Culture

Critical Foresight: Alt. Styles

Through this investigation of contemporary futurestext I argue that fragmentation of Australia’s future perspective along apocalyptic fault lines is most visible during the last decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, apocalyptic subjects exercise a strong influence over Australia’s internal styles of thinking about the future towards the close of the 1990s. During this period, many religious organisations through their publishing arms provided an intellectual justification and articulated account of their apocalyptic and endist positions that usually always opposed dominant cultural values of progress. The default view is to regard their accounts as positioned on the margins of society. Yet their styles of futures-thinking — which suggested a form of apocalyptic anticipation towards the times ahead — were produced and expressed within a specific historical, cultural and symbolic conjuncture of late twentieth century globalisation, postmodernism and pre-millennial apocalyptic expectation inclusive of society.

Richard Landes, director of the Centre for Millennial Studies in Boston and close observer of millennial ‘movements’ and ‘moments’ in recent American history, has explored uses of the relationship between the first apocalypse (1000 anno Domini) and contemporary millennium activities around 2000AD for understanding approaches to the third millennium. Drawing on the social effects of the calendar shift in the year 1000, he argues that although apocalyptic, millennial discourse is usually studied as a marginal occurrence, staying at the fringes of mainstream society, producing minor, mostly ineffectual communities that attract small numbers of adherents and occasionally arouse wider public attention in their habits of setting a date for the end of the world, it can occupy positions of centrality in society from time to time. Landes calls the infrequent but nonetheless intense instances of public curiosity around announced dates of Armageddon as ‘media apocalypses’. Media apocalypses are unique events in which the brief public broadcast of marginal styles of apocalyptic thinking can galvanise the appeal of an ‘end-of the-world-as-we-know-it’ (shorthanded in internet circles as ‘teotwawki’) date on a broader, less marginal scale, albeit until the customary prophetic ‘no show’.

In general terms, this configuration between apocalyptic margin and secular centre is reproduced quite significantly within Australian media and scholarship. Australia has not been immune from short-lived but intense moments of media apocalypse in an otherwise secularised journey through time. On 19 January 1976, the preferred place to be in Australia was anywhere but Adelaide, which was prophesied by a housepainter to be washed away by a tsunami — God’s watery ‘revenge on Adelaide for becoming a sin city’. It made local headlines and popular history:

Hamish Robertson: Good morning. I’m Hamish Robertson, this is AM. And first, let’s say a cheery Good Morning, Adelaide, nice to see you’re still with us. Today of course is The Day, January 19th, which if an Adelaide housepainter-cum-clairvoyant can be believed, is the day the city could meet its doom. There’s to be an earthquake and tidal wave. No hard, or even soft, scientific facts mind you, just a feeling. But Adelaide has taken heed, it seems, and their King Canute, Premier Don Dunstan, is down at Glenelg Jetty today to prove there’s nothing to worry about. Also watching the water lap around the jetty is Jim Bonner.

Jim Bonner: The Glenelg Jetty at this moment probably looks the same as it does at this time of the day every summer, with the first few tourists and would-be swimmers just starting to turn up. I don’t know if any of them are taking the day off work, but they might be here for the party that is meant to get under way soon. A pastry-cook is going to sell pasties and orange juice in anticipation of a big crowd. He’ll be dressed for the occasion in case anything unusual occurs: in a bow tie, bathers, flippers and snorkel. There’s also a report of insurance company employees walking to work wearing wetsuits and underwater diving gear. But job absenteeism is one of the big worries as a result of what Mr Dunstan describes as the ‘quite nonsensical hysteria arising from the earthquake and tidal wave prediction.’

Don Dunstan: There is absolutely no basis for it at all. And I would not make a statement about it because I think it’s such nonsense, but for the fact that it has already caused a very great deal of community damage, and is likely to cause more from the reports and complaints that have been made to me. There have been families that have put themselves into debt to move out of South Australia at that time, there are other families who have sold their houses when they couldn’t afford to do so. That sort of thing has happened amongst some poorer sections of the community. I’m trying to see to it that there is no more damage, and trying to reassure people that there is absolutely nothing in this at all. [1]

In Australian scholarship, apocalyptic styles of approaching the future are conventionally read as strategies of individuation (expecting an ‘end of things’) resisting dominant, mainstream forms of futures thinking (anticipating a ‘progress of things’). That is, users of apocalyptic styles are commonly situated at the margins of society; they are seen to resist a centre of social-humanist ideas including notions of progress, secularism, technophilia and scientific extrapolation; and their associated literature, usually apocalyptic in nature, both arises from and continues the situation of struggle between margin and centre. For example, texts like the Watchtower Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom or Awake! magazines, produced by the Watchtower and Bible Tract Society (official publishing arm of the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect), were the objects of 10,279,163 hours of home-based tutoring and door-knocking activities. These texts were the ‘required reading’ in 19,368 separate Jehovah’s Witness-led Bible-study sessions in Australia 1998, an increase of 1 per cent over 1997. [2] These texts give voice to the combination of Watchtower millennial dreams and apocalyptic expectation.

Such literatures serve to maintain sectarian communitarian (as an illustration, all Jehovah’s Witnesses congregations throughout the world are synchronised to study the same weekly tract at the same time) and doctrinal cohesion. Additionally, in filtering mainstream news and events through a ‘signs of the endtimes’ sieve, magazines like the Watchtower examples, assist in framing strategies of interpretation and resistance. At least, this is the conventional view — that apocalyptic literature is mostly something external to the ‘truths’ of society that can be studied outside mainstream concepts of the Australian nation. Yet this view denies I think the power of apocalypse styles of interpretation and disallows recognising their wider hold over — and distribution throughout — the Australian national imagination. Granted, as discussed below, Australians are encouraged by mainstream media and social elites to conceptualise apocalyptic anticipation in contemporary society as fundamentally a ‘misreading’ of the future; that is, a form of sacred thinking lacking the Enlightenment-based non-apocalyptic century consciousness that situates the citizen as a subject within a specific secular history and identity (say, for example, the construction of the ’19th Century’ as Victorian or the ’20th century’ as barbaric). Apocalypse then, associated more with fin de millennium than fin de siecle, is regarded as the intellectual home of marginal thinkers who position themselves in relation to a deity or sacred history but who are positioned separate from the larger society in thought and practice like ‘goats from sheep’. But curiously, as Landes observes, ‘millennial moments are moments where this stuff [sacred history, apocalyptic expectation, etc] moves to the centre of the culture and one of the things that we want to do at the centre is follow the path’. [3]

Did Australia experience such a millennial moment in 1999? Is it indeed relevant to ask whether a millennial ‘moment’ existed in Australia around the late 1990s? To what uses were such a ‘moment’ put to? Is there a history or sequence to the ‘moment’? Did Australia move from a possessive form of century-consciousness (‘our’ century type television shows and newspaper lift-outs) to an apocalyptic awareness (‘Y2K’ gloom and doom publications, broadcasts, warnings)? Was there a symbiotic relationship between the two? I think it is possible to argue that apocalypse occupies a less marginal position in Australia today than usually thought but I wonder if it has ever occupied a marginal position? If Australians might ‘think ourselves into the place’, [4] in what way did we think ourselves into the (apocalyptic) future? If, according to Nile, ‘Australian civilisation does not go that way’, which way in fact does (or did) it go? [5]

In discovering some of the ‘paths’ into Australia’s sense of the future, I examine whether apocalyptic styles of futures thinking represent, within a responsive differentiated form of signification, a particular set of circumstances for all Australians around the millennial ‘moment’ that Mackay has defined as ‘turning point’. I argue, for these reasons, that the ‘raw material’ [6] that links together, at a symbolic level, Australia’s anticipation of the millennium — the contemporary specificity of the calendar’s ‘count up’ to 2000, the unprecedented (r)evolution within all social and cultural strata, the historical momentum of millennial prognostication — frames countercultural pictures of the future as much as it does mainstream. In this respect, it can be maintained that countercultural senses of the future do not ‘affirm only those blocked “readings” excluded from the airwaves and the newspapers … they also articulate, to a greater or lesser extent, some of the preferred meanings and interpretations’ [7] available to Australians. The apocalyptic styles, though not privileged forms, can serve contradictory purposes, finding both a marginalising voice and an echo in the signifying practices of Australian media.

The Socially Cohesive Future

On the one hand, a credible broadcast image of social cohesion about what the millennium ‘really should mean’ to Australia was manufactured through the media appropriation of countercultural subjects awaiting apocalypse (say, Y2K ‘survivalists’) and redefining them as ‘extremists’ as The Today Show, A Current Affair, and Sixty Minutes frequently expressed in their journalistic rhetoric. Newspapers similarly would print investigative exposes of socially dangerous activities within cults, emphasising their ‘difference’: ‘Preying on the innocent’, [8] ‘In the hands of God’ [9], and ‘Gas attack cult on revival trial’ [10]. Sometimes this was through satirical or tongue-in-cheek example: ‘As it happens’, remarked Phillip Adams January 1999, ‘I’m privy to significant information. Y2C has already occurred, as evidenced by the contact I’ve had with no less than three Christs. Two of them in Australia — one in Queensland and one in Tasmania — and another turned up in France wearing long white robes. He was accompanied by a bimbo-style Mary, Magdalene rather than Virgin. What’s a young columnist to do in such circumstances? How was I to pick the right Saviour? Will the real one please stand up? I chose to tell about the others and asked them to sort it out among themselves — issuing an invitation to the surviving Saviour to give me a call. Nothing has happened so far; I’ll keep you posted’. [11]

Leading up to the turn of the millennium, mainstream media presented Australians with images of ‘other’ groups (e.g., Magnificat Meal Movement, Jehovah’s Witnesses, God’s Executioners) and differentiated them as unstable and irrational while relaying back an image of the national (celebratory) expectation in ‘our lives’, framed ideologically as ‘safe’, ‘secular’ and ‘rational’. The ‘millennium’ became not only an (epochal) element in chronological time as the many media countdowns implicated, but it was also thought of as a ‘plunge into a field of social relations’ within which the ‘turn of the millennium’ brought about ‘some specific effects’. [12] In a sense the rituals of observing the passing of time, especially celebrations involving the millennial moment, are unremarkable, except that the ‘millennium’ has acted not as a formative influence on humans. This millennial moment permitted moderated eulogies of the twentieth century and a modicum of secular visionary engagement, neither of which rose above being more than analogous commentary but which paid rhetorical service to notions of change, transformation and inevitability. Examples include: ‘A prophetic rivalry: from prediction to truth’, [13] ‘The vision splendid: the world is on the brink of a new millennium, and Queensland has to take its place on the starting blocks’, [14] ‘Dark Reflections on screen: facing our fears …’, [15] and ‘Year of the high-flying porker: nothing is more certain than change’. [16]

On the other hand, apocalyptic senses of the future can be observed manifesting a broader (and perhaps stronger) ‘ideological effect’ as well in various mediums within Australia, ‘progressively colonising the cultural and ideological sphere’ of Australia’s future perspective. [17] This intensified around closer to the millennial turn. In 1999, network television broadcast peak-hour contemplative programming such as ‘Doomsday: What Can We Do?’, ‘Prophecies of the Millennium’, ‘Signs from God’, ‘Christ’s Second Coming’, ‘Nostradamus’, ‘Miracles and Visions’ and ‘Prophecy: Threat or Warning?’. These entertainment products doubled as vehicles of apocalyptic civil values because their context of reception was that of a more widespread millennial expectation. While in the service of broadcast capital — that is, ratings — these presentations provided opportunities for alternative readings (or apocalyptic decoding) and were packaged with an ideological warning in fine print: ‘The following program is based on speculation and conjecture. Viewers should explore all sources of information before reaching their own conclusions’. But real life is increasingly indistinguishable from representations of ‘real’ life and it is argued that apocalyptic senses of the future were consumed through the conjectural filter of 45-90 minute programs such as these with little space for reflection. Considering television is pitched to mainstream audiences, with mainstream readings and warnings, the implied social effect — apocalyptic thinking — ‘is exclusive to none but is shared by all alike’. [18]

In like manner, a seemingly obsessive but packaged courtship exists with disaster-related, mini-apocalyptic docutainment, where — as one advertisement goes — we ‘witness mass destruction and awesome terror’ via ‘graphic’ and ‘dramatic footage’ (Storm Warning, 3 Minutes to Impact, etc). Likewise, in registering the consumption of a millennial future teetering on the Y2K technological collapse, newspaper articles were replete with endtimes-related headlines: ‘Apocalypse … soon’, [19] ‘Apocalypse now(ish): Why are we all being so good, so correct, so righteous, so healthy? Is it a form of repentance for our ’80s sins? Do we know subconsciously, as Shane Danielsen does, that the end is nigh?’, [20] ‘Global leaders brace for casualties: millennium bug, a special report’, [21] ‘Children of the Apocalypse: The approach of the new century is filling many of us with great fear — for the economy, Australia’s social fabric and the environment. But what do the children foresee? Paola Totaro asked a group of 11-year-olds and got some surprising answers’,’ [22] ‘Apocalypse next week’, [23] ‘Apocalypse soon, say forecasters’, [24] and ‘Apocalypse Now (-ish): The visionary position … down under’, [25] ‘No need to panic just yet, but … we’re all doomed!’, [26] and ‘Is the end nigh?’. [27] Religious or alternative spirituality movements spread their apocalyptic messages via, for example, printed matter, [28] mail-order videos, [29] conferences and tours, [30] and electronic publications. [31]

Apocalypse as a Way of Life?

Lee Quinby, feminist author of Millennial Seduction: A Sceptic Confronts Apocalyptic Culture, observed the emergence of apocalyptic groups in the late twentieth century as necessarily dividing and sub-dividing, becoming more profuse closer to the turn of the millennium. Implicit in Quinby’s work is the contemporary notion that people are reporting identification with apocalyptic thought and groups more and more: ‘Some are very diluted in their form, others are much more focused and geared toward political change themselves’. [32] The persistence of apocalypse as a significant interpretative practice within Australian culture is not generally acknowledged. Yet an Australian history of apocalypse is possible. Judith Webster at the department of history, University of Adelaide, addressed the shape and multiplicities of ‘apocalyptic narratives’ in post-war Australian society in the search for a definition: how did Australia imagine the apocalypse in the new atomic era?

Optimism for the peaceful development of atomic technology and the benefits it would bring coexisted with fears of nihilistic self-destruction … Christian writers incorporated both the new atomic threat and the massive destruction of world war two into their warnings about the apocalypse. [Secondly], secular discourse, from politicians and scientists, to writers and artists …, while at odds with Christian views that the fate of the world was preordained by biblical prophecy, appropriated aspects of Judeo-Christian mythology, most importantly the themes of survival, rebirth and regeneration of society. At the same time, another strain [of secular discourse] used these eschatological images while uncharacteristically positing an end to all earthly life, without rebirth or renewal, something that the arrival of nuclear weapons had recently made a real possibility for the first time. [33]

An assumption underpinning Webster’s examination is that Australian life outside the religious frame can be affected by the mixing of nonetheless religious apocalyptic thought and images with contemporary social, cultural and technological development. This suggests that Australian national culture and apocalypse can, in some way, be linked. This connection may at first seem tenuous, but there is more to it than symbolism.

Endtime expectants are tied to doctrines of theology that define the ‘end’ in very specialised terms. These terms can be contradictory across theologica — one spiritual movement may understand Sunday worship to mark a sign of the end whereas another religious organisation might perceive something more immediate and apocalyptic in the ascendancy of smart cards — but for endtimes believers their interpretative home resides along a single intellectual path: the ‘end of the future’ is theological. The apparent explosion of apocalyptic thinking about the future during the 1990s did encourage other writers to talk of the countercultural agents of apocalyptic concepts as being like a new Australian class of undifferentiated consumers of doom. Responding to a poster that appeared throughout major Australian towns in 1992 — ‘The Final Warning of God: Jesus is Coming 1am 29th October 1992, in the air (It’s the Rapture)’ — David Bennett from the Bible Society, an interdenominational agency in Brisbane, was prompted to ask whether ‘the end of the is world is near, or is it?’. Bennett concluded that apocalypse was not in fact imminent but (reiterating the ‘misreading’ argument) was rather another misinterpreted theological narrative motivated by misguided characters unfamiliar with sound scriptural inquiry. With the layperson in mind, Bennett marked out the theological landscape used to represent and define the apocalypse in Australia in his 1996 publication The End of the World is Near. [34] However, in a paper written two months before the turn of the millennium, Bennett introduced a hidden class of character in the Armageddon script, the Endtimer, and argued that prophecy popularisation in Australia, if less visible than our western counterparts, remained alive and well in 1999. [35]

Rehabilitating the Future

I have seen the future — and it was being repaired. [36]

He is a bad man who does not pay to the future at least as much as he has received from the past. [37]

The politics of applying and interpreting the future are subject to an expanding range of social, cultural and economic factors. Efforts to recalculate the future anew, beyond the reach of apocalypse, exist but appear minimal and stretched. Recent examples are distinctly non-Australian — Matt Gronen’s Futurama and Arthur C Clarke’s 3001: The Final Odyssey evidently shift conceptions of the future from 2000AD to 3000AD. Collections of conferences have considered how the intersections between Australian culture, history, time and millennium should invite (in an critical sense) a more articulated and institutionalised shaping of futures thinking. The 1997 Start Trek and Endgame: Millennial / Politics / Narratives / Images conference encouraged papers with the blurb:

As we move toward the millennium, some consideration of its cultural significance and its possible effects is not only relevant but also timely. Does the year 2000 signal the end of (a) tradition? The beginning of a new one? In what ways might the culture’s own projects be seen to be transforming themselves? What continuities from one millennium to the next might there be? What, if anything, might postmodernity hail? [poster].

Millennial Encounters: Time, Millennia and Futurity conference in Victoria 1998 repeated a like-minded concern examining a ‘variety of cultural and epochal responses to millennia’ in a panel format since the ‘approach of a millennium inevitably generates discussions, visions and negotiations of time, past, and the possibilities of futurity’.

In similar fashion, articles in Australian newspapers published post-Y2K new year’s eve reinforce the original projected meaning of millennium as hopeful but tend to draw on technological, celebratory, revisionist and spatial metaphors, language that is inspirational but when viewed from within the emerging field of futures studies are somewhat impractical. As an illustration, Queensland Times triumphant ‘Future in our hands’ [38] implies that we have relations of power over the future — the ‘future’ as an object is ‘graspable’. Yet the special section in the same paper, titled ‘Into tomorrow: how your life will change in the new millennium’, [39] shifts readers’ front page ‘hold’ on the future away from any discourse of control: life will be changed radically by the autonomous forces (technological, social, scientific) of ‘tomorrow’, external forces that leave individuals ‘amazed’. Jean-François Lyotard wrote about this technological ‘modern neurosis’ in his discussions of postmodernism: ‘[w]e can no longer call this development by the old name of progress. This development seems to be taking place by itself, by an autonomous force or “motricity”. It doesn’t respond to a demand coming from human needs’. His work contained a warning that ‘human entities, individual or social, seem always to be destabilised by the results of this development’. [40]

‘And about time: Welcome to the start of the new millennium … or is it? What can history, other cultures and the role of the new decade (the noughties) add to this passage of time?’ [41] broods on the problem of millennial calibration and the arbitrary activity of celebration. ‘A thousand memories’, [42] ‘A new era dawns’, [43] and ‘The time of our lives’ [44] all mix century-nostalgia with Y2K-partying. The latter article begins a metaphor of spatialisation in describing the millennium, as if one was looking across an unviolated, virgin scape. This follows three other metaphors: one, a ‘minimal’ measure of the present (imperceptibly short, fleeting, below human perceptual thresholds, nano-like) [45]; two, a veiled reference to the conspicuous consumption of blatant million-dollar cash investments in fireworks celebrations; and three, an implication of unparalleled historical rupture: ‘In the blink of an eye, in a blaze of colour, the 20th century passed into history last night, giving way to a new year, a new century, a new millennium, unspoiled and sparkling with hope and promise’.

International writers, however, (in the ‘world’ sections of Australian media) mediate western disappointment with our imaginative capacity (or rather lack of) for critical futures thinking. For example, Boris Johnson labels expectants of negative trends as ‘gloomadon-poppers’ and contests: ‘So here it is, the New Millennium, and I have to tell you it is not what we were led to expect …The future has turned out to be a lot less futuristic than we once imagined … is it conceivable that people will stick to the old ways, and that your vision [of the future] will remain as ludicrous as Woody Allen’s orgasmatron?’. [46] Similarly, Susan Levine offers with the by-line ‘faulty visions’ that ‘this was the future that isn’t: prognostication ain’t what it used to be, which is why Boswash was hogwash’. [47]

Clear vision, it seems, is the most impermanent of imaginative forms. Contemporary apocalyptic conceptions and uses of endism permeate Australian secular society quite significantly by 1999 and remain effective combatants against disciplined futures study within Australian psyche beyond January 2000. [48] ‘It is usually the extreme’, argue the editors in the December 1999 ‘End’ issue of M/C: Journal of media and Culture Studies:

Often-dangerous forms of endist belief that the media popularly exploit to define “other” forms of “endist” fundamentalism. Reading about the apocacidal (suicides for the apocalypse) tendencies of various cults and sects horrifies us in their acts of forcible manipulation. Yet apocaholicism (a mental state of intoxication on the endtimes) cannot be limited to the extra-societal gathering in the outer suburbs that awaits an end with grim but enthusiastic anticipation and which makes the occasional evening news headline or Sixty Minutes exposure. Nor can a keen sense of apocalypse be situated as being primarily a characteristic of religious fundamentalism. [Australian] Secular society itself … is drunk on different meditations of the “end”. [49]

This spread of apocalyptic epistemology throughout the 1990s universalised a view within secular and religious Australia that the approach of the third millennium involved an ‘ending’ of the world, be it a technological or Christian Armageddon. With the benefit of hindsight, writing in January 2000, it is true that none of the doomsday scenarios then held proved to be valid and the non-event of a Y2K date-verification crisis has undermined the world of apocalyptic certainty that many newspaper reports implied at the time: ’1998, 99, countdown to chaos’, [50] ‘The birth of a computer catastrophe’, [51] ‘Computer bug may bite early’, [52] ‘City gets taste of Y2K chaos’, [53] ‘The day the world shuts down’, [54] ‘Computers in trouble: stop the millennium bug before it stops your business’, [55] ‘Shutdown offers a taste of 2000 havoc’, [56] ‘Y2k bill doubles to $10 billion’, [57] and ‘The bug that ate business: a 2000 horror story’. [58]

Realising that Australia’s futures perspective in the 1990s tends ‘less toward [future] achievement [and goals] and more toward avoidance’ [59] is to begin examining the theories, ideas and images of the future and the effectual life of Australian responses to them. This is an important and worthwhile activity. Defective, impractical senses and visions of the future ‘lock-up the human perceptual system in closed, unproductive loops, leading ever further [away] from an active engagement with the world’. [60] By contrast, properly implemented critical futures inquiry can ‘prefigure more advanced stages of civilised life’ [61] to which we can productively work towards.

A Lifestyle of Becomings

Australian studies scholars and mainstream commentators agree that there is an urge for ‘culture shift’ in Australia. But how the nation arrives at this and what kind of culture shift should be encouraged is the subject of intense debate. For Hugh Mackay, a widely-read commentator for the mainstream, the postmodernism argument subspeciates into either an argument about the diversity of choices or an argument about the difficulty of choosing: ‘We construct our social reality and then operate as if it is the reality. Some … want to make us feel uncomfortable about that, as if every reality we construct is a mere delusion that will somehow limit and constrict us; others are perfectly content for us to adopt our reality and stick with it … [The] crucial point is that we have to choose. But how do we choose?’. [62] Mackay ties the value of choice to the relationship between cultural heterogenisation / synthesis or postmodernist relativism (which he collectively describes as shopping at the ‘cultural bazaar’) and absolutes: ‘It might be possible to be open to all kinds of new ideas, new fashions, new “constructs”, yet remain grounded in a core belief — or a core system of thought — that sustains us. It might be possible, after all, to shop at the cultural bazaar — and even to pluck bits and pieces from a wide range of stalls — while still operating within a serviceable framework of enduring attitudes, values and beliefs that we have discovered, from our own experience, will give meaning and purpose to our lives … Acting as if you believe in something is the first step towards believing it, and once you believe it, you are on the way to a sense of purpose’. [63] But what these arguments fail to consider is the temporally-related concerns structuring the ‘outcome’ of choice and determining positive options from negative directions: ‘the decisions we make, the directions we choose, the futures we extinguish and those we enable, all frame and condition the lives of our descendants’. [64]

Slaughter calls this tension between choice, choosing and futures responsibility the ‘civilisational challenge’ that confronts the world of nations and not just Australia alone. The dynamics of these tensions have begun to be explored in a sophisticated manner as a critical field of enquiry within the emerging discipline of futures studies. But in Australian studies, much needs to be done to situate futures as providing both a viable framework forward and a real ground for ‘hope, insight, empowerment and social and organisational innovations of many kinds’. [65] For the moment, however, let us note the current problems in Australia and Australian studies as the ‘You Are What You Foresee’ dynamic (from the same family as the popularised ‘you are what you eat’, consumer society’s ‘you are what you buy’ [66] or Mackay’s ‘you are what you believe’). From this point, we can acknowledge an Australian cultural industry of prognostication that — through a combination of commercial appropriation and consumption of futures metaphors, a minimalist perceptual apparatus of time, and a postmodern rupture in absolutes and tradition — promotes less a particular direction to a viable future and more a consciousness or lifestyle of becomings.

Futures in Australian Studies

I take my lead from Carolyn Steedman’s re-positioning of cultural studies and pose a series of questions directed at Australian studies around the above point. [67] I don’t propose to address all these but the activity of asking has directed my line of enquiry significantly. The questions are by no means exhaustive but they cover sufficient ground to encourage a model of critical thinking about Australian studies and its relation to the future and, perhaps in considering possible answers, attempt to increase the critical power of the field. My additional guide has been an extract from Slaughter’s work which, though applied elsewhere, is relevant to the utility of Australian studies and the notion of public intellectualism:

To be more effective … [Australian studies might] begin to clarify its use of guiding concepts and metaphors, relating these to cultural presuppositions and traditions of inquiry that can be easily mistaken as inevitable, neutral and value free. One result will be a more accessible style of discourse. In this regard, it should emphatically disown the hectoring, insistent tone adopted by some in the past and consciously develop strategies of communication based more on dialogue and negotiation. It should also seek a more credible balance between stability and change, recognising the mutual existence of each other rather than tending to overstress the latter. Above all, it must seek to develop a better understanding of its own, often obscured, ideological commitments. [68]

How futurical then is Australian studies? If it is futurical, what futures methodologies does it use? Can it take account of futures-related text (information positioned and empowered as ‘relevant’ to the future or ‘representative’ of future reality) and language (or futurespeak, metaphorical frameworks, closed and open visionary structures)? Is it possible to construct a national picture of the future that does not resort to metaphors involving human life-cycles (‘adolescent, maturing, growing, evolving’) and technology? Is the problem in creating a coherent and intelligent national conception of the future related to political, contradictory uses of futurespeak? Can Australian studies in its current form take issue with the governance of epochal futures (say 2000AD) over the national imaginary? Can it critically investigate the political renderings of time and change through which the ‘millennium’ (as an example) was deployed and prefigured as an intervention into, and a revolution of, contemporary Australian history? What other tropes of temporal transformation have punctuated Australian futures? Would the move to a new form of critical engagement with Australian culture, involving critical futures in the theory and action of its imagining, mediate the tensions between choice and responsibility? Is Australian studies’ extrapolative narrativisation of the present a sign that the field is methodologically crippled in futures, with uneven investment in ‘consciousness-raising’ rather than in ‘truth-telling’? [69] Can Australian studies adequately consider the current poverty of national foresight and the rise of surrogate apocalyptic thinking as part of the underlying systems of value and meaning (reductionism, industrial epistemology, instrumental rationalism, etc) circulating within Australian society? How today should critical futures engage the present and vice versa in productive, sensitive ways? What has futures to do with Australian studies?

It is in this particular historical moment at the turn of the millennium, given the destabilising conditions of the last century and the problematic outlook of the early twenty-first century, that Australian studies requires a critical futures sense to respond to the contemporary ‘civilisational challenge’ ahead. A new body of enquiry, I argue, integrating the methodologies of critical futures and Australian studies — Australian futures studies (AFS) — would equip substantively the (political, cultural and social) struggle to find, defend and enable optimistic and responsible futures against the superficial and destabilising futures seducing the national imagination. That is, Australian futures studies would be sensitive to the flows, ruptures and effectual life of, and responses to, futures thinking. [70]

