Contested Futures

A Sociology of Prospective Techno-Science

Nik Brown, Brian Rappert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351949002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

In a unique volume, Contested Futures brings together a group of scholars to examine the relationships between social action and the future. Rather than speculating upon what the future might bring, the volume interrogates the metaphors and practices through which the future is mobilized as an object of present day action and agency. The book shifts the analytical gaze from looking into the future to looking at the future as a sociological phenomenon in its own right. Futures are thus contested in as much as they register differences of interest, time frame or organizational and political form. Contestation is also evident in the ascendancy of certain discourses, languages and metaphors which foreclose some futures whilst facilitating others. But futures are far from being simply linguistic abstractions, and in fact can often be seen to harden into material entrenchment as expectations become scripted into 'path dependency' and 'lock in'. Contested Futures is an invaluable analysis for both academics and policy actors seeking a better understanding of the ubiquity of futures-discourse in the context of today's uncertainties.

Part One
Time, Temporality and the Social Construction of the Future

1
Introducing Contested Futures: From Looking into the Future to Looking at the Future

NIK BROWN, BRIAN RAPPERT AND ANDREW WEBSTER

The future is like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding all objects from our view (Hazlitt, 1822).

Like every thing future, all speculations on this subject must… be in a measure uncertain (Greenleaf, 1816).

Introduction

The British Medical Association recently published a book called Clinical Futures in which the stated aim of its editors was to ‘redress a balance and create a forum’ where the perspectives of clinicians rather than ‘political, social, economic, legal, and organisational theory [might] take a freewheeling look at the likely trends in diagnosis and treatment over the coming decades… The intention is to bring the imaginative conjectures of clinical investigators to the fore of thinking about the future of health policy. We want to start a process that will strengthen the sometimes muted voice of physicians’ (Marinker and Peckham, 1998).

Whether or not one agrees with the sentiment that ‘the future’ has been dominated by social science at the expense of clinical voices in health policy, there could be no better illustration of the way in which the future comes to be defined as a contested object of social and material action: if actors are to secure successfully for themselves a specific kind of future then they must engage in a range of rhetorical, organisational and material activities through which the future might be able to be ‘colonised’. Whilst Contested Futures and Clinical Futures share a perspective on the future as a discourse in which different voices vie for ascendancy, they differ in one fundamental respect. In the very best of futurological tradition, Clinical Futures is a book about what the future should or might look like. Contested Futures does not postulate on the probability of one future against another nor generate normative prescriptions about particular futures. Instead, the intention here is to turn the analytical gaze towards the phenomenon of future orientation itself. The purpose of this analysis is not the future per se, but the ‘real time’ activities of actors utilising a range of differing resources with which to create ‘direction’ or convince others of ‘what the future will bring’. As such, our purpose is to shift the discussion from looking into the future to looking at how the future as a temporal abstraction is constructed and managed, by whom and under what conditions.

This is done through exploring the contested future(s) of various sciences and technologies, not least because the experience and projections of late-modern society are, arguably unlike other periods, increasingly framed by techno-scientific language. Typically, our visions of the future are dominated by new technologies. The magazine Newsweek (1999/2000) recently asked what we can expect in the 21^st century. The future outlined was one almost exclusively framed in terms of the implications of advances in science and technology: gene therapy and nanotechnology will cure disease, cars will drive themselves, pigs hearts will be used for organ transplants, computers will become an even more ubiquitous part of life, the Internet and the Cybercafe will become the venue of choice for our relationships, and so on. Little space is made for questions of human relations that are not structured around or presented as a consequence of the very latest gadgets. The optimism expressed for the future is coupled with a quality of inevitability in the development of particular technologies. While gene therapy might entail significant dangers, there is really no choice but to push ahead. The only question left is how fast particular advances will come.

In contrast to such treatments of the future, the contributors to this volume all share a concern to understand how it is that some futures come to prevail over others, why once seemingly certain futures happened to fail, how other futures are marginalised as a consequence of the dominant metaphors and motifs used in every day life, and the consequences of particular framings of the future.

