future

i will have spoofed the future
i’m back in the future again, nothing’s changed. It’s all just like I left it. 
Bishop, X Men, 1992
I don’t know anything about “the future”. But a few things could sketchily be said about the notion of future as a component of a wide range of theories, systems and apparatuses. To be sure, there are various ways of conceptualizing, projecting and investing in futures, and of understanding futurity. According to most dictionaries, future means a mode of thinking a time to come; this could be structured by desire, infinity/ ends, paranoia, potentials, hope, faith – and indeed, by the present.
There are various fields that concern themselves with futures, offering divergent approaches to the concept as such. The future can, much like anything else, not only be read from any perspective, but also imagined as being anything – because future refers to an open space for projection, it almost inevitably entails the imagining of an entire reality or set of conditions and possibilities.
Our imaginations of the future are always informed by ideas, practices and movements of the present (or past) – future as dispositif allows us to project those into a space where they can potentially affect all spheres of life (this doesn’t have to mean that all such projections are totalizing). Because it is not determined by anything other than our (present) knowledges and hopes, we might say that future allows us to think difference and change on quite open terms. Imaginings of futures are up to us to make or transport, and as such we are responsible for them. Unsurprisingly, this is difficult and furthermore complicated by various factors.
Stories of the future…
If Europe is to flourish and create the jobs of the future, enterprise is the key. 
Margaret Thatcher, Bruges speech, 20th September 1988
While future is (something else) for everyone, there are people dealing with (specific) futures (which are however never considered as univocal and hence appear in the plural) on a paid and daily basis. For example, futures studies or futurology aims to reflect on how changes in the present might affect a reality of tomorrow whilst offering a broad perspective; this mainly entails using strategic foresight to create scenarios. Scenario planning has been on the rise since its introduction by the Shell corporation in the 1970s. Similarly to horizon scanning, itrefers to the systematic examination of potential threats, opportunities and likely future developments, including (but not restricted to) those at the margins of current thinking and planning. Another related term is forecasting; again a process of evaluation of probabilities, often geared towards business (as demand planning), but also meteorology, land use, sports, policy, science, etc. While futures studies opens a wide field of research, study and consultancy that analyzes images of the future via the collection of quantitative and qualitative data about the possibility, probability, and desirability of change , its orientation towards consultancy and policy often means that desirability is reduced to a factor that is accommodated in a market-research like way. The foreseeing of futures and the delineation of trends that occurs via statistics and probability is always at the same time the production of more or less generalized futures, leading towards an approximation thereof. More on that later.
On the more creative side of futures production is science fiction, which departs from predominantly imaginary scenarios to create fictive accounts of what another reality could be like. The future setting of sci-fi makes the possibility of a different world more plausible, neither obliging the genre to a specific method or set of references. While much of this is linked to sites such as Hollywood, there is also a significant market for alternative or non-homogenized sci-fi (queer, feminist, anarchist, spiritualist…).
Thirdly, politicians (and other persons seeking to legitimize an argument or action) rely upon the notion of future (mostly deployed in the singular) when making promises. A reference to future, whether it be more or less explicit, easily makes a prophecy out of a statement (whether this is self-fulfilling or not, depends on the speaker. There are of course also prophets and fortune-tellers whose trade is “the future”. These rely upon divination and other non-scientific methods for their predictions, however not necessarily significantly more so than some contemporary politicians.
To summarize: future plays an important part in politics, science, business and technology. Policy makers, nanotechnology labs, venture capitalists, consultants, stem cell banks, insurance brokers and eco designers rely upon future scenarios, but also activists, therapists, artists, and so forth. Either way, future denotes a political agenda and plan for action, which constantly changes in relation to the present. Also, there are also prophets and fortune-tellers whose trade is “the future”, relying upon divination and other non-scientific methods.
I will propose to understand futures as apparatuses for projection, which can be mass-produced as well as singularized, and the reference to which in the singular or plural is indicative of the status ascribed to them by their interpellator-operators. They can be invested with all kinds of epistemology and politics. What strikes me as most interesting about futures, is that they raise responsibilities. In their concrete invocations, they function like projection-machines that prompt us to respond and act upon them (rendering them possible/impossible). Which are about the present.
Contrary to the intuition of those not engaged in it, Sci-fi writing can be a useful praxis for engaging with the world of today. It makes room for imagination, speculation and desire; the question of the desirability of certain scenarios can not be avoided in such writing praxes. Imagine a future without obligatory death; what would it mean to live forever, would it be desirable to be free to choose ones moment of death, etc. Or more concretely; what would a future without personal motorized vehicles look like? If we just project one aspect of the present into the future, this begs a lot of questions. Because any future potentially could be very different, it is entirely up to us to judge it desirable or not.
