The future is not a blank slate. Ideas of the future surround us in society, shaping our assumptions about what’s coming and what’s possible. Since the industrial revolution, narratives of economic and technological progress have competed with earlier visions of an equitable society and eschatological visions of future catastrophe and transformation. Post-war projections of scientific discovery and colonisation moved through science fiction and into the stories of ‘smart cities’ and ‘AI for everything’ that emerged over the last couple of decades. Today, these future narratives are shifting again: our newspapers are full of talk about ‘green new deals’ and ‘building back better’.
These ideas of the future get things done. Some academics call them ‘future imaginaries’, shared symbols, images and values through which we collectively represent the future. Science and technology studies, the sociology of expectations, and futures studies are three fields with a particular interest in what future studies researchers call ‘images of the future’. Studying these ideas is important, because they are put to work in the present by lots of different groups, for different reasons: to mobilise resources and capital, to rally support to a project, to present policy decisions or investment choices as inevitable and necessary. Ideas of the future underpin finance, education, politics and culture. Indeed, the idea of ‘the future’ as a distinct thing is fundamental to how our society represents itself to itself, celebrating growth and progress. We’re encouraged to inhabit the present as if it were already the future, wearing next year’s fashions now, being ‘ahead of the curve’.
But our approach to the future is a cultural inheritance we ought to examine. Assumptions about the nature of the future and our relationship to it are what enable the ‘future discounting’ that makes polluted air and inadequate infrastructure someone else’s problem. An open, empty future is what underpins the expansionist and colonising actions of historical empires and multinational firms. And the future narratives that currently dominate don’t generally feature people who aren’t white or living in temperate parts of the planet.
We need to reassess the future imaginaries we’re working with, and come up with some new ones. In the programme, we’ll be thinking about the ideas and resources that might help to do that, and who we need to include to make them true alternatives.
Hello! I'm Richard Sandford, programme lead for the MSc Heritage Evidence, Foresight and Policy, based in the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage at The Bartlett. This is newsletter 3 in a series of 8, giving a flavour of what the programme’s about. Questions? Feedback? Drop me a line.
Within the field of heritage, there is already a wealth of thinking about how people imagine other times. Researchers in heritage are familiar with the differences between official narratives of the past and national heritage, and heritage ‘from below’, the grassroots heritages of other communities: migrant and diaspora groups, local groups whose heritage isn’t listed but which nevertheless forms part of the fabric of social lives. Memory and remembrance take different forms in all these different contexts, producing, in the present, different imagined pasts tied to particular sites, artefacts, and cultural practices (as Pierre Nora, among others, points out).
But remembering the past isn’t simply about what existed at that time. It encompasses the future imaginaries that were current for those groups at that time as well, the aspirations and hopes, the expectations and assumptions that shaped their lives. Nostalgia is a powerful force, and not simply in the reactionary, negative sense that so many commentators (at least in the UK) see behind phenomena like the vote to leave the European Union. Smith and Campbell (2017) discuss some of the ways people use nostalgia to make sense of the past and imagine new futures, with one of their respondents describing heritage as “nostalgia for the future”, keeping alive the possibility that what is remembered now might come again. Perhaps another aspect of nostalgia is remembering (maybe falsely, certainly incompletely) a time when what was anticipated seemed better. Maybe the focus of the nostalgia that drove some to vote for Brexit is not some imagined past, but the glorious future that stretched out in front of the people who lived there.
From page 92 of "Sun Pictures of the Norfolk Broads. By Payne Jennings. With letterpess description by E. R. Suffling. (Third edition.)"
Another aspect of heritage that’s relevant: researchers in heritage studies tend to work with a general understanding that ‘heritage’ is made, understood and valued in the present. Heritage is a product of now, not the past. Futures researchers know that this is true of ‘the future’ as well. Narratives of possible futures might be linked to our best understanding of the processes unfolding beyond us, as heritage is bound up with history, but they are made in the present and reflect how things are now.
