Last week I presented two papers at Anticipation 2024 in Lancaster: abstracts here and in the next post.

Many groups are concerned with improving the quality of anticipation in social life, and are vocal champions for thinking more about the future. But focusing on the future is not always a positive thing to do, and locating our concerns there comes with risks: the false promises of politicians and business leaders, the vulnerability of our interests to ‘tradable’ futures (Adam and Groves, 2007), the weakening of claims of harm (e.g. Ruckenstein, 2023), or the deferral of necessary action. This paper describes some of the ways in which working with the future is risky. It suggests these are reason enough to ask where we might do without the future, or which aspects of our life do not, after all, require us to talk about the future, and offers an account of an alternative temporal frame: the thick present.

Various authors have offered different accounts of the thick present, from within futures studies (e.g. Jönsson et al., 2021; Poli, 2011) and beyond (e.g. Haraway, 2016; Neimanis & Walker, 2014). The paper offers an account of how the present may be ‘thickened’, suggesting that it becomes so through the exercise of agency, and draws on theories of practice (e.g., Welch, Mandich, & Keller, 2020; Emirbayer and Mische, 1998) to describe how action in a thick present might be imagined to avoid the risky and unreliable future, working instead with lived futures (Adam and Groves, 2007), reliable insofar as they are bounded and produced by existing relations of care between people, places, and practices, and utopian futures (Thompson and Zizek, 2013; Levitas, 1991), which being eternally ‘not yet’ may be relied upon to never come about. This account of action in a thick present, the paper claims, might help us recognise where we can do without the future, and avoid its risks, while continuing to act.

References

Adam, B., & Groves, C. (2007). Future matters. Brill.
Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency. American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/231294.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Jönsson, L., Lindström, K., & Ståhl, Å. (2021). The thickening of futures. Futures, 134, Article 102850. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328721001592.
Levitas, R. (1991). The concept of Utopia. Syracuse University Press.
Neimanis, A., & Walker, R. (2014). Weathering: Climate change and the “thick time” of transcorporeality. Hypatia, 29(3), 558–575. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12064
Poli, R. (2011). Steps toward an explicit ontology of the future. Journal of Futures Studies, 16(1), 67–78.
Ruckenstein, M. (2023). The Feel of Algorithms. University of Carolina Press.
Thompson, P. and Zizek, S. (2013). The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia. Duke University Press.
Welch, D., Mandich, G., & Keller, M. (2020). Futures in Practice: Regimes of Engagement and Teleoaffectivity. Cultural Sociology, 14(4), 438–457. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975520943167