Culture

Critical Foresight: New Ways

One would expect people to remember the past and to imagine the future. But in fact … they imagine … [history] in terms of their own experience, and when trying to gauge the future they cite supposed analogies from the past; till, by a double process of repetition, they imagine the past and remember the future. [1]

Hugh Mackay in Turning Point: Australians Choosing Their Future (1999) writes that ‘Attitudes are the symptoms of a society’s state of mind. They reveal our responses to the things that have happened to us and, occasionally, they offer a glimpse of the kind of future we are hoping for’.[2] Using a selection of personal interviews and group discussions which form the 1994 edition of The Mackay Report as representations of these ‘attitudes’ and interests of society, Mackay explores the notion that contemporary Australians are participants within a radical form of culture shift, one that ‘amounts to the discovery of a new way of thinking about Australia’.[3] Mackay’s identification and use of contradiction within these collective beliefs and evaluations of Australian citizens develops the theme of a ‘turning point’, that the dissonance existing between our value judgements about Australian socialisation articulates an emergent cultural identification with resolution or ‘turning point’. Such a ‘turning point’ is enacted by active citizenship: ‘This is the time’, Mackay writes in an inspirational tone, ‘for setting our goals and directions, but there’s no short cut to depth and maturity. We are still, in cultural terms, in our adolescence … [But] what’s wrong with being young? Why not relish the chance to shape our future; to create this Australia in our own image?’. [4]

Australian culture is not easily defined and located and Mackay admits this later in chapter twenty-five, ‘Young and Free: Give Us Time’, as a consequence of adolescent political and societal immaturity ‘having more energy than focus’. [5] The sense that ‘Australian maturity’ is analogous to the ‘maturity of an individual’ permits easy comparisons to adolescence, that biological period characterised (in Mackay’s terms) by a ‘tumult of turbulent emotions and conflicting goals’. [6] In this way, it is possible (and maybe useful) to define the logics and structures underpinning popular ideas of ‘Australian culture’ as insecure, slippery and open to radical, emotional (as opposed to its antithesis: mature and rational) modification. Turning Point subjects Australian attitudes to considerable scrutiny to draw out this point. Mackay surmises that although Australians ‘have created something wonderfully robust, diverse and vibrant … we’re still deeply unsure of our identity and we don’t yet have a clear vision of who or what we want to be’. [7] Contrary to the senses of cultural fragmentation and social disharmony that Turning Point‘s analysis of premillennial Australia seems to otherwise evoke, Mackay’s dominant theme is that this ‘amounts to the discovery of a new way of thinking about Australia’. [8] His ‘We are at a turning point’ thesis has a certain resonance with tropes of hope and escape from the present environment.

Does it make sense to speak about our contemporary cultural and social environment, as Mackay and other commentators do, that a ‘new way’ of imagining Australia is being formed at the cusp of an identifiable ‘turning point’? What in fact is this ‘new way’ being presented as different and desirable to the ‘present way’? Is this ‘turning point’ the source or respondent or both to an emerging conceptual apparatus?

Dancing with the Devil: Mainstreaming the Future

[There are] those who claim to have particular or special understanding of the national psyche, those who claim the authority of the ethnographer in speaking for all of us … This claim to be able to represent the nation, even to be emblematic of Australianness, rests on a claim to knowledge of real values, attitudes and experience … [But] any acknowledgment of cultural diversity is quickly countered by a firm emphasis on the rights and needs of the mainstream, a tidal surge of opinion and belief that brings the ordinary to the centre of social and cultural life and sweeps aside the ugly debris of difference. [9]To write convincingly about futures we must know who we are, where we are from and whose interests we are pursuing. [10]

A feature of contemporary public dialogue that flows directly from a loss of objectivity and critical engagement is the invested nature of much privileged modern-day social analysis. By this I mean that some cultural observations or analyses, given a position of centrality in the arguments of Australia, are necessarily popularised, reflecting shrewd insight and marketing know-how. Mackay — whose credentials are adduced alongside reflective interpretation in his 1999 publication which describes him as ‘Australia’s leading social researcher’ providing ‘the definitive analysis of contemporary Australia … for anyone who cares about Australia’s future’ [11] — suggests that:

Times of uncertainty — especially when linked with a half-formed sense of expectancy — have, in the past, been fertile breeding grounds for religious revivals … though … that seems unlikely in our case … Is there going to be a mass movement of some other kind, in which we will define ourselves by some new-found sense of purpose? [12]

This position implies a certain rhetorical foresight about what is ‘likely to happen’ but rejects other possibilities and ignores the considerable Pentecostal, charismatic and millennial religious revivals that have already occurred in Australia in favour of an anonymous, unanchored but self-defining movement. It is an example of ‘inspirational futurism’, never quite freeing itself from the ‘temporal provincialism’ of ‘the spirit of [our] times’ (Mackay’s ‘Zeitgeist’) to pursue Australia along, say, the lines of enquiry offered by Elise Boulding’s 200-year present or Frank Hopkins’ 150-year historical perspective. [13] In effect, it doesn’t extend a sense of the present beyond a minimalist setting. That which is just beyond the minimal present — the uncertain — is instead to be embraced as a conventional feature of modern life.

This is an example of profundity as an illusion of particular language uses and appeals to powerful institutions:

Social theories that merely rationalise existing conditions and thereby serve to promote repetitive behaviour, the continuous reproduction of established social practices, do not fit the definition of critical theory. They may be no less accurate with respect to what they are describing, but their rationality (or irrationality, for that matter) is likely to be mechanical, normative, scientific, or instrumental rather than critical . [14]

At the heart of Turning Point, without adequately defining who ‘we’, ‘our’ and ‘us’, there are incidents of reductionism — ‘All we have to remember is that each of us wants to be taken seriously. Each of us wants to be heard. Each of us wants our needs, our values, and our points of view to be taken into account. That is all reconciliation has ever been about. The challenge is actually tiny and it has little to do with “past generations” …’ [15] — bias — ‘Was John Howard sensing this mood when he suggested in 1997 that most people simply wanted the native title debate “off the agenda”? It sounded heartless at the time, but perhaps it was just another sign of our desire to retreat, to disengage, and to regroup. Perhaps we needed a break from ‘issue’: we didn’t mean to dismiss native title as unimportant …’ [16] — subjectivity — ‘Unless I’m misreading the signs …’ [17] — and elitism — ‘The issue of reconciliation needs to be understood in the context of the demographic fact that Aborigines represent about two per cent [Mackay's emphasis] of the Australian population. This is not America. We do not have a ‘race problem’ that is numerically large. Aborigines are one of the smallest cultural and ethnic minorities in our society’. [18] These deny Mackay’s work a sense of proper critical engagement along the Edward Soja’s line of enquiry, concepts such as reductionism, bias and elitism de-focus important questions. Mackay’s recent work seems committed to maintaining the status quo. Arguably written in the mode of pop futurist enquiry — in which existing social relations are taken as given, support is given for the status quo and the future appears externally constructed via technology, overall tending to be diversionary tract [19] — Turning Point avoids epistemological questions over power relationships, ideology, transformation and the reconceptualising of meanings. As David Tacey describes:

They’re in touch with the breakdown, the destruction, the sense of an ending, but they are not especially good on the other aspect, which has to do with re-enchantment, renewal. Maybe they are not post-Modern at all, in the sense that they have gone beyond, or post, the modern logic of modernity. They are merely extending the disenchanted logic of modernity into its late … phase … [As most modernists] they have turned breakdown and destruction into an art form. The myths, legends and religions of the past are all blown to smithereens, deconstructed in an atmosphere of frenzy. And the deconstructionalist looks for, and finds, historical prejudices, political values and out of date attitudes at the centre of these exploded myths, T S Eliot’s ‘heap of broken images’. [20]

Why quote Mackay in a thesis interrogating present-day constructs of the future and generally advocating the formation of a public intellectual line of interrogation? Certainly, other names associated more deeply with futures thinking invite analysis of the type suggested by this thesis. Barry Jones would be a candidate, given his early work in the Commission for the Future. But, in the contemporary age, Jones is not as massively consumed by the media and public as Mackay. Considered widely as having a finger on the pulse of Australia, Mackay is the first port of call for social attitudes. In this respect, there is a consumption component involved in selecting Mackay’s work over say Jones.

