Futurity Now: An Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 31.

Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013). See especially Chapters 9 and 15 on the structural effects of what Appadurai calls an “unequally distributed” good of this sort in diverse cultures that are nonetheless deeply invested in various acts of future-making (289).

Complementary thoughts on the subject can be found in Leslie A. Adelson, “DAAD Faculty Summer Seminar 2012: ‘The Futures of Interdisciplinary German Studies,’” German Studies Review 35, no. 3 (2012): 511–520. It should also be noted that the special issue of The Germanic Review titled “Futurity Now” differs from the Cornell conference proceedings of April 2012 in several key respects. Conference presentations by Nahum D. Chandler, Devin Fore, Andreas Huyssen, and Patrizia McBride are not included here but in separate monographs by the respective authors instead. The McBride essay included in this issue of The Germanic Review represents entirely new material. All other conference contributions have been rigorously revised and expanded for publication.

Francis Fukuyama controversially pronounced the victory of Western liberal democracy as a form of government in 1989 as marking “the end of history.” See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Robert Kagan has more recently published equally controversial but updated thoughts on Western liberal democracies in his book The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Knopf, 2008). Focusing on Germany but also speaking more generally as well as autobiographically, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht argues that we no longer have futures in his book Nach 1945—Latenz als Ursprung der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012). Whereas Gumbrecht posits a growing primacy of the present, Hermann Lübbe contends that we are experiencing a fundamental shrinkage in the temporal dimension of the present. See both Hermann Lübbe, Schrumpft die Gegenwart? Über die veränderte Gegenwart von Zukunft und Vergangenheit (Luzern: Hans-Erni Stiftung, 2000) and his Im Zug der Zeit: Verkürzter Aufenthalt in der Gegenwart, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Springer, 2003).

Studying the future is, of course, not in and of itself new after 1989 or even in the twentieth century, especially for the social and political sciences as well as economics. Ossip K. Flechtheim coined the German term Futurologie in 1943 for what has come to be known in English as “futures studies.” The World Futures Studies Federation and the Journal of Futures Studies were established in 1960 and 1996, respectively. Analyses of “futures studies” and Zukunftsforschung are proliferating internationally today. See, for example, Reinhold Popp and Elmar Schüll, Zukunftsforschung- und gestaltung: Beiträge aus Wissenschaft und Praxis (Berlin: Springer, 2008). I prefer the term “future studies” because—unlike the more commonly used “futures studies”—it foregrounds the very conceptualization of the future rather than planning for the management of particular futures.

Niklas Luhmann, “The Future Cannot Begin: Temporal Structures in Modern Society,” Social Research 43, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 130–152, here 135.

Niklas Luhmann, “Describing the Future,” Observations on Modernity, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 63–74, here 63–64.

Rüdiger Campe, “How to Use the Future: The Old European and the Modern Form of Life,” Prognosen über Bewegungen, ed. Gabriele Brandstetter, Sibylle Peters, and Kai van Eikels (Berlin: B-Books, 2009), 107–120. See also Rüdiger Campe, The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist, trans. Ellwood H. Wiggins, Jr. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

This definition of futurity is more capacious than the one that Amir Eshel advances in his insightful comparative study of contemporary literature in German, Hebrew, and English. See Amir Eshel, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013). There Eshel writes, citing literary author David Grossman: “Contemporary literature generates the ‘open, future, possible’ by expanding our vocabularies, by probing the human ability to act, and by prompting reflection and debate. I call these capacities of contemporary literature ‘futurity’” (4). In my terminology, the strong link that Eshel posits between literary language, human agency, and critical thought represents only one possible use of the future, which Eshel defines for his purposes as futurity. Note that Eshel also speaks of “expanding our vocabularies” for thinking about the future.

Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Fukuyama, The End of History.

Luhmann, “The Future Cannot Begin.” See also Reinhart Koselleck, one of the leading conceptual historians of European modernity, for related assessments in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. and with an introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Koselleck's Zeitschichten: Studien der Historik, with a contribution by Hans-Georg Gadamer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), is also relevant.

See especially Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Perspective: The Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity,” trans. Martin Chalmers, British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 1 (2000): 79–105. See also Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992).

See Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), for seminal essays in this regard.

See Benjamin Robinson, The Skin of the System: On Germany's Socialist Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

See also Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact, in this connection. Appadurai pointedly contrasts what he calls an “ethics of possibility” with an “ethics of probability,” for example. Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope is especially important for Appadurai's articulation of the former. See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). See also Campe's key essay on probability and affect in the early modern era (“How to Use the Future”), as well as his monograph The Game of Probability, which has only recently become available in English.

See Jean Améry, “Ressentiments,” Jean Améry: Werke, ed. Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, Vol. 2, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre, Örtlichkeiten, ed. Gerhard Scheit (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002), 118–148, here 128.

Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos (New York: Doubleday, 2005), xv–xvi. See also Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (New York: Doubleday, 2011).

See especially Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Humboldt Revisited: Liberal Education, University Reform, and the Opposition to the Neoliberal University,” Ideas in Motion, ed. Joshua Derman, special issue of New German Critique 113 (Summer 2011): 159–196. See also German Studies in the United States: A Historical Handbook, ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003).

Hirokazu Miyazaki, The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). See also Hirokazu Miyazaki, Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance (Berkeley, CA: University of Californa Press, 2013).