Culture

Critical Foresight: Anodyne Futures

For some reason the past doesn’t radiate such immense monotony as the future does. Because of its plenitude, the future is propaganda … [1] [2]

To make a closer study of how uses of texts about the future are implicated in the construction of futures knowledges and subjectivities, a metalanguage is needed to provide an analysis of futures-thinking beyond the ‘insightful interpretation’ phase, a theorisation that brings ‘Australian studies’, ‘text’ and ‘future’ into new relations with each other under the field of AFS.

Given the future is usually conceived as something which ‘does not exist’, how, it can be asked, might one study something that popularly lacks empirical certification? The first task in interrogating ideas of the future is configuring an appropriate language of engagement. In the past, scientific terminology has characterised international futurology; for example, Yujiro Hayashi’s ‘futuro-epistemology-conceptology-engineering’, [3] François Hetman’s ‘comprehensive guarantism’, [4] Paul Hawken’s ‘disintermediation’, [5] Alvin Toffler’s ‘posumerism’ [6] and Herman Kahn’s ‘basic long-term multifold trend’. [7] But language of this type has been open to accusations of appropriating possession over a study of processes through exclusive language and concept ownership. French sociologist Alain Gras was inspired on this basis to condemn futurology as ‘basically a technique of political domination … ultimately linked with the policy of ruling elites because its hidden agenda is the reproduction of domination’. [8]

It is important to avoid impenetrability in meaning. As a guide I follow the example given by the ‘public intellectual’ (see definition, Australian Public Intellectual-Network, www.api-network.com). In this way — following the imperative towards a ‘democratisation of representation’ in which all citizens partake in a form of Australian public intellectualism [9] — I draw upon the fields of Australian, communication, critical futures and cultural studies and propose that an elementary framework for exploring the tensions between choice, choosing and futures responsibility, while not invulnerable to criticism, is to look at the relationship between three layers of futures flow in Australia. These three distinct layers, through which an Australian futures discourse might be developed and explored, can be termed and defined in order of importance: futurestext, futurescape and futurespeak.

Futurestext

By ‘futurestext’, I mean any media, practice or discourse that registers, refers to and/or encourages thought along the idea of future. The possible type of futurestext can range from an evangelical tract about the endtimes (such as the ‘Jesus Loves You’ example in the introduction) to an advertisement on television in 1999 claiming that if you drive a Toyota car then ‘the future is now’. I use the suffix ‘text’ to indicate that a futurestext typically has a material existence, though not necessarily limited to written form but inclusive of speeches, pamphlets, architecture, broadcasts and commercial. In this respect, futurestext can include epistemological futures studies such as Charles Birch’s Confronting the Future (1993) and the Commission for the Future series and at the same time contemporary advertising and broadcast programming in which the ‘future’ is often mobile and, as the late 1990s demonstrated, quite millennial: ‘Next Stop: The Future’, Queensland Rail; ‘Job Access: Your ticket to a better future’, Queensland Government; ‘As we race for the future, we haven’t forgotten the past’, Garuda International Airlines; ‘The Future is Genovis’, Genovis Sewing Machines; ‘If you thought the past was great, stay tuned for the future’, ABC Promotion (1998); ‘Trust an unknown future in a known God’, Taringa Baptist Church; ‘Welcome to the future’, Ron Casey launching Galaxy TV; ‘Protecting our children’s future’, Sunsmart; ‘Gold Medal 2000′, Energiser Drink; Spirit 2000: Olympic Dreaming, TV Special on ABC; ‘Shape up for the future’, Shape Milk; and ‘The future is calling’, Vodaphone.

But a futurestext can also be understood — in addition to being ‘textual’ — as a product of imaginative social and fiction mapping, as part of an imaginative (sometimes national) resource. It can be an object located in a ‘framework of concepts and propositions’ situated around the idea ‘future’ [10] and as such can become a ‘perspectival construct’ informed by the historical, linguistic, political and cultural ‘situatedness’ of different types of writers. [11] Such writers might be managers, academics, politicians, citizens, issue-activists, journalists, or even endtimers. There are, of course, other levels of meaning to the construction of ‘text’ (and writer) within the term futurestext.

Futurestext and Authentication

In not being persuaded that authors of futurestext are somehow independent of subjective factors and of social and cultural influences, permitting unembroidered conceptions of the future, many of the matters raised in the discussion below on futurestext take what is commonly called the ‘textual turn’, engaging in questions of creating meaning and writing and representation both inside and outside the production of futurestext. Such questions are questions of power — ‘of who it is that produces which account of the [future] social world’ [12] — questions of pleasure and desire — of which futurestexts ‘persuade and convince, of whom they persuade and convince and to what desired ends’, of who such a futurestext will ‘be “talking to” in its production and its eventual distribution?’ [13] — and questions of social action — what material change is the futurestext intended to produce in the writer and reader?

Futurestext and Power: Plan or Be Planned For! [14]

Paul Longley Arthur writes significantly on the power of pre-colonisation antipodean fantasies to influence the formation of Australia’s historical consciousness over the past half millennia: ‘[H]ypothetical space was utilised as a setting for European utopian fiction long before there was any concrete empirical knowledge of the region in Europe’, Arthur claims.

Visions of the Antipodes in literature formed a pre-text that greatly influenced (and effectively limited) the “reality” that Europeans “found” when they finally arrived in Australia. To Europeans landing in the uncharted Antipodes, it was as though they were playing out a colonial drama that had already been rehearsed on the stage of the European imagination.

