An old woman winding
her way down a side street never sees herself
from behind,
a child of three coddling
the hiatus of her mother’s
pagan hand, the belt of a paper
memory. Never from behind
she dreams her own past present
again, rising to meet it like bread leavening.
* * *
Mid cocktail hour: would that this hard wood rage
to smoke and fire! Would that I stand forever calling
at the back of pigtails bobbing
fearlessly ahead, to take my place one day, to drag
eyes down martini glass stems toward
Cheyenne carpets. (Those slippered feet were mine
once.) I ache to smell the thick
balm of burning, to tumble through to audit
my first memory. Would
that this fleece-coated floor shatter
to cedar talc below me and I fall
ambassador to an age of unfinished
chivalry, to that of a lesser hour. The moment
is black; my mind sifts through crumbs of
cedar like picture postcards, telling
the story of a counter melody, of what was
wished and might have been but
never was.
* * *
I see the tonic is a glitter dome, it percolates
façade and biscotti laughs on teeth
like fermented woodchips under
rubber soles. In its tent lagoon with gin
and ice I catch the residue of pink
ribbon fleeing
to the exile of a hollow hand.
I see it from behind, the way
the one meets the other, mortised
like liquor swelling
around frozen stones. They are consummate.
Then, every hollow had its fill but now spaces
are tumid in their emptiness. Now,
the lagoon is the eyes
of an old woman winding
her way down three glacial stairs
to meet me, coaxing gently
with steady irises.
-- Vicky Sprow
Sunday
Futurefesto, by Alex Pasternack
Some notes I'd probably like to change in the future
Disconnected imaginary prologue
Of course you want to hook-up with him, but how make the first move? When he finally shows up at the party, hair windswept from the hover SUV, he’s wearing a neon leather jacket with strobe light goggles hat haven’t even been invented, accompanied by his eclectic bunch of friends, and humming the song at the end of Mahler 1 over the DJ’s heavy beating while the crowd lavishes him with shouted one-liners. His mechanized boots mean he dances like the freak child of Michael Jackson and a Viennese actionist artist (the kind that paints/dances in his own blood). No one else is as entranced as you: all previous conversations about poems or gymnastics disappear, the room shrinks and grows, and suddenly you’re not drunk or even buzzed or whatever else: though you’ve never met, this is the moment you’ve been dreaming of all your life. His famous reputation, worldly experience, and the simple inclusion of Nietzsche and Sam Cooke on his online profile tell you all you need to know. And yet you can’t decide whether to approach with a witty remark or defect to the bathroom to stare at your sad excuses for eyebrows. It’s not just that he’s already surrounded by all the party people, or that you don’t know any witty remarks, or even how to dance (not just)—you just wouldn’t want to destroy his aura, lose your distance, find out that what you imagined was wrong. And yet, by that bizarre logic of revelry, you cannot not talk to him, even if it’s “I like your goggles.” But that won’t do. So you’re up against the window sill, time standing still, enjoying your distance and yet desperate to talk with him; or to rip off his sweaty shirt and make love. Could this be...the future?!!
Flashes of the future
I’ve never been to Tokyo, don’t have a large flat screen TV, or 10,000 songs in my pocket, or internet wherever I go, or a phone that’s a camera that’s a bicycle pump, but I once had my own circular, white space station. It was the amazing bicycle wheel of a spaceship I glimpsed in my Star Wars Question & Answer Book About Space—the same station that appeared famously in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001—that first got me excited for the future. That was third grade: I had seen Star Wars only nine times, Reagan wanted to build a Death Star, and according to page 31, the shiny white space station that simulated gravity would be ours by 1990. I had some time to prepare. But when the International Space Station (ISS) did appear—a decade after Challenger, after the Golden Arches began appearing around Red Square, after the Gulf War—it was a like a vulgar alarm ripping through a wonderful sublime dream. Instead of smooth and circular, the ISS was bulky, labyrinthine, and chaotic, a jumble of assorted tubes and boxes that wouldn’t appear out of nowhere, but would need to be made over the course of decades. Most disappointing, the station would only allow room for a handful of people, not a large exodus of humans from an overpopulated, overtaxed earth. My dreams of going to space were derailed, at least temporarily. My gawking hope in the future—like my application to space camp—had been rescinded.
And yet, even the though the future didn’t turn out as I’d—we’d—expected, the space station is a reality now. Frustrating as the discrepancy is between the past’s future and the present day, I think there’s more to be gained from this dual image—this dual space station, the watercolor one of my boyhood memory and the photographic space station of the present day—than just future fatigue. Not only can the future never look like our wildest dreams or nightmares, but the space that appears between past dreams and present realities can be more liberating than restrictive. It makes us aware of just how wide the space is between present dreams and future realities—all of a sudden we’re not bound to predictions, but given possibilities, not constrained by the false certainty of doom saying and ebullient promises, but made certain of only uncertainty.
“The true picture of the past flits by,” the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote, referring to the uncanny and momentary apparition of the past in the present, the sudden image that shows the gap between the hopes of the past and the reality of the present. He thought that such a gap would give us the chance to resurrect from the old relics the unfulfilled chances, the unseen sights that might shed new light on how to reconstruct the present. But beyond that—and this is I think what Benjamin is getting at—we could also use such “true pictures” to reconstruct the future. Thus when old ideas of the future differ from the present, we get that revolutionary chance to see why things happen differently than we had imagined: we get a chance to imagine that alternative timeline, stretching out of the past, that eludes us: those alternative timelines that scare us and excite us, that goad us on to care about the direction of our present timeline. (1) The future, by definition, lies less in the technologies we can touch or buy or use, the things that purport to bring us the future, but in the dreams and willfulness through which we can turn the present into the future. The rotting space stations of our dreams paint a future that doesn’t miraculously appear out of thin air but that must be carefully constructed.
Post-2001 Interlude
In some ways, my belief in starry utopian futures disappeared when the spaceship of 2001 disappeared into film myth; and in many ways, the future arrived suddenly when the airplanes of 2001 made the World Trade Center disappear. For many, this was the future rearing its ugly head. If the division between pre- and post- September 11 sounds a lot like another division—BC and AD, or Eden and the fall—that may be because its convenient to see the terrorist attacks as a blow to our triumphant narrative of progress, a narrative that contains revenge, determination, adversity, and someday, “success.” While thinking 9/11 in epic, messianic terms of good vs. evil helps to calm our confusion over the searing inexplicability and tragedy of the events—this happens throughout history, stirred by the biblical threat of immanent doom—narrativizing tends to brush aside more subtle points about the events, their causes and our reaction. The critic Max Raphael writes that Picasso’s use of “mythic” symbolism in Guernica was an attempt to make sense of destruction, the product of “his desire to give hope and comfort and to provide a happy ending, to compensate for the terror, the destruction, and inhumanity of the event.” But Picasso did not see what Goya had already seen, namely, that the course of history can be changed only by historical means and only if men shape their own history instead of acting as the automatons of an earthly power or an allegedly eternal idea. (quoted in Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 34).
Of course the ever-lingering question of 9/11 is not how did this happen but why—not what did they do but what are we doing. Ultimately, thinking merely in terms of “national security failures” leads us to minimize the actual reach of our impact, to think that we have little influence beyond our geographical, bureaucratic, military borders. The 9/11 Commission’s stated goal is illustrative: “to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks...[and] to provide recommendations designed to guard against future attacks.” Of course it would be naive and conceited to think that what we can write the future, or prevent terrorist attacks; but to operate on the opposite premise, that all we can do is try to defend ourselves and fire back, is potentially more dangerous. The commission’s ultimate interest, to “guard against future attacks” is a worthwhile goal; but what about trying to prevent those attacks from happening to begin with?