There are a number of themes which have guided this project and which inform, in one way or another, the contributing chapters:

• Futures as Contested
• Agency, Action and the Future
• Path Dependencies, Determinance and Lock-In
• Contesting Future Models
• The Creation of Future Spaces/Moments - The Orchestration of Opportunity

It should be clear from this list (which is explored in detail below), that we do not see the future of science and technology as in any way the result of a linear or naturally evolving process. It is not simply that the future is always uncertain and so possible in multiple forms; this could quite clearly be a position adopted by someone who could still hold to an evolutionary perspective on science and technology (Basalla, 1988; Nelson and Winter, 1982). It is that the future of science and technology is actively created in the present through contested claims and counterclaims over its potential. Like all discourses, ‘the future’ is constituted through an unstable field of language, practice and materiality in which various disciplines, capacities and actors compete for the right to represent near and far term developments. By all measures, the future has become a big business. Witness in this regard the importance of the future in contemporary fiction and film, the need for public policy dealing with the environment to justify itself in terms of long term sustainability, the growing market for scenarios, Foresight, and horizon scanning in organisations, and even the emergence of book such as this one.

In many ways, the manufacturing of ‘the future’ is no different from discourses about ‘the past’ - not least, the history of science and technology itself. The history of science as recounted in most textbooks gives little idea of the contested futures that once shaped the development of what is considered to be the ‘scientific canon’ of today.¹ At the same time, it may well be true that those voices who sought to articulate what we might call ‘past futures’ were fewer in number and occupied positions of social status which meant that the ‘contest’ was narrower, more confined and less structured by liberal democratic discourse (Held, 1987). Today, the voices which declare a right to speak to the future are arguably more numerous, drawing on much wider, more heterogeneous forms of social authority. This is likely to mean that stabilising future expectations will become more and more difficult, especially for those charged with their social management, that is, government and regulatory agencies.

Futures Contested

As implied by the use of the plural noun ‘futures’ in the title to this volume, a common finding amongst its contributors is that futures occupy a contested terrain rather than being singularly or consensually defined. Social actors, at individual, institutional or wider cosmopolitan levels construct future expectations which may run in parallel with and contest each other, occupying different time-frames and carrying different interests. Therefore, we need to ask how and why futures are contested, and how future scripts are stabilised around a specific set of expectations and practices. How do actors seek to engage with and manage the promise and risks their futures are perceived and portrayed to hold?

The issues addressed in Contested Futures resonate with key tensions and ambivalences identified in contemporary commentary on Western society, such as the pervasiveness of discourses of risk, reflexivity and future indeterminacy. Beck, for instance, notes the almost crippling degree to which technoscience is widely seen to be both the source of terrible risks and yet the only plausible solution to determining impact and the deployment of ameliorative measures (Beck, 1992, 1995). Such strains are invariably refracted through a heightened public and political reflexivity evident in, for example, precautionary regulatory regimes. This relatively new arrival to what we might call ‘future governance’ betrays an understanding that sources of hazard require caution even when clear causal connections between today’s actions and tomorrow’s threats are vague or even improbable (Adam, 1998). So futures are not only contested in respect to a plural politics but also in respect to differing degrees of indeterminacy which have fragmented the basis on which we engage with the future. Hence, it is no longer the case that previous disciplinary approaches to the future have the value or legitimacy they once had and, instead, new voices have entered the discursive fray of the future’s politics.

The future is also contested in respect to the relationships between acceleration, speed and an ever receding horizon action and agency. Anthony Giddens has contended that ‘ours’ is the most future oriented society there has ever been. That is to say it is the one most ‘preoccupied’ with the future, precisely because, unlike ‘traditional’ society it no longer has a sense of control over the future (Giddens, 1998). Saturated, as it is with competition, risk and knowledge intensity, planning has become more, not less, indeterminate:

… there is no way that the accumulation of knowledge will allow us simply to colonise the future, to carve out the future as a space which we can just invade and colonise. The very development of knowledge actually makes the future more rather than less opaque… In the Middle Ages there was no concept of risk because it was not required. The idea of risk only develops when you have a society, which actively tries to break away from the past and conquer the future. In traditional cultures there is a sense in which there is no notion of the future… as a separate temporal domain because the future looks very much like the past. But with the rise of Modernity you have a society bent on changing the future. The Enlightenment philosophers saw the future as a territory you can occupy and colonise… and get away from God and dogma and from the influence of the past to shape the influence of the future (Giddens, 1999).

For some, such as Baudrillard (1994) this loss of control over the future is as much to do with our collapsing sense of control over the past, where the meanings and ‘truths’ of a linear history no longer make any sense. It may also be seen as a result of what Giddens (1998) calls the ‘end of nature’ where we no longer are concerned by what nature can do to us, more what we have done to nature.

