed two generic templates: utopia and dystopia. Utopia, a literary depiction of an ideal society, and dystopia, its dark double, postulated a historical teleology in which the future was qualitatively different from the past and the present. In my essay I argue that we have entered the period of post-utopia, characterized by the sense of a continuous present, nostalgia, and narrative formlessness. Even those fictions that seem to represent a dystopian or apocalyptic transformation of the present are, in fact, articulations of the refusal to imagine the future. And this refusal is a symptom of a general paralysis of the historical imagination whose repercussions go beyond literature. The essay discusses the genre of young-adult (YA) fantasy and science fiction as highly symptomatic of the post-utopian trend in literature today. Though YA fantastic fiction is often described as dystopian, I argue that this is a misnomer and that such texts as Hunger Games, Maze Runner, The Giver, and other popular YA fantasies are, in fact, post-utopias and post-dystopias, characterized by specific narrative and thematic features that I describe as subversion of the bildungsroman, narrative circularity, and history as trauma.

This essay examines a figure for the spectatorship of catastrophe in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870): Captain Nemo viewing the lost Atlantis 300 meters beneath the Atlantic. It shows how Verne transforms romantic images of beholding ruins as picturesque or sublime in this scene by putting a helmet on the beholder. This helmet, required by divers for survival underwater, masks the countenance of the beholder, a mask that Verne extends to the posture of Nemo, who is petrified as he contemplates Atlantis by the glowing light of lava that is, bizarrely, still erupting. The essay makes sense of the scene by drawing on Maurice Blanchot’s poetics of disaster, arguing that the helmeted beholder creates a new image of spectatorship in tandem with a new temporality of ruins, collapsing past, present, and future into catastrophic paralysis. The essay then traces the legacy of this figure in science fiction films of outer space, from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). The image of the helmeted beholder occurs in scenes in these films that, as in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, show a cataclysmic moment when the astronaut’s empowered agency is suspended, revealing the mind-blowing power of a cosmos he or she is powerless to affect.

“Animals, who do not think at all, the boa for whom digestion is a matter of long days, the marmot who sleeps all winter, the whale who lives for three hundred years, the seagull who flies for a month without tiring”: these creatures, evoked by Proust in Jean Santeuil, provide examples of relationships to reality and duration that are radically different from those of human beings. Proust, that “expert” in time, is not the only writer to be fascinated by the diversity of animal temporalities—and perhaps by unthinkable forms of extratemporalities. At the very moment of the Sixth Extinction, contemporary writers, by complex and various literary means, are attempting to immerse their readers in other forms of projection into the future. The problem is knowing whether the ark on which the Proustian zoo embarked 120 years ago is still able to float: “For you are dimming, whales! Like enormous lamps. And if you are not going to be there, you and the other beasts, do you think we will be able to find our way in the dark?” (Chris Marker and Mario Ruspoli, Vive la baleine!, Argos Films, 1972)

This essay attempts to show and think the way in which young artistic, poetic, and political collectives (e.g., in France: Catastrophe, Mauvaise troupe, Jef Klak, Le peuple qui manque) cope with the current social situation facing youth in order to imagine, through their everyday practices, the forms of a life to come. New collective writing, inventions of links, and ways of relating to work, affects, ecodiplomacies, struggles, theoretical mobilizations: all are inventions of ways to live in a damaged world. The future, here, is grasped through the figure of impatience (the impatience to make), and all the actual forms of precariousness find themselves braved and defied in those vigorous practices of imagination.