An answer to that long-term question may be a long time coming, but waging war—while it may kill some potential enemies and eventually lead to greater democratization—doesn’t get us much closer to an answer, and it may even get us farther away. After all our democratization of Iraq is geared toward giving us more channels of understanding, or at least influence, in the Mideast for the next generations. Peace and freedom despite our differences is what we want, I think, not just me, and you, and the people against the war and the people for it, the Israelis and the Palestinians, Sunnis and Shites, Iraqi and American officials, and the soldiers who are giving up their lives. But the strong rhetoric about the “future” that has imbued celebrations of US intervention there is a good example of the sort of narravitizing that actually disengages us from realizing future dreams. Thus the beginning of a typical statement issued in the midst of the invasion by Tony Blair and George Bush:
The future of Iraq belongs to the Iraqi people. After years of dictatorship, Iraq will soon be liberated. For the first time in decades, Iraqis will soon choose their own representative government. Coalition military operations are progressing and will succeed. We will eliminate the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, deliver humanitarian aid, and secure the freedom of the Iraqi people. We will create an environment where Iraqis can determine their own fate democratically and peacefully. (April 2003)
The erroneous predictions and rosy language here make the “future” of Iraq look as absurd to us right now as any 1930’s depiction of space exploration. But they also underscore the danger of compelling narratives of the future, packed in tight with untold ideological and economic interests, and presided over by an assertion that “We will create” an environment for the future. There’s no doubt that the US and a few other countries have helped get rid of one of the world’s most oppressive leaders; but the famous “future of the Iraqi people” eventually becomes a hollow-sounding refrain amidst the din of gunfire in the process of making that future, the screams of tortured prisoners in former Saddam’s former prisons, and next to that other “future” that is hardly mentioned but which lingers over everything: America’s. The promise of Iraqi democracy extolled by spokespeople is held in difficult parallel with the future of American supremacy extolled by the military, government and the press—as seen in unmanned planes, super bullets, lasers, the “battlefield internet,” and so forth. And it is no secret that the future those things stand for—our future of oil and influence in the Mideast—was a large part of the reason we went to Iraq to begin with. So: not just how did this happen but why, but also, how can our future make sense with theirs—especially when theirs is also ultimately ours?
Playing with(in) the future
These days it’s so hard not to move in and grab the future. After all, it’s right in front of us, laid out in sexy ads that scream the “future is now.” That phrase is one of the postmodern era’s more worn-out banalities, the kind that makes me feel simultaneously hot and spleeny, being completely paradoxical and yet so (seemingly) accurate. But the landing of robot scientists on Mars, the first artificial heart transplant, vacuum-cleaning robots, and wearable computers all make up the body of evidence, alongside of course the latest “not available in stores” kitchen utensil (as if being available only over the phone intimates the futurity of the thing). Every day another device emerges out of the recycling bin of the future to amaze us, to make us happy, to allow our best conversations, to capture our favorite moments, to shake us awake with its symphonic renditions of Brahms. The uncanny mixing of phone with camera with music player with personal symphony—the elision of old technology with new technology into as-yet-unseen technology—symbolizes exactly what’s so bizarre about the phrase “the future is now.” That the future, which by definition can never arrive in the “now,” has done so, is just barely believable when technology appears to do everything already, and by its presence allows no time (literally) for meditation. And as society gets “faster,” the phrase grows more apt, more believable. The real problem with the “future is now” idea—aside from its inanity and the fact that it is completely absurd in the context of much of the rest of the world— is that it serves up the fiction that the future is here, whether we like it or not. And when it’s always ringing in your ears with the latest Britney Spears, you hardly have a chance to even consider whether you do.