In respect to the social theory of temporality, these considerations have forced on us an entirely new conceptual means of engaging with the future. Theorists like Adam have pointed to the helpful merits of recent science discourses ranging from eco-evolutionary theory and chaos theory in thinking about our relationship to the future. For example, evolutionary theory has drawn our attention to the long historical processes of species development now potentially threatened by the compressed time frames of genotechnology. The second law of thermodynamics has whittled away our sense that we can reverse today’s actions in the future by stating that rearrangements of energy are inherently unidirectional involving irreversible states of ageing and decay. Where Newtonian physics once propagated the view of an equally proportionate relationship between causes and effects, chaos theory has unseated this equilibriumism with an appreciation of how small changes disproportionately reverberate throughout entire systems in nonlinear ways. Such is the complexity of the relationships between processes which operate to different temporal principles that ‘identical paths and outcomes would constitute a miracle’ (Adam, 1998 p. 46).

Deconstructing past agendas and opening up new ones generates uncertainties as well as opportunities. For those in industry this has meant a growth of markets for new (both process and product-based) technologies which are increasingly knowledge-intensive - such as ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies), genetic diagnostics or the rapidly expanding digital electronics sector (Gibbons, 1994). Yet these markets are not to be constructed simply through the ‘logics’ of competitive advantage: they are hedged about by technical, cultural, economic and regulatory constraints that make them highly unstable. It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that the competing innovation agendas being pursued today are, to some degree, marshalled and corralled by the policy sector through future-oriented government programmes such as Foresight that has swept through the world’s most industrially active nation-states over the past decade or so (Gavigan, 1997; Martin, 1995). Indeed, the emphasis on the need to create a sense of shared future through policy instruments like Foresight programmes are indicative of the need to address and manage the future’s fragmentary or indeterminate character. When the future can no longer be expected to follow on neatly from the past, then imaginative means must be employed.

The analysis of articulated futures is crucial because it is in the shared times of the new millennium that contested futures in science and technology are most apparent and where the future agendas of distinct constituencies have to take account of one another. The chapters in Contested Futures illustrate the different ways conflicts are expressed and the strategies different actors use to embed and secure a particular reading of the future.

Agency, Action and the Future

A particularly thorny problem for those who seek to understand the way in which future technologies and knowledge are secured is where to locate agency. How is it that things come to be the way they are and, more importantly, as a consequence of whose actions, under what conditions, and to what effect? In some circumstances futures are formulated for technologies by concentrating agency in a product or even a scientific claim, thus obscuring the many other actors and contingencies upon which that product’s future once depended (Deuten and Rip, Chapter Four). This may be especially the case, for example, when scientists claim that they have made a dramatic ‘breakthrough’ which opens up new work: breakthroughs are often presented as speaking for the future implications of a technology when in fact the future career of the specific knowledge-claim is still yet to be built (Brown, Chapter Five). Sometimes, rather intriguingly, scientific claims to novelty can bite back and create unanticipated problems for scientists: this happens for example when patent claims filed on novel inventions for future development are refused because the patent examiner cites prior work of the same (and not only other) scientists, on the grounds that this earlier work anticipated future developments, including that lodged by the patent claim (Webster and Packer, 1996).

Agency is also often attributed to a particular technology itself, seen as unfolding or developing naturally along identifiable lines as its ‘self-evident’ benefits are taken up by users. This view is typically found in commentaries on the ‘future impact’ of a list of new technologies. Here, the key question is not whether a certain option will be pursued, but rather when it will come in being. In its more elaborate forms, such thinking has led to some of the more sweeping claims about the dynamics of technology in industrial society (Kerr, 1960; Bell, 1974). Technology here works to promote a convergence in social structure by virtue of its organising potential, especially in the workplace. In such a situation, human agency becomes reduced to engaging in behaviour to ensure the speedy uptake of particular technological possibilities. The force implied in this attribution of agency is that one can either ride the wave of advancement or drown in the waves of progress.

Powerful political narratives - such as those associated with both communism and fascism - also capture future promises. On the one hand, communism implies a future where the perfect society is to be secured through action, while fascism is typically motivated on the basis of the perfect society already being here (in the highly charged language of dominant essentialist ethnic identities, such as the ‘Aryan race’). The ‘liberal democratic’ political narratives pervasive in many Western countries are, of course, not without their commitments. Those in subordinate positions are promised the rewards experienced by the well-off if they play the rules of the game set out and reinforced by those in dominate positions. There is too a politics of the future which involves different forms of selection and boundary work - that of gender a...