Past Perfect Future Present
Past perfect continuous is a grammatical tense that shows something
started in the past and continues up until a point in time. It is like
the register that Foucault speaks to use in, elaborating a genealogy of
the present, the historical formations that persist.
CLR James used the phrase “future in the present”
to
elaborate an approach to politics that fermented utopian energies and
fervor not through a projection into a distant future one could not
hope to touch, but from drawing from the radical potentiality already
existing within the present. In the present possibility of a radical
future that struggles take root, not to create from nothing, but to
realize what already is emergent.
Between the past perfect and the realization of the future present
there is a void, an empty center, from which the becoming subject, the
compositional emergence animating how the future in the present is
elaborated drawing from the past perfect. It is filled with cuts of
sense, ruptures, renewals, and becomings.
A compositional archive does not collect and track these becomings,
ruptures and renewals for the purposes of tagging them, naming, fixing,
and declaring them over. Rather, the archive is a living memory of
these compositional moments, an archive that avoids this final closure
or fixation by acting as a resource for the coming process of
composition.
Art & immaterial Labor
Conference, Tate
Britain, January 19th,
2008
Audio from Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco
'Bifo'
Berardi, and Toni Negri, as well as a general discussion