The work of Mackay promotes collaboration and dialogue with an abstract, imagined institution called the ‘mainstream’ while at the same time attempting to embody notions of ‘objective’ and ‘value free’ ethnographic knowledge: ‘as a social researcher who has spent his life listening to Australians talking about life in Australia’, boasts Mackay when discussing reconciliation, ‘I have been driven to an additional conclusion about the matter’. [21]

Authority here resides in the apparently ‘humble’ act of ‘listening’, in which the object of discussion (that is, the group consensus of ‘ordinary’ mainstream Australians) follows a text-commentary relation of ‘speaking for itself’ during Mackay’s play of ‘ethno-methodological indifference’ motivated by the implied mass of opinion ‘driving’ him. [22] But the mainstream — in keeping with John Hartley’s work on the imaginary construction of television audiences, [23] Leigh Dale’s scholarship on ‘Mainstreaming Australia’ and Toby Miller’s analysis of the ‘well-tempered citizen’ — is perhaps a citizen-audience imagined empirically, theoretically and politically to be the dominating form of citizenship in Australia. It is assumed to be privileged through sheer numerical mass and vocality or opinion.

Yet this citizen-audience is an invisible fiction that ‘serves the need of the imagining institution’, in this instance, Hatzimanolis’ assimilationist liberalism: ‘others must become like us, my present is your future’. [24] At no point of this discussion is ‘the audience “real” or external to its discursive construction’. It does not lie ‘beyond its production as a category, which is merely to say that audiences are only ever encountered per se as representations‘. [25] In this view, Mackay is correct (without realising it I think in this sense) when he admits in a chapter on diversity that ‘to talk of the mainstream misses the point’. [26] It can be argued that Mackay’s text is a ‘representation’ of the Australian mainstream and not in fact mainstream itself. Hence, the ‘commentarial domination’ of Mackay (akin to Jackie Cook’s location of Stan Zemanek’s ‘talk’ in talkback radio [27]) as ‘coloniser’ of the object-text (in this instance, the opinions of ‘ordinary Australians’) is displaced but not in any sense removed.

It is perhaps instructive then to examine Mackay’s Turning Point as a futurestext itself. This is to suggest ways in which the consumption of his angle on the future and others might be directed more ‘reflexively towards [Mackay's] representational practices’ of the mainstream future, including his ‘will to truth or … to mastery’. [28] Ann Game, for example, contends that sociological works produce sociological fictions rather than analysing what ‘actually’ occurs in society. [29] Thus, to use Mackay’s contemporary writing on the future is not an attempt to incorporate distinctly mainstream, ‘motivated-by-market’ cultural research (what von Wright has otherwise called ‘non-intrusive sociology’ [30]) into a comprehensive and unified theory of how the nation perceives the future. Rather, the work of Mackay and other commentators– who have appropriated speaking positions of national and cultural significance as ethnographers (though how much ‘ethnographer’ exists in practices of ethnography has been intensely debated by James Clifford, Kevin Dwyer, Allan Luke, Robert Hodge and Alec McHoul) — is to briefly stage some public voices and/or fictions directing Australia’s modern-day ‘mainstreamed’ vision quest as massively consumed by the Australian public.

Australia’s Continuing Vision Quest: What Kind of Fiction is the Future Imagined to Be?

The Australian land mass was an alluring enigma in the European imagination centuries before its ‘discovery’ and colonisation. So when British settlers finally arrived in 1788, they brought with them a vast store of prior expectations and images, based both on actual reports of explorers and on historical myths, which persuasively moulded their way of seeing the unfamiliar land and its people. Australia’s nebulous ‘reality’ began to be formed and measured against these powerful historical images and they continue to have a clear bearing on perceptions of Australia even now. [31]

Mackay presents his sense of late twentieth-century Australian cultural dissonance not simply as contemporary social phenomenon but also as a matter of cultural identity which, on account of various disintegrations within social, financial, and political relations and institutions, implies a near-future and necessary transformation to a more sophisticated, harmonised society: ‘At the turn of the century, Australians believe that our potential as a prosperous, fair and decent society has not yet been realised, and they hope that, like an awkward adolescent on the verge of adulthood, Australia might be about to discover its destiny’. [32] Mackay suggests that we each know ‘Australia, in the end, will come good’. [33] Similarly, David Carter in Becoming Australia: The Woodford Forum argues that recent developments in fashioning Australian history ‘reveal shifting attitudes to Australia and being Australian, to ways of being at home here and situating ourselves in time and place’. [34] These are not isolated views.

During the 1990s, commercial and popular media often enunciated an effect of millennial time on cultural life, from colour-spreads of ’2001 Fashion Odyssey’ [35] through picking the ‘Name of the Millennium’, [36] to ’2000: Date with Destiny’. [37] Increasingly, millennial time mixed politics with the betterment of cultural identity: ‘The celebrations for the millennium and the centenary of Federation should be the culmination of a giant corporate plan. It’s the perfect opportunity to recognise the dreams and aspirations of all of us for a better understanding of what it means to be Australian’. [38] Halfway through the last year of the twentieth century, the Courier Mail printed:

Something inevitable is that as the world faces a new millennium, there will be an unending parade of vision … Queensland Premier [Peter Beattie] reckons there has been a huge change in political and social attitudes in recent years as people reject negativity in public life. “People want a vision, they want a future”, he says. Beattie is joined by a band of optimists who have a shared vision for Queensland. Like a civic cheer squad, they are cheering on the new and urging — through persuasion and direct action — new players on to the field instilled with a will to win … The consensus about the future is that one big transformation is needed. [39]

Even Mackay in an earlier work, Reinventing Australia, embraces this future as the dream of a ‘third chance’: ‘A sure sign of millennium madness was the inability to come up with at least one substantial dream of the future. All the emphasis in the interpretation of dreams was placed on catching a glimpse of the third Chance — as the new millennium was coming to be called’. [40]

However, within Australian studies there is a characteristic awkwardness towards the future social imaginary. The space for opening up new forms of identification which often typifies contemporary Australian studies — especially those examinations that mix the temporal opportunism of ‘end of century’ revisionism with utopian metaphors — can ‘confuse the continuity of historical temporalities, confound the ordering of cultural symbols, [and] traumatise tradition’. [41] Vision may abound with inspirational language and uplifting prediction within our popular publications (which peaked the days following 31 December 1999) but this is not to be confused with sound methodological inquiry into the future. Australian studies’ present-day internal struggle with, for example, the political logics of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, the 1999 failure of the Republic Referendum and the continuing disempowerment of Aboriginality — as it were, David Carter’s ‘battle lines drawn across the nation’ [42] — these events or non-eventualities contest the ‘conclusion’ of the ‘present way’ and block the progress of a ‘new way’ to perceive, interrogate and respond to the future.

At the conclusion of Turning Point, Mackay retreats significantly from the methodological implications of the ‘adolescent’ association, qualifying it with the properties of a ‘rough kind of sense’ that is ‘not an absolutely valid analogy’ and which doesn’t amount to ‘self-criticism’. [43] Yet it positions his argument within the useful context that Australia is still ‘growing up’. In examining the deficiencies of the historical consciousness surrounding the 1950s and 1960s, David Carter warns that we need to ‘commit ourselves to an interesting history in the future, however dangerous and difficult that might prove to be’. [44] By bringing these two studies together, the question is: in what way could the future be ‘dangerous and difficult’ and is Australian studies ‘grown-up enough’ to deal with this apparent new uncertainty of the future? To resituate Dick Hebdige’s question to the study of youth subculture as a question put to the quality and character of contemporary Australian studies, is there something historically specific missing from present-day accounts of Australian society, perhaps an explanation of why certain forms of cultural myopia (Hansonism, Republic non-vote, etc) should occur at this particular time, a moment positioned as a special ‘turning point’ but which in practice seems to act less significantly on the civic body as an agent of change? [45]

In Mackay’s analysis, the term ‘new way’ signals a move away from the model of conceiving Australia as set and instead a shift towards sites of cultural creation which embrace uncertainty:

Australia is becoming a truly postmodern society — a place where we are learning to incorporate uncertainty into our view of the world. The absolute is giving way to the relative; objectivity to subjectivity; function to form. In the modern worldview of the twentieth century, seeing was believing; in the postmodern world of the turn of the century, believing is seeing. Conviction yields to speculation; prejudice to a new open-mindedness; religious dogma to a more intuitive, inclusive spirituality’. [46]

According to Mackay, the ‘old order’ was theorised as a practice of cultural relations within which ‘differences of opinion were triggers for conflict’: in the ‘new way’ of Australia, ‘differences of opinion are accepted as part of the richness of our social, cultural, intellectual and religious tapestry’. [47] But this, it might be argued, is a linguistic sleight of hand, presupposing as it does that the ‘new way’ is in fact ‘new’ for Australia.

