Contemporary Music and Its Futures

Abstract

extraterrestrial colonisation. The miraculous tesseract turns out to be the work of the future people whose advanced intelligence is the implied result of that colonisation process. Note that, despite the prominent thematisation of inter-dimensionality here, linear causality and intentionality in the universe of Interstellar still seem to work as humans would normally expect: without at least some basic abstractions it would be difficult to produce fiction at all. 1 The film's message seems to be that the solution to the catastrophe of global degradation is to be found not in the knowledge we have now, but 'out there' in one of many possible futures. Justice and peace, the trope implies, are matters outside of history: all humanity can do now is try to stay competitive and keep up the appearance of progress. The power of this plot device lies in the way it politicises the present. In Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred, for example, a mysterious force shuttles the protagonist inexplicably between past and present. The book's narrative follows what is in effect a kind of fold in history, linking relationships of care and moments of trauma across two intersecting plot trajectories. The fragmented present forces the reader to confront the horror of slavery not as a bounded, finished historical event but as a process working at the level of the protagonist's genetic code; slavery transposed to the level of metaphysics. Hypothetical changes enacted in the past enable the reader to encounter an apparently harmonious present in the subjunctive, to consider the ways that things could be going differently, and thus arrive at a better understanding of the necessities and contingencies which constitute the now of everyday experience. The name for this imaginary time of hypothetical resolution in French is uchronie. The term comes from the title of an 1876 novel by Charles Renouvier, a central philosopher of history, religion and law under Napoleon III, and an important influence on the pragmatist thinking of William James (Renouvier 1988). In a lengthy preface, Renouvier leads his reader to understand that the core of the text has been passed down in secret by a scholar fleeing the inquisition in the years following the execution of Giordano Bruno. The fictional author of this text finds himself intellectually hamstrung by the church's failure to reconcile the new empirical science with its metaphysical commitment to a single, personalised Absolute. If Europeans in the past had chosen to remain polytheistic, he asks, would they today be better equipped to accept the pluralist metaphysics that the new sciences seem to demand? What, for example, would have happened to philosophy if the Roman empire had chosen not to back Christianity? Renouvier's novel is both the answer to that question and an experiment in the kind of critical history that he saw his pluralist metaphysics as making possible. It treats the Absolute as an event like any other, a specific node in a chain of relations with no necessary outcome at any given time...