FUTURES

“The future is wide open” —
on prophecy, projection, and the urge to know
Sara Duana Meyer
‘Clairvoyant’ is not exactly a presentable job these days, and prophets
don’t have it any easier, even though humanity’s urge to see into
their future has not waned since the days of antiquity when Delphi
was hailed as the center of the world – its particular condition
determined by the arguably random GPS of two eagles which Zeus
had released from separate ends of the earth to see where their
paths crossed. This early legend, which awards special status to the
place where the future can be foreseen, points to the overlapping
coordinates of time and space and reminds us that time as the fourth
dimension of the universe is actually an age-old concept.
What can one say about ‘the future’? Not much, for its most
striking characteristic is its indeterminability. The future can be
dark or rosy, promising or forbidding. Nothing is more exciting than
what the future holds in store: as long as it does what it does
best and stays out of reach, everything is possible, even simultaneous
multiple realities.
But the sobering fact remains that – in a linear-thought
system governed by the laws of physics – the future is also something
else: it is completely unavoidable. And herein lies its paradox:
the future follows upon the present, which forces our focus onto
something ‘coming after’ instead of ‘lying ahead.’ This entails that our
present, this fleeting moment of transit, of inbetween, ultimately
ends where the future begins; and it is not by accident that our
ambivalent fears of the unpredictable are expressed and portrayed
in countless versions of an impending apocalypse.
The arts have been the sounding board and experimentation
field for many a quest to understand the future. Well known
in this regard are the Futurists of the early twentieth century,
who passionately despised everything from ‘the past’ which to them
reeked of reactionary tradition and was to be discarded. Excited,
instead, by new technologies, they saw forceful speed and
aggression as the necessary tools for change. Utopias came at a
high premium at the time, for they provided counter versions of the
status quo, of the ‘now’.
Our 21st century reality, however, is haunted by the sense
of having finally arrived in the future. Is this so? Have we managed
to break out of the space-time-continuum?
Recent decades have seen massive upheavals and radical
changes, on a scale that no one could have imagined a hundred
years ago. Or could they have? If a prophet had foretold our day-today
life, would they have been heard? The seer would have
envisioned a global dissolution of boundaries, or, as Gilles Deleuze
coined it, deterritorialization – transnational mechanisms conveyed
in a constant flux of commodities, bodies and information. Global
flows for which the economically charged term ‚transfers‘ seems a
much better fit than the neo-platonic concept of panta rei. And even
the prefix ‘post’ – be it that of modernism or that of colonialism –
appears to have exhausted itself, giving way to the literal common-
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