Late Futurism – The Future as a Mode of the Present

The Professional-visionary Class

For the late futurist, the future is not something that is built, implemented or prevented, but something that is imagined. The imagination of the late futurist, however, does not want to be that of the economist who anticipates GDP growth in the first quarter, but that of the little boy who experiences something like the Neverending Story adventure: their imagination is radical. According to one of countless definitions, radical imagination is about the “courage to imagine a future completely different from the current world.” Daydreaming, yes, but with the ambition of social engagement. Indeed, the late futurist starts from the assumption that the imaginative activity is currently depotentiated and needs a boost. 

To better frame this concept it is worth going back to a book from ten years ago, titled The Radical Imagination. Anticipating the current use of the term, authors Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish argue that “the radical imagination is term employed by many and explored by few” because, as they admit, it eludes any definition. In short, it is an “aspirational term, largely hollow of any concrete content or meaning.” Thus, we add, suitable for accommodating the aspirations of anyone, including a professional-visionary class. While the authors seem to agree that imagination is weakened today, they insist that it is an activity closely if not necessarily linked to social movements, concluding that “without the radical imagination, we are left only with the residual dreams of the powerful.” But then the question arise: what happens when these same residual dreams present themselves as radical?

The reason why the word ‘imagination’ became a breeding ground for late futurists is to be found, of course, in the past. In 2007, journalist Bruce Nussbaum wrote: 

Business men and women don’t like the term “design.”  I think they think it implies drapes or dresses. Even top CEOs who embrace design don’t want to call it that. They want to call it “Innovation.” That has a manly right to it. It’s strong, techie. These folks are perfectly willing to use the word “vision,” whatever the heck “vision” is. They like “Imagination,” whatever the heck that is. But they don’t like  “design.” Go figure.

Generic enough to intrigue the unicorn-hunting angel investor as much as the fund-granting bureaucrat, poetic enough to soften the hearts during a public speech, who could be against imagination, especially when cloaked in the political commitment of “courageous activists, visionary artists, and fierce organizers” (and it matters little how fierce, visionary, and brave they really are?) So, on one hand there is this simplistic and conservative imagination of Star Wars and its fans, and on the other the heroic and progressive imagination of a group of fearless experts who would not reap the same benefit by simply calling their work design or perhaps facilitation.

What for Haiven and Khasnabish is a humbling, complex and exhausting mediation activity becomes for a design-star “literally, imagination pushed to the maximum.” Meanwhile, someone else argues that “even when we don’t have all the answers, we believe wholeheartedly that the future is extraordinary and we continue to manifest that irresistible vision.” These words, that would not be out of place in some reel on the Law of Attraction: radical imagination turns out to be equivalent to self-help optimism, to what even the least skeptical now call “toxic positivity,” the same positivity that obfuscates the clear perception of the end of the future. Put another way, while the emphasis on the power of imagining otherwise may make sense in contexts of everyday activism, where the weight of reality can be overwhelming, it makes less sense in the context of design, management and consulting where it should be taken for granted that imagination produces change. In this context, the radical imagination becomes instead a huge pat on the back that the late futurist gives to themselves, instilling confidence in their professionalized residual dreams. For their part, designers, who should be exercising the art of compromise at the margins of the real, suddenly become courageous the very moment they ignores such margins, leaping into dreams. This is how, over the course of a decade, radical imagination has gone from being a tool in the service of social justice movements to a resource for the professional-visionary class of late futurists. From the temporary autonomous zone to the conference room: a textbook case of elite capture.

Max Haiven, who is not a designer but a political scientist, shows in a recent project of his (developed together with Xenia Benivolski, Sarah Olutola, and Graeme Webb) how the radical imagination can escape the fluffy paws of late futurists. The World after Amazon is a collection of speculative stories written by some of the workers of the retail giant. In this volume, the editors have not positioned themselves as professionals of vision (it is no coincidence that the original workshop was entitled “Worker as Futurist”), but rather as facilitators at the service of the imagination already present in the workers’ point of view— although occasionally slipping into academicism and romanticization. The World after Amazon is an organizational rather than authorial work, involving meetings, writing workshops and more generally concrete solidarity.

The End of the World

Speaking of militant imagination, Jameson’s refrain, later popularized by Mark Fisher, according to which “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” is supposed to mean that capitalism is so ponderous, ubiquitous and asphyxiating that it leaves no practical or poetic way out. Again Fisher: “Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.” Here, however, I would like to dare an alternative interpretation: the end of the world is easy to imagine because it is about the future as a mode of the present, that is, what is more or less linearly extrapolable from a non-estranged present. The end of capitalism, difficult or perhaps impossible to imagine, is instead the new, the other, that which is perhaps even already here but has not yet emerged as a recognizable figure. And it is not necessarily a beautiful figure: McKenzie Wark, for example, wonders if something worse awaits us.

