In this paper, Aaron Irion examines the historical, philosophical, and material conditions underlying modern conceptions of time and futurity, arguing that the contemporary crisis of the future is inseparable from the development of capitalism and the extension of its logics. The paper contrasts a fading utopian imagination with the contemporary predominance of dystopianism, resignation, and cultural repetition. Drawing on a wide array of thinkers, it argues that late capitalism has produced a perpetual present in which the capacity to imagine genuinely alternative futures has been foreclosed, while also identifying the absent future as a spectral force that continues to haunt the present through unrealized possibilities and frustrated expectations. Against the deterministic and teleological bent that characterizes both traditional philosophies of progress and the fatalistic catastrophism of contemporary thought, Irion ultimately calls for the resurrection of the future as an open, indeterminate field of competing possibilities immanent to the present. Drawing on Berardi’s concepts of futurability and potency, he argues that emancipatory transformation requires identifying these latent possibilities, cultivating collective political subjectivity, and developing a praxis capable of actualizing alternative social arrangements. The paper thus advances a conception of the future that is less a predetermined destination or guaranteed historical outcome than an inherently uncertain political wager: a commitment to breaking with the present and creating a world whose contours cannot be known in advance.
“The realms of time have been separated for him like water, earth, and air. The tide of what has been has receded from the rock of the present, and the future lies veiled in cloud on the horizon.”[1]
“They are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet.”[2]
“But to me the future is still black and blank…”[3]
Of time, teleology, and progress
To talk about the future is to talk about temporality, and to do so in a very particular register. This may seem an obvious statement, and in a way it is. But is also something that cannot be taken for granted or treated superficially. The way we think about the future, and the way we talk about time more generally, is always a product of historical, material conditions. That time has not always been thought of in a way we would understand today cannot be emphasized enough. If the past is a foreign country, as the saying goes, likewise its conceptions of temporality and futurity. The general trajectory of thinking about time has involved something of a narrowing. In the past, there was a diversity of ways to think about time across cultures, periods, etc. There is, in other words, “no reason to suppose that we can legitimately articulate a comprehensive, monolithic pre-modern or ancient conception of time and temporality,” even if certain temporal structures seemed to endure and even if “we find homologous conceptualizations of time in cultures that had no apparent contact with one another.”[4]
That, for instance, the ancient Greeks thought about time differently than we generally do is obvious to anyone who has read Plato’s Timaeus or Politikos. But the fact that the Greeks thought about time differently than their contemporaries is no less important. To give one vulgarly-put example, it has been said that “Time is a line to the Jews, a circle to the Greeks”—though this distinction obviously needs complicating.[5] The point here is simply that one cannot take the concept of time for granted and therefore cannot take the concept of the future for granted either.
For all these reasons, we can say with Bifo Berardi that “The future is not an obvious concept, but a cultural construction and projection.”[6] But its cultural construction is not epiphenomenal to the mode of production that undergirds that culture. “The rise of the myth of the future [as we know it] is rooted in modern capitalism, in the experience of expansion of the economy and knowledge. The idea that the future will be better than the present is not a natural idea, but the imaginary effect of the peculiarity of the bourgeois production model.”[7] Time, as with space (as the work of Henri Lefebvre made clear),[8] is produced not given. This helps explain why a specific conceptualization of the future predominated in the previous century and lingers on ex negativo in our present: contra the economic and cultural diversity of previous epochs, the postmodern era has tended towards uniformity, meaning that the space for different conceptualizations of the future has narrowed. That uniform model is in crisis, but alternatives are wanting, as will be explicated below. The point is that, for us—especially, though not only, those of us in the West—the background conditions that inform our temporal imaginations are undoubtedly bound up with the legacy of modernity, its bourgeois production model, and its intellectual expression in the Enlightenment (and then bound up with the overcoming of all three of these in postmodernity). Before we can address this last point, let us first turn to the Enlightenment and its legacy.
Enlightenment and the philosophy of history
The embryo of the Enlightenment can be traced to the middle of the sixteenth century, though its gestation would take some hundred or more years. In any case, from the eighteenth century onward history would be conceptualized distinctly and treated as an idea, and as such require a philosophy. The Enlightenment thus replaced a theology of history—which had been the predominant mode in Western thought for nearly a millennium—with a philosophy of history. At base, the Enlightenment’s “philosophy of history served to deconstruct the Christian origin myth,” as Johannes Rohbeck makes plain.[9] However, the theological was not entirely overcome; its formal elements were somewhat retained in its philosophical successor. As Vincenzo Ferrone notes in his The Enlightenment: History of an Idea, “the vast scenarios built by the Enlightenment completed the secularization of that theologically based eschatological time…”[10] More than form alone, Enlightenment thinking retained some of the substance of its theological prehistory, which is why Georg Cavallar has lamented the problematic though widespread cliché that the Enlightenment “was hostile to religion and was secular and atheistic.”[11] Cavallar and others insist that the truth is much more complicated.
