“So it was I had my first experience with the Accelerator. Practically we had been running about and saying and doing all sorts of things in the space of a second or so of time. (…) But the effect it had upon us was that the whole world had stopped for our convenient inspection.” H.G.Wells, 1901, The New Accelerator in Modern Short Stories,
The growth of cities has created bigger opportunities for (and was in many ways led by) the production of new needs. With consequent increase in waste production. Part of this waste is the result of consumption: composed by materials and objects that were destroyed by human use or have decayed over time. But an increasing part of this waste is generated through symbolic processes, i.e., created by the production of consumption, by industries whose main products are new forms of desire. Since innovation is the main drive of economy, commodities are produced for worlds that do not exist yet, worlds which they will help shape. This power of transformation is enacted not only by design, but mainly by the immaterial labour that produces the world in which the new commodity will have a place. Thereby, obsolescence is inscribed in things. Sign-value overrides use-value, turning goods into monsters.
Science produces its own needs in similar ways. After generations of modern social science, we fell in the trap of the post and the modern. Social scientists of the late 20th century and early 21st have occupied themselves in finding a word to couple with the prefix post, while others keep searching for the best prefix for the word modern. So we have for example post-modern, post-industrial, post-colonial and post-human. Or post-modern, late-modern, hyper-modern, liquid modern, super-modern... What is misleading in this activity is the fact that it is directed to the definition of the present historical moment. First of all it gives the idea that we can place the present into a historic line, on the one side forgetting the past contributions to the spatialisation of social sciences, and, on the other how the present can not be contained in a historical image, for it is always moving. Most significant, in my opinion, is another consequence of this global sport of reassembling the ‘post-modern’: the difficulty in imagining a world beyond the present, a society organised in different ways, the contribution of social sciences to the invention and re-invention of the future. The post will have to be attributed to what comes after us, what we can only imagine, the superation of ourselves. Otherwise we will fall into a dead end of history and will only be able to imagine what is here now.
The growth of cities has created bigger opportunities for (and was in many ways led by) the production of new needs. With consequent increase in waste production. Part of this waste is the result of consumption: composed by materials and objects that were destroyed by human use or have decayed over time. But an increasing part of this waste is generated through symbolic processes, i.e., created by the production of consumption, by industries whose main products are new forms of desire. Since innovation is the main drive of economy, commodities are produced for worlds that do not exist yet, worlds which they will help shape. This power of transformation is enacted not only by design, but mainly by the immaterial labour that produces the world in which the new commodity will have a place. Thereby, obsolescence is inscribed in things. Sign-value overrides use-value, turning goods into monsters.
Science produces its own needs in similar ways. After generations of modern social science, we fell in the trap of the post and the modern. Social scientists of the late 20th century and early 21st have occupied themselves in finding a word to couple with the prefix post, while others keep searching for the best prefix for the word modern. So we have for example post-modern, post-industrial, post-colonial and post-human. Or post-modern, late-modern, hyper-modern, liquid modern, super-modern... What is misleading in this activity is the fact that it is directed to the definition of the present historical moment. First of all it gives the idea that we can place the present into a historic line, on the one side forgetting the past contributions to the spatialisation of social sciences, and, on the other how the present can not be contained in a historical image, for it is always moving. Most significant, in my opinion, is another consequence of this global sport of reassembling the ‘post-modern’: the difficulty in imagining a world beyond the present, a society organised in different ways, the contribution of social sciences to the invention and re-invention of the future. The post will have to be attributed to what comes after us, what we can only imagine, the superation of ourselves. Otherwise we will fall into a dead end of history and will only be able to imagine what is here now.