Museums and libraries are heterotopias

Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.

Michel Foucault, 'Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias' in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité (at https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwimo4-YlaHkAhVQblAKHWf9DZoQFjAFegQIBRAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fweb.mit.edu%2Fallanmc%2Fwww%2Ffoucault1.pdf&usg=AOvVaw333VKyhg9HhLuy9An6eJNQ ) p.7

Progress is a matter of political struggle, following no pre-plotted trajectory or natural tendency

Various modernities are possible, and new visions of the future are essential for the left. Such images are a necessary supplement to any transformative political project. They give a direction to political struggles and generate a set of criteria to adjudicate which struggles to support, which movements to resist, what to invent, and so on. In the absence of images of progress, there can only be reactivity, defensive battles, local resisitance and a bunker mentality – what we have characterised as folk politics. Visions of the future are therefore indispensable for elaborating a movement against capitalism. Contra the earlier thinkers of modernity, there is no necesssity to progress, nor a single pathway from which to adjudicate the extent of development. Instead, progress must be understood as hyperstitional: as a kind of fiction, but one that aims to transform itself into a truth. Hyperstitions operate by catalysing dispersed sentiment into a historical force that brings the future into existence. They have the temporal form of 'will have been'. Such hyperstitions of progress form orienting narratives with which to navigate forward, rather than being an established or necessary property of the world. Progress is a matter of political struggle, following no pre-plotted trajectory or natural tendency, and with no guarantee of success. If the supplanting of capitalism is impossible from the standpoint of one or even many defensive stances, it is because any form of prospective politics must set out to construct the new. Pathways of progress must be cut and paved, not merely travelled along in some pre-ordained fashion; they are a matter of political achievement rather than divine or earthly providence.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) pp. 74-75

the stasis of a present moment

If modernity projects a present of permanent transition, forever reaching beyond itself, the contemporary fixes or enfolds such transitoriness within the duration of a conjuncture, or at its most extreme, the stasis of a present moment.

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 24

Supermodernity makes history into spectacle

What is seen by the spectator of modernity is the interweaving of old and new. Supermodernity, though, makes the old (history) into a specific spectacle, as it does with all exoticism and all local particularity.

Marc Augé, Non-places (Verso, 2008) p. 89

At the cost of community

The polis – the Greek city – was the center of Western communal life, based on the now-faulty assumptions of a common purpose, a common consensus, and an unmediated harmony and unity of all human life. Through our postmodern deconstruction of totalizations, we think we have reinstated freedom of choice and enabled the voice of alterity to rise, but we have clearly done so at the cost of community.

M. Christine Boyer, CyberCities (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996) p. 28

Non-places are the real measure of our time

If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike in Baudelarean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of 'places of memory', and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position. A world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shanty-towns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity); where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral, offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object, whose unprecedented dimensions might usefully be measured before we start wondering to what sort of gaze it may be amenable. [...] Non-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified – with the aid of a few conversions between area, volume and distance – by totalling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called 'means of transport' (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself.

Marc Augé, Non-Places (Verso, 2008) pp. 63-64

Modernity knows of no other life but made

The modern romance with progress – with life that can be 'worked out', to be more satisfactory than it is and bound to be so improved – is not over, though, and is unlikely to end soon. Modernity knows of no other life but 'made': the life of modern men and women is a task, not a given, and a task as yet uncompleted and relentlessly calling for more care and new effort. If anything, the human condition in the stage of 'fluid' modernity or 'light' capitalism has made that modality of life yet more salient: progress is no longer a temporary measure, an interim matter, leading eventually (and soon) to a state of perfection (that is a state in which whatever had to be done would have been done and no other change would be called for), but a perpetual and perhaps never-ending challenge and necessity, the very meaning of 'staying alive and well'.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 134

Modernity is the time when time has a history

In the time of the Greek Olympics no one thought of track or Olympic records, let alone of breaking them. The invention and deployment of something other than the power of human or animal muscles was needed for such ideas and for he decision to assign importance to the differences between the capacities of human individuals to move, to be conceived and to stimulate practice – and so for the prehistory of time, that long era of wetware-bound practice, to end, and the history of time to start. The history of time began with modernity. Indeed, modernity is, apart from anything else, perhaps more than anything else, the history of time: modernity is the time when time has a history.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 110

The future is over

Exhaustion is a cursed word in the frame of modern culture, which is based on the cult of energy and the cult of male aggressivity. But energy is fading in the postmodern world, for many reasons that are easy to detect.

Energy is fading because of the demographic trend: mankind is growing old, as a whole, because of the prolongation of life expectancy, and because of the decreasing birth rate. A sense of exhaustion results from this process of general aging, and what has been considered a blessing – the prolonged life expectancy – may prove to be a misfortune, if the myth of energy is not restrained and replaced with a myth of solidarity and great compassion. Energy is also fading because basic physical resources like oil are doomed to extinction or dramatic reduction. Finally, energy is fading because competition is stupid in the age of the general intellect. The general intellect is not based on juvenile impetus and male aggressivity – on fighting, winning, and appropriation. It is based on cooperation and sharing.

This is why the future is over, and we are living in a space that is beyond the future. If we are able to come to terms with this postfuturistic condition, we'll renounce accumulation and growth, and will be happy in sharing the wealth from our past of industrial labor and from our present of collective intelligence.

