This essay examines some implications of "the future" as a construct applied to
understanding the course or possible course of music history. Looking at the functions
and malfunctions both of how we project and how we might interpret projections, the
essay questions the usefulness of "the future" and the activities that would validate it. By
discussing prediction's inherent transformation of ideas into ideologies, the essay seeks a
rejection of "the future" on the grounds that any seemingly aesthetic or musical positions
it might take are ultimately disguised political values running contrary to art's ability to
seek its own status.
Richard Wagner, or for that matter anyone with a pronounced interest in ideas about the future, could have learned a great deal from a visit to Disneyland. Wagner wrote that "the begetter of the artwork of the future is none other than the artist of the present, who presages that life of the future, and yearns to be contained therein. He who cherishes this longing within the inmost chamber of his powers, he lives already in a better life--but only one can do this thing: the artist."(1) Talking about Disney in Romantic terms would seem almost as improbable as the description "Mickey Mouse" in a discussion of Götterdämmerung. This is not to suggest that there is no artistry to be found with a Disney logo attached, but merely that Wagner, among many others, may have been shortsighted in his farsightedness. He didn't anticipate the possibility of shortcuts, while one of the Disney empire's most successful deceptions is to present the future.
"Present" is particularly apt in its combination of one meaning, so intimately connected with the "magic" of the Magic Kingdom (i.e. its skills of marketing and presentation), with the word's other denotations like the "here and now." This blurring of verb and noun reflects the context in which we are asked to think of the future not just as time, but as place: Tomorrowland. Ignoring the irony of Thomas More's "Utopia," (named from Greek uo, meaning "no," and topos, meaning "place"--Utopia is literally, then, "no place") Disney's talents for presentation transform a relative temporality, which by its very definition can never exist, into a fixed spatial location by means of an equation like Laurie Anderson's Let X=X: "I can see the future, and it's a place. About seventy miles east of here, where it's lighter."(2) Rather than being forced into passivity by waiting like Vladimir and Estragon for the arrival of that which can never come, the spatialization which Laurie Anderson treats wryly and Disney takes seriously by similarly spatializing other concepts (as with Fantasyland) means that the future becomes a place to go. Tomorrow is a deliberate destination, and we can quite literally take steps to get there. The spatialized future is open for inspection and interaction in real time. And while Disney's particular transubstantiation of time into space may be of limited value beyond the amusement it offers--time travel with plenty of free parking--the idea of Tomorrowland encapsulates what seems to be the deeper issue behind conceiving of the future in whatever form we choose to present it: control. The future is a matter for direction.
In Music, the Arts, and Ideas, Leonard Meyer suggests that speculating about the future is important "not because one wishes to control or determine the future, but because our understanding of the meaning and significance of the present depends in part upon the implications which the present appears to have for the future."(3) Meyer would be correct if implications were somehow neutral or independent of the minds that conceived them. However, unlike the "implications" in natural systems, which Meyer himself more than once rejects as a model for understanding those of culture, implications in cultural, political and social domains are realized or not depending upon the choices and actions of some human agency.(4) A conceivable future is precisely that because the acts and decisions which might lead to it are themselves at least partially imaginable. The very ability to speculate, to conceive of implications and their possible resolutions, desiring a shape for that which is yet to be, means that thinking about the future inherently assumes (again, in more than one sense) some form of control, whether real or projected. Spatialization of the temporal is one symptom of the "yearning" towards control that colors emphatic visions of the future, musical or otherwise. It is also, of course, a plan of action.
