Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel Rosenberg is Assistant Professor of History in the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. He specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the French Enlightenment.

Susan Harding is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her most recent book is The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"An eclectic, provocative mix of ideas and approaches united by their common intelligence and lucidity, the essays in Daniel Rosenberg's and Susan Harding's "Histories of the Future "tease out unexpected adjacencies between a welter of social, political, and cultural scenarios that touch on questions of the "yet-to-come." This is a book that should be read by anyone with an interest in the relationship of the future to the past--and of the present to both."--Jeffrey Kastner, senior editor of "Cabinet "magazine

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

HISTORIES OF THE FUTURE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................................................................ix1 Introduction: Histories of the Future Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding........................................................12 A Notebook on Desert Modernism: From the Nevada Test Site to Liberace's Two-Hundred-Pound Suit Joseph Masco.....................193 How to Make Resources in Order to Destroy Them (and Then Save Them?) on the Salvage Frontier Anna Tsing.........................514 The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines Vicente L. Rafael..............................75INTERLUDE I Global Futures: The Game Anna Tsing and Elizabeth Pollman..............................................................1055 Electronic Memory Daniel Rosenberg..............................................................................................1236 All That Is Solid Melts into Sauce: Futurists, Surrealists, and Molded Food Jamer Hunt..........................................1537 Sing Out Ubik Pamela Jackson....................................................................................................171INTERLUDE II Access Fantasy: A Story Jonathan Lethem..............................................................................1858 Subject, City, Machine Miryam Sas...............................................................................................201INTERLUDE III Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement Hirato Renkichi Translated by Miryam Sas...............................2259 The Future of the Old Economy: New Deal Motives in New Economy Investors Christopher Newfield...................................23110 Why Rachel Isn't Buried at Her Grave: Ghosts, UFOS, and a Place in the West Susan Lepselter.....................................255INTERLUDE IV The Trouble with Timelines and A Timeline of Timelines Daniel Rosenberg and Sasha Archibald..........................28111 Living Prophecy at Heaven's Gate Susan Harding.................................................................................29712 Trauma Time: A Still Life Kathleen Stewart.....................................................................................321Bibliography........................................................................................................................341Notes on Contributors...............................................................................................................355Index...............................................................................................................................357

Chapter One

Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding

We have been living through boom times for the future. Even before the escalating storms of 2001 and the conflicts that followed, our cultures and industries collaborated in a remarkable proliferation of words and images about the future. And none of this has shown any sign of slowing down. Whether in modes of progress or apocalypse, the media flow over with anticipations of things to come, with utopias, dystopias, stories of time travel and artificial intelligence, with accounts of acceleration and progress, of doom and imminent destruction, with scenarios, predictions, prophecies, and manifestoes. In this swirl of uncertainty, even the benighted "science" of futurology has come back into style.

In the first years of the twenty-first century, representations of the future have cycled wildly through a historical repertoire from the ray-gun gothic of the 1930s to the noir and the endism of the 1940s and 1950s to the plastic op-art modularity of the 1960s and back again. As if following a kind of Moore's Law scaling principle, futures today seem to be reproducing themselves faster and more cheaply than ever. At the same time, their shelf lives appear to be getting shorter. Any child can historicize them for you, can tell you in a minute which future is up to date and which is already over, which doesn't run fast enough on the current microprocessor and which doesn't run at all.

More and more, our sense of the future is conditioned by a knowledge of, and even a nostalgia for, futures that we have already lost. Indeed, nostalgia for the future has become so pervasive today that it has even developed a distinctive set of commercial uses. As Arjun Appadurai suggests, contemporary mass consumption "is not simply based on the functioning of simulacra in time, but also on the force of the simulacra of time." If, as E. P. Thompson argues, different modes of production imply different forms and experiences of temporality, our current mode of consumption appears to imply a nostalgia for productivity in general and for all the different experiences of temporality that it might be able to produce. Today our futures feel increasingly citational-each is haunted by the "semiotic ghosts" of futures past.

Whether ultimately this phenomenon will turn out to be an expression of the logical limits of the progressive chronotype (what, after all, comes after progress?) or simply another version of the Baudrillardian hyperreal (simulacra in yet another realm), the rise of future-nostalgia has already brought to light phenomena of formal and historical importance. From a formal point of view, future-nostalgia reminds us that the future is not, and has never been, an empty category. Even as we accept a skeptical critique of prophecy, we must acknowledge that for us the future is not so much underdetermined as overdetermined. Our lives are constructed around knowledges of the future that are as full (and flawed) as our knowledges of the past. Often these future knowledges are profoundly freighted, since they involve anticipatory hopes and fears. As one commentator recently put it, our futures are junkyards of memories we have not yet had. They are not merely geometrical extensions of time. They haunt our presents, obeying architectural laws that look more like Gaud than Euclid. They arise in the most diverse and peculiar ways.

In historical terms, the development of future-nostalgia also points to a kind of crisis in modern futurity. From the beginning, the modern was constituted through a rejection of prophecy. The philosophy of the Enlightenment required that time would be open to human achievement and that events could gain meaning from their interrelation, rather than from their relationship to absolute, biblical beginnings and ends. As Fredric Jameson has argued, by bracketing eschatological questions, the Enlightenment effectively "sealed off" the future from prophetic knowledge. But this development had paradoxical consequences. In no way did it amount to a going out of business for futurological workshops. The Enlightenment proscription against traditional prophetic practices turned out to produce new and intensified imaginative demands on the future and new techniques of narration and prognosis. The very possibility of an open-ended time elicited an outpouring of grand narratives from Condorcet and Kant to Hegel and Comte. This effect was by no means limited to high philosophy. In the arena of fiction, for example, the late eighteenth century saw an efflorescence of future fantasies. And for the first time in literary history, these futures took place not in some vague hereafter but in a chronological expanse freed from the finitude of sacred history, in the profane historical future, in the years 2440, 1850,...