Culture

Critical Foresight: Unfinished?

King Solomon once wrote that ‘where there is no vision the people perish’. [1] It is arguable that vision is a strong and necessary foundation in the building up of society, its members and the projects of civilisation. From this viewpoint it is not unreasonable to say that the vision or future envisioned differentiates the citizen, community or society from its peers. Different visions modify emotion, intellect, politics, vocation, ethics and behaviour in different ways. To act as an ombudsperson of these processes of modification — to ensure an expansion of options rather than an artificial narrowing — is an ambitious task. It is prudent then to expect generalisations of many kinds collecting around ‘vision’ and ‘future’ where critical and reflexive thinking of the kind described in previous chapters is not utilised. For example, statements of the nature below gather much attention in newspapers, radio broadcasts and publications. Inspirational opinion-making of this kind and its related call to action is well known, often well received and widely consumed:

[W]hen the present flawed unfinished adventure began … [a] day of invasion for some of us it might have been, the start of a brutal conquest it certainly was … [But] from brutal beginnings, the experiment, with great sad gaps, has worked. There is much to rejoice in. And, of course, much to do. Let us do it, in good heart. [2]

Like others, the above excerpt reflects perhaps a sense of the unfinished optimism (or Nile’s ‘perpetual provisionality’) central to the ‘becoming’ thesis. [3] But how useful is this attitude really when the ‘call to action’ might be under-developed or vague? In digesting Bob Ellis’s ‘Visions of Australia’ made on 22 January 2000, we might ask how do Australians actually (re)invent a future ‘in good heart’? And what is it that according to Ellis needs ‘much’ doing?

Kim Beazley, in a parallel sermon of optimism, articulates the widely shared pre-millennial vision that ‘if we as a generation can use our voice, a voice accepting responsibility, responsibility to protect the fairness that is this country’s soul, then future generations will truly be able to rise up and call us blessed’. [4] Is it clear in Beazley’s extract from the pulpit how, or in exactly what sense, the Australian citizen might begin to ‘accept responsibility’ or ‘protect fairness’? Perhaps not. I would argue that under closer consideration, of the kind advocated by the present discussion, commentaries of this nature contain some significant deficiencies that can be identified as starting points for enquiry.

As an illustration, statements like Beazley’s — when set up against a contemporary social stage of tribulation — may stir our sympathies. This is not without intention. Beazley’s speech forms part of the political strategy to renegotiate local electoral allegiance with a Labour party that promises — what Beazley envisions to be — a ‘fair future’. To achieve this, Beazley relates contemporary ‘Australian experience’ not with the essential criterions of identifying who is Australian but with his use of the collective ‘we’ and its connection with national knowledge: ‘We have known war and peace, poverty and plenty, drought and flood; we have known all these things’. [5] This ‘experience’ becomes a potent political fiction, a myth, in which the shared nouns of catastrophe (‘war’, ‘poverty’, drought’, and ‘flood’) motivate identification in this collectivity. Who counts as ‘we’ in this rhetoric? It is the ‘we’ who have knowledge (though not necessarily direct experience) of these things. ‘Fairness’ rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of present existing ‘plain unfairness’ within this ‘experience’ and therefore of possibilities beyond ‘unfairness’. Beazley’s speech is then a border war between ‘inevitable’ and ‘negotiable’ in which the ‘fair future’ is represented as seductively and realistically as possible. The stakes in this battle are choice and restriction, in which the desired choice — a ‘responsible’ selection of the Labor party for re-election — is presented as the option of less restriction, less ‘unfairness’ in the future. But, to resituate Theodor Adorno’s famous phrase, ‘these are two halves of a whole that do not add up’. [6] There is, it would seem, a need for conceptual explicitness and practical clarity in these self-effacing approaches to the future. Slaughter continues:

Regardless of whether the view expressed is optimistic or pessimistic, whether the task is to create utopia or merely to avoid dystopia, something is missing. People who are deeply involved in particular ways of life, values, logics-in-use, traditions, and so on — people whose world-views differ in many substantial ways from those quoted — are being asked to co-operate from a great distance in a demanding series of more or less well-define tasks that lack historical precedent, or, so far as they are concerned, contemporary sanction. Thus, generalised “calls to action” may be a very ineffective way of communicating [a change in the] … substance of social life and social being. [7]