If the cell phone ring is one of the most frequent heralds of our future, it sounds like the “future is now” more than ever. Just as our ears hesitantly adjust at a rap-metal concert, so we get used to it all, all the cell phones and headphones and automated homes beeping and talking to us and even playing songs by the hottest rap-metal bands. There are two ways out of this future world as far as I can see, and neither involves the sacrilege of throwing your phone against a wall. The first is easy and shouldn’t take long: rip out your eardrums. The second is not so easy, but it may actually improve our ability to hear—and see, and touch and taste and smell the future. We simply need to try to stop thinking of the future in terms of hi-tech things and think instead in terms of hi-tech imagination. Marty Heidegger’s “question concerning technology” is useful here: the future relies on “the essence [Wesen] of technology,” (so far so good) which “is by no means anything technological” (come again?). Heidegger wants to think of technology not in the modern sense of things that do things for us, but more in the more classical sense of techne (“art,” “skill,” or “craft”), with its connotations of imagination and artistic creation, the old poiesis (check out RL Rutsky’s High Techne). This version of “technology” holds out a future less organized around the “futuristic” instruments of media, communication war, commerce, energy, etc, than on rethinking how and why these objects are used, and imagining a world that is not bound to and by them, one that might even (*shh!!*) make them useless.
Perhaps we need to stop thinking about “the future” and start thinking about how we talk about it; stop talking about what the future will be like, and thinking how we want it to be; stop talking about the future as if it will come, and make it come.2 The “future is now” wouldn’t be so false if we made now into “the future,” rather than imagining that the future is already here, or that it will come “on its own.” The future doesn’t arrive in the present—only the present can arrive in the future.
It’s hard to remember that. Here’s a clipping from a November 30, 2000 New York Times article, entitled “In High Tech Home Future Is Now”:
The comparison of the TV that looms on the wall of the “futuristic” home with “the monolith in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’” is more apt than it seems. That other unforgettable image from Kubrick’s film symbolizes the tools that made humanity what it is, and, ultimately, what unmakes it too. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that that circular space station, and its menacing onboard computer HAL, is just another version of the monolith, the miraculous thing that gives us our “future” while distracting us from alternative futures. The space station becomes one thing among many that could have been part of our “future”; that it wasn’t suggests that we can’t confine ourselves to thinking about the future in terms of particular technologies, or space stations, as sexy as they are.
A few months ago I was about to start reading a New Yorker article (December 15, 2003) about newer tactics being taken by the military in response to guerrilla fighters in Iraq (“Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?” its subtitle asked) when my eyes unconsciously wandered across the page, across the cartoon, to another image: a large black television (monolith!). The beautiful Sony ad drew me in with other questions that I had never given thought to, but somehow felt I should have: “Could a “61 TV that had the narrowest body, also feature the world’s deepest picture? And could combining great design with a WEGA Engine system be the key to brining such an anomaly to life? We’re the only ones asking these questions. And [this television] is proof that when you ask questions that are like no other, you get results that are unlike any that the world has seen.”
If our postmodern world is a sort of global battleground of images, technologies and information, the biggest fight is for who gets to make the future. If we hope to stake a claim against those that would fight to make the future for us (companies, governments, also terrorists, armies) through their seductive questions and even more seductive answers, we need to ask our own questions, questions that don’t have immediate solutions, whose solutions aren’t delivered in the tones and clicks and voices of mp3-camera-phones, in the report of machine guns, in the sexy leer of the future as he struts into the party. Our actual questions are long-winded and complicated, our solutions perpetually approached from the imagination and a radical inventiveness. Can’t we come up with our own questions “that are like no other, to get results that are unlike the world has seen”?
(Footnotes)
1 Susan Buck-Morss writes of Benjamin’s historical visions: “Such knowledge leads to total, nihilistic mistrust in this history’s progress, but it can transform the rage of a humanity betrayed into energy for political mobilization in order to break free of it. Thus theological illumination that redeems past history, and political education that condemns it, are one and the same endeavor.” (The Dialectics of Seeing, 245)
2 The New York Times, 4.1.04: “Perhaps the strangest thing about the life-pricing business is the way the lives of future generations become discounted -- quite literally. Regulators begin with the assumption that it’s better to have $200 in your pocket today -- when you can earn interest on it -- than a promise of $200 in the future. Equating money with human life, they conclude that a life saved today should count twice as much, in dollar terms, as a life saved 10 years from now; a life saved a century from now scarcely counts at all. That is why cost-benefit analysis might sanction, say, nuclear reactors that provide you and me with cheap energy at the expense of lives lost to cancer decades down the road. But as Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling point out in their recent book, ‘’Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing,’’ it is hardly clear why the same logic should apply to the value of our great-grandchildren. (On the other hand, those future generations may well have developed a cure for cancer, so perhaps we are justified in worrying about them less.)” The writer’s parenthetical assumption is part of a pervasive, perpetual, and dangerous logic that abjures our responsibility to find a cure because someone else “naturally” will.
