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Biography
Jason Ensor is a PhD Candidate supervised by Professor Richard Nile at the Institute for Media, Creative Arts and Technology (Murdoch University) and Associate Professor Tim Dolin at the School of Media, Society and Culture (Curtin University of Technology) in Perth, Western Australia. The title of his dissertation is “Places of Publication and the Australian [...]
Publications
Jason Ensor’s publications have ranged across subjects as diverse as Armageddon, Australian literature, refugees, technology and print culture studies. Jason’s early work reflects the concerns of his Masters thesis which developed links between between religious conceptions of apocalypse and the secular fin-de-siecle in Australia, 2000. Though Jason has moved recently into the field of Australian [...]
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.
Critical Foresight: New Ways
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]
Critical Foresight: Alt. Styles
Through this investigation of contemporary futurestext I argue that fragmentation of Australia’s future perspective along apocalyptic fault lines is most visible during the last decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, apocalyptic subjects exercise a strong influence over Australia’s internal styles of thinking about the future towards the close of the 1990s. During this period, many religious organisations through their publishing arms provided an intellectual justification and articulated account of their apocalyptic and endist positions that usually always opposed dominant cultural values of progress. The default view is to regard their accounts as positioned on the margins of society. Yet their styles of futures-thinking — which suggested a form of apocalyptic anticipation towards the times ahead — were produced and expressed within a specific historical, cultural and symbolic conjuncture of late twentieth century globalisation, postmodernism and pre-millennial apocalyptic expectation inclusive of society.
Critical Foresight: Anodyne Futures
To make a closer study of how uses of texts about the future are implicated in the construction of futures knowledges and subjectivities, a metalanguage is needed to provide an analysis of futures-thinking beyond the ‘insightful interpretation’ phase, a theorisation that brings ‘Australian studies’, ‘text’ and ‘future’ into new relations with each other under the field of AFS.
Critical Foresight: What is Time?
During the second half of the twentieth century, it was commonly accepted that ‘we can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present’. [2] But if, as Stambaugh asserts, ‘temporality is … the occurrence, the taking place of thinking’, where thoughts and actions in time are contextualised by a taxonomy of tense, then any meaning, significance and value ascribed to the epochal moment like say the ‘turning of the millennium’ is a mere linguistic and imagined projection of our current prejudices, interests and concerns, and is in no way attached in any real sense to the advent itself. [3] In the words of metaphysical philosopher J R Lucas, ‘whereas the present and past are real, the future, as long as it is still future, is not’. [4] On this view, it may be reasonable to ask why it was fashionable during the late 1990s in Australia to gather futures around the number 2000?
Critical Foresight: The Present
The future is socially constructed; it is not an element of empirical reality. As with time in general, the future is constitutive of a social and cultural order. Our conception of time and modes of time keeping are also culturally specific. For Australian society does not regard time nor keep time in the same manner or form as say Indian or Chinese cultures. How Australians reckon the pattern of passing moments is culturally specific to a western scheme of calibration and temporality. Similarly, Australian responses and reactions to patterns of time reckoning are also culturally specific. In Australia, citizens are inculcated to react to socio-temporal cues like, say, Australia Day on January 26 or Anzac Day on April 25. Other cultures do not respond to these cues in the same way that Australians choose and are often required to. Responses to socio-temporal cues are learnt.
Critical Foresight: Introduction
Towards Critical Cultural Foresight addresses the manner in which knowledge of the future (or ‘futurestext’, that is, information positioned and empowered as being ‘relevant’ to the future and significant to the construction and formation of the ‘future’ subject) was created, propagated and given prominence in Australian culture and Australian Studies during the calendar move from the second to the third millennium. It argues that the future can be positioned as a text subject to various desires and uses and that from such positioning a form of apocalyptic thinking can be observed as a deep cultural process guiding interpretations of the future for Australians. Situated within the often overlooked discipline of Australian Studies, a field succinctly described by Ffion Murphy as ‘a discursive formation and cluster of theoretical and methodological strategies for scholarly inquiry into Australia’, [2] this thesis interrogates the politics behind processes actively inventing the future.
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