The End Is Near: Envisioning a Living Future in the Kingdom of the Dead

• In Event: Ghosts of Modern Futures Past – I

Abstract

Contemporary political, popular, and scientific narratives are haunted by crisis: existential risks of food and water insecurity, systemic economic instability, and climate change. Such threats seem not only real and overwhelming, but also strangely familiar. We have collectively faced the threat of ecological collapse and overpopulation at numerous other points in history, each of which produced its unique deluge of theories, predictions, and alternative futures. Such past visions of catastrophe and expert prescriptions for salvation may seem dated and debunked, yet the most influential among them continue to capture our imaginations. Enduring expert descriptions of possible human futures conjured long ago, like that of Malthus, haunt our experience of the present, our expectations for the future, and imaginations of a good world that we seek to enact today. Derrida captures this disorientingly iterative nature of history in his concept hauntologies, identifying time and multiplicity as central to (re)imaginations of possible future worlds: “Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the Singularity of any first time, makes of it also a last time” (10).

The proliferation of bioeconomy strategies, blueprints and plans that have emerged in the last several decades offer a variety of visions of a world transformed by biotechnology, and prescriptions for pathways to these futures. These visions are resolutely forward looking, while inescapably haunted by past imagined crises, Malthusian or otherwise. This presentation considers such visions of the future, present and past—examining over-population and ecological collapse as enduring concepts that inform what has and may once again seem possible.

Author

• Tess Doezema, Arizona State University