Introduction to Histories of the Future

C H A P T E R 1 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 Introduction: Histories of the Future We have been living through boom times for the future. Even before the escalating storms of 001 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.1 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.’’ 2 If, as E. P. Thompson argues, different modes of production imply different Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding 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.3 Today our futures feel increasingly citational—each is haunted by the ‘‘semiotic ghosts’’ of futures past.4 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.5 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.6 They are not merely geometrical extensions of time. They haunt our presents, obeying architectural laws that look more like Gaudí 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 Enlight Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 Future junk mail. Early-twentieth-century futures. Chromolithography. Villemard Publishers, 1910. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. [Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.] Introduction 5 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 enment effectively ‘‘sealed off ’’ the future from prophetic knowledge.7 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.8 The very possibility of an openended 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 440, 1850, 1900, and 7308.9 Of course, these future narratives were also morality tales for the present, but in them the present is materialized through striking new kinds of proleptic imagining.10 The new futurisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries allowed—and even required—the thinking of alternative timelines: in them, the present was not just the past of the future but the ‘‘the past of future, contingent presents.’’ 11 It is difficult to overestimate the implications of this new possibility. But it is equally crucial to note that its victory was only ever partial. Even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the contingent futures that emerged during the Enlightenment never fully displaced the necessary futures of prophecy. In some instances, such as the case of Auguste Comte (and, arguably, much of American pub- lic culture), modern visions of progress themselves took on a providential character.12 In others, such as the nineteenth-century Uchronie of Charles Renouvier, contingencies piled on contingencies seemingly without end.13 6 Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 Moreover, the religious prophets did not oblige anyone by going away. As it turns out, what most characterizes the modern problem of the future is not its historical distance from the mode of prophecy but rather its hybrid and contradictory relationship to it. The modern period saw a proliferation of techniques for imagining, predicting, and narrating futures—many in an importantly ambiguous terrain ‘‘between science and fiction’’—and a developing cultural consciousness of the instability of this new temporal landscape.14 By the end of the nineteenth century, according to contemporary observers, time itself appeared to be accelerating, and futures—big and small alike—seemed to be coming and going with breathtaking speed.15 In the memorable words of Henry Adams, thinking historically in 1900 evoked the feeling of having one’s neck broken.16 And this sense of acceleration did not go away. Instead it became something like second nature, so that by the late twentieth century, the problem was no longer how to account for historical acceleration, but how to account for the acceleration of acceleration itself. In recent years, futurological upheavals have continued to take place with much ado, as in our recent and paradigmatic turn of the millennium. Although the coming of the new millennium did not occasion the level of crazy cult activity or terrorism anticipated by many observers and political leaders, it did provoke a remarkable outpouring of speculation. Prophets, prognosticators, predictors, fortunetellers, astrologers, millennialists, apocalyptics, visionaries, seers, and their journalistic and academic fellow travelers clogged the airwaves, magazines, newspapers, bookstores, and pews with their wares. As we approached 000, the clock of discourse ticked louder and louder. The future itself seemed to shrink to fit the narrowing frame of time left until the calendar turned over. As one observer put it, ‘‘When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 000. Now, thirty years later, they still talk about what will happen by the year 000. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life.’’ 17 When all was said and done, though, 000 could not have been anything but an anticlimax to the countless stories in which it played an anticipatory role. There was something vampiric about it: a thousand flashbulbs popped, but nothing showed up in the picture. Still, it was everywhere. There was no escaping it. It haunted us. In the months leading up to the turn of the millennium, anticipations of the year 000 transformed into anticipations of the ‘‘Year 000 Problem,’’ or the ‘‘ bug,’’ or simply ‘‘,’’ and for a while the future was now. New York Times, September 23, 2001. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 Shortly after the turn of the millennium, the same dynamic was repeated with greater and graver intensity in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The attacks utterly suspended our futures, big and small, public and private, local and global. For Americans on 9/11, it was as if time had stopped, or at least stood terribly still. The sensation was strikingly evoked by a graphic artist’s drawing for the New York Times. Shortly after the attacks a full-page image of the the terrible smoke cloud rising from the burning World Trade Center declared us ‘‘Peering into the Abyss of the Future.’’ Two years later a calendar image still finds us stuck on 9/11. An event as big as 9/11, calling on such resources of collective imagination, virtually commands us to consider ‘‘The Future’’ as a singular story and as a singular presence in national and international life. But at the same time, it reminds us how decisively our imagination of futures can change in response to changing times. And it leads us to ask what sorts of cultural work are necessary to make new futures cohere. The problem of futures after 9/11 is not just the problem of deciphering big narratives; it is also the problem of mapping networks of small stories and practices changing with place and time. In the end, the events of  and 9/11 lavishly demonstrate that the future in the modern West is not the empty category that it is supposed to be— that the conflict of futures present and past is as central an element of modern temporality as was the adaptation and confirmation of futures before 8 Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 As , it had a technical and a rational and, especially, an economic content. Its importance was to be measured in the amount of money that was spent on preventing it, or cleaning up the mess that it created. It gave us something to believe in and to anticipate when we were barred from hoping for something mysterious. It also had the effect of spectacularizing a new world order, as, according to the experts, only the hypertechnologized and the primitive would be spared. As some skeptics had predicted, at , the big story turned out to be the nonstory. Early on there were reports of problems here and there released from the bunker-style headquarters of our own federal ‘‘ Preparedness Center,’’ but none of these turned out to be serious. Yet the failure of the  apocalypse to materialize did not lessen its historical importance. Like the nuclear tests of the 1950s, , in all its dimensions—cultural, commercial, and political, as well as technological—energized an entire economy of anticipation and produced a powerful expressive performance of a still-unstable global culture business vying for metanarrative control over the future.18 Not surprisingly, this moment also saw a prose explosion: ten years after the declared ‘‘end of history,’’ we were still ‘‘zeroing in on the millennium’’ and having ‘‘conversations about the end of time.’’ 19 the eighteenth century—that our uncertainties are at every moment themselves positive cultural expressions. This is the paradox of modern futurity: while we are taught to believe in the emptiness of the future, we live in a world saturated by future-consciousness as rich and as full as our consciousness of the past. There is abundance everywhere, in big narratives and in small acts, and in every place where hopes and doubts are mobilized, in everything that we know and are not supposed to know. ‘‘The future’’ is a placeholder, a placebo, a no-place, but it is also a commonplace that we need to investigate in all its cultural and historical density. This is what Histories of the Future sets out to do. Through a selection of essays and artifacts, the book maps sites where big futures—metanarratives that foresee, predict, imagine, divine, prognosticate, promise, and reveal the future—make contact with everyday lives. It traces a variety of small futures, some pervasive and some fugitive, all haunting their presents. It examines the densities and overdetermination of our futurizing imaginations. It tries to understand what ‘‘the future’’ is by looking at what ‘‘the future’’ does when it is called upon in practical situations in art and politics and in everyday life. The essays that make up this volume are themselves densely interlinked, and the volume is intended to operate as a hypertext, opening up analytic paths among disparate temporal experiences of modernity, links between technology and messianism, life and half-life, panic and nostalgia, waiting and utopia, conspiracy and linearity, prophecy and trauma. Introduction 9 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 New York Times Book Review, April 20, 2003. 10 Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 Each of the essays presented here was written in relation to the others and grew out of a series of seminars, conferences, and collaborative research experiences. The authors first convened during a six-month residency at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine, in 1997. This turned out to be consequential in itself. From our arrival, Irvine appeared to us a remarkable example of American corporate futurism in all its complexity and self-contradiction, and our collective experience of the place served as a jumping-off point for many of our reflections. At the time of our arrival, Irvine was still the largest entirely planned community ever built in the United States. Like many planned communities, it depended from the start on its own industry, in this case, an especially clean industry, well suited to the developing information and service economies of the late twentieth century. Before the chartering of the city, the land on which it would be built was held by a private corporation that had obtained ownership of much of the large rancho that had formerly extended through Orange County and beyond. In the 1960s, as farming in the area declined, the Irvine Corporation donated a substantial property to the University of California system to establish a new university which would become the ‘‘economic engine’’ at the heart of this clean city. The local signage pays homage to the division of industry and residence and to the protection of local residents from the possible harms of both industrial and urban life. The seal of the City of Irvine, visible from the roads that lead in and out, does not proclaim a future in so many words, but the future is called up in other ways, through the figures of a child on the left and a cultivated tree on the right.20 In its shield, Irvine defines itself as a project of control, protection, and culture that is echoed in the layout of every subdivision and the architecture of the campus. In Irvine, geographic, economic, and social futures were mapped in every possible detail. But, as Anna Tsing argues in her essay here, grand futurizing schemes ‘‘never fully colonize the territories on which they are imposed.’’ 