Nonetheless, the concepts of time and history would be primarily ideological and philosophical, not theological, after the Enlightenment’s dawn and would facilitate a certain notion of progress. As Ferrone notes, Enlightenment philosophy informed “the idea of a stage-by-stage development of civilization that enabled thinking about mankind’s progress as a whole.”[12] This stageist epistemology took different forms in the works of different enlighteners and is evident in the progressive liberalism of someone like the Marquis de Condorcet,[13] in the speculative philosophy of someone like Hegel, and in the historical materialism of someone like Marx. Its vestiges remain, as can be superficially seen in President Obama’s invocation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s line that the “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” (that Obama cribbed this line from a religious figure no doubt supports what was said above about the complicated relations between Enlightenment and Religion).
It may be worth looking at some texts here. The connections between the Enlightenment, capital-H History, and progress are already evident—albeit in “a relatively discreet, almost lateral way,” to use Michel Foucault’s formulation—in one of the epoch’s foundational texts: Immanuel Kant’s 1784 “What is Enlightenment?”[14] There, Kant commands that, having become enlightened, man cannot attempt to stymie future generations from further enlightening themselves, because this would be a “crime against human nature, whose original destination consists directly in this progression.”[15]
Here, we clearly see a teleological conception of history on display, one that leads through the enlightenment but progresses beyond any particular historical period. Foucault, writing on the bicentennial of Kant’s text, situated it within Kant’s wider oeuvre and noted exactly this point, claiming that all of Kant’s work “seek[s] to define the internal teleology of time and the point toward which [the] history of humanity is moving.”[16] This is especially clear when one looks to another of Kant’s texts, his “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” written just a few months before “What is Enlightenment?” and published in the same journal. In this text, Kant makes clear that history is not an empirical catalog of events, but rather philosophical, a kind of “world history, which is to some extent based upon an a priori principle.”[17] That principle, “despite all the vicissitudes it underwent, nonetheless showed a constant propensity towards ‘progress,’” in Ferrone’s estimation.[18]
This is why Foucault suggests that Kant’s text is emblematic of a certain “attitude of modernity.” This attitude has several features, but key for our purposes is the relationship between present and future. As Foucault says, “For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is.”[19] It is thus through the critical bent of Enlightenment reason that radical futures become possible and probable. The Enlightenment was but one moment, albeit a crucial one, within the “overall movement” of History, with its “basic directions.”[20]
What Foucault called the attitude of modernity prefigures what Jameson, a decade later (at precisely the moment it was fading to black), would dub the “modern feeling,” that “conviction that we ourselves are somehow new, that a new age is beginning, that everything is possible and nothing can ever be the same again; nor do we want anything to be the same again, we want to ‘make it new,’ get rid of all those old objects, values, mentalities, and ways of doing things, and to be somehow transfigured.”[21] This is a material condition, as Jameson makes clear, but it is also an ethic: “we have to make ourselves modern, too; it’s something we do, not merely something that happens to us.”[22] Later in his text, Jameson will call this an obligation: “Besides being a release and a liberation, the New is also an obligation: something you must do to yourself to rise to the occasion and be worthy of the new world tendentially in emergence all around you.”[23] Within this context then, the future is, or rather was, something to look forward to, something which could already be seen in the present, but which would be fundamentally different to it—it was something that needed to be worked towards.
This optimism for the future was culturally pervasive for decades, perhaps even centuries. Of interest to me are the strains of Marxist thought and practice that embraced a radical, stageist teleology wrapped in historical materialist garb—Stalinism being the most obvious.[24] Later developments, both political and philosophical, would obviously trouble this view.
Here it is worth remembering that the genealogical account of this teleological orientation was only ever partially true, for a couple of reasons. There were always enlighteners who rejected these teleological commitments and their presuppositions, such as many of those thinkers associated with the Scottish Enlightenment.[25] Moreover, the reception and dispersion of this genealogy needs to be more properly historicized. Certain notions that we tend to associate with the Enlightenment as a whole, or with specific figures working within in its bounds, have proven to be, not innocently received, but rather revised and popularized later—in a process that repackaged as inheritances what were in fact novel reinterpretations or outright innovations. The most famous instance of this process is the contested notion of the “end of history” which was attributed to Hegel and became so influential in the 20th century, and which concerns precisely the themes we are concerned with here: temporality and futurity. But as recent work has shown, what came to be known as the “end of history” was not faithfully received from Hegel but rather the product of a novel interpretation thereof by Alexandre Kojève, a product that was disseminated widely.
Nonetheless, it is still of the utmost importance to look at what this teleology wrought, what the utopian imagination looked like and the cultural products it produced. It is, in other words, critical that we investigate those futures that were once imagined, before they faded away.