The formation of the ‘new way’, Mackay recognises, can be traced essentially to particular conceptions made by the Europeans and their descendants about Australia, first clearly evident during the discovery and colonisation period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Australia is ‘still the New World’, Mackay asserts:

The place where the mistakes of the past might be corrected; where ancient hostilities might finally be forgotten; where class divisions might yet be realised … So we still believe that the faith invested in us by those who came here by choice will ultimately be justified. That’s the bedrock truth about Australia at the turn of the century: we believe that, given time, we will become what the European dream always said we would become — a kind of antipodean utopia. [48]

This visionary theatre for manifesting Australia as a culture of ‘collective becoming’, [49] it would seem from Mackay’s disclosure, is in fact an ‘old way’, a theoretical ‘hidden imperative’ that is now ‘after 30 years of confusion and uncertainty … reasserting itself’ as a cultural enunciative within Australian studies and socialisation. [50]

Can what mainstream commentators like Mackay and Australian studies scholars propose as the ‘new way’ within postmodernism — transformation and sophistication at the site of Australian cultural creation — be really understood theoretically as a ‘return’ to the ‘old way’, unlocking the perceived immobility of the ‘present way’? Philosophically, the answer actually is no. Michel Foucault has denied ‘return’, arguing that history ‘preserves us’ from the ‘ideology of return’, that it is impossible to ‘go back’ to the very circumstances culture, society and politics are escaping: i.e., the past. [51] Granted, some Australian politicians such as John Howard or Pauline Hanson do seek out ‘cheap form[s] of archaism or some imaginary past forms of happiness that people did not, in fact, have at all’ [52] to add a mythologised sense of ‘returning to an Australian Eden’ (often located in the 1950s) in their speeches and policies — Foucault identifies this as a ‘facile tendency’. [53] But current Australian studies argue that it has no courtship with archaisms or falsehood. However, this ‘new way’ remains not so ‘new’.

Perhaps then the ‘new way’ that Mackay speaks of is more properly understood in the direction opposite to ‘return’: as an referent to the ‘form of cultural experience and identity’ [54] envisaged in the contemporary ‘theoretical description’ of Australian social experience as becoming? Though the theory of a ‘coming Australia’ is a solidly observed tradition, from the works of Manning Clark to Richard White, ‘Becoming’ is gaining new theoretical status for articulating the nation as a continuous site of emergent cultural identity. It is a term that represents Australia as just beyond immediate cultural authorisation. In this usage, Australia is to (eventually) become the culture it is currently meant to be. Contingent on perceiving a ‘lack’ in contemporary social experience, ‘becoming’ permits viable contestation, revision and new vision within Australian studies analyses. ‘Australian civilisation’, advances Nile in his account on the term’s sometimes oxymoronic status (are ‘Australian’ and ‘civilisation’ compatible terms?), ‘is never quite an achieved state — it is always developing but not quite yet developed — but a primary process towards achievable and practical goals’. [55]

This constant state of creation is given a particular edge and focus on account of the turn of the millennium or for that fact any ‘turning point’. For Mackay, this implicates or invites a ‘new way’ to conceive ourselves — a ‘primary process’ that has perhaps always been the way, I suspect, of Australia for over two centuries but which has appeared in different guises and political forms reflective of the times. As an illustration, on 2 October 1911, Joseph McCabe writes in The Lone Hand, under the heading, ‘Australia as a Forecast of the Future’: ‘From the biological point of view Australia is a medieval paradise, a dip into the earth of at least five million years ago; from the human point of view it is a dip into the future, an illustration of a stage in the history of men which Europe and America will reach to-morrow, and Asia and Africa the day after. That is the profound and supreme interest of Australia’. [56] Move forward nearly nine decades and, for Nile and Michael Peterson in Becoming Australia, this continuing creative process of actively conceiving Australia as a site or experiment of the future sews the thread of an evolving consciousness throughout (post) modern Australian studies, weaving a fabric of cultural analysis orientated towards ‘becoming’.

The problem of the ‘becoming’ thesis, it would seem, is the problem of immateriality in the sense that it cannot be easily charted or empirically related. Images of the future tend to be visual or ‘abstractly symbolic’. [57] Consider Bob Hawke’s ‘clever country’ or ‘no child will live in poverty’ speech, or ‘The Lucky Country’ from the book of the same name. [58] These have focused Australia’s collective attention on the type of country it aspires to be. First, imagining a nation where distributive injustice gives way to wisdom within the then emerging information age; and second, in face of an adversarial natural environment, a nation in which the politics of surviving the sentence of history — from convicts to farmers, from ‘displacement, subjugation, [and] domination’ [59] to homeland, independence and diversity — confer a self-certainty about our fate as lucky and Australian individuation as country. In the particular case of The Lucky Country, though the book was an ironic comment on Australia’s development as involving more luck than design, the entrance of the title into the Australian vernacular is indicative of a community willing to misconstrue the phrase in its favour.

Grand visions of the type described above, which have often evoked active and proud citizenship, are steadily fading from Australia’s national imagination. The transmission of a culture of becoming rarely occurs in Australian national politics and claims of moving towards a ‘living’ future, to borrow an organicist term, hardly figure in the public imagination beyond infrequent calls for an ecologically sustainable society. Commentators tend to remember ‘Well may we say God save the queen because nothing will save the governor-general’, [60] or ‘Run over the bastards’ [61] or ‘This is the recession Australia had to have’ [62] before recalling an Australian equivalent (if any) to Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream …’ or John F Kennedy’s ‘We choose to go to the moon …’. Likewise, while Australia’s national anthem ‘Advance Australia Fair’ survived New South Wales premier Bob Carr’s 1996 attempt to replace it, Australians retain an affinity for Waltzing Matilda, a national song about ‘an unemployed, suicidal sheep stealer’. [63] Contrary to the ‘dawn of new era’ rhetoric splashed across the front pages of all Australian newspapers on 1 January 2000, vision is waning and imprecise.

Could the question be put then, not controversially or blasphemously but rather critically, that contemporary Australian studies does not adequately represent the triumphant expression or confident statement of a clear, articulated vision but rather a ‘desperate, even manic, attempt at reassurance’? [64] Is Australia indeed a culture of becoming in spite of ‘inadequate planning, incompetent leadership and uncommitted populace’. Or is this, as MacKay quietly poses before a wave of positivist reappraisal, ‘an empty hope’? [65] Perhaps a definitive answer is still not yet possible but it is inventible:

Where it has come from and where, if anywhere, [Australia] is going … [b]ecoming Australia is challenging and, frequently, exhilarating. And not entirely without hope. Perhaps, despite all the evidence of disintegration, including the recent outbursts of bigotry, we are still involved in nation building. [66]

A Role for Australian futures studies and the Re-enchantment of the Cultural Imagination

And yet we suffer, as so many former colonies do, from feelings of smallness. We believe, somehow, that real life, the life that really counts, is happening elsewhere … We are buffeted now by new and frightening forces we do not understand. Globalisation. New ways of selling. Ravenous corporate imperialism. The death of small town life. The competition of Asian wage slaves. The jobs lost to computers. The feeling daily that each day of paid work may be our last. A generation of university graduates who can look forward at best to lives of busking, market research or waiting on tables. A feeling that our competitors may be too big and wealthy, and we are in a race we are losing. How much of this is colonial cringe and how much is realism is hard to say. But we do not seem to be thinking of the future any more, just sharing out what the dying Don Dunstan called ‘the spoils of defeat’. [67]

[H]ardness is creeping into our soul, because we haven’t been ready or we don’t know how, to defend the fairness that makes us Australians. Australians don’t mind change; they will look change in the eye any day of the week, confident that they have its measure. What Australians don’t like is unfairness. And lately it’s been hard to tell what is inevitable change and what is plain unfair. A lot of things have been called inevitable when they are really negotiable. [68]

A new generation of Weet-Bix kids are on the move. Full of energy, and vitality, our country’s future is written in their faces. Fuelled on Weet-Bix goodness they are set to lead Australia into a new Millennium. Our kids are Weet-Bix kids and our future is off to a great start. [69]

It is a reasonable claim that behind futures thinking and its related material and symbolic output, futurestext and futurespeak are authors. People invent futures and, on terms of the thesis, this is considered an act of authorship. Such an approach has a two-fold investigative angle: it seeks to assess the worth of futurestexts in not breaking from the evaluative models of traditional literary criticism and authorial intention; and it seeks to understand the processes through which futurestext become socially meaningful, variously interpreted and politically used. This approach to the subject characterises futures as purely human constructs and works through not only the relationship of text to objects (or imagined objects) but also through the relations of class and political struggle. For although all members of a society might share in moments of history common senses of the future, different classes will appropriate signs and languages of futures to different political uses. Culturally specific evaluations of the future can be associated with the distribution of power within society, so that, in the two following examples say, the association of control — in the term ‘choice’ — with vision, goals and aims is indicative of a secular democratic society whereas the linking of providence — in the term ‘prophecy’ — with religion, scriptural writings and God indicates a theocratic (ruled by a deity) community.

