(Un)cancelled Future

Last November I delivered a paper at the Hamburg (Insecurity) Sessions conference, which was themed around "the slow cancellation of the future" - a thought-slogan associated with Mark Fisher. 

Well, partly delivered - as often seems to happen with me, the allotted period of time ran out before I got anywhere near the end.

Here is the full text, tidied up, expanded here and there, and given a new title: (No) future music?

Cast of characters: Bifo Berardi, Fredric Jameson, J.G. Ballard, Alvin Toffler, Kodwo Eshun, Marc Acardipane, Phil Knight, Oswald Spengler.

Debt-dude David Graeber speaks at length:  On Bureaucratic Technologies & The Future as Dream-Time
 

Blurb - "The twentieth century produced a very clear sense of what the future was to be, but we now seem unable to imagine any sort of redemptive future. How did this happen? One reason is the replacement of what might be called poetic technologies with bureaucratic technologies. Another is the terminal perturbations of capitalism, which is increasingly unable to envision any future at all."

(via Carl Neville)

Reminded me I meant to link to this Frieze dialogue between Franco 'Bifo' Berardi,  author of After the Future, and Mark Fisher, author of forthcoming Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures