Professor Andrew Dewdney has published a book review in the forthcoming issue of Journal of Design History about ‘Memories of the Future: On Countervision’ edited by Dr. Stephen Wilson and Deborah Jaffe.
Read an excerpt here:
“The editors present the reader with a scenario of the current crisis of representation, in which politics is eviscerated by neo-liberal global capitalism. In this state of a weakened political imaginary it is suggested that our hold on the future has become highly tenuous, with time’s forward horizon shrinking to a perpetual present, such that the future is a thing of the past. The introduction hints of the undoing of modernist certainty under new global conditions of insecurity and precarity. At its most polemical the book asks whether the new future is a no-future.
As much as the book offers an understanding of the wider cultural context it also aims to offer new perspectives on the scholarly study of memory and the future. In a gentle and understated way the book is arguing, through exemplification more than anything else, that memory studies needs reconceptualising through cross-disciplinary, if not transdisciplinary approaches to the analysis and account of material cultures and practices.”