“Future Theory” CBG (Condensed Boston-Gig): 25-minute speed-edit of the Boston #Future_Studies session [—https://twitter.com/youtopos/status/1712484682804404634]
http://Drive.Google.com/file/d/1IuYNngbUSAspbkIW_el4PHIEDzLIA8oZ

‘Theory’, from the Greek θεωρία, is derived from the Greek word θεωρός, meaning to-catch-‘sight’-of (-ωρός) a ‘view’ (θεα-); … it shares the same roots, etymologically, as the related word ‘theatre’. The latter fact is part of the reason why the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche exhorted us to “open up our theatre-eye—the great ‘third eye’ that looks out into the world through the other two” (#Morgenröte—#Dawn/#Daybreak—§507). ‘Future’ is derived from an irregular anticipatory active participle of the Latin sum—‘I am’—namely the ‘I will be’ &/or ‘I am [in the process of] ʙᴇᴄᴏᴍɪɴɢ’ that was the Latin #futūrus, the #fu of which derives from the older Greek #phúō (φύω): ‘to appear’, ‘to become’, ‘to arise’ (root of #phúsis—φύσις—the Greek word for nature from which we get our idea[s] of the physical-a.k.a-natural world). ‘Future Theory’, strictly speaking, would be a ‘catching-sight-of’ the ‘view’ which ‘arises’, ‘appears’, ‘becomes present’ (presented to us) in-&-as the ‘theatre’ of ‘nature’ (φύσις). The problem, in the words of the #phusiológoi, the ancient Greek philosopher-logicians-of-nature (or to be more precise, in the words of Heraclitus, author of the treatise entitled ’On Nature’), is that φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ: nature loves to #hide, to #conceal, to #encrypt itself. The ‘theatre’ and ‘theory’ here aren’t easy to see, to catch-sight-of: they are obscure, indeed ‘by ɴᴀᴛᴜʀᴇ’ obscured. So for all of their visual inclinations, the words ‘theory’ and ‘future’ (and the phrase ‘Future Theory’) are actually anti-apparent, anti-appearance. To enter into the theatre of theory (‘Future Theory’ more specifically: futurity being even harder to discern, since it ɪꜱɴ’ᴛ yet—i.e. since it has no ‘ʙᴇɪɴɢ’ yet) is to enter into a theatre of obscurity—what could be called ‘the fog of war’, to lift a phrase from theorists dealing with the theatre of war (the term itself is from Carl von Clausewitz) … This was also a point made by Heraclitus long ago, since he was of the opinion that the theatre-of-operations in which he, as a philosopher-of-nature, ‘operated’, was itself a theatre-of-war: war being the basis of all things, all things coming-to-be (coming into and out of existence/appearance) through struggle/strife/battle/fightⁱⁿᵍ/ᴡᴀʀ (πόλεμος). I am ‘myself’ only in-so-far and in-as-much as I fight (that is, struggle) to be who I am.

When, in his masterwork #Finnegans_Wake (the title of which is a pun on the French word ‘fin’, meaning the ‘end’, the English word ‘again’, calling-into-question definitive ‘ends’, and the idea of both waking-up to the possibility of ‘ends’ repeating again and of ꜰᴜɴᴇʀᴀʟ-ʀɪᴛᴇꜱ [‘ᴡᴀᴋᴇꜱ’] ꜰᴏʀ ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ being—in the endless ‘end’ again—ꜰᴜɴᴇʀᴀʟ-ʀɪᴛᴇꜱ ꜰᴏʀ ᴛʜᴇ ᴇᴠᴇʀ-ʟɪᴠɪɴɢ), … [[When, then (to start that sentence again)]] the modernist writer James Joyce joined-together the two words that most ‘struck’ the post·modernist theorist Jacques Derrida, the words ‘ʜᴇ ᴡᴀʀ’, (subject of a 1982 lecture by Derrida entitled ‘Two Words for Joyce’), he—Joyce—was making another pun: one that both demonstrated and enacted what could be called the Heraclitean fog-of-war, since the phrase ‘ʜᴇ ᴡᴀʀ’ functions in the text like ‘he was’ (hence a statement of being, or rather, of having been) while also suggesting that the person in question is at war (‘he wars’, ‘he [makes] war’), which of course would make sense as far as Heraclitus would be concerned, since for Heraclitus being ＩS war. … The phrase functions multi-linguistically [[like the title of the book, and like every phrase ɪɴ that book]] in-this-particular-case because, as Derrida pointed-out in his lecture, ‘ᴡᴀʀ’ actually means ‘ᴡᴀꜱ’ in German. War with an ʜ before the ʀ—ᴡᴀʜʀ—is the German word for truth (what is true), so ᴀʟʀᴇᴀᴅʏ what we have here with only two words (these two words: ʜᴇ ᴡᴀʀ), is a word-cloud: a fog-of-words. Words, like all things, are (even in their strict precision) cloudy, murky, obscure. Any sense of ‘precision’ is a mask covering-over its true/ᴡᴀʜʀᴇɴ ‘nature’, its ‘nature’ as ‘true’/ᴡᴀʜʀᴇɴ/ᴡᴀʜʀ. And its ‘truth’—“ᴛʀᴜᴛʜ”—is ᴡᴀʀ. … ‘Truth’ is always in conlict; ‘truth’ is always a conflict (always conflictual, always conflicted; any sense otherwise is merely flicker-fusion—illusion).

