Nick Srnicek: Postcapitalist Temporalities

Series 2.1: POST-CONTEMPORARY

Contemporary art, as the name says, is the art of its time: it belongs to the present in which it takes place. Moreover, that present is not just a moment of time but a (now global) societal organisation that art draws from and engages with. However, this limitation of contemporary art to the present-day means that art has lost the traction on futurity that historically typified the avant-gardes of modernism. In this, contemporary art deprives the present of having any direction at all. The overall directionlessness of contemporary art today - its multifariousness - is one index of this destruction of futurity.

Yet finance capitalism, the energy sector, the military, social media, artificial intelligence and big data, bioengineering and speculative theory are all now increasingly shaping the present by operationalising a relation to the future and its uncertainties. These institutional configurations can be called post-contemporary: they are - they will be - shaping the very forms of societal organisation that contemporary art claims to work from and which it claims to address.

If contemporary art remains bound to the time of its making it misses - will miss - the changing futural dynamics of the present. The post-contemporary is happening now. In order to remain contemporary, contemporary art must then become post-contemporary. This series of lectures will examine how futurity can be deployed to that end.

NICK SRNICEK: POSTCAPITALIST TEMPORALITIES

What happened to the future? With the death of grand narratives, and the consolidation of global capitalism, it has become common to deem the future over. The right deems this a world historical end point, while the left falls into melancholy and empty negativity. Can we think a postcapitalist futurity today? What would it mean in light of the twentieth century and the critiques made of progress? This talk will try and suggest some ways forward.

Bio: Nick Srnicek is the co-author of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, 2015 with Alex Williams).

Видео Nick Srnicek: Postcapitalist Temporalities канала Goldsmiths Art