Wholeness Hunger

Beazley’s ‘call’ is not without merit nor isolated. But in this peculiar era of contradictions and ‘broken images’, [8] in which Australians simultaneously hold ‘profound doomsday views’ and ‘millennial notions of a complete change’, it seeks a problematic engagement — redefinition and recuperation:[9]

[O]ne idea has held true for Australians: it is the idea we like to think defines the soul of our nation. It is the idea that each of us is valued, that we each have a right to our own dreams for the future, and especially in a country like this one, an equal chance to fulfil them. In other words, it is fairness. [10]

To mobilise the ‘fair future’ to the centre of culture requires a sensitive, critically self-aware reworking of Australia’s connection with time and citizen, a recuperation as it were of a ‘new dreaming’ which breeds the ‘connected self’. [11]

The world comes into being through this … web of connections which sustain life; … that our origins and our future are within this web; that the meaning of our lives is within this web; that the histories of our bodies and our minds are within this web; that the meaning of death is here too; that the generations on which we ride the waves of time are of and in this web … the world is not in need of a new story, it is we who are in need. [12]

This should invite both a ruthless, penetrating practicality in reinvigorating Australia’s ‘soul’ and the humility to undo the ‘self-interest’ which has till now only rewarded ‘the isolated … and competitive and dominating self’. [13] It calls for a rupture with existing epistemological structures of meaning. Without fetishizing other ‘cultures of connection’ such as Indigenous (or the popularly labelled ‘wisdom’) cultures, it invites Australian society to break down the proverbial ‘unfair’ future, question its nature, unmask its implicit investments and flaws, and remake a site for ‘fair’ futures. There is value in this process. Our connections with the world outside will be more evident, sustainable, real and responsible. But there is resistance too. The current industrial and capital forms of social relations and imaginings continue to work against diversification, enchantment and connection:

For settler descendants … connections are ruptured almost daily. Towns are flooded, suburban streets erased, farms repossessed, pastures blown away, forests stripped, historical sites bulldozed, relationships of care subverted to the rule of profit. Here in Australia, and around the world, economic rationalism, global economic treaties and a culture of social worth defined by consumer power, reward the isolated and dominating self. So it seems … that despair often appears before us as our destiny, as well as being a daily temptation. [14]

These destructive forces are not abstract nor without perpetrators. Deborah Rose Bird suggests that our common dreams are losing to the same destructive forces that have worked their violence on Aboriginal culture. ‘We know violence under the name of colonisation and we know it under the name of development. Today we’re learning to know it under the name of globalisation’. [15] Argues Rose Bird:

Wholeness hunger is itself part of modernity and it slips into longing for a world that one can only encounter in dreams. Here in Australia and in other settler societies … one form of wholeness hunger manifests itself as the desire to attribute to indigenous people a reality that conforms to the very dreams of wholeness that are themselves brought into being by our own fragmentation. So these dreams get framed by reversals. Modernity fragments, therefore indigenous reality must be whole. Modernity destroys, indigenous people must conserve. Modernity impels us towards instrumental relationships with others and requires of us an extreme callousness; indigenous people must be kind, thoughtful and knowing. In this kind of reversal, indigenous people are configured as a sort of us as we dream of being, when we recoil from the pitiless alienation that is the experience of modernity. [16]

Apocalypse Is a Way of Western Life …

Themes of apocalypse then — (‘multiple’) destruction, destinies of despair, ‘increasing disconnection’, ‘disenchantment’ and impending collapse — are working their corrosive way through Australia’s social order in many forms. This has been the concern of the present project over the past three years, respectively pre and post millennium apocalyptic senses. [17] At the time of writing this closing chapter, I must conclude that apocalypse remains a significant, if largely unacknowledged, interpretative practice of contemporary Australian mental life. On 23 April 2000, when Sixty Minutes promoted its lead article, ‘The Doomsday Machine’, with graphic title splashes of ‘Armageddon: Cold War Chills’, it continued in a mainstream channel of communication the formal, almost mechanical relationship that exists between apocalypse and Australian society. [18] When considered on the terns of this book, it is an unusual headline to appear in mainstreamed presentations and invites questioning of the type encouraged under Australian futures studies or public intellectualism. That typologies of ‘Armageddon’ should be perceived in the contemporary events of history is common to religions like Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Maranatha Revival Crusade and the Christadelphians but just how resonate theologically, socially and politically are such ideas in the climate of secular Australia today? What audience does the Sixty Minutes headline appear to be ‘talking to’? What are the assumptions made by its producer and their ‘itinerary of meaning’ in constructing this particular headline as it relates to the continuing nuclear proliferation between nations?

In the programming of the Sixty Minutes lead article, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the imagined identity of the target television audience is tied up in the expectation of climatic ends to civilisation. How so? Television current affairs are more than a ‘representational text’ broadcast among other productions via a ‘technology of delivery’. [19] Current affairs programming has ‘developed strategies which can simultaneously familiarise and defamiliarise’ its subject content in ways not always immediately perceptible. [20] Over the course of twenty-one years, Sixty Minutes has tested and proven ‘distinctive techniques for selection, regulation and transformation’ of its subject. Simultaneously, it has constructed myths about its own internal processes as — according to current promotional material — ‘Australia’s most successful current affairs television program’, which continues a ‘tradition of excellence in reporting, camerawork and editing’, that presents a mixture of ‘headline-grabbing investigative reports, interviews, profiles and stories on the issues facing Australians’ and relates ‘stories through the eyes of those involved … by writing in a relaxed, contemporary fashion’. [21]

It is these dimensions of current affairs as a consistent and coherent practice ‘bring[ing] the world back home’ in techniques of production publicly deployed as fair, truthfully representative and astutely aware of the ‘real story’ that Sixty Minutes invites approval of its continued broadcast. That is, Sixty Minutes is a multilayered textual structure, ‘continuous with … those broader social discursive patterns which Fairclough identifies as contributing to the establishment and maintenance of specific orders of discourse’, [22] whose effectiveness is intensified by publicly advised (and ratings sanctioned) processes of broadcasting production. Or on terms of Sixty Minutes‘ investigative imperative — which curiously relies upon some knowledge of ancient biblical history in its public relations — ‘don’t cover the Great Flood, interview Noah!’ [23]. This in mind, what ‘contemporary fashion’ or ‘order of discourse’ is being related by ‘The doomsday machine’ or ‘Armageddon: Cold War Chills’? It is the aforementioned sense of apocalypse that is particularly manifest in the Sixty Minutes article as well as Australian society and culture at the turn of the millennium.

The Twenty-Fifth Question: How Do We Depoliticise Australian Futures?

… unless every present reworks its own archetypes, its own sacred stories, brings them alive in terms that speak to the new times, then it’s going to find itself in deep trouble, as is the case in the modern west. [24]

That to find the grand meta-narrative … or the ‘common dream’ of a culture which allows that culture to give itself universals by which it operates, to have shared dreams, is distinctly what the entire project of the moment is not about. It is saying that common dreams, shared dreams, tend to be impositions of power elites and potentially totalitarian and we shouldn’t have them. [25]

As noted earlier, newspapers frequently use metaphors of shift and change and re-placement in time when reporting millennial activities during the 1990s and early 2000. Commercial and popular media often mixes political innovation with visions of a better cultural life. The unstated assumption behind this political rhetoric, then and now, is that we cannot understand the forces and necessity of cultural change unless we appreciate the special significance of certain (powerful) moments in — and generations of — time. This suggests that Australian national culture and polity is, in some important way, linked to time. This connection might seem obvious in the coverage given to the 1999 Republican movement’s ‘It’s time for a change’ campaign or in the celebration of national and popular events as they relate to time passed (Australia Day, Anzac Day, New Year’s Day), but there is more to it than this.

When the 31 October 1999 Sunday Show television program attempted to manufacture opinion in favour of the republican president model through a ’2005 hypothetical scenario’, the connection between polity and time is not just a matter of rhetoric or linguistic innovation. It actually describes a key feature of the way culture and cultural change is created, propagated, enjoyed and modified. National forms of time, and the opportunities they create, help shape the culture that is produced. And national politics plays its part in this process, by the support given and the opportunities denied in manufacturing cultural time and change and in the sites allowed for civic response. If experienced time is public, then cultural time is political. The formation and deployment of cultural time acts as a technology of change over a civic body. Australian futures studies would be concerned with what relations of power operate to manufacture millennial polity and culture.

