Enumerating the Future: Cancellation as Overload
Despite what I’ve said in the recent past about generational labels, this hits close to home. (Image taken from the Etsy shop of “TheStitchKween”, if you’re interested.)
Edgar and I talk through most of the articles that go up here before they go up, so even if there’s only one name on it, the end result is a product of much back-and-forth, and there’s a bit of each of us in each piece. This also means that at the edges of these conceptual discussions, things bleed into other concerns. Like any married couple, we discuss plans and options for the future, for example.
Now, I’ve commented in the past that it’s kind of hard to plan for the future when it feels like “planning for the future” could be either buying cans of beans or saving money for retirement (though given that I and Edgar are — respectively — an adjunct instructor and a museum guard, retirement is a bit of a fantasy, but you know what I’m getting at). This gets at one of the problems that I want to grapple with today.
It seems to me that our ideas about the future are ambiguous – by definition, the future is unset, unbuilt, and can be written or rewritten endlessly. This is part of both its wonder and its terror.
Several nights ago, I listened to an episode of the podcast Flash Forward that discussed the possibility of China becoming a global superpower. The host noted that part of its expanding ambitions lay in the so-called “Belt and Road” initiative, where China intends to invest in a titanic infrastructural system that stretches from Kenya in the southwest to Indonesia in the southeast, and curls all through Russia and Central Europe. It’s intended to be completed by 2049.
But by 2049, at this rate, Exterminism will be in full effect. Traditional agriculture is supposed to be failing, the sea level will be rising, and perhaps this network of roads will be the channel by which climate refugees the world over flee? And where to? Europe as a whole struggled to deal with a million plus Syrian Civil War refugees, how many countries are going to do their part if there are hundreds of millions of climate refugees?
To an extent, it’s very similar to the beans-versus-retirement dilemma that Edgar and I are dealing with.
There’s the brain bug that says that we can ignore the things we know will be happening in the future, because we don’t want to deal with it, and moreover says that planning for the desired outcome alone is fine. We habitually silo off our plans for the future. We could easily say that this means that there is no coherent future – or no future at all.
So here we have a retreat of something we touched upon previously.
There is a section in Mark Fisher’s The Ghosts of My Life entitled “The Slow Cancellation of the Future.” This miniature essay is a somewhat important passage for a lot of people who are enthusiastic about his work. It touches upon something that we all intuit, and puts it into words, which is much of what is good in Fisher’s work: the articulation of something that would be otherwise inchoate.
In this passage, Mark Fisher (previously the subject of a series here) builds upon a concept that Franco “Bifo” Berardi first laid out in After the Future, writing that we live, paradoxically, in an era of stasis that, “has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of ‘newness’, of perpetual movement. The ‘jumbling up of time’, the montaging of earlier eras, has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is now so prevalent that is no longer even noticed.” In Fisher’s conception, there is no future, and we live in constantly-produced and constantly-remixed versions of the past (the vogue for the 1980s in the 2010s, which were themselves built upon a nostalgia for the 1950s).
For Fisher, this is best articulated through popular music. Later on in the same essay, he declares that:
Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be. While 20th-century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th century.
This reminded me of something that I encountered a long time ago online – references to a psychological study where subjects were hypnotized to temporarily remove from them the concepts of “past,” “present,” or “future” – and occasionally two at a time. The article this was written up in, called “Behavior and the Place Names of Time” by Dr. Bernard S. Aaronson, described how the study made use of both a subject under hypnosis and a subject simulating the mindset that consciously occurred to them from the prompt. Aaronson noted that:
The no future condition produced a euphoric, semi-mystical state in the hypnotic subject. Everything seemed to be occurring in boundless, immanent present. He seemed totally free of any anxiety and spent his time savoring the experiences of the present. No marked personality change was observed. He seemed interested in colors and textures and savoring each interaction to its fullest. The standard scene painting reflects some of these interests.
The simulating subject responded to the suggestion of no future with an initial period of depression. This gradually changed to a stoical, philosophical mood in which he felt no anxiety but also no anticipation of pleasures to come. He showed some loss of drive and seemed contented just to sit. Some loss of contact with the past was noted by the outside observer. No major personality changes were noted.
On the other hand, attempts to “ablate” perception of the present from a hypnotic subject resulted in a horrific state of catatonia – including the suppression of autonomic functions like blinking and balancing – and one subject “described his condition as a state of unbeing, like death.” This led to the study canceling any tests that involved the elimination of the “present” status.
It’s interesting that we always have the concepts of undeath and anomalous time entangled in our minds — possibly going back all the way to the prophetic dead from Homer’s Odyssey. The recent vogue for biologizing undead monsters is, honestly, confusing to me.
While the simulation of the no-future condition might correspond to something like what Fisher described, I think that, hypothetically, it might reflect something more along the lines of the untried “No Present and Future” condition that Aaronson’s team refused to inflict on someone. The simulator from that study showed a pattern of increased nostalgia and hostility, but this was – once again – a simulation.
I haven’t found any evidence of this study being replicated, so it’s best to take it with a grain of salt, but if excising the future led to a feeling of euphoria in the hypnotized patient, that could be because under the effects of hypnosis, the very idea of a future was inaccessible. The subject simulating the loss of the future still had the idea, and so was in a position to enact mourning for its loss.
The same study found it possible to “expand” the perceptions of the past, present, and future – leading to, respectively, happy torpor, psychedelic exuberance, and languid fulfillment.
I bring up this study because I find the intersection between it and the work Fisher did very interesting, especially when averaged out to what I have experienced and observe in the world. What we are experiencing isn’t just the future sinking behind the horizon, but the future fracturing, and the past growing swollen and heavy, dragging us back into it.