In name, at least, this desire for control may have found its most insidious, yet at the same time least potent, implications in the fascist-leaning "Futurism." Threatening that he could "not much longer succeed in restraining a desire to create a new musical realism by a generous distribution of sonorous blows and slaps," and claiming that "audacity makes all things lawful and all things possible," Russolo's famous manifesto on the "Art of Noises" applied the anti-aesthetic ideals of a purgative violence to the course of the aesthetic.(5) Noise was not simply an acoustic phenomenon, but a cultural and political one meant to displace an entire culture of musical sounds and rituals. "Futurism" was to the future what "Serialism" became to the row after Webern--the amplification of an idea into an ideology as an expression of the desire for control. The real stakes of projected control, on the other hand, are usually far less malignant than those of Futurism, though perhaps ultimately no less political. In thinking of the future, that is to say in thought about the future, not necessarily in the future itself, the status quo is often the least anticipated outcome, but the urge towards control itself ingrained in most visions of the future is the attempt to envision the changes which dissolve the status quo as part of an evolution, rather than as a mutation. That is, whether it is perceived or manufactured, it is necessity, and not accident, which is the propeller of speculation.
For example, there is a very prominent and powerful American composer whose discourse at the university and conservatory composition departments he visits usually includes prognostications that a new "common language," as he calls it, will soon emerge from the current stylistic pluralism that Meyer characterizes as a "fluctuating stasis."(6) This composer feels that musicians and audiences have become disenfranchised from one another. Alleging both that tonality was such a "common language" up until its abandonment and that it was a "language" which "never hurt anybody"--thereby sidestepping some possible issues behind its dissolution--the composer/visionary asserts the desirability of a new such "common language" that will function similarly to his understanding of tonality and reunite composer with composer and composer with audience. He apparently views his own attempts at articulating a possible "common language" as unconvincing to audiences and/or composers, at least as far as their value as a plan of action, and he therefore reserves judgment about what might constitute an actual abiding "new language." Nevertheless, his view of the future of music is one dependent on the control manifested in building around common practices (or rebuilding, if one actually accepts his views on the function and effects of tonality) a musical community where, rather than branching into a multiplicity of new, independent or interdependent contexts, as in Meyer's "fluctuating stasis," changes could be measured against and understood within a larger, dominant context. A common language would in that case be at least as much a political and social system as an artistic resource.
To Meyer in 1967, the future in stylistic terms would be a "dynamic steady state" similar in structure to the present, but differing in its constituent styles:
If our time appears to be one of "crisis," it does so largely because we have misunderstood the present situation and its possible consequences. Because a past paradigm has led us to expect a monolithic, all-encompassing style, the cultural situation has seemed bizarre and perplexing. The "crisis" dissolves when the possibility of a continuing stylistic coexistence is recognized and the delights of diversity are admitted. The question then becomes not is this style going to be THE STYLE, but is this particular work well-made, challenging, and enjoyable.(7)
Meyer's model of the future essentially obviates participation in a style as an aesthetic criterion, shifting the burden of value to a smaller unit--the work. The proponent of the "common language," on the other hand, delights in the promise of access to a shared intelligibility. The point, however, cannot be who has the crystal ball with the best reception. Meyer himself suggests that his prognostication had the virtue of already being true when it was made, and is still largely the case some thirty years later.(8) However, whether either, neither, or even both of these speculations about the future eventually becomes or remains the case (the future is, after all, a very big place!) is of little or no consequence to the act of speculation. The real outcome, whatever it may be, is of far less relevance to the conception of the future than understanding the forces inherent in thinking about the future. Since it is fairly safe to say that, however well informed, most speculations fail to become the case, it might be more profitable to understand not only how the clearest "implications of the present" can just as often resolve in unexpected ways, but also what the consequences of speculation itself are. Does the idea of the future itself have a destiny?
One of the brightest spots in the history of the future was when Beethoven responded to questions about the complexity and obscurity of his Opus 59 quartets by saying, "Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age!"(9) The story is very familiar both in its literal form and in the sentiment it is often accorded, and suggests at least two clear possibilities for how we might interpret such a projection. We could, for example, place the idea of being "for a later age" in the same light as some of Wagner's projections, i.e. as a declaration about what music should or could be like in years to come. That interpretation would suggest that the musical world might develop in such a way that the Razumovsky Quartets would not in the future seem as comparatively "long and difficult" or "not easily comprehended" as they were described in 1807.(10) In such a reading of the statement, the Razumovsky Quartets would suggest a future compositional paradigm that would absorb them through their function as models.
We are fortunate, in an odd way, that the future didn't turn out like that. The Razumovsky Quartets exemplify what Kerman calls a "dialectic of appreciation" between individual works in Beethoven's output and his oeuvre viewed as a whole. Beginning his discussion of the Razumovsky Quartets, Kerman writes of Beethoven's output in general that, "the individual works grow more and more individual, more breathtakingly unpredictable--yet controlled, almost predicted by the radical evolutionary curve of the corpus."(11) While plotting Beethoven's compositional output might, as Kerman suggests, make the appearance of the radically original a predicted outcome, the unpredicted character of the works is not only in the differentiation among the quartets themselves or within Beethoven's output, but also in the overall trajectory of history. They remain displaced long after their novelty, like that of all great works, eventually gave way not to familiarity, as we might otherwise expect, as much as to a perpetual newness. Further, coming not at the end of Beethoven's lifetime, but certainly towards the end of Classicism itself, the unpredictability engendered in the Razumovsky Quartets is so characteristic of the Beethoven oeuvre as to ensure perhaps one of the most noteworthy exceptions to Carl Dahlhaus' observation that "newness is exclusively ascribed to the beginnings of a lengthy period of evolution (a period of evolution, that is, which spans one or two centuries) and not to the middle or later stages."(12) The Razumovsky Quartets were new music in an already well ripened style.
As suggested above, however, the fact that the outcome has little to do with the speculation itself is only part of what would be wrong with interpreting Beethoven's reference to the future as a blueprint for action. It is also questionable whether Beethoven would have so misunderstood the fact that his aesthetic aspirations were not entirely those of his contemporaries, let alone the possibility that they could be embraced by a subsequent generation of composers. Just as unlikely, on the other hand, is that he would himself have so undervalued the quartets as to think that their achievement might become coin of the realm in some future status quo.
No, the idea of being "for a later age" probably expresses Beethoven's desire that in time the quartets might come to enjoy something they could not have, despite reports of their being "popular" among music-lovers, in the years immediately following their creation: a more complete engagement and penetrating comprehension.(13) Beethoven's projection was of a future understanding of the present. Unlike Wagner's artistic prescriptions, the future for the Razumovsky Quartets was not to be the point at which implications are realized in the sense of being put into action, but rather the point at which the past becomes transparent--"realized" in the cognitive sense. The vision for the quartets was a point of reflection, not of projection. Beethoven doesn't seem to have been suggesting that the generic, anonymous "they" would or should take up the Razumovsky Quartets as a model, or that the musical world would conform itself to his ideals and create a context around the pieces, but that the necessity, aesthetics, and context of their composition would in time become clearer. The composer's vision of the future was of a present that would be able to look profitably over its shoulder at the Razumovsky Quartets. The quartets were to be a paradigm of how to listen and understand, not how to compose.
Given that future composers would also have been listeners, and that taking the Razumovsky Quartets as compositional models would also demonstrate a deeper type of understanding, the difference between the quartets as a point of reflection vs. a point of projection might seem thin. Was Opus 59 forward-looking, or looking forward to being looked back upon? Is there a difference? That narrow distinction widens significantly when we understand the problem it underlines in projections about the course of a culture. Speculation may, as the term itself suggests, reflect either the past or present. Projections may not only be wrong, but can come out backwards: mirror, or crystal ball?
In Phillip K. Dick's novel, Counterclock World, time runs in reverse, and commonplace things like shaving or eating breakfast seem like minor miracles when events are viewed in reverse order. Shaving becomes the application of whiskers to the face. Meals begin with regurgitation, and so on. Similarly, in Martin Amis' Time's Arrow, looking at time in the wrong direction gives Auschwitz a noble, rather than evil, purpose: the creation of Jews. Our privileged perspective as readers makes it obvious that the meanings of these events change with their temporal direction, but the narrative voice in Amis' novel, on the other hand, doesn't suspect until the very end that he's seen everything the wrong way around.
