ABSTRACT
The future isn't what it used to be. It has disappeared into the realm of commodity exchange to be promoted as something that's already arrived, a type of Baudrillardean hypertélique slight-of-hand that has produced the present as a future dystopiaÐa utopia that has been lost in advance. As captured in Edward Kienholz's assemblage artwork, The Future As an Afterthought (Hopps, 1996), we are faced with the consequences of our historical choices. On the other hand, we are told by the custodians of family values that the past is something that we can look forward to, once the present is swept clean. Sweeping clean the present in this context means getting rid of those pernicious and short-sighted liberals whose youthful rebellion in the 1960s was responsible for the present disintegration of the social order. Intellectual life is on the demise. Within universities the link between intellectual life and revolutionary praxis has been relegated to the dustbin of institutional memory. Theory has become a dirty word as the pure scientists stage their attacks on the academic left in books such as Higher Superstition by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt (1995).
