Ghosts of Modern Futures Past – I

Abstract

While collectively imagined futures were thought to have mobilized previous generations’ sense of purpose, today’s worlds-to-come seem geared toward energizing individual pursuits aided by technological advancements.

From 1980s postmodernism to recent concerns with “post-truth,” anxiety over a perceived loss of shared meaning and with it, of shared futures has been at the core of much contemporary discourse. Does this mean the futures promised by modernity must be pronounced dead? Yes and no. We declare them undead, and ask:
how do modern futures linger in the present, casting a shadow on the now?

Animated by but not limited to Derrida’s writings on “hauntology” and Jasanoff’s work on sociotechnical imaginaries, this session convenes theoretical explorations, empirical studies, and experimental inquiries into the disjointed time of global capitalism. In various ways the presentations explore how innovations in science and
technology get imagined, taken up, and abandoned; how subjectivities get remade, stretched by allegiances to
the past and belief in an inevitable future; how certain bodies get written out of visions of the future based on historical and extant prejudices; and how modernity itself gets experienced as multiple, recursive, and contingent.

While the prefix ‘post’ signals a passage beyond what was before, this panel questions historical compartmentalization and notions of linear time. If we have always already been modern, then how do the
ghosts of futures past haunt our uneven present?

Chair

• Geneva Smith, University of New Mexico

Discussant

• Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• A Hauntological Turn for STS - Kasper Hedegaard Schiølin, Harvard STS Program, Harvard Kennedy School; Stefan Schäfer, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies

• The End Is Near: Envisioning a Living Future in the Kingdom of the Dead - Tess Doezema, Arizona State University

• The Silence of Interconnected Technologies: Internet of Things and Ghost Infrastructures in Brazilian Innovation Projects - Cristiana de Oliveira Gonzalez, State University of Campinas

• Gaunt Figures of the Future - Gabriel Dorthe, Université Catholique de Lille

Session Organizers

• Kasper Hedegaard Schiølin, Harvard STS Program, Harvard Kennedy School

• Hilton Simmet

• Stefan Schäfer, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies

• Tess Doezema, Arizona State University

• Madisson Whitman, Purdue University

• Gabriel Dorthe, Université Catholique de Lille