‘Hypothetical’ space, or what Simon Ryan has called ‘blank’ space, worked ‘semiotically to form the antipodal landmass as empty, unsettled and inviting European inscription’. [15] Exploration played a critical part in ‘Australia’s coming-into-being as a place in which Europeans could be situated imaginatively’. As Paul Carter has investigated elsewhere in The Road to Botany Bay, ‘exploration effected a transformation of [hypothetical] space into [real] place’. [16] Exploring the fantasy was both an influential and transformative process in the creation of Australia. What is revealing of the power behind such fantasies and fictions of the future and their eventual exploration? Power is an important issue because futurestext can structure the self-constitution or imaginations of one’s own future reality if not that of an entire community, sect, class, or nation. As the European fiction of ‘blank’ space sanctioned a future policy of terra nullius (since Australia was effectively ‘empty’ in their imagination, awaiting inscription), it can be maintained that images of the future can act (and have acted) in the service of social control. This is neither a recent observation nor a novel development in human relations. The ‘ideological bias’ of ‘projected vision’ is ‘not unusual in futurology’, remarks Max Dublin [17] and has considerable history.

For example, in 1798, English economist Thomas Malthus published the treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population As it Affects the Future Improvement of Society that revealed the cheerless future of overpopulation and widespread famine awaiting the citizens of industrial societies. Malthusian calculus made the world familiar with the practice of prediction and in so doing ignited a debate over the limits to growth, not unlike the discussions found in the Club of Rome publications produced during the 1970s. Malthus used mathematics to predict that a looming imbalance between population growth and food supply would lead to the eventual starvation of England. But the solution prescribed by Malthus — that the lower classes should inhibit their rate of reproduction — served less as futurestext imbued with the ethical and moral intelligence of say the biblical prophets and more the self-righteous intervention of a threatened elite: ‘It is conventional wisdom among historians’, offers Max Dublin, ‘that this prescription vindicated the prejudices of the dominant elite of the society in which Malthus live who wanted to blame the poor for their misery rather than take some of the responsibility for this situation on themselves’. [18]

Nearly two centuries later, George Orwell’s famous and relevant exploration of the future in 1984 is the story of Winston Smith’s rebellion against the Party, of his hatred towards Big Brother and thoughtcrime. Early into this fictional exploration, Winston reflects on the perpetual state of war that has existed between Oceania and Eurasia: ‘The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia … But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness … if all the others accepted the lie that the party imposed if all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink”’. [19] Transposing the direction of Orwell’s commentary, from a control of knowledge about the past to a control of future mythology, provides more than just an occasional point. To paraphrase, a modern re-configuration of Orwell’s argument might suggest that ‘who controls the future controls the present, and that all is required is an unending series of victories over your imagination’.

Troubled by society’s overwhelming willingness to be guided by futurologists (as some ‘scientific’ workers of futures ideas are known as) with what he identified to be selfish goals, Max Dublin wrote in Futurehype: ‘A well articulated vision of the future is the natural centrepiece of most ideological systems, especially those on the farther ends of the political spectrum’. He explains, ‘extreme ideologies all envision the playing out of a great drama over time, and the final [dramatic] climax — be it the “withering” of the state if it is an ideology of the Left, or some sort of breathtaking apocalypse in which the world will be destroyed and/or renewed if it is one on the Right — is always played out at some, usually unspecified, period in the future’. [20] Behind contemporary ‘new age’ enthusiasm, Slaughter identifies ‘atavistic conceptions of futures involving territoriality, domination and conquest’, prompting him to conclude — having traced the military and strategic roots of American futurism: ‘behind every large-scale project of the future lie interests that are served in the present’. [21]

Ivan Illich argued in 1971 that futurology promoted cultural contraction along technocratic lines. He remarked in Deschooling Society that ‘research now going on about the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalisation of values’. [22] Works such as Toffler’s Future Shock trilogy (1990), Hazel Henderson’s Creating Alternative Futures (1978), Lelia Green and Roger Gunery’s Framing Technology: Society, Choice and Change (1994), Oliver Markley’s Changing Images of Man (1974), Birch’s Confronting the Future (1993), Slaughter’s Future Concepts and Powerful Ideas (1996), and Lynette Hunter’s Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing and the Arts (1999), represent attempts to locate technocratic and meritocratic values within society and to distinguish which inherited meanings from the industrial era have ‘gone sour’. [23] Taken together, they mark a growing widespread movement of retreat from history, culture and tradition in the reconceptualisation of meaning in the future. Primarily the central process at work within the social sciences (which these texts are products of) is the growing distrust of objectivity. Post-positivist, postmodernism, feminist, poststructuralist and interpretivist critiques have eroded the basis on which the social sciences once claimed certainty about what was being studied and said.

In reopening the Australian civilisation debate in his book of the same name, Nile noted a similar retreat, that the present argument was ‘informed by the fin de siecle and fin de millennium, a period of extraordinary change and great communal soul-searching’. We are caught ‘in the midst of tremendous upheavals in our social, cultural and personal relationships’, he wrote six years prior to the turn of the millennium, in an age ‘when time-honoured intellectual, emotional and economic assumptions neither sustain nor comfort us’. Nile saw the ‘complexion of the country … to be transforming before our eyes’, more than lightly encouraged by the twin group fantasies of fin de siecle and fin de millennium. [24]

It is useful then to speak of the ‘future’ as a situated textuality with specific invested interests and a power to transform and control. In this view, it is possible to describe the purpose of futurestext in media and media practice as intending to produce some form of material change, as elicited by the more powerful members of a society, a community or a collective.

