Histories of the Future
Norman Klein: nmklein@msn.com
Fall, 2012
Thursday 7-10
Skye is our TA: skyemoret@gmail.com
First key point: The “future” always ages faster than the present. As a result, many tropes
are left stranded by historical changes, but continue to “survive” in science fiction, in media, in
urban imaginaries, in politics, design; as inversions of history. An archaeology of these futures
can be constructed, shaped into prototypes, reassembled, archived. These futures are obviously
selective memory.They also “exist” as parallel worlds (a poetics of the unbuilt).
A second obvious point: All utopias are, by definition, also dystopic. Otherwise, why start
over again, scrap the past? This is one of many tools that we can use for researching “histories of
futures.” The future, by definition, is a fictional act, a clinical imaginary. But this fiction is also very
solid, like a brand or a religion or a master plan. How then to collect, give order and design an
informed version of these futures.
Assignments
Readings and brief essays (500 words) for each of three eras or blocs: key periods when the
contradictions—or misremembering-- of the future. can easily be located.
A mid-term essay of 1,500 words after the second bloc.
A proposal for the final essay, of 500 words
The final essay: 2,500 words
(1) 1873-1914: The clumsy, unfinished industrial takeoff; The Imaginary Twentieth
Century; an archaeology of what steampunk utterly left out, as selective memory .
(2) 1915-60 : Futurist myths identified with twenties modernism; and its heritage.
Before and after world wars and holocausts; master planning and the giant nation
state.
Mid-term essay
(3) 1968-2008: Myths identified with the emergent global civilization,
and neo-liberal “spectacle.” The sixties “future” also as Modernist ruin. The decline of
the industrial nation state as our future.
Brief essay.
And of course: (4) 2008-2030: Futures identified with the dismantling of the American
psyche, in what people are beginning to call a post-global era. Redefinitions of
public/private identity, a more entropic imaginary of the future: The new regionalism,
neo-feudalism. There is a massive literature from 1965 to 1995 predicting this
rhizomatic body without organs (i.e. Delueze, Guattair), etc. And theories of globalism
(since 1980 essentially); and biopolitics (mostly over the past fifteen years, but with
roots dating back into the seventies). My position in this class is that we are now in a
new stage (post 2008), beyond what was defined as globalism; and as yet unnamed…
We will also add readings and sites and online videos. The sources will often involve
“phantasmagorical” stories and built illusionistic environments where the future invades the
present as a collective memory, as a parallel world (a kind of perverse modernity, a brand, an
ideology). There is a grand tradition within such stories, particularly since 1870. They are usually
identified as science fiction, but are also crucial to modern architecture, industrial design, media
as power; utopian communities; special-effects cinema, themed environments; and now, the
impact of digital media on our civilization.
We will locate other tools for separating out these different “histories” of the future. For
example: what we make of the difference between analog, intuitive and digital media; changing
fantasies about automatons, robots, cyborgs—the mythic future of the body; cross-over or crossembedded forms of culture, when cinema and theater cross-embed, when the digital and
architecture cross-embed; the difference between parallel worlds and “dialectics.” and so on.
Among the tools we will encounter, and put into this “history:” parallel worlds, myopias,
grotesquerie, steam punk, the body as machine, engineering memory and identity, electricity and
the x-ray, etc.
Thus, this class will be a journey into the “misremembering of the future,” and not only
in science fiction, but also Victorian “utopian” literature, modern urban planning, centuries of
caricature, animation, cinema, industrial design, entertainment; in architecture as imaginary
space as much as buildings, in the fantasies behind many social movements, in painting, theater;
and of course digital media art. And most of all: what doe these histories of the future tell us about
our ruptured moment.
Class Description: How many ways has the future been imagined—and is now being
re-imagined in 2010? Even an initial list triggers many options for media designers: the body
without fatigue (called dynamogenesis in 1903; very much an issue in the bio-arts today); Lost
Worlds; “imaginary mega- cities;” utopian and dystopian phantasmagorias; environmental
imaginaries; science-fiction cyburbias. By examining these built and unbuildable futures, we can
integrate many fields, to discover tools from architecture, literature, cinema, animation, games.
Readings
1) Scanned chapters from Klein, The Vatican to Vegas;
and The Imaginary Twentieth Century.
3) Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan, Yesterdays Tomorrows:
4) Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
5) Franco Berardi, After the Future
Schedule
SEPT. 13: Introduction— Why the Future is Always about the Present. Various models for
imagining the future, from 1870 to 2050
Reviewing three eras, to begin a mapping toward projectsL
1893-1926; 1920’s; 1980’s to the present/future
Contrasted to our “futures” 2010-2050… LA as the city of the
future “fifteen years too late.” Factual fiction…
PRELIMINARY SYLLABUS: I WILL IDENTIFY STRATEGIES FOR STARTING OUT, THEN IN A
WEEK OR TWO, IDENTIFY WHAT IS THE MOST EFFECTIVE OF THESE.
SEPT. 20: The Imaginary Twentieth Century—1893-1926
Discussion: Imaginary Communities circa 1890. “Extraordinary Voyages” during the
era of Verne and Wells. The Lost City of Z. Background on theories of utopianism,
collective memory, urban history, pre-cinema.
**Read Online: Two Stories by H.G. Wells--“The Accelerator,” (1901) and “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes” (1895).
Both in the following site, chapters VII and XXVII, of Wells’ short story collection
entitled, The Country of the Blind (Project Gutenberg 2004; orig. 1904)
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11870/11870-8.txt
Also, short story by E.M Forster, “The Machine Stops.” Available online
**Read Also Online (for background):
section about “Alternative Worlds,” in SF (If You Like This)
http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/thisthat.html#allohistory
**“Future-War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871-1900 (1997), by I.F. Clarke
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/clarkeess.htm
One might say that this is the actual “steampunk” era. Its history of the future can be
divided into four sub-categories: lost worlds; the dense city; the coming war; bodies without
fatigue. I’ll review various sources over the next two classes. Students really love to thumb
through Leonard de Vries, Victorian Inventions. I’ll bring in other sources as well.
Some are online, of course, For example:
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (very influential, but not thrilling to read)
www.sparknotes.com/lit/lookingbackward/
A. Merritt, The Moon Pool:
www.sfsite.com/07a/mp107.htm
www.litrix.com/moonpool/moonp001.htm
www.ibiblio.org/ais/sllmoonp.htm
M.P, Shiel, Purple Cloud:
www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/s/m-p-shiel/purple-cloud.htm
There are also forces that shaped the design of the future, as utopia and dystopia. Let us try
these out, to assemble as way to archive, and write about imaginary futures.
1. The industrial takeoff after 1870, and how it was “reenacted,” or
critiqued, in imaginaries about the future.
2. The scale of these rapidly expanding cities; and how to design its
infrastructure, since so little infrastructure was in place by 1890.
3. The industrial control or replacement of nature— the aerial view;
crystal cities; submersive cities and vessels. Looking at harbors
4. The distrust of urban industrial life: gothic revival; lost worlds and
imperialist exotica; scientific engineering and the suburb and farm
towns-- as nature’s Workshop
5. The transition from steampower to electrical power; and new tropes,
new shapes that suggest the future…
6. The residue of futures that were never physically realized, but remain
in the collective imagination somehow…
7. Cities that defy, yet symbolize, versions of the future, like Los
Angeles… How and why it developed, comparisons to other major
cities of the age…
8. Assembling and archiving how the future changes.
a. Foucault and the episteme. A brief summary that I found:
Episteme is a key term in Michel Foucault 's historical inquiry into the
structure of knowledge, where it forms part of a challenge to the idea
of the continuous accumulation of knowledge throughout history.
Instead, Foucault sees discontinuities and ruptures in the ways that
knowledge is organized in different epochs. In The Order of Things (
1971), he distinguishes between the classical and modern epistemes:
the former structured by resemblances between things—analogies,
sympathies, juxtapositions; the latter by a principle of classificatory
reason that anchors the concept of man within a singular framework of
order and relation—a network of signs that have approximal
relationships to things. Foucault suggested that our modern episteme
may already be over, although he only began to speculate about a
postmodern organization of knowledge.
b. The Paradigm, as in Paradigm Shift:
A term associated with Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (1962 … A paradigm is first established as
a ground-breaking method, or code, as in scientific
breakthrough, etc. However, Kuhn sees multiple revolutions in
the history of science, that is, multiple cases of the overthrow of
one scientific paradigm by another.
c.
Social Imaginary:
An image the responds to a widely held, but imaginary, belief.
9. How to move beyond the western models of the future, of
utopia/dystopia, of social Darwinism (“survival of the fittest).
10.
The ideologies of the future, from anarchism to communism to
liberalism and socialism, to neo-liberalism, Lecture: The Victorian stages of “Science as Fiction,” how the future is
“misremembered.” Lost Worlds (the moon as Africa); The dense overgrown city;
Premonitions after 1872 about “the Great War” that will come.
