Futurology Is the Quintessential and Consummating Discourse of the Unwholesome Whole That Is Neoliberal/Neoconservative Corporate-Militarism

The Me Generation denigrated the We and then, utterly predictably, found that me without we is incapable of a flourishing life (Ayn Randian pious puke to the contrary notwithstanding), let alone survival for anybody but the luckiest or most brutal few.

After a generation of chirping Reaganesque "government is the problem" and Clintonesque "era of big government is over" mantras, America is now a "No, We Can't" society, not just incapable of improving infrastructure and public investment, but at this point incapable of keeping its existing highways from crumbling, its neglected bridges and pipes from collapsing and bursting.

Americans have settled for CGI space stations in action films and military recruitment ads, ageing-and-death-denialist Americans sigh and pine to hyperbolic press releases from pharmaceutical companies peddling youth and pep and to reassuring futurological lies mis-shelved in science sections peddling nanoscale Everything for Nothing Machines and techno-longevity just around the corner, or imaginary geo-engineering technofixes to real climate crises, deceptions and delusions and derangements of The Future in pastel-hued soft porn tonalities handwaving away an utter bankruptcy and parasitism and inertia of conscience and criticism in the face of the demands, threats, and promises of our shared present.

Just as: The neoliberal financialization of economy fraudulently sells ever more fantastically leveraged debts as if they are assets, criminally externalizes costs onto the next generation or the next continent, and idiotically mistakes logos for stuff.

So too: The industrialization of ecology fraudulently sells the net loss of superficially increased yields purchased through wasteful, toxic, monocultural, energy-input intensivity as a "Green Revolution," pollutes the atmosphere and ground water, depletes topsoil and aquifers, disrupts local ecosystems beyond healing, externalizing the costs of contemporary waste and harm onto the next generation or the next continent, and idiotically mistakes the GDP and skyrocketing stock arrows for commonwealth.

And finally: Futurology is the consummation of neoliberal fraud, peddling the dislocations of global financialization as "the acceleration of acceleration" (which is indeed, perhaps, how an ever more precarious world feels, for a time, for those who are lucky enough to be relative beneficiaries of neoliberal dislocations, especially if they are stupid and short-sighted enough to imagine that riding the gravy train can last forever, and heartless enough not to notice or care about the distress and waste it imposes on the lives of their neighbors), peddling altogether-imaginary responsibility-deferring wish-fulfilling non-solutions to actual problems, from Robot God parental-supercomputers to "solve" intractable historical and political dilemmas, to nanobotic genies-in-a-bottle and immersive virtual pleasure palaces to "solve" intractable quandaries of poverty, to masturbatory megascale corporate-militarist geo-engineering and off-world migratory science-fiction scenarios to "solve" intractable ecological quandaries, to "mind-uploading" "bio-engineering" and "nano-medical" quasi-immortalizing super-therapies to "solve" intractable dilemmas of mortality, malnutrition, neglected diseases, vulnerability in all living bodies.

And like our fraudulent modern corporatists, selling hyperbolic expectations and barking PR pitches and debts and stealthily externalized costs and vaporware as if they were real assets, futurological discourses are suffused with the same contempt for the material, for the real: disdaining organismic brains and bodies in which intelligence and life are actually materially incarnated, disdaining the diversity of stakeholder knowledges and aspirations and struggles of which history and progress actually consists, disdaining the practices of laboratory testing and peer-review publications out of which consensus science generates its contingently warranted assertions (preferring, as they do, computer models and computer coders as their ideal "scientists" -- which is rather like preferring accountants as one's ideal "poets" -- grand hypotheses depending on glib general analogies from biology by non-biologists, charismatic cranks, pop-science bestsellers, and would-be gurus over actually widely cited and well-substantiated consensus scientists).

It is very much to be hoped that President Obama's jobs bill, coming swiftly on the heels of the heartbreaking sausage-making of healthcare reform, will re-open the long-relinquished progressive-to-New Deal era of infrastructure building and public investment (driven if nothing else by the pragmatic exigencies of mid-term elections, for which jobs jobs jobs will equal votes votes votes to maintain precarious Democratic majorities without which no actual governing seems possible given the monolithic obstructionism and ideological anti-governmentality of the Republican opposition, as Obama must surely grasp as keenly as anybody), employing millions of citizens in the repair of our catastrophically stressed infrastructure, in the construction of intercontinental high-speed rail to connect our cities, building an intelligent grid of dozens of millions of windmill farms and solar rooftops, building inner-city farmers markets, subsidizing the proliferation of small-scale organic and polyculture farms, planting a billion trees, building and healing community colleges and not-for-profit research universities and sending a generation of young people to school.

The market fundamentalists who have the President's ear make that a hard hope to maintain, given their role in the substitution of ponzi-scheming financialization and logo-ization for production, and in their penchant for prosperity on the cheap, purchased through outsourcing and crowdsourcing, cost-externalization and risk-shifting onto ever more precarious planetary populations they deem to be expendably infra-human (I'm talking to you, Lawrence Summers, you disgusting death-dealing actually dim-witted self-important scum-bag, and your whole neoliberal wrecking crew).

Americans need to wake up from the delusive dreams of neoliberal corporatist financial-fraudsters and neoconservative militarist imperial-adventurists (which, as David Harvey insists, are not antagonistic but in fact inter-implicated, a neoliberal/neoconservative, corporate-militarist unwholesome whole).

And, just the same, indeed, of a piece with the same, we need to wake up from the quintessentially American futurological fantasies -- originating in nuclear-plastic-petrochemical compensations for too-palpable apocalyptic technoscientific nightmares of nuclear war, accumulating trash, and suburban sprawl, by means of a constellation of schemes and frauds and daydreams of unbounded abundance -- and now consummating in faith-based initiatives like the transhumanists peddling their consumer-age eugenicism, the digital utopians peddling their vaporware, the techno-immortalist hucksters peddling their stainless-steel skin creams and boner pills, and the geo-engineers peddling their glossy corporate-militarist scenarios to combat corporate-militarist climate catastrophe, and so on and on.