The “end of the world” is an all-too-simple exercise since it does not unsettle the present: it can be traced back to all the utopias and dystopias we have seen first in the movies and then on Netflix. To put it succinctly, the future is inflated. Instead, the factory of the new is almost completely unbeknown to us. But if that is the case, what good is imagination to us? Imagination is not so much useful to envision the future, possible or not, but to estrange the present. We need not to imagine, but to see beyond, as in an autostereogram where to be able to see the shark’s silhouette we have to squint our eyes. More than imagination, then, we need something like far-sightedness: we need to gaze beyond the veil of the present into the present. To do so, we need a place to exercise this vision, namely, the past, but we need to structure it so that it gives us the right momentum in our time – we need to reinvent it. After all, that is what science fiction always tries to do, even when it talks about 4272 AD. This is very evident in those stories that, while involving aliens and flying cars, seem so blatantly 1950s to us. In Ballard’s words: 

Consciousness is nothing more than a passage between a dying order, the past, and an impending order, the future, in a world in which even the people who are closest to us are in many ways foreign to us – even the beings we love are strangers.

Hatred

A case of estrangement from the present that is dear to me is that of William Morris, among the protagonists of the Arts and Crafts movement. Together with his mentor John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Morris cast an alienating gaze on his own time, observing the ugly, dirty and inhuman London of Dickens, his contemporary, as if he were a man catapulted, by some unknown curse, from the Middle Ages into the Victorian Age. “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization”, Morris reflected in 1894. He was, in short, a romantic; in fact, he gained notoriety first and foremost through endless epic poems that few remember today; establishing himself only later as the proto-designer craftsman everyone knows. 

Up to this point one might think of a typical story of escapism, of a late nineteenth-century nerd who takes refuge in a fantasy world made of armets and broadswords. And indeed, realizing as much himself, that is, the melancholy impotence of his work, Morris falls into depression. What is the use of all the care embodied by a piece of furniture or a fabric if the wealthy class that can afford them continues to plague the world with their ignorance and hypocrisy, spreading squalor and brutality everywhere except within their own circles—and sometimes even there? Morris found the answer to this dilemma in Socialism, a political current that was minoritarian and marginal at the time, with very few adherents in the United Kingdom (Marx’s Capital had not yet been translated into English). The British proto-designer foresaw in Socialism the new, the other figure. But it is precisely through his foreign gaze, deeply anchored in a made-up Middle Ages, that Morris finds the footing to throw himself into the future. The lie of the past allows him to bring into focus the new that emerges.

The Good Death

“You have a great future behind you.” This bizarre admonishment opens Prophetic Culture, an essay in which Federico Campagna (who hits the nail on the head when he calls prediction “a kind of interior design of the future”) finds in the mythic lie the way out of an idiotic and now moribund modernity; a way out—it’s unfortunate to say—of ourselves. We are the past, and therefore it is not our task to imagine the future, but to offer the last testimony of our time, which, however, need not be literal or truthful; it need not be the chronicle of a failure, but—if it is to survive—must be marvelous and stunning, like William Morris’s Middle Ages. Campagna writes:

Whatever they might produce and however perfect their art might be, their only chance [a civilization has] of transmitting their story to a living ear is by being misinterpreted, misunderstood, taken apart, pillaged and recomposed. Even then, though, something shall remain faithful to the original voice that sung out a world and its time-segment – a genetic echo, still resounding in their distant offspring.

There can be no fertile use of imagination today that does not take into account the sad premise that the future is dead. This means that with it died our hopes and thus, in a sense, ourselves; that the new will not belong to us, that we will be alien to it. Indeed, we already are, because the new is already simmering below ground, and when the magma will submerge us it will be too late. Therefore, the most we can ask for is, as Campagna explains, another chance, hoping that someone will take it, not through the empty promise of a better future, but with “the concrete offer of a better past.” Only those who will be there to receive this offer will be able to say whether we have at least managed to achieve a good death.

Il futuro cementifica / La vita possibile / Qui la vista era incredibile / Da oggi è probabile / Che ciò che siamo stati non saremo più – Baustelle
(The future cements / The possible life / Here the view was incredible / From today it is probable / That what we have been will be no more)

“What Is Radical Imagination?” Everyday Activism Network, https://www.everydayactivismnetwork.org/archive/radical-imagination.

Haiven and Khasnabish 2014
Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish, The Radical Imagination. Halifax: Fernwood.

Nussbaum 2007
Bruce Nussbaum, “Are Designers The Enemy Of Design?”. BusinessWeek Online, https://web.archive.org/web/20070322165349/http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/
NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2007/03/are_designers_t.html.

Táíwò 2022
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Benivolski, Haiven, Olutola, Webb 2024
Xenia Benivolski, Max Haiven, Sarah Olutola, Graeme Webb (eds), The World After Amazon: Speculative Stories from Amazon Workers. Thunder Bay: RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab.

Fisher 2009
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books.

Wark 2021
McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? London: Verso.

Ballard 1995
J.G. Ballard, Il futuro è morto: Psicogeografia della modernità. Milano: Mimesis.

Thompson 1977
E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. New York: Pantheon Books.

Campagna 2021
Federico Campagna, Prophetic Culture. London: Bloomsbury.