Familiarizing you with various terms: Utopia/Dystopia: panopticon; City Beautiful, etc.
“As an iceberg, floating southward from the frozen North, is gradually undermined by
warmer seas, and, become at least unstable, churns the sea to yeast for miles around
by the mighty rockings that portend its overturn, so the barbaric industrial and social
system, which has come down to us from savage anti-quity, undermined by the
modern humane spirit, riddled by the criticism of economic science, is shaking the
world with convulsions that presage its collapse.”
-Edward Bellamy
SEPT. 27: The Imaginary in the Design of Space (World’s Fairs). All utopias are, by definition,
also dystopic…
Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan, Yesterdays Tomorrows (well curated catalogue for a
Smithsonian show, 1984)
Reading Online** World’s fairs.
1893 Chicago World’s Fair: two sites. But we also should compare that to NY 1939…
users.vnet.net/schulman/Columbian/Columbian.html
xroads.virginia.edu/MA96/title html
documentary films on world’s fairs;
Yale Archive on world’s fairs:
http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/SearchExecXC.asp?srchtype
=VCG
Background to late nineteenth century models: “New Atlantis Revisited: Science and
the Victorian Tale of the Future,” by John M. Christensen (1978)
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/16/christensen16art.htm
“Documenting Spectacle: An Artist’s Notes on the Shanghai Expo”
Meghann McCrory http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/documenting-spectacle-anartists-notes-on-the-shanghai-expo
Oct 4: Fictions and Therapies for Redesigning the Body Without Fatigue
Electrotherapies, Dynamogenesis.
Sites: Electrotherapy Museum www.electrotherapymuseum.com/
Writings of Charlotte Parker Gilman online (Herland, etc.)
“Death of Neurasthenia”
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/179/6/550
Georg Simmel “The Metropolis and Mental Life “(1903):
Easier to Google this. Or at:
www.uwgb.edu/urs/RayHustchison_web_pages/Metropolis%20%20life.htm
Discussion of essay:
http://condor.depaul.edu/~dweinste/intro/simmel_M&ML.htm
The UC Berkeley Exoskeleton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkBEDy3eA1o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdK2y3lphmE&feature=related
OCT.11: Twenties Modernism
(2) 1919-1930 in Europe (Theater, Constructivism/Productivism, industrial and graphic design,
cinema-- responses to the postwar crisis in the Soviet Union and Germany);
(3) Archaeology and history as models for research of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. How to research media, arts installation, conceptual art,
and “everyday culture” within an historical frame.
(4) The History of the Present. 1973- 2020 (Memory/Forgetting and the City as ruin; Video Arts
(from 1970 to 1990, and afterward), Electronic Feudalism. The prologue to globalism, then its
“cosmopolitan” stage; and its new stage, essentially since 2008.
Read: Berardi, After the Future
On JStor: Boijko, “Agit-Prop Arts;” Brecht, “The Modern Theater is Epic Theater,” Leah
Dickerman, “The Fact and the Photograph;” Benjamin Buchloh, “From Faktura to Photography”
(1983); Christina Lodder, “The Art of the Commune: Political Art in Soviet Journals, 1917-20”
(1993); Briony Fer, “Metaphor and Modernity: Russian Constructivism;”
“Hugh Ferris: Delineator of Gotham” (easier to Google. Columbia University has his
papers. Even the Art Center Library has many of his books. I’ll leave them on reserve.
We are looking at how the “imaginary” modern city turned into a grammar about urban
future in Hollywood films)
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:fzF5UXE3bcQJ:thenonist.com/index.php/thenoni
st/permalink/hugh_ferriss_delineator_of_gotham/+hugh+ferris,+imaginary+buildings&h
l=en&ct=clnk&cd=11&gl=us
Lecture: Using models from the twenties: a brief history of industrial time and space, compared to
“globalized” models since 1980…Robots, Taylorism; Fordism, The Takeoff of The Entertainment
Economy
OCT. 18: Twenties Modernism continued
OCT. 25: Bloc 3
Begin discussion of Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge
Archaeology and history as models for research of how difficult it is to receive the present, much
less the future. The shocks after 1968…
And the ruins of the sixties: “What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?”
