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Simon Bayly

The End of the Project: Futurity in the Culture of Catastrophe

Published in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18:1, 2013.

I The Work of the Project

By way of a greeting: are you in work right now? With this question, there comes a

recognition that the futural meaning that work brings is not as freely available as it perhaps

has been in the past. The question demonstrates Freud’s understanding that work is one of the

cornerstones of humanness but also that the chance to work is something that can be

randomly given and taken away. The contingency of work makes humanness, however that

might be construed, into something that is also fragile and contingent. This question implies a

mutual understanding that such contingency is generated by “forces”: agentless systemic

conditions that cannot simply be attributed to others who might be in a position to help or

hinder. This greeting expresses an intimate understanding of the hardness of the times and of

the shared effort to get by and make do that is required, effort that may be thwarted by

unanticipated events or unsurpassable obstacles. But there are also times and people for whom

this question appears awkward or impertinent: an unwarranted suggestion of vulnerability.

Instead, the question politely becomes: what are you working on?

Perhaps these two different questions mark one of the chief divisions of contemporary

labour: the division between those may or may not have work and those who are always

working, working on something, or working on getting work or on preparing for work to

come (which all amount to the same thing). This division separates those whose work

confines them to the present, against which they must perpetually seek to make a meaningful

connection with the future in other realms of life, from those who live in a different

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relationship to time, one overburdened with significance, responsibility and obligation. In

other words, there are those are or are not (or ought to be, according to increasingly

unquestioned politics of welfare) working and then there are those with projects –

undertakings that cast their long shadow into a future that is both “open” and urgently

prescribed.

What follows pursues the lived experience and temporal horizons of the project at the

expense of more familiar histories of work and labour. But this is not to claim that all work

has been entirely converted into a project, through the effects and affects of, for example, the

managerial discourses of creativity and collaboration or the application of “new”

communication technologies in the workplace. While contemporary communication

technologies have partially re-distributed the workplace back into the domestic spaces and

times from which the factory (and then the office) had separated themselves since the

eighteenth century, formalized institutions of work continue to play a significant economic

and social function - even in the so-called “post-industrial” economies. But it is to claim that

these environments and their activities are increasingly modeled on the logic of the project.

Within “the new spirit of capitalism” that has harnessed the ethic of a generalized creativity

autonomy to the on-going project of economic accumulation and expansion (Boltanski and

Chiapello), the project itself has proliferated as the basic mode of productive labour to the

extent that is has become an organizing principle of life and work, of life as a work.

Rather than displacing older traditions of work and labour and their theorization, this

is to suggest that the project is increasingly used to format aspects of life that would seem far

removed from its sphere of influence, from the professionalized contexts of care and

education to the intimate scenes of friendship, parenting, sex and love. In her recently

published study Work’s Intimacy, Melissa Gregg explores how affect-laden forms of

cognitive and immaterial labour made possible by communications technologies displace or

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reshape these more familiar sources of intimacy and social belonging with pervasive

psychological and social effects. If the transformation of not only work, but also of essential

aspects of self-actualization and social relating, into project can been seen as part of these

developments, then it will be worthwhile paying some attention to a term whose proliferation

might otherwise appear entirely unremarkable.

As this essay goes on to explore, the project is suffused with a peculiar temporality

that has come to shape the dominant contemporary image of the future. This is an image of a

fateful openness, full of the libidinal possibility of what is “to come” but which also invites

and fends off a depressive and deadly rapture – in other words, a form of the Freudian death

drive. What follows attempts to address this “projected” image by working through its

particular combination of thanatos and eros in relation to the temporality of catastrophe and

disaster that seems to subtend a pervasive sense of both personal and planetary futures.

II The Time of the Project

But first: what is a project? The use of the English word “project” to describe a certain

kind of planned proposal or undertaking is well established by the fifteenth century, often in

relation to activities of the state or other civic authorities.1 But rather attempt a clear-cut

definition – and part of what constitutes a project is precisely its idiosyncratic relation to

notions of definition – we can approach this relation to time in the milieu for which the

project has become the essential “unit” of production and, as is widely suggested, which has

itself become the model for many kinds contemporary working practices: art.

In their introduction to an essay collection on “the art of the project”, whose subtitle

promises a study of “projects and experiments in modern French culture”, Johnnie Gratton

and Mark Sheringham sketch a history and a taxonomy of the project as a “paradigm for the

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visual arts since the emergence of modernism” (8). That they see no need to pay any specific

attention to the declared “French” dimension of their own project in the book, is presumably

due to the fact that the project has become a transnational norm for contemporary art (8).

Avoiding any attempt at a specific definition, they suggest that a project is likely to combine

various permutations of the paradigmatic artistic and intellectual “turns” of the twentieth

century: inter-disciplinary, process-based, performative, ethnographic, pedagogical,

participatory, site-specific and durational. More often that not, the project deals in improvised

practices, fluid processes and agile performances unencumbered by the fixations of plans,

products or outcomes, which it may instead ironically repurpose or intentionally fail to deliver

on.

As Gratton remarks in another essay on artistic subjectivity, “a project's agent

undergoes a process of attenuation of his/her prerogatives, either specifically artist/author or

simply as subject-as-self” (126). As is evident in recent relational or socially-engaged art

practice, this self-attenuation entails an abrogation of the previously sovereign powers of the

modern artist (tellingly replaced by the “agent” in the quotation above) through a variety of

means: the dissolution of the art-object into open-ended, quasi-performative processes; the re-

siting of these process into the flux of everyday life (a sociological category coterminous with

the rise of art-as-project); the distribution of tasks and roles to others as co-creators, for whom

art may have had little value or whom it has not previously addressed; the introduction of

chance and arbitrariness into artistic decisions normally dependent on aesthetic judgment; the

preference for techniques of documentary to record data in the manner of an ethnographer or

archivist; the display of this documented data as a intentionally weak substitute for the auratic

artwork. While it is clear that these qualities draw together a very heterogenous collection of

practices, some key features are claimed as essential to the project, including its

transformation of the experience of time:

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Rooted in the etymological indelible make-up of the term “project” … temporal pro-

jection into an as yet unrealized and open future, marks an indispensable characteristic

of anything regarded or designated as a “project”… An “art” of the project might

suggest engagement in a process that not only takes time but offers creative ways of

using, experiencing, structuring and reappropriating time, and of exploring the effects of

time as change and durée [duration]. (Gratton and Sheringham 18)

But what drives the following discussion is not so much the “creative” possibilities of

temporal play in the project, but the temporal frame implicit in the project as such, an “as yet

unrealized and open future”. That is to say, rather than a neutral space for temporal

experimentation, the project itself is already bound by particular configuration of time that

subtends its more overt commitment to the open horizon of what is to come with an

implacably fixed sense of futurity that operates in the tense of “what will have been”.