-- Alex Pasternack
Disconnected imaginary prologue
Of course you want to hook-up with him, but how make the first move? When he finally shows up at the party, hair windswept from the hover SUV, he’s wearing a neon leather jacket with strobe light goggles hat haven’t even been invented, accompanied by his eclectic bunch of friends, and humming the song at the end of Mahler 1 over the DJ’s heavy beating while the crowd lavishes him with shouted one-liners. His mechanized boots mean he dances like the freak child of Michael Jackson and a Viennese actionist artist (the kind that paints/dances in his own blood). No one else is as entranced as you: all previous conversations about poems or gymnastics disappear, the room shrinks and grows, and suddenly you’re not drunk or even buzzed or whatever else: though you’ve never met, this is the moment you’ve been dreaming of all your life. His famous reputation, worldly experience, and the simple inclusion of Nietzsche and Sam Cooke on his online profile tell you all you need to know. And yet you can’t decide whether to approach with a witty remark or defect to the bathroom to stare at your sad excuses for eyebrows. It’s not just that he’s already surrounded by all the party people, or that you don’t know any witty remarks, or even how to dance (not just)—you just wouldn’t want to destroy his aura, lose your distance, find out that what you imagined was wrong. And yet, by that bizarre logic of revelry, you cannot not talk to him, even if it’s “I like your goggles.” But that won’t do. So you’re up against the window sill, time standing still, enjoying your distance and yet desperate to talk with him; or to rip off his sweaty shirt and make love. Could this be...the future?!!
Flashes of the future
I’ve never been to Tokyo, don’t have a large flat screen TV, or 10,000 songs in my pocket, or internet wherever I go, or a phone that’s a camera that’s a bicycle pump, but I once had my own circular, white space station. It was the amazing bicycle wheel of a spaceship I glimpsed in my Star Wars Question & Answer Book About Space—the same station that appeared famously in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001—that first got me excited for the future. That was third grade: I had seen Star Wars only nine times, Reagan wanted to build a Death Star, and according to page 31, the shiny white space station that simulated gravity would be ours by 1990. I had some time to prepare. But when the International Space Station (ISS) did appear—a decade after Challenger, after the Golden Arches began appearing around Red Square, after the Gulf War—it was a like a vulgar alarm ripping through a wonderful sublime dream. Instead of smooth and circular, the ISS was bulky, labyrinthine, and chaotic, a jumble of assorted tubes and boxes that wouldn’t appear out of nowhere, but would need to be made over the course of decades. Most disappointing, the station would only allow room for a handful of people, not a large exodus of humans from an overpopulated, overtaxed earth. My dreams of going to space were derailed, at least temporarily. My gawking hope in the future—like my application to space camp—had been rescinded.
And yet, even the though the future didn’t turn out as I’d—we’d—expected, the space station is a reality now. Frustrating as the discrepancy is between the past’s future and the present day, I think there’s more to be gained from this dual image—this dual space station, the watercolor one of my boyhood memory and the photographic space station of the present day—than just future fatigue. Not only can the future never look like our wildest dreams or nightmares, but the space that appears between past dreams and present realities can be more liberating than restrictive. It makes us aware of just how wide the space is between present dreams and future realities—all of a sudden we’re not bound to predictions, but given possibilities, not constrained by the false certainty of doom saying and ebullient promises, but made certain of only uncertainty.