Significantly however, we can also choose not to project anything particular at all, and to see future as an entirely other kind of concept, as deconstructivists such as Derrida do. In this case, we might understand futurity as a not quite tangible dispositif for going about the world, which allows us to experience and live the present in an open yet critical/crisis-bound way. This might consist in an affective mode rather than in a set of images.
In either of the outlined approaches to the concept of future, what is at stakes appears as a very wide, open and complex terrain that is closely linked to the political and performative. It may be that future or futurity do not exist at all – indeed this is a condition for their existence – but beyond a banal sense of future as the not-yet-arrived, it might be that future is too vast, general and fuzzy a notion to bring it down to any more than an entirely context-dependent frame for projection, and as such needs to be explored not as a concept but a field of knowledge in its own right… while I can not get at any in-depth exploration of these questions here, I will continue to outline some dominant applications of future, in hope of coming closer to formulating core questions around what it is we are dealing with, and to test my proposal of future as dispositif.
Time and Progress
We look forward to doing something, being somewhere, meeting someone. Life seems to progress and cumulate towards moments we imagine and struggle to bring about. According to a conception of time as a linear flow or succession of events, culmination brings about progress. Change is not seen as qualitative, but as quantitative and measurable in units (of time, money, certificates…), which we aspire to and which are made more or less accessible to us via socio-cultural structures and institutions. The conception of time as linear stems from judaeo-christian ideas of a beginning and end of time, of history as a movement from one thing to the next in a successory logic that works towards certain ends . 
Progressive time is however not to be confused with temporal orientation as such (i.e. clock time), as it views events as mediated by an objectified, unidirectional, external temporal power. The notion of progress has inscribed itself in what I will call western/ized collective unconsciouses (for lack of a better term right now) as being complicit with that temporal power. Throughout modernity, science and technology signify as the carriers of this kind of progress, supposedly driving the developments that determine a fate of humanity (the idea of a mastery of nature is key in this). A model for going about the present and for determining futures in which productivity plays a key role, progress prioritizes and as such legitimizes certain actions (both in capitalist and socialist systems).
As long as I breathe, I shall fight for the future, that radiant future in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizon of beauty, joy, and happiness! 
Leon Trotsky, On optimism and pessimism: on the 20th century and many other issues, 1901
Time in ancient Greece, as well as Mayan and Vedic time were conceived as circular, whereby seasons and death-birth cycles often gave models for repeating (and rational) temporal patterns. Such ideas of time notably appear and make sense in agrarian societies. Since the industrial revolution, the acceleration of technological development and its strong impact on labour and daily life gave rise to ideas of time as progressive. From such a perspective, the orientation of time may be defined in terms of technology, industrialization and informatization, which are seen as inevitable and vital, affirming the dominance of specific ideas of progress (evolutionary, scientific, economic, social). The notion of progress today is related to an incremental and systematic gaining and marketing of knowledge, while in earlier times it meant something else .
Futurama
Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. 
Walt Disney, Speech on the opening day of Disneyland, July 17th, 1955
The spectacular “Futuramas” of the 1939/40 and 1964/65 New York world fairs marked important steps in the production of generalized subjectivities which link ideas of the “future” with motor-technology and consumerist lifestyle. Sponsored by General Motors, these spherical palaces attracted some 26 Million people and showed visions of America in 1960 and 2024, in either time frame notably consisting of superhighways and cars . This iteration of a consumerist future proved highly successful, profitable, and enduring.
There exist countless models for the future : the consumer society, socialism, the information society, sustainable living, the Singularity, End time, the ubiquitous dream society of icons and experience , the creative industries, Armageddon, etc… Any model or idea brought into relation with the notion of future (what is this notion? can it quite be called a notion?) can determine our course of action in the present. Via mainstream and other media, films, toys, and so forth, we frequently encounter technotopias: in the early 21st century, these are often determined in relation to the internet, nano/biotechnology, neuroscience, or military technology (the latter being much less visible a factor in the conditions of apparition of many technotopias). The discourses that legitimize the portrayal of a certain development as determining “the future” are extremely varied, however they frequently involve notions such as safety/security, risk, efficiency, comfort, benefit, sustainability, in relation to the above fields.
Paranoia and performativity
Growing industries of risk management and security rely upon linking images of the “the future” to threat. Campaigns and discourses around terrorism and the ensuing production of fear have regained momentum since 2001, along with hard-pressed awareness of climate change. Global warming confronts us with a possible (near) end point to humanity and brings forth new models of sustainable futures, with corresponding measures, social configurations and industries. 
