Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding, eds. Histories of the Future.
Heckman, Davin
Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding, eds. Histories of the Future.
Durham: Duke (ill, 2005. ix + 30 pp. $99.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.
Critical cultural studies tends to have a certain unreflective,
unacknowledged teleological stance that at once strives for something
better but denies the modernist narrative of "progress."
Surprisingly, for all the productive criticism of modernity, there is
very little work that tackles our contemporary temporal paradox
directly. Narratives of progress find themselves criticized. As do
appeals to history. Yet discussions of the intersection of times past
and times future tend to deal with the present only in passing.
Questions of being are left overwhelmingly to robust thinkers like
Nietzsche, Deleuze, Haraway, and others who defer articulating the
subject except as something just beyond ourselves--posthumans--whose
being is defined by becoming. But for those preoccupied with the
singular experience of subjectivity, the question of being as being is a
question whose time has come. Although Daniel Rosenberg and Susan
Harding's Histories of the Future is framed as a study of
"futurism," it is an important step toward a critical cultural
studies of the present at the intersection of two axes: Time, from past
to future, and Culture, from traditionalism to futurism.
According to Rosenberg and Harding's Introduction, "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"
(9). In this respect, the volume is a masterpiece of editorial vision.
Initiated in 1997 by Susan Harding for the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Histories of the Future: existed first as
a research workshop. In 1998, the project was carried forward as the
topic of a conference held at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
And from there, it was cultivated and nurtured until it was made
manifest in the present volume. Each component stands on its own merits,
yet read together the possibilities for "coalescence" (1)
spring to life and augment the impact of each piece. It is rare that a
work with so many contributors, covering so many topics, with so many
methodologies achieves such a rich and productive harmony of ideas.
Furthermore, a series of interludes--a game, a short story, a
manifesto, and a timeline--enliven and enrich the more scholarly
contributions to this volume. (2) By engaging readers in the process of
speculation, the volume sheds a little more light on the radical
possibilities that confound predictions and determinations. At the same
time, such exercises in the fantastic help ground the hyperbolic futurism of the status quo that seems to tell us, "Things will be
better than ever, if we simply leave them alone." While such
exercises are typically considered more creative than critical, they are
wholly appropriate for a work designed to make us think about the place
of the future in everyday life.
The Introduction and the final chapter provide coherency to the
volume. The Introduction, as it should, provides a pragmatic overview of
the explicit possibilities mapped out in the contents. The final piece,
Kathleen Stewart's "Trauma Time: A Still Life," yokes the
broad scope under the notion of "trauma time"--the time
"when things in themselves act as conduits channeling the literal
into the figural and back, 'meaning' is no longer something
simply and surely located in a symbolic system or in the eyes of the
viewer but in a spark generated out of the very shiftiness of subjects
and objects" (331). The effect of such a conclusion serves to
authorize readers to open their readings outwards and look beyond the
text. Rather than strive to be a definitive "history of the
future;' the editors have chosen to frame their work as a
beginning. Given the precarious state of being in an age of
acceleration, decisions such as these are both visionary and
responsible.
Read as a hypertext, discursive pathways often lead in unlikely
directions. For example, readers interested in ecological survival might
meander through Joseph Masco's "A Notebook on Desert
Modernism: From the Nevada Test Site to Liberace's Two Hundred
Pound Suit," to Anna Tsing's "How to Make Resources in
Order to Destroy "Them (and Then Save Them?) on the Salvage
Frontier, and wind up in Susan Lepselter's "Why Rachel
Isn't Buried in Her Grave: Ghoses, UFOs, and a Place in the
West:" Readers interested in technology might drift from Vincente
L. Rafael's "The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics
in the Contemporary Philippines,' over Daniel Rosenberg's
"Electronic Memory," and through Miryam Sas's
"Subject, City, Machine:" Scholars interested in apocalyptic
visions might begin with Masco, continue with Pamela Jackson's
"Sing Out Ubik," and arrive at Susan Harding's
"Living Prophecy at Heaven's Gate:' Those with a
predeliction for studies of the mundane might begin with Jamer
Hunt's "All That Is Solid Melts into Sauce: Futurists,
Surrealists, and Molded Food," dwell on Jackson, and wind up at
Christopher Newfield's "The Future of the Old Economy: New
Deal Motives in New Economy Investors:" But as mentioned in the
passage cited from the Introduction, possible trajectories are much more
numerous than the four detailed above.
While the volume as a whole is worth the time and effort of careful
reading, three pieces stand out as exceptional models of good
scholarship that offer critical insights reaching far beyond the scope
of the book. Masco's meditation on "Desert Modernism;" in
its pleasurable meanderings through the Nevada Test Site, the Yucca
Mountain Project, Rachel, and Las Vegas, manages to situate militarism,
technological utopianism, conspiracy theory, entertainment, environment,
and American exceptionalism as connected components of a particularly
American type of modernism. Identifying a curious continuity as the
child of dysfunctional Cold War, Masco maps out the "contradictions
of a disabled narrative of progress [that] have come to saturate everyday life with unruly new forms of imaginative agency,
simultaneously exhilarating, excessive, apocalyptic--American"
(25). For American Studies scholars, Masco's piece ought to be
mandatory reading.
Another profound contribution, Anna Tsing's discussion of the
"Salvage Frontier," transports the spatio-temporal mythology
of the frontier to the uneven spaces of the global economy. By looking
specifically at South Kalimantan, Indonesia, Tsing documents the role of
the Indonesian state-military apparatus played in "creating the
'wildness' of the frontier" (54). Problematizing popular
notions of progress, Tsing offers a careful picture of what
"discovery" looks like to the people that have been living
there all along.
And, finally, Newfield's critical view of the "New
Economy" aims to dispel popular myths about the ideals and motives
of investors. As Newfield explains, when we consider "what people
actually say about their economic perceptions and choices, the
conventional image of the new investor falls apart" (235). In spite
of popular praise for economic risk, Newfield discovers that most people
invest precisely to avoid risk. New Deal promises and hopes, rather than
an eager acceptance of the boom and bust cycles of corporate capitalism,
have, paradoxically, spurred investment in the New Economy. With great
sensitivity and style, Newfield provides a perspective on the myth of
newness and transformation that exposes the divergent utopian ambitions
that exist between the wealthy and those who work for them.
Rosenberg and Harding proclaim that their "accent here is
decidedly on the side of the small" (14). And readers will
undoubtedly appreciate the precision that contributors have devoted to
careful criticism of everyday manifestations of the future. Rather than
striving to be the definitive resource on the topic, Histories is
appropriately open-ended and subtly focused on particulars. However,
Histories of the Future ultimately proves to be a big book with big
ideas that will provoke all readers to think a little differently about
the place where yesterday and tomorrow converge.
(1) Coalescence is defined in Anna Tsing and Elizabeth
Pollman's contribution to this volume, "Global Futures: The
Game;" as "the historical force that arises from a
transformative coming together of disparate groups, institutions, or
things" (108).
(2) The interludes are Anna Tsing and Elizabeth Pollman's
"Global Futures: The Game," Jonathan Lethern's
"Access Fantasy: A Story;" Hirato Renkichi's
"Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement;" and Daniel
Rosenbcq,, and Sacha Archibald's "The Trouble with Timlines
and A Timeline of Timelines."
Davin Heckman
Siena Heights University