“The true picture of the past flits by,” the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote, referring to the uncanny and momentary apparition of the past in the present, the sudden image that shows the gap between the hopes of the past and the reality of the present. He thought that such a gap would give us the chance to resurrect from the old relics the unfulfilled chances, the unseen sights that might shed new light on how to reconstruct the present. But beyond that—and this is I think what Benjamin is getting at—we could also use such “true pictures” to reconstruct the future. Thus when old ideas of the future differ from the present, we get that revolutionary chance to see why things happen differently than we had imagined: we get a chance to imagine that alternative timeline, stretching out of the past, that eludes us: those alternative timelines that scare us and excite us, that goad us on to care about the direction of our present timeline. (1) The future, by definition, lies less in the technologies we can touch or buy or use, the things that purport to bring us the future, but in the dreams and willfulness through which we can turn the present into the future. The rotting space stations of our dreams paint a future that doesn’t miraculously appear out of thin air but that must be carefully constructed.
Post-2001 Interlude
In some ways, my belief in starry utopian futures disappeared when the spaceship of 2001 disappeared into film myth; and in many ways, the future arrived suddenly when the airplanes of 2001 made the World Trade Center disappear. For many, this was the future rearing its ugly head. If the division between pre- and post- September 11 sounds a lot like another division—BC and AD, or Eden and the fall—that may be because its convenient to see the terrorist attacks as a blow to our triumphant narrative of progress, a narrative that contains revenge, determination, adversity, and someday, “success.” While thinking 9/11 in epic, messianic terms of good vs. evil helps to calm our confusion over the searing inexplicability and tragedy of the events—this happens throughout history, stirred by the biblical threat of immanent doom—narrativizing tends to brush aside more subtle points about the events, their causes and our reaction. The critic Max Raphael writes that Picasso’s use of “mythic” symbolism in Guernica was an attempt to make sense of destruction, the product of “his desire to give hope and comfort and to provide a happy ending, to compensate for the terror, the destruction, and inhumanity of the event.” But Picasso did not see what Goya had already seen, namely, that the course of history can be changed only by historical means and only if men shape their own history instead of acting as the automatons of an earthly power or an allegedly eternal idea. (quoted in Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 34).
Of course the ever-lingering question of 9/11 is not how did this happen but why—not what did they do but what are we doing. Ultimately, thinking merely in terms of “national security failures” leads us to minimize the actual reach of our impact, to think that we have little influence beyond our geographical, bureaucratic, military borders. The 9/11 Commission’s stated goal is illustrative: “to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks...[and] to provide recommendations designed to guard against future attacks.” Of course it would be naive and conceited to think that what we can write the future, or prevent terrorist attacks; but to operate on the opposite premise, that all we can do is try to defend ourselves and fire back, is potentially more dangerous. The commission’s ultimate interest, to “guard against future attacks” is a worthwhile goal; but what about trying to prevent those attacks from happening to begin with?
An answer to that long-term question may be a long time coming, but waging war—while it may kill some potential enemies and eventually lead to greater democratization—doesn’t get us much closer to an answer, and it may even get us farther away. After all our democratization of Iraq is geared toward giving us more channels of understanding, or at least influence, in the Mideast for the next generations. Peace and freedom despite our differences is what we want, I think, not just me, and you, and the people against the war and the people for it, the Israelis and the Palestinians, Sunnis and Shites, Iraqi and American officials, and the soldiers who are giving up their lives. But the strong rhetoric about the “future” that has imbued celebrations of US intervention there is a good example of the sort of narravitizing that actually disengages us from realizing future dreams. Thus the beginning of a typical statement issued in the midst of the invasion by Tony Blair and George Bush:
The future of Iraq belongs to the Iraqi people. After years of dictatorship, Iraq will soon be liberated. For the first time in decades, Iraqis will soon choose their own representative government. Coalition military operations are progressing and will succeed. We will eliminate the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, deliver humanitarian aid, and secure the freedom of the Iraqi people. We will create an environment where Iraqis can determine their own fate democratically and peacefully. (April 2003)
The erroneous predictions and rosy language here make the “future” of Iraq look as absurd to us right now as any 1930’s depiction of space exploration. But they also underscore the danger of compelling narratives of the future, packed in tight with untold ideological and economic interests, and presided over by an assertion that “We will create” an environment for the future. There’s no doubt that the US and a few other countries have helped get rid of one of the world’s most oppressive leaders; but the famous “future of the Iraqi people” eventually becomes a hollow-sounding refrain amidst the din of gunfire in the process of making that future, the screams of tortured prisoners in former Saddam’s former prisons, and next to that other “future” that is hardly mentioned but which lingers over everything: America’s. The promise of Iraqi democracy extolled by spokespeople is held in difficult parallel with the future of American supremacy extolled by the military, government and the press—as seen in unmanned planes, super bullets, lasers, the “battlefield internet,” and so forth. And it is no secret that the future those things stand for—our future of oil and influence in the Mideast—was a large part of the reason we went to Iraq to begin with. So: not just how did this happen but why, but also, how can our future make sense with theirs—especially when theirs is also ultimately ours?