The paradoxical possibilities of this closed futurity are addressed later. At this point,

what is worth highlighting as an essential distinction that separates the project and work is

that every project binds itself to a imagined future that is intended to transform for the better,

in some way, the totality of the world. At one level, this seems an implausible claim. Yet, in

whatever form, the project is always minimally invested with its etymological sense of pro-

ject, of “throwing forward” and an accompanying sense of futural potential and promise. As

Henri Lefebvre, the pre-eminent thinker of the sociological domain of the project, the

everyday, insists:

Without of the concept of “totality”, how can we possible formulate, or even conceive

of the one of the principal laws of social and human development? This is that law:

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once it has taken a definite shape in social practice, each human activity wants the

universal … It makes itself real through works, and each work is the result of a

momentary totalization through the predominance of a particular activity … . (Lefebvre

181-2)

The claim here is that the exceptional status of works (religious, scientific, philosophical,

political, artistic) in the Lefebvrian sense has, in the 50 years since the writing of The Critique

of Everyday Life, come to saturate the everyday in the form of projects. Whilst work would

seem intuitively to be bound up with a temporality of going-on-being that lacks a definitive

endpoint or singular objective, a project as a “total work” is partially defined by both its

temporal horizon and the extent to which it aims to transform the going-on-being of the

existing state of affairs, be that a decrease in waiting times in a doctor’s surgery, the

construction of a new museum or the revolutionary change of a political system. Such

examples expose the fact that what might be a project for, say, the new museum’s architect, is

merely a temporary work place for the electrician wiring the fire alarm system. This

reinforces the sense of the “division of labour” between project and work described earlier

and indicates the extent to which “life in the project” is a subjective, existential condition

mutually implicated with particular sets of working practices, whilst at the same time an

overarching tendency in the formatting of contemporary labour.

But whether in authoring or servicing the project, the logic of future improvement,

development and progress is always at work in its conception and realization. Isn’t any

attempt to change something, however apparently trivial, almost guaranteed to be described as

a project today? But what is perhaps less evident is the equal commitment to risk, uncertainty

and destruction that comes from any intentional effort to initiate change. Every project tempts

fate, invites its own undoing. For Lefebvre, this is essential to the notion of a work:

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No matter how close it gets to success, every endeavor is destined to fail in the end. …

Every totalization which aspires to achieve totality collapses, but only after it has been

explicit about what is considers its inherent virtualities to be. When it makes the illusory,

outrageous, and self-totalizing claim that it is a world on the human (and thus finite)

scale, the negative (limitation, finiteness) this “world” has always borne within itself

begins eating it away, refuting it, dismantling it, and finally brings it tumbling down.

Only when a totality has been achieved does it become apparent that it is not a totality at

all. (184)

Here, Lefebvre makes an explicit connection between the unfolding of the work or project

and its intimate relationship to disaster and annihilation, a connection that he suggests will

continue “until such time as everyday life becomes the essential work of a praxis which has at

last become conscious” (183).

The notion of disaster as somehow integral to the temporality of the project, which can

be overcome only through the redemptive undoing of an alternative temporality of the

everyday will be essential for the subsequent discussion. As an invitation to both apply and

subvert the pre-determined and rational objectives of work, tasks and plans, the project is, in

its most exuberant forms, directed towards the production of an excess of unforeseeable

possibilities, the outcomes of which remains desirably undecidable. For example, in the

converging fields of robotics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, the typical researcher

is often no longer interested in whether the entities that she studies conform to predicted

behaviours mapped out in project proposals. Instead the success of a project is measured by

the extent to which these entities can exceed both their previous manifestations and the

benchmarked expectations of the project itself. In this sense, experimental design in these

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contexts entails the maximization of the potential for artificial ensembles to deviate from the

“programmes” of their individual components, to do precisely what they are not supposed to

do. In a manner that evokes the ambitions of the projects of earlier artistic avant-gardes, this

kind of contemporary scientific researcher thus no longer seeks to master nature but to

operationalize a second, artificial nature to exhibit its own unpredictable processes of self-

emergence and autonomous development. These processes can then be harnessed for,

amongst other things, “improving human performance” or even for “changing the societal

‘fabric’ towards a new structure”:

Technological convergence could become the framework for human convergence. The

twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a

higher level of compassion and accomplishment. It is hard to find the right metaphor to

see a century into the future, but it may be that humanity would become like a single,

distributed and interconnected “brain” based in new core pathways of society. (Roco

and Bainbridge 6)

This is obviously an extreme formulation of the project as world-making totality,

emerging from a particular field of futurological speculation whose dream of a “human

convergence” is no doubt a nightmare from many other perspectives. These wild hopes and

predictions “project” an unabashed messianism that inserts itself within the time of the project,

regardless of its particular form or scale of activity. While it may seem utterly insignificant on

a wider scale, there is a underlying sense that, through a chain of implications and

associations, the concrete and limited realization of a project takes on the transformation of

the whole world, which is both is medium and its measure. It is this latent messianic hope

(picked up in much satire on contemporary management practices) that structures the

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temporality of the project. Although the project opens up a heterogeneous time whose passage

may be pleasurably or profitably uncertain and unpredictable, it is nevertheless orientated to a

determinate future - even if that determination is nothing more than the arbitrary termination

of the project itself. Working on the project, I live and work in and for the future, not as

something merely open and unspecified but literally as a projection that either will or will not

turn out to be the particular version of the future to which the project has dedicated itself.

