Which is to say, no future at all. DRM
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Not that it matters, but the death of the future was the central theme in Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire, a set of Charles Elliot Norton lectures he gave in June 1972. The table of contents basically says it all in a nutshell:
1. A Tradition against Itself
2. The Revolt of the Future
3. Children of the Mire
4 Analogy and Irony
5. Translation and Metaphor
6. The Closing of the Circle
Revolution/Eros/Meta-Irony
The Pattern Reversed
The Twilight of the Avant-Garde
The lectures trace the arc from the French Revolution and its poetic reaction of Romanticism (Tradition against itself) as the conscious awareness of an aesthetic and secular revolt of the discontent intelligencia against the post-revolutionary bourgeois order (Revolt of the Future). In this revolt instead of returning to a mythic past, romanticism invents the future as the temporal resolution to the dialectic of art v. life (Hegel). Paz moves on the gritty naturalism of mid-19th Century of Baudelaire and Courbet, and then the grim industrial moments (Children of the Mire) of Marx and Zola.
The arrival of the Russian revoluton and WWI contains the merging of avant-gard `future' with a `future' utopia of communism and social reform movements of 20s-30s in general, with their ambivalent supra-rational orders of modernity (Revolution/Eros/Meta-Irony). And then the closing of the temporal circle with the disillution of revolutionary ideals, the collapse into the dysotpia of tech-noire, and finally meta-irony against itself, as the death of the future, placed in the post-WWII to the Sixties era:
``The end of art and poetry? No: the end of the `modern era' and with it, the end of the idea of the `modern art and literature.' Criticism of the object prepares the way for the resurrection of the work of art, not as something to be possessed, but as a presence to be contemplated. The work is not an end in itself nor does it exist in its own right: the work is a bridge, an intermediary. Nor does criticism of the subject imply the destruction of poet or artist but only of the bourgeois idea of author. For the Romantics, the voice of the poet was the voice of All; for us it is the voice of No One. `All' and `No One' are equal to each other, and both are equally far from the author and his `I'. '' (Children of the Mire, 160p)
That's the rough sweep. Paz was optimistic. I am not.
The correspondence between the above movements in the arts and the developmental phases and dissolutions of the modern capitalist system of production can be made, mostly using leftist styled post-modernists like Harvey and Jamesion. They encompass the transistion from the fully rationalized and routine production of `objects' like tanks or Fords at the begining of the last century (modernity)---to the creation of transitive states of being at the end of the century forming an economy of mere `services', `permissions', `access', `information', `downloads', `upgrades' and other emphemera which have no material substrate at all (post-modern, so-called post-industrial `products'). With this transistion, a temporal order where the `future' has some positive and definite direction is erased, through a miasma of interlocking socio-economic hierarchies of credit and financial `devices' (mere regulations transduced into pseudo-objects possessed by pseudo-classes, statistical profiles) which return the material projection toward the futuristic utopia, into the closed circle of a never-ending present---the totemistic mantra of the neoliberal Empire.
Thus we live both materially and conceptually in a ritualistic present wholly without temporal extension of either past or future (capital dreams not of the future, but the zero-time of now). To which I would add, exactly like our music---the a-melodic a-harmonic omni-present heart beat of the boom-box rapping free associations in proto-words of pornographic violence---chanting the primodial universals of blood and semen to all and no one, a reductionism of being and nothing, becoming manifest as body, only to be fully present in acts of sex and death---the beat atomizing time itself as the cardinal of aleph-nought: one and one and one and one...
Chuck Grimes