In practice, no sign or text of the future is apolitical. To choose to communicate a vision of, say, ‘goal’ rather than ‘aim’ places a small but significant distinction on what is written or spoken about that future. Likewise, a trajectory of religious politics is discernible in the theological example of preaching ‘salvation by work’ as opposed to ‘salvation by faith’. In the first, a future safe from the tribulations prophesied to descend upon the world is secured through the efforts of improving the conditions of one’s fellow neighbours — in the second, it is granted through belief alone. Uses of futurestext and futurespeak thus call forth the value-system of the culture or community within which the text is used and interpreted. On this account, futures mythology grows out of a need to define goals and desires, to explain perhaps restraining behaviours today for the hope of gain tomorrow, to distribute relations of power over activities of organisation, planning and internal social structures of the nation, and to account for directions of progress or egress.

This view draws its strength from decentralising the position of futures in western and Australian temporal thinking. It moves towards an epistemological break with the various kinds of naturalised, mythologised and commonsense forms of futures-thinking which pass themselves off as true but which in fact encode the cultural values of a socio-political order. That is to say, in order for the future to be defined ‘from the outside’, its commandeering of the national imagination through short-term paradigms needs to be competently disengaged to make such a perspective assignable — the future can be grasped through its defamiliarisation. Post-mythological and post-structural models are suggested by this angle of investigation though these are not easily reached and can become untenable if poorly implemented. Models of enquiry into the future and about the future must take account of the inter-relatedness of all subject positions regarding the future in question. The text, its author, the analyst, the culture, the audience, the citizen — all provide a ‘colour’ within envisaging the future as a subject in process, as important parts of the becoming thesis.

Public Becoming: Planned Obsolescence and (Re)Discovery

For the future has been habitually confused with being a denotable construct about which ‘true’ or ‘false’ statements — could these be in the family of Nile’s national ‘lies’? — can be made rather than as a connotative artefact of human thought dependent upon widely accepted interpretative practices. To consider the future as an artificial social product with constructed cultural intention is to open a way beyond this current temporal thought. Much influenced by Michel Foucault’s argument that ‘truth’ is always and everywhere an element of vested power-interests, by redefining its contemporary categories, concepts and applications as perhaps social control in action, the future can be reconceived, recovered and re-explained in radically different ways from conventional reasoning. This can lead to the creation of a new intellectual site — a public intellectual network — to rethink Australia’s national possibilities. If this methodology is taken on board within Australian Studies, the ‘future’ as Australian’s know it in the early twenty-first century might be significantly questioned and may become obsolete. And the subject-position of futurists within society might be re-evaluated or at least re-placed and recast to responsibly and socially accountable positions.

Granted, in attributing considerable power to the media and complementarily presupposing the ‘well-tempered’ citizen audience to be active, engaging receivers of the messages directed at it, [70] fictions of the future in Australian society are frequently mapped through advertising and popular publication by various types of futurists. ‘Business as usual’, ‘progress is profit’, ‘time is short’, ‘the future is now’, ‘embrace uncertainty’, ‘live for the moment’ — these compact forms of ideological code or philosophy (conceptual equivalents to what genetic research calls the ‘meme’), conflate senses of the future to profit-delimited patterns of capitalism and industrialism and dominate common dialogues within twenty-first century society. Yet it is these same conceptual memes that, under the diagnosis available to what I have called Australian futures studies, require a rethinking of the future and a dispossession of present-day imaginary mis-recognitions. That is, there is a need to unmask social futures mapping of this kind and other kinds as products of specific forward-thinking enterprises. In this way, to return to the above-mentioned ideological ‘memes’, it can be alternatively conceived that business is not in fact usual and progress is not always profitable when environmental discourse (with its warnings of ecological collapse) is incorporated into commercial tropes of industrialism. Likewise, time is not short and the future is not actually ‘now’ if citizens extend their sense of the present beyond entrenched ‘short-sightedness’. And embracing uncertainty encourages anxiety rather than contentment, but living for life — not merely the moment — may prove to be more fulfilling.

Here then, I suggest, is a pressing intellectual agenda for Australian studies. Unless Australianists [71] probe our (historical and contemporary) attempts to harness the future to social ends, the theorisation of Australia as a becoming culture will be inadequate to the task of Australian studies and will lack the methodological support through which Australian scholars seek theoretical validation and approval. After all, as Roland Barthes puts it, ‘method certifies’. [72] But this is not in any way to concede a new form of Australian studies orthodoxy within which alternative futures are (re)packaged or recycled in safe academic forms. Nor is it to argue that a privileged discourse of Australian futures studies could somehow speak the ‘truth’ of the future and rank other interests in the future on a specific scale of priority. Indeed, the challenge I’m suggesting is not entirely academic; it can be political as well. For the call to a reinvigorated form of Australian studies assuredly finds no allegiance in the liberal government’s compression of arts funding and university departments during the year 2000. Yet, in addition to requiring new research tools to understand Australia’s conception and uses of the future in the past and present and in approaching the future as itself becoming, Australia needs to create a new knowledge institution — Australian futures studies, perhaps — for guaranteeing that these tools are implemented and these questions are investigated.

Australia needs, from the perspective offered by public intellectualism, an ombudsperson of temporal fiction mapping who, in effect, can act at times as a liberator of the national imagination from politicised, religious or other totalising forms of futures-thinking. It requires a democratisation of futures as it were, a way of seeing the future as a subject mobilised by humans over a progression of multiple situations, sites of contestation, discourses and desires, with little — certainly no master narrative — that would justify any single claim to be mediating the future on behalf of particular interest-groups, communities or societies. It requires recognition that some narratives, which recommend a future, are frequently aligned with profitable, political and commercial interests rather than responsible and reasoned critical inquiry on the fate of the human experiment and the projects of civilisation. Assuredly, in western societies a basic criterion for filtering out certain futures and applying others remains economic profitability. The implications of ‘a close relationship between futures-related activities and the existing centres of social and economic power’ are an area of concern. [73] Significantly then, Australian studies requires a multiaccentuated sense of futures to balance the more base elements of popular, corporate and political futurism.

What is at issue is not necessarily diffusion but discovery, not application but invention, not vision but critical foresight. One of the tasks of next generation Australian studies scholars, I argue, will be to create the new public intellectual technologies for reflexively understanding cultural uses of the future and to involve society as a collective in the working out of these processes. The features that will ground these technologies in culture exist already as natural elements of higher-order human capacities for speculation, foresight, modelling and choice. Slaughter describes the elegant, complex ways in which human beings are fundamentally capable of applied foresight, forward thinking and responsible behaviour mindful of potential long-term consequences:

[H]uman beings are able to think not only about ‘the future’ but futures plural. Unlike the human body, which is necessarily constrained in time by the close coordination of biology (respiration, digestion, protein synthesis), the human mind, imagination and spirit are free to roam at will among a stunning array of different worlds and world-views, past, present and future … Crudely put, the ‘wiring’ of the brain/mind system is sufficiently complex and inclusive to permit consideration of past environments that the body and perceptual apparatus were never present to experience directly. It supports knowledge and understanding of significant contexts in the historical present that are displaced in space (for example, Chernobyl, Bosnia, Okalahoma City), and it enables the forward view a potentially panoramic outlook on a vast span of alternative futures. [74]

Can we theorise the group consciousness and fantasies of our Australian cultures as equally adaptive? Does the Australian national imagination ‘roam consciously throughout a rich, complex extended present, to understand responsibilities and consequences, and to speculate on futures to come’? [75] Where do we locate the common dreams of the nation?

