The Future

Marc Augé, John Howe

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781781687185
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

For Marc Aug, best-selling author of Non-Places, the prevailing idea of "the Future" rests on our present fears of the contemporary world. It is to the future that we look for redemption and progress; but it is also where we project our personal and apocalyptic anxieties. By questioning notions of certainty, truth, and totality, Aug finds ways to separate the future from our eternal, terrified present and liberates the mind to allow it to conceptualize our possible futures afresh.

Chapter 1

Individual Future and Collective Future

The subject of this book is the future.

Not the future in the sense of ‘what is to come’. That is a somewhat myopic concept that we project without much thought onto ill-defined groups (‘What future are we shaping for our children?’) when we talk, again without much thought, of our presumed inadequacies (‘We are accountable for the future of our children’) or our hopes (‘Science is the future’).

Not that future, but the future as a time of conjunction, the most concrete time of conjunction if it is true that the present is always ungraspable, ever retreating with the ceaseless passage of time; and that the past is always obsolete, irremediably finalized or forgotten. The future as life in the process of being lived individually.

That future is essentially obvious, while we are in perpetual doubt over ‘what is to come’. What it boils down to is current events which give a content to the future by occurring. On that basis it can arouse every hope and every fear. There are societies in which occurrences, as pure contingency, are experienced as unbearable: they are interpreted, to slot them into the structure, and thus make them into a normal, expected expression of the order of things. Misfortune in general and illness in particular are investigated with a view to identifying the individuals responsible for them, but also to reaffirm the existence of an immutable norm: that is why their anthropologies (if this term is understood to mean a coherent body of representations assembled over time and transmitted from generation to generation) already include definitions of the individual, of the body, of consanguinity and of the collection of interpretative tools that make it possible, when the occasion arises, to explain apparent disturbances as indirect expressions of the norm. Taken together, these elements comprise a set of instructions which ethnologists analyse piece by piece in chapters covering, for example, kinship, the notion of the individual or beliefs in magic and sorcery. But the ‘persecutory’ conception of misfortune corresponding to this type of interpretation (when someone falls ill or dies, someone else must necessarily be the cause), while most spectacularly expressed in those human groups in which the individual is closely, substantively and structurally integrated with the collective, is only one of the modalities through which human societies in general try to account for events by fitting them into a logical and chronological succession. The past is never wholly occluded either on the individual or the collective level.

The future, even when it concerns the individual, always has a social dimension: it depends on others. Any episode seen as a ‘stage’ in an individual’s life (an examination, a competition, a job, a marriage) depends to a large extent on people other than himself and fixes him more firmly in the web of collective obligations. It is sometimes said that the individual ‘constructs’ his future, but others participate in that enterprise which is primarily a manifestation of social life. Inversely, people speak these days of the social ‘exclusion’ of those who apparently have no ‘future’, who complain and protest because their assignation to a miserable and continuing present is experienced as the equivalent of a death sentence.

So, both senses of the ‘future’ are expressions of the essential solidarity between the individual and society. An absolutely solitary individual is unimaginable, just as one sort of future without the other would be unbearable. But inversely, to subordinate an individual to collective standards and his future life to what befalls the group smacks of totalitarianism. The radiant future once promised to the popular masses was a contradictory and impossible idea, in that it implied the stopping of time and thus the disappearance of the future – and of the individual with it. Basically it is the same with the future as it is with happiness. The object of democracy is not to ensure the happiness of all, but to create the conditions for it as a possibility for each individual by eliminating the most obvious sources of unhappiness. An acceptable future for all would be one in which everyone could manage their own time and give meaning to the future by individualizing their personal futures.

The real problems with democratic life today stem from the fact that technological innovations exploited by financial capitalism have replaced yesterday’s myths in the definition of happiness for all, and are promoting an ideology of the present, an ideology of the future now, which in turn paralyses all thought about the future.

So what is proposed here is a dual approach, a dual study. We will start by examining the two main modalities of relation to the future observed in the diversity of human societies: the one which makes the future a successor to the past, the schematic one; and the other which makes it a birth, an inauguration. Both have acquired institutional and cultural forms of expression. We will also consider what is becoming of these two modalities in the contemporary period. Singular or collective, individual or social, purely temporal or historical (all these aspects remaining indissociable for the time being), the future is today taking on a new dimension and displaying several faces. It arouses multiple fears, but also – because man as a symbolic creature cannot live without some awareness of others and of the future – recurrent expectations, hopes and utopias. It is the acceleration of these ‘mood swings’ and the accentuation of this bipolar character, common to collective mentalities and individual sensibilities, that characterize henceforth our relation to the future.

