The Future For Sale; or, How Jules Verne Predicted the Browne Report

“It must be confessed that the study of belles lettres and of ancient languages (including French) was at this time virtually obsolete; Latin and Greek were not only dead languages but buried as well; for form's sake, some classes in literature were still taught, though these were sparsely attended and inappreciable – indeed anything but appreciated.” So we read in a prophecy by Jules Verne of Paris in the Twentieth Century, discovered just a decade and a half ago, yet written a century and a half ago, since locked away in a vault for safe-keeping.

Amongst the ubiquitous electric lighting, horseless carriages, and other marvels anticipated in Verne's tales of the future, we are informed of the Academic Credit Union – a national education system operated according to the principles of the Crédit Mobilier and other national banking concerns run as joint stock operations, still relatively new to France at the time the book was written. Proportional to the collapse in literary studies the Academic Credit Union precipitates, we find a boom time for civil engineering, mechanics, physics, and finance; “whatever,” Verne tells us, “concerned the market tendencies of the day.”

In the 1860s it was an absurdist satire to suggest the conquest of education by the norms of the banking trade – today it seems increasingly to be accepted common sense. From the Browne Report's recommendation of stripping funding to the arts and humanities, to new plans from universities in Leicester, Durham and London to award students for their 'corporate skills', business is increasingly the paradigm for academia. And as Verne's nightmare becomes a reality, any qualification not immediately conducive to turning a profit seems destined to beg the question, from press and public alike, of why the state should be asked to foot the bill.

In its time, Jules Verne's dystopia was a rare voice of despair – rejected by his publisher as implausible - in a century characterised by the overwhelming optimism of its literary predictions. For the utopian writers of Victorian times, the nation's responsibility towards the life and culture of its citizens, quite apart from any considerations of profit or business sense, was pivotal. From Richard Wagner's demand for a state-financed opera theatre, free to all comers, to Edward Bellamy's promise of a citizen's credit allowance, corresponding to an equal share of the nation's annual product; the futurists of the industrial age would regard the modern belief in individualism as little short of barbarism.

“There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support,” insists Bellamy's man of the future. “Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support.” Looking Backward, written in 1887 but set in the year 2000, was enormously popular at the time, spawning dozens of sequels and responses, and even a number of intentional communities.

Though it may be tempting to scoff at yesterday's dreams of a bright future, it is worth recalling that it is precisely this utopian impulse that led to the establishment in Britain, not just of universal free education, but also - and at a time when the nation's finances were far worse off than they are now - a national health service and welfare system.

Since the twin nihilisms of punk's 'no future' and Thatcher's 'no such thing as society', utopian thought has been thin on the ground. Where we do find glints of optimism in the mainstream media, it is a faith, not in any national or international state, conceived as a community of common interest, but in private corporations and individuals to provide for us. This is the message both of David Cameron's 'Big Society' and Wired editor Chris Anderson's book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. What is new about Anderson's 'free' is not its gratuitousness, but the question of who is to foot the bill.

For the internet's techno-utopians, everything can be free, paid for not by a redistributive tax system but by advertising. The price we pay is that our most intimate discourse - chatting on Facebook or Gmail, making mixtapes for friends on Spotify - is thoroughly permeated by direct marketing, as though our mobile phone calls were constantly being interrupted by targeted radio ads. So yesterday's dystopia becomes today's supposed utopia, and hope for the future becomes a commodity to be sold at market price.

[image: Gilles Roman, from this website]

Fresh Hell, Palais de Tokyo, Paris

There is a utopian thread running through Adam McEwen's Fresh Hell exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. Is this to be understood in spite of its title, or in its spirit? After all, isn't Orpheus, in a sense, the first utopian? Orpheus who, by the power of his song, crossed to the underworld and raised hell, therein becomes the first artist to travel to undiscovered countries, the first for whom art is a demand for the impossible.

British-born, New York-based artist, McEwen has been given carte blanche by the Palais de Tokyo, the third in a series to do so, after Ugo Rondinone and Jeremy Deller. He has used the space to assemble a vast panoply of works, spanning centuries of aesthetics from medieval busts of the Kings of Judah to recent work by Sarah Lucas and David Hammons, to express a kind of scattered, associative cognitive map of his own influences and desires. McEwen, the former newspaper obituarist who entered the world of fine arts with a series of fake celebrity death notices (Macauley Culkin, Rod Stewart, Jeff Koons, &c.), has entered his own private underworld and brought back for us his prized Eurydices, refusing, all the while, to look back.