This reversal is a possibility when thinking about our own future, at least in terms of cultural developments. We may be confused about the direction in which we're actually looking: that which we see as the future could simply be a regurgitation of the present or even the past. To what extent is our gaze fixed backward, rather than forward, and how does the meaning of our ideas change because of our failure to perceive the difference? A good example of that potential reversal would be Wagner's conception of the "artwork of the future." While Wagner had the profoundest impact on the entire Western musical world, and composers as stylistically diverse as Richard Strauss, Engelbert Humperdinck, Debussy, and Hugo Wolf may each have picked up on various aspects of Wagner's musical and/or philosophical thought, it would be impossible to argue that even with the advent of "Wagnerism" the "artwork of the future" was anywhere more clearly and completely realized than in Wagner's own work. In Wagner's oeuvre, the "future" was literally an idea whose time had come. To himself, certainly, Wagner lived "already in a better life"--in the future. Further, the possible breech birth of speculation in Wagner's particular vision becomes even more critical if we consider the extent to which ideas of myth and restoration play a role both in his thinking and in his reception, making his speculation also a curious form of nostalgia. That soon after Wagner's death the "artwork of the future" as a viable aesthetic direction was also an idea whose time had already gone (except possibly to the cult of Wagnerites) would remove hardly a grain from its value, but that value is much more clearly attached to the future in its role as a sign of the times than as the shape of things to come.
This reversal is not, of course, a failure peculiar to Wagner. It is an inherent limitation of pictures of the future (Again, this may not be true of the future itself, but simply of thought about the future.) that they cannot be drawn on a tabula rasa, but are always conditioned by the perception, understanding, or misunderstanding of past and present. Nor was Wagner unaware of that limitation, and much of his conception of the "artwork of the future" even depended upon it. His idea that "the future is not thinkable, except as stipulated by the past," reveals a cornerstone of his thinking while also delimiting it.(14) Understanding Wagner's work may reveal far more about Schopenhauer, Liszt, and Nietszche than about Richard Strauss. Wagner's music dramas, putting into practice that which he felt the "artwork of the future" should and could do, demonstrate in the clearest possible terms that a picture of the future may be conceived and articulated at its own moment of perigee, when it is actually closest to being realized. Speculations may rest on an understanding of past and present that could seem to imply, necessitate, or even dictate a given course of thought or action. But such thinking would be all the more firmly rooted to the present, and rather than becoming a more probable outcome, the predicted or desired future may become less likely than when it was conceived. The future of the "artwork of the future" almost immediately began receding, not approaching, and we should suspect that as products of the past and present other ideas we have about what might be are likely to devolve in the same way.
To Meyer, this inability to jump over our own shadow, to overcome the conditions of speculation, is actually an advantage. He asserts that "we must speculate--both in the philosophical and in the stock-market sense--about the future if we are to form any sort of coherent picture of the present."(15) As a theorist trying to understand things like music, the arts, and ideas, Meyer's interest in the future naturally favors it as a tool of explanation. His thinking suggests that, since we can't really say with any degree of certainty what is going to happen, and since how we conceive of the future is determined by what has happened already anyway, then the only real value in speculation is derived from how it reflects our current position (which is, of course, also conditioned by the past). Such reasoning is sound as long as understanding the present is, as it is for Meyer, the main goal of speculation, and it is also that reasoning which might allow us, as Meyer does, to dismiss control as a necessary face of speculation. To Meyer, the future functions essentially as a theory of history.
