Histories Of The Future

by Rosenberg, Daniel; Harding, Susan

• ISBN13: 9780822334859
• ISBN10: 0822334852
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-07-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

We live in a world saturated by futures. Our lives are constructed around ideas and images about the future that are as full and as flawed as our understandings of the past. This book is a conceptual toolkit for thinking about the forms and functions that the future takes. Exploring links between panic and nostalgia, waiting and utopia, technology and messianism, prophecy and trauma, it brings together critical meditations on the social, cultural, and intellectual forces that create narratives and practices of the future. The prognosticators, speculators, prophets, and visionaries have their say here, but the emphasis is on small narratives and forgotten conjunctures, on the connections between expectation and experience in everyday life.In tightly linked studies, the contributors excavate forgotten and emergent futures of art, religion, technology, economics, and politics. They trace hidden histories of science fiction, futurism, and millennialism and break down barriers between far-flung cultural spheres. From the boardrooms of Silicon Valley to the forests of Java and from the literary salons of Tokyo to the roadside cafeacute;s of the Nevada desert, the authors stitch together the disparate images and stories of futures past and present.Histories of the Futureis further punctuated by three interludes: a thought-provoking game that invites players to fashion future narratives of their own, a metafiction by renowned novelist Jonathan Lethem, and a remarkable graphic research tool: a timeline of timelines.Contributors.Sasha Archibald, Susan Harding, Jamer Hunt, Pamela Jackson, Susan Lepselter, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Masco, Christopher Newfield, Elizabeth Pollman, Vicente Rafael, Daniel Rosenberg, Miryam Sas, Kathleen Stewart, Anna Tsing

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
1 Introduction: Histories of the Future
Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding	1	(18)
2 A Notebook on Desert Modernism: From the Nevada Test Site to Liberace's Two-Hundred-Pound Suit
Joseph Masco	19	(32)
3 How to Make Resources in Order to Destroy Them (and Then Save Them?) on the Salvage Frontier
Anna Tsing	51	(24)
4 The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines
Vicente L. Rafael	75	(30)
INTERLUDE I Global Futures: The Game
Anna Tsing and Elizabeth Pollman	105	(18)
5 Electronic Memory
Daniel Rosenberg	123	(30)
6 All That Is Solid Melts into Sauce: Futurists, Surrealists, and Molded Food
Jamer Hunt	153	(18)
7 Sing Out Ubik
Pamela Jackson	171	(14)
INTERLUDE II Access Fantasy: A Story
Jonathan Lethem	185	(16)
8 Subject, City, Machine
Miryam Sas	201	(24)
INTERLUDE III Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement
Hirato Renkichi Translated by Miryam Sas	225	(6)
9 The Future of the Old Economy: New Deal Motives in New Economy Investors
Christopher Newfield	231	(24)
10 Why Rachel Isn't Buried at Her Grave: Ghosts, UFOs, and a Place in the West
Susan Lepselter	255	(26)
INTERLUDE IV The Trouble with Timelines and A Timeline of Timelines
Daniel Rosenberg and Sasha Archibald	281	(16)
11 Living Prophecy at Heaven's Gate
Susan Harding	297	(24)
12 Trauma Time: A Still Life
Kathleen Stewart	321	(20)
Bibliography	341	(14)
Notes on Contributors	355	(2)
Index	357