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/03/24/what-will-life-be-like-in-the-year2008/?Qwd=./MechanixIllustrated/111968/forty_years_future&Qif=forty_years_future_0.jpg&Qiv=thumbs&Qis=XL#qdig
Mid-term essay due on oct. 25 (1,500 words)
Nov. 1: I’ll be away in Germany
NOV. 8: Project description for final essay (500 words, with bibliography, research plans)
Boosterism, Urban Erasures, cinematic imaginaries…
Selections from The History of Forgetting
Selections from The Vatican to Vegas
Scripted spaces, labyrinths, artifice—malls, theming, enclaving; and the future of
privatized public amusement after the Crash
Background to the seventies
Karal Ann Marling, “Disneyland 1955: Just Take the Santa Ana Freeway to the
American Dream,” American Art, vol. 5, No1/2 (Winter- Spring, 1991), pp. 168-207. Or
selections from Marling’s book Designing Disney’s Theme parks: the Architecture of
Reassurance, 1998
Read online: in Time Magazine, October 15, 1973, “Disney: Mousebrow to Highbrow,”
by Robert Hughes http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,9108121,00.html
(Finally, another online source— on Google Books:
John Hannigan, “Fantasy City: Pleasure And Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis,” in
Readings in Urban Theory (Second Edition, 2002), edited by Susan S. Fainstein and
Scott Campbell., pp. 305-324
The following address should work:
http://books.google.com/books?id=iKgj6QbfXtcC&pg=RA1-PA335&lpg=RA1PA335&dq=disneyland+theory&source=bl&ots=NJagLWHvGl&sig=KakQMe7DnNGzK
p65uxmM86XWmTM&hl=en&ei=FFenSuS6DIH2sgP58PGBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=disneyland%20theory
&f=false
I will also add material on Las Vegas, chapters from The Vatican to Vegas . And on
scripted spaces, labyrinths, artifice—malls, theming, enclaving; and the future of “semi-public”
spaces after the Crash.
The Future of Media Narrative Strategies. This is obviously essential to all our class discussion,
but we want to arrive at a few useful conclusions by the end of the term: a method, modes of
research.
Nov. 15 The end of western industrialism as the primary model in the world. Has globalism
entered a very new stage? What is that stage as a “misremembering of the future?” Neofeudalism… The new regionalism… the bi-apparatus of the body (from the cyborg manifesto to
biopolitics)
Nov. 22. Thanksgiving
Nov. 26. Final Essay due (2,500 words or more)…
Review …
Some of the many sources that might interest you, for our bibliography
Among subject areas that often have bibliographies: Media Studies; biopolitics;
debates on the manipulation of experience (through simulation, scripted spaces, etc.); archeology
of cinema; automata; postructural theorists (1965-1995); parallel worlds; utopian theory; social
memory/forgetting… We can add more, as we set up a working archive (and discuss archiving
itself).
The list below can easily be multiplied many times. These are title that some students
have found useful in the past:
Donna Goodman, A History of the Future (weak on the early chapters, a reasonable
summary of industrial futurist design after 1920. Not very strong as a
theoretical model)
Leonard de Vries, Victorian Inventions
Carolyn Jones, ed., Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
(on the fictionalizing of space; and ludic/collective play)
Annette Kuhn, Alien Zone II
(science fiction, spatial design and phenomenology, as of 1995)
Hugh Aldersley-Williams, et al, ed. Design and the Elastic Mind
(catalog for exhibition on nano-art, at MOMA, 2008)
Carolyn Thomas de la Pena, The Body Electric:
How Strange Machines Built the Modern American
Wolfgang Schivelbush, Disenchanted Night:
The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (brilliant summary of
1980’s theory and art about the mediated body)
Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, ed., Steampunk (readings)
Norman M. Klein: The History of Forgetting; The Vatican to Vegas;
Bleeding Through; Freud in Coney Island; The Imaginary 20th Century
For updates (www.imaginary20thcentury.com)
Linda Krause and Patrice Petero, Global Cities:Cinema, Architecture
and Urbanism in a Digital Age
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York
Mark Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire
Paul Virilio, The Open Sky; or Speed and Cinema
Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen
Guiliana Bruno, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner,”
In October 41, Summer 1987
Guiliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts
Anna Munster, Materializing New Media:
Embodiment in Information Aesthetics
Terri Smith, ed., Antinomies of Art and Culture
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
List of films that we will see (I will select these soon; and keep amending the list, of
course)
Visual Archive: The visual record that accompanies this journey is immense. In the first
bloc (1870-1920), we will be seeing dozens (if not hundreds) of illustrations, rare films from early
cinema, reviewing all the media associated with science fiction, as well as the collective memory
that became modern architecture, planning, design, world wars, the body of the future. We will
learn how to overcome nostalgic homage. We are searching for tools that can help us in work
today, and to research powerfully what science fiction was revealing and hiding.