The Future by Marc Augé (review)

Of late there has been something of a critical ‘turn’ to the future (the futurological turn? Back to the Future?) – from ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s After the Future (2011), Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future (2005) and Arjun Appadurai’s The Future as Cultural Fact (2013) to, now, the new ‘Verso Futures’ series that includes the subject of this review, Marc Augé’s The Future (2014). As the Heideggerian truism goes, you only really notice a thing when it breaks. A far cry from the certain and seemingly inevitable utopian futures underpinning much of the twentieth-century imagination, ecological doom and economic gloom now hedge the twenty-first century from all sides, and the stunted future is now plotted in iPhone generations and Marvel movie phases rather than radical transformations and Year Zeros. The condition called capitalism now seems chronic, and terminal, sustained by libidinal investments that have long gone sour for the majority. Climate change and ecological crisis demand concerted action, but too often produce magical thinking instead – a kind of wait-and-see faith in science – and radically progressive political responses appear mostly ineffectual, relegated to Jameson’s disappointing ‘shaking of the bars’ and watchful waiting as the leviathan slouches on. Understanding how the future operates as a real object in the present is a step towards overcoming the impasses before us, towards reclaiming the potential of the future as difference, not repetition. The question is whether Augé’s essay helps in that regard.

For sf scholars, the futurological turn might seem like old news – long used, as we are, to discussing the interaction of the present with its own imagination of the future, and long used, again, to locating these imaginations in real, material products in the here and now: books, films, art and so on. But this turning of interest in a variety of disciplines towards the future, and towards the inclusion of the future as a present fact in their theorising, can only be of benefit. The approaches and insights of these different intellectual traditions overlap with sf scholarship, broaden it, reveal new avenues and relevance, and enrich the discipline as much as these scholars from other fields would benefit from the wealth of work already done in sf. One particular discipline is of more than usual interest to sf scholars, that of anthropology, since it shares so much with sf. Both are intellectual products of colonial conditions; both are concerned above all with encountering the Other, and exploring all the contradictions and problems such an aim presents; both have struggled to become more self-reflexive, and to free themselves of the taint of their origin; and, in more recent times, anthropology does what the best sf has long done: look closer to home, estrange the mundane.

Marc Augé, author of – amongst a number of respected studies – the breakthrough hit Non-Places (1992) and now The Future (2014), has a career history that reads like a fractal capsule of this larger disciplinary trajectory. Beginning with a series of works on the Alladian peoples, situated on the Ivory Coast, Augé then turned his attentions, and the techniques and perspective he had developed in his earlier work, to his local Parisian context. Finally, since Non-Places, he has striven to understand how the local and the global interact, persuaded that, in the contemporary period, it is impossible to understand the former without acknowledging the influence of the latter. From this line of intellectual development comes his newest work, which grapples with the modalities of the future in the here-and-now, and their relationship to the chronic present.

The book begins with a key distinction: it is not about the future as ‘what is to come’, but rather the future ‘as a time of conjunction’ (1). For anyone familiar with the well-known Derridean separation of ‘ futur’, or ‘the future’, from ‘l’avenir’, or the ‘to come’, Augé’s distinction will be confusing. For Derrida, ‘the future’ designates that which is ‘predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable’ (Dick...