III Life in the Project

What is life like in the project, organized around a future that is both contingent and

necessary? The intelligibility of this question affirms the earlier suggestion that the project

has come to exist not merely as a discreet activity (labeled art, work, labour or anything else)

within life, but as the normative form of life itself. Taking his cue from contemporary art

practices and their twentieth century avant-garde inheritance, Boris Groys describes the

project as, above all, the claim for a socially sanctioned loneliness (“Loneliness” 72). This is a

different kind of loneliness than that which pervades the ever-expanding communicative

transparency and “connectedness” of the contemporary everyday structured by

communications technologies. This is a loneliness that cannot be simply communicated, since

it arises out of a saturation of communication itself.

A project offers a better prospect for the sublimation of this particular loneliness in the

form of a lure: the possibility of escape from an exposure to the perpetual presentness of the

everyday, to the dull dread of its going-on-being that once went by the (now curiously

unfamiliar) name of alienation. Accordingly, the loneliness of the project derives from the

way in which it shifts its agent into a different experience of time. A condition of undertaking

a project is that it takes over one’s whole being. Life in the project leaves little time for life

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elsewhere, even at night or in one’s dreams. I have to quarantine myself as far as is possible

within the time of the project, but only on the condition that I do not destroy the social

relations that have permitted me to undertake it in the first place and on which I depend for

my basic sustenance and wellbeing. Project time must accordingly colonize the time of the

everyday and become indiscernible from it, all the while maintaining a secret separation. Like

Archimedes, someone working on a project can be at work at anytime and anywhere – even,

or especially, in the bath.

While the project may require me to saturate myself in unfamiliar forms of sociality, at

the same time it generates a prophylactic relation of difference and separation: a loneliness

that the project both creates and seeks to repair. This sense of loneliness is the paradoxical

corollary of the project agent’s surrender of autonomy, authorship and attraction to this

broader sociality. The project then becomes a kind of formal alibi to retreat from the

heterogeneity of the lifeworld (the usually discreet times and places of, say, work and play,

co-workers and friends, family and organization) and to submit instead to a singular world

that saturates all of the others with the forward-looking energy of its irresistible demands –

even if those demands are, as in some artistic projects, dedicated to laziness, inactivity or

other forms of the undoing of the temporal-spatial organization of the everyday.

But to dedicate myself to this task, I must alter my relationship with the present, which

takes on the characteristics of a nebulous and distracting illness, even as the project may

demand I immerse myself in it. Illnesses of that sort are often described as chronic –

something one just has to live with. Typically, one does not die of a chronic illness, but from

its terminal companions or side effects. Hence the sickness that the present represents for the

project is that of chronos itself, of a time that cannot resolve itself into anything, even death.

This is a time that one can neither seize nor be seized by and which one perhaps cannot even

adequately represent. The dim malaise that Groys correctly diagnoses as accompanying the

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inevitable conclusion of any project – successful or not - is an anxiety about the sickness of

the non-projected present to which the end of the project consigns us.

Perhaps this malaise is a symptom of the project’s wider dissemination as the default

mode of orientation to being and time. An indication of this possibility is found in Groys’

declaration that “the formulation of diverse projects has now become the major contemporary

preoccupation”– a statement whose particular kind of insight is directly correlated to its

apparent banality (“Loneliness” 70). To enter into adult existence today is coterminous with

the self-creation of projects, even if the ultimate project is the protracted effort to configure

the self itself as a project – a heroically homosocial venture that has always sought to divide

man from woman, adult from child. (This disposition is resonant with - but also perhaps

entirely distinct from - earlier Nietzschean notions of life as a work of art in ways that are not

directly pursued here.) Another way to consider the figure of homo sacer, the “bare life”

described by Giorgio Agamben, is simply as a life without projects, a life that has been

stripped of the means to configure itself as a project, unable to project itself forward into a

future.

But at the same time the project appears to have gradually succumbed to the logic of

bureaucracy, of the plan, the programme and the procedure, from which its artistic

manifestations originally sought to escape, or at least to subject to various modes of

détournement. More than ever, as Groys’ statement above declares so literally, it is no longer

the actual undertaking of projects that constitutes their legitimation, but primarily their

formulation and then their submission to judgment by a higher authority that will approve or -

statistically far more likely - reject them. The singular distinctiveness of the contemporary

project is made startlingly obvious when we reflect on the fact that to initiate a project today

is to initiate something that can by definition be carried out by someone else. The

idiosyncratic signature that retrospectively attached itself to project in its earlier political and

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artistic incarnations (despite a supposed antagonism to the claims of authorship) is

increasingly regarded as undesirable – as noted earlier, one can no longer be the author of a

project, only its temporary and replaceable agent, even when the project is the self. And while

the formulation of many projects today takes far longer than their realization, most are in fact

finished well before their conclusion. Seeking its commission not from within itself, but from

a legitimating authority, each project is required to spell out in ever-increasing detail exactly

how, when, with what means and under which regime of evaluation it will enact and provide

evidence for the version of the future that it so passionately describes. (Projects today are at

least partially evaluated in advance on the credibility of their own stated procedures of

retrospective self-evaluation.) But, as Groys indicates, if this future can be completely and

publically described in advance, then the project loses all sense of purpose since it then

resynchronizes with the present that it was expressly designed to overcome (“Loneliness” 76).

The project then becomes merely a script for a possible future imagined as a sequence of

logical steps away from the present, a user’s manual for getting from here to there.

Sensing this recuperation, many contemporary artistic projects refuse a teleological

futurity and instead fetishize their own essential incompletion (each project itself always “part

of a larger project”), contingency or failure. The project then becomes a particular way of

experiencing and, through its documentation, representing a time that simultaneously drives

towards and postpones a preferred future, occupying a present that runs parallel to the one

from which it originally sought to differentiate itself. Caught in this crisis of self-cancellation,

the most cherished projects often turn out to be those that have never been started.

IV The Messianic Interval

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Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the

end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism

by way of imagining the end of the world. (Jameson 76)

If the project has lost much of its futural promise to the dissipative energies of capital, this is

perhaps symptomatic of the broader sense in which the future itself is not what it used to be.