Pertinent images of the future determine policy in the present, but of course the choice of imagery can never rely only upon scientific knowledge. Throughout our grappling with climate change, it is clear that we do not know for sure what it will have been due to – human activity or a warming of the planet that occurs independently of what we do. We cannot tell what it will have been about, but we have certain ideas and accordingly we try to take preemptive action. Finally, I briefly want to mention debt and its relation to contemporary financial markets as related to ideas of future in a significant way. As a way of deferring the production of value into the future and from labour towards the bio-political (towards the bodies of workers themselves), debt is part of a process whereby life and its time themselves become capital and generate surplus value. In line with the precarization of work that occurs with post-fordism and neo-liberalism, debt reaches into the future, imposing an everyday logics of speculation, projection and investment.
Stalin and I are the only ones who visualize the future. 
Adolf Hitler, Obersalzberg speech, August 22nd, 1939
To make a statement about what the future will be is to reveal how one prefers to think about it, perhaps by making a promise or a threat. Because future is what does not yet exist, it does not manifest itself other than through our imagination and the actions we put towards its realization. Our future projections are however based in the concrete situations and contexts of the present, aspects of which we wish to affirm and prolong. Imaginary futures operate by extension; one could call them future presents. 
They are often linked to perlocutionary utterances that further establish certain modes of relation to a world. A statement about the future to some extent announces this future, and as such affects others. Whether framed as speculation, intuition or prophecy, a proposition of future is of concern to potentially anybody.
Future is a verb 
Bruce Sterling
The question that presents itself is what else future/s (in their relation to futurity in the Derridean sense) could mean. How do we come to think of futures that aren’t handed down to us by governments, companies, or other powerful people – not in order to think of individualized futures, because these are abundantly available, but of futures that we collectively and singularly imagine and invest in ? We continually redefine ourselves through the possibilities in terms of which we project our own future . How can we understand future as a dispositif for subjectivation, a concept that we play and perform, invest with meaning as well as oppose and counter- act at different instances? As a metaphor for a sense of becoming and ethics, perhaps? What drives our futures, and how do we conceive of them? How can future be envisaged as a political concept, which contributes to movement, action and processes of singularization?
If we understand future as an empowering and open mode for thinking hope, desire, openness and responsibility, as something which changes according to context, then its manifestations will be plural and always in negotiation with eachother. Having futures in mind does not have to mean being in possession of some truth, law or any other way of controlling things, but can mean to enable us to take ideas and hopes further while making them project, reflect, and refract the present. Such futures will one day have been instable political and social dispositives, as opposed to strictly science-, technology- or capital- oriented forms of imagining. To future is to move futures into the realm of plurality, relationality and open source. If they impact on our ways of navigating the present, then the interactions between their divergent manifestations and stakes will mean a lot to us.
It will have been
To not know what will be, but still act in good faith is to leave a space open for some sense of futurity to reveal itself, at the same time as actively participating in that futurity. Futurity is perhaps a more appropriate name for the complex ways in which our not-knowing and keeping-open becomes operative. The French “avénir” or german “Zukunft” reveal the hesitation or ‘state’ of uncertainty that emerges when we sense things to come. The temporal mode of futur antérieur in the French language reveals some of this: it will have been a shared process of questioning . This form of referring to the present contains a kind of promise, or commitment, which can bring the fact that there is no security or truth, towards a responsibility which speakers or doers take for their speech/ action to take on a certain meaning in the future. It will have been a just judgement . To think of it can mean to actively participate in the becoming of a future, while never knowing exactly what direction this process will take; it refers to a mode of experience and ethics that is situational, and highly reflexive. Far from deadlocking all sense of agency due to sheer abundance of possibility, thinking futurity might be understood as an open and engaged mode of going about the world.
Possibilities are for visionaries and activists, probabilities are for spectators and consultants. 
Hawaii Center for Futures Studies website
Thinking the future in this sense doesn’t mean to choose one out of billions of scenarios, but rather to start from ones own present thoughts and desires. In this process, keeping utopia and dystopia apart will not be possible at all times, as those need to be continually negotiated in relation to eachother. To think of the future in terms of possibilities or potential that open out ways of thinking about practice, rather than of probability or inevitable disaster, can help to encourage self-organization and response-ability. 
To be a spectator of future scenarios – be they apocalyptic, conspiratorial, hippie, cyborg, super-proprietary, etc – is inevitable, as we are confronted with plenty of those every day. Indeed with every person, we meet a different sense of futurity. However to emancipate from a position of consumption of others´ futures, towards a critical and imaginative participation in other futures can help with relating the sense and stakes of someone elses projection to the ideas, hopes and desires we hold ourselves. This process is perhaps vital for understanding futures in the plural. Perhaps also is.
Futures as technologies of the self, not just technological futures
-Welcome to a future – your future. Sorry if I will appear naïve to you – you know that I’m young and that I’m only a visitor in your space.
– Sure.
