The Speculative Time Complex

The basic thesis of the post-contemporary is that time is changing. We are not just living in a new time or accelerated time, but time itself—the direction of time—has changed. We no longer have a linear time, in the sense of the past being followed by the present and then the future. It’s rather the other way around: the future happens before the present, time arrives from the future. The main reason for the speculative reorganization of time is the complexity and scale of social organization today. If the leading conditions of complex societies are systems, infrastructures and networks rather than individual human agents, human experience loses its primacy, as do the semantics and politics based on it. Correspondingly, the present as the primary category of human experience—in its biological sentience at least—which has been the basis for both the understanding of time and of what time is (or, at least, what it is presumed to be), also loses its priority in favor of what we could call a time-complex

Coronary anomalies and anatomical variants detected by coronary computed tomographic angiography in Kashmir, India

Background: Coronary Artery Anomalies (CAAs) presenting in adulthood are rare and associated with adverse cardiac events, including sudden cardiac death. Coronary artery anomaly is the second most common cause of Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD) in young athletes. Cardiac Computed Tomographic Angiography (CTA) is a readily available non-invasive imaging modality that provides high-resolution anatomical information of the coronary arteries. Multi-detector row CT is superior to conventional angiography in defining the ostial origin and proximal path of anomalous coronary branches.Methods: This was a prospective study included 186 patients who underwent coronary CTA from December 2018 to November 2019 in Government medical College, Srinagar on a 256 slice CT. The indications for coronary CTA were an equivocal, or non-diagnostic stress test, atypical chest pain, suspected anomalous coronary, as well as the evaluation of cardiac cause of syncope.Results: Ramus intermedius was the most common anatomical variant seen in 25 patients (13.4%). The prevalence of coronary anomalies in this study was 5.66% including myocarding bridging. The most common anomaly was high take off of coronary artery from sinotubular junction accounting for 1.6%.Conclusions: Coronary Computed Tomographic angiography is much superior in detecting coronary artery anomalies than invasive coronary angiography because of the absence of soft tissue information like as is needed in myocardial bridging. Proper knowledge of the anomalies and their clinical significance is highly important in planning treatment and easing hardships of cardiologists in dealing with them

ContraContemporary

‘Contra-contemporary’ takes issue with the famous statement by Frederic Jameson that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. The essay contends that this statement is not only a modernist redux that paradoxically affirms the ‘eternal present’ of contemporaneity; it moreover proposes that it is not so much the absence of the future that is our problem today, but rather a surfeit of futurity that conditions and thus precedes the present in a risk society. The new, understood in Arendtian terms as the new-born present resulting from human action, is increasingly impossible in a postmodern condition that is contra-contemporary. Moving beyond the modern-postmodern deadlock, the essay concludes by envisioning what politics and art might look like in this contra-contemporary condition

Artist As Quarry

A discussion between Tirdad Zolghadr and Suhail Malik that aims to help artists understand themselves as institutional actors within the field of art without defining this institutionalisation as an intellectual loss or strategic compromise. The contention is that artists who drop the guard of personal self-protection and cease to emphasise individual self-interest can now access the real prerogatives that contemporary art has to offer. In Zolghadr’s terms, the proposed move is from “quarry as victim” to “quarry as mine or reserve”; from the pathos of hunted prey to contemporary art as a resource to be mined collectively

Introduction: Art and finance

The editorial premise of this special issue is that the adage ‘art and money do not mix’ is now wholly untenable. As detailed in our extended interview with Clare McAndrew, the art market has grown rapidly over the last twenty years, leading to systemic and structural changes in the art field. For some, this growth of the market and its significance for art is an institutional misfortune that, for all of its effects, is nonetheless inconsequential to the normative claim that art and money shouldn’t mix. This commonplace premise looks to keep the sanctity or romance of art from the business machinations of market mechanisms, as eloquently summarised by Oscar Wilde’s definition of cynicism (‘knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing’). This issue repudiates that normative moral code, and precisely for the reasons just stated: by now, the interests of the art market permeate all the way through the art system. The interests of the art market shape what is exhibited and where; what kinds of discourse circulate around which art (or even as art) and in what languages; and what, in general, is understood to count as art. In short, the art market – comprising mainly of collectors, galleries and auction houses – is now the primary driver in what is valuable in art. And it is not just value and valuation that are transformed by the recent expansion of the art market. Together with increased interest in art by both financial firms and individuals from that sector as private collectors-investors, the expansion of financial markets in a period also characterised by rapid growth in the art market and increased power within the art field for its highly commercialised operators may, combined, suggest a common endorsement of speculation and risk across these sectors. Contemporary art’s speculations and unmooring of stable meanings or coordinates are met by risk-based, speculative accumulation strategies on the side of finance itself

Postface

Both of the conferences organized in Arles by CCS and the Human Rights Project at Bard College under the auspice of the LUMA Foundatin — “The Human Snapshot” and “The Flood of Rights” — produced an object, be it in a somewhat tentative, fragile, perhaps inconsistent way. The object we have been trying to establish is composed of three sets of practices, each of which is undergoing its own set of transformations: contemporary art and its legacy; human rights, at its edges; and the digital revolution in media and journalism. We might have different determinations of what that object is. "The Flood of Rights" conference gave shape and traction to this still-uncertain manifold object-under-invention: what was striking across the discussions was the centrality of the image as a primary vector for historical rights claims, political congregation, media organization and reorganization, psycho-noetic formation, and art

'Introduction'

Realism Materialism Art (RMA) presents a snapshot of the emerging and rapidly changing set of ideas, practices, and challenges proposed by contemporary realisms and materialisms, re ecting their nascent reworking of art, philosophy, culture, theory, and science, among other elds. Further, RMA strives to expand the hori- zons and terms of engagement with realism and materialism beyond the primarily philosophical context in which their recent developments have taken place, often under the title “Speculative Realism” (SR). While it is SR that has most stridently challenged critical orthodoxies (even if, as discussed later in this introduction, the positions convened under the SR banner are often discordant and form no uni ed movement), RMA purposefully looks to extend the purview of realist and materialist thought by presenting recent developments in a number of distinct and heteroge- neous practices and disciplines. Cutting across diverse thematic interests and modes of investigation, the con- tributions to RMA demonstrate the breadth and challenge of realist and materialist approaches to received disciplinary categories and forms of practice. This pluridis- ciplinarity is typical of the third term in our title: art. RMA a rms, as art now does, that there is no privileged area, thematic, or discipline in the investigation or reach of realism and materialism: not philosophy, not science, not even art itself. Art is then not just a eld trans gured by realism and materialism; it is also a method for convening and extending what they are taken to be and do when extended beyond philosophical argument