Unsurprisingly, the word punk<\/em> was first uttered as a derogatory term, referring to prostitutes, petty criminals, and other members of an underclass demoted in social status for ignoring bourgeois protocols. But once appropriated to beckon the transgressive rebel and iconoclast, punk\u2019s vacant future now stands as a symptom, a cogent outcome of corporate greed. When punk attitudes become forms of protest, their skirmishes strangely resonate with the quixotic conduct of May \u201968 and the writings of Debord, Deleuze, and even Badiou. Ergo, is dissent also central to French thought because of its callous use of the word futur (defined as an imaginary, fictitious time projected beyond the present, as opposed to the adjacent term avenir, which points to actualthings-to-come)?3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - See Philippe Meyer\u2019s essay Le futur ne manque pas d\u2019avenir<\/em> (Paris: Gallimard, 2000) for a more elaborate differentiation of the two terms.<\/span> This nuance denotes a more intricate understanding of the future tense and clearer boundaries between imagined and concrete events coming after our evanescent present. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This assertion that the future will always be financially better off is again predicated on the fallacies of permanent growth and progress. <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The craft of speculating on the conditions of future generations was studied intensely within science fiction, a literary and filmic genre sparked by the wonders that the industrial revolution was expected to unlock. But the scenarios concocted in Sci-Fi now suffer from an ever-shortening foresight, as we move toward present-day works: from Olaf Stapledon\u2019s Last and First Men<\/em> (1930) anticipating human life in the next two billion years, to the<\/em> Star Trek<\/em>franchise (1966\u2013present) portraying space explorers between the twenty-second and twenty-fourth centuries, to recent cyberpunk thrillers, initiated by William Gibson\u2019s Neuromancer<\/em> (1984) .<\/em> This last set of movies and novels depict near-future scenarios, which are flipping in quick succession to calendar dates of the past, such as Blade Runner<\/em>(1982) and its timeline set in November 2019. Cyberpunk thus distorted our expectations of a stable past, present, and future and demonstrated that \u201cthe future\u201d of the 1950s (filled with clunky robots and big-brained aliens) was utterly different from \u201cthe future\u201d of the 1990s (operated by genetically modified post-humans and wet-ware hackers). <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n More complex and socio-politically convoluted, Richard Fleischer\u2019s dystopian film Soylent Green<\/em> (1973) summons topical issues of unfettered pollution and overpopulation that trigger the collapse of agricultural systems in a fictitious 2022, forcing humans to (spoiler alert) engage in cannibalism. Such thinning out of the timeframe between factual present and speculative futures brings forth a sense of concern and urgency, voiced by Extinction Rebellion and countless other activist assemblies. Outdated incremental change, as professed by centrist politics, only saves the planet for our children-to-come and conveniently serves as the event horizon of a distant futurity to be pursued but never attained. Against this, the ground-breaking reforms prophesized by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s Green New Deal and Greta Thunberg\u2019s 2019 climate action speech at the United Nations plead for actions taking effect right here<\/em>, right<\/em> now<\/em>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Visit npr.org for full transcript of Thunberg\u2019s 2019 UN speech.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Punk Sociology<\/em> author David Beer links aesthetics with DIY creativity and no-nonsense semantics, measuring punk gestures by their degree of authenticity, sarcasm, and Fear of Selling Out(FOSO<\/em>).5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - David Beer, Punk Sociology<\/em>, (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 20-24.<\/span> To these criteria I would add a sharp sense of timing and placement, as incisive as when the Sex Pistols crashed the British monarch\u2019s silver jubilee in 1977, singing God Save the Queen<\/em> while cruising the Thames River before the Houses of Parliament. Occupy Wall Street protests were orchestrated, with similar aplomb, in reaction to the bank bailouts of 2008. Often discredited for spouting unclear demands and a delayed response, Occupy was nonetheless instrumental in steering the public\u2019s anger away from government officials and toward the real decision makers of the day. By staging its protests in front of Wall Street and not the White House, Occupy nonverbally spoke truth to the hegemonic powers that now lie, undisputed, in corporate money. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In today\u2019s muddy political climate, elusiveness is not a liability but an essential asset. Occupy and others need greater fluidity to master urgent actions and ad hoc invention rather than committing to set-in-stone principles, which are much easier to control, discredit, and topple. Punk\u2019s utter disregard for future betterment effectively channels such actions, just as Edgar Olgu\u00edn\u2019s contempt for decorum empowered his response to the mass kidnapping and execution of a hundred students in the Mexican province of Guerrero. His photographic series Poner el cuerpo: sacar la voz<\/em> (Showing One\u2019s Body, Raising One\u2019s Voice, 2014\u20132015) pictured naked men and women in public spaces, scribbled with protest slogans like living placards; he plastered the resulting images across social media to vent his outrage in a most viral yet sincere manner.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - See Olgu\u00edn\u2019s 2014 project on Tumblr:< https:\/\/ponerelcuerpo.tumblr.com >.<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Art-making, for punks, requires a love of living dangerously in the moment and a tolerance for ambiguous levels of success. Pussy Riot\u2019s breakthrough performance in Moscow\u2019s Red Square captured the world\u2019s imagination in 2012, as they delivered songs such as \u201cPutin is Wetting Himself\u201d while wearing brightly coloured balaclavas. The collective\u2019s leaders, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, paid dearly for these actions, as they were arrested for hooliganism and spent two years in jail for this and other stunts. However, they have since enjoyed much recognition from the art world, including high entries in both Art Review<\/em>and Artnet\u2019<\/em>s list of most influential people. Ironically, many detractors discredited Pussy Riot for allegedly commodifying the art of protest once they reached wider audiences. French duo Claire Fontaine has weathered this delicate balance for years, deflecting accusations that revelling inside art markets would disqualify its contempt for capitalism. Claire Fontaine\u2019s response highlights every artist\u2019s dilemma, as both critics and enablers of high-end gallery systems: \u201cInside, outside, these are things we don\u2019t understand. Who says that? There is no such thing that is defined outside<\/em> of capitalism anymore.”7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - \u201cClaire Fontaine by Anthony Huberman,\u201d Bomb,<\/em> no. 105 (Fall 2008), accessible online.<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Spunkt Art Now<\/em>, a project curated by S\u00e9bastien Pesot in which I have been involved, also reactualizes punk in twenty-first-century art. As Pesot argues, \u201cWe need to do more than regurgitate the scene\u2019s longstanding slogans. Simply proclaiming yourself punk is so not punk.”8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Excerpt from S\u00e9bastien Pesot\u2019s Spunkt Art Now manifesto, published at La Fabrique culturelle: <www.lafabriqueculturelle.tv\/ capsules\/12461>.<\/span> Likewise, Spunkt ally and feminist collective B.L.U.S.H. mixes the rawness of punk with ecological concerns. Its performance The Litany of Curfews<\/em>(2019) incorporates audio samples of French marine explorer Jacques Cousteau addressing the pollution of oceans as early as 1970. His voice evolves over soundscapes of whale songs,live<\/em> effects, and pre-recorded drum and guitar riffs, while Annie Baillargeon, Isabelle Lapierre, and Marie- H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Blay slowly unload an enormous bag of plastic refuse like a toxic pi\u00f1ata. <\/p>\n\n\n\n B.L.U.S.H.<\/em> intermingles environmental anxieties from the past with our own fears of the future collapse of the biosphere. As a result, the trio punctures our modern conventions of linear and progressive time, belittling the dogma of growth to integrate it back into natural cycles of emergence, regress, and rebirth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In these cyclical efforts to conserve nature, it is now the eco-artists who are called \u201cconservative\u201d for resisting the \u201cprogress\u201d of laissez-faire economics. The seemingly benign interruption of May \u201968 here finds more traction when joined with other historical rounds of unrest: Gandhi\u2019s Salt March of 1930, the Selma protest of 1965, Tiananmen Square in 1989, Arab Springs in 2010, Black Lives Matter in 2020, and more to