Gaunt Figures of the Future

• In Event: Ghosts of Modern Futures Past – I

Abstract

Grand narratives are haunting contemporary sociotechnical imaginaries, capturing many debates in terms of “shocks of narratives”, in which few space is left for nuanced analysis (think of transhumanism or ecological collapse). Highly mobilizing, they put present deliberations and imaginaries under the pressure of threatening yet vague scenarios. This paper builds on the hypothesis that many future projections have become toxic for our imaginaries.
The first aim of this paper would be to explore some of these narratives, to point out their specificities and common structures. Transhumanism, “collapsology”, and “post-truth” seem to be productive sites of exploration. In these debates, past positive futures (ideals of progress, religions or objectivity) are declared dead, and, at the same time, they structure the debates like never before (for example the playing god argument in critiques of biotechnology, or exponential curves portraying both technological progress and ecological disaster). Past positive ideals are turned into living dead, cursing the imaginaries of the future.
In a more speculative second step, drawing on feminist scholarship (Haraway, Tsing, Stengers) and on science fiction (Brin, Le Guin), this paper will explore ways of resisting to this situation. One does not simply walk out of a curse. Following Derrida, for whom we need to talk to (and with) ghosts, is it possible to domesticate these gaunt futures? Who and what is threatened in these haunted forecasts? Which temporalities are at stake, if the future is supposed to urge for new values and institutions? What would a “de-haunted” critique look like?

Author

• Gabriel Dorthe, Université Catholique de Lille