Malik, Suhail. 2018. ContraContemporary. In: Thijs Lijster, ed. The Future of the New: Artistic Innovation in Times of Social Acceleration. Amsterdam: Valiz, pp. 247-278. ISBN 9789492095589 [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

‘Contra-contemporary’ takes issue with the famous statement by Frederic Jameson that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. The essay contends that this statement is not only a modernist redux that paradoxically affirms the ‘eternal present’ of contemporaneity; it moreover proposes that it is not so much the absence of the future that is our problem today, but rather a surfeit of futurity that conditions and thus precedes the present in a risk society. The new, understood in Arendtian terms as the new-born present resulting from human action, is increasingly impossible in a postmodern condition that is contra-contemporary. Moving beyond the modern-postmodern deadlock, the essay concludes by envisioning what politics and art might look like in this contra-contemporary condition.

Item Type:	Book Section
Additional Information:	Book Contributors: Lietje Bauwens, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Robin Celikates, Wouter de Raeve, Elena Esposito, Boris Groys, Alice Haddad, Akiem Helmling, Bojana Kunst, Thijs Lijster, Suhail Malik, Benjamin Noys, Hartmut Rosa, Nick Srnicek Carolyn F. Strauss, Rolando Vázquez, Alex Williams
Keywords:	contemporaneity, postmodernity, modernity, avant-garde, posthistory, pretermodernity
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Art
Dates:	Date Event September 2018 Published
Item ID:	24242
Date Deposited:	14 Sep 2018 11:15
Last Modified:	10 Jun 2021 17:57
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/24242

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