Bruce Sterling once had Oscar, the protagonist of his quintessential Clinton-era neoliberal sf novel, Distraction histrionically declaim that America "invented The Future, godammit!" in a moment of hysterical huckster denialism in the face of real limits, and like the shattered protagonist in William Gibson's early sf story "The Gernsback Continuum," it's true, we Americans are still wading deep down in the muddy murky swamp of The Future we sold ourselves, vestigial futuristic chrome gew-gaws and art deco masonry fading in and out of the funk and fog like scarcely discernible sign-posts guiding us nowhere.

The Market is fueled by The Future: two dumbed-down deceptions like the ads on a sandwich-board holding each other up for scrutiny only so long as neither rickety face leans too far under the least pressure and collapses the whole mess.

And the free market fundamentalists are selling The Future most of all. Futurology is the quintessential discourse of neoliberalism, its starkest most insane unsanitary reductio. (I would say that this is activist-scholar Mike Davis's most urgent and abiding insight.)

And be sure, it is the palpable substance of futurity, that openness inhering in the diversity of contending collaborating co-dependent perspectives, productions, projects of self-creation in our present, in our presence, peer-to-peer, that we are selling for this parochial, packaged domestication of The Future -- futurity for The Future, freedom for force, foresight for hyperbole, investment for scams, problem solving for debts, products for logos, governance for landfill, our commonwealth for their shit.

Arendtian Exercises

Loss, Connection, Transformation, March 2008

Hannah Arendt on Futurology, April, 2009

Hannah Arendt on Common Sense, April, 2009

Hannah Arendt on AI, April, 2009

Arendt, Fanon, King on Violence, May, 2009

More on Freedom, May, 2009

The Peer, February, 2010

Rhetoric and Nonviolence, June, 2010.

My Own Opposition to Capital Punishment, September, 2011.

Judith Butler at the People's Mic, October, 2011.

Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains, published in the Fall 2013 issue of Existenz. (Sections four and seven, especially, take up Arendt.)

"Public Happiness," August, 2014.

Of Natal Politics, February, 2015.

Natality, Tech "Disruption," and Killer Robots, February, 2015.

Returning to the Arendtian "Turn" on Judgment, February, 2015.

The name of this blog, "Amor Mundi," was the personal motto of the political thinker and cultural critic Hannah Arendt.

Arendt is both my earliest and certainly my most abiding philosophical influence, and only Judith Butler has had anything like a comparable impact on my thinking. Sometimes I feel almost as though the whole of my own thinking has just been an interminable effort to reconcile with one another the ways in which Arendt and Butler keep mattering to me in ever different, ever deepening ways however much everything else seems to change.

I have sometimes quipped to my students that whereas most philosophers have written about politics like it was marriage (a matter of contracts, compromises, housekeeping), Arendt wrote about politics like it was sex (a matter of agony, ecstasy, fraught collaborations moment to moment, peer to peer) and that I will always cherish her for that.

In a somewhat programmatic statement I offered up once to explain what I hoped to accomplish -- if that's the right word -- with this blog and get at the temperament out of which it arises I wrote:

"Amor Mundi" is the love of the world. It is the love of the worldly. It is the worldly love of that becoming that becomes us. It is the love of the collective struggle of which that becoming consists, and on which that becoming depends for its force, for its serendipities, for its pleasures, and for its dangers.

I feel keen kinship with Arendt's statement about herself, quoted in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's magnificent biography of her teacher and friend Arendt, For Love of the World (a title which itself refers, of course, to Amor Mundi), that "I have a kind of melancholy, which I can only grapple with by understanding, by thinking things through." It was only through this grappling, writes Young-Bruehl, that Arendt could "hold to an attitude she called amor mundi, love of the world" (xvii), an attitude with which she meant to confront and reject "the philosophical tradition of contemptus mundi" (324).

I think it is also quite crucial to think of amor mundi as cognate with Nietzsche's amor fati, what he took to be the affirmation of the threatening, promising contingency of worldly life as it is, characterized most essentially in the eternal return, the intensive interminable responsibility, refigurability, resignifiability of reality. With his own motto amor fati Nietzsche likewise demanded a repudiation of what he to took to be a fearful, resentful (to wit, "The Fearful Ones," ressentiment) unworldliness in traditional philosophy.

But where for Nietzsche loving the world was a matter of stamping the obliterative dynamism of the relentless encounters of the self and the living world with a significance one would sign and resign one's own name to (this is "How one becomes what one is"), for Arendt loving the world was accomplished through the no less dynamic but as supportive as obliterative encounters of the self with the pluralities within and without us: The plurality within is the dialogue of the "I and the me" that constitutes thinking, the ongoing reconciliation of our histories with our hopes, out of which come the assertions of judgment offered up to the hearing of the diversity of our peers, the plurality without us, the testimonies to fact and to value, the making of promises and the offerings of forgiveness, the clash of opinions through which we collectively make the world and substantiate our selves in the world.

I am anthologizing here some of my posts which have taken up the work of Hannah Arendt in an explicit, sustained way. Although Arendt's name comes up a lot here on the blog, and in my conversation more generally, I was surprised how rarely I have really devoted significant space to her here. I definitely mean to write quite a bit more about Arendt on the blog, and someday to transcribe and elaborate lectures I have devoted to her work over the years in my teaching life.

Futurology by Analogy

Foresight is to futurology as investment is to speculation.
Policy is to futurology as deliberation is to marketing.
Thinking is to futurology as sense is to hyperbole.