Just as the main use of a compass is to tell us where we are going, not where we are or where we have been, we should not entertain any suggestion that speculation on the part of those not acting solely as theorists, whether Beethoven, Wagner, or Wall Street, is pursued only for its value vis a vis the present or the past. Thinking about the future is obviously an end, not just a means, to those who perceive themselves as having a stake in the outcome. Because the life of his works depended upon future sympathy with his ideals, Wagner was not just describing, but also prescribing in his writings. Nor, especially considering the general scorn which greeted most of his output to that point, could Schoenberg simply have been navel-gazing when, in 1921, he told Rufer, "I've made a discovery through which the pre-eminence of German music is ensured for the next hundred years."(16) Likewise, the composer yearning for a "new common language" does so aloud in front of a younger generation of composers who might be the ones to begin formulating and using it. For most, the wager placed on thinking about the future is clearly far more than an understanding of the present.
The question then becomes one of what they risk. Is the hazard of that wager only in the possibility of being incorrect? Certainly there is, as we might expect, the chance of being short-sighted or simply wrong about what might happen. There is also the possibility that "implications" could be entirely overlooked or misinterpreted, the result of which is simply silence surrounding what ends up being an imminent development.
Neoclassicism, for example, was one of the most fertile fields that music of the 20th century would sow. Using the past as both reference and resource became simultaneously part of Strauss' way out modernism, Schoenberg's way in, and Stravinsky's way of ignoring it. The latter maintained that "Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course--the first of many love affairs in that direction--but it was a look in the mirror, too."(17) That view supports clearly the idea of a conflation of past, present, and future concerns in the understanding of a new aesthetic direction. More to the point, however, is the significance of the idea of an "epiphany" and the suddenness it lends to that change. The impetus for Pulcinella was a suggestion and commission by Diaghilev, not an evolutionary development in the composer's style up to that point.
Perhaps the change in Stravinsky's musical orientation was foreseeable (foreseeable in hindsight, that is--as with the Razumovsky Quartets in Beethoven's output) in light of the many mutations in his total oeuvre, but the actual nature and direction of the mutation would have been as difficult to imagine as his later conversion to serial techniques. Neo-classicism does not seem to have been either foreseen or accompanied by a committed polemic. Before the fact of Neoclassicism's entrenchment both within Stravinsky's output as well as within the overall fabric of 20th century music, there appear to have been few if any suggestions that a reworking of past materials or styles would become such a dominant force in the future of new music, Stravinsky's or otherwise. Indeed, Stravinsky was certainly not the first 20th-century composer to have turned to the past as a stylistic reference, but it would be difficult to argue against the fact that it was the weight of his artistic authority, an authority based to a large extent on the success and trust earned by his non-Neoclassical works, that tipped the scales and joined the course of new music with that of Neoclassicism. So while the propeller of speculation may be necessity, neither speculation nor necessity itself can be taken for granted as a factor behind real and abiding change.
We could also ascribe part of any failure to foresee the approach and rise to prominence of Neoclassicism to a failure in imagining the limits of 19th century Romanticism, limits that would in the 20th century turn it into the object of rejection. More specifically, Neoclassicism's unannounced arrival was also made possible by the particular stance it took regarding history. Of course, a future style which intentionally faced the past would alone have exaggerated the difficulties described above in understanding the historical orientation of prognostication. The rejection of Romanticism engendered in Neoclassicism, however, wasn't just an embrace of the past, which would also have been accomplished by a return to an earlier, less excessive Romanticism. Such a move, what Dahlhaus might have described as the "moderately modern," could simply have been regarded as conservative or reactionary.(18) Rather, Neoclassicism was driven by the re-valuation of a discontiguous past, a past which Romanticism itself had finally rejected. This, in turn, would have made the other problem in speculation that much more difficult--overcoming the conditioning effects of the present or immediate past. Classicism would have been perhaps the biggest blind spot in any idea of the future conditioned by a Romantically derived present. Dahlhaus' observation that, "the new can be seen, paradoxically, as being at one and the same time the actual subject-matter and the blind spot of history" has a corollary: sometimes the new derives from the blind spot of history.(19)
Whatever the sources of Neoclassicism's unexpected newness it would be wrong to think of any lack of foresight regarding its advent as problematic. We lost nothing by not suspecting. Or, put another way, composers seem not to have been disadvantaged by having no coherent vision to suggest or predict what might happen to music in the coming years.(20) The first big step towards the current "delights of diversity" was taken by Neoclassicism's failure to extend and expand upon, as expressionism had done, the domain of the Romantic aesthetic. Similarly, we are no worse off if someone predicts the emergence of a "new common language" which never materializes. Successful prediction does not play the same role in understanding the position of music in a historical or cultural context as it does in science, where theorizing and predicting are intimately connected. In studying the natural world, an inability to predict that which has not yet been empirically verified may spell the death of a theory. Conversely, theoretical predictions later supported by empirical evidence keep a theory viable. If we don't foresee the direction of musical change, on the other hand, we have very little to lose beyond the dubious honor and backhanded compliment accorded to those said to be "ahead of their time." So, the question remains--where is there a problem with prediction as a cultural undertaking if its failure to materialize has no serious consequences? Even if there is little to gain, doesn't it represent a bet we can't lose?