As Jameson and many others have suggested, it is the future as such, as a shared horizon of

modernist universal emancipation, that has succumbed to the future imagined as global

catastrophe, disaster or apocalypse. From the perspective of the present, the futureless horizon

of the postmodern “end of history” appears an aberration squeezed between the catastrophes

of the horrifying “real” of post-Enlightenment historical progress (marked by names such as

Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and the prediction by a leading scientist of “our final

hour” when “terror, error, and environmental disaster threaten humankind's future in this

century - on earth and beyond” (Rees, title page). It seems no longer necessary to spell out the

ways in the culture of disaster continues to characterizes the contemporary “moment”, in a

manner which can be traced back through the compressed and aphoristic discourses of

Heidegger, Adorno, Levinas, Blanchot, Benjamin and others. Similarly, it is relatively

uncontentious to view the entirety of late twentieth century European philosophy as unfolding

in the aftermath of a pervasive sense of catastrophe that it itself withdrawn from thought. The

antithesis of this weak but all-encompassing sense of catastrophism is the “weak messianic

power” that Benjamin (255-6), writing in 1940, regarded as the intellectual inheritance of a

true understanding of history and which has since been the subject of numerous further

meditations. Notable here is Derrida’s “messianicity without messianism” which attempts to

extract a typically complex and minimally redemptive hope for the future from Benjamin’s

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intuition, sensed as “still too Heideggerian, too messianico-Marxist or archeo-eschatological”

(Derrida 62).

However no such qualms have prevented a renewed philosophical interest in the

archetypal messianic figure, the apostle Paul, with recent contributions from Badiou, Žižek,

Agamben and a sizeable secondary literature in their wake. From some perspectives, this

continued fascination with the messianic in contemporary thought might well be ruinous for

political philosophy: the secular evacuation of messianism of its theological contents (no

Messiah, no chosen people, no “one, true faith”, no heaven on earth, etc.) in order to arrive at

its “pre-political” structure is but an empty formalism, a messianicity almost entirely

subtracted from itself, leaving a remainder that is simply unable to function as a foundation

for any form of praxis. Yet even the most trenchant critique of this persistence of the

theological turn, such as that found in the “speculative materialism” of Quentin Meillasoux,

finds room for the logical possibility of the future emergence of a redemptive divinity in a

universe subject only to the necessity of contingency.

While Badiou and Žižek are more interested in Paul as a figure for a renewed militant

subjectivity, Agamben's focus is on the specific nature of temporality in messianic experience.

Leaving aside some of the more awkward implications of the philosophical rehabilitation of a

figure so central to Christianity, it is Agamben’s text on Paul, The Time that Remains: A

Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, that is drawn on here precisely because its

articulation of messianic temporality offers an alternative relationship between futurity,

disaster and the presentness of the everyday to that embedded in the notion of the project.

In a phrase that immediately connects to the temporality of the project outlined above,

Agamben defines messianic time as the time that remains: “the time that time takes to come to

an end, or more precisely, the time we take to bring to an end, to achieve our representation of

time” (67, emphasis in original). He arrives at this definition of messianic time in a virtuosic

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unraveling of only the first ten words of Paul’s epistle to the Romans. In attempting to show

how Paul articulates an understanding of messianic time in a way that is a direct antecedent to

Benjamin’s “weak messianic power”, Agamben provides us with a structure with which to

understand messianic time itself. The most significant aspect of messianic time is easily

overlooked: that it is indeed a time with a structure (albeit a paradoxical one), a time that

actually takes time, rather than something that marks the simultaneous advent and arrival of

the end of time as a point on a linear image of time.

Messianic time is the time between two times, the coming of the messiah and the end

of time. This time has to be distinguished both from the time of the apocalypse to come and

historical time prior to the arrival of the messiah. It is not added onto or subtracted from these

times, but rather opens up a new kind of interstitial time that is hollowed out of the divisions

of chronos (historical or profane time). The best illustration here is the interpretation placed

by rabbinical sources on the problematic description in Genesis of what was to become the

Sabbath: “And on the seventh day God completed his work which he had made; and on the

seventh day he rested from all his work” (qtd. in Agamben 72). But instead of altering the

first “seventh” to read “sixth”, as do the early Greek translations of the Bible, and thus turn

the day of rest into a day added on to the time of the project of the creation, the Genesis

Rabbah suggests otherwise: “Man, who knows not time, moment and hours, takes something

from profane time and adds it to holy time; but the holy one, blessed be his name, who knows

times, moments and hours, will enter on Saturday only by a breadth” (qtd. in Agamben 72).

Agamben continues: “Saturday – messianic time – is not another day, homogenous to others;

rather, it is that innermost disjointedness within time through one which may – by a

hairsbreadth – grasp time and accomplish it” (72).

Messianic time is thus not simply a time between two times. Instead, it is time that

entirely shifts our experience of time but without apparently adding the power of an extra

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time. Like the Saturday Sabbath observed in the Jewish week, which curiously anticipates and

trumps the Sunday day of rest that follows in the Christian tradition (and largely adopted by

Western secularism) the messianic “time of the now” is like an ordinary day in the sequence

of days, but one in which everything is minimally displaced –by that hairsbreadth – and so

utterly transformed. Agamben concludes:

Chronological time separates us from ourselves and transforms us into impotent

spectators of ourselves – spectators who look at the time that flies without any time left,

continually missing themselves – messianic time, an operation time in which we take

hold and achieve our representations of time, is the time that we ourselves are, and for

this very reasons, is the only real time, the only time we have. (72)

But what would it mean to grasp time and to accomplish it within the secularized time

of modernity? How could one act in good faith with the belief, as Benjamin has it, that “every

second [is] the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter” (Benjamin 263)? These

are not the kinds of questions that Agamben is able to pose. The kinds of actions that would

seem to perform this accomplishment are of an altogether different kind to those found in the

project as described above: violent actions, versions of the Lacanian passage à l’acte in which

the self strikes a mortal blow at itself through a suicidal attack on the symbolic representative

of the “big Other”. These actions remind us of the terrible violence that is imagined at the

terminal point of monotheistic versions of messianic time, in which historical time gives way

to the Day of Wrath when God’s final act of division judges all those who have ever lived and

the earth is destroyed and a new heaven and earth created. This conjunction between

messianic time and the potency of divinely inspired violence appears in the cyclical

resurgence of faith in the justice of revolutionary violence. Neither Paul nor Agamben dwell

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on this intimate bond between violence, apocalypse and redemption, the former because it has

yet to be invented within a Christian eschatology, the latter because it is precisely in the

rendering inoperative of violence and the law that lies the promise of a Pauline conception of

messianism.