Ombudsperson of Fiction Mapping

This thesis has established the link between text and time in defining the essential elements of futurestext. Text can be a powerful conveyer of time and our relationship to time’s unfolding. Text in this role can perform interesting functions. For example, text can ‘capture’ time. In her paper ‘Diaries, Time and Subjectivity’, Julia Martin reasons that particular texts — like the diary — relate special and unique senses of ‘being in time’ from one day to the next. Diaries speak of a subject ‘that is fragmented, secretive’ and ‘discontinuous’, yet they enable a complicated weaving of available narratives. For this reason, argues Martin, the diary ‘is simultaneously representative and non-representative of the time in which it is written’ and explores whether ‘it is possible to access “real life” [experience] through narrative’. [76]

On the point of this thesis, texts can also ‘create’ time and it is these particular texts that have concerned the present Australian studies analysis. Certain texts, like the religious and secular examples discussed above, do claim to access ‘future life’ through narrative. I have argued that Australian studies might become engaged not only with the assemblage of these futures within the target society but also in reflexive discussions about its own futures knowledge-producing and representational practices within social, political, cultural and imaginative contexts. Couched within the ‘writing Australia’ debate enjoined by Ffion Murphy and next generation scholars in New Talents, I have speculated that the Australian studies commentator might consider their practices of speaking about Australia to a community of other commentators and question the positionality of such analysis — indeed, the ‘writing’ of Australia studies — in relation to the meaning of ‘representation: interpretation, communication, visualisation, translation and advocacy’. [77] The production and reception of Australian studies may be innovated in this way and resituated in the public domain. The producer of Australia studies — the scholar, the writer, the researcher, the advocate — might no longer be an insider or practitioner of field-building, comfortable in the lofty white towers of James Jupp’s ‘Chardonnay socialism’, but instead a citizen democratised as public intellectual, a voice that speaks in circumstances which do not favour them. [78]

The call for the public intellectual as a type of ombudsperson of the future and culture has prominent supporters. From the pulpit of the Ashfield Uniting Church in Sydney, mixing state and religious concerns in a presentation overlooked by the media of the day, Kim Beazley redirected a question posed by Mark in the new testament– ‘what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul?’ [79] — from citizen to society to fellow citizens:

What does it profit a nation if it gains the whole world but loses its soul? … I worry that ideas like the knowledge nation, ideas I see as essential to the future, have become a cliché at the very time we most need them to mean something to people. Changing that is a job for me, but it is also a job for those who believe in a fair future for our country … Ultimately and appropriately for today, this is a question of belief. Do we really believe in fairness in this country? Not just the word, but for what it demands of us all. Are we really prepared to make the investment in our fellow citizens that is needed? [80]

Adaptive Value in Australian futures studies

I have suggested that this emerging breed of Australian studies scholar, perhaps equipped with the tools available under Australian futures studies or public intellectualism, might better account for the set of relationships and dialogues between futures, text and culture. In accounting reflexively for the textuality of their own texts, Australian public intellectuals would be situated self-consciously in the relations of power operating about, within and around (futures) text. In engaging histories of debates concerning the politics of representing and signifying the future, Australian futures studies might become a project that focuses significantly on the making, the becomings of Australian society, on the ‘generative nature of the meaning of [Australian] texts, the process and the metaphor of performativity’. [81] In reviewing the active political invention of the future, ‘the notion of advocacy’ in this way would be ‘placed alongside the issue of agency, the “politics and poetics” of speaking for, about and to, others; that is, the question of addressivity in relation to [Australian studies'] disciplinary formation’. [82]

In drawing the threads of this discussion together then, the search for responsibility and methodology in Australian futures brings a corresponding set of arguably important questions to the fore. When confronted with future mythology — whether this takes the form of an image or vision of the future, an advertisement marketing futures alongside the pursuit of consumption (where citizens exchange capital for a consumable promising shares in a future), a sectarian community sermonising salvation and redemption from the apocalypse via a franchise of commitment, or political elites seeking to re-enchant their electorates with visionary speech acts — we need to be more critically aware of our invention. As I opened this project, we must ask ourselves not ‘is it true?’ but ‘what is it meant to do?’

This approach to futures recognises the textual element inherent in constructing the future. Such a mode of analysis is clearly complex when considered in terms of exposing the penetration of particular types of futures thinking into culture and social life but it is a move towards proposing more positive, critically self-aware forms of realistically and practically approaching the future. In this respect, an ideology of futures-thinking may be analysed, where the writing of futures and the consumption of futures representations are perceived as meaningful practices locating cultural strategies of foresight in action. There is value in this kind of analysis. Different patterns of futures construction and reception convey distinctive styles of thought and distribution. Some represent an attraction to exotic, strange and new re-conceptions of present-day social relations; some create an opportunity to renegotiate, even re-evaluate or ridicule, the choices of the past (and thereby recast choices of the present in a different perspective). Edelman distinguishes the adaptive value of these kinds of activity:

The freeing of parts of conscious thought from the constraints of an immediate present and the increased richness of social communication allow for the anticipation of future states and for planned behaviour. With that ability comes the abilities to model the world, to make explicit comparisons and to weigh outcomes; through such comparisons comes the possibility of reorganising plans. [83]

Slaughter describes a responsible interpretation and use of the present in relation to understanding the past and future, though not without a warning:

There is no past in the sense of a completed totality, split off from the present. Equally, there is no future that stands alone, unaffected by what has gone before. Both are constitutive of the present in a process of unending mediation and change. It follows that, to the extent such mediation becomes increasingly conscious, and motivated by the highest (emancipatory) interests, we may indeed aspire to an ethic of improvement and human fulfilment. Equally, by adhering uncritically to understandings, ideologies and commitments of earlier periods, and therefore failing to engage in this process, we may miss the chance to counteract the forces that lead to dystopian futures and the end of the human experiment. [84]

Sham Futures

As with Georg Simmel’s analysis of the manner by which conspicuous consumption cultivates ‘sham individuality’, other futurestext can express status (‘a promising future’, ‘your ticket to better future’) and fashionability which can be accounted for (if left unchallenged) as containing a Simmellian ‘sham’ value on the basis of their artificiality. [85] These futures, implying status, often have their origins in the same language and conceptual apparatus, marketed as distinctive only in brand. The sophisticated, even saturated, advertisement of one future containing a greater degree of cultural capital or competence over another future is not perhaps to distinguish genuine, viable futures from impractical, critically-unworthy futures but is rather one salvo among many in a ‘border war’ between choice and restriction for the average citizen. [86] For example, the difference between Vodaphone’s ‘The future is calling’ and Toyota’s ‘The future is now’, or Genovis ‘The future is Genovis’ and Galaxy TV’s ‘Welcome to the future’, reflect marketing practices invoking a common, fashionable metaphor rather than useful commentary on the future per se: status is conferred on the innovated product possessing an innovated future. Similarly, the quarrels in which the citizen becomes involved in with government, institute, organisation, council or committee over a future going beyond the bounds of acceptability (for example, a proposed highway cutting through ones’ property to cater to anticipated increased traffic flow) are evidence not so much of an internal conceptual tension about the future (traffic flow will likely increase) as of a divergence of interests between choice and restriction (the proposed highway, argue the directly affected, should cut through somewhere else).

Even the activities of recognising the advertised millennium were itself part of a unified project encouraging and harmonising fashionabilities associated with forms, styles and content of celebration. The differentiation of ‘celebrating the millennium’ into activities — such as viewing the 25-hour television broadcast, participating in the Woodford Festival, taking the family to the Southbank fireworks spectacular, raving in millennium parties, booking tickets at an expensive restaurant or picking a spot for first dawn watching, to name a few — was marketed quite broadly. The distinctions between choices were emphasised. On a surface level, this was due to their ranging content and the opportunities opened up by popular and official culture for all kinds of individual and social creativity and decoding of the idea ‘millennium’. But in another sense, the differentiation between choices reflected the classification, organisation and categorisation of citizens within a collective conceived to consume the ‘millennium’ fiction at a specified time (new years’ eve). As Theodor Adorno argued on the culture industry in a different tense, ‘something was provided for everyone so that none would escape’. [87] Certainly, the hierarchical range of patterns for celebrating the millennium was of varying quality and advanced Adorno’s ‘rule of complete quantification’.

Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with [their] previous determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for [their] type … differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end. [88]

Thus in the lead up to 2000AD Australian newspapers ran articles that asked, ‘How will you celebrate 2000AD?’ on the basic assumption that Australians would or should.