21 Even in Irvine, where wealth has grown unabated since the earliest days, futures have not been fully controlled. There are little signs of this everywhere, found inside closets and tucked under tables. As you drive south from Irvine toward San Diego, the child of the future changes shape. No longer firmly protected by a paternal corporate arm, this immigrant child figured on a Caution sign on the highway is clinging for dear life to the hand of her mother and father who are sprinting across the freeway, hoping not to get hit as they race into an uncertain and perilous future. Even in its earliest days in the 1960s and 1970s, the fantasy landscape of Irvine was colored by a lingering dystopian haze. It is strange to look back on the production stills from the Planet of the Apes film shot on the campus of . Actors in sci-fi ape costumes are off to lunch with humans of the everyday variety. And nothing really looks so wrong with this scene. As we read the futures unfolded and still unfolding in Irvine and its environs, our group developed a tool kit for thinking about the future. We paid attention to plans, predictions, and narratives about the future, but also to the everyday purposes and situations in which they were conjured. We came to see futures all around, not only in explicit forms of futurism but in the manners of talking, doing, and imagining that get us through from day to day. Futures in this sense lie not only in a segregated, marked domain (characterized by practices such as forecasting, planning, and speculation) but in the domain of social practice generally. The particular environment of Irvine attuned us to the pervasiveness and diversity of these future-making practices. In places designed to express corporate uniformity—behind the berms and hedgerows, around traffic islands and sculpture gardens, in commercial plazas and recreation areas—we saw signs of practices that complicated and resisted the single vector of Irvine’s master plan. There are postcards to the future carved into the smooth surfaces of this futuristic city and counterterritorializations mapped in skateboard wax on every concrete plaza and stair.22 During the course of our work in Irvine, we became interested in the proliferation of these sorts of contrasts and conflicts and the problem of Introduction 11 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 Seal of the City of Irvine. Photograph © Daniel Rosenberg. Planet of the Apes movie set, Irvine, California. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of California, Irvine. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 explaining them. How to account for the sort of corporate and political futurism that built the city without obscuring the complex trajectories that grew out of it, drawing on it and challenging it all at once? How to describe and analyze the acts of small resistance and interpretation all around us without losing sight of the imaginary, structural, and bureaucratic power of the place? How, in general, to think grands récits with local acts? How to think strategy with tactics? Narrative with practice? These questions led us to read and to study Irvine, but they led us many other places, too. Our conception of futures developed further when we traveled as a group across Southern California to several sites in and around Las Vegas. We visited the casinos, the Hoover Dam, the Liberace Museum, the Nevada Nuclear Waste Site, the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, and the desert town of Rachel, Nevada, at the edge of the storied secret government installation at Area 51. We sought to explore the American West as a spatial metonym for the post-Enlightenment future—a region at once empty, being emptied out, already filled up, and always filling up with unfolding futures and futures past. For our group, this region became a laboratory, an imaginary, in which we explored the cultural and sentimental microdynamics of future making. This research collaboration is represented directly in this volume. Several of the essays draw their topical material from our excursions in the American West, and the exploratory work that we did there influences every Introduction 13 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 Migrant Futures. Photograph © Daniel Rosenberg. essay. This takes many forms and focuses—from the play of memory, repression, and return, to the uncanny, messianic expectation, unintended excess, and the operation of myriad desires and fantasies—for justice, direct communication, getting outside or inside, or elsewhere, for the other, another life, wealth, democracy, power, or revisable pasts and a universe of total information. In a Western terrain that makes claims of narrative priority and independence, we found a dense network of futurisms from the past and from elsewhere, a network that demanded an approach that was at once global and local. In this way, our initial work on the American frontier