The end of weary winters
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) is an emblematic look at what the utopian imagination groomed an American to expect from the year 2000. When its protagonist, Julian West, falls asleep in 1887 Boston and wakes up one hundred and thirteen years later, the United States has been transformed into a softly communist utopia: work hours are drastically reduced, no one works past the age of forty-five, goods and services are abundant and publicly provisioned, technology has advanced considerably and is used to further human wellbeing, social conflict and crime have all but vanished, and the list goes on. Trying to make sense of this new world, West’s mind is consumed by scattered lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1842 poem “Locksley Hall,” which seem to describe the world West now inhabits: “For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be…” And if there was any question of the teleology undergirding this transformation, we soon hear of “universal law” and get the following line: “For I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.”[26] Nearer the end of the novel, we are imbibed with a boundless optimism toward the future: “With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.”[27]
That this utopian imagination was pervasive is vulgarly apparent in the fact that Looking Backward sold more than copies than all but one other novel [Uncle Tom’s Cabin] in nineteenth-century America. It also had the immediate political effect of inspiring quasi-mass movements, captured in intentional communities and four thousand “Bellamy societies” across the country and abroad before 1900. These organizations not only published newspapers and books of their own, inspired by Looking Backward’s ideas, but also formed ties with various parties in the United States (most notably the People’s Party, but also the Socialist Labor Party and Fabian socialist sects).[28]
The imaginary on display here would retain its potency through the turn of the century and throughout the first half of the twentieth. It was captured not only in other utopian novels—William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890), for example, was a critique of Looking Backwards but no less utopian than this last—but later in film and television, too. However, it was always troubled by other imaginaries, always troubled by an outside that stubbornly refused to submit to its virtual hegemony. We turn now to that outside.
The future is bleak and bland
As was just intimated, the utopian imagination was always met by a skeptical gaze, captured in various ways by the works of some of the greatest artists of the last two centuries. As far back as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), novelists saw not a bright future but an apocalyptic one. But very often even these skeptics were bound to the utopian imagination, even as they tried to subvert it.[29] It is telling that many dystopian novels, for instance, do not begin outside the utopian frame, but rather work through it, suggesting that the pursuit of utopia will turn into its opposite (sometimes necessarily and sometimes more contingently). Dostoevsky’s Demons (1871) may be the earliest of this type insofar as the novel’s protagonist, Shigalyov, sets out to build a new society based on scientific inquiry, one meant to emancipate all those suffering under the yoke of Tsarism, but ends up creating a dystopia instead. Shigalyov captures the transition from utopian hope to dystopian reality in a confession: “Proceeding from unlimited freedom, I end with unlimited despotism.”[30] Later, this trope would reemerge in the novels of Huxley, Orwell, Rand, and many others besides. In all of them, one can see that, though the outcome is subverted and pessimism prevails, utopia remains a structuring paradigm. The transition from these dystopias of yore to our own is captured well by the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, in his analysis of the 2006 film Children of Men. As he says, “Once dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it.”[31] In other words, even in modern dystopias the future is foreclosed. This condition is part and parcel of how Fredric Jameson described postmodernism; as he said already in the late 80s, “what is implied is simply an ultimate historicist breakdown in which we can no longer imagine the future at all, under any form—Utopian or catastrophic.”[32]
Nonetheless, in a certain way, determinism and teleology have not been altogether abandoned. They live on; their logics have remained, but their content has been reversed. Whereas the content of history’s march was once thought to be progressive and ameliorative, the last determinists are now catastrophists. The future is foretold and history is in motion, but its end is no longer the best of all worlds, but the worst: Apocalypse. As Berardi wrote already in 2011, “In the last three decades of the [twentieth] century, the utopian imagination was slowly overturned, and has been replaced by the dystopian imagination.”[33] Twenty years before him, Jameson presciently saw this condition coming of age, noting that “the imagination of catastrophe still retains the forms of a near and a far future category; if the atomic exchange has grown distant, the greenhouse effect and ecological pollution are, by way of compensation, ever more vivid.”[34] Ever more so by the day.
Indeed, this sad state of affairs has been visible for the entirety of our present century, being diagnosed poignantly by theorists such as Fisher, such that it’s worth bringing us back to his discussion of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 adaptation of Children of Men. Fisher’s analysis of that film makes clear that dystopia will no longer result from some kind of hard break with the present but will rather naturally unfurl from it: the world of Children of Men “seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it…The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart” (the film feels even more prescient today given that its thematics of demographic collapse now haunt Western elites the world over, who worry endlessly about below replacement birth rates).[35]
One feels this catastrophism seeping into all of Western culture, and conservatives have now converged on the trends identified by those theorists quoted above. The post-liberal political theorist Patrick Deneen (echoing Jameson, though he would not know it) put it this way in 2018: “My unscientific impression is that more popular programming than ever is devoted to this theme. If our sense of threat from nuclear weapons seems to have waned somewhat, we have found other night terrors, from medical catastrophe to cyborg warfare on humanity to cataclysmic climate change and the specter of human extinction.”[36] And the conservative commentator Ross Douthat, in his The Decadent Society, strikes a similar chord by suggesting that the utopian imagination began to give way to resignation and then dystopia as early as the 1980s or so. “This resignation,” says Douthat, “haunts our present civilization.” He gives a convincing account of how this manifests culturally. The 1960s gave us the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which “promised a manned mission to Jupitar in its eponymous year,” and the television series Star Trek, which “assumed that space exploration and colonization would follow as naturally from the Apollo program as sailors and settlers had followed the course discovered by Columbus.” From the 1980s through to our own day, “movies especially began to treat the infinite spaces differently—as a zone of terrors where no one hears you scream (Alien and its imitators), a source of sinister invasions and a home of malignant demigods (the UFO craze, The X-Files), or as purgatory to be escaped by a safe return to earth (Apollo 13, Gravity, The Martian, Ad Astra).”[37]
As my previous references to Shelley, Dostoevsky, and others suggest, it is not as if dystopian art is a recent invention. But the fact that it has almost entirely displaced utopian imagination is telling. One would be hard pressed to think of films or television series from the past two or three decades that are unequivocally, unironically, earnestly utopian. The exceptions tend to prove the rule, and even there the picture is muddied. It is notable that these exceptions, such as the 2015 film Tomorrowland, which gained a cult following precisely for being earnestly utopian, almost always underperform their competition. In Tomorrowland’s case, its box office grossing was almost doubled by a film that debuted but a week earlier: Mad Max: Fury Road, a film set in a ruinous, post-apocalyptic wasteland characterized by resource scarcity, contending warlords, and creatively mechanized violence. Beyond the box office, Mad Max was received much better by critics, too.
More recently, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey proved to be representative of this catastrophic imaginary. While the classic Adornoian interpretation suggests that Odysseus’ journey marks the dawn of Western bourgeois civilization,[38] Nolan completely inverts this, suggesting instead that the hero’s nostos must be seen as the end of what is, for Nolan, clearly a surrogate civilization for our own. Nolan’s quintessentially shallow dialogue ensures that this is not lost on the audience, and the latter is forced to suffer through lines such as “Our age of bronze is collapsing” and “We lived in a world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it,” among others.
When films and television are not overtly dystopian today, they tend to repetitious nostalgia-bait. Remakes, reboots, adaptations—these dominate the cultural scene. Thus, the loss of the utopian imagination not only means a countervailing tendency towards dystopian imagination, but in many cases the loss of imagination altogether—the incapacity to imagine or create something genuinely novel, whether it be hopeful or terrifying (as our discussion of Fisher above prefigured). To fill the void, endless recycling steps in, as Fisher and Douthat both diagnose. This is a hallmark of postmodern culture, as Jameson has it: “it is on this renunciation of the new or the novum that the claim to historic originality of postmodernism in general…is founded.”[39] In other words, what is “new” in contemporary culture is precisely the absence of the New.
This does, indeed, differ starkly from preceding eras, from the “modern” era, with its “formal insistence on novelty, innovation, the transformation of older forms, therapeutic iconoclasm and the processing of new (aesthetic) wonder-working technologies.”[40] It is worth saying that this account is not beyond reproach. Jürgen Habermas, for his part, finds this “cult of the new” to be characteristic of a tendency he calls aesthetic modernity. For him, this last cannot, and should not, be mistaken for modernity writ large. In fact, aesthetic modernity, for all its claims on the new, “discloses a longing for an undefiled, immaculate and stable present,” and therefore ends up as an “exaltation of the present.”[41] The genuinely modern attitude, the one whose call we have yet to properly answer, “preserves a secret tie to the classical” and “depends on vital heritages,” though its task is not merely to pass these heritages down through the generations.[42]
In any case, Horkheimer and Adorno, as far back as the 1940s, saw this “exclusion of the new” that I have been discussing coming and, more potently and presciently, saw how this exclusion would appear as precisely its opposite: “Nothing is allowed to stay as it was, everything must be endlessly in motion. For only the universal victory of the rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction promises that nothing will change, that nothing unsuitable will emerge.”[43]
What is more interesting is that even when this foreclosure is avoided at the imaginative level, when the future is genuinely taken up in the content of films, television, novels, etc., it is nonetheless retained at the formal level. This is the basis of the nostalgic mode that Jameson diagnoses wherein, in Fisher’s words, “contemporary or even futuristic reference at the level of content obscure a reliance on established or antiquated models at the level of form.”[44] In his Postmodernism, Jameson, looking at one example from the video arts, states this plainly: “even the few formal markers we have been able to isolate…are deceptive; they are now no longer features or elements of a form but signs and traces of older forms. We must remember that those older forms are still included within the bits and pieces, the bricolated material, of this text…”[45] The bottom line is this: modernism was novel in content and form—or, at a minimum, this was its drive (even if it did not always succeed).[46] That is all over now.
As I have been stressing, we can give a materialist account of why this is. There is a reason Jameson called postmodernism “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” As he explains, “Despite the delirium of some of its celebrants and apologists…a truly new culture could only emerge through the collective struggle to create a new social system. The constitutive impurity of all postmodern theory…confirms the insight of a periodization that must be insisted on over and over again, namely that postmodernism is not the cultural dominant of a wholly new social order…but only the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself.”[47] With the old New having run its course but a new mode of production unable to emerge, our present culture is forced ever more increasingly to act as a parasite feeding on the old. This is what explains the incessant production of sequels, remakes, adaptations and the like. It is reflected in the transition from the ethos of modernism to postmodernism; whereas modernism “thought compulsively about the New and tried to watch its coming into being…the postmodern looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds…” In other words, modernism was interested, in a utopian mode, with what would substantively come of changes, while postmodernism is interested not in this content but form alone, the “variations themselves,” seeing contents as nothing more than “just more images.”[48] This is why cultural products can sometimes feel new, and are certainly marketed as such, while being nothing of the sort, being (at best) modifications of older iterations.
Thus, this change in cultural imagination is not epiphenomenal to political economic changes in the West. Rather, it stems from the demands and requirements that capitalism makes of time and history today. Capitalism is unkind to the past, it “subsumes and consumes all previous history” through its logic of equivalence and commodification. Cultural products, even those of the past, must be assigned a monetary value and thus, “In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts,” which can presumably be commodified and marketed.[49] This relates in a way to how Jean Baudrillard diagnosed the End of History moment, not as the end of history but as its destruction.[50] Even Douthat, though only in passing, seems to make this link between late capitalism and culture. Discussing the film industry, he notes that “the economics of the business depend increasingly on the constant recycling of famous properties that originated as mass-market entertainments between the 1930s and the 1970s.”[51]
In any case, the way we experience time now is as a “series of pure and unrelated presents in time,” [52] a “perpetual present” that can neither imagine the future nor remember its own past.[53] Culture merely reflects new patterns in capitalist accumulation itself, whose new motto is “no long term.”[54] “Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform division.”[55] And of course this chaos follows directly from the fact that capitalist time itself is always already not one thing, but many, not one temporality, but a complex machine greased by differential temporality. Capitalist time is a “time of times, a complex time that cannot be read in the continuity of the time of life or clocks,” but rather beats to the drum of intersecting differential times and their “invisible rhythms and punctuations.”[56] It is “constructed out of the reality of the different rhythms which punctuate the different operations of production, circulation, and distribution”: production time, labor time, the turnover times of fixed, variable, and circulating capital, and all the rest.[57] In its pursuit of accumulation, capital tries to synchronize these fundamentally asynchronous times (along with others) but is never wholly successful. That failure leaves open a door through which class struggle can pass; the spaces where asynchronous temporality is felt become sites for struggle.[58]
But that struggle is always at a crossroads, for accepting the asynchronicity of capitalist time can itself lead to political impotence and quietude, insofar as “the breakdown of temporality suddenly releases [the] present of time from all activities and intentionalities that might focus it and make it a space of praxis.”[59] Chaotic time makes it difficult to assess where and when one should act. At the same time, trying to subordinate asynchronicity back into, say, a linear time, closes the door on sites of struggle and allows capital to synchronize time on its own terms. In any case, what is clear is that if there is a future for class struggle, it must pass through a confrontation with temporality/ies.
Hauntology and lost futures
To return us nearer to the key issues at hand, let me say that if the future is over, it is nonetheless still lingering, at least in some of us, still making itself felt precisely by way of its absence. If there is mourning or loss at work here, it is not of a traditional type. What has been lost is not something we once had, materially speaking, but something we had come to expect—only to have those expectations dashed. As much as a loss, it registers too as a failure.[60] Under these conditions, we walk around pained by “the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach.”[61] This is a properly hauntological condition insofar “We are not haunted by the dead but by apparitions and hallucinations, by our hopes and dreams of what could still happen but no less struggles to materialize itself.”[62] The future, then, even in its absence, can have a certain effectivity. For this very reason—that is, because of its absence—the future is today a spectral force, as that last was conceived of by Derrida when he theorized that “to haunt does not mean to be present.”[63] And in fact, there is a complete coincidence between the specter and the future properly conceived: “At bottom, the specter is the future, it is always to come, to present itself only as that which could come or come back…”[64] The specter is a “presence to come,”[65] but a presence of what? It is devoid of content, at least of content that is accessible to us in the present. Here too its coincidence with the future qua future is revealed.
Derrida’s hauntology was taken up by Fisher, most potently in his Ghosts of My Life, and forms the theoretical basis for what the latter calls lost futures. As he says, “What’s at stake in 21st century hauntology is not the disappearance of a particular object. What has vanished is a tendency, a virtual trajectory.”[66] That vanishing means that “not only has the future not arrived, it no longer seems possible.”[67] What is being described here is therefore not nostalgia for a particular period or even for a particular future. What is being longed for is rather a set of processes that made imagining the future possible at all; what is being longed for is not a no longer but rather the not yet of the futures that were imaginable even before they could be materially actualized.[68] The loss of the future is thus about so much more than one idea of it. Rather, it has meant “the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.”[69]
We are thus suffering from a peculiar kind of amnesia, not insofar as we have forgotten the past but insofar as we have “forgotten having been in the future.”[70] But then again, the degrees of separation between these two temporalities are never as wide as one might assume, especially if we consider the formal manner in which we imagine them. As Ricoeur said long ago, “Every narrative—even of the future—speaks of the irreal as if it were the past.”[71] So perhaps it a capacity for this narrativization which is missing in the end. In any case, what we know to be true is that the loss of the future has returned us only to this rotten present, where we will reside forever—and “Oh! The wretchedness of that return!”[72] And yet, it is the very spectrality of the future that can disrupt this terminally cancerous condition. Insofar as “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony,”[73] the perpetual present of our own can be upended by the ghost called the future.
Thus far, I have insisted on a historical and materialist account of time, history, and futurity, arguing that different material conditions and historical circumstances taint the way we conceptualize and live the concepts just mentioned. But I want to depart slightly from that in closing this section, if only for a moment, and suggest that there is something ontological about the desire for the future. We might say with Fisher that “the most powerful forms of desire are precisely cravings for the strange, the unexpected, the weird.”[74] And the future is all of these things. And, therefore, the desire for the future, like the desire for the strange, the weird, and the eerie is preconditioned by a “fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.”[75] Even when the old teleological models were operative, there was still no way of knowing for sure what the future held, no way of actually seeing the future in advance à la Cassandra or Freyja. The future was and is always a void, and there is something enticing, erotic, even orgasmic about the void, about “this release from the mundane, this escape from the confines of what is ordinarily taken for reality,” that the void of the future represents for us.[76]
In the next section, our last, we will look back at our inheritance…and then dive headfirst into the void.
To commit to the future is to commit suicide
As noted above, certain teleological assumptions ossified in the Marxist imagination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the tradition was also haunted by skeptics of such rosy teleology, who were always there even if operating only subterraneously. Michael Löwy claims, for instance, that Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was “the first Marxist to break radically with the ideology of progress. His thinking has therefore a distinct critical quality, which sets him apart from the dominant and “official” forms of historical materialism, and gives him a formidable methodological superiority.”[77] I think we can question this periodization of Marxist thought and find kernels of anti-teleological thought in Marx himself.
If one reads only the first pages of the Manifesto, it is still clear that the future is as likely to be heavenly as it is hellish, that we may find there emancipation or “common ruin.”[78] Commenting on these pages, China Miéville has remarked that the document’s minatory tone leaves readers with the sense that the working class “might not win, that things might get even worse.”[79] In fact, the Manifesto’s formal characteristics, alongside its “tenor of exhortation” suggest exactly the opposite of determinism and teleology. The pamphlet’s “urgency suggests, rather, that nothing is so written in the stars.”[80] On Marx’s method, Ellen Meiksins Wood has suggested that historical materialism is always “a judgement about the structure of power in society in general and capitalist society in particular, about the configuration of historical forces, about the nature of the obstacles to human emancipation and the conditions and possibilities for overcoming these obstacles.”[81] This overcoming was only ever a possibility. Nothing more nothing less. Today, if we are to recover a sense of the future, it will have to be one completely devoid of vulgar teleology and yet nonetheless absolutely committed to the future as future, committed to something, anything, other than this.
Which is to say that the future is always double, or more precisely, that it is empty, black, and blank. It has no predetermined content—it is always as likely to be brighter as it is darker, angelic as it is monstrous, or some combination thereof. This is the lesson that H.G. Wells imbued in us as early as 1895, when the protagonist of his The Time Machine travels into the future and finds a world populated on the surface by a society of light, “graceful children” and in its depths by “bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing[s],” who soon enough band together and pursue him as their prey.[82] Wells’ time traveler, in the moment just before he leaps into the future, describes the feeling thus: “I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then.”[83]
Derrida knew this feeling well; it is why we hear from him, in a line from Of Grammatology that I am fond of quoting, that the future can “only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger,” in the form of a “monstrosity” that “breaks absolutely with constituted normality.”[84] To break with our normal, to break with today in service of the future, is to close our eyes, put a gun to the head of our present, and squeeze the trigger until we hear it click. Where we end up afterwards is anyone’s guess. This is why, as I have written elsewhere, “the orientation toward the future…is a wager. It is not a guarantee.”[85] To commit oneself to the concept of the future is not to commit to a specifically brighter or darker future, but to “a world rather than no world…a future or no future,” in the words of the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.[86]
The future, then, is not a preconceived object, nor a place we can travel to. It is, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, “not a promised and a pre-existing land, but a world created in the process of its tendency, its coming undone, its deterritorialization…not at all a hope, but a simple ‘finding…’”[87] It is not that we have no agency at all. What we do here and now is not irrelevant to the future, to the coming undone of the world.
This is because the tendency invoked above by Deleuze and Guattari is never singular but always plural, never one but always many. “Tendency is movement in a given direction. The vibrational complexity of the world as potentiality can be interpreted in terms of coexisting and conflicting tendencies.”[88] These tendencies—we may call them possible futures—are not infinite, to be sure, because they must be materially inscribed in the present order, even if their inscription is often hidden from us (which is to say that a return to hunter-gathering or to universal barter is probably not inscribed in the present, but many other things are). We are therefore always drowning in what Berardi calls “futurability,” a “layer of possibility that may or may not develop into actuality”; we are always in “the vibrational condition of wandering in a space of possibility.”[89]
The extraction and implementation of one of these futures requires what Berardi calls potency: the subjective energy that “transforms the possibilities into actualities.”[90] The subject of this transformation cannot be taken for granted. In fact, late capitalism, both in its material architecture and its ideology, has done everything it can to disabuse us of the idea that such a collective subjectivity could ever (re)emerge, that what Berardi calls elsewhere a genuine “movement” could ever (re)emerge.[91]
But none of this is predetermined. And moreover, it is precisely in our abandonment of determinism that glimpses of the future can begin to be seen again. There is, in this way, a “revitalizing possibility” in our tearing ourselves away from determinism: “if it could have been different, it can – perhaps – always already be different too.”[92] Beginning from his recent interest in quantum mechanics, Slavoj Žižek arrives at a similar insight: “To understand how something emerges into our reality in a particular form, we have to understand that it enacted all possible forms, and that these ‘superposed’ forms continue to echo in the final form; like a hologram, it is indissolubly haunted by the unrealized possibilities it makes visible, the things it could have become, but did not.”[93] We should not give up on these specters that haunt us, these traces, because they may yet become something more than they are. They may prove to be illusory, but they may not. For as Freud taught us long ago, sometimes illusions come true.[94]
But this still, largely, leaves it up to us. This is always already the Marxist program; as Jameson says, “On the classical Marxian view, the seeds of the future already exist within the present and must be conceptually disengaged from it, both through analysis and through political praxis.”[95] Or as Marx himself once said, the workers’ movement’s task is “to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.”[96]
In any case, “When we are freed from faith we can grasp the real tendency of the time, and we can seize the most interesting opportunities that the tendency brings about.”[97] Here are the inklings of a new praxis and its tasks: the subversion of existing codes and the rescue of autonomy from capitalism’s teeth, the interpretation of the present and the identification of its futurability, the formation of a collective subjectivity that can actualize possibilities that are immanent to the present, and finally the resistance to all forms of power, defined as “reduction[s] in the field of possibilities to a determinist structure.”[98]
The future is not out there. It is here with us now. Here, lying dormant alongside innumerous implicit possibilities. Waiting for us to identify it, to wake it up, to give it a body so that it may become-flesh. If we can do that, our overdue emancipation may yet await.[99] But we cannot know for sure, and all actualizations are always ontologically provisional. In the end, whatever actions we undertake, the commitment to the future is still a commitment to the unknown, to the not-possibly-knowable. We may not be able to live with the future and whatever it holds. But given the rottenness of our world, we certainly cannot live without it. And so it is with shaky hands that we must pull the trigger on the present and wake up God only knows where…
[1] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 25.
[2] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006), 221.
[3] H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, in H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine (Garden City, N.Y.: Dolphin Books, 1961): 191-276, here 276.
[4] Ralph M. Rosen, “Ancient Time Across Time,” in Ralph M. Rosen, ed., Time and Temporality in the Ancient World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, 2004): 1-11, here 3.
[5] Arnaldo Momigliano, “Time in Ancient Historiography.” History and Theory 6 (1966): 1-23, here 5.
[6] Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 17.
[7] Berardi, 18.
[8] Fredric Jameson, commenting on Lefebvre’s contribution, once said that “What Lefebvre wanted to stress, however, was the correlation between these hitherto universal and formal organizational categories…and the historical specificity and originality of the various modes of production, in each of which time and space are lived differently and distinctively…” Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 364. See also pages 410-411.
[9] Johannes Rohbeck, Modern Enlightenment: Insights for the Crises of the Present (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2025), 52.
[10] Vincenzo Ferrone, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 5.
[11] Georg Cavallar, Failed Enlightenment? A Philosophical Introduction (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2026), 145.
[12] Ferrone, The Enlightenment, 6.
[13] “If man can predict, almost with certainty, those appearances of which he understands the laws; if, even when the laws are unknown to him, experience or the past enables him to foresee, with considerable probability, future appearances; why should we suppose it a chimerical undertaking to delineate, with some degree of truth, the picture of the future destiny of mankind from the results of its history?” Marquis de Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind. Excerpts featured in Frank E. Manuel, ed., The Enlightenment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965): 177-184, here 177.
[14] Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983 (New York: Picador, 2011), 11.
[15] Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightening?” in Frank E. Manuel, ed., The Enlightenment: 34-41, here 38.
[16] Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984): 32-51, here 38.
[17] Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in Immanuel Kant, On History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963): 11-27.
[18] Ferrone, The Enlightenment, 7.
[19] Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” 41.
[20] Foucault, 38.
[21] Jameson, Postmodernism, 310.
[22] Jameson, 310. My emphasis.
[23] Jameson, 381.
[24] Stalin effectively laid this out in a famous text, “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” which adopts the view that “The dialectical method therefore holds that the process of development should be understood not as movement in a circle, not as a simple repetition of what has already occurred, but as an onward and upward movement, as a transition from an old qualitative state to a new qualitative state, as a development from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher.” These transitions, these stages, are fully knowable and predictable and thus “the history of society, ceases to be an agglomeration of ‘accidents’, for the history of society becomes a development of society according to regular laws, and the study of the history of society becomes a science.” Of course, this last point is one that I insist we must uphold—we indeed remain historical materialists; we must indeed study society scientifically. But it in no way follows from that point that we can know the results of that study in advance nor that we can expect development to naturally move “onward and upward.” See J.V. Stalin, “Dialectical and Historical Materialism.” September 1938. Housed on the Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm. My emphasis.
[25] “Again, the Scottish philosophers, though they shared the philosophes’ project of a science of human nature and society, none of them endorsed the claim that indefinite improvement was possible, or progress inevitable.” John Gray, Liberalism: Second Edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 20.
[26] Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (Minerva Publishing, 2018), 85.
[27] Bellamy, 166.
[28] All of this is discussed in detail in Elizabeth Sadler, “One Book’s Influence: Edward Bellamy’s ‘Looking Backward.’” The New England Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1944): 530-555.
[29] Mark Fisher clocks this in his Capitalist Realism, where we hear that “Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination — the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of new ways of living. Not so [any longer].” Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2009), 2.
[30] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons (London: Penguin, 2008), 446, cited in Adrian Pabst, Postliberal Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), 34.
[31] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2.
[32] Jameson, Postmodernism, 286.
[33] Berardi, After the Future, 17.
[34] Jameson, Postmodernism, 383.
[35] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2.
[36] Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 92-93.
[37] Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020), 2-3.
[38] See Horkheimer and Adorno, “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” in Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 35-63.
[39] Jameson, Postmodernism, 104.
[40] Jameson, 304.
[41] Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983): 3-16, here 5.
[42] Habermas, 4, 13. Elsewhere, Habermas is clear that the future cannot be shackled to the past. Criticizing Germany’s political and intellectual scene in the early 1990s, he claimed that “the temptation to choose models from the past for the interpretation of the future seems impossible to resist. The futurity of the past could have been worked through with a self-aware creation of a constitution. Instead, the future is being perceived in the form of the past: ‘Let’s get it over with, just like we did one before!’” Jürgen Habermas and Michael Haller, The Past as Future (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 66.
[43] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 106-107.
[44] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 58-59.
[45] He continues later on, “We are left with that pure and random play of signifiers that we call postmodernism, which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts—such is the logic of postmodernism in general…” He reiterates this point throughout the text, looking at different cultural objects. This insight applies not only to the objects themselves, but to attempts to analyze them. In a discussion of the postmodern novel, he notes, for instance, that “the older interpretive values live on as residual temptations, which all prove unsatisfying and frustrating.” Jameson, Postmodernism, 83, 96, 100, 144, and passim.
[46] “As always, however, the dilemmas of the postmodern themselves modify (and are in turn modified by those of the modern, for which innovation was unambiguous enough as an ideological value, but structurally ambivalent and undecidable in its realization.” Jameson, 104.
[47] Jameson, Postmodernism, xii.
[48] Jameson, ix.
[49] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 4.
[50] Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
[51] Douthat, The Decadent Society, 93.
[52] Jameson, Postmodernism, 27.
[53] Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998): 1-20, here 20.
[54] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 32.
[55] Fisher, 34.
[56] Louis Althusser, “The Object of Capital.” In Louis Althusser et al., Reading Capital: The Complete Edition (London: Verso, 2015): 215-357, here 248.
[57] Althusser, 248.
[58] Massimiliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
[59] Jameson, Postmodernism, 27.
[60] “What defined this ‘hauntological’ confluence more than anything else was its confrontation with a cultural impasse: the failure of the future.” Mark Fisher, “What is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2012): 16-24, here 16.
[61] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2014), 98.
[62] Mattie Colquhoun, “Key Words: Hauntology,” Red Pepper, May 18, 2025, https://www.redpepper.org.uk/key-words/key-words-hauntology/
[63] Derrida, Specters of Marx, 202.
[64] Derrida, 48.
[65] Derrida, 126.
[66] Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 22.
[67] Fisher, 21.
[68] Fisher, 27.
[69] Fisher, “What is Hauntology?,” 16.
[70] Nick Land, “No Future.” In Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2025): 391-401, here 399.
[71] Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 74, cited in Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2010), 525.
[72] H.