In the close of 1999, capital-industrialist ideas of time and tropes of political innovation converged to influence the production, distribution and consumption of culture and polity — and cultural and political change — in Australia. How does time politicised as millennial affect what is seen and heard, what is composed and created? How do Australian political ideas and values, institutions and interests, interact with notions of time through mainstream and popular media to manufacture cultural shift and opinion? What networks operate to form millennial anticipation? Can we theorise cultural time in 1999 as Australian millennial time? Is it possible to theorise the political conditions that exercise this formation of Australian millennial time? And did the millennium-future exist before Australian polity certified the fact?

These questions like the others are important because of the implications they have for the role of time in the quality and character of Australian cultural life and for the use of cultural time in politics. To understand the ways in which the ‘millennial’ cultural time of 1999 and contemporary Australian politics converged in an effort to reshape cultural life and polity is to understand in what way the nation builds and rebuilds itself. It has been commonplace to locate responsibility for western cultural time in the date appearing on a calendar because of the associated tendency to decipher the place of temporal meaning as contained in the calendar’s systemised logic and a popular willingness to view such configuration as sequentially sound and socially relevant. But this tends to downgrade other forces shaping and generating ‘authentic’ time. If time is thought to be the product of time-keeping practices, it is easy to see how cultural uses of time (in this instance, ‘millennial’) come to be viewed as being pre-thematic and pre-theoretical backgrounds to cultural life rather than agencies of it — ‘pre-thematic’ in that the future sense of 2000AD assumed a position of commonplace involvement in contemporary public dialogue and ‘pre-theoretical’ in that popular awareness of an imminent millennium was not largely nor actively informed by the cognitive interests of an academic discipline. [26]

But cultural uses of time are never for minor effects. For example, the act of ‘arriving at the millennium’ was a triumph of collective awareness whereby a series of narratives around a structured and fictional event converged. Media heraldry of pre- and post-millennial activism facilitated this ‘semantic innovation’ and the new temporal locus (2000AD plus) was ‘brought into the world by means of language’. In ‘synthesising the heterogeneous’, dissimilar content within the numerous millennial narratives (including their story-tellers and audiences) was gathered together and ‘harmonised’. With print and electronic modes of communication eliciting dramatic responses of celebration, the multiplicity of events and structural features of the immediate future were ‘seized all at once’ by the ‘authorial overview’ of 2000AD. In other words, there arose both formal and informal agreements among the cultural and political bodies that produce and maintain Australia’s ‘timing’ that the ‘millennium’ should assert symbolic power in various culturally accepted forms. In interrogating the religious and secular politics used within this millennial semantic shelter, consider the ways in which politicised time can indeed have a profound impact upon the cultural life of a nation. Why do political authorities become involved in the organisation of cultural time, such as: the encouragement of millennium celebrations or festivals by local and federal councils; the push for a millennial republic because ‘It’s time for a change’; the production of policy papers like the SEQ2001 Project; or the creation of a Millennium Office within the Department of Internal Affairs? In what way did the 31 October 1999 Sunday Show broadcast of a ‘hypothetical future in 2005′ serve political interests? The answer does not lie simply with the political will of individual politicians; it lies both with the changing political economy of culture and time and with the cultural exchange and politicised uses of time. How useful then is it to link millennial apocalyptic time to Australian culture and to make political and media practice the engine of such connections? And in theorising this apocalyptic millennial subjectivity as Australian time, what might be recuperated, re-enchanted, reconciled, reinvigorated and recovered?

Australia, the Foresight-Driven Culture?

[Each citizen should] participate in the process of taking the[ir] vulnerability into a direction of enhanced activism about creating [their] own history in a just society — use the millennium for that kind of opportunity. [27]

More and more people see the need to talk, to act, in order to create a sustainably better quality of life, not only for ourselves but for our children and our grandchildren. I am constantly talking to people now who are asking not ‘How do we meet our material needs?’ but rather ‘How do we arrange our activities so that our quality of life improves, rather than just our material wealth?’ I think the world is moving towards a new set of social, political and economic realities, and I think we need to be much better prepared to face this radically different future. We have to shift our emphasis from economic efficiency and materialism towards a sustainable quality of life and to healing of our society, of our people and our ecological systems. [28]

Do not model yourselves on the behaviour of the world around you, but let your behaviour change, modelled by your new mind. [29]

What role does ‘future-thinking’ play in Australian hope and expectation? Can we establish a discourse of ethics regarding the use or misuse of future mythology? And how might we engage studies of the future in the historical and sociological disciplines that would see the future as itself a theory with very particular ideological and metaphysical investments, an address to the present, transforming it into the fulfilment of the future we aim to aspire to?