What Aaronson’s team did was show us what happens when these states become unintelligible to us (when ablated) or all-consuming (when expanded). These show the caricatured end points that changing emphasis can have on our thinking: no cultural shift could bring us to these points, completely “ablating” or “expanding” them. A deeper dive on this would be interesting, but it seems that the state of “no future” as described in Aaronson’s state might correspond to the pre-colonial conception of time as present in some African cultures, which seemed to have time divided into two general phases, the deep past and a combined present/recent past. While this was not universally the case on the African continent before European colonization, the podcast The History of Africana Philosophy describes it as being present in a number of cultures.
We often think about time as being either linear or cyclical, but this often ignores some more basic questions — such as whether the past, present, or future are even real in any meaningful sense. Memory certainly does, though.
So the “cancellation” of the future is not the same as the absence of a future. It must be something else entirely. I think that the description of the process from Ghosts of my Life – as the “slow cancellation” of the future – shows something important: it isn’t the absence of the future that we are focusing on here, but on an ongoing process. It is precisely the multivocal and unresolved nature of our future plans, I believe, that leads to this cancellation: “We can’t decide how, so we just won’t.”
In short, we don’t suffer from a complete lack of future, we suffer from having too many futures. Specifically, futures that cannot be productively reconciled. This fragmentation is perceived as a cancellation, because we retreat into the past due to the uncertainty of the future.
The frustrating thing here is that this unset and unresolved nature is exactly what the future is. Or, I should say, what it now seems to be: at various times in the past, people had a teleological view of history – believing in an onrushing final judgment, or an endless ascension into a more and perfect state, or expanding out and conquering the universe.
None of that seems possible anymore, because we can’t decide on a future, and so we don’t bother to have one. And every single moment that we can’t imagine a new future and just go back into the nostalgic mode of culture it becomes harder to think of the future as the future.
So what is to be done?
The “hauntological” response described in Ghosts of my Life is to look for futures predicted in the past, and stitch together these traces into a new vision of the future. Not in the sense of recapitulating retro-futures – there’s a whole hauntological read of Cyberpunk 2077 in there that I might write after I’m done with the game, but my take will probably head in a different direction – but in the sense of analyzing the abandoned programs of past theorists and reformers and creating something that summons forth the specters haunting them.
This is not necessarily a bad idea, but I worry that it would just add more to the mix.
I’m digging the game, but Comic Book Resources hit it on the head here.
What would an anti-hauntological approach be (Edgar proposes the term “Exortatory”)? To look for these traces and banish the specters. To exist only in an eternal golden now?
Well, that, quite clearly, is the response of the neoliberal orthodoxy: those reformers failed. They’re losers and their programs should be consigned to the flames because of it. Now let’s look at these promo stills of Harry Styles’s Watermelon Sugar, which looks like “what if the 70s but also Miami Vice?” Or if you don’t like that, you can play this video game of performative resistance to the system where you’re also a hired killer subcontracted by the police (that’s the aforementioned Cyberpunk, which I both greatly enjoy and which I have heard classified as “Neon-Liberal” due to its politics. I’ve made my thoughts on the genre clear, I feel.)
Do whatever, but what the hell is up with the fly on those pants?
Of the two, I feel like the hauntological option is better, but that’s only because I haven’t come up with a third option yet.
Let’s see if we can cobble one together right here and now.
Okay, so if we go back to what we posted on History (as opposed to historiography), and take the definition of culture as “a machine for transforming the raw material of time into history.” Though perhaps “lived experience” would be better than “time”, though perhaps that’s just an intermediary stage. What are the parts of the machine?
Well, they are clearly us, those people who live in the society in question. This would be the basic constituent material components of the machine – our relations and what we produce from them. We all perform actions, and this produces from our lives the stories of our lived experience, our memories. These stories are averaged out into our culture, and from them we produce metaphors, analogies, anecdotes, rules, guidelines, ideas, and ideology. This would be the second-order machine, the sense-making apparatus that produces history from these things.
I think of culture (or cultures, more broadly) as being a vehicle that traverses the field of time, leaving a trail of history behind it, the way that a train might be surrounded by gangs of workers laying down track before it, so that others might follow it in the future. To extend this metaphor, our problem is that there is difficult terrain ahead and, even though we can’t decide on a route to proceed upon, we are continuing onward, which will no doubt lead to ruin as the vehicle becomes caught in a gorge or canyon or river and ceases to be the functioning machine that it once was.
The following metaphor, admittedly, borrows heavily from imagery from Iron Council by China Miéville (heavily featured here), the ending of which has some strong Acid Communist vibes.
To oscillate in and out of the realm of the metaphorical, what is needed here is a quick but comprehensive survey of the land ahead, conducted by scientists, philosophers, historians, artists, experts, and amateurs, so that some kind of route forward can be picked. Because without knowledge of the space into which we are about to move, we are lost. This may involve reaching back into the bag of solutions we have tried in the past, or into the stockpile of possible solutions we invented but didn’t use, but the last thing we need, the thing that we cannot allow to happen, is simply an insistence that the problems don’t exist.
In such a situation as ours, we need to pick a goal and we need to set our sights upon that goal, navigating by it as our north star. I feel the answer as to what this shared goal should be is fairly clear, though perhaps others disagree with me.
But I’m not sure how much credit to give to that.
The somewhat utilitarian framework of “society should be aimed at allowing the greatest number of people to find the greatest amount of meaning in their lives” is not one that I think can be objected to on ethical grounds – practical, perhaps, but too often concerns of practicality are brought in solely to protect that status quo, to argue that the world is as it ought to be. The really pernicious thing is that concerns of practicality are used to make people who don’t necessarily believe that the status quo should be the case argue in its defense.
Let’s not let practicality govern our goals; the choice of a desired end-goal is one that should be made with our ideals in mind, not concerns about banal function.
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