Call for Proposals - After Tomorrow - Flat Journal

We are apocalyptic only so we can be wrong. Günter Anders We live in end times. This is, no doubt, a thought that has crossed many of our minds in the past few years, perhaps over and over again, often in the middle of the night. No doubt these thoughts are compounded with the knowledge that in January 2020 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hand on their Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been, and reaffirmed that time in January 2022. That affirmation came before the ongoing horror of the invasion of Ukraine, the publishing in February 2022 of IPCC Working Group II Report on Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability followed in April by the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. One can only imagine the loss of a few seconds at the very least. However not everyone has the same relationship to the end of the world. For many the end already came hundreds of years ago. Some suggest the native peoples of the Americas even have a date, October 12, 1492. Colonization, enslavement, genocide, the horrors of history outstrip even the most hyperbolic apocalypses dreamed up in science fiction. Nevertheless many remain, living in the after. The end of world is plural, in time and space; like so much else, it is not evenly distributed. The typology and taxonomy of eschatology laid out by Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in their brilliant “The Ends of the World” show that there are many worlds and many ends, and our task is to choose which world and which end. The past few decades have seen a dramatic foreshortening of the future. Where there used to be flying cars and teleportation, we now anticipate a new version of our phone and maybe a slightly faster internet connection. Mark Fischer describes this as “Lost Futures.” The future now looks like just more of the same and then…a break. The future is no longer just what happens next, increasingly it is what happens /after/, after the end. It is this /after/ where we start to get purchase. We can look to what has been learned by those who are already living in the after, those who Stengers following Lautour call “Terrans.” We can strain, at sometimes against all odds, so see the “end” as, paraphrasing Donna Harraway, a boundary not a destiny; perhaps even as an opportunity. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalising rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. José Esteban Muñoz For this our 4th issue of FLAT, our theme is After Tomorrow..