 |
| Achille Mbembe |
Since 2008, when you initiated the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and
Criticism (JWTC), you were very much concerned with thinking about the future —
why and why now? Is there something about our current epoch that requires us to
think about the future?
Mbembe: There were two reasons. The first was that the category of the
future was very central to the struggle for liberation if only in the sense
that those who were involved in it had constantly to project themselves towards
a time that would be different from what they were going through, what they
were experiencing. So the political, in that sense, was about a constant
engagement with the forces of the present that foreclosed the possibility of
freedom, but it was also the political, closely associated with the idea of
futurity. And what seems to have happened after 1994 [in South Africa since the
first democratic elections after apartheid], is the receding of the future as a
temporary horizon of the political, and of culture in general, and its
substitution by a kind of present that is infinite and a landing. This receding
of the future and its replacement by a landing present is also fostered by the
kind of economic dogma with which we live; to use a short term, neoliberalism.
The time of the market, especially under the current capitalist conditions, is
a time that is very fragmented and the time of consumption is really a time of
the instant. So we wanted to recapture that category of the future and see to
what extent it could be remobilized in the attempt at critiquing the present,
and reopening up a space not only for imagination, but also for the politics of
possibility.