Actually, it is a bet we cannot win. Predicting correctly is still a loss, for the problem with a projected future is not in its potential lack of predictive value, but in the reasoning and values attached to such projection in the first place. Extrapolations of artistic change are plotted with reference to a de facto belief in a Zeitgeist-- a belief that the diverse facets of a culture can be accounted for in light of a prevailing expression. The spirit of the times is a summary, a characterization, and, as in the term "Age of Enlightenment," for instance, represents the aspirations, aesthetics, philosophies, and politics of a culture distilled into a single bottle. But while this art of portraiture may be applied to the study of the past or self-consciously to the present, as in the "Information Age," it is demanded by the future as an object of study through its assumption that, although details may as yet be indistinguishable, the general complexion and profile of change can be sketched out for later recognition or realization. Tomorrowland and Futurism, for example, attempt to address the spirit of the times before the fact. Viewing the Zeitgeist from a reverse angle, thought about the future is premised on an image encoded in, or decoded from, an overview.
It is this assumption of a Zeitgeist which is necessarily loaded against us when thinking about the future. To understand how, we need only look more closely at what the Zeitgeist has to offer. Though well worn and, perhaps, serving an almost poetic need, its particular point of view is troublesome in its singularization of the plural as well as its pluralization of the singular. As Meyer points out, the Zeitgeist is suspect even when applied to the past:
The fact that ideologies change, are not necessarily consistent, and may be pluralistic makes it doubtful that some sort of abstract spirit--a Zeitgeist--guides or determines the destiny of a culture in a mystical and necessary way. Nor is a cultural ideology the expression of a group personality which is somehow independent of the behavior and beliefs of the individuals involved. Rather, it is a set of specific and identifiable attitudes, convictions, and suppositions which are invented, modified, and communicated by particular men and women whether in the present or in the distant past.(21)
In the light of day, then, Zeitgeister are really the same as other spirits--shades of distinct, individual entities rather than nameless, abstract forces. The unexamined Zeitgeist, however, rests on its dissolution of the individual into the collective and in its subsumption of works into a teleology which seems more often than not to be applied in retrospect. In art history, for example, viewing the paintings of Turner as a nascent Impressionism would be to see them bearing witness to some future ideology of which the painter could not have been aware. Likewise in the history of music, thinking of Purcell as a composer of "semi-opera" makes of his works only incomplete statements of a future state of affairs. In turn, even those states of affairs--be they Impressionism relative to Cubism, or the number opera relative to music drama--and, in fact, all works, all lives, all achievements, are rendered transient and incomplete when viewed through the "yearning" eyes of the Zeitgeist. With a view to the entire portrait, no single stroke is a full statement.