Futurestext and the Consumption of Performative Transformational Rituals

Futurestext can be dispersed along different modes of communication through Arjun Appadurai’s ‘mediascape’ or Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘datasphere’. Consumption of a futurestext can be quite widespread and diverse as futures are exportable between individuals, groups and nations. The future is — like a sign, or a nation (Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’) or even a television audience (John Hartley’s ‘invisible fiction’) — a construct of particular institutions which, when linked to the means of both producing and organising meaning in social contexts, can be internalised widely by an audience that Toby Miller has defined to be composed of ‘well-tempered citizens’. [25] This socialisation of a thing produced (that is, a ‘futurestext’) has associations with Horkheimer and Adorno’s theorisation of the culture industry. In a modern setting, their argument refers to the power of radio, cinema and television (and the related if less sophisticated output of advertising) to transform value into a product (or lifestyle) exchanged within a capitalist system. This account does not assume that the individual is a passive subject in the sequence of cultural administration. Yet, on terms of this project’s investigation, the cultural production of a ‘futurestext’ (say, the iconic ’2000′) at the level of mass dispersion and consumption can both embrace and constrain all humans subject to its influence.

As an illustration, although celebrating millennial eve on the Sydney Harbour may benefit status from obtaining expensively priced (and therefore rare) seating at a restaurant, they were in fact as powerless before the textual politics of ’2000′ as non-celebrating citizens. Neither group could affect any change on the imminence of ’2000′ as an ‘event’. Why not? Because, ’2000′ had become more than another date on the anno Domini calendar. It had become both a transnational and translational (to appropriate Arjun Appadurai’s terminology) product toward the close of the 1990s. It was transnational because viewing the ‘dawn of 2000′ as it moved across the face of the planet (and therefore across national boundaries, as if through a form of international turnstiles) during the 24-hour live telecast — perhaps best described as a moment of the millennial ‘tuned-in planet’ — confirmed the spatialisation of millennial ‘appearance’. A non-existence of national limits was made viewable by ‘global’ media technologies: the ‘millennium’ seemingly travelled everywhere. No nation could hide from it. In a collusion of different rituals of celebration — and perhaps instances of what might be called ‘temporal cross-dressing’ — millions watched and celebrated on the night of 31 December 1999 as representatives of native epistemologies (for example, the Maori in New Zealand) welcomed in the year 2000 (which is fundamentally a western site of meaning and not Maori ritual) alongside the competition of conspicuous consumption in fireworks between western subjects (say, Sydney Harbour and Thames River, London).

The year 2000 was translational because it became a broadly disseminated discourse in which the particularities of a culture were subsumed to celebrating the millennium in a ‘global’ framework. Though the social specificity of producing meaning in ’2000′ was tied at times to western contextual locations and social systems of value (Big Ben, Sydney Harbour Bridge, Times Square, fireworks, dance and drink), ’2000′ was also translated into non-western (other) sites of culture, often with the invention of a new tradition (‘celebrating 2000′ was not an activity usually coded within society). In other words, celebrating ’2000′ became a global rite de passage which marked both a transition from one stage of life to another (from the second millennium to the third) and the submission of individual societies to the collective requirements of ritualising ’2000′ as an event. Primetime television certainly broadcast this sense of celebratory cohesion; as a unity through incorporation of the diverse practices commemorating the year 2000.

Futurestext and the Western Inscription of Time: Temporal Nullius

In the closing year of the twentieth century, the ‘world’ appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be engaged in anticipating the future at a millennial turning point. Yet, Australian ‘faith’ in 2000AD was constituted as pre-thematic, pre-theoretical and culturally imported: ‘pre-theoretical’ in that popular awareness of an imminent millennium was not largely nor actively informed by the ‘cognitive interests of an academic discipline’; ‘pre-thematic’ in that ’2000AD’ assumed a position of commonplace involvement in contemporary public dialogue; and ‘culturally imported’ as belief in 2000AD was not exclusive nor indigenous to Australia. Curious questions arise as to the nature of belief in this futurestext. What did contemporary society believe in the year 2000 and why? In what way did Australian television networks and media impute the potential of 2000AD? Did the urge towards global chronometric cohesion insist (and here the project of politicising time extends beyond national boundaries) that other cultures use this form of counting and think about the year 2000 in the same regard that western societies did?

