Report: The Future Anterior as a Way of Thinking the Present

Wednesday nite’s Nonsite event (11/12/08) at SF Camerawork with Amy Balkin and David Buuck was particularly gratifying for me because David’s and Amy’s works have been corresponding for a long time, if only in my head, and so this evening was the occasion for making an otherwise imagined conversation actual.

And that conversation seems to have realized many of Nonsite’s hopes to make manifest, as material for sustained discussion and investigation, some of the submerged lines of communication between projects located in disciplines often kept at some remove from one another: say, poetry and drawing, performance and social practice. The rich discussion that emerged during the Q/A made it clear that the investigations Balkin and Buuck are pursuing converge with many of the collective’s concerns and engagements, so there’s no doubt we will be following-up. In the short term, we are hoping to make an audio-file of the evening’s talks available here, soon, and perhaps there will be further discussion on the website as well. Stay tuned, too, for Kristin Palm's generous introduction. [read more at blog post]

While doing work in different media -- Buuck’s being linguistic, sculptural, performative and ‘dirt-specific,’ Balkin’s visual, interventionist, conceptual, and legal -- these two artists share a set of concerns that converge along a number of axes: the commons, local histories, public use, and the temporality of social action. For both, time itself becomes a critical social medium whose vectors of force penetrate and determine the shape of so-called “public space,” as their projects generate, and make use of, multiple social narratives. Many of Amy’s works, like *Invisible-5*, are spatial and durational, while others, like *This is the Public Domain*, are engaged with the temporality of legal processes and the citizen’s constrained agency therein. Similarly, *Public Smog* intervenes in the burgeoning market of carbon off-sets and maps the emergence of that neo-liberal commodity, whose value is tethered to corporate time.

By contrast, Buuck’s recent BARGE (Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-Aesthetics) project, *Buried Treasure Island*, bends our sense of social time by performing actions cast in atypical grammatical tenses to displace the past’s claim on the future. In his (de)tour guide, Buuck writes, “these are those things that *will have had to have been*, that *will have had to yet occur* in order for such performatives to be able to imagine themselves into being today. Thus the body becomes the vessel for acts of conceptual theater, site-specific performances that aim to have had liberated other futures from the husks of the present.” If you don’t yet have a copy of Buuck’s (de)tour guidebook accompanying BARGE’s Buried Treasure Island, check-out www.davidbuuck.com/BARGE/BTI.

So, while Buuck’s obsolete oil drums and gasoline pumps on Treasure Island will have been sculptural monuments from a post-oil future commemorating our yet-to-be-realized tomorrow, Balkin’s charcoal logo-rubbings from the signage of corporations nefariously involved in the nation’s terror machine, make visible the often invisible names and involvements which appear in “Sell Us Your Liberty or We’ll Subcontract Your Death” as shadowy epitaphs, invoking a moment when the invisible will have become the negative imprint of a memory, or the decaying trace of a nightmare.

At a time when the public sphere has consolidated itself as the organization of private interests, what might it mean to activate residues of past utopian dreams in the interest of other futures? And how might such a time- travel project potentiate site-based interventions in the logic of empire's temporality when the future as we know it appears like a catastrophic fulfillment of yesterday’s fantasy? I’ve been thinking a lot about, and working with, the future anterior tense for a while, specifically as a way of thinking the present. Tyrone Williams’s work has helped me considerably, so in the interest of contributing to some threads emerging from Wednesday nite’s event, I thought I would include here some fragments from a piece I’ve been writing (for too long now) on Williams's book *c.c.* (Krupskaya, 2002). But first, an excerpt from a letter I wrote to Tyrone after his book came out:

Dear Tyrone:

Maybe history isn't haunted by what happened, rather by what didn't happen. But, I think it's also haunted by what hasn't happened yet, the specter haunting from a future we're still unable to imagine.

You refer to "the possibility of disruption -- or permanent abortion," like a wrench in our unsustainable status quo, this possibility haunts our unsustainable present like a promise. It has to.

And in order for us to be faithful to that promise, don't we have to let our selves and our work be similarly haunted? You use the word "ghosted", or am I misremembering that? In any case, really possessed, not only by what didn't happen, but by something we can't imagine happening yet. The short hand for this i guess would be "another world", one whose futurity wouldn't be determined by dominant interests today. This might be a kind of “catastrophe,” but considering how the "unimaginable catastrophe" is the present we’re already living now, it would also be catastrophe’s antithesis.

But more to the point, it's yr use of the future anterior tense, the "what will have happened" that suggests to me a grammar that might inform a response to the crisis, granted a weak one, as it creates a rift in our understanding of what's happening, and traces a fault thru the present. It's a rogue tense, pressing on oblivion's horizon, reaching to break this continuum of catastrophe, or at least open a place from which to ask, "what will we have done to have made this other future?" I mean, what if this other future, the one beyond the privative horizon of private property, the one that breaks with empire’s temporality and is not a mere extension of the present, what if this future were somehow already here with us, haunting our bodies even like some as yet unnameable organ or sense?

Maybe what the present continuous was for Gertrude Stein, the future anterior is for us—the tense haunting our own "modern compositions," or at least our situation, the only tense that might promise to disrupt permanently the time of Empire, which the present continuous has become.

*

from: “Future Thens And Past Tomorrows: Spectral History In Tyrone Williams’s *c.c.*”

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(Tyrone Williams, from “Cold Calls”)

This recalls a future “those___________…”
future then, future unannounced
however called for

Tyrone Williams, “Study of a Negro Head”

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W.E.B. DuBois, *The Souls of Black Folk*

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Susan Howe *The Europe of Trusts*

[...]

Despite the “end of history” triumphantly proclaimed by neo-liberal technocrats in the wake of geopolitical shifts nearly two decades ago, history continues to impose new demands on poetry today. This so-called “end of history”—co-terminus with the “ends” and means of global capitalism—haunts all of us together with our projects. Rather than disavowing that spectral referent and exorcising its ghost, Tyrone Williams’s c.c. sustains an active meditation on the question: what will “the end of history” not have been? Williams’s work activates the promise of a present that will not have been terminal—the promise of something other that “the end of history”—while proposing that this promise calls to us with some interpellative force from a future radically disjoined from our present tense. From the point of view of a future radically discontinuous with own present, something can be seen that we cannot quite see. By drawing this other time into relation, the poetry allows itself to be haunted by a tense that is not contemporaneous with any “now,” a history whose remains we already are.

As I hope to show by way of Williams’s work, the future anterior -- what will have been -- informs a poetry that courts its own mediation by a future that is not “our own.” From the strange vantage point of a “future then,” the so-called "end of history” becomes legible as nothing more than history’s current dominant ruse.

It is the anterior future that is operative here. The tongue that will have spoken of this future, together with the language and the labor through which it will have emerged, do not yet exist. But they will have arrived, eventually. And the site of such eventuation, like that of the disfigured “i” who will have spoken of it, is the misprized site of a violent elision in the present, the site of an “inaudible howl,” that cold and unidentifiable call toward which it is *c.c.*’s calling to orient us.