Where the market failed to locally finance the celebration of the future, tropes of transaction between investment, profit and millennial moments appeared in advertisements inviting capital within the promise of profitable return. The business community of Mallacoota argued that it was among the prestigious locations in Australia to receive ‘first dawn’ light from the rising 1 January 2000 sun. Why light from that particular sunrise and not any other should be prestigious was not taken up in significant debate but the potential profit of capitalising on this event through those persons who understood ‘first dawn’ to be important was, as evidenced by the Mallacoota First Dawn internet home page:

You can sponsor the Sunrise and Virtual Celebrations by purchasing banner ads that link back to your web site. With the immense exposure that Virtual First Dawn in Mallacoota is receiving from National and International media outlets, television, cable and radio as well as thousands of hits on a daily basis, your web site will be in a position to harvest all those visitors. Please use the contact form to express your interest in advertising your business on the very popular First Dawn Mallacoota On-Line multimedia web site. There are several sponsorship packages available. [89]

Commercially Opportunistic Futures

Consumerisms and addictions are the tragic symptoms of unlived spiritual life. When we are connected to spirit through public enchantment, spirit has a creative outlet. But when this outlet is blocked, or lost … then we become enslaved to what I would call fake questing for spiritual fulfilment. When our public spirit is broken down and offers no enchantment, there is a terrible, mad and destructive rush towards private or [purchasable] personal enchantments. And countless predatorial industries and businesses arise to supply us with the goods and services to help us fill the void that we sense at the heart of our lives. [90]

What is remarkable about this millennial urge to commercial opportunism? In a consumer world, the preaching of millennial prosperity finds enthusiastic ears and the moral argument of reaping what society has sown finds it sponsors not necessarily in social fabric but in profit, a sentiment well exploited. Hawking preferred forms of recognising and celebrating the millennium, businesses, councils, governments and organisations clamoured for millennial attention. The Millennium Society boasted that ‘the Big 2000 might be capitalism’s best invention since Christmas’ [91] and Fortune magazine, writing on the merchandising of the millennium, claimed that ‘undoubtedly, the turning of the millennium will be one of the largest commercial events of our lifetime’. [92]

Political jousting for the most profitable event was a feature of the 1990s and characterised millennial planning. Perceiving a commercial opportunity in ‘first light of the millennium’ prominence, thirteen pacific island nations — including Samoa, Fiji, Kiribati, Tonga and the Cook Islands — formed in 1996 a joint planning and marketing alliance called the South Pacific Millennium Consortium. This consortium was established for coordinating millennial celebrations, maximising promotional exposure and augmenting the influx of tourist capital. It was an attempt to avoid any clashes and rivalries between pacific states likely to undermine promotional hopes while at the same time capitalising on their claims to being the first locations in the world to greet the year 2000. A number of significant developments arose from this arrangement. Proposals were put forth to boost ‘coconut economies’ with capital drawn from tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of visitors intent on being members of the exclusive, apparently prestigious, millennial first dawn club. Several pitches used the region’s bisection by the dateline as a ploy to market dual New Year celebrations. In this scenario, a millennial tourist would celebrate first dawn in Fiji just west of the dateline and then fly east 620 miles to Samoa where it would still be 31 December 1999 and welcome in a second new year. Other motions were legislated by respective government cabinets. In 1997, Kiribati President Teburoro Tito moved the international dateline from central Kiribati (otherwise known as ‘Christmas Island’) to the pacific nation’s far eastern border. In this way Kiribati was under one time regime when the millennium arrived — previously the dateline had divided the island into two different time zones. Caroline Island, southeast of Hawaii and a member of Kiribati’s Line Islands, was officially renamed ‘Millennium Island’ to promote a series of events planned to mark 2000 and to invite both development and population of the uninhabited island.

Yet despite much vaunting, the consortium collapsed in November 1998 after a series of disputes regarding inadequate tourist infrastructure and continuing rivalry over third millennium prominence. But efforts to capitalise on the conjuncture between geographical location and millennial appearance continued in diverse, sometimes extravagant ways. While the exclusive island resort of Vatulele in Fiji offered an ‘ultimate millennium holiday package’ for US $500 000, other pacific states looked to the guarantee of global television exposure during a planned 25-hour third millennium broadcast organised by the British Broadcasting Corp, Cable News Network and thirty-eight additional television networks. In the mobilisation of human resources, the millennial turn — in its secular tropes of New Years Eve countdown and first dawn viewing — was conceived as a moment primed with capital-raising opportunities. The businesses that owned the rights to claim elements of the millennium as their own maintained the competitive edge in the transaction of cash for memorable millennial time.

The Salvation Franchise

Lord we pray that Jesus will be exalted today. Lord we pray for Australia. Lord we do believe in the potential of this nation. Lord we see you as being the hope for this nation. Lord I pray in the name of Jesus that the cause of Christ will continue to go forward in our country and the unifying gospel of Jesus is the answer for the nation, and we speak your name again over Australia today. We thank you Lord that our hope is in you and I pray father that people can finance us in Jesus Christ in your precious name. [93]

A politics of business can be sensed too within many forms of religious differentiation, as in the above prayer by Brian Houston spoken at the launch of a coalition of Pentecostal churches — the Australian Christian Church. It is no accident that the narrower the definition of salvation, the more specialised the rituals for attaining it, the qualifications for distributing it and the exclusivity for keeping it. Such restrictions place the power of salvation into the hands of a small number of people who make available upon specialised or ritualised request the means to lease it. I use the word ‘lease’ because salvation is never fully settled. Instead, a symbolic contract is achieved between the franchise and the seeker in which salvation is conveyed to the seeker for a specified period but usually in exchange for membership and often mental and financial obligation. If the seeker breaks the contract, salvation is lost. Jehovah’s Witnesses call this act of severance ‘disfellowshipping’ and the seeker is designated by continuing followers of Watchtower as an ‘apostate’, a term redeployed to mean an individual who has lost the faith and is additionally against the almighty creator. Many ex-witnesses are emotionally scarred by this devastating, violent act of seemingly removing salvation and have setup international support services. In this sense, a small elite using exclusive language and narrow definitions and who therefore monopolise the forms and the senses of achieving salvation habitually frames salvation and the rituals of being saved from a monstrous future. Who benefits and who is disempowered by the agenda being set in this manner? Why are only selected people able to lease directions to the road of salvation with maps that periodically imply the master planner has changed compass, be it the secular salvation from ecological doom or theological salvation from the damnable mark of the beast?

Saving a person from the antichrist has become a robust industry. Religious entrepreneurs proliferate their scriptural shandies and spiritual quick fixes to the middle-class disheartened with the expertise of experienced confidence tricksters and the finesse of door-to-door salespeople. Subscribe to a local salvation franchise of the ‘gospel of wealth’ variety found marketing in the early morning hours of Australian televangelism and a continual stream of ministrations will arrive in the mail replete with US postage markings and external messages warning you and your postie: ‘This envelope contains important information the devil hopes you will never find out!’, ‘Eight things you need to know before the new millennium’, ‘Has Y2K plunged us into a countdown to chaos? Don’t panic — prepare and trust God!’ or ‘Unleash the power of your faith!’. Content will vary across a range of marketable approaches. Two recent postings I received from the same franchise respectively presented a 4-5 page personalised letter requesting I purchase ‘dynamic ministry materials’ like Your Y2K New Millennium Survival Personal Library Kit for an appropriate ‘seed harvest’ of $165.99. This reflected ‘fair market value’ on ‘powerful’ items including The Antichrist: 666 video, a three audio tape set called End Time Signs and the Book of Revelation Comic Book. An explanation sheet was also included for explaining the rituals required to activate an enclosed ‘miracle touch’ 2-inch square cloth, apparently anointed — touched in a supernatural way — by a special class of persons self-identified as ‘prayer warriors’. Some packages have reflected telegram-style formatting to ‘emphasise the great URGENCY’ felt by a pastor ‘that many of you may be on the verge of falling apart or feeling absolutely overwhelmed by fear, anger, depression, rejection, worry’ and who desperately require a newly-released ‘powerful book of wisdom’ to overcome personal tribulation and to successfully ‘rebuke the devil’. Often, correspondence signed from the pastor displays these excesses of individual concern, claims of divine new revelation blended with unbiblical doses of numerological deduction, and a persistent problem with capitalisation. The accompanying letter to the Y2K Personal Request Sheet begins with direct address, encouraging its reader to perceive the year ahead in the interpretative scheme suggested by the pastor — understanding the year in this way would bring status and benefit:

Dear Jason, you are now reading a letter that HAD TO BE sent to you. From the moment I felt prompted to begin, I knew in my heart, I HAD NO OTHER CHOICE … Yes, the Lord told me to prepare this … He gave me a vivid, supernatural glimpse of the miracle difference this one letter could make in your life … especially in this year of 1999 …You and I are now living in the year 1999. When you study Biblical numbers and their significance in end-time prophecy, patterns and plans … you quickly learn that the NUMBER “9” is the number which signifies FRUITFULNESS! Jason, God wants you to see your year of ’99 … in a special way. ’99 … {NINE NINE} SEE it as your YEAR OF DOUBLE FRUITFULNESS.

