Scott McFarland
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jamespate
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markcmarino
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mkirkpatrick
slowstudies
Mrs. Johnson
Nalini
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devisingmemory
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You are invited to continue your Tomorrowland Forever discussions and provocations using this online public forum.
Posts and comments made before November 1, 2011 will be edited into a collectively-written review of the festival for Electronic Book Review (ebr): electronicbookreview.com.
ebr has a tradition of eminent critique, as well as a history of engagement with &NOW. For example, ebr published a review of the 2004 &NOW by Rob Wittig, Scott Rettberg and William Gillespie: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/festivarian
Thank you for your participation!
Sincerely,
Scott McFarland and James Pate
P.S. Questions? Email or call Scott: scott-mcfarland@sbcglobal.net or 773-505-3964.
Mark Wallace, 
Scott McFarland 000 on 000 Permalink |
textual elaborations? penumbra? beyond the digital? re:telling? break fiction’s future? UCSD? Undead? electronic literature? formal innovation + progressive politics? po(eat)ry? rituals? sculptural wayfinding? flesh tableaux? orphic genre? library innovention? formal alarm? crossing time? Emily Dickinson? FC2? drag and trash? sciamachy? FUTURE’S HISTORY? Encyclopedia Project? (di)visions? rhyme and rhizome? LandScrape? social insects? excess? assemblage poetics? Les Figues? DARPA? neurological transcendence? documenting tomorrow? eclectic fiction? ancient documentaries? bioperversity? Sidebrow? &NOW Books? guarding the fort? an aberrant future? best beasts? puppets? grassroots spectacles? Pan-American? errible language? Jell-O? movie stars? Our Lady J? tiny ephemera? Mallarme? women’s bodies? progress that didn’t? if you lived here you’d be home now? artificially intelligent? Armantrout? Howe? NO FUTURE? alternative pedagogy? prosthesis? my darling spellcheck? Alzheimer’s writing? national excess? Jaded Ibis? freaked and freaking? spectacular astonishment? Electronic Disturbance Theater the worm has turned? Montevidayo? Tomaula? Olsen? J of Experimental Fiction? ConPoWo? ALWAYS ALMOST ALWAYS-ALREADY?
Mark Wallace 000 on 000 Permalink |
Calls for progress lead inevitably to critiques of the historical limitations of the idea of progress, while rejection of progress only highlights how many ways the concept is still important. The dynamic of the binary remains especially relevant when imagination of either pole becomes too narrow and static. Of course, as people often say about binaries, “Can’t we have a third term?” Or a thousand, for that matter.
jamespate 000 on 000 Permalink |
Good points all, Mark. My own problem with a teleological view of history is 1) the way it can be perverted easily into totalitarian means (those who are not part of the future are part of the past in the most literal way possible) and 2) the foundationalist worldview it promotes, the Hegelian notion that history is reason and reason is history, which strikes me as oppressive to say the least…Whose “reason” and whose “history”? I agree with Foucault and Nietzsche on this: history is fiction. Which is why Foucault always said he wrote “fiction.” No foundation, no rationalist dialectic….no final horizon of a paradise of the authentic self (which most utopias depend upon)….
Mark Wallace 000 on 000 Permalink |
So far, with one notable exception to my knowledge, the No Futurists, and the Queer and Aberrant and other Political Futurists, have kept mainly to their own panels.
This point is probably indicated by the way, James, that the future-think you’re critiquing above doesn’t resemble the kind of futurism discussions that are happening at the Festival, except to the extent that some people in those discussions have also criticized a too progress-oriented version of the future. I don’t say this as criticism, necessarily, except to the extent that the lines along which who does not converse with whom has always been a fascinating part of festivals and conferences.