»Is it possible to create a 'location' in which the new self-employed find some of their needs for identity and culture, communication and mutual support, to have been met; where they can express their vision of a 'polis', and start to project a city on the scale of their needs and desires?«
Sergio Bologna, the great Milanese analyst of the present change taking place in life and work in post-Fordian Western Europe, raises this question in a utopian plan, co-authored by him, that proposes a radical new conception for the living space of this class, and is published for the first time in this springerin issue. Bologna closes with the appeal: »When all dimensions of political action are too small – and this is the case with the new forms of work – only the dimension of a utopia can be realistic.«
At present, many reversions to utopian concepts of modernism are circulating in the art scene. Recombinations of future-world fantasies from the sixties and seventies have become fashionable in all cultural fields. In these, the question of other social formations and conditions is often suppressed in favor of a futurological escapism of form. But this question does seem to be raised on another level, however: that of space. The clearer it becomes that the re-formed U.S. nationalism that has emerged since September is, for example, more than a reactionary farce on the transnational intertwining of capital agglomeration, and the clearer it becomes that the idea of esthetically and politically autonomous lifestyles and practices stands in the way of the new political fantasies of control and surveillance, the more evident it is that a new approach is needed to counter the late-capitalist global and spatial power rituals. The new challenge is not just one of dealing with internal problems of cultural identity or complex subject positions, which amounts to a question of articulation, and of being heard. Rather, it is a challenge involving the space in which the subject's desires for articulation – which are, in fact, incompatible – overlap. When Bill Ayers, a former member of the activist movement »Weather Underground,« founded in 1969, who is now a professor in Chicago, reviews historical phases of symbolic resistance in this issue, one reason is to reflect upon the changed scenario critics of official U.S. politics have faced since then, and which criteria could guide this criticism in the future.
Contrary to all the most recent manifestations of a »no-past« philosophy, Future Worlds is also concerned with stressing the heuristic power of historical analysis – for example, in the contribution by Jason Simon, who provides a photographic documentation of the historical transformations in a corridor at Harvard, or in Andrea van Straeten's article dealing with »rumor clinics« and the fiction of social sedation in post-war America. Jacques Attali's and David Toop's essays on the history and esthetic practice of one of the identity-producing labels of the present day, and of electronic music; Nebosja Jovanovic's text about war, art and trauma in a protectorate; Tanja Förster's report on an art festival in a Beirut that is still recovering from civil war; a look at scenes in Hungary and Russia or at a video by two young artists about urban systems of control in London: all these describe contemporary formations and conditions of the space in which Bologna sees the models for his political utopia developing – the cultural space.