I must say that I am quite fascinated by the idea that mankind’s own imaginings of the future are as ever eerily self fulfilling. I mean this mostly as a matter of aesthetics; it is the conjurings of our imagination, spanned across history, which give us the ‘alien future’ and which then guide us in realising our notion of the ‘futuristic’, the ‘modern’ etc; all in a manner which is profoundly historical; or as you might say, touched with our own unknowingly creative hands.
What ‘futuristic’ means is decisively shot through with unrecognised retrospect; a turning back in narrative twisted and distorted by the ingrained instinct to view time as a linear and singular progression.
All this talk about the future as something ‘alien’ belies the fact that the future remains, as always, what ‘we’ make it. This phrase, oft used as a dictum for freedom of choice, is now subverted to show how ignorant we are of the play of history in human reality. The meaning that guides us, which is not ours and which subsequently feels alien, is like an organism which feeds into every meta-discourse, a kind of inescapable inheritance; which is precisely that region of our grounding of groundings which is nonetheless prior to our best efforts at reaching the fundamental. What ‘we’ make of the future is no more ‘ours’ than the system in which we make it. But it is not really ‘inhuman’ either.
It is something alive like evolution, but also dead like evolution. It resists anthropomorphisation, by which I mean that our attempts to schematise it in relation to our human concepts of life, agency, and causation, are subverted when aspects of each, and their antithesis’s, are found all to apply equally (or rather, ‘indiscriminately’) in the description we eventually settle on, a description which remains nonetheless itself an outgrowth of the organism, and not either ‘yours’ or ‘mine’.
I do occasionally wonder whether it is even possible to harness this organism and direct it willingly. This may sound contrary to what I have been describing thus far; however even something limited in this regard would be significant.
Such a harnessing would be a kind of being-historical thinking after all; however yet I think that just this moment - the achievement of the peak of subjugation - would also be the point at which it is realised how incomplete is even this most complete of possible subjugations. There is, I fear, no such thing as creativity. It seems more accurate to say that we grasp only part of what we are embroiled in, and the rest of what we may call ‘our creation’ is not any more ‘ours’ than is our identity, our beliefs, our language, or finally – our meaning. We are all blind in this respect. We are perpetuators, not creators.
We think of the future as we do a foreign country. When we think of travelling to other cultures – i.e. in the ‘present’ - cultures which we consider to be backward, we often think that in some sense we are travelling into the past. Likewise, when we look into the past, we often think analogously that in some sense we are travelling to a foreign nation. What should be made clear is that in the first case we are only really travelling into ‘our own past’, and that in the second the notion of foreignness is critically unpegged – i.e. relative to what is familiar and thus no more than a shadow of what we might call the ‘genuinely foreign’. Of course though it is almost by definition that we can never label or confront this Other, lest we would domesticate it and in so doing remove what was foreign, henceforth occasioning the same outcome.
The future too can be a foreign country, but it is our own foreignness, and it is precisely the kind of place which is susceptible here and now to these kinds of anthropological accounts. Objective time, I think, is the culprit in all of these confusions.
Regards,
James
, but I couldn’t let such a thoughtful post go without response.
