FIVE

ASAP Futures, Not Infinite Future

It may be more functional if we mobilized these concepts toward the day after tomorrow rather than toward the infinite future progression of self-improvement. It may be more useful to operate with short-term projections without thinking about them within the ideology of pragmatism, a marked pragmatism, but operating more within the notion of intellectual work. This is a very subtle shift. Worrying about whether an artist can be good is not what should be at issue or in question. We should be curious about the quality of the work in the near future—the quality of its critical function. There should be a desire to transfer the critical dilemma into an imminent, temporal space rather than to defer it into the dysfunctional infinite.

You find that a lot of structures within the art world veer toward the idea that the default state will be an endlessness and infinite projection. The suggestion here, then, is that ASAP is more positive and problematic than infinite projection. If you defer continually, nothing happens, nothing changes. Everything will be fine, but you will flounder within a state of permanent projection. The difference between projection and displacement is political. One model accepts things the way they appear to be; the other moves things around to find a better arrangement. Displacement always differs from projection. Projection is always either supernegative or superpositive, in the sense that it removes the subject from immediate action. It is the speculative tool of choice. So we should be more interested in reclaiming the speculative as a critical problem and using displacement as a tool toward taking it apart. The speculative is a concrete version of projection. Dialectical positions have to be affected by pleasure and psychosis. There are necessarily some human qualities in play here that are not pure. Look at people’s behavior in an educational environment, and you can see that they often become psychotic, or they become pleasure seekers—because of their desire to continue an endless dialectical relationship with their own projection. After that, it is all just industry and intelligence.