References

1. Re-aired 23 January 2000 in ‘Millennial Dreams Four’, Rachael Kohn, The Spirit of Things, Radio National.
2. 1999 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Philadelphia, 1999, pp 32-3.
3. Richard Landes, interview by Rachael Kohn, in ‘Millennial Dreams One’, The Spirit of Things, Radio National, 4 April 1999.
4. Richard Nile, ‘Civilisation’ in Richard Nile (ed.), The Australian Legend and Its Discontents, op. cit.
5. Richard Nile, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Nile (ed.), Australian Civilisation, op. cit., p 3.
6. Dick Hebdige, ‘The Function of Subculture’, in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London, Methuen, 1979p 448.
7. ibid., p 449.
8. John Beveridge, Courier Mail, 2 October 1999, p 30.
9. Graham Lloyd, Courier mail, 5 June 1999, p 27.
10. Peter Hadfield, Sunday Mail, 5 April 1998, p 91.
11. Phillip Adams, ‘Millennium’, Weekend Australian, 2-3 January 1999.
12. Michel Foucault, ‘Space, Power and Knowledge’, an interview with Paul Rabinow, translated by Christian Hubert, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon, 1984.
13. Polly Wilson, Weekend Review, 14-15 September 1996, p 4.
14. Dennis Atkins, Courier Mail, 5 June 1999, p 30.
15. Calvin Wilson, Courier Mail, 29 may 1999, p 12.
16. David Bentley, Courier Mail, 31 December 1998, p 9+.
17. Hebdige, op. cit., p 448.
18. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkhiemer, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans John Cumming, New York, Seabury Press, 1972.
19. Sydney Morning Herald, 10 October 1992, p 39.
20. Shane Danielsen, Sydney Morning Herald Metro, 2 October 1992, pp 1-2.
21. Mark Hollands (ed.), Australian, 7 April 1998, p 1+.
22. Paola Totaro, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 December 1990, p 29.
23. Sun-Herald Sunday Life!, 20 December 1998, p 34.
24. Sydney Morning Herald, 28 October 1995, p 1.
25. Agenda, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 October 1994, p 15.
26. Rodney Chester, Courier Mail, 13 March 1998, p 5.
27. Tom Skotnicki, News Extra, Sunday Mail, 15 march 1998, p 14.
28. For example, ‘A New World Order Is Coming! A expose of covert moves toward a new world order and the destruction of our freedoms’, The Sunday Law Times: An Australasian Publication in Defence of Our Freedoms, Strathpine, Queensland, Patriotic Christian Distributors, circa 1991; or Antichrist and the Battle of Armageddon, The Second Coming of Christ, Signs of the Times, Turkey, Russia and the Time of the End, to name a few booklets from the local Christadelphians / Gospel Furtherance Committee library.
29. For example, 1999: The Rapture, the Meltdown and the Coming World War; The Day God Shakes the Heavens and the Earth; The Coming World Economic Crash; Countdown to the New World Order and the Mark of the Beast, titles available from Maranatha Revival Crusade, Nanango, Queensland; or Countdown to Armageddon and Beyond: Astonishing Predictions of the Future, Charmhaven, New South Wales, The Family, Aurora Productions, 1996.
30. For example, 1996 Australian International UFO Symposium, Queensland UFO Network; Benny Hinn, Prophecy Tour and Conference 1998, Inner-Faith Propriety Limited, Nerang, Queensland; World in Crisis, Endtimes Ministries Seventh Seminar, Landsborough, Queensland, 1996.
31. The Magnificat Meal Movement, Toowoomba, Queensland, http://homepages.iol.ie /~magnific/.
32. Interview with Lee Quinby by Rachel Kohn, ‘Millennial Dreams 6′, The Spirit of Things, Radio National, 6 February 2000.
33. Judith Webster, ‘A Man-Made Apocalypse?, How Australians imagined the “end of the world” in the new atomic era’, In/Between: Negotiating Time and Space, http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/history/conferences/inbetween/.
34. David Bennett, The End of the World or Is It?, Boolarong Press, Camp Hill, Queensland, 1996.
35. David Bennett, That Year 2000: The End or a Beginning? , in Jason Ensor and Felicity Meakins (eds), End — M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, vol 2, no 8, 8 December 1999, http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/edit.html.
36. Mel Calman, 1931-94, cartoon caption in The Times, 30 December 1986.
37. A W Pollard, 1859-1944, Observer, ‘Sayings of the Week’, 31 July 1927.
38. Erin O’Dwyer, Queensland Times, 1 January 2000, p 1.
39. Queensland Times, 1 January 2000, pp 10-12.
40. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Defining the Postmodern’, in During, op. cit., p 144-5.
41. Ron Brunton, Weekend, Courier Mail, 1 January 2000, p 1+.
42. Hedley Thomas, Courier Mail, 31 December 1999, p 1.
43. front page, Sunday Mail, 2 January 2000.
44. Wayne Smith, Courier Mail, 1 January 2000.
45. Slaughter, op. cit.
46. Boris Johnson, ‘In Our Fantasies and Prophesies We Overlook Human Nature: Still Waiting’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 2000, p 19.
47. Susan Levine, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 2000, p 19.
48. Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, Sydney, Random House, 1994.
49. Jason Ensor and Felicity Meakins, ‘Editorial: “End”’, in Jason Ensor and Felicity Meakins (eds), End — M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, vol 2, no 8, 8 December 1999, http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/edit.html, bit 1.
50. NZ Herald, 23 November 1996.
51. Larry Gonick, Bulletin, 3 June 1998, p 71.
52. Sonia Madigan, Sunday Mail, 11 October 1998, p 26.
53. Chris Newton, Australian, 6 October 1998, computer supplement, p 5.
54. Steven Levy and Katie Hafner, Bulletin, 3 June 1997, p 73.
55. National Australia Bank pamphlet.
56. John Macleay, Australian, 29 September 1998, p 8.
57. Sue Ashton-Davies, Australian, 22 September 1998, p33.
58. Sally Jackson and John Macleay, Australian, 31 December 1997, p 1.
59. Slaughter, op. cit., p 57.
60. ibid., p 53.
61. ibid., p viii.
62. Hugh Mackay, Turning Point: Australians Choosing Their Future, Sydney, Macmillan, 1999, p 171.
63. ibid., p 180.
64. Slaughter, op. cit., p 5.
65. ibid., p x.
66. Charlene Spretnak, States of Grace, San Francisco, Harper, 1993.
67. Carolyn Steedman, ‘Culture, Cultural Studies and the Historians’, in Lawrence Grossberg et al, eds, Cultural Studies, New York, Routledge, 1992.
68. Slaughter, op. cit., p 212.
69. During, op. cit., p 46.
70. This is the next part of the thesis digitising project and represents chapter four. 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.

© 2010 Postscripts : Postgraduate Writing.    Copyright | Terms | Privacy | License