Clearly subscribing to a future that’s perceived to promise more choice and less restriction (while entailing risk) permits the citizen (or governments, nations, businesses, and communities) to differentiate themselves from their fellow citizens whom they identify with less choice and more restriction in other futures.

Loading the Future with Symbolic Software

As with the case with the Millennium Consortium, future-conscious citizens often consolidate their membership to a particular future as they distinguish themselves from the mass. The form this takes is not limited to the example provided by the above-mentioned pact of pacific islands. Some consolidations are new and expect to wield political power:

Australian Christian Churches really wants to impact the fibre of the country, the heart of Australia. I genuinely believe that the church is the answer of the nation in the future. I think Australia’s got a great future and I think the church has got a great part to play in it. [94]

Others are quite long-lived and doctrinally deep. As an illustration, Australian Jehovah’s Witnesses demonstrate a pronounced satisfaction and sense of organisational structure in a future grounded on the impending theocracy of their god while displaying a clear avoidance of tainted ‘worldliness’ outside their respective congregations:

Why, though, does the Society construct new buildings when the world is in such an uncertain state? Brother Barry explained that Jehovah’s organisation expects to survive these troubled times. God’s people are getting equipped and organised to give the greatest witness possible in these final years before Armageddon brings an end to this system of things. And they hope that many of their new facilities will be used in the great post-Armageddon reorganisation work. [95]

The Watchtower Society characterises present-day Jehovah’s Witnesses activities as formative of a supreme mission implicated in a hope for the future:

The purpose of The Watchtower is to exalt Jehovah God as Sovereign Lord of the universe. It keeps watch on world events as these fulfil Bible prophecy. It comforts all peoples with the good news that God’s kingdom will soon destroy those who oppress their fellowmen and that it will turn the earth into a paradise … It adheres to the Bible as authority. [96]The wonderful apocalypse hope is still alive! For their part, Jehovah’s Witnesses are convinced that the wonderful promises in connection with the Millennium will be fulfilled … Jehovah’s Witnesses are engaged in a worldwide Bible educational work to enable as many people as possible to embrace this hope … As heralds of these glad tidings, Jehovah’s Witnesses are really the mouthpiece of a symbolic heavenly messenger whose mission is also described in Revelation. [97]

In this respect, Jehovah’s Witnesses amalgamate around the creeds and doctrines of the Watchtower Society by observing proper conduct and directing their thinking along a required, arguably inflexible pattern:

Fight against independent thinking! As we study the Bible we learn that Jehovah has always guided his servants in an organised way. And just as in the first century there was only one true Christian organisation, so today Jehovah is using only one organisation. (Ephesians 4:4, 5; Matthew 24:45-47) … If we get to thinking that we know better than the organisation, we should ask ourselves: “Where did we learn Bible truth in the first place? Would we know the way of the truth if it had not been for guidance from the organisation? Really, can we get along without the direction of God’s organisation?” No, we cannot! (Compare Acts 15:2, 28, 29;16:4, 5) When we consider the mighty spirit forces that are fighting against us, we must acknowledge that on our own we could not possibly win. Yet with God’s backing, and with the help and support of his organisation — our worldwide association of brothers — we cannot lose. (Psalm 118:6-12; 1 Peter 5:9) [98]

Indeed, from one end of Australia to the other, a theological tug-or-war today pits the mainstream manufacturers of Christian salvation like Catholicism and Anglicanism, once the apex rivals of the religious hierarchy, against the less historically-entrenched franchises, lead by charismatic ego-theologists — ‘I am/You are God’ — like Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland or ruling councils of elders such as Watchtower’s, that push their products into the seeker’s homes. Fought at the television set, the Internet browser (a new Bible-highway), the front gate or door and every Queen Street corner in Australian cities, it is a battle of abstractions. The emerging heavy-weights of salvation, for example The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, send their thousands across Australia — each congregation’s house-to-house pattern administered by the resident ‘map-servant’ — to call on locals and push their current book, pamphlet, and magazines relevant to the degree of invitation. Each day, negotiations in theological abstractions for Jehovah’s Witnesses and their listeners takes place on a scale of hundreds of thousands in Australia alone.

‘Explore / Choose Your Future’: Choice and Restriction

It is not problematic, however, to argue that sites dealing with futures in the secular domain work through a similar play between consolidation, distribution, differentiation, pride, inflexibility and avoidance. For example, how formalised is the differentiation of options in the future within, say, contemporary meanings of employment? Citizens I argue are encouraged at various stages of interaction with society that not every future should be perceived equal. Australian business Careers-Online’s presents employment as an open landscape awaiting a type of exploration with its leading motto, ‘explore your future’. The University of Queensland, in a tone less exploratory and more selective, promotes on its student website the imperative ‘choose your future’. What temporal relations between the citizen and future can it be asked are being de-focused or directed in this manner? Here I would consider that the possibility of dialogue between citizens and their futures — as respectively job-seekers and students in the Careers-online and the University of Queensland examples — is pre-empted by framing and presenting (perhaps wholly unproblematic) options as preordained alternatives. These ‘alternatives’ offered ‘at face value’ invite selection based on (implicit) pride and (avoiding) restriction but not revision, re-creation or reinterpretation. The debate over which future best suits the job seeker or the student, in appraising their respective skills and talents, perpetuates a semblance of competition and the range of choice.

Not all contemporary futures avoid a full consciousness of responsibility. In Nile’s ‘becoming’ thesis, the national conception of the future often promises to make or reveal Australia as the nation it is conceptually meant to be and the strive in the emerging new talents of Australian studies is to become aware of this very trope of ‘becoming’. Yet other futures are less sophisticated and baser in their outcomes. Some may be interpreted as an ideological distraction from contemporary social tensions or at least a manifestation of unfulfilment in the mental life of citizens. These types of invention find an echo in the marketing of purchasable enchantments like crystals, stones, self-help publications, tapes and ‘new age’ sacralised paraphernalia. A similarity in purpose is also found in the theological architecture of salvation franchises that offer solutions to the discontents, decisional stresses and cognitive overloads of (present and future) life via an escape route common to the apocalyptic Christian mindset:

[V]irtually every person who comes with some sort of message of imminent redemption of the world makes it clear to his audience that there is still just at least a little bit of time left. And they would like to use that little bit of time that’s left in order to encourage as many people as possible to make the commitment to join their community so that they will be ready when the end of days, which is near at hand, actually unfolds. [99]

As might be evident from the present enquiry, there is a temptation to reduce the aims of this project to simply a matter of acquiring the appropriate language or terminology to describe the features of futures thinking commonly at play. This might be a valid criticism but there is more at stake than the work of excavating a grammar for describing contemporary futures mythology, perhaps I would characterise a more ambitious duty. Language after all does not bear ‘a clear and unambiguous relationship to the “real world”’, though frequently institutions have tried to capitalise on promoting such a link (for example, the Queensland University of Technology’s motto, ‘a university for the real world’). [100] But to redirect a lateral glance made by Foucault at the projects of spacialisation and history, what is crucial is to begin writing the story of futures (or temporal relations), which would concurrently be about a story of forward-thinking power: from the political strategies of visionary speech, through the invested capital interests of salvation franchises, to the cultural creation of the national future. [101] Within Australian futures studies, commissioned with writing the near and far histories of ‘becoming’, we might probe the social, ethical, political, commercial and vocational levels of the various futures that populate a citizen’s relationship to the future with a variety of images, meanings and possibilities. Of these acts in imaginative invention, we might ask several questions.

