Future Theory

A Handbook to Critical Concepts

Patricia Waugh, Marc Botha, Marc Botha, Patricia Waugh

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781472567376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

By interrogating the terms and concepts most central to cultural change, Future Theory interrogates how theory can play a central role in dynamic transition. It demonstrates how entangled the highly politicized spheres of cultural production, scientific invention, and intellectual discourse are in the contemporary world and how new concepts and forms of thinking are crucial to embarking upon change. Future Theory is built around five key concepts – change, boundaries, ruptures, assemblages, horizons – examined by leading international thinkers to build a vision of how theory can be applied to a constantly shifting world.

Section One

Rethinking Change

1

Memory

Haunting pasts without utopias

Enzo Traverso

Historical turn

In 1967, reconstructing the long trajectory of the uses of Cicero’s celebrated maxim, historia magistra vitae est [history is the teacher of life], Reinhart Koselleck stressed its exhaustion at the end of the eighteenth century, when the birth of the modern idea of progress replaced the old, cyclical vision of history. The past ceased to appear as an immense reservoir of experiences from which human beings could draw moral and political lessons. Since the French Revolution, the future has had to be invented rather than extracted from bygone events. The human mind, Koselleck observed quoting Tocqueville, ‘wandered in obscurity’ and the lessons of history became mysterious or useless.¹ The end of the twentieth century, nevertheless, seemed to rehabilitate Cicero’s rhetorical formula. Liberal democracy took the form of a secular theodicy that, as the epilogue to a century of violence, incorporated the lessons of totalitarianism. On the one hand, historians pointed out that innumerable changes occurred in a turbulent age; on the other hand, philosophers announced the ‘end of history’. Fukuyama’s optimistic Hegelianism has since been criticized, but the world that emerged from the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism was desperately uniform. Liberalism invaded the stage; not since the Reformation had a single ideology established such a pervasive, global hegemony.²

The year 1989 stresses a break, a momentum that closes an epoch and opens a new one. This is reflected in the international success of Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes (1994), a text which places in a broad historical perspective the widely shared perception of the end of a cycle, of an epoch and, finally, of a century.³ In this context, the unexpected and disruptive character of the fall of the Berlin Wall immediately took on the dimension of an event: an epochal turn exceeding its causes, opening new scenarios, suddenly projecting the world into an unpredictable constellation. Like every great political event, it modified the perception of the past and engendered a new historical imagination. The dialectic of the twentieth century was broken. Instead of liberating new revolutionary energies, the downfall of State Socialism exhausted the historical trajectory of socialism itself. The entire history of communism was reduced to its totalitarian dimension, which appeared as a collective, transmissible memory. Having entered the twentieth century as a promise of liberation, communism exited as a symbol of alienation and oppression. The images of the demolition of the Berlin Wall appear, a posteriori, as a reversal of Eisenstein’s October: the film of revolution had been definitely ‘rewound’. Revolution had been subsumed under the narrative of totalitarianism.

Reinhart Koselleck defined as a Sattelzeit – a ‘saddle time’, a time of passage – the period in the seventeenth century stretching from the crisis of the Old Regime to the Restoration (c. 1750–1815). In this cataclysmic era of transition, a new form of sovereignty emerged, based on the idea of nation that, for a short period, erased the European dynastic regimes; a society of orders was replaced by a society of individuals. Words changed their meanings and a new conception of history as a ‘singular collective’, including both a ‘complex of events’ and a meaningful narrative (a kind of ‘historical science’), finally appeared.⁴ So might the concept of Sattelzeit help us to understand the transformations that are now happening in the contemporary world? We may suggest that, toutes proportions gardées, the years from the end of the 1970s to September 11, 2001 witnessed a transition whose consequence was a radical shift in the general landmarks of European history, of its political and intellectual landscape. In other words, the fall of the Berlin Wall materializes a transition in which old and new forms merged together. It was not a simple revival of the old anti-communist rhetoric. During this quarter of a century, market and competition – the cornerstones of the neoliberal lexicon – became the ‘natural’ foundations of post-totalitarian societies. They colonized our imagination and shaped a new anthropological habitus, constituting the dominant values of a new ‘life conduct’ (Lebensführung) in comparison with which the ethically oriented old Protestant asceticism of the bourgeois class – according to Max Weber’s classical portrait – appears an archaeological vestige of a submerged continent.⁵ The extremities of such a Sattelzeit are utopia and memory. This is the political and epistemic framework of the new century that is opened up by the end of Cold War.

In 1989, the ‘velvet revolutions’ seemed to return to the situation of 1789, short-circuiting two centuries of struggle for socialism. Freedom and political representation appeared as the only horizon, according to a model of classical liberalism: 1789 opposed to 1793 as well as to 1917, or even 1776 opposed to 1789 (freedom against equality).⁶ Historically, revolutions have been factories of utopias; they have forged new imaginaries, new ideas, and have aroused expectancies and hopes. But that did not occur with the so-called ‘velvet revolutions’. On the contrary, they frustrated any previous dream and paralysed cultural production. A brilliant essayist and playwright like Vaclav Havel became a pale, sad copy of a Western statesman once elected president of the Czech Republic. The literature of Eastern Germany proved extraordinarily fruitful and imaginative when, submitted to the suffocating control of the STASI, it created allegorical novels stimulating the art of reading between the lines. Nothing comparable appeared after the Wende. In Poland, the turn of 1989 engendered a nationalist wave, and the deaths of Jacek Kuron and Krizstof Kieslowski sealed the end of a period of critical culture. Instead of projecting themselves into the future, these revolutions created societies obsessed by the past. Museums and patrimonial institutions devoted to recovering national pasts kidnapped by Soviet communism simultaneously appeared all over the countries of Central Europe.

