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PRICE-DISSERTATION-2019.Pdf (7.232Mb) Future Monumentality The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Price, Evander L. 2019. Future Monumentality. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42029591 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA FUTURE MONUMENTALITY A DISSERTATION PRESENTED BY EVANDER LEWIS PRICE TO THE COMMITTEE ON HIGHER DEGREES IN AMERICAN STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE SUBJECT OF AMERICAN STUDIES HARVARD UNIVERSITY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS APRIL 2019 MAY, 2018 © 2019 EVANDER LEWIS PRICE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii “Tell Me a Story” Robert Penn Warren Tell me a story. In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances, and starlight. The name of the story will be Time, But you must not pronounce its name. Tell me a story of deep delight. iii Dissertation Advisor: Jennifer Roberts Evander Price DISSERTATION ABSTRACT FUTURE MONUMENTALITY Future monuments are monuments built with the express purpose of remembering the future. They are most easily understood by example. This dissertation focuses on three: Carl Sagan’s Golden Record, Stewart Brand’s “Clock of the Long Now,” and Robert Moses’ 1939 New York World’s Fair, called the “World of Tomorrow.” Categorically, future monuments envision and manifest an imagination of the future, and impel mindfulness of it. They show us how much future there is imagined to be. They inherently betray the aspirations and anxieties of the cultures that built them. They are useful tools for remembering that the future isn’t what it used to be. The future monuments analyzed here span the twentieth century. The first chapter focuses on the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which provided millions of wide-eyed fairgoers the exuberant experience of peering into the future. The second monument is Carl Sagan’s Golden Record, a literal LP made of gold, strapped to NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 which, slipping through the erosionless vacuum of space, will outlast all humankind, and perhaps the planet itself. The third future monument is a colossal clock designed by Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis, Brian Eno, and funded by Jeff Bezos, dubbed “The 10,000 Year Clock,” or “The Clock of the Long Now,” which is meant to inspire an ethics of ten-thousand-year thinking. At the core of this research is an assumption: How people imagine the future affects how they act in the present—perhaps even more so than how people imagine the past. Van Wyck Brooks, in his canonical essay, “On Creating a Usable Past,” (1918) argued that, if the past, as currently imagined, is not of direct use to Americans in the present, why not simply imagine a different one? What precisely that past is or ought to be, well, that is up for discussion. I propose that, in the intervening century since Van Wyck Brooks, we flip this manifesto on its head: What would it mean for Americans to create a usable future? What did the usable future look like in the past? Future monuments are my vehicle for this analysis. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DISSERTATION ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................ IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................................. VI CHAPTER 1: ON CREATING A USABLE FUTURE MONUMENT ....................................................... 1 Future(s) Studies, Futurology, Future Monuments ................................................................................... 6 Time as Metaphor ................................................................................................................................... 11 Symmetrical Archaeology ...................................................................................................................... 15 Case Studies ............................................................................................................................................ 20 CHAPTER 2: THE WORLD OF TOMORROW .................................................................................. 30 The Semiotic Phantom ............................................................................................................................ 31 The Valley of Ashes ................................................................................................................................ 34 The 1939 World’s Fair ............................................................................................................................ 47 The 1964 World’s Fair ............................................................................................................................ 58 Conclusions: Ashes to Ashes .................................................................................................................. 62 CHAPTER 3: THE GOLDEN RECORD “FOR FUTURE TIMES AND BEINGS” ................................ 93 The Golden Record ............................................................................................................................... 101 No Such Lingua Cosmica ..................................................................................................................... 104 A Noble Metal ....................................................................................................................................... 117 Discus Aureus: Ramus Aureus ............................................................................................................ 123 The Great Demotions ............................................................................................................................ 129 Conclusions: For the Now .................................................................................................................... 137 CHAPTER 4: THE CLOCK OF THE LONG NOW .......................................................................... 147 Clock as Future Monument ................................................................................................................... 157 Ecopragmatism, Ecomodernism, Ecocapitalism ................................................................................... 159 The Clock as Concept ........................................................................................................................... 163 The Cult of the Clock ............................................................................................................................ 166 Conclusions: The Interval ..................................................................................................................... 173 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS ~ DIMENSIONS OF FUTURE MONUMENTALITY ............................ 184 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................... 189 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The old proverb, “it takes a village” to write a dissertation is true despite being cliché among acknowledgements. My village is Harvard Square. What follows is an incomplete list of gratitude: Mentors—Foremost in that village is Jennifer Roberts who mentored me through all stages of my doctorate, through coursework, general exams, prospectuses, chapter conferences, all the way through the defense itself. She was my earliest ally, and somehow was able to foresee a future for a dissertation about the future. Never has a person held me to deadlines with such success. Stephanie Burt efficiently bundled advising into my Tfing obligations, simultaneously providing me the science fiction tools I needed to learn, and a paycheck, too. Alexander Rehding, the email ace, possibly the most responsive advisor to grace a Gmail account, supplied me with a near constant stream of articles, thoughts, and comparisons to enrich my research, in addition to helping me network with numerous contacts—notably, Ian Bogost, who graciously agreed to serve as outside reader for the final draft. Fellowships & Institutions—I was able to finish this work efficiently thanks to the Mahindra Center’s dissertation completion fellowship. The Bok Center Harvard Horizons program helped me think about how to crystalize my research for a wider audience. I received numerous timely research/conference grants from the Graduate Student Council, the Center for American Political Studies, and the crucial American Studies fourth year award. The History Department allowed me to keep an office in the basement of Robinson. Widener Library imbued me with the superpower know as “scan-and-deliver.” The Center for Speculative Inquiry helped me think through the early stages and, importantly, pointed me towards the Clock of the Long Now. The Radcliffe Institute generously supported an Exploratory Seminar I designed with Giovanni Bazzana, which enabled me to meet a medley of scholars and thinkers whose ideas recharged my batteries in the critical final months of writing. Paul Farber and Monument Lab have pushed me to think about the best ways to continue expanding Future Monumentality into other times; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston has inspired me to look more into contemporary
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