✻
This means that future imaginaries, like other kinds of cultural heritage, change over time, and become less relevant as circumstances change. The retro-futures of the Cold War were treated with irony at the time, in cartoons like The Jetsons, and finally died at the beginning of the 20th century in a wave of entitled memes about missing jetpacks.
T-shirt by John Slabyk, at https://www.threadless.com/shop/@threadless/design/damn-scientists
Since then, these Cold War narratives of technological progress have morphed, on the one hand, into the predictive fantasies of data-driven capital, living five minutes into a constantly-changing future extrapolated from the recent past, and on the other into the accelerationist dreams of Aaron Bastani’s ‘fully-automated luxury communism’, in which the promise of artificial intelligence and robotics is spread beyond the current owners of the means of production for the benefit of all. The various flavours of a ‘Green New Deal’ hark back to the original New Deal (in a further illustration of nostalgia driving futures) to outline a series of social and economic reforms that allow societies to address climate change and social injustice, due in part to capitalism, while leaving the way we think about labour and capital largely unchanged. At the other end of the scale is the disastrous social collapse portrayed in movies from Mad Max to The Road, and which fuels the imaginations of ‘doomsday preppers’.
Still from Elysium: extreme inequality and technologically-advanced policing
The apocalypse has always held a popcorn-munching attraction that makes it ideal material for science fiction. But away from the blockbusters, science fiction has been a venue for exploring alternative futures for decades. There are plenty of examples that fail to challenge regressive ideas about how people should treat each other or relate to the natural world, but away from the colonial exploits of Dan Dare or the casual bigotry of Isaac Asimov (to suggest just two examples), science fiction can be a place for asking not just ‘what if?’ but also, in the words of writer Tim Maughan, ‘what could possibly go wrong?’. The value of science fiction for thinking through radical change and complex consequences has long been recognised by foresight practitioners, and increasingly by businesses and policy groups.
✻
Frederic Jameson characterises science fiction as fundamentally utopian in Archaeologies of the Future. He suggests that any alternative offered to global capitalism must be utopian, in the sense that it must be so radical a departure from what is known that it is able to escape the “crippling” (Archaeologies, xii) belief in the inevitability of capitalism and the proven unworkability of any alternative. So a utopia represents a true break with things as they are at present. This means using what we have available to us—existing language, categories, ways of ordering the world—to imagine and describe something unlike anything we know. Utopias risk failure from two directions, then: make the difference between our present selves and those in a utopia too great, and we can’t relate. The narrative is incomprehensible. But locate it too firmly in human nature as we know it, and it becomes just a straightforwardly reformist political project, working in a world we know with constraints we understand (Archaeologies, 168).
So the trick is not to resolve it one way or the other. This echoes the utopian quality Ruth Levitas draws from Ernst Bloch, that of being perpetually unobtainable (‘not yet’) while eternally desired. It shares this quality, I think, with the nostalgia I mentioned above: a perpetual searching for a future that was promised in the past.
The music critic Simon Reynolds, and later the cultural critic Mark Fisher, suggested that this kind of temporal dislocation was a contemporary feature of recorded music: they popularised a term borrowed from Derrida, ‘hauntology’, to describe the atemporal echoes of earlier music and different genres of sound that were turning up in electronic production. In the 1990s (as Reynolds has described extensively), rave, techno and jungle all drew on, and constructed, a particular future imaginary, offering a doorway to the future, along with a kind of blues and sadness that came from recognising this promise would remain unfulfilled. In my recollection, the future that jungle and drum and bass sought was already nostalgic and utopian.
So the steady spread of rave nostalgia, on the one hand, and the evolution of rave elements (detuned chords, breaks, pitch-shifted vocals, filter sweeps) within the current post-rave scene on the other, seems like another layer of this utopian nostalgia.