Mention of the post·structuralist theorist Jacques Derrida brings me to part of the readings for this session, from William Allen’s recently-published book on literary, literal and philosophical #Illegibility. On page 24 of our 26-page extracts from his book, Allen writes about the furtive—that-is-to-say evasive—quality of futurity, and quotes Derrida with regard to this very notion ... “The ‘furtive’ would thus be the dispossessing power that always hollows-out speech in the evasion of self-reference” since what we have to say about the future is, strictly speaking, kind of hollow (the future being, as yet, ‘empty’: a blank space) and in-no-actual-sense something we can truly ‘possess’. Derrida suggests that it is therefore both beyond our possession (in fact, a ‘dispossession’) and beyond the surety or security of any actual/active self-relation. It is in this way doubly ‘hollow’ (a double ‘hollowing’). “Furtiveness is a double power, and takes place through this duplicity.” The idea here is that ‘the furitive’—the furtivity of futurity in our case—is a kind of splitting, both within whatever is presently presented (the given text or context: the text-qua-context itꜱᴇʟꜰ) and, since it breaks-up and breaks-with this text-qua-context, beyond the text-qua-context. The ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are both “hollowed-out” and start to echo. Becoming aware of this ᴇᴄʜᴏlogy is unnerving, disconcerting, and downright disorienting (‘inside’ and ‘outside’ become overlapping holes—holes with and without a ‘w’).

“The abandoning of the self [/self-reference] to ‘the furtive’ [amounts to] a delegated or deferred decision. To confirm this point,” writes Allen, Derrida moves into a discussion of Georges Bataille’s interest in ‘slipping’ or ‘sliding’- words: words that appear to ‘silence’ themselves—like the word ‘silence’ itself, which can only renounce itself in its annunciation.” The concept of the ’sliding’ or ‘slippery’ word (blatant in the case of a word like ‘silence’, but less obvious, or more subtle, when it comes to words in general), attempts to highlight the fact that ‘stability’ rather than ‘slipperiness’ is the goal—generally speaking—when it comes to language: the goal, but not necessarily the way things ᴀʀᴇ, the way ‘ʜᴇ ᴡᴀʀ’ here (going back to Joyce). The present (and presented) world, the present (and presented) word, [[the way we presently ‘word’ our world]] slides into the future in weird ways—‘weird’ being a word that means ‘strange’ but is actually derived from an Old English word for ‘fate’, as in ‘destiny’ or ‘destined future’ (our ‘future destination’). The poet Mallarmé—whose name literally means ‘insufficiently armed or armored’ (a soldier poorly armed for battle), just as Georges Bataille’s name means ‘war’ &/or ‘battle’: ‘bataille’—was well aware that no-matter how well-prepared one might be, no-matter how well one mitigates (i.e. lessens) the influence of chance, chance will never be abolished, and the writer (who always writes for the future, N.B) in some respects throws-down words like a gambler throws dice. … ‘A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance’—‘Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’: this was the title of Mallarmé’s most famous poem. And as Allen explains on the next page of our readings (page 25 out of 26), Mallarmé’s method seems to have been one of being open to chance, being open to the blank unknown spaces and places. “The blank is not only the space between words, and between the text and the seemingly endless field of the page, but it is also to be found within the words themselves in their phonic or textual form as the blank empty whiteness (blancheur) of their spacing alongside the curves-and-seams of their folds—in French, their pliˢ prior to ex-plication.” By playing on (and playing with) the various possibilities of word-work in every page of his poem, Mallarmé allows both a destabilization of his text and, in addition, what Allen (via Derrida) calls the “diacritical appearance of another kind of reading: the lateral, differential ᴠᴀʀɪᴀᴛɪᴏɴ that is marked by the spacings and openings of the text. These are not variations from an established or potential ‘center’ or ‘culmination’, for (as Derrida makes clear) the poetic expanse cannot be gathered-up into a final or total meaning.” The text—heck, any text, any context—unveils itself, unfolds itself, (is unfolded) in different ways by different readers (and different readings), hence “fans out”… or, to use the French word, becomes a kind of “éventail” [[noting here that the French word for a fan, éventail, harbors in it the word event (the ᴇᴠᴇɴᴛᴜᴀʟ): the event (and eventuality) of its very ʀᴇᴀᴅɪɴɢ]].

In my “Seven Prophecies of the Future” video-lecture (screened at the ꜰᴜᴛᴜʀᴇ ꜱᴛᴜᴅɪᴇꜱ ᴘʀᴏɢʀᴀᴍ installation for the 2021 #Venice_Biennale) I took Professor Mohaghegh’s key word—his key word for the Third of these Seven Prophecies being ‘ᴛᴇᴍᴘʟᴇ’—and unpacked it backward and forward, showing that the word itself, like the word for the Old Medieval ‘Soldiers of the Temple’ (the ‘Templars’), designates a site or situation of contemplation and of what the French might call ‘un temps plié’: a folded or enfolded ‘time’. The task of that talk (and of each recorded talk screened at that show) was to exemplify the given ‘key word’ with an interesting architectural, artistic and cutting-edge technological example, and my selections were the unfolding over a span of several dynasties (& about 2,000 years) of the great Egyptian temple of Luxor’s construction, the unfolding of a contortionist’s body in-&-out of a glass box for a work of performance-art, and the folding-&-unfolding of complex contemporary technologies (medical apparatuses used in surgeries, space-exploration apparatuses loaded onto rockets in compact form and then unfolded once the rockets reach orbit, et-cetera, using principles taken from the Japanese art of origami—in this case called technorigami). I mention this here, not only because it refers to notions of “fanning-out” or unfolding, but also because these “fannings” or unfoldings take place (and take time) over radically different time-spans (time-&-space-spans): 2,000 years in the case of the Temple of Luxor. ... Which leads me to the subject of ᴛɪᴍᴇ-ᴄʀʏꜱᴛᴀʟꜱ—a topic that will lead me to a point that might undo some of what I have just said (and in this way exemplify how quickly ‘what we know’ can be displaced, replaced, or erased). …

[[#ᴄᴏɴᴛɪɴᴜᴇᴅ]]