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Thursday, June 24, 2010

"The Future" Is Nothing But An Ad

Jamais Cascio, the only self-described futurist I take the least bit seriously, upon seeing in a store window the slogan "The Future Is Not Something We Enter It's Something We Create" asks the question, "Is something still meaningful and true, even when it's been turned into a marketing slogan?"

It is interesting to note that this is a different question from asking whether a Debordian bon mot loses its critical force when it becomes a graffiti-scrawl in a Parisian alleyway cluttered with bloody broken bottles and suffused with tear gas. The slogan in the window to which Cascio refers also looks homemade and may aspire more to a situationist sort of impulse (and hence looks to me to be a misguided misfire of a different kind than the one Cascio is talking about), rather than to the sort of awfulness that worries him, the sort through which, say, the Death-Eaters of Nike seek to appropriate the emancipatory energies of Burroughs to sell slave-made shoes or the mall rats of Apple seek to appropriate the genius of Einstein to peddle their conformist crapola.

Be all that as it may, the appropriation of Shakespearean aphorisms and Wildean paradoxes and world-historical Presidential phrasemaking by advertising sloganeers amply shows such insights easily survive these opportunistic flash-in-the-pan commercial parasitisms. But I would argue that while the critical or world-building force of a fine thought wrapped in a fine phrase is usually capable of re-activation once it is re-encountered in a more proper context, it is true nonetheless that a person encountering such a phrase first or only in a marketing context has had much if not all of its potential for meaning and emancipation stolen from her to be replaced by some huckster's crap product. This is a terrible thing and it is a phenomenon that looks to me to be destroying America more generally, as it happens.

Nevertheless, the deeper question for Cascio in particular in all of this, of course, is whether or not futurological discourse as such is or ever has been anything other than marketing and promotional discourse writ large, however much it pretends to be a mode of technoscientific or technodevelopmental deliberation.

Alas, I have come to the conclusion that futurology is little more than a Mythological discourse in Roland Barthes' phrase, a disseminated advertisement and valentine that endorses, naturalizes, promotes the incumbent-elite developmental assumptions and aspirations of our corporate-militarist extractive-industrial-broadcast-surveillance complex endlessly to itself for itself, a futurism that is always actually an insistent retro-futurism, and that it is not only not true but actively obfuscatory and falsifying in its force, that it is not only not meaningful but actively deranging and distracting in its work.

My only quibble with the very healthy self-questioning Cascio testifies to in his post (this vital self-questioning of his is the reason that Cascio is the only self-described futurist I take the least bit seriously), is that it seems to imply that the particular slogan here in question was meaningful prior to its appropriation by the suave fraud of corporate advertising in the first place (hence his question's "still").

I disagree that the slogan was ever a meaningful one, and I think the meaninglessness of the phrase "The Future Is Not Something We Enter It's Something We Create" is relevant to the larger questions of Cascio's post.

"The Future" is not some "thing" at all in my view: it has no autonomous existence nor will it ever have one, it's "life," such as it is, is drawn entirely from a parochial inhabitation of the present. What futurists are talking about when they are talking about "The Future" is always about their anxieties, their hostilities, and their alienation in the present and in the terms in which presence is lived (namely, its finitide, its contingent historicity, it vulnerable biology, it frustrating and error-prone sociality).

Those in the present who imagine or aspire to the future are entering thereby not into "The Future" but into a changed relation to that present and the peers with whom they are sharing, contesting, making it. There is futurity in the present, just as there is history reverberating into it, but "The Future" is a profound denigration and falsification of that openness in presence, not a celebration of it. To live for "The Future" is to deny the living futurity in the present, just as to identify with the post-human is to dis-identify with the diversity of human lifeways in the present. Indeed, these two deathly repudiations are deeply connected, and help account for the tendency of futurological discourses to give rise to marginal insular sub(cult)ural futurological formations. As I put the point in my Futurological Brickbats:
Futurity is a register of freedom, "The Future" another prison-house built to confine it. Futurity is the openness in the present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of calculating, contending, and collaborative stakeholders who struggle to make and remake the shared world, peer to peer. Futurity cannot be delineated but only lived, in serial presents attesting always unpredictably to struggle and to expression. "The Future," to the contrary, brandishing the shackle of its definite article, is always described from a parochial present and is always a funhouse mirror reflecting a parochial present back to itself, amplifying its desires and fears, confirming its prejudices, reassuring its Believers that the Key to History is in their hands…. To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms.

Cascio's blog is entitled "Open the Future" and I have always considered that title to reflect his ambivalent awareness and exploration of this very tension, which is brought to crisis within what he takes to be his own futurological discourse, between the futurity in the present and in the presence of our peers that is and must remain open and what his fellow-futurists and would-be prophets and guru-wannabes denominate "The Future" their scenario-fabulizing and ad-copy would presumably disclose but at the threatened cost of futurity's closure. Indeed, I think it is something like this very point that Cascio discerns, through a glass darkly, as the meaningfulness of the slogan threatened by a pernicious marketing impulse that I suspect actually inspired the phrase in the first place.

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