If we are not able to do this, we will be doomed to a century of violence, misery, and war.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) pp. 81-82

Idyllens rörelseproblem

Det finns en definitiv gräns för den mängd kulturstoff som en människa kan tillägna sig på ett aktivt, funktionellt sätt. [...] Och vad skulle behövas utöver detta? Vilken rörelse i vilken riktning skulle vara att föredra framför en fullständig rörelsefrihet inom den hittillsvarande mänskliga traditionen?
Den är tillräcklig.
Men vart tar människan vägen? Idyllens rörelseproblem innebär en paradox som kan formuleras så här. Meningsfull rörelse innebär att man är på väg någonstans. Idyllen, så som Schiller definierar den, avser att gestalta ett fulländningstillstånd. Vart skulle en människa i detta tillstånd bege sig? [...] Ett tillstånd utan meningsfull rörelse blir ett slags död. Det kan inte uppfattas som fulländat.

Sven Lindqvist, Myten om Wu Tao-tzu (Månpocket, 2013) pp. 85-86

Permutera historien

Själv vågar jag ännu inte tro på någonting, kanske är det förklaringen till att jag måste släppa allt och bara arbeta med detta. Kopiera, permutera, multiplicera – som en övning i produktivt användande av det förflutna och historien, ett användande som inte stannar vid representation eller åminnelse, utan även blir en återtillägnelse, en framtid. En åkallan? Att upprepa, kopiera, variera. Komplicera, permutera, multiplicera. Då spricker det monolitiska, då grumlas det klara. Då förvandlas historien, synbarligen lika oföränderlig som själva verkligheten, till något ofärdigt: det som nyss verkade vara fullbordat och klart öppnas därmed upp för en ny begynnelse, en fortsättning.

Andrezej Tichý, Kairos (Albert Bonniers, 2013)

Modernist architecture

Modernist architecture, just as the positivism that formed its foundations, was as single layered and hierarchical as the damaged cultural tissue it claimed to erase. Modernist architecture was too classical in its knowledge, too tied to cause-and-effect conceptions of process, too slavish in its worship of the machine (and its deterministic processes) to embody the chaotic spirit of the new age. Architecture, tied then and now to hierarchies of authority of both the left and the right, to modernist and postmodernist doctrines, has missed out on the revolution in knowledge that occurred in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and that continues today.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 15

We can no longer speak of wisdom. Only the products of its decay remain. There are two: one is the rumour about the true things (a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete); the other product of this diathesis is folly – which, to be sure, has utterly squandered the substance of wisdom, but preserves its attractiveness and assurance, which rumour invariably lacks.

Walter Benjamin, 'Max Brod's Book on Kafka' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 142

Låt mig vara tydlig: arbetssamhälle = kapitalism = tillväxt = modernitet.
Att tänka sig ett uppbrott från detta är en ganska stor sak. Det går bortom allt trams om “nolltillväxt”, vilket mest är ett sätt att bejaka tillväxtens kris – ett nollmål förutsätter ett samhälle där det fortfarande är meningsfullt att mäta “tillväxten”. På samma vis är “postmodernismen” mest ett sätt att bejaka modernitetens kris, utan att avskaffa dess kategorier.

Rasmus Fleischer, 'Till kritiken av arbetskritiken' on Copyriot (08/04/13)

Den moderna myten är en berättelse om framsteg, om mänsklighetens oupphörliga transport mot perfektion. Den linjära tidens obändiga framåtrörelse ekar i pornografins drivande dynamik, i den politiska ideologins idé om enkelriktad förbättring: alltid en strävan mot, aldrig en vila i. Förändring och förbättring utsätts för sammanblandning, ömsesidig omdefinition i termer av varandra.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) p. 109

This law would signify the following to us: in the same place, on the same limit, where history is finished, there where a certain determined concept of history comes to an end, precisely there the historicity of history begins, there finally it has the chance of heralding itself – of promising itself. There where man, a certain determined concept of man, is finished, there the pure humanity of man, of the other man and of man as other begins or has finally the chance of heralding itself – of promising itself. In an apparently inhuman or else a-human fashion. Even if these propositions still call for critical or deconstructive questions, they are not reducible to the vulgate of the capitalist paradise as end of history.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994) p. 93

Whatever may be its indetermination, be it that of "it is necessary [that there be] the future", there is some future and some history, there is perhaps even the beginning of historicity for post-historical Man, beyond man and beyond history such as they have been represented up until now. We must insist on this specific point precisely because it points to an essential lack of specificity, an indetermination that remains the ultimate mark of the future: whatever may be the case concerning the modality or the content of this duty, this necessity, this prescription or this injunction, this pledge, this task, also therefore this promise, this necessary promise, this "it is necessary" is necessary, and that is the law.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994) pp. 91-92

How can one be late to the end of history? A question for today. It is serious because it obliges one to reflect again, as we have been doing since Hegel, on what happens and deserves the name of event, after history; it obliges one to wonder if the end of history is but the end of a certain concept of history.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994) p. 17

De-growth, in the sense that it provides the philosophical foundations for a project for an autonomous society, is probably not a humanism because it is based upon a critique of development, growth, progress, technology and, ultimately, modernity and because it implies a break with Western centralism.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity Press, 2009) p. 99

Modernization, by stripping away the traditional representations with which human temporality was disguised and domesticated, revealed for one long stark moment the rift in existence through which the unjustifiability of the passing of time could not but be glimpsed, by Baudelaire, who called it ennui, the ticking away of the meter still running, the look downward into the meaninglessness of the organic, which does not set you any tasks but only condemns you to go on existing like a plant.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 84-85