Histories of the Future (review)

Critical cultural studies tends to have a certain unreflective, unacknowledged teleological stance that at once strives for something better but denies the modernist narrative of “progress.” Surprisingly, for all the productive criticism of modernity, there is very little work that tackles our contemporary temporal paradox directly. Narratives of progress find themselves criticized. As do appeals to history. Yet discussions of the intersection of times past and times future tend to deal with the present only in passing. Questions of being are left overwhelmingly to robust thinkers like Nietzsche, Deleuze, Haraway, and others who defer articulating the subject except as something just beyond ourselves—posthumans — whose being is denned by becoming. But for those preoccupied with the singular experience of subjectivity, the question of being as being is a question whose time has come. Although Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding s Histories of the Future is framed as a study of “futurism,” it is an important step toward a critical cultural studies of the present at the intersection of two axes: Time, from past to future, and Culture, from traditionalism to futurism.

According to Rosenberg and Harding s Introduction, “The essays that make up this volume are themselves densely interlinked, and the volume is intended to operate as a hypertext, opening up analytic paths among disparate temporal experiences of modernity, links between technology and messianism, life and half-life, panic and nostalgia, waiting and utopia, conspiracy and linearity, prophecy and trauma” (9). In this respect, the volume is a masterpiece of editorial vision. Initiated in 1997 by Susan Harding for the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Histories of the Future existed first as a research workshop. In 1998, the project was carried forward as the topic of a conference held at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And from there, it was cultivated and nurtured until it was made manifest in the present volume. Each component stands on its own merits, yet read together the possibilities for “coalescence”¹ spring to life and augment the impact of each piece. It is rare that a work with so many contributors, covering so many topics, with so many methodologies achieves such a rich and productive harmony of ideas.

Furthermore, a series of interludes—a game, a short story, a manifesto, and a timeline—enliven and enrich the more scholarly contributions to this volume.² By engaging readers in the process of speculation, the volume sheds a little more light on the radical possibilities that confound predictions and determinations. At the same time, such exercises in the fantastic help ground the hyperbolic futurism of the status quo that seems to tell us, “Things will be better than ever, if we simply leave them alone.” While such exercises are typically considered more creative than critical, they are wholly appropriate for a work designed to make us think about the place of the future in everyday life.

The Introduction and the final chapter provide coherency to the volume. The Introduction, as it should, provides a pragmatic overview of the explicit possibilities mapped out in the contents. The final piece, Kathleen Stewart’s “Trauma Time: A Still Life,” yokes the broad scope under the notion of “trauma time”—the time “when things in themselves act as conduits channeling the literal into the figural and back, ‘meaning’ is no longer something simply and surely located in a symbolic system or in the eyes of the viewer but in a spark generated out of the very shiftiness of subjects and objects” (331). The effect of such a conclusion serves to authorize readers to open their readings outwards and look beyond the text. Rather than strive to be a definitive “history of the future,” the editors have chosen to frame their work as a beginning. Given the precarious state of being in an age of acceleration, decisions such as these are both visionary and responsible.

Read as a hypertext, discursive pathways often lead in unlikely directions. For example, readers interested in ecological...