There is a hint in what has been said so far that a refurbished time of the project,

restored to its impossible suture of contingency and necessity, might somehow permit us

access to a secularized version of messianic time. This would be a time in which we might

grasp and accomplish our own time by projecting into it an externally imposed conclusion or

caesura - something to which the project of today otherwise seems impervious in its energetic

rush towards its self-appointed future destination. Taking up Agamben’s analysis of Paul’s

apostolic mission, Boris Groys accordingly describes the avant-garde artist as a “secularized

apostle, a messenger of time who brings to the world the message that time is contracting, that

there is a scarcity of time, even a lack of time” (“Weak Universalism” 108). But to speak of a

lack of time, of time as scarce – the cliché of modernity as the state of permanent change and

urgency that has no time for anything – is to remain within a chronos that has armoured itself

against the possibility of kairos emerging from within it, the very antithesis of the messianic

vocation. For Paul, the messiah has always already arrived in an event that is by definition

subject to misrecognition. Thus the contraction of messianic time is not a reduction in the

quantity of available time prior to the messianic arrival, but the intensification of its

experience within the present, to the point that that shows up and renders inoperative our

representations of time. This would be an experience of time always in doubt about its own

authenticity, just as it is the destiny of the true messiah to be not recognized in his own time

and for false messiahs to be recognized as true.

It is this sense of counterfeit and lack of legitimation that so many projects of

twentieth century art made into their essence (precisely through the foregrounding of a non-,

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or even anti-messianic impulse) and which compels them to court disaster through ironic acts

of deferral, delay and the wanton dissipation of time, which also often made them hostage to a

“weak”, charismatic melancholia. But this description characterizes a messianism whose

weakness has dwindled to an almost zero degree, far weaker than that typically ascribed to the

political and artistic avant-garde, whose missed revolutionary moment undoubtedly informs

Benjamin’s sense of the potential of his own time. And while, as for Paul, Benjamin and

Agamben, messianic power is constituted in an essential weakness, there is nevertheless a

pervasive sense of a more profound and terminal diminution of the messianic promise of the

aesthetic project of a progressive universalism here.

V The Time of the Project between Two Disasters

This lessening of identification with the project (of politics, of art, of politics as art and

vice versa) as the redemptive other of the disaster that saturates the past, present and future

takes many forms in contemporary thought. One the one hand, it shapes a desire for a wider

acknowledgement of loss, mourning and mutual vulnerability as ontologically foundational

within accounts of ethical responsibility. On the other hand, demands for an epistemological

analysis that continues to focus on specific, local and historical questions of power, violence

and justice remain equally pressing. While the distance between these two poles might be one

that ought not to be compacted too easily or quickly in the search for the foundation a new

universalism, they share a temporal inheritance in that they do indeed unfold in an aftermath –

in the time that follows particular disastrous events or an epoch that is itself retroactively

interpreted as founded on disaster.

The thinking conditioned by its happening in the aftermath of disaster depends upon a

particular kind of temporality, whose character is usefully revealed by its difference from the

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messianic. In thinking after the disaster, the past is the time when some possibilities were

realized and others were not: a time of reckoning victories and defeats, blame and

responsibility, the counting of those who died and those who survived. Whilst open to

reinterpretation or to the arrival of a present in which its intelligibility may arrive for the first

time, the principal sense of the past is as something fixed – a fixity that is some way defines

what is past as such. Correspondingly, the future is the time of infinite possibility:

indeterminate, incalculable, the time of a justice, democracy or new world order essentially

and eternally “to come” - but always imminent and demanding of a response in the here-and-

now. The present is then characterized an elongated period of waiting – a time of

development - for whatever is “to come”. During that time, the project assumes the diligent

work of preparation for something that cannot be anticipated and, in the Derridean version of

this thinking, will never actually arrive in the mode of an event that could be grasped or even

recognized as such. In this temporality, the present is the time that the project seeks to prize

open between a disastrous past and a redemptive future, in order to allow that future to arrive

before the advent of the catastrophe that appears to be the logical conclusion of human history

- and so render it inoperative.

But what remains to this project today when the future itself is overtaken by an image

of total catastrophe? Crushed between the ruins of the past and an impending cataclysm of

self-destruction that escalates these local histories of disaster to a global level, humanity

becomes the suicidally endangered subject and object of its own life project: the negation of

its increasingly probable self-induced annihilation. The secular messianicity of the time of the

philosophical project after modernity (which retroactively refuses the postmodern that it is

said to have partially constituted) reacquires its earlier conjunction with the divine destruction

and violence that are an essential feature of all religious eschatologies. But this catastrophic or

redemptive messianism denies itself the solace of a heaven on a new earth (or even on the

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existing planet) and in some significant configurations, settles for a much more modest and

seemingly unquestionable good: species survival.

One apostle of this project of species survival, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, has suggested that it

can only be furthered through the adoption of a profound change in our relationship to the

future: le temps du projet, or “projected time” (“Rational Choice” unpag.) Instead of

representing time as bifurcating from a more or less fixed past into a possible set of branching

futures, each accorded a probability of realization of the basis of particular actions in the

present, projected time takes the form of a loop in which the future, rather than the past, is

construed as a fixed destiny that is not subject to probabilistic calculation. The anticipation of

that fixed future then functions as if it is sending signals back into the past, which then prompt

action in the present.

According to Dupuy, in the case of a future inscribed as catastrophe, projected time

thus involves the creation of an image of the future that is sufficiently convincing as

catastrophe to set in motion actions in the present that will prevent its occurrence, barring an

accident. The necessity of introducing the accidental into this formulation is required because

if we can be sure that measures taken in the present will prevent the occurrence of a

catastrophic future then it has been demonstrated (empirically and philosophically) that those

measures (which tend to come at significant cost, whether financial, ethical and political, in

the present) will be indefinitely postponed, thus paradoxically permitting the undesired future

to take its course. (Current political attitudes towards, for example, the reduction of carbon

emissions would seem to bear this out). Note that the accident is not itself figured as a

possibility, which would be to reintroduce a set of possible futures with various probabilities,

but as an actuality. Thus the fixed point of the future is a superposition of two states, one of

which is the occurrence of the catastrophe that is both accidental and fatal, the other is its non-

occurrence. In le temps du projet, the enlightened common sense that understands that we

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make our own future must be overturned. Instead the future must be sacralized by a process

that situates humanity’s self-destructive violence within an exteriority that used to belong to

the realm of the divine. According to Dupuy, only by repurposing the structure of a

metaphysics of the sacred can modernity avoid the catastrophe it has set in motion (La

Marque du Sacré).