At the hinge-point of these two moments we will try, using the example of Flaubert and Madame Bovary, to examine the notion of creation and, more specifically, to what extent a work of literature can anticipate the future or inaugurate it.

Chapter 2

Outlining the Plot, Expounding the Intrigue

The links between life and art are so close that it is sometimes hard to know in which direction borrowed words are tending. Originally, an ‘intrigue’ or ‘plot’ meant a complicated, embarrassing or nefarious scheme; for that reason the terms have been used about love affairs and political affairs, while also spreading to the theatre.

We are interested in the plot of a play or film because it stages a problem whose solution we expect: we are expecting the plot to be resolved. So long as it is not (and in principle it is not resolved until the end), we live in a ‘suspended’ time, the suspense found at its most intense in detective films and novels. This expectation arouses a specific pleasure derived from a particular relation to time: the real time spent reading or watching the spectacle, and the fictional time of the plot itself. The dénouement or resolution may contain surprises and, while awaiting it, the reader or spectator is not usually able to anticipate the retrospective reading that the detective hero will provide at the end. Our pleasure is born firstly of a pure form of expectation; knowing that all will become clear, we long to hear the end of the story in whose rhythm we are caught up, but we also know that our pleasure depends on that desire which depends on our expectation; we appreciate the author’s skill at ‘making the pleasure last’.

The paradox of the detective or police thriller is that it is usually written in the past tense, about events anterior to the present of the investigation aiming to elucidate them, but nevertheless affords the reader or spectator a vivid awareness of the immediate future. Fundamentally, in fact, this is the paradox of any literary or cinematic work: while offering the reader or spectator a few moments of anticipation and desire, in reality it already exists in completed form as a book, film or DVD. Everything is settled from the start. Some impatient individuals break the spell and destroy the illusion by reading the last few pages first, or arriving in the cinema during the closing minutes of the film (this used to be a common experience in the days of continuous programming; it is rarer today, but video and the change from public to private screenings make any chronological manipulation possible), thus condemning themselves to seeing the adventure as already written into inevitability via an inexorable narrative leading to an unavoidable end. Expectation of the unavoidable has a lure of its own (one well understood by tragic poets), but it proceeds from a retrospective reading of history which denies the existence of the future as an opening onto the radically new.

More subtly than such voracious, over-curious types, we may sometimes find ourselves taking pleasure in rereading a novel whose ending we have not entirely forgotten, or seeing again an old movie, thriller or other, still faintly present in our memory. In those cases our pleasure, setting aside anything to do with beauty of expression or aesthetic feeling, undoubtedly stems from the rare opportunity to combine memory and expectation. In cinema, we rediscover the faces, landscapes and events absolutely identical to the ones we had seen in the past (with a certainty that memory alone normally refuses), but we are also caught up anew in the rhythm of the narrative and the expectation of the dénouement, even when we remember it. Of course – and this applies even more to rereading a book – we come across forgotten details, or aspects that passed unnoticed the first time; we don’t necessarily have the same gaze. So the experience is one that also speaks of ourselves, which is what gives it its special intensity: the private upsurge of a future which had been put behind us.

Three further comments on the word ‘plot’ (in French, intrigue). It has clearly pejorative connotations when applied to the covert manoeuvres we suppose to exist in social and political life: plotters are people who care only to achieve their aims, especially by bringing their ‘connections’ into play; they follow a skewed, falsified and untruthful (but social) conception of life. The adjectival form ‘intriguing’ on the other hand has a much more positive sense, referring not to the idea of mystery, which suggests something unknowable, but to curiousness in its dual aspects, passive and active: we describe as ‘curious’ something that awakens curiosity. An intriguing phenomenon excites both the curiosity of the inquisitive individual and his desire to take a closer look. In all cases, the intrigue is only resolved by deconstructing a complex tangle of interpersonal relations, social relations: for good or ill, the intrigue – the plot – brings into play the relations that comprise social life.

In the theatre they are represented, in a novel they are described, and in a thriller we try to discover them in their raw reality behind the mask that conceals them.

In any event, working up a plot establishes a dual relation with reality. It poses a question which has to be answered, and in that sense impinges on the future. But once set up, the plot requires to be resolved: in other words, the solution to the enigma is initially oriented towards the past, even if it claims to liberate the future. The assumption is that the key to the future always depends on the past.