Manix, ‘Living in the Past’:
This tune, released in 2013, is a conscious recreation by the artists 4 Hero of the sound they began with in 1992. The vocal, “some of us live for the future, and some of us wonder” sounds like a conscious repudiation of the ‘welcome to the future’ message that was central to the original era. It’s a strange album: unabashedly looking back, it’s either a warm-hearted recollection of simpler times or a jaded cash in. Look at that album art.
Sophia Loizou, ‘Vestal Waters’
This is a different thing altogether, full of submerged ghosts of the pre-millenial sounds of the future, like the traces of jazz you hear in Ravel and Debussy. I think it’s beautiful.
✻
The point Reynolds and Fisher were trying to make is that hauntology is a dead end, as far as imagining new future imaginaries is concerned. It’s a symptom of a general tendency that Fisher, and Jameson, saw in capitalism: an inability to create authentic, new ideas of the future. I think it shows how not to create futures from heritage, perhaps avoiding the kind of exploitation of heritage that David Lowenthal and Robert Hewison decried in the 1980s.
Instead, I think we need to recognise the ideas of the future contained within heritage that are there to be unlocked, revitalised, recognised as immanent and given room to breathe. I mentioned Afrofuturism last week: I think it’s a powerful example of this approach, recognising the potential contained within heritage and culture, and working consciously to bring it out. Mark Fisher saw hauntology and Afrofuturism as instances of the same condition, the interrupted temporality and smeared contemporaneity that he saw as a feature of late capitalism. His insight that hip-hop, techno, and jungle all rely on the “plastic” time accessible through the technologies of sampler and turntable is illuminating, and his suggestion that African slaves were the first to suffer the ‘future shock’ of the modern world is convincing. The article is a really valuable overview of some key themes in Afrofuturism. But I don’t think that the Afrofuturism he was talking about is quite what people are doing now.
"Mind Blown" by Manzel Bowman, 2015, part of the exhibition ‘Unveiling visions: unveiling of the black imagination’
The new afrofuturists (‘Afrofuturism 2.0’) have, to my mind, a different, steelier, outward-looking energy that makes it hard to see any equivalence with hauntological electronica. That’s not to say they no longer work with the speculative and recombinatorial time Fisher describes, or that acts like Moor Mother aren’t continuous with the work he’s considering. But it’s more focused on active rewriting of the futures on offer, reclaiming and transforming historic trauma, and less about inhabiting imaginary future ruins, in the way that parts of the English hauntological scene have been. The Afrofuturism of the Black Speculative Arts Movement or Nnedi Okorafor seems to me more focused on futures that grow from the possibilities in the present. Futurist Lonny J Avi Brooks gave a quick account of his view of Afrofuturism to the Long Now Foundation which offers some context.
I don’t think we should all be Afrofuturists. But I think we can accept the Afrofuturist invitation to create new future imaginaries that will serve us better.
Links
Your Future London, part of the Centre for London’s ‘London Futures Review’: an interactive summary of five scenarios where you can leave a one-click response. Illustrates the challenge of communicating complex things in a simple way—using established tropes about technology and society can make it hard to see things in a new way. ❡ Evan “Skytree” Snyder explains how he uses quartz crystals as piezoelectric inputs to his modular synth in order to collaborate with non-human forces from deep time on music exploring the far future (includes eating moon rocks and a radio dead zone caused by a barbed-wire/tree hybrid) ❡ A BESTIARY OF THE ANTHROPOCENE “seeks to capture this precise moment when the biosphere and technosphere merge and mesh into one new hybrid body”: some fantastic contributors to what looks like an amazing book ❡ “Shifting baselines syndrome” means we could quickly get used to climate chaos: one role for heritage might be to remember how things were, so we can see how far we’ve travelled, and the scale of what’s been lost ❡ Wool-like material can remember and change shape: how would you collect something made from this? What’s the best form for it to take? Who gets to decide? Which would decay most slowly?
Colophon
Thanks for reading! If you're interested in the programme, there's more information on how to apply here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/heritage/study/heritage-evidence-foresight-and-policy-msc.
© 2021 UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage