Futures

This is part of the ‘key terms’ series. Short pieces to explain how I am using certain terms. As my understanding changes, I may revisit and re-write these pieces.

Whilst this is a project mostly about histories, because I argue that histories are political, shape how we understand the present, and gesture towards possible futures, it is important to outline what I understand by the idea of ‘futures’.

According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, the future is ‘a period of time that is to come’ (2022). It hasn’t happened yet. And therefore we do not know what this period of time may contain. It is in some ways open. Full of possibility. Social movements often spend a lot of time working with these possibilities - what we don’t want to happen, what we do want to happen, what might happen if we don’t act now.

Here, futures exist in the present - they are about anticipation. In anticipating what futures may or may not come into being, futures conjure feelings of hope and fear, solidarity and disillusion, guiding activity in the here and now.

An example: imagine a future where it is possible to stem the harmful impacts of climate change, transform economies so that they become regenerative rather than extractive, and repair the legacies of colonialism for people and planet. What does this make you feel? What does it make you want to do?

We don’t actually know what will happen, whether it is possible or not. But the futures we orient towards, whatever they are, shape action in the present, informed by our understanding of histories in the past - all weaving together, perhaps in non-linear ways.

Because pasts, presents and futures are entangled, having caution around the futures we seek to move towards and even create may be wise as Vanessa Andreotti does in her book Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanities wrongs and the implications for social activism which draws on the wider work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective.

She argues that we are all shaped by modernity, racial capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and so too ‘our ways of imagining are bound by collective referents of reality and these referents restrict what is possible for us to imagine’

Her advice is that we all must hospice the lessons of modernity, let it ‘die well’, and sit in the mess of the world, not seeking to control where next, knowing we can’t yet imagine a way out. And yet that we must still also gesture towards a future that is decolonial, that is reparative, even though, she argues, we will fail. But how we fail matters - because by failing generatively we can learn the lessons as we go.

Futures are about a time yet to come that does not yet exist. It is about anticipating that time and what it might involve in ways which mobilise hope, fear, solidarity in the present. As we imagine futures, we must remember our imaginations are themselves limited by the ways we are shaped by modernity. And though we may gesture towards a better future, as we fail, we need to learn the lessons of what must die well from our world so that what comes next, whatever it may be, can emerge.