The Plot Against the Future

This chapter, for the book 'Memories of the Future: On Countervison' (Stephen Wilson and Deborah Jaffé, eds.) was originally delivered as the keynote address for the second day of the conference 'Memories of the Future' at Senate House, London on 3 May 2014. If we are asked to think about a time machine, we might imagine an object that looks different to all the other objects in the world, like the bizarre vehicle described by H.G. Wells. In this chapter, I introduce another kind of time machine, which rather than being a different kind of object in the world, might be constructed out of a different usage of existing objects. In this instance, the time traveller is someone who talks about and uses the things of this world in a different way than everyone else. I discuss this second type of time machine in detail through an analysis of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s story 'Memories of the Future'. The final part of my chapter applies the distinction between new objects and new uses of existing objects to historical analysis. I ask if there is something that could separate knowledge of how things were in history (and how things might have been in counterfactual histories) from the recreation of historical knowledge in a form that this world does not use it. This part of my chapter focuses on Robert Musil’s reconstruction of Austro-Hungary on the eve of World War One in his book 'The Man Without Qualities'.

• http://www.arts.ac.uk/chelsea/research/g...
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPoxpeTA...