An incisive analysis of neoliberalism's intensely futural composition
of time--the pretermodern, a condition of overwhelmed modernity.
The modern vision was characterized by a future that had the potential
to transform the present through human foresight and planning. With the
depletion of modernity, however, the institutions and operations of the
"contemporary" offer new configurations of time-sequencing and history.
Theses such as "posthistory," "presentism," or the "cancellation of the
future" diagnose our postmodern condition as that of a progressless
contemporaneity haunted by the ghosts of futures past.
In this incisive intervention, Suhail Malik contends that such claims
fatally misidentify the rigorously postmodern time-innovations of
neoliberalism, which instead enable a torrent of futures, a condition of
superfluous and multitudinous newness in which futures are continually
enacted upon and factored into a "speculative present".
In ContraContemporary, Malik seeks to describe this intensely futural
composition of time, which is at once true to the premises of modernity
yet far outstrips its anthropometric limitations--a condition of
overwhelmed modernity that Malik calls the pretermodern. Malik
demonstrates how the fate of the avant-garde and its successors in
contemporary art indicates the shifting registers of futurity and the
new, confronts the violent colonial origins of global modernity and
their transmutation into postmodern racisms, and radicalizes the
analysis of "risk societies." He contests the widespread image of a
postmodernity deserted by the future, presenting instead a trenchant
vision of the task of constructing an art and a politics adequate to the
speculative present. When the future is happening now. Everywhere. All
the time.