opened doors to other frontiers—to Indonesia, the Philippines, and Japan; to France, Spain, and Italy—on the other sides of the oceans that are supposed to separate and punctuate the course of history. In the essays assembled here, the prognosticators, speculators, utopians, prophets, imagineers, and all the other architects and visionaries of big futures have their say. But our accent here is decidedly on the side of the small. In contrast to the many books that have focused on the big story of the future, Histories of the Future foregrounds everyday attitudes, images, stories, performances, debris, movement, lifestyles, and work. The grands récits and their characteristic mechanisms (prophecy, prediction, etc.) appear in this book, but always and only in relation to the places, practices, and objects through which they take shape.23 The aim of Histories of the 1 Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 Near Rachel, Nevada. Photograph © Daniel Rosenberg. Introduction 15 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 Future is to explore the relationship between expectation and experience on the level of everyday life. While the essays and interludes that follow defy simple summary and classification, they abound in conceptual linkages, shared themes, and common sites. We have ordered them in a way that highlights certain connections, but they may easily be read in another order. The volume as a whole represents all the intensities of an ongoing conversation that may be joined and rejoined at various points. Histories of the Future begins with the question of frontiers. Joseph Masco’s essay on the nuclear frontier in the American West may be read as a companion piece to Anna Tsing’s essay on the resource frontier in Borneo. Masco focuses on popular and military cultures in and around Las Vegas from the 1950s onward, providing a postnuclear revision of Turner’s ‘‘frontier thesis’’ as he explores the play of amnesia, conspiracy theory, and spectacle that constitute the ‘‘desert modern.’’ Tsing, too, provides a retake on the frontier thesis, arguing that on the Indonesian ‘‘resource frontier,’’ a local discourse of wildness functions in concert with powerful and decentered logics of capital, creating rifts in the big narratives of ‘‘the future of the environment.’’ Both essays examine the material and cultural waste that frontier futurizing practices leave in their wake. The following two essays by Vicente Rafael and Daniel Rosenberg explore the relationship between technology and modern or postmodern futurisms. Rafael, in his study of protest and revolution in the Philippines, examines a new site of messianic expectation and action—a ‘‘fantasy of direct communication’’ and collective justice—created through practices of electronic communication, particularly the use of cell phones and instant messaging. In his analysis of the work of the information theorist Theodor Holm Nelson, Rosenberg demonstrates the simultaneous intensification and disavowal of problems of memory and nostalgia in information culture. Each of these essays brings into focus and troubles the prevailing eschatology of information technology. The next three essays revolve around imaginations of the future in literary and artistic movements. Jamer Hunt’s essay focuses on futurist and surrealist happenings in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially on the futurist banquets. He argues that these events provide a crucial counterpoint to the technophilic rhetoric of the movement and that the aesthetic of the banquet arose from its premonitions of degeneration and rot as much as from those of speed and strength. Pamela Jackson leads us through the baroque temporal landscape of the recessionera Southern California of Philip K. Dick. Jackson shows how Dick cobbled 16 Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 together a new kind of prophetic language out of the discarded materials of a commercial culture. Miryam Sas, too, focuses on space and place in her account of the futurist art movement in Japan. She shows how the Japanese futurists grappled with the problem of cultural translation and with the difficult manipulations involved in mapping new ideas onto bodies and landscapes with palpably distinct histories. The final four essays in the volume deal with risk, paranoia, and fatalism as practices of everyday life. Christopher Newfield examines the culture of investment in the bubble economy of the 1990s, arguing that what looked from the outside like a new kind of orientation toward the future was more a translation of long-standing hopes and fears into a new situation and language. Susan Lepselter takes up another such translation in her study of the stories and rumors circulating through Rachel, Nevada, a small, economically depressed town on the edge of a high-tech military base, Area 51. She shows how everyday stories of losses, wounds, and broken dreams resurfaced, coalesced, and became more real than ever in the form of an elaborate and marketable conspiracy between alien invaders and the federal government. Susan Harding examines still another folk technology of time in her essay on the end-of-the-millennium wanderings of the Heaven’s Gate group. In the group’s writings, recordings, media artifacts, and suicidal performances, Christian and  or alien visions mingled to produce an expectation of impending apocalypse. It is a quintessentially premodern time scene, a classic if thoroughly heterodox episode of socially enacted prophecy, and at the same time an exemplary moment in the crisis of modern futurity. For Kathleen Stewart, all these sites and problems represent versions of fallout from the modern trauma of attempting to live in linear time. This temporal friction creates