Anarchitectures of the Future: Speculative Infrastructures for the Planetary Present

The modern promise of progress opened up the future: it turned it a source of aspiration and possibility, an untapped reservoir, an ineluctable infatuation. For over two hundred years, the future was modernity’s promise and its consolation, its clarion call and its lullaby. But, after progress, the future is not what it used to be. Given over to the contingencies and peripeteia of an earth rendered forever unstable and unsafe, the future has been rendered precarious when not marked by the spectre of catastrophe (always yet to come). Reprising the impulses and motifs of artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s experiment in “anarchitecture” and is aesthetics of collapse, this paper makes a case for abolishing “the future” in the collective unrest that is the elaboration of planetary social life. Experimenting with the question of the future and its outside in the planetary present, the paper probes the potential of a theory of social change after progress, one capable not of building a future but of elaborating infrastructures of social thought and social life outside modernity’s hegemonic regime of historicity.