We might recognise that cultural uses of time are never for minor effects. Gaynor Macdonald argues that notions of time and timelessness — and the related phenomena of stasis, tradition, history and change — have ‘always been a part of the politics of constructing Aboriginalities in Australia’. [26] Exploring the intersection between concepts of time and political power within Aboriginal contexts, Macdonald continues: ‘Employed as means of inclusion and exclusion, notions of time have been an effective medium of governance. More recently they have become part of Aboriginal strategies for negotiating access to resources. Concepts of time have been politicised and contested, for instance, in recent native title and stolen generation debates’. [27]

When we use the calendar medium non-reflexively, we accept and reinscribe the belief — and Williams has argued that it is nothing more or less than an ‘arbitrary’ collective act of faith — that it is our cultural practice of anno Domini computation that literally makes possible continuity into the ‘secular millennium’. Yet the act of ‘arriving at the millennium’ is a triumph of collective awareness in which a series of narratives around a structured and fictional object of time (the millennium) converge. Media heraldry of pre- and post-millennial activism facilitates this ‘semantic innovation’ and the new temporal locus (2000AD plus) is ‘brought into the world by means of language’. In ‘synthesising the heterogeneous’, dissimilar content within the numerous millennial narratives (including their story-tellers and audiences) is gathered together and ‘harmonised’. With print and electronic modes of communication eliciting dramatic responses of celebration, the multiplicity of events and structural features of the immediate future are ‘seized all at once’ by the ‘authorial overview’ of 2000AD. [28]

In other words, there arose a formal agreement among the communities that produce and maintain Australia’s ‘timing’ that the ‘millennium’ should assert symbolic power in various culturally accepted and novel forms. How these powers (or themes of celebration, transformation, etc) are written into the ‘symbolic and actual life-space’ of our lives, how ‘ideas, ideologies, commitments and particular ways of construing’ the future world are signified, legitimised and communicated, how mainstream definitions of ‘millennium’, for example, are imputed in the processes of cultural editing and social and cultural change, is worthy of serious enquiry. [29] ‘New images’, admits Elise Boulding, ‘generate new behaviour possibilities’. Particular images — like the millennium as signified by the symbol ’2000′, used often during the 1990s to structure possibilities of historical transformation (moving from the ‘twentieth century’ and into the ‘twenty-first century’) — are ‘selectively empowered’ and ‘explode later … into the realised future’. She concludes, ‘in any cultural epoch, only certain images of the future out of a much wider pool … develop enough cultural resonance to affect process, and to move toward actualisation’. [30] In what way do certain images become selected and written into the contemporary cultural code? How is one future certified over another?

Perhaps, as a theoretical extension of Ryan’s ‘blank space’, there exists in the post industrialised imagination a ‘blank time’ that invites (along with potent imperialist associations) a form of western inscription: a temporal nullius as it were, a time existing in a ‘blank’ state as a precondition to exploration, that is ‘ours’ for colonising. Certainly, exploring the millennium prior to its televised ‘revelation’ seemed to be something of a national obsession in Australia during the 1990s. For a short time, dramas imaging the twenty-first century, popular science docutainments on the future of the human species, social commentators forecasting Australia twenty-years ahead, endtimers heralding an impending apocalypse, shops marketing year 2000 merchandise (from spectacles to boxers), advertisements using 2000 or apocalyptic signifiers to bolster sales — all these things became centred in popular and public consciousness. How was this possible?

Much like explorers ‘(re)spatialised the Australian continent’ [31] at the time of colonisation, their activities ‘bridging the gap between Australia as it was imagined and Australia as it was “discovered”’, [32] narratives of exploration are frequently deployed to re-temporalise the future around moments of implied public significance. Towards 2000 (also a title of one such published narrative), descriptive accounts and imaginative fictions produced by pop futurists and vocal social elites (scientists, commentators, politicians, sporting figures, academics, etc) followed an imperative to ‘know’ the future surrounding the ‘turn’ of the millennium and beyond. Their fictions were implemented and recycled via newspapers, dramatic displays, television and radio broadcasts, publications, symposia and conferences (those mechanisms that Benedict Anderson identifies for providing imaginary links between citizens). As an example, the Australian television program Beyond 2000 (formerly Towards 2000) achieved a similar aim through a discourse of scientific edutainment. Throughout each weekly episode, it sustained an evolving relationship between the fictional object (‘future’) and a new human-centred temporal fact (‘controllable and thereby knowable’), contrary to the future’s otherwise ‘naturalised’ state (‘unknowable’). Texts like this direct their audiences away from considering that what is written or spoken about the future is a human product or political fiction supported by social convention. This creates a site of textual contestation in which futurestexts are authenticated by their authors — that is, environmental ‘warnings’ are ‘proved’ by ‘scientists’, ‘horoscopes’ are ‘foreseen’ by ‘astrologists’ and even ‘signs of the times’ tracts are ‘revealed’ by ‘believers’. These fictions and others like them contribute to the way Australians collectively constru(ct)ed a sense of the time in which they live. In this manner, the future around 2000 was situated in the Australian imagination and moved from being ‘unknown’ to ‘known’ in a process of possessing time.

Futurestext and Writing

In terms of Paul Carter’s classic investigation of exploration texts and Cartesian techniques of apprehending space, the millennium was explored, colonised and then exploited. It was written into being and the future moved from temporal nullius to a landscape of futurestexts, a futurescape.

The notion of ‘writing’ and ‘signification’ used here are understood ‘as processes of transformation rather than representation’ [33] and, in this sense, it is argued that futurestext ‘act’, that they produce and position the future as a social process or discrete detail to which citizens respond accordingly. [34] Anne Game, in her 1991 work Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive Sociology, begins with ‘the basic semiotic assumption that culture or the social is written, that there is no extra-discursive real outside cultural systems’. [35] In other words, the way an author conceptualises the future creates (writes) the text that is disseminated. There are no ‘real’ futures (text) apart from what is perceived that way. Cultural innovation or transformation can be closely related in this manner with the production, combination and utilisation of selected, arguably ‘real’, futures images.