The ritual logic evoked at the beginning of this book proceeds from the layout of a plot. Whatever its ultimate purpose (to explain a misfortune, to master a vicissitude or ensure an orderly transition), it achieves it through a systematic review of the past. Allow me to return briefly to the conceptions of misfortune that underlie accusations of ‘witchcraft’. The idea that any misfortune or illness springs, directly or indirectly, from the wishes of another person (hence belonging to what medical anthropology calls social aetiology) is traditionally very widespread in, for example, African lineages; when someone dies, a number of procedures are undertaken to determine the identity of the culprit who is, quite literally, put on trial. Explanatory templates pre-exist the enquiry. They can cover lineage as well as matrimonial alliances, paternal kinship and maternal kinship; in some societies it is claimed, for example, that attacks through witchcraft take place more easily inside a lineage (patri- or matrilineage), but it is also accepted that an attack by the father, in a matrilinear society, or by the maternal uncle in a patrilinear society, remains a possibility; still other scenarios can be envisaged in reference to witchcraft (exchange of crimes within a magicians’ society itself presented as the maleficent double of the age-class system) or outside that frame of reference (a god of voodoo type may get annoyed with someone who neglects his shrine). All of these theoretically envisageable scenarios have two complementary characteristics in common: rejection of contingency (the diagnostic procedure aims to operate a return to the intellectual, symbolic and social order) and a perpetual referral to the past as the only possible source of meaning. I was astonished, during my first stay in Côte d’Ivoire, to note that everyday life in the village, swarming with rumours concerning the sick and the dead, resembled a sort of perpetual police investigation.

Ritual, as we know, addresses two types of event: specific events which arise at moments when they are not necessarily expected, but also recurrent events, like the changing seasons; in the latter case ritual is undertaken not to banish the event but to ensure that it takes place. Once again, people want to act on the future, but a future conceived and desired as identical to the past. The wish for such regularity, most important in regions of the world where any climatic upset can have catastrophic results, is nothing new to us. Even as a child I can remember hearing people say that there were no proper seasons any more, and we have all noticed the anguished perplexity aroused today by the prospect of global warming. Human groups need temporal references just as much as spatial ones, and the theme of seasons is used metaphorically in a wide variety of contexts: sport, politics, literature, education. The year is punctuated by re-entries or ‘terms’ which give it a rhythm and channel our vision of the immediate future. In France the expression ‘social re-entry’ (rentrée sociale) is even used to designate the protest campaigns which, after the summer holidays, often accompany worker demands and the resumption of labour. Working up a plot is an aspect of that setting of things to rights. Observation of meteorology can give seasonal change – when it comes late, for example – a dramatic character in some parts of the world. And under the present system, we see how the media insist on dramatizing the most expected and recurrent episodes of political life, or announcing with startling emphasis the most trivial rivalries in the new sporting calendar. It seems that more fundamentally, the meteorological metaphor is a substitute for ritual activity aimed at mastery of the future; independently of its stated purpose and official objectives, it contributes to the symbolic ordering of the world by trying to banish the fears aroused by perception of the inexorable passage of time.

The prophets I met in Africa called themselves prophets, a title they borrowed from the Bible, and like the biblical prophets they contented themselves with short-term predictions, on the scale of individual lives. Harris, the first of them in Côte d’Ivoire, announced in 1913 that within seven years blacks would be on a par with whites. During the 1960s and ’70s, following decolonization, his successors saw the figure of President Houphouët-Boigny, the country’s first post-independence leader, as symbolizing the promise of rapid development. Meanwhile they devoted themselves, as healers, to the care of individual maladies which they interpreted in terms of the old logic: they did not deny the existence of the sorcerers they claimed to be battling, but in healing people, or believing that they did, they thought (not without an element of contradiction) they were illustrating the advent of the new era.

The colonial influx was incommensurate with the phenomena traditionally managed by ritual activity. An event par excellence, an advent, it was the sign and proof of a radical change on which it was imperative to have a position. It was ‘intriguing’ in itself, surprising, and it led to a questioning both of the past which had made it possible and of the future it heralded and even prefigured.

Prophets, in Côte d’Ivoire and elsewhere in Africa, especially in the Congo and South Africa, added a personal stamp to the traditional procedures for deciphering intrigues: they too wanted to be both sign and herald, they would be the first manifestation of the new times they announced, and their own material and social success would stand as evidence of this. Many failed, and those who made a name for themselves did so by creating a place, a conspicuous setting for their activity, building stone or concrete churches and establishing more or less close relations with the political authorities, both before and after independence. Adherence to the person of the prophet gave access to the new world: that was the essence of their message.

Was it so different from the message of our own politicians? Working out a plot is not restricted to lineage-based societies, and it constitutes an unavoidable stage in apprehension of the future. Reinterpreting the past to imagine the future, in a short-term way, is what all politicians do. The economic conjuncture, ...