T.J. Demos

What comes after end-of-world narratives: visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.

There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end—of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it. In this book, drawing on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed—Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist—as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, T. J. Demos poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives. He argues that it's as vital to defeat fatalistic nihilism as it is to defeat the false solutions of green capitalism and algorithmic governance.

How might we decolonize the future, and cultivate an emancipated chronopolitics in relation to an undetermined not-yet? If we are to avoid climate emergency's cooptation by technofixes, and the defuturing of multitudes by xenophobic eco-fascism, Demos argues, we must cultivate visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.

The Museum of Capitalism, a traveling exhibition that has been hosted in Oakland and Boston and will arrive in New York City in fall 2019, treats capitalism as a historical phenomenon. This speculative institution views the present and recent past from the implied perspective of a future society in which our economic and political system has ended, and is now memorialized and subjected to the museological gaze. The goal of the museum, and its publication, is to "educate this generation and future generations about the ideology, history and legacy of capitalism." To this end, Museum of Capitalism features sketches and renderings of exhibits and artifacts, combined with relevant quotations from historical sources, interspersed with speculative essays on the intersections of ecology, race, museology, historiography, economics and politics.

Included are representations of artworks and museum exhibits created by artists Oliver Ressler, Sayler/Morris, Dread Scott, Temporary Services, Superflex and others, original Isotype graphics drawn from the museum's lexicon of "capitalisms" and texts from Lucy Lippard, Lester K. Spence, T.J. Demos, Chantal Mouffe, McKenzie Wark and Kim Stanley Robinson, among others. For this new, expanded second edition of Museum of Capitalism (the first was published in 2017), Jodi Dean, Ben Davis, Madeline Lane-McKinley, Nina Power, Abigail Satinsky, Simon Sheikh and FICTILIS have contributed new texts.