We must invent a liveable future. To think modernity means to participate in collectivity as a project. It is collectivity’s capacity to make the future that is at once the most vigorous element of modernity, its most precious heritage, and the emblem of its unmitigated catastrophes. To think modernity requires the willingness to pry open its contradictions. We must accept that collectivity is born of failure, but not doomed to defeat. We must affirm a future inhabited by not-yet-knowable collectivities: entirely new forms of living in common. Our modernity is the horizon line between these unknown forms and a scorched earth. The idea of a life in common must begin from the shared belief that life today is unlivable. Unsparing critique of the violence of our world is a necessary starting point for imagining what life in common could and should look like. Before we can construct a life in common, we must project a vision in which the enormity of our potentiality outruns and displaces the constraints of the present, that is, the constraints of capitalism.

In the cinema of the Iranian New Wave — my current area of research — many filmmakers sought to reinvent the filmic means of representation in order to create such visions of collective potential. The modernity of the New Wave lay in its desire to create a cinema for a people that did not yet exist, a people axiomatically excluded from the Iranian state’s push toward modernization. This cinema required a film language for which there was no domestic precedent. The image of life in common was thus projected in an unfamiliar but capacious visual lexicon. These films and their still missing people are also artifacts of our modernity. They are emissaries of the future.

Our potentiality is infinite; it is not confined to what is essentially human. To condemn the conditions of contemporary life means the capacity to imagine a future that is more than the mere opposite of life under capitalism. This future would be a future of collectivities: constant, newly emerging forms of life that are the condition of possibility for a heterogeneous collectivity. This collectivity is bound by a life in common that exceeds the possibility of the old universalisms with which humanistic thought is all too familiar. But at the same time, capitalism — the universalism of modernity — cannot be fought by mobilizing a universalism that draws from the same ideas and principles already familiar to us. As Cesare Casarino writes, “we need to steep the politics of the common in a universalism based on common potentials and common projects.” Future collectivities can be both constituted by and reflective of such a politics; to enact this change we must be willing to surrender to the experience of proximity to singularities, particularly those that are entirely unfamiliar to us.

Originally published in White Wall Review 42: Special Issue (2019)