This is the second paper I presented at Anticipation 2024 last week, with the inspirational Robin Zebrowski.

Time, for a wide range of cultures, is conceived in terms of space. The language used to describe the world shapes how we think of it (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999; Boroditsky, 2000; Thibodeau and Boroditsky, 2011; Gentner, Imai & Boroditsky, 2002) and the language used, in the Anglosphere and beyond (e.g. Moore, 2014), to represent the future is spatial. We see this in the modernist notion of ‘linear time’, of futures imagined as stretching out ‘in front’ of us, in the ‘sedimented time’ of Koselleck (2018), in signed languages that gesture to the front and back of one’s body to convey future and past (Taub 2001), in current explorations of ‘long’ and ‘deep’ time, and in the cones and roadmaps of futures studies and foresight, with their imagined volumes and networks in which different possible futures are arranged. The future, for most of us, is spatial by default.

Spatial futures, whether linear notions of ‘progress’, ‘future generations’, or ‘deep time’, are often imagined to have a special moral character. But we suggest that, regardless of the ethical aims of groups propounding them, spatial futures are often colonising in their intent, framing the future as a space into which the interests of the present can be projected. In this paper we describe some alternative, non-spatial, futures, which we characterise as ‘immanent futures’, from work in dispositional, speculative and utopian futures (e.g. Osberg, 2018; Wilkie et al., 2017; Levitas, 2013; Poli, 2011). We suggest that these offer alternative ethical stances to colonising spatial futures, and, given the deep cognitive foundation of spatial metaphors for time, argue that it falls on futures educators and those concerned with ‘futures literacy’ to develop capacities to think with immanent futures, in order to cultivate moral stances that tend less towards the colonisation of the future.

References

Boroditsky, L. (2000). Metaphoric structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition 75, 1-28.
Gentner, D., Imai, M. & Boroditsky, L. (2002). As time goes by: Evidence for two systems in processing space→time metaphors. Language and Cognitive Processes 17(5): 537-565.
Koselleck, R. (2018). Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories – Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford University Press
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1999).Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied mind & its challenge to Western thought. Basic Books.
Moore, K. E. (2014). The spatial language of time: Metaphor, metonymy, and frames of reference. John Benjamins.
Osberg, D. (2018). Education and the future. In R. Poli (Ed.), Handbook of anticipation. Springer International Publishing AG. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-31737-3_88-1
Levitas, R. (2013). Utopia as method: The imaginary reconstitution of society. Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9781137314253
Poli, R. (2011). Steps Toward an Explicit Ontology of the Future. Journal of Futures Studies, 16(1), 67 – 78
Taub, S. (2001). Language from the body: Iconicity and metaphor in American Sign Language. Cambridge University Press.
Thibodeau, P. & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PLoS ONE 6(2): e16782. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016782
Wilkie, A., Savransky, M. & Rosengarten, M. (2017). Speculative Research: the Lure of Possible Futures. Routledge.