Slaughter makes significant claims for the power of futures work in analysing transformation: ‘By understanding the present cultural transition less in terms of the external regulation or control of techniques and technologies, than as a transformative process involving breakdowns and renewals of meanings, we penetrate to the core of all our major concerns’. [36] This has a certain resonance with discussions on culture shift, Mackay’s ‘age of redefinition’, or Nile’s ‘becoming civilisation’ thesis. Australia may very well be a text itself, still in the process of being (re)written by authors whom we only occasionally get glimpses of. ‘Australia’, it can be argued, is an example of what post-structuralists envisage as the ‘subject-in-process’. That is, one subject out of many dispersed over a range of multiple positions, sites of struggle and discourses, which — defying what has been called the ‘master narrative’ — nonetheless becomes an optional (and often dominant, as times of war or the Olympics would indicate) construct of national identity out of various signifying codes and practices. The move from monoculture to multicultural and back during the 1990s reveals that this is an ongoing process

Yet within the expanded definition that futurestext might indicate all forms of textual and discursive practice involving futures thinking, questions of power and desire in (futures) textual production inevitably connect with questions of public accountability and the material effects of (futures) texts. Depending on one’s subjective relation to any given futurestext, some constructs of Australia’s future appear more ‘real’ or carry greater meaning than others: not all futures are created equal.

Futurestext and the Subjectivity / Objectivity Dichotomies

Critical discourse analysis has in part been formative of my own understandings of the situatedness of futures thinking and futurestext. Within feminist postructuralist accounts of cultural studies and critical discourse analysis, a special reading of the term ‘method’ is available through the work of Alison Lee, Cate Poynton, Sandra Harding, Patti Lather and Cleo Cherryholmes. In drawing on poststructuralist understandings of ‘method’, Lee and Poynton provide a useful metaphor for the power relations involved in textual inscription which can be applied to and instructive in describing uses of futurestext: ‘[P]oststructuralist readings’, write the editors of Culture and Text, ‘view research and knowledge production as always and inevitably an enactment of power relations’. [37] Research practices viewed in this way can be construed more as:

“Inscriptions of legitimation” than procedures [which] help us get closer to some “truth” that is capturable via language … [This] allows an understanding of the force of textuality, its formalised strategies for convincingness, its speech acts. [38]

But this is not to concede the form of ‘textualisation’ that Marxism and socialist feminists disapprove of in its ‘disregard for the lived relations of domination that ground the “play” of arbitrary reading’. [39] As a site of epistemological struggle, what is at stake in deconstructing futurestext is the capacity to depose ‘default’ definitions and ideological functions of the ‘future’ — that is, ‘given’ static conceptions versus alternative dynamic perceptions, ‘business as usual’ versus strategic realignment, industrial epistemologies versus critical futures methodologies. It is to problematise the understandings, concepts and values of the future that are mistaken as ‘given’ and theoretically neutral. It is to gain ‘access to meanings and commitments that tend to be hidden precisely because they frame our world’. The reader becomes not a ‘passive observer’ but a ‘co-author, fully capable of calling forth meaning, purpose and intention’. [40]

Futurestext and the Theorisation of Futures Positions

The theorisation of situated/positional futures in Australia and Australian studies requires a metalanguage concerning the future for revealing the potential usefulness of fine-grained futures description and an account that attends to the connections between political, social, cultural, linguistic, institutional and theoretical dimensions of futures-thinking. The type of conception of textual and cultural practice informing this theorisation derives principally from intersections between cultural studies accounts of ‘situated knowledges’, ‘intertextuality’ and ‘culture’ and Australian studies accounts of ‘civilisation’, ‘becoming’ and ‘writing’.

Taking key writers in turn to define each of these terms, Lee and Poynton, in their work Culture and Text, focus on a poststructuralist understanding of text: ‘”Situated knowledges” offers a way to think about the circumstances in which texts arise and how they are used and mean … [These] knowledges are distributed through assemblages of texts situated in appropriate contexts, where “text” may involve various forms of semiosis, not just language, and where “setting” both is and is not “context” and certainly involves “institution” … [I]ndividuals come to speak as particular kinds of subjects — to speak themselves into being — through speaking the discourses that enable the particular institution’. [41] John Frow and Meaghan Morris, following the work of Raymond Williams, cite culture as a ‘way of life’: ‘the ‘whole way of life” of a social group as it is structured by representation and by power … a network of representations — texts, images, talk, codes of behaviour, and the narrative structures organising these — which shapes every aspect of social life’. [42]

Nile constructs the notion of Australian civilisation as a text written in lies. ‘A book on civilisation should very likely be full of wonderful lies’, opens Australian Civilisation, ‘and a book on Australia would seem to require, almost as a matter of course, that lies be told. This much, at least, those two marvellously loaded words “Australia’ and “civilisation” appear to share in common. “It’s all lies”’. [43] Yet with these lies comes an inevitable tension with truth and legitimacy: ‘At the heart of settler Australian anxieties are deep seeded feelings of illegitimacy … Australia is a tension pulling in two directions simultaneously, of a civilisation that has not yet arrived but just about to end — and the end of civilisation, as much as Australia’s unconventional beginnings, are with Australia much of the time’. [44]

