IAPL2012-CB-0531-052.. - The International Association for ...

WELCOME TO ESTONIA
Estonian towns), the future is always literally an archaeological problem: regulations
require archaeological excavations for every future building site. One never quite
knows what complications of history one will be obliged to contend with as one tries
to move forward into the future.
Andrey Platonov, a prose writer whose whole stories some of my friends knew by heart,
wrote in one of his pieces of the Soviet era, of a “memory of the future.” This phrase
was then understood as condemning the utopian dream called Soviet communism. It
still resonates today, however, with none of its acuteness lost, as crystalizing something
of the complex temporal sense of a historical being in times of flux. The distribution
of futures and pasts unfold together with disruptions in the regimes of the sensible,
with old imagined futures crashing down, their imagined pasts crumbling in their wake,
as new sensibilities bring into visibility a new order of the signifying past and the
fantasies of destiny. In Estonia, this order of things came crashing down in the late-
1980s, when national feeling reawakened in order to take a stand against new Soviet
programmes of excavating phosphate in northeastern Estonia. This first, successful,
rebellion was followed by reawakened interest in old architectural artefacts. If the
fight against phosphate mining was a mass refusal of Moscow’s vision of the Estonian
future, the call to work in old castles, churches, and graveyards was a call to look back
into time and stitch together a new narrative of the past, one proper to the new logic
of appearance in what was quickly to become the post-Soviet era in Estonia.
From one perspective, we see clearly here, in the temporal layers of Tallinn and other
old Estonian sites, how “the constitution of temporality” needs “to be apprehended
from the standpoint of the emergence of memory elaborated and conserved by the
organization of the inorganic” (Stiegler). Time is technical, yes, but not only. From
another perspective, the archaeologies of the future also point to the sensual, to
human togetherness, to the affectivity of sharing.
The idea to bring IAPL to Estonia was born in the Research Group in Cultural and Literary
Studies at the Estonian Literary Museum, a major cultural archive and a humanities
research centre in Tartu, the old university town in Southern Estonia. The topic of the
conference itself also comes from Tartu: there, our research group organized a series
of very successful “archive-conferences”: Archives of forgetting (2008), Archaeology
of forgetting (2009), Archaeologies of the future (2010), Eschatology and apocalypse
(2011), Aesthetics and the politics of undecidability (2012). I am most thankful to
all members of our congenial group, who have shared and lightened the burdens in
organizing this event.
We have enjoyed organizing this conference as a joint event with Tallinn University.
For an archaeological investigation into the future, the partnership of an archive of
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