More recently, the Arab revolutions of 2011 have quickly reached a similar deadlock. Before being stopped by bloody civil wars in Libya and Syria, they destroyed two hated dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt but did not know how to replace them. Their memory was built out of defeats: socialism, pan-Arabism, Third-Worldism and Islamic fundamentalism (which did not inspire the revolutionary youth). Such revolutions and mass movements are burdened with the defeats of the revolutions of the twentieth century, an overwhelming heaviness that paralyses the utopic imagination.

End of utopias

Thus, the twentieth-first century is born as a time shaped by a general eclipse of utopias. This is a major difference that distinguishes it from the two previous centuries. Opening the nineteenth century, the French Revolution defined the horizon of a new age in which politics, culture and society were deeply transformed. The year 1789 created a new concept of revolution – no more a rotation, according to its original astronomical meaning, but a rupture and a radical innovation – and laid the basis for the birth of socialism, which developed with the growth of industrial society. Demolishing the European dynastic order – the ‘persistence’ of the Old Regime – the Great War birthed the twentieth century, but this cataclysm also engendered the Russian Revolution. October 1917 immediately appeared to be a great and at the same time tragic event that, during a bloody civil war, created an authoritarian dictatorship that rapidly transformed into a form of totalitarianism. Simultaneously, the Russian Revolution aroused a hope of emancipation that mobilized millions of men and women throughout the world. The trajectory of Soviet communism – its ascension, its apogee at the end of the Second World War, and then its decline – deeply shaped the history of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century, on the contrary, opens with the collapse of this utopia.⁷

François Furet drew this conclusion at the end of The Passing of an Illusion [1999], with a ‘resignation’ to capitalism that was excitedly emphasized by many reviewers: ‘The idea of another society has become almost impossible to conceive of, and no one in the world today is offering any advice on the subject or even trying to formulate a new concept. Here we are, condemned to live in the world as it is.’⁸ Without sharing the satisfaction of the French historian, Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson formulated a similar diagnostic, observing that the end of the world is easier to imagine nowadays than the end of capitalism.⁹ The utopia of a new, different model of society increasingly appears as a dangerous, potentially totalitarian desire. In short, the turn of the twenty-first century coincided with the transition from the ‘principle of hope’ to the ‘principle of responsibility’.¹⁰ The ‘principle of hope’ inspired the battles of the previous century. It haunted also the most terrible moments of that age of war and revolution and encouraged resistance movements across Nazi Europe. The ‘principle of responsibility’ appeared when the future darkened, when we discovered that revolutions had generated totalitarian monsters, when a growing understanding of ecology made us aware of the dangers menacing the planet and, so, began to think about the kind of world we would leave to future generations. Using the famous conceptual couple elaborated by Reinhart Koselleck, this diagnostic might be formulated in the following way: communism is no longer a point of intersection between a ‘space of experience’ and a ‘horizon of expectation’.¹¹ The expectation disappeared, while experience has taken the form of a field of ruins.

The German philosopher Ernst Bloch distinguished between the chimeric, Promethean dreams haunting the imagination of a society historically unable to realize them (the abstract, compensatory utopias, such as the aircrafts imagined in the technologically primitive societies arising from the Middle Ages), and the anticipatory, emancipatory hopes inspiring a possible revolutionary transformation of the present (the concrete utopias, such as socialism in the twentieth century).¹² Today, we are witnessing the vanishing of the former and the metamorphosis of the latter. On the one hand, taking varied forms from science fiction to ecology studies, the dystopias of a future nightmare made of environmental and social catastrophes have replaced the dream of a liberated humanity – a dangerous dream of the age of totalitarianism – and confined the social imagination to the narrow boundaries of the present. On the other hand, the concrete utopias of collective emancipation have turned into individualized drives for the inexhaustible consumption of commodities. Dismissing the ‘warm stream’ of collective emancipation, neoliberalism has instead introduced the ‘cold stream’ of economic reason. Thus, utopias are destroyed as they are transformed, by their privatization, into a reified world.¹³

According to Koselleck, the present gives its meaning to the past. At the same time, the latter offers to the actors of history a huge collection of experiences indispensable for formulating their own expectations. In other words, past and future interact, related by a symbiotic link. Instead of being two rigorously separated continents, they are connected by a dynamic, creative relationship. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, nevertheless, this dialectic of historical time seems exhausted. The utopias of the past century have disappeared, leaving a present charged with memory but unable to project itself into the future. There is no visible ‘horizon of expectation’. Utopia seems a category of the past – the future imagined in a bygone time – because it no longer belongs to the present of our societies whereas the past haunts them as an unfinished experience. History itself appears as a landscape of ruins, where a living legacy of pain transforms it into a work of mourning.

Some historians, such as François Hartog, characterize the regime of historicity that emerged in the 1990s as ‘presentism’: a diluted and expanded present absorbing and dissolving in itself both past and future.¹⁴ ‘Presentism’ has a double dimension. On the one hand, it is the past reified by a culture industry which destroys all transmitted experience; on the other hand, it is the future abolished by the time of neoliberalism: not the ‘tyranny of the clocks’ described by Norbert Elias, but the dictatorship of the stock exchange, a time of permanent acceleration – borrowing the words of Koselleck – without a ‘prognostic structure’.¹⁵ Twenty-five years ago, the fall of real socialism paralysed and prohibited the utopian imagination, generating for a while new eschatological visions of capitalism as the ‘insu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section 1: Rethinking Change
• Section 2: Boundaries and Crossings
• Section 3: Ruptures and Disruptions
• Section 4: Assemblages and Realignments
• Section 5: Horizons and Trajectories
• Index
• Imprint