Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

animated cartoons shed light on how Lhasa Tibetans who use the karaoke may be able to, according to anthropologist Vincanne Adams, 'abrogate, even if only momentarily, the scripts for cultural difference written for them by westerners, and even by the Chinese, and they sometimes become all of these th ings while still remaining Tibetans and modern'. {Adams 1 996, 538) On a parallel plane, the Philippine reissue of an animation series titled Voltes V which fascinated my generation and was banned by the Marcos government for its putative bad influence on the regime's emergent citizens may clue us into how Japan stakes its claims of peace and policing in the region . In the context of shows like Prince Planet and Astro Boy in the 60s and the work of Japanese artist Kenji Yanobe, Juliana Engberg comments that 'future-oriented, perpetually wide-eyed , superboy comics performed a necessary collective postwar therapy for national rebirth and peace. In the other parts of the world they sent a message of Japan's preparedness to problem solve and participate in the creation of global harmony'. (Engberg 1 999, 1 08) Th is kind of ethnography can be related to Fenella Cannell's recently published book on power and intimacy in the Bicol province in the Philippines in which the author demonstrates the potential of an anthropological id iom that gives justice to the versatil ity of local engagements, from gay beauty contests to funerals to the cult of the Dead Christ. (Cannell 1 999) 2. A discussion of global isation as site of contestation staked out by a translocal civil society. Here we are best gu ided by the remarkable scholarship of Saskia Sassen who argues that 'we need to dissect the economics of globalisation to understand whether a new transnational pol itics can be centred in the new transnational economic geography . . . (and) to recover non-corporate components . . . and the possibility of a . . . politics of those who l ack power but now have "presence"'. (Sassen 1 998 , xxi) 3. A shift of focus of the contemporary aesthetic of change from flow or fluidity to viscosity, a regulated l iqu idity that keeps properties and people, labour and capital settled and stirred . 4. The critique of modernity which seeks to recover the aesthetic of local experience and its moral world , the emotional economy, intuition, gut feeling, sentiment, and embodiment of constraints and possibilities beyond traditionally demarcated domains, between what James Clifford terms 'local ism and wordliness'. Here we may also benefit from the ideas of Argentinian Enrique Dussel who contends that modernity is limited by the ecolog ical destruction of the planet, the decimation of living labour, and the 'impossibil ity of the subsumption of the populations, economies , nations, and cultures that it has been attacking since its orig in and has excluded from its horizon and cornered into poverty' . (Dussel 1 998, 2 1 ) Fredric Jameson for his part refers to a modernist postcoloniality alongside a multiple and postmodern ist one. (Jameson 1 998) 5. The comm itment to pursue an artistic and critical practice that is not simply reflective or descriptive of the present material cond ition , but programmatic and generative of a certain l iberative future. We may begin to discuss Felix Guattari's 'ethic of fin itude' that could transform this planet into a 'universe of creative enchantments' (Guattari 1 992 , 30); or Chantal Mouffe's alternative to liberalism and the proliferation of sectoral causes in the form of a radical democracy that aims to carve a 'new common sense . . . which would transform the identity of different groups so that the demands of each group could be articulated with those of others according to the principle of democratic equ ivalence' (Mouffe 1 993, 1 9); or any other performative strategy that, according to Durcilla Cornell, may provoke the dominative system to 'alter itself so that it not only no longer confirms its identity, but disconfirms it and , indeed , through its very iterability, generates new meanings which can be further pursued and enhanced by the sociosymbolic practice of the political contestants within its milieu'. (Cornell 1 993, 2) 69