Playing with(in) the future
These days it’s so hard not to move in and grab the future. After all, it’s right in front of us, laid out in sexy ads that scream the “future is now.” That phrase is one of the postmodern era’s more worn-out banalities, the kind that makes me feel simultaneously hot and spleeny, being completely paradoxical and yet so (seemingly) accurate. But the landing of robot scientists on Mars, the first artificial heart transplant, vacuum-cleaning robots, and wearable computers all make up the body of evidence, alongside of course the latest “not available in stores” kitchen utensil (as if being available only over the phone intimates the futurity of the thing). Every day another device emerges out of the recycling bin of the future to amaze us, to make us happy, to allow our best conversations, to capture our favorite moments, to shake us awake with its symphonic renditions of Brahms. The uncanny mixing of phone with camera with music player with personal symphony—the elision of old technology with new technology into as-yet-unseen technology—symbolizes exactly what’s so bizarre about the phrase “the future is now.” That the future, which by definition can never arrive in the “now,” has done so, is just barely believable when technology appears to do everything already, and by its presence allows no time (literally) for meditation. And as society gets “faster,” the phrase grows more apt, more believable. The real problem with the “future is now” idea—aside from its inanity and the fact that it is completely absurd in the context of much of the rest of the world— is that it serves up the fiction that the future is here, whether we like it or not. And when it’s always ringing in your ears with the latest Britney Spears, you hardly have a chance to even consider whether you do.
If the cell phone ring is one of the most frequent heralds of our future, it sounds like the “future is now” more than ever. Just as our ears hesitantly adjust at a rap-metal concert, so we get used to it all, all the cell phones and headphones and automated homes beeping and talking to us and even playing songs by the hottest rap-metal bands. There are two ways out of this future world as far as I can see, and neither involves the sacrilege of throwing your phone against a wall. The first is easy and shouldn’t take long: rip out your eardrums. The second is not so easy, but it may actually improve our ability to hear—and see, and touch and taste and smell the future. We simply need to try to stop thinking of the future in terms of hi-tech things and think instead in terms of hi-tech imagination. Marty Heidegger’s “question concerning technology” is useful here: the future relies on “the essence [Wesen] of technology,” (so far so good) which “is by no means anything technological” (come again?). Heidegger wants to think of technology not in the modern sense of things that do things for us, but more in the more classical sense of techne (“art,” “skill,” or “craft”), with its connotations of imagination and artistic creation, the old poiesis (check out RL Rutsky’s High Techne). This version of “technology” holds out a future less organized around the “futuristic” instruments of media, communication war, commerce, energy, etc, than on rethinking how and why these objects are used, and imagining a world that is not bound to and by them, one that might even (*shh!!*) make them useless.
Perhaps we need to stop thinking about “the future” and start thinking about how we talk about it; stop talking about what the future will be like, and thinking how we want it to be; stop talking about the future as if it will come, and make it come.2 The “future is now” wouldn’t be so false if we made now into “the future,” rather than imagining that the future is already here, or that it will come “on its own.” The future doesn’t arrive in the present—only the present can arrive in the future.