Although Dupuy has remarkably little to say about it, it is clear that the project

necessary to realize le temps du projet is overridingly an aesthetic one: the creation of a

sufficiently convincing and credible image of the future. Whether the aim is for a disastrous

or an auspicious image, this is neither a philosophical or political task but an aesthetic

vocation, however much the former may inspire the latter. This is a difficult task since the

future is so often characterized as something literally incredible, no more so than when it

comes crashing into the present as a disaster that is experienced overwhelmingly as a fiction,

as something unbelievable or “unreal” coming out of the blue.

The difficulty here is perhaps compounded by the way in which catastrophe in le temps

du projet is itself insufficiently temporalized. The particular catastrophes that Dupuy and

others see lying ahead are the interrelated phenomena of climate change, fossil fuel depletion

and the unregulated growth of converging bio- and nanotechnologies. But there is an obvious

sense in which these phenomena are not “in” the future. Neither do they necessarily take place

within the compressed event-like temporal format that characterizes the majority of historical

examples that have determined the notion of catastrophe itself. These typically include natural

phenomena such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions and “man-made” calamities

such as aerial bombardments, nuclear or biochemical accidents, and, most significantly,

genocides - but not, say, chronic epidemics such as those of malaria and AIDS in sub-Saharan

Africa or the incessant rise of fatalities in automobile accidents worldwide. Climate change,

which is for many by far the most significant threat ever faced by humanity, is simply not an

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event-like catastrophic phenomenon to which we can attach a specific date. Indeed it is spatial

and temporal dispersion (the most tangible local effects manifest themselves far from the

point of their causal origin) that distinguishes the complexities of current anthropogenic

catastrophe from its disastrous predecessors. Neither does the image of the future created by

dozens of films, books and documentaries seem to have been made the likely effects of

climate change more credible in the popular imagination by the multiplication of numbers and

dates, whether in terms of carbon reduction targets (e.g. 330ppm by 2020) or scenario plotting

for possible futures organized around averaged degrees of warming.

Given this, it becomes tempting to temporally situate a relationship to these phenomena

in an aftermath – climate change as catastrophe that has already happened, rather than

something that is perpetually deferred to a near or far future, to which we must simply

become (unequally) accommodated. But both these temporal displacements belong to a

modernist conception of disaster in which time is split into a before and after, with the present

occupying the moveable site of this split. Each of these displacements inserts a requirement

for an aesthetic “as if” into a collective relationship to time. The demand is to act “as if”

something has happened or will happen which simultaneously appears as “unreal” in the

present. This unreality persists in spite of the multiplication of isolated events that are asserted

as linked to a catastrophic “master” event originating in the past or the future.

It is this “as if” that reciprocally determines “projected time” (whether projected

forward or back) which presses it back into chronological time and gives it an equality which

“separates us from ourselves and transforms us into impotent spectators of ourselves –

spectators who look at the time that flies without any time left, continually missing

themselves” (Agamben 72). An understanding of messianic time that unequivocally

distinguishes itself from the ambiguities of an “open” futurity is decisive here. This is because

messianic time is what enables an escape from the tyranny of temporality itself, a time in

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which we are perpetually consigned to occupy either a beforehand or an aftermath structured

by catastrophe. For what messianic subjectivity actually reveals is that time is no longer “of

the essence”. Instead, the time that flies gives way to an “an operational time in which we

take hold and achieve our representations of time, … the time that we ourselves are, and for

this very reason, … the only real time, the only time we have” (68).

The achievement of this orientation to time also requires that we give up the axiomatic

ethical horizon of species survival, which we earlier noted as structuring a catastrophic or

redemptive form of messianism. The question of the end of the human species is one that is

simultaneously raised and abjected by most ecological thinking. Urgent invocations to “save

the planet” always only refer to a planet habitable by six billion plus humans and must repress

the fact that the planet as such has no need of saving and is guaranteed, with a certainty that

far outstrips any probabilistic prediction of human collective futures, to “survive” beyond our

disappearance from it.

Yet intellectual contemplation of the end of the human species is not typically regarded

as a worthwhile or empowering form of philosophical speculation, at least within most

Western traditions. But what remains scandalous within the subjectivity of biblical

messianism is precisely this bond between apocalypse and the redemption of the human

species via its complete transmogrification at the end of time. This is not an understanding

that rests on some terminal point in the future, but one that recursively incorporates and

disperses that projected time within itself. Messianism does not take the form of prophecy for

a future or the conjuring of a credible image through the imagination of the “as if” but of a

performative announcement about a total transformation that is not just already underway in

the present but has always been implicit. Accordingly, there is no point of view from which to

situate a post-apocalyptic or redeemed world: “no subject could watch it or act as if at a given

point” since “even the subjects who contemplate it, are caught up in the as not, called and

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revoked at one and the same time” (Agamben 41).

Dupuy asserts that le temps du projet requires a fixed point in the future around which it

can organize its reconfiguration of temporality and causation. But what if the aesthetic “as if”

of a sufficiently convincing image of this fixed point is robbed of its power precisely because

of its representational efficacy, because of the primacy it gives to the perspective of the “as

if”? Is this possibility played out in the multiplication of futural images of annihilation and

catastrophe as somehow survivable (in which humanity, following the Judaic example,

always reconstitutes itself from a remnant, as in the film 2012 or Cormac McCarthy’s The

Road)? Portraits of the future that are as bleak and unforgiving as those imagined in a film

such as The Age of Stupid still require the paradoxical survival of someone to tell the story of

the time “when we could have saved ourselves” but did not. Even the hubris of humanity

capable of witnessing its own disappearance is evident in the recent surfeit of “documentary”

TV specials in which one can vicariously enjoy scenarios of a planetary future without the

human species.