come. Especially since they have morphed to virtual entities, the tables have turned on formerly conformist business leaders, who now embrace innovation and disruption to exacerbate the cravings of users with an unquenchable thirst for new apps and devices. And yet, technology trends prescribing<\/em> the future are wrongly perceived as predictions<\/em>. While pushing the widespread use of networks as essential tools for the coming decades, the digital revolution made a fortune from this kind of fortune-telling, and it foreclosed our ability to think futurity otherwise. The catchphrase The Future is Now<\/em> epitomizes the aspirations of a consumer market to shackle things-to-come onto a predestined fate. But is the future really just a misnomer of the present? No, not really. This is only clever posturing, and punks hate posers. Even Google economic consultant Hal Varian downplayed this conflation: \u201cAll the data in the world can only measure correlation, not causality.”9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Hal R. Varian, \u201cBeyond Big Data,\u201d Business Economics<\/em> 49, no. 1 (2014): 6.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The upcoming ventures of AI surveillance, hyper-automation, and Facebook money are now posited as essential, inevitable, and foretold as economically benevolent. This assertion that the future will always be financially better off is again predicated on the fallacies of permanent growth and progress. Baby boomers may have lived in such a gilded age of inflation, but millennials woke up from this investor\u2019s dream to a nightmare of student and mortgage debt. Conversely, emerging groups like New York- based Decolonize This Place (DTP) have put degentrification at the centre of their mission statement. Pointing the finger at both artists and galleries for moving into low-income neighbourhoods and forcing local residents out, DTP denounces the austerity measures that cut social housing, education and health programs. Since 2016, DTP\u2019s annual demonstration on Columbus Day has challenged the necessity to toggle between artist and activist modes, when consolidating the dispersed anger of Indigenous, Black, and other communities affected by post-colonialism into more cohesive art campaigns. In December 2018, Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon headed DTP\u2019s drive to denounce the Whitney Museum\u2019s vice- chair, Warren Kanders, for his association with Safariland, an arms manufacturer deploying teargas at the Mexico-U.S. border, which led to his resignation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Fittingly, creators are now mobilizing to shape a survivable legacy of their own making. Before being accused of selling out, as Pussy Riot and Claire Fontaine did before them, DTP and others need to think of system-wide approaches to appropriate the present, as it slips into the future. This involves removing artists from the mechanisms that codify them as commodity producers, akin to the heteronormative behaviours that reduce men and women to their procreative roles: making babies to increase the tally of workers, soldiers, and consumers. These social contracts grease the wheels of productivity that build and sustain the foundations of control and dominance in capitalist empires. Punk\u2019s anti-perennial impulse rejects the utilitarian mindsets of production and re-production, forcing every individual to consider the prospect of jouissance \u2014 of self-realization in the present \u2014 and renounce the blind hope in a redemptive futurity that will forever postpone our sense of purpose. Little Orphan Annie was right to sing \u201ctomorrow you\u2019re always a day away.\u201d If only our societies could sidestep the techno-fetishism that fuses the then and the now, we might be able to keep an open mind about the multiple paths of things to come and dare to improvise when facing the unprecedented, instead of haphazardly planning for the unpredictable.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO2-IMG2-IM_Sorenson_Olguin_1_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
Poner el cuerpo: sacar la voz<\/em>, 2014-2015.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO2-IMG4-IM_Sorenson_Blush_D8C_7705_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
The Litany of Curfews<\/em>, performance, L\u2019OEil de Poisson, Qu\u00e9bec, 2019.
Photo : Etienne Boucher <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO2-IMG3-IM_Sorenson_DTP_Whitney_MTA_Branding_1_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
Poster denouncing a member of the Whitney Museum board of directors who is president of Safariland, 2018.
Photo : courtesy of Decolonize This Place<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n