The sort of overview inherent in the idea of a Zeitgeist, and therefore in the future as a cultural construct, can only be misapplied to how artistic change actually occurs. In The Classical Style, Charles Rosen puts a finer point on the unsuitability of the collective as basis for understanding artistic change:
The history of an artistic 'language,' therefore, cannot be understood in the same way as the history of a language used for everday communication. In the history of English, for example, one man's speech is as good as another's. It is the picture as a whole that counts, and not the interest, grace, or profundity of the individual example. In the history of literary style or of music, on the other hand, evaluation becomes a necessary preliminary: even if Haydn and Mozart improbably differed in all essentials from their contemporaries, their work and their conception of expression would have to remain the center of the history. This stands the history of a language on its head: it is now the mass of speakers that are judged by their relation to the single one, and the individual statement that provides the norm and takes precedence over general usage.(22)
Thinking about the future instead of the past does not salvage the Zeitgeist from the wreckage it creates. The real problem with thought about the future is that its conditioning belief in a spirit of the times renders the sort of distinction Rosen describes impossible. In making its case, projection imposes an overview that defines the individual only in relation to the "mass of speakers," and not the other way around. As Rosen argues, however, such a distinction is a pre-condition to understanding the value and direction of art. In redirecting the Zeitgeist's gaze from yesterday into tomorrow, projection still cannot avert its tendency to subsume "specific and identifiable attitudes" into a "group personality," to use Meyer's terms, and is blinded to the difference between the "profundity of the individual example" and the "mass of speakers," to use Rosen's. By attempting to define, suggest, or even foresee the position, activity, or works of individuals within a society or other context, cultural projection invariably becomes about control and/or power, and the contemplated future becomes about the transformation of ideas into ideologies. Extrapolation tacitly validates the pre-determination of change, of works, of individuals, or of contexts. Even when it begins in answer to an aesthetic query or perceived need, therefore, projection seems unavoidably political in its dissolution of the individual into the collective.
In its predisposition for the direction of the whole, projection compels us to view cultural change more as the product of an evolution, the course of a species, than in terms of a mutation, in which change derives from the individual. "In this artwork we shall all be one:" the guided social covenant necessary for Wagner's "artwork of the future" evokes the former, evolutionary standpoint.(23) Stravinsky's favored contract, on the other hand, seems to have been that, "the artist imposes a culture upon himself and ends by imposing it upon others. That is how tradition becomes established."(24) That view is upheld by his personal "epiphany" in connection with Pulcinella, which is then probably best understood as an instance of heritable change in the individual. Where the contract is made between the artist in contradistinction to a collective, the future becomes an unstructured outcome of individual actions. On the other hand, while it would be foolish to argue the relative merits of Stravinsky's and Wagner's music, it is very clear that Wagner's social contract is the inverse of Stravinsky's and attempted to construct a future for itself by first identifying, and then identifying with, a collective.(25)
The real problem with thinking about the future, therefore, is not that it might fail, but that it might succeed. Projection assumes that a sign of the times can be posted, and not simply read, while its spirit may be conjured and not merely captured. Extrapolation is thus an attempt to expand the jurisdiction of the Zeitgeist and extend its value beyond where we may merely wish to grasp it to the point where it can become manufactured to satisfy a need or desire. Nothing but the "artwork of the future" could "close the last link in the bond of holy necessity," as Wagner writes.(26) So, too, was Tomorrowland built both to advertise the future and to allow us to consume it now. Such impatience has spelled the demise of "buzz," the relatively slow, unstructured, uncertain word of mouth. As a disseminator of culture, buzz has been usurped by "hype," the preemptive disseminator whose attempt by means of enforced value to minimize the risk and impact of rejection is backed by speculation in both the financial and the predictive senses. In the glow of hype, the uncertainty of what the future holds sheds the interrogative in favor of imperative. The question remaining shrivels to that of management and the allocation of resources. In attempting to guide us into the future by guiding the activity of others, the visionary invariably leads from behind: the future is a program for the misuse of authority.
Référence: http://farben.latrobe.edu.au/mikropol/volume2/link-s/link.html