This is not to say that a future with unmitigated climate change is the definitive

endgame for humanity or even for a global majority. Indeed, it is perhaps more likely to be

rather like the present – with its full gamut of inequalities and injustices – only massively

more so. But these representations offer us a world cleansed of humanity but “as if” we were

still in it, as spectators of a time past our own disappearance, which is total, instantaneous and

without human suffering - apocalypse-lite. In a sense, they depict a world that is entirely

contiguous with the one we already inhabit, with the exception that we have condescendingly

stepped offstage for a few moments to see what might happen without us.

VI The Truth of Extinction

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Le temps du projet appears metaphysically plausible yet aesthetically intractable. Might

that intractability be circumvented by another perspective that supplements the “species-ism”

that grants a primacy to the world-disclosing human as the exclusive subject of its own self-

understanding? Contemporary science provides such an alternative perspective with the

extrapolation of the second law of thermodynamics (things fall apart) that underpins the

theory of the heat death of the universe. This is the time not merely of the extinction of the

human species or its current planetary home, swallowed by an expanding sun in six billion

years, but of the galaxy that sustains it and of every single other galaxy. After a trillion trillion

trillion years from now, which is not just an endpoint in time but when time itself comes to an

end, stars and galaxies will have been absorbed into supermassive black holes, which will in

turn radiate away the remaining energy in the universe. Atomic matter will cease to exist,

leaving a state of maximum entropy. Within a secular scientific imagination, this is the true

apocalypse, the final unveiling, when time itself really does come to an end.

What would it mean – now – to commit to the heat death of the universe as the ultimate

fixed point of projected time, beyond the being-toward-death of Dasein, beyond the

annihilation of the planet Earth, beyond the survival of humanity? Ray Brassier articulates the

way in such a commitment might offer a new kind of intelligibility:

Thus, it is not so much that extinction will terminate the correlation [the post-Kantian

“common-sense” perspectives which declare that whatever knowledge we have of the

world can only ever be how that world appears for us and not in-itself], but that it has

already retroactively terminated it. Extinction seizes the present of the correlation

between the double pincers of a future that has always already been, and a past that is

perpetually yet to be. Accordingly, there can be no “afterwards” of extinction, since it

already corrodes the efficacy of the projection through which correlational synthesis

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would assimilate its reality to that of a phenomenon dependent upon conditions of

manifestation. Extinction has a transcendental efficacy precisely insofar as it tokens an

annihilation which is neither a possibility towards which actual existence could orient

itself, nor a given datum from which future existence could proceed. It retroactively

disables projection, just as it preemptively abolishes retention. In this regard, extinction

unfolds in an “anterior posteriority” which usurps the “future anteriority” of human

existence. (230)

Considered in this way, the concept of extinction blows apart the cramped sense of finitude

bequeathed by modern philosophy: a tensor between a deathbound subjectivity and the

imperative of species survival (whether on the planet Earth or beyond). Instead, extinction

becomes the source of a coruscating exigency:

It is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of

extinction. Senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative; they represent a

gain in intelligibility. The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point

at which the “horror” concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-being

becomes intelligible. (238)

In the extreme nihilism of this conclusion, senselessness and purposelessness are not

equated with the dereliction of thought. Instead, extinction constitutes a productive and

provocative limit for a properly ecological thinking. The world bequeathed to us by

something like climate change is one in which the world (or nature) is no longer something

“out there” as an indifferent stage for our comings and goings, but is something we are very

palpably “in”, profoundly sensitive to our activity but utterly indifferent to our fate as a life

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form. Just as the complex meaning and alien substance of “atmosphere” now clouds every

clear blue sky and every conversation about the weather, so our own bodies are understood as

intimately populated with microscopic organisms and ecologies that appear unconnected with

our habitual sense of “humanness”. Like the weather, the world has multiplied and become

both strange and strangely familiar, saturated with a dizzying confusion of proximity and

distance that is both – and this is the “horror” – traumatic and pleasurable.

As we adjust (or not) to this claustrophobic universe of relationality and dependence

between the organic and the inorganic, the concept of extinction comes as a breath of fresh air.

This arrival is not manifest through the opening up of an elsewhere or another time in which

we might get a perspective on our collective condition or possible future as a species, but

through an immense expansion of everything in relation to everything else, analogous to the

hyper-inflation of the early universe that cosmology theorizes as the necessary corollary of its

eventual heat death.

The time in which, as Brassier describes, temporal projection has been disabled and

temporal retention abolished is the time of a long now in which the possibility of an “as if”

has disappeared. This is a time in which Benjamin’s jetztzeit, the messianic “now-time” of a

moment without history that erupts into the chain of causality, is permanently instantiated.

This “now-time” is itself given time, stretched out like a drape over the furniture of a

chronological time that no longer furnishes anything and must be gently retired. In light of the

darkness of extinction, there is no other time into which one might project as an alternative

possibility. Universal extinction, and not the being-towards-death of the human, is now the

ultimate fixed point that trumps any and every future that might be imagined in the “as if” of

projected time. It is thus no longer plausible to philosophically separate the problem of “the

time of our lives” that has saturated modern philosophy, art and literature, from the time of

the universe. The time of extinction is the time of a messianicity without a Messiah,

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messianism or even messianicity itself, a time that is “at once a naturalization of eschatology

and a theologization of cosmology” (231).

VI Towards a Cunning Vision of Doom

For Brassier, it is philosophy that ought to refuse its heritage as a medium of affirmation

or justification and instead become “the organon of extinction”, the means by which

subjectivity might achieve “an adequation without correspondence between the objective

reality of extinction and the subjective knowledge of the trauma to which it gives rise” (239).

Yet there is a hint in the preceding discussion that it is precisely the inassimilable and

exorbitant truth of cosmological extinction that unfortunately corresponds only too well to the

economic regime of capital, against which Brassier's own project implicitly pits itself. One of

the truths of capitalism is precisely its perpetuation through the repetition of unsuccessful

attempts to negate its own progress towards self-annihilation. This only partially repressed

desire for catastrophe is perhaps best expressed in the pervasive figure of “meltdown” now

widely used to describe the condition of all types of complex systems that increasing appear

to operate closer and closer to “tipping points” of instability and disintegration, from nuclear

reactors to financial markets, from urban traffic flows to the individual psyche. Rather than

being an exceptional state of disequilibrium, operating at the edge of “meltdown” is now the

efficacious norm.

