The Time Complex. Post-Contemporary

by Armen Avanessian (Editor), Andreas Töpfer, Benjamin H. Bratton

Time is changing. Human agency and experience lose their primacy in the complexity and scale of social organization today. The leading actors are instead complex systems, infrastructures and networks in which the future replaces the present as the structuring condition of time. As the political Left and Right struggle to deal with this new situation, we are increasingly wholly pre-empted and post-everything. The contributions in The Time Complex. Post-Contemporary re-localize the present as part of a changed, speculative time complex and draw a precise diagnosis of the situation in order to negotiate speculative predictions of a future presence.

Genres: Philosophy

165 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2016

About the author

Armen Avanessian is an Austrian philosopher, literary theorist, and political theorist. He has taught at the Free University of Berlin, among other institutions, and held fellowships in the German departments of Columbia University and Yale University. His work on Speculative Realism and Accelerationism in art and philosophy has found a wide audience beyond academia.

Reviews

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

some great pieces here, especially stategic clarifications by Nick and Alex and XF collective on their critiques of "folk politics" in XF manifesto and Demanding the Future respectively. AA and SM's long intro piece sets the stage for the discussion of the shortcomings of political Left and political Right int understanding temporality vis a vis modernity. Elena makes makes clear that what is at stake in the progressive sophistication of neoliberal financial instruments such as futures and collaterals is our capacity to imagine the future present (in the sense of future to be) in contrast to the present future. aihwa ong's piece gives us a brief glimpse of how the compromise between what she calls cosmopolitan universality and various local particulars in the context of East Asian genetic research demands us to think of post-contemporary in terms of a strategic assemblage of different times and a mobilization of different fears and concerns. what all these thinkers have in common, in my opinion, is the rejection of the all too digestible critique of the universal.