This thesis has raised a number of questions about the nature, direction and control of futures thinking and it may seem unorthodox to close this project with more questions. Yet it is problematic I think to offer complete closure where little is perhaps available. For this thesis has addressed the manner in which futures knowledge is created, propagated and given prominence in Australian culture, that is, symbolic processes of meaning-making which have been deeply ingrained over generations. As I opened this discussion, we must be mindful that we are dealing with uncertain, open-ended and value-laden texts. This requires a qualitative examination rather than a quantitative analysis. The task at hand is to become critically suspicious of futures thinking and to acknowledge that there are no simple answers. In this sense, I have declared throughout the thesis a relationship between the future and critical theory and to suggest that a reflexive sense of situatedness is needed when discussing the future. When investigated in this manner, some futures can be usefully identified as artificially narrowed, representing a closure rather than an expansion of options. Reversing default interpretations of the future is to invite critical and textual attention. I have argued this is a worthy activity. Considerable utility can be derived from positioning the future as a text subject to various desires and uses. In the case of the present study, from such positioning a form of apocalyptic thinking can be observed as a deep cultural process guiding interpretations of the future for Australians. This springs from the view that apocalypse is a persistent interpretative process competing against clearly articulated and responsible vision within the Australian national imagination.

In conclusion, to answer any question about the future requires the analysts to place themselves in a position to see something of the design and construction of contemporary futures. In effect, the analyst must probe beneath the surface of hidden ideologies, commitments and interests and unravel popularly consumed futures and their futurespeak — like for example, in the timeframe of the present study, ‘future’, ’2000′, ’2001′, and ‘millennium’ — from their contemporary frames of expression with full consciousness of being participants in the same cultural processes creating them. What this means in practice is paying careful attention to internalised and external processes of socio-cultural framing and editing, inherited world-views, invested meanings, unquestioned assumptions, habits of perception and embedded presuppositions which obscure fuller accounts of social reality, social change and, more importantly, social potential.

This is not an unambiguous activity but rather a deep ‘epistemological play in the fields of culture and time’. [30] It is, in effect, a pursuit of the critically aware, foresight-driven society that is not merely past-driven but reflexively aware of its own becoming. [31]

References

1. Proverbs 29:18.
2. Ellis, op. cit.
3. Richard Nile, ‘Civilisation’, The Australian Legend and its Discontents, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2000.
4. Beazley, op. cit.
5. ibid.
6. Adorno, op. cit.
7. Slaughter, op. cit., p 206.
8. Tacey, ibid.
9. Quimby, op. cit.
10. Beazley, op. cit.
11. John Cleary, ‘Re-enchantment’, The Spirit of Things, Radio National, broadcast, 11 August 1999.
12. Deborah Rose Bird, ‘Re-enchantment’, The Spirit of Things, Radio National, broadcast, 11 August 1999.
13. ibid.
14. ibid.
15. ibid.
16. ibid.
17. ibid.
18. ‘Armageddon: Cold War Chills’, Dan Rather (reporter), 60 Minutes, George Crile (producer), CBS, aired channel nine, 23 April 2000.
19. Cook, op. cit., p 61.
20. ibid.
21. ‘The Team’, Sixty Minutes, website, <http://www.sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au>, accessed 25 April 2000.
22. Cook, op. cit., p 61.
23. ‘The Team’, Sixty Minutes, op. cit.
24. Carroll, op. cit.
25. Cleary, op. cit.
26. David Carr, Time, Narrative and History, Indianapolis, Indianapolis University Press, 1986, p 18.
27. Quimby, op. cit.
28. Janet Holmes a’Court, Sambell Oration, ‘The Republican Prophet: John Dunmore Lang’, The Spirit of Things, Radio National, broadcast, 25 August 1999.
29. Romans 12:2.
30. Slaughter, op. cit., p 367.
31. This is the final part of the thesis digitising project and represents the conclusion. 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 contained in previous chapters of this thesis.

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