Past Futures: Extreme Subjectification, The Engineering of the Future and the Instrumentalization of Life
After Shell Oil : “Global Scenarios for the Future” 2001
[excerpt from the Introduction – full text available as PDF here ]
The extension of liberalism and the globalization of capitalism are not only the symptoms of a new planetary configuration, the completion of a totalizing process begun with the modern project of emancipating private life in the juridical-procedural framework of the vacanting state sovereignty. Their present junction within a diffuse articulation of power constitues the very medium for the production of human relations, while the way we currently represent it mediates between capacities of decision and action. By modeling the context and translating it into in-progress scenarios for an anonymous „direction” of global „extras”, played out on the stage of history, corporate economy produces a new form of exercising sovereignty and life administration, extended at the level of the immanent formatting of subjectivity.
According to Shell International scenario guru Pierre Wack, scenarios are narratives that imagine and describe possible futures. The exercise is intended to help corporations and governments identify opportunities for competitive advantage: what actions or strategies today can maximize profit in any imaginable future. In addition, scenario narratives are intended to help today’s powerful actors to identify “the future that is worth building”. The 1992 narratives describe different visions for the year 2020. The big question asked by the visionaries in the exercise is: how will the world respond to liberalization? It is the last time in the history of future scenarios that two possible, opposite outcomes are imagined. All subsequent Shell scenarios operate under the collective premise entitled TINA There is no Alternative to liberalization, a vision often expressed by neo-liberal revolutionary Margaret Thatcher in the early 80’s. Read as a single discursive corpus, „Global Scenarios 1992-2020” expose the narration of complete world domination, of the expansion of the corporate administration of the world on the level of an atemporal and immutable stasis. Thus, the two „fictional worlds” announce the emergence of a recent metanarrative: the process of „eternalizing the present” by controlling the future, rethinking subjectivity in the name of global planning. It thus signals the complete instrumentalization of life, the reduction of existence to the calculus of its efficient administration, the internalization of control exercised upon the social body regarded as a site of immanence for the multiple territorializing actions of power.
PAST FUTURES is a collaborative project which develops a critical interrogation of the possibilities for positioning ourselves relative to the matrix of economic and political conditions defining us as social subjects. What began as a proposal for an artistic intervention, inserting a scenario as a „ready-made” textual object in the context of a discussion on the notion of bare life, evolved into a collaboration which proposes a disjunctive manner of (artistically/discursively) practicing historical reading. Where we look, through what medium and from where determine a series of disappearances, obfuscations and camouflages, displacements of perspectives opened towards the possibilities for shaping our futures, as they appear today regarded from the perspective of the past, dissolving the concatenation of temporal regime within the present stasis which conditions the unidirectional perception of reality.
Articulated in the form of a critical „textual installation” consisting in graphic and textual interpretation of the ready-made Shell scenario „Global Scenarios: 1992-2020”, the project formally assumes the conditions of discursive production specific to the illusive modern separation between the economical, cultural, social and political. Inserted as a web resource operating as terminal of a network connecting the political macro-economical actors and singular individuals, the scenario in question is thus situated in the interstice of the stratified relations of knowledge and action constituting the public sphere, generating and problematizing the context of its own reception. The graphic interpretation of the original Shell diagram intends to produce a „subjective” counter-look upon the discursive practices of economical objectivation of human relations, while the invitation to simultaneously follow the textual commentary and the hyper-textually exposed scenario comments upon the complementarity between the media of distributing/concealing information. The actual absence of the scenario comments upon the relation between copyright/shareware, subsequently, between ready-made, production and recycling information, specific to the neo- liberal cultural economy.
Proposing the production of critical interpellation through the practice of historical reading as an alternative vehicle of subjectivation, and conceiving intervention as a civic action, the project functions as a platform for information and analysis, offering the reader access to information of public interest while suggesting at the same time possible means for individual documentation and collective debate. The artistic/critical gesture intends to contribute to the construction of a mobile interface between the administration of the informational network at the level of global economic and political actors and the control of its distribution in the public space. In turn, its activation by the reader opens up a field of critical mediation between the political space of art and the artistic space of the political.