This new edition of Making & Breaking proposes the term ‘post-contemporary’ not as a theoretical label for a new, perhaps even revolutionary (what would that even mean today?) turn in art and culture. Instead, it represents an attempt to use the notion of the post-contemporary as a speculative future horizon for a critical debate on the social conditions in which art and aesthetic practice are presently taking place. For those working within the aesthetic fields of cultural production, the project of sensing a post-contemporary could provide a thrilling alternative to the default complicity demanded by the neoliberal creative industries. How do we get from the contemporary to the post-contemporary?

The adverse impact of the pandemic on the arts and cultural sector is widely acknowledged. The collapse in income and employment comes on the heels of a long-term decline in public funding and a growing precarity amongst cultural workers. The brunt of the pandemic, the ‘great unequaliser’, has fallen differently on full-time permanents and insecure casuals, on well-paid arts sector CEOs and the self-employed. The established patterns of inequality in class, gender, race, disability and region – well-documented long before the pandemic – have been reinforced. Whatever the effects of the different forms of support provided (or not) by government to the sector, it is safe to say that any recovery may be a long time coming. Justin O’Connor poses the question: Is there an alternative?

Finance has been allowed to develop to a state where it is functionally insulated from the catastrophic consequences of social and ecological tendencies it has in part institutionalised, rewarded, and found ways to profit from for a long time. This insulation is based on an ideological fiction that can also be found in the creative industries. However, while financial capital is insulated from the crises of economy and society, creative ‘human capital’ is not.

In this social media age, all students dream of launching a platform. The desire implies an entrepreneurial aspiration that many are not even aware of. This is how artists, activists, designers and geeks imagine they will find their audiences and become rich and famous. At the same time, platforms seem to lead us into a kind of neo-feudalism. They have begun to exert political and even quasi-religious powers as they influence not just elections but also our very sense of reality. Can we expect to see a revolt against the platform condition?

In our present, in Earth Year 2021, there is a battle between interpretative systems. This can be said about any era of human history, to the extent such human history has been recorded. The question of science has been central to this battle. Science is connected to a question precisely because of its alleged connection to offering access to the objective reality. The question Angela Dimitrakaki poses is how the ideologies of the alt-right, at the centre of which we find the denial of or at least scepticism about, the existence of an objective reality came about. Is there anything objective that can be said about that? How did the evolution of the history of ideas turn so as to land us in a historical moment where all interpretations of the present are deemed at best equivalent and at worst subjective?

The turbulence of orientation that arrives with the end of a world (where given axioms no longer provide referential certainty), can be expressed as a recognition of the gap between theoretical and practical forms of knowing. Correspondingly, the intelligibility of the end of a world is constituted by the capacity to bear witness from the geography of this gap. Currently, this gap is constituted by the friction between Euromodern, globalizing practices (modes of concrete inhabitation), and the planetary (as a theoretical, explanatory model). What kind of pedagogies are necessary in order to bridge this gap?

That the future has been ‘slowly cancelled’ — experientially, symbolically, materially — speaks to the multifaceted attrition of political, sociological and existential agency and validity in the decade between the credit crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. But this diagnosis of our contemporaneity is a mistake.

For years, nomadism has been celebrated by our cultural industries as an exhilarating idea and practice. We were, until recently, eager to move with global flows of creative energy (and capital), and to leave behind any sense of belonging or of essence. But there are changes in the air. Increasingly, we speak of indigeneity and roots, of territory and belonging. The current pandemic brutally enforces this new tendency, putting a pause on travel and holding people in isolation for unprecedented periods. The experience has forced us to rethink our individual relationships with freedom of movement.

How to break the largest, heaviest, most pervasive and most toxic infrastructure in history, the global fossil fuel system? How to break that system down without shutting off the lights at night and the heat in the winter, without cratering national economies, and more urgently, without sparking a civil war, or even a world war? How to make an entirely new electric power grid in the unbelievably short span of time that remains before planetary ecological collapse? And how to make that highly innovative technical system serve basic human goals of equity and reciprocity, under the grassroots guidance of a democratic politics that keeps Big Oil from simply taking over a new imperial role as Big Energy?

The problem with the Anthropocene is not that it’s too human-centric, but that it is not human enough. Industrial capitalism’s fundamental mode of design has become anti-human at heart. This mode of design disassembles human beings and their experiences so that they can become disconnected modules. It reduces relationships to mere junctures in order to create space for endless growth. Today, it is crucial to divorce design from capitalism and to imagine an alternative design logic.