_– I’ve been going through the archives, and found quite a lot of information on you – my particular interest was in the time around 2007, when you were in your late twenties. It seems that the “internet”, this early precursor to what I grew up calling the “transpository”, was a particularly important site of activity for you then?_
– Yes. Back then, that technology was not quite what it is today. Most of its key features were there: you could share, talk, present, produce, inform. But what was not quite possible yet, if I remember correctly, is the democracy function, in all the aspects we know today. You couldn’t access all knowledge on that internet, nor could you access all knowledge outside of the internet, and you also couldn’t participate in direct democratic decision making. The platforms, fora and voting instances we have today only existed on a mini scale, in the framework of collaborative projects for example.
– But how did socioplanetary decisions get made, then?
…
If I try to remember the present, I will soon realize that I can’t get around constructing a scenario for the future in the process. This scenario might be highly speculative, science-fiction like, full of wild neologisms and unthought-of technological devices, as well as slowly and carefully woven, as a set of interconnections that point towards what does not yet exist. In fact, when I set out to remember the present. I necessarily end up proposing a future that will be implausible and problematic. If someone else is to collaborate with me on such a proposal, we have a lot of talking to do. The arising moments of doubt and insecurity lead us to question what future means to us, what movements we are making towards it, and what wishes we are – singularly and jointly – holding. 
While I can have a sense of futurity in my every day, the experiment of remembering my present allows me to confront and articulate ways in which I can project my thought, language, practice and life. That may initially feel like a closure or reduction, however if seen as a nomic game, it can be transproductive. To try to perform one single desirable future will be to stop at a dead end. But to switch between many futures, in a spirit of exploration and play, might be to realize the limits of what we can think of as futures.
Postscript: the future archive
The future archive is a project that issues an open series of responses to the problem of how to perform divergent futures. It engages interview- conversations that are set in possible times and spaces to come, which two or more people performatively inhabit as proposed versions of futurity. From there, contemporary society is remembered. Upon every conversation, a different future is negotiated via a discursive method that borrows from techniques of interview as well as dialogue and free speculation.
Aiming to offer spaces for carefully developing vocabularies and gestures which might point towards potential ways of thinking, acting and existing, the project encourages articulations of hopes and desires for future ways of co/existing, negotiating the space between a remembered present and a potential future, as well as facing up to the problematics of the proposals and imaginaries at hand. The locus of this is always practice (be it theoretical, activist, scientific, social etc), which is cast into a possible future upon which it is imagined to have impacted. With the questions of transformation and the social as its starting point, the future archive draws out a topology of divergent scenarios and tactics.
While there is an interviewing party and an interviewed, what is engaged is working together to make a movement towards what could be desired beyond contemporary language, problems, politics, etc, in playful negotiation with imagination and responsibilities. Conversations are video recorded and become part of an online platform (<a href="http://www.futurearchive.org">www.futurearchive.org</a>) that acts as archive as well as space for exchange and discussion, offering all material as open content. The future archive brings forth collaborative projects that pertain to thematic research strands within the project, engaging discussions, performances, screenings, interview labs, technologies of performance as much as writing.
Manuela Zechner
this text was published in etcetera magazine, autumn issue 2007, on futurology, ">www.e-tcetera.be_</a>
references:
<a href="http://www.hsl.gov.uk/capabilities/horizon_scanning.htm">http://www.hsl.gov.uk/capabilities/horizon_scan…</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_studies">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_studies</a>
These ends can vary, however in their religious origins are commonly eschatological, while dominant contemporary representations of such ends are mostly associated with power, security, control and wealth. The coming forth of certain utopias is entirely dependent on context.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_progress">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_progress</a>
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74cO9X4NMb4">www.youtube.com/watch?v=74cO9X4NMb4</a>
I am indebted to Richard Barbrook, particularly his book “Imaginary Futures”, Pluto Press, London 2007.
Jim Dator, Korea as the wave of the future: the emerging dream society of icons and aesthetic experience, 2004 <a href="http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/dator/japan/Korea_Wave.html">http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/dator/japan/Korea…</a>
Brett Neilson, The magic of debt or Armortise this! in Mute, Vol. 2#6, Mute Publishing Ltd, <a href="http://www.metamute.org/en/The-Magic-of-Debt-or-Amortise-This">http://www.metamute.org/en/The-Magic-of-Debt-or…</a>
See the work of Felix Guattari for distinctions between singularization and individualization
Mike Sandbothe, Linear and dimensioned time, 2003 <a href="http://www.sandbothe.net/349.html">http://www.sandbothe.net/349.html</a>
Jean-Paul Martinon, “On Futurity”, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2007.
As such, futurity sits close to messianism and religious thought.
I am indebted to Peter Zeillinger, who helped me understand some of the ways in which 
Derrida uses the gestus of “à-venir”, “to-come” or “Zu-kunft”.
<a href="http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/2007/03/possibilityprobability.php">http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/2007/03/possibili…</a> 2008-02-06T16:39:52Z 20 true future

2008-06-28T12:07:52Z