Twenty-Four Questions

Does the futurestext serve the community or the community serve the futurestext? What aspects of society and its relation to time does it reflect or invent? Are there identifiable trajectories of temporal thinking that it mirrors (cyclical, linear, minimalist, cosmic, spiritual, determinist, prophetic, timeless)? Does it privilege one sense of time over the erasing of another? Does it serve to commodify time, knowledge and relationships for some form of profit? Does the text empower community members and, if so, whom does it benefit and what is its purpose? What kind of constitutive interests are embodied in the futurestext? Does the futurestext enhance or depress cultural life? Does it concentrate, centralise or equalise the power of choice? How does the futurestext affect the perception of our needs and social relations? What does it persuade citizens to ignore? Is it consistent with the creation of responsible, critical options in the future? What are its effects on relationships within and without the community? Does it foster a diversity of forms of knowledge, perhaps keeping in tune with Kim Beazley’s dream of the ‘knowledge nation’, or a contraction of options, perhaps portioning out shares of Don Dunstan’s ‘spoils of defeat’? Is this future a desirable place, even in imagination? Does it create or institute a knowledge elite? Is this elite required for its perpetuation? What beliefs does its use foster and encourage? Can its value system be directly apprehended or are its ideologies and commitments implicit and submerged? Is the futurestext totalitarian? Has it been objectified and made viable before debate over it (if any) begins? Does it invigorate, reform, weaken or deaden human creativity? What kind of capital (for example, labour, sacrifice, profit) does it require for its social or individual activation and realisation? What cultural resources is a reader of the futurestext required to utilise? And does it contribute to (de)mystifying the public, confusing purpose or inhibiting progress toward greater effectiveness? [102]

References

1. Lewis Namier, 1888-1969, Conflicts, pp 69-70.
2. Mackay, op. cit., p vii.
3. ibid.
4. ibid., pp 298-9.
5. ibid., p 298.
6. ibid., p 299.
7. ibid., pp 298-9.
8. ibid., p vii.
9. Leigh Dale, ‘Mainstreaming Australia’, JAS, no 53, 1997, pp 1-2.
10. Richard Slaughter, Futures for the Third Millennium, p 227.
11. Mackay, op. cit., back cover blurb.
12. ibid., p 302.
13. Frank Hopkins, ‘The Senior Citizen as Futurist’, in F Feather (ed.), Through the 80s, World Futures Society, 1980, p 388.
14. Edward Soja, ‘History: Geography: Modernity’, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London, Verso, 1989, as extracted in During, op. cit., p 117.
15. Mackay, op. cit., p 130.
16. ibid., p 30.
17. ibid., p 300.
18. ibid., p 129.
19. Slaughter, op. cit., pp145-6.
20. David Tacey, ‘Re-enchantment’, The Spirit of Things, Radio National, broadcast, 11 August 1999.
21. Mackay, op. cit., p 124.
22. See Gillian Fuller, ‘The Textual Politics of Good Intentions: Critical theory and Semiotics’, in Lee and
23. Poynton, op. cit., pp 81-98.
24. John Hartley, in Frow and Morris, op. cit.
25. Efi Hatzimanolis, ‘Timing Differences and Investing in Futures in Multicultural (Women’s) Writing’, in Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman (eds), Feminism and the Politics of Difference, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1993, p 128.
26. Hartley , op. cit., p 166.
27. Mackay, op. cit., p 35.
28. See Jackie Cook, ‘Dangerously Radioactive: the Plural Vocalities of Radio Talk’ in Lee and Poynton, op. cit., pp 59-80.
29. Lee, op. cit., pp 194-5.
30. Game, op. cit., pp 3-5.
31. Quoted in Robert Hodge and Alec McHoul, ‘The Politics of Text and Commentary’, Textual Practice, vol 6, no 2, pp 189-209, 194.
32. Paul Longley Arthur, ‘Fantasies of the Antipodes’, op. cit., p 37.
33. Mackay, op. cit., p ix.
34. ibid., p xix.
35. David Carter, ‘Working on the Past, Working on the Future’, in Richard Nile and Michael Peterson, Becoming Australia: The Woodford Forum, University of Queensland Press, 1998, pp 6-25, 7.
36. Courier Mail, 12 March 1999.
37. Courier Mail, 9 June 1999.
38. Courier Mail, 7 March 1998.
39. Wendy McCarthy, ‘Summer Agenda’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5-8 January 1993.
40. ‘The Vision Splendid’, Courier Mail, 5 June 1999.
41. Reinventing Australia, Pymble, Angus and Robertson, 1993.
42. Homi K Bhabha, ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency’, The Location of Culture, New York, Routledge, 1994, extracted in During, op. cit., p 196.
43. Carter, op. cit., p 8.
44. Mackay, op. cit., p 296.
45. Carter, op. cit., p 25.
46. Hebdige, op. cit.
47. Mackay, op. cit., pp xix-xx.
48. ibid., p xxi.
49. ibid., xviii.
50. Michael Peterson, Introduction’, in Richard Nile and Michael Peterson, Becoming Australia: The Woodford Forum, University of Queensland Press, 1998, p 4.
51. Mackay, op. cit., p xviii.
52. Foucault, op. cit.
53. ibid.
54. ibid.
55. Bhabha, op. cit., p 196.
56. Richard Nile (ed.), Australian Civilisation, op. cit., p 6.
57. Joseph McCabe, ‘Australia as a Forecast of the Future’, The Lone Hand, 2 October 1911, pp 483-9.
58. Slaughter, op. cit., p 57.
59. Donald Horne, The Lucky Country, Ringwood, Victoria, Penguin, 1964.
60. Bhabha, op. cit., p 190.
61. Gough Whitlam, 11 November 1975.
62. Sir Robert Askin on anti-Vietnam war protestors, 1967.
63. Paul Keating, 1991.
64. Mackay, op. cit., pp 293-4.
65. Slaughter, op. cit., p 57.
66. Mackay, op. cit., p xvi.
67. Philip Adams, Becoming Australia, foreword.
68. Bob Ellis, ‘Visions of Australia’, Weekend Courier Mail, 22 January 2000, pp 1-4
69. Kim Beazley, Ashfield United Church, Sydney, 11 December 1999, reported in John Cleary, ‘Millennial Visions’, The Religion Report, Radio National, 15 December 1999.
70. Weet-Bix 750g box, Sanitarium
71. Miller, op. cit.
72. A term describing Australian studies scholars as used by ‘Maynard’ in an Australian Public Intellectual Network chat forum, Next Generation Postgraduate Australian Studies, www.api-network.com, 24 May 2000.
73. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans by Stephen Heath, Oxford, Fontana, 1977, p 196.
74. Slaughter, op. cit., p 215.
75. ibid, p 307.
76. ibid.
77. Julia Martin, ‘Diaries, Time and Subjectivity’, In/Between: Negotiating Time and Space, <http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/history/conferences/inbetween/>.
78. Alison James, Jenny Hockey and Andrew Dawson (eds), After Writing Culture, London, Routledge, 1997, p 2.
79. Murphy, op. cit.
80. Gospel of Mark 8:36.
81. Beazley, op. cit.
82. Alison Lee, ‘Discourse Analysis and Cultural (Re)Writing’, in Lee and Poynton, op. cit., p 200.
83. ibid., p 202.
84. G Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, Basic Books, New York, 1992, as quoted in Slaughter, ibid., p 307.
85. Slaughter, op. cit., p 220-221.
86. Georg Simmel, Essays on Culture: Selected Writings, D Frisby and M Fetherstone (eds), London, Sage, 1997.
87. The term ‘border war’ is borrowed from Donna Haraway’s penetrating ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, op. cit.
88. Adorno, op .cit., p 34.
89. ibid.
90. First Dawn Mallacoota, <www.firstdawn.net>
91. Tacey, op. cit.
92. Tom Huth, on the merchandising of the millennium in Fortune magazine.
93. Millennium Society co-chairperson Cathleen Magennis Wyatt.
94. Brian Houston, at the launch of the Australian Christian Church, ‘New Beginnings’, The Spirit of Things, Radio National, broadcast, 23 February 2000.
95. ibid.
96. ‘You CAN take it with you (Organisation survive)’, in The Watchtower: Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom, 1 November 1983, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Denham Court, New South Wales, p 30.
    Inside cover statement in its current form as it appears in The Watchtower: Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom, 1 December 1999, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Denham Court, New South Wales, p 1.
97. ‘The Apocalypse — To be Feared or Hoped For?’ and ‘Glad Tidings from the Apocalypse’, in The Watchtower: Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom, 1 December 1999, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Denham Court, New South Wales, pp 5-8, 9-14.
98. ‘Deciding for Yourself What You Want to Believe is PRIDE!’, in The Watchtower: Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom, 15 January 1983, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Denham Court, New South Wales, p 27.
99. Al Baumgarten, ‘Millennial Dreams One’, The Spirit of Things, Radio National broadcast, 4 April 1999.
100. Slaughter, op. cit., p 207.
101. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, New York, Pantheon, 1980, p 149.
102. This is the next part of the thesis digitising project and represents chapter five. 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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