moments of crisis, or ‘‘trauma time,’’ when past meets future and time stands still. Stewart renders and evokes such moments in a series of ‘‘still lifes’’ portraying practices, objects, encounters, actions, stories in which past- and future-making technologies converge on and constitute a scene, a pause, a moment of aperture in the modern order of things. Four interludes break up and reconfigure the relations among the essays. The first interlude, ‘‘Global Futures,’’ is a boardless board game designed by Anna Tsing and Elizabeth Pollman. They, like Newfield, evoke problems of choice and risk in the construction of futures. Like Rosenberg, they thematize the multiplicity of possible narrative trajectories toward the future. Like Lepselter and Stewart, they emphasize the social and political power of storytelling. The second interlude is an experiment in genre fiction by award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem. Lethem’s story ‘‘Access Fantasy’’ at once evokes and comments on the dystopian visions of Notes 1  3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 For a recent overview of secondary literature on millennial and apocalyptic movements, see Harding and Stewart, ‘‘Bad Endings.’’ On the return of futurology, see, for example, the reissue of the 1967 study edited by Daniel Bell, Toward the Year 000. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Fredric Jameson makes a related argument in ‘‘Nostalgia for the Present,’’ 53–73. E. P. Thompson, ‘‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.’’ William Gibson, ‘‘The Gernsback Effect.’’ See also McCaffrey, Storming the Reality Studio. Bender and Wellbery, Chronotypes; Baudrillard, America; Kathleen Stewart, ‘‘Nostalgia—a Polemic.’’ James Gleick, Faster. Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 7. Koselleck, Futures Past. See also Daniel Rosenberg, ‘‘An Eighteenth-Century Time Machine’’ and ‘‘Condillac’s Exemplary Student.’’ Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation, 1644–001; Aldiss, Billion Year Spree; Bronislaw Baczko, Utopian Lights. Jameson, Singular Modernity, 7. Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society, 31–. Introduction 17 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 Philip K. Dick conjured by Jackson. It also resonates with Harding’s implicit tale of the self-novelization of a contemporary religious group and with Rafael’s preoccupation with the place of communications technology in the utopian and dystopian landscape.The third interlude is Miryam Sas’s translation of Hirato Renkichi’s Japanese Futurist Manifesto. This translation, the first ever in English, flows directly from Sas’s essay on Japanese futurism but may also be read in relation to the Global Futures game and essays by Rafael, Masco,Tsing, and Harding, each of which raises the problem of mobilization in a different way. The final interlude, Daniel Rosenberg’s collection of timelines, graphically displays the ongoing and laborious cultural work necessary to maintain our visions of linear time. This is the central theme of Stewart’s essay, but it pervades all the pieces gathered in Histories of the Future. We find it in the confrontation of big and small narratives in Masco’s and Tsing’s essays; in the problem of hypertext linkages that Rosenberg and Harding pose; in the practices of repetition, haunting, and degeneration that Sas and Lepselter examine; and in the dynamics of risk and fatalism explored by Newfield, Jackson, and Stewart. With this foretaste of things to come, we invite you to pursue your own tracks through our volume, exploring its futures at once open-ended and overdetermined. 1 18 Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/624716/9780822386810-001.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 22 January 2024 Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age; Tuveson, Redeemer Nation; Fitzgerald, ‘‘The American Millennium’’; Harding and Stewart, ‘‘Bad Endings.’’ 13 Renouvier, Uchronie (l’Utopie dans l’histoire). The same impulse animates contemporary discussions of counterfactual history which are central to the popular imagination of historical studies. See Niall Ferguson, Virtual History. 14 Certeau, ‘‘History,’’ 199–1. 15 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space. 16 Henry Adams, ‘‘The Dynamo and the Virgin’’ and ‘‘Acceleration of History,’’ in The Education of Henry Adams, 379–90, 489–98. 17 Brand, The Clock of the Long Now, –3. This tone is characteristic of many of the popular works published at the time. Stephen Jay Gould’s Questioning the Millennium, for example, begins with a reminiscence of the idea of the millennium being ‘‘burned into my cortex’’ as an eight-year-old child (39–40). For related psychoanalytic readings of apocalyptic prophecy and science fiction, see especially Martin Jay, ‘‘The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Inability to Mourn,’’ 84–98; and Constance Penley, ‘‘Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia.’’ 18 Joseph Masco, in this volume. 19 To name only a few of the key texts in the millennium debates: Carrière et al., Conversations about the End of Time; Marcus, Zeroing In on the Year 000; Strozier and Flynn, The Year 000. On the problem of ‘‘posthistory,’’ see especially Perry Anderson, ‘‘The Ends of History.’’ 0 Liisa Malkki, ‘‘Children, Futures, and the Domestication of Hope,’’ unpublished essay. 1 Anna Tsing, in this volume.  On postcards to the future, see Vicente Rafael, ‘‘The Undead: Notes on Photography in the Philippines, 1898–190s,’’ in his White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. For a useful comparison to the problem of inhabiting Irvine, see Holston, The Modernist City. 3 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition.