Declaration of the Notion of The Future

TYPE: INS declaration
AUTHORIZED: First Committee, INS
AUTHORIZATION CODE: TMcC010910
DOCUMENT FOLLOWS

The International Necronautical Society now entering its eleventh year, the First Committee has recently come under pressure to release, in keeping with the INS’s avant-garde demeanor, some kind of “statement” both assessing the organization’s achievements and prognosticating for its future. Both these impulses we reject.

As for the first: What would it mean to speak “of” the INS’s first ten years? To speak above them, overdub? The commentary might include an account of the distribution of the Founding Manifesto at London’s Articultural Fair of 1999; of swift uptake of the Manifesto’s propositions by the art world and its institutions; of a string of ever-more-ambitious projects—hearings, publications, radio broadcasting units running out of Moderna Museet Stockholm and the Institute of Contemporary Arts London (the “black boxes,” as they have become known); of Declarations hosted by Tate Britain and the Drawing Center in New York; of less-voluntary hostings of our propaganda channels by the BBC and other media outlets, whose websites we have intermittently co-opted; and, finally, of historicization—of inclusion as a study-object on the syllabi of art schools.

But what would be the good of such a commentary? To count the scratches one has made across a strip of film assumes that one can step outside the film and hang it up to dry, pegged by quotation marks. An error of scale and a conceptual failing, too: the film is everywhere, always, already—and our aim should be to render it all scratches.

Should we speak, then, of the future? This might appear a more avant-garde undertaking. Yet we reject it, too, even more vehemently. Why? Because the concepts, presumptions, and ideologies embedded in this overstuffed and lazy meme—“The Future”—are in need of an urgent and vigorous demolition. Such a demolition is the task this Declaration sets itself. Its contents should, like all INS propaganda, be repeated, modified, distorted, and disseminated as the reader sees fit.

1. The Future, culturally speaking, begins with a car crash. Or rather, an account of one: a disaster always already mediated, archived, and replayed. “We had stayed up all night, my friends and I,” shouts Marinetti from the front page of Le Figaro in February 1909. In a few paragraphs he’ll launch into a lyrical eulogy of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons, of factories, trains, steamers, and aeroplane propellers cheering like enthusiastic crowds as they carry us forward; he’ll incite us to destroy the museums, libraries, and academies, and inform us that time and space died yesterday. But first, the car crash has to be narrated. After their frenzied nocturnal pacing and...