Similarly puzzled by what Ffion Murphy calls ‘one of the most persistent questions connected to the study of Australia: does Australia have a unique culture in any sense of the word that may, for whatever reason, be worthy of study?’, Cameron Richards searched for a methodological framework for celebrating and critiquing Australia and was compelled ultimately to make sense of Richard White’s ‘brilliant if undeveloped and contradictory insight that it is not so important whether the images of Australia “are true or false, but how they are used” … [It seemed] that the “paradox” of Australian Studies is largely a result of critics approaching the forms and discourse of Australian cultural history as if they were either literally true of false’. [45] With the publication of Writing Australia: New Talents 21C, Murphy responds to the 1990s silencing of the ‘knowledge class’ and argues for a renewal of the public intellectual debate and a (re)’writing’ of Australian studies. Concerned with the practices and politics of representation within Australian studies and the public sphere, Murphy problematises the active citizenship of intellectuals and mobilises a re-invigoration of the public intellectual voice:

With breathtaking simplicity, just about any suggestion of detailed cultural analysis could be swept aside on the basis that the questions raised were too “academic”, merely ‘hypothetical”, overly “partisan”, not “dignified”, lacking “common sense” or outside the bounds of “reasonableness” … Linguistically, Australia moved from “reconciliation” to the ‘black armband view of history”, from “multiculturalism” to the “mainstream”, from ‘tolerance” to ‘un-Australian”, and from “the republic” to the “monarchy”. Arguably, societies most need their public intellectuals when circumstances do not favour them. [46]

In closing the introduction, Murphy challengingly lays out the new canvas of Australian studies, moving away from nationalistic forms of Australian studies enquiry to a more critical, dynamic, pro-active frame of discussion:

Writing Australia suggests that public intellectual inquiry is in very capable hands. Next generation researchers and writers are more than able to assume responsibilities for maintaining and extending studies into Australia … Australian studies may now mean something quite different to traditional practices and the various attempts made in the 1970s and 1980s to establish Australian studies as a discreet and identifiable academic discipline. It may also mean something quite different to the classic divide and territorial disputes between Australian and cultural studies referred to by Cameron Richards. [47]
Futurescape

This brings us to the second term of reference: futurescape. Futurestexts are the building blocks of — to extend Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ and Arjun Appadurai’s ‘imagined worlds’ — what I call the ‘futurescape’.

What is a ‘futurescape’? It can be reasonably argued that we live within societies that increasingly value information, data, images and ideologies; that increasingly places emphasis on colonising intellectual territory through various novel forms of media; that seeks to empower those possessing the greater territory of knowledge; and which promotes the acquisition of information for its own sake. Social stature today is measured by how much access an individual has to the datasphere, how much interaction an individual has with differing and competing forms of data. The Internet has contributed to eroding maps and boundaries, to eroding territorial frontiers. Little space remains to conquer. One of the last places left for our societies to explore — perhaps a frontier — is time itself: namely the future. It might be argued that power today has very little to do with material possessions and financial assets acquired in a lifetime; power, it might be suggested, is instead determined by the amount of control an individual can exercise over the(ir) future and the(ir) concept of the future.

By this, I mean the politics of actively inventing the future and the politics of promoting a dominant future that includes one set and excludes another set of beliefs. To reason along these lines requires an examination of the link between citizen and society in the cultural construction of futures and facing some questions about the nature of belief in the social fantasy of futures. In the contemporary context of ‘approaching the third millennium’ we might ask about this future: what is our relationship its conceptualisation? Which individuals have a voice in select or prominent visualisations of the future? In what way do particular groups control or influence the expression of the future? Which individuals of these groups create the icons and symbols of the future? Are these icons subject to modification?

Society’s perspective of the future has expanded into a true region of prime socio-temporal territory — a millennium, a place of time seemingly as real and open as the world was half a millennium ago, with unknowable, unstable and dangerously competitive elements. This new space I call the futurescape. It is not an objectively defined space that appears the same from every angle of vision. Rather, the futurescape is the site of human intellectual endeavour, economic extrapolation, social trending, and political invention. As a matter of form, there are at least two distinct futurescapes at work within Australian society, though in describing them their boundaries are by no means definite. They are the theological futurescape and the secular futurescape.

Theological Futurescapes

Young’s argument that ‘the gazer into the future has never yet found a really comfortable intellectual position, and perhaps never should unless, that is, he is a preacher’, has wide applicability in the theological futurescape which is replete with preachers of all types promulgating a future. [48] The theological futurescape is characterised by four primary features. First, it is a thematic area that anticipates the future in light of biblical prophecy, especially the key text, Revelation. Introduced in its first chapter as ‘the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto Him to show his servants things which must occur shortly come to pass’, at the cusp of 2000 years of the Common Era, evangelical groups are still proclaiming shortly but with ever greater conviction. It is of scholarly interest that evangelist groups mediate the book of Revelation — often through complicated, sometimes unrecognised links to the secular world – and shape the communication of this text to Christian readers in a way that no two Christian groups connect us to the text in the same process. Yet all claim that their reading of Revelation and contemporary times is true and accurate. Hence, the theological futurescape is competitive where the prime currency is membership numbers, adherents to prophetic doctrine.

