“In the past, even the future was better.” Karl Valentin, Bavarian comedian and philosopher of the absurd, ironically quipped in the 1920s about the “good old days,” in a time in which the future still held, as we know now, the most catastrophic events of the twentieth century. Valentin’s aphorism suggests the kind of all-encompassing nostalgia for the past that even extends to past futures, conjuring up a mood that regained currency again over the last decade. In a non-ironic vein, Zygmunt Bauman (2017) has coined the term “retrotopia” to characterize the nostalgic zeitgeist of the present with its numerous “back to” tendencies and its widespread sense of a longing to return—to tribalism, to the womb, to greater social (in) equality, and to premodern regimes of gender. A utopian aspiration is projected onto the return to an imaginary and allegedly ideal past rather than engaging in the construction of a better future. Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” emblematically expresses this retrotopian imagination. In a similar vein, the contributors to The Great Regression (2017), taking their cue from Bauman, identify and offer critiques of “democracy fatigue” (Appadurai) as evidenced by a new authoritarian populism and the global rise of regressive social movements. In contrast to the phenomena analyzed by Bauman and others, movements such as #FridaysforFuture and #ScientistsforFuture face the opposite direction, raising consciousness about the future of the planet and humankind and working to engender a new spirit of responsibility and care. Mostly ushered in by a younger generation (statistically, the retrotopians tend to be a bit older on average), #FridaysforFuture and similar interventions are building momentum in a transnational movement urging for immediate action in favor of a future as such. “Retrotopia” and “Fridays for Future,” then, are two diametrically opposing poles of an ongoing public debate which lay claim to the future in different ways: restoration versus change. Bringing together keywords that are crucial for a discussion of these and related topics—sustainability, neoliberalism, security, and forecasting, to name a few—this volume directly resonates with the developments described above.
This publication provides the essential vocabulary currently employed in discourses on the future by presenting 50 contributions by renowned scholars in their respective fields who examine future imaginaries across cultures and time. Not situated in the field of “futurology” proper, it comes at future studies sideways, so to speak, and offers a multidisciplinary treatment of a critical futures’ vocabulary. The contributors have their disciplinary homes in a wide range of subjects—history, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, media studies, American studies, Japanese studies, Chinese studies, and philosophy—and critically illuminate numerous discourses about the future (or futures), past and present, from various perspectives. In fact, their cooperation in this volume is a genuine effort to conjoin across disciplinary boundaries: the book actively creates synergy between different fields and subjects by cross-referencing the entries. In compiling this critical vocabulary, we seek to foster conversations about futures in study programs and research forums and offer a toolbox for discussing the complex issues involved.
Recent studies in the humanities and social sciences attest to an urgency for critical future studies in an emerging transdisciplinary and cross-cultural field. Marc Augé’s The Future (2015), John Urry’s What Is the Future? (2016), and Jennifer Gidley’s Future: A Short Introduction (2017) offer somewhat condensed overviews of the field. A decade earlier, Fredric Jameson, in his Archaeologies of the Future (2007), laid the groundwork for a renewed engagement with the future against the backdrop of late-capitalist globalization. His study probes the continued relevance and political value of notions of utopia. The late Jose Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009), for instance, relates notions of futurity to queer identities to counter what he considers a stale presentism. In her Cruel Optimism (2011), Lauren Berlant critiques neoliberal fantasies of a coming good life based on notions of upward mobility, security, and durability. She thereby lays out the necessity of new modes of relating to temporality. In his collection of essays, The Future as a Cultural Fact (2013), Arjun Appadurai considers matters of futurity within a global condition. He makes a postcolonial argument for a reconsideration of the future based on a negotiation of the tension between a late-capitalist ethics of probability, on the one hand, and a radical ethics of possibility on the other. Lastly, it is capitalism’s reliance on the powers of the imagination regarding opportunity and risks that Jens Beckert’s Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics (2016) addresses. Critical Terms in Futures Studies picks up on various approaches to the field and charts processes of making and un-making knowledge(s) of and for the future.
Of course, neither the variegated discourses on the future nor the basic openness and unpredictability of the future itself can be grasped, let alone be defined within the narrow limits of glossaries, dictionaries, or encyclopedias. Instead of presupposing universal categories, the study of the semantic registers of the future requires a focus that retains a sensibility for the often conflicting and contradictory particularities arising from cultural difference and historical context. With its innovative scholarly design, its intellectual flexibility, and its focus on problem-based thinking, Raymond Williams’s well-known and much emulated concept of Keywords provides a model for our format in outlining the various cultural conceptualizations of the future in their irreducible multiplicity. As its subtitle suggests, the book aims to provide what Williams (1988) has called a
Keywords, according to Raymond Williams, are sites of meaning production and sites of struggles over meaning, “they are significant binding words in certain activities and their interpretation; they are significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought.” This critical vocabulary tries to map such meanings and convey such struggles for the matters concerned with prospecting the future. In doing so, it adds to existing inventories of and introductions to the study of the future. Hopefully, it will prompt further discussion.vocabulary, which is significantly not the specialized vocabulary of a specialized discipline, though it often overlaps with several of these, but a general vocabulary ranging from strong, difficult and persuasive words in everyday usage to words which, beginning in particular specialized contexts, have become quite common in descriptions of wider areas of thought and experience. (14)
References
- Bauman, Zygmunt. 2017. Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity.
- Williams, Raymond. [1976] 1988. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. London: Fontana.