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Future as Intervention/Intervening

Sat, May 27, 9:30 to 10:45, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 3, Aqua Salon AB

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

For scholars, the future is at times a formality, often placed at the end of an essay with a degree of reassuring self-evidence. This panel seeks to retrieve the future (and futurity) from its consignation as afterthought and theorize its centrality in communication and media studies. Despite (or perhaps a result of) assertions that the future has been lost in postmodernity and in the anthropocene, the future as a concept has recently garnered increasing attention and interest: as and in premediation, prospection, projection, cultural fact, imagination/fancy, collective thought, disruption and virtuality. The future is always-already an intervention or intervening (working with Derrida’s distinction between futur and à venir), whether in the service of continuity or disruption, whether communicated as a promise, warning, hope or threat. This panel “thinks the break itself” to use Jameson’s words, not only as something to-come temporally (planned, premediated or unforeseen), but also as a modality fundamental to epistemologies of communication and media.

The panels theme fits squarely into this year’s conference theme “interventions.” Each of the panelists theorizes the future and addresses how it intervenes and coordinates actors against the backdrop of a number of timely social, political and cultural issues: Brexit, the rise of Trump, immigration, surveillance and counterterrorism. The panel presents a variety of distinct conceptualizations of the future: as currency (Hong), as projection (Tenenboim-Weinblatt), as a return (Al-Ghazzi; Riley) and as predmediation (Szpunar). Yet, the individual papers play out in complementary and intersecting ways. This stems from the fact that the future is theorized across the papers as a fundamentally mediated construct, whether through narrative and social media (Riley), the news media (Tenenboim-Weinblatt), the informant (Szpunar), political discourse (Al-Ghazzi), and algorithms and markets (Hong). Riley discuses the weakening of “growth scenarios” in the face of a return to a “better era,” a “returnism” for which Al-Ghazzi provides a useful taxonomy. Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Szpunar both explore the complex mediality of the future as projection and premediation (concepts in tension) and force a rethinking of the communicative temporalities of both news media and the law, respectively. In each of these, the epistemological relationship/tension between of the past and future in communication requires re-theorization, a call captured in Hong’s analysis of contradictory fantasies of control and freedom, the epistemic black markets of shifting promises, threats, hopes, and warnings.

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