It would be easy to characterize this feature of capital as a symptomatic of an ahistorical

death wish at the core of human biology and psychology. However, this would be to

profoundly mis-read both the Freudian notion of the death drive and its relationship between

the capitalist mode of production. The death drive does not entail the submission of life (of an

organism or system) to the originary reign of death. Instead, the life of an organism in all its

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energetic complexity is a convoluted deviation that seeks to maintain its existence by resisting

any path to death that does not conform to its own particular economic limits and conditions

for self-preservation. As Freud puts it, these conditions “are component instincts whose

function it is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off

any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in

the organism itself … what we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in

its own fashion” (Freud 33). In Nick Land’s reclamation of the radically indifferent and

inhuman aspect of Freud’s idea, the death drive is the truth of capitalism as a “social suicide

machine” (Land 265):

Capital, one is told, will either survive, or not. Such projective eschatology completely

misses the point, which is that death is not an extrinsic possibility of capital, but an

inherent function. The death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine part. The

immanent voluptuosity of every unprecedented deal takes off from the end of the

bourgeoisie. (266)

Decrying the humanistic revisionism he sees as compromising this realization, Land asserts

that:

The revolutionary task is not to establish a bigger, more authentic, more ascetic

exteriority, but to unpack the neurotic refusal mechanisms that separate capital from its

own madness, luring it into the liquidation of its own fallback position and coaxing it

into investing at the deterritorialized fringe that would otherwise fall subject to fascist

persecution. Schizo-politics is the coercion of capital into immanent coexistence with its

undoing. (278)

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But what remains to such a revolutionary task when, as evidenced in divergent

temporalities of on-going financial, economic and climate-related “disasters”, capitalism

itself rationally embraces its own madness, liquidates its own fallback positions and so

comprehensively invests in its deterritorialized fringe? When the fear of falling “subject to

fascist persecution” is overwhelmed and incorporated by the fantasy of total extinction?

Implicitly building on Land’s provocations, Reza Negarestani develops the thanatropic

model to suggest that:

If the ultimate conception of capitalism is an accelerative and inevitable singularity of

dissolution which assimilates every planetary resource, then it cannot be a radically

alternative way of dissolution to those already affordable by the human organism …

Capitalism does not repel the excess of the truth of extinction [e.g. catastrophic climate

change, solar collapse, the end of humanity or the heat death of the universe] as much as

it economically affirms … such an excess. (Negarestani 195)

Capitalism’s affirmation of this excess, its way of binding itself to and internalizing all

kinds of exorbitant exteriority (a.k.a impending catastrophe), turns out to be precisely what

permits its own preservation. It is the very unsuccessful nature of this impossible binding

that gives “disaster capitalism” the familiar dynamic of repetition-compulsion vis-à-vis its

relationship with the disasters that it engenders and which paradoxically sustain its desire

for “growth”. This is perhaps goes some way towards explaining why sufficiently

convincing images of a catastrophic future, far from being adequate to produce a response

that would prevent their realization, appear to be having the opposite effect: contemporary

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capitalism, (or necrocracy, as Negarestani names it) feeds off the consumption of the

images (and the realities) of its own self-induced dissolution.

What this understanding reveals is that care for humanity’s survival as a terrestrial

species, as a kind of primordial ethical force arriving from the future, might be paradoxically

integral to capitalism’s particular mode of conservation rather than its overcoming.

Necrocracy proliferates through serial acts of protecting itself against the very threats to life

that it generates, as a means to ward off any alternative ways of binding exteriority which

would prevent it from dying “in its own fashion” - something that, with regard to the

contemporary “human”, remains entirely uncertain. Negarestani suggests that such

alternatives

do not simply suggest dying in ways other than those prescribed by the organism, but

rather the mobilization of forms of non-dialectical negativity which can neither be

excluded by the dominant dissipative tendency of the anthropic horizon nor can be fully

sublated by its order”. (199)

Such alternatives thus cannot simply place themselves on the side of humanity (and, by

extension, the planet preserved as an environment capable of supporting it) against the

supposed deathbound logic of capital because it is this privileging of “life” - and whatever

threatens it - that is central to that logic. This is why various forms of emancipatory thought in

modernity find themselves in the somewhat uncomfortable position of advocating conceptual

versions of the inhuman, as forms of negativity which refuse the perversity of this anthropic

horizon. But, if Negarestani is correct, then it is just this dialectical form of the

human/inhuman opposition that renders it into a convention that is perfectly capable of being

put to work within the anthropic horizon itself. A wilful antihumanist “coercion of capital into

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immanent coexistence with its own undoing” (Land 278) then joins the exorbitant truth of

extinction posited by Brassier in that both “ultimately and ironically lack a cunning vision of

doom” (Negarestani 199).

As the preceding discussion has attempted to explore, such a “cunning vision” also

requires an alternative form of temporalization in which the present is no longer situated

between both past and future figured as a disaster, catastrophe or apocalypse. For reasons

outlined above, neither the open-ended but goal-driven time of the project (that has replaced

the cyclical rhythms of work) nor le temps du projet (Dupuy’s “projected time”) provide an

adequate form of temporality for such a vision. The conjecture here is that a kind of

“everyday” messianic time, the non-evental kairos opening up within chronos, offers a

potential alternative. This a messianicity that does not understand itself as the exposure to a

radically unpredictable future which entails the imminent but unpredictable arrival of an

exorbitant exteriority, be that the other, death, resurrection or redemption, or even radical evil.

Such a formulation would seem to mime the “terroristic” logic of necrocracy too closely,

fuelled as it is by the same exorbitant exteriority that Land and Negarestani diagnose as

essential to the necrocratic regime. Instead, this is a messianicity that thinks neither of

salvation nor of apocalyptic revelation. It does not meet the violence of the past with the

anticipation of violence from the future. In doing so, it seeks to suspend the efforts of both

work and project - “revolution is not a duty, but surrender” (Land 287) - making its home in

borrowed or stolen times, multiplied out of that hairsbreadth when Saturday comes.

Notes

My thanks to journal’s anonymous reviewer for a perceptive and engaged response to earlier

drafts of this paper.

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1 The OED offers up an archaic usage of “projector” to describe someone as a “promoter of

bogus or unsound business adventures”, a meaning which perhaps continues to haunt every

self-designated “project” today.

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