As If

Abstract

Regardless of any human pretense to foresight or omniscience, we are stuck with thereality that for now the future is, and remains, an open-ended question. In pursuing theissue of humankind’s preoccupation with its mastery and the ensuing contests over itscharacter, this essay begins with a tracing of future-oriented thinking’s development and thevarious manners of foresight which result, considering the future’s indeterminacy in light ofthe fundamental human impulse to plan around its projected, imaginary image. It will brieflychart the evolution of foresight as a means by which humans plan for—and in effectcreate—their futures. From early conceptions of the not-yet as a phenomena observable inthe rhythms and patterns of nature, to the later methodological rigours of modern foresightpractice, it centres the foundational concept of the ‘image of the future’ (as what is “seen” byforesight) and it’s mythopoetic function in bringing the future under a measure of humancontrol, providing placeholder knowledge and the certainty necessary to the carrying out ofactions calculated to either increase or decrease the likelihood of any particular imagesactualization. Foresight is presented as a defining characteristic of modern capitalistdynamics, operating in its most common institutional form as a means for extending thereach of presently powerful political and economic actors into the future, generating thefictional expectations that underlie the complimentary practices of speculative investmentand risk securitization. Following this, the essay turns to alternative formations which queer futurityand foresight, productively exploiting the fact that the images generated by foresight andspeculation, regardless of the power of their authors, are necessarily fictional. Relishing in(rather than retreating from) the future’s indeterminacy, queer futures proliferate possibility,disrupt reproduction, and instrumentalize desire in the performance of emancipatory futuresthrough their rhetorical and material instantiation in the present. As a counterpoint to thecapitalist and queer future imaginaries discussed, the paper closes on a consideration ofindigenous anti-futurisms which regard the imaginaries at the heart of foresight andpretensions of humankind’s command of the future as necessarily apocalyptic, thereforeincorporating foresight only insofar as it articulates the anticipation of a decline and eventualcollapse of ‘the future’ as such.