Second, modern-day evangelist groups tend to make distinctions between scholarly and faithful approaches to biblical prophecy. The scholarly approach does not view biblical prophecy as self-contained or self-authenticating. Contemporary evangelist groups are aware of this and so seek to uncover the connections in prophecy that are not apparent on the surface, the latent connections, the hidden structures and the invisible systems of biblical prophecy of which the secular world is a part. In this sense, theological chronologies that ‘prove’ the prophetic faculty of biblical prophecy, that ‘prove’ the end of the world is tomorrow, have become a fad of our age. Considerable effort is expended in establishing the truth behind a chronology and the identification of Endtime signs alongside the legitimisation of biblical codes of conduct. In effect, the theological futurescape is prophecy-driven.

Third, in present-day evangelism, biblical prophecy takes on distinctive hues, shapes and qualities reflective of the contemporary society the evangelist inhabits. The approach of the year 2000 seems to evoke excess response from evangelist groups throughout the world and such communities respond strongly to new technologies, political patterns and manoeuvring on the global stage, and the turn of the millennium. Whereas the secular futurescape, it can be said, is being funnelled down to a key calendar point, that is the turning of the millennium, the sheer inability to pinpoint biblical prophecy to a specific timeline that every evangelist group agrees upon has cultivated a theological futurescape of competing chronologies and contested Endtime interpretations. The Theological Futurescape is conspicuous for its lack in homogeneity.

Finally, the Futurescape is inhabited by evangelists, an umbrella term used here to refer broadly to Christian fundamentalists, evangelicals, Pentecostals, charismatics and Christian cultist who insist on some sort of spiritual rebirth as a criterion for entering the kingdom of heaven, who often impose exacting behavioural standards on the faithful and intense pondering on the outworking of prophecy in our time, and whose doctrines, organisations, publications and activities comprise the theological futurescape.

Secular Futurescapes

The concerns and inhabitants of the Secular Futurescape are politically different to those of the theological persuasion. For example, within the Australian secular futurescape, probing questions flourish about our collective national direction, questions posed by, for example, politicians, social commentators, secularists, academics, and issue-activists: What will be Australia’s orientation within the proposed new international order? Will Australia in the twenty-first century still be responsible for its own well-being and self-reliant development based upon national sovereignty and the creative utilisation of its resources? What role will ecological sustainability play in the make-up of future Australian society? Will Australia have self-assured and self-confident control over its own destiny? Or will Australia’s development as an autonomous entity be jeopardised by other nation’s decisions? Will the international forces that have to date greatly influenced Australian politics, economic development, foreign policy and cultural tastes, take over completely?

For the Australian seeking to colonise the futurescape with their own intellectual flag, exploration of these questions involves reconsideration of what it means to be “Australian” today and consideration of the alternative scenarios for future Australia which have emerged in recent years (of which the Ecologically Sustainable Society and the Multicultural Republic are the most controversial, ambitious and far-reaching). In a substantial respect, there is a growing, albeit intensifying, call for a millennial dimension, or at any rate some millennial potential, to such scenarios (a quick example would be that Australia should be a Republic for the Sydney 2000 Olympics) and within secular futures-thinking itself, more so than any corresponding period of prospective thought that has gone before.

Such intersections between Australian-futures rhetoric and the millennial motif repertoire are enhanced by the chronological “fact” of the secular millennium “being so close”. Among the projections and planning of future Australia, 2000AD is so charged with profound symbolic connotations that it has become the cornerstone of both our signifying practices of futurity and our chronological framework for the future. From this vantage point, popular and “official” futurists seek to identify the images of post-2000AD Australia that are “possible”, “desirable” or “necessary” and outline the current objectives under way to achieve and relate the future image of society to the present. However, these explorations and scenarios do not exist as pure abstract imaginings or in an ideological vacuum totally disassociated from contemporary culture and the rhythms of civilisation. Instead, they are anchored quite strongly within: a generated context of great communal anticipation towards this moment named the ‘turn(ing) of the millennium’; for example, the Australian newspapers running articles that ask, ‘how will you celebrate 2000AD?’ on the assumption that Australians will or should; a manufactured context of importance about our modes of signification and identification in the future through invalidating current symbols; for example, those with a public voice seek to ask ‘Does the Australian flag adequately represent our future identity?’ (But what are the cultural implications of throwing Australia’s symbols and identity into question, specifically when related to the necessity and practicability of shaping the future?); and an existing hierarchy of political power where those who seek and are able to influence the direction of our culture do so by infusing and grafting new ideas onto our chronological framework (for example, prime minister Paul Keating often linked the political call for an Australian republic with the year 2000.

Like any landscape, it has different features that arouse our attention and distract us: these range from mainstream representations of the secular futurescape, particularly those sci-fi entertainments exported to Australia from America, to home-grown advertisements which market the future as a flexible but attainable commodity.

Futurespeak

Futurespeak is the language and discursive strategies used to talk and think about the future. Typically, there are three primary metaphoric paradigms for sensing/tensing the future: the future as ‘where’; the future as ‘when’; and the future as ‘what.’

The future as ‘where’ or ‘elsewhere’ began with Thomas Moore’s Utopia. Speculation about a more just society and sensational fabulations about unusual peoples and cultures, tended for a considerable period to be set on remote islands and great southern continents, presented as hearsay, dialogues or traveller’s tales. The grand archetype of traveller’s tales is Gulliver’s Travels by virtue of Gulliver’s voyages to places where he has encounters with strange creatures. In contemporary times, the spatial metaphor of ‘where’, as some kind of place, had the effect of locating the future in some direction ‘forwards’, as derived from the scouting party or the ship of traveller’s tales. Such metaphors of ‘where’ and its rhetorical answer ‘forwards’ as the direction in which we would like to encounter the future, condition people to think time in terms of a linear direction, with the future ‘down the track’, and implies that we are ‘advancing’ towards it. Certainly, visions of the ‘near future’, authenticated by the secular mythology of physical and social progress ‘forward’, are pervasive in contemporary futurestext.

Second, metaphors implying that the future is in some manner ‘forward’ sense the future simply at a later and somewhat flexible date. In this sense, the future is located in some future time, and in the conversion of ‘elsewhere’ to ‘elsewhen’, contemporary futurespeak locates the future at some forward date like, say, the twenty-first century. And third, there is the future as ‘what’. In this framework, the future may be understood in terms of metaphors deriving from conditions, values, beliefs, the governing order, etc. In the contemporary society this can include the exchange of references to the new world order, the ecologically sustainable society, the pacific century, the multicultural republic of Australia, a return to a prior golden age, and a theocratic kingdom. [49]

References

1. ibid., p 135.
2. Joseph Brodsky, 1940-1996. Less Than One.
3. Yujiro Hayashi, ‘The Direction and Orientation of Futurology as a Science’, International Future research Congress, Oslo, 12-15 September 1967.
4. François Hetman, Futuribles, no 24, 10 February, 1962.
5. Paul Hawken, The Next Economy, New York, Henry Colt, 1984.
6. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, London, Pan Books, 1981.
7. Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener, The Year 2000, New York, Macmillan, 1967.
8. Quoted in Dublin, op. cit., p 112.
9. Alison Lee, ‘Discourse Analysis and Cultural (re)Writing’, in Alison Lee and Cate Poynton (eds), Culture and Text, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 2000, p 194.
10. M Mulkay, Science and the Sociology of Knowledge, New South Wales, Allen and Unwin, 1979, p 34.
11. Appadurai, op. cit., pp 221-2.
12. Lee, op. cit., pp 189-90.
13. ibid.
14. Russell Ackoof, Creating the Corporate Future: Plan or Be Planned For, New York, Wiley, 1981.
15. Longley Arthur, in Barcan and Buchanan, op. cit., p 37.
16. Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p 105.
17. Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, ‘A Prospect of Future Regularity: Spatial Technologies in Colonial Australia’, in Ruth Barcan and Ian Buchanan (eds), Imagining Australian Space: Cultural Studies and Spatial Inquiry, University of Western Australia Press, 1999, p 48-9.
18. Dublin, op. cit., p 100.
19. ibid., p 99. See also Annie Vinokor, ‘Malthusian Ideology and the Crisis of the Welfare State’ and John Sherwood, ‘Engels, Marx, Malthus and the Machine’, in American Historical Review, vol 90, no 4, 1985.
20. George Orwell, 1984, p 34.
21. Max Dublin, Futurehype, Victoria, Penguin, 1989, p 104.
22. Slaughter, op. cit., p 228.
23. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, New York, Harper and Row, 1971, p 2.
24. Slaughter, op. cit., p 226.
25. Richard Nile, Australian Civilisation, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1994, p vii.
26. Miller, op. cit.
27. Gaynor Macdonald, ‘Time and the creation of Aboriginalities’, In/Between, http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au /history/conferences/inbetween/.
28. ibid.
29. Slaughter, op. cit., p 95.
30. Elise Boulding, ‘The Dynamics of Imaging Futures’, World Future Society Bulletin, 1978, vol 12, no 5, pp 1-8.
31. Hughes-d’Aeth, op. cit., p 48.
32. Longley Arthur, op. cit., p 45.
33. Ann Game and Andrew Metcalfe, Passionate Sociology, London, Sage, 1996, p 91.
34. Paul Rabinow, ‘Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Postmodernity in Anthropology’, in James Clifford and George Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, University of California Press, pp 234-61.
35. Anne Game, Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive Sociology, Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1991, p 4.
36. Slaughter, op. cit., p 228.
37. Lee and Poynton, op. cit., p 198.
38. ibid.
39. Haraway, op. cit., p 274.
40. Slaughter, op. cit., p 228.
41. Lee and Poynton, op. cit., p 5.
42. John Frow and Meaghan Morris (eds), Australian Cultural Studies: a reader, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, p viii.
43. Richard Nile (ed.), Australian Civilisation, op. cit., p 1.
44. Richard Nile, ‘Civilisation’, in Richard Nile (ed.), The Australian Legend and its Discontents, University of Queensland Press, 2000.
45. Cameron Richards, ‘The Australian Paradox(es) Revisited’, in Ffion Murphy (ed.), Writing Australia: New Talents 21C, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2000, p 175.
46. Murphy, op. cit., pp 3-4.
47. ibid., p 11.
48. M Young, Forecasting and the Social Sciences, Heinnemann, 1968, as quoted in Slaughter, op. cit., p 212.
49. This is the next part of the thesis digitising project and represents chapter three. Portions of this material originally appeared in Jason Ensor, Towards Critical Cultural Foresight: Australian Futures Studies, Perth, Western Australia: Arts Naked, 2007, and in Jason Ensor, “Towards Critical Cultural Foresight: Australian Futures Studies”, Master of Arts thesis, School of English, Media Studies and Art History / Australian Studies Centre, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, 2001. Some references above may point to information in previous chapters of this thesis.

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