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.
6 Comments
First best check, is there a Mark in the system here - could be of course, in which case I didn’t realise, if its me, then I normally go under the cover of Matt, but I really don’t mind, Mark does the job, in fact sometimes here they get mixed up a bit and I have seen it written Mad and once even Mad Jam, my middle name being James, which I like a lot.
Maybe I have missed something else too as I never saw mail mentioning file formats from Lars, maybe Mark read it on my behalf, if it exists.
Well, I know nothing whatsever about SF, having got half way through a Willaim Gibson novel once before transferring it to the ‘life is too short’ shelf - oh, I have read a hell of a lot of William Burroughs though, if that counts, probably not…oh well, so don’t know if SF is useful and interesting for smart people with nice ipods nanos or sad and boring for people who play fantasy games and keep a plastic medieval axe on the wall (like Mark), so I’ll take your comments as accurate on that topic.
Well, I think you have got hold pretty much of what I was on about in those pages, so I think we share a fairly common take on what things are about in some general baseline way, so good. Most of the words you use I wouldn’t, probably, usually use to shape concepts - ontology, hegemony, ‘perfect knowledge’, performing, other, ideology (well, I might use that, on special occasions, like Mark’s birthday) as they all have a bit of history which can’t easily be escaped and don’t really describe what I’d like to try to think about anyway - but, we’ve already established that words don’t matter much, even names, so no problems as I don’t think I am trying to do anything too difficult, just saying the future is an idea like any other, it is inscribed by technologies including foresight practice, including apparently good ones like speaking to each other and that if we were to use a different way of making it down we might find out something we don’t already know, which when most foresight is money pissed up the wall we might as well do as not do.
Ok, nice!
Great to see and read that you are already onto it! Although it’s a pity Mark won’t join us, Matt is the perfect stand in! ;-)) Just for a bit of comment: I guess we can’t help words having a history, but I am all for explaining their place in the discussion. I think of words used in Foresight discourses, like sustainability, reflexivity, complexity… now these to me often come across as empty signifiers… and thus I partly agree with Matt’s call for the “inhuman” machine, the idea of very large and varied inputs producing the unknown from unexpected linkages and permutations… it somehow reminds me of this book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wisdom_of_crowds
which is more about prediction than the unexpected…
therefore again I am sceptical whether a big amount of ideas fed into a machine can produce a new quality, I don’t know enough about the history of Delphi studies… it might as well be the same old “empty” ideas, just more of them… therefore we really might need new vocabulary… and sf can show the difference sometimes - but who is gonna used the new words? Do they have to be decreed? Not too many academic linguistic inventions have made a significant difference to the world lately… which reminds me of the 7th of June being the last day of the G8 summit in former East German Heiligendamm… which again ties in with Matt’s last comment of foresight being money not distributed wisely enough…
P.S. Haven’t seen Lars’ remark about files either. But hope he will join in.
Of course, the point about file formats was from Lars’ paper! Was just too tired last night to think that far. :-) Now back to my pollen allergie…
@Matt
Sorry about the name mix-up, I don’t know what I was thinking.
Anyway, I agree that words have histories and most the words I use in the above were culled from the two papers - even when the words were contested. This history of words is difficult to break free from - as Burroughs used to say “to speak is to lie, to live is to collaborate” indicating the inevitability of complicity when working within the confines of established norms.
Locating the transformative power of the future must come, I agree, in recognizing the anomalous. Burroughs attempted to coax the anomalous by creating his own “inhuman machine” in his cut-ups and fold-ins, reducing his own subjectivity in his writings. Derrida attempts to articulate some of the same concerns in his concept of grafts and dissemination - showing how words inherit meaning.
The question is how we avoid the viral replication of the present, and how we can create an inhuman machine to generate new concepts and disseminate them in order to make sure they don’t die the death of academic linguistic inventions. Burroughs’ answer would be to cut everything up - no limits on what is used - which sounds a bit like the Delphi methods, though I don’t know much about those.
Some inspiration can be found in sf in the way that its fictional discourse depends on something parallel to Lyotard’s paralogy. Sf misrepresents the world to distort the present, and it depends on a strategy of the unknown to do so. It creates a collision with hegemonic ontology and creates an intensified engagement with the structure of language.
I think we’re on the same track, but I’m a bit stumped as to how to move forward right now. I’ll get back to this, however.
Maybe we need to go back to the question from Lars’ paper: How big are actually the chunks of the present? Where does it end? And in order to relate to the future, we need to define past as well… no past - no future. Is viral replication of the present a bad thing? Asked differently: Is technological determinism a bad thing? I am both excited and abhorred about all techno-scientific possibilities lying ahead of us… so I do not have a clear stand on things - especially not on Sunday afternoons… :-)
Hi all,
I like your blog post a lot, Steen. It is very good for thinking.
Yes, sounds reasonable, and highlights the difference between change and development, if we think of change as the becoming real of future proper, and development as the unfolding of the present. Along these line, and within this language, we could say that “capitalism” (as the hegemonic ideology”) naturalize the development of new computers as an “hegemonic ontology”. Moore’s Law then (“computers double their capacity every 18. month”) is not about change, but about the unfolding of an hegemonic present or hegemonic ontology. This makes me think of at least two things, two comments to your blog post:
1) An idea concerning the way you speak, Steen, about “speed” and its Western (and especially US American) cultural appreciation. By the way, Eagles celebrates it nicely in this line: “Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy” (From the tune “Take it easy”). Isn’t this also a celebration of a certain “change”, or a development clothed as change? Are we not supposed to not “let the sound of your own [new and speedy computer] drive you crazy”? Do “capitalism” want us to see things like Moore’s Law as “change”, and as a change that we should accept in a sort of Buddhist way (“take it easy”)? So we better like speed, and we may think of it as “change”, only to really take part in an unfolding of an hegemonic ontology?
2) It is probably trivial to point it out, but just for the argument: Your paper, and even more your blog, is written within a quite typical “leftist” of “feminist” tradition, a tradition that is “relentlessly looking for ways to intervene, change, diffract” (that, I guess, could have been a Donna Haraway quote). There is a strong commitment to search for true change in this tradition. So it has been critical to determinisms of all kinds, because this has been closing the doors to change. It could have been equally critical to the radical indeterminacy that might be inherent in the idea of the “monstrous future”. Because, perhaps, this monster is a beast that cannot be thought of in advance. It always hits us as an accident, never as an unfolding of a plan. Think it and it disappears as a Troll. It cannot be planned. Must we let go of the radical urge for change? Must we?
Or is there a “crazy machine”, of the kind that Matt writes about, or are there SF-fantasies? And do some of these throw up ideas that contain a potential “Other”, some other world between complete determinacy and complete indeterminacy, complete order and complete chaos?
Its late and I may be rambling too much, but I might throw out another idea of Alfred North Whitehead (and of quantum physics). The idea of “potentia”. Potentia is ontologically real, but merely as a possibility, as “not yet actualisation”. They exist AND they may become. Within classical physics and Cartesian philosophy “potentia” and “objective tendency” is “subjective”. Take away the Cartesian dualism, and you are either left with an objective world without potentials (and thus either totally deterministic or totally chaotic), or you add “ideas” to the world itself, and accept that potentia is ontologically real … I don’t know where this leaves us …
good night.
-lars