It’s hard to remember that. Here’s a clipping from a November 30, 2000 New York Times article, entitled “In High Tech Home Future Is Now”:
“This is not your Jetsons’ house,” said James Benard, a product manager in Microsoft’s consumer strategy group. “You don’t have to be futuristic to start getting ready for the future.”
That point appears clear when visitors step into the living room of what the company is calling the Microsoft Home in New York. At first glance, the space looks like almost any other in a well-appointed apartment: hardwood floors, a comfortable sofa and minimalist bookcases. But there is a 50-inch-screen RCA television looming large in the room like the monolith in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’
The comparison of the TV that looms on the wall of the “futuristic” home with “the monolith in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’” is more apt than it seems. That other unforgettable image from Kubrick’s film symbolizes the tools that made humanity what it is, and, ultimately, what unmakes it too. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that that circular space station, and its menacing onboard computer HAL, is just another version of the monolith, the miraculous thing that gives us our “future” while distracting us from alternative futures. The space station becomes one thing among many that could have been part of our “future”; that it wasn’t suggests that we can’t confine ourselves to thinking about the future in terms of particular technologies, or space stations, as sexy as they are.
A few months ago I was about to start reading a New Yorker article (December 15, 2003) about newer tactics being taken by the military in response to guerrilla fighters in Iraq (“Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?” its subtitle asked) when my eyes unconsciously wandered across the page, across the cartoon, to another image: a large black television (monolith!). The beautiful Sony ad drew me in with other questions that I had never given thought to, but somehow felt I should have: “Could a “61 TV that had the narrowest body, also feature the world’s deepest picture? And could combining great design with a WEGA Engine system be the key to brining such an anomaly to life? We’re the only ones asking these questions. And [this television] is proof that when you ask questions that are like no other, you get results that are unlike any that the world has seen.”
If our postmodern world is a sort of global battleground of images, technologies and information, the biggest fight is for who gets to make the future. If we hope to stake a claim against those that would fight to make the future for us (companies, governments, also terrorists, armies) through their seductive questions and even more seductive answers, we need to ask our own questions, questions that don’t have immediate solutions, whose solutions aren’t delivered in the tones and clicks and voices of mp3-camera-phones, in the report of machine guns, in the sexy leer of the future as he struts into the party. Our actual questions are long-winded and complicated, our solutions perpetually approached from the imagination and a radical inventiveness. Can’t we come up with our own questions “that are like no other, to get results that are unlike the world has seen”?
(Footnotes)
1 Susan Buck-Morss writes of Benjamin’s historical visions: “Such knowledge leads to total, nihilistic mistrust in this history’s progress, but it can transform the rage of a humanity betrayed into energy for political mobilization in order to break free of it. Thus theological illumination that redeems past history, and political education that condemns it, are one and the same endeavor.” (The Dialectics of Seeing, 245)
2 The New York Times, 4.1.04: “Perhaps the strangest thing about the life-pricing business is the way the lives of future generations become discounted -- quite literally. Regulators begin with the assumption that it’s better to have $200 in your pocket today -- when you can earn interest on it -- than a promise of $200 in the future. Equating money with human life, they conclude that a life saved today should count twice as much, in dollar terms, as a life saved 10 years from now; a life saved a century from now scarcely counts at all. That is why cost-benefit analysis might sanction, say, nuclear reactors that provide you and me with cheap energy at the expense of lives lost to cancer decades down the road. But as Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling point out in their recent book, ‘’Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing,’’ it is hardly clear why the same logic should apply to the value of our great-grandchildren. (On the other hand, those future generations may well have developed a cure for cancer, so perhaps we are justified in worrying about them less.)” The writer’s parenthetical assumption is part of a pervasive, perpetual, and dangerous logic that abjures our responsibility to find a cure because someone else “naturally” will.
-- Alex Pasternack