Elif Cadoux ~ That You May Have a Good Future: Rehearsing the Subjunctive from the Cell to the Sea

Thesis Advisor: Hypatia Vourloumis

Thesis: That You May Have a Good Future: Rehearsing the Subjunctive from the Cell to the Sea

July 2024

Abstract

How does fiction pattern the possible? As the world-making cadence that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten dub the killing rhythm creates the illusion of a pre-purchased future, all earthly entities, from the cells in one’s palms to the gyres in the ocean, are influenceable and subsumable. That You May Have a Good Future observes the momentum of speculation and its insidious narrative structure, exploring subjunctivity as a method for counter-rhythmic fictions, scripts, and practices. Responding to Samuel R. Delany’s call for science fiction that embraces subjunctivity’s “brush with mysticism” over the “violent nets of wonder” of speculation, That You May Have a Good Future stages scenarios of speculative and subjunctive tense, sense, and story. Where the speculative creates if/then algorithms of risk and yield, subsuming alternate rhythms under the beat that disciplines what is imaginable, the subjunctive, its milder mannered sibling, refuses its insistently linear temporality and its violent mastication of land and bodies in the pursuit of progress. Subjunctive fictions express desires in lieu of goals and unsettle the fixity of the past, allowing for non-linear movement within a hypervolume of potentiality. Engaging works of biotechnological art, science fiction, and memoir through registers of critical theory and art criticism, poetry and playwriting, the speaker attempts to practice an alternative grammar of the future. By meeting and countering dystopia, this work attempts to skirt speculation’s entrapment of memory and anticipation, biology and story.

Author: Elif Cadoux