For the Negotiating the Future seminar, I’m in the workshop entitled “What is the future? The end of the present, a monster or just a metaphor?” The following is an attempt to synthesize our thoughts a bit.
Both of your pieces deal with how the future can be conceptualized as different from the present – not just separated as that-which-is-yet-to-come but as radically different. You both focus on this fact that it should be unexpected – words such as monstrous, outside typology, the unknown, uncertainty, accident and interruption are commonly used to describe the future that is different from today and different from the management-type thinking of best course of action for the future.
Lars’ piece deals primarily with how the future arrives, so I’ll start with his. He argues that the future is an unexpected change in the unfolding of the present time – expressed as when one chunk of duration is replaced by another. As I understand that, it is a radical change (the only “real” future for both of you) if it is a change that could not – even with “perfect knowledge” – be predicted or expected. As far as I can tell, this ties in with Mark Matt’s interest in a critical vocabulary for the unknown – Lyotard’s paralogy.
Because of this tension of the knowledge to describe the future as it arrives (replaces and unfolds), the future becomes a site of struggle and ideology, according to Mark Matt. The one who can stake out the territory of the future and determines (within reason) that the changes were expected, is in a position of hegemonic ideology (which, in Lars’ point of view would be a hegemonic ontology, right?), and so can naturalize the future and so makes alternatives unthinkable (alternate ontologies, for Lars). Hegemonic ideology would prefer to keep developments within the unfolding present, thus never becoming unpredictable.
An unpredictable future world would thus prove monstrous, unthinkable from the hegemonic point of view. So, the future is folded into the present as the best course of action, thereby naturalizing technological (and other) developments. Challenging this naturalized future and predictable developments must be done by engaging critically with the moments of ontological disruptions, and to do this we need a new vocabulary based on a different discourse which does not depend upon “perfect knowledge”. Instead, it must be an approach to the unknown and attempt to perform as the Other.
The way I see it, the best instances of science fiction (sf) does exactly that; it is culture’s and society’s “performing Other” in the way it attempts to articulate a sense of difference or change from the current historical moment. Sf is almost perfect for Lyotard’s strategy of paralogy because sf has so many empty signifiers – words that are either invented or taken out of context and given a new meaning. Sf is therefore useful in discussions of the future not because it can predict the future, but because its words – its fictional discourse – provides a vocabulary for talking about future change. Sf is about change in whatever form it will take, and sf is willing to speak of these changes from a position outside of perfect knowledge. The words, ideas and concepts of sf can thus be used to de-naturalize discussions of the future that would otherwise take place within a hegemonic ideology/ontology – as in the case of Haraway’s cyborg essay.