In the determined expressions of the runners in Bruce Nauman and Frank Owen's (1975) film, Pursuit, their bodies strangely eroticised, their gaze fixed passionately on some impenetrable point in advance both in space and in time; in the dogged dignity of Gino de Domenicos, as he pursues his impossible projects, to fly, or to make a pebble cause square ripples on water; in Jessica Diamond's insistence that the world is not enough, as she scrawls “Is that all there is?” above a line drawing of the continents. In all these works we find precisely that utopian striving, that leap into the impossible that Ernst Bloch defined nearly a century ago. “The category of utopia,” wrote Bloch, “possesses the other” into “overtaking the natural course of events.”

Works like Georg Herold's (1994-2010) Hängendes Labyrinth, which invites its audience in, offering a space “to meditate... a symbolic pilgrimage towards a holy place”; the obsessively detailed Indian ink maps of imaginary landscapes drawn by Henri Michaux under the influence of mescaline; produce other worlds and alternative spaces, while the pneumatic tubes that crown the exhibition's entrance evoke as much the literary utopias of the late nineteenth century as more recent dystopias in print and on film, such as 1984 and Brazil.

Just as prevalent, however, across the exhibition floor, is a certain aesthetics of failure. The empty stalls of Michael Landy's (1990) Market look forward to his later works, Break Down, in which he ceremoniously destroyed his own life and works, and the Art Bin (2010) he installed in the South London Gallery. Martin Kippenberger's The Good Old Time (1987) presents something resembling a great leather rubber dumpster, a body bag for some vast, obscene object.

Perhaps, then, McEwen's vision of hell relates to what is now presumed to be the inevitable failure of all utopias. Herold's labyrinth is, after all, just a maze which leads nowhere, and Nauman's runners sprint through blackness, without destination, their purpose but a charade. It is the great stone heads of the Kings of Judah which first greet us upon entering, intended perhaps as a warning, or cautionary tale. These thirteenth century statues, originally part of the décor of Notre Dame cathedral, were decapitated by Jacobin revolutionaries in 1793 in their systematic attempt to erase all traces of feudalism. With their crowned foreheads, the figures were presumed to represent French kings not Biblical figures, so McEwen resurrects them as victims of a desecration born of misguided fervour.

For all McEwen's cynicism towards the grand recits of modernity, he remains, nonetheless, a believer, one of the hopeful striving for the impossible. Is it not the case, after all, that the message of Jonathan Borofsky's (1984) Object of Magic, and of Walter de Maria's (1966-7) High Energy Bars, is that the art still can and must demand the impossible? Through this very demand – this magical status of art, object of a ritual fascination – it can transcend its lowly thing-like being and become something possessed of strange powers; move the underground and, like Orpheus, raise hell.

Impossible Music

We may be grateful that an intrepid team of Oxford musicologists have established once and for all that the above depicted sonata for flute - as played by the derrière - is, indeed, impossible. In fact, of all the instruments depicted in Heironymus Bosch's legendary tryptich, The Garden of Earthly Delights, only the flute and the drum were in any way playable (and neither of them, in quite the way they were intended). Of the painting's hurdy gurdy, Andy Lamb, manager of the Bate Collection, the museum behind the project, attests in The Guardian, "The design seems to be fundamentally flawed. When you turn the handle, you get a half-hearted buzzing noise, but you can't get any melodies out of it. It would be difficult to hold because its strings are in the wrong position – and there is even a superfluous string."

But if the infernal music of the painting's right hand side - the music of hell, of dystopia - is impossible; the imagined utopian music of the right hand side is unrepresentable. Bosch's contemporary, Thomas More, who claimed to have been told about Utopia by a man from Antwerp, where Bosch lived and worked for many years, offers the following in supplement to The Garden's silent left hand:

"Yet in one thing they very much exceed us: both vocal and instrumental, is adapted to imitate and express the passions, and is so happily suited to every occasion, that, whether the subject of the hymn be cheerful, or formed to soothe or trouble the mind, or to express grief or remorse, the music takes the impression of whatever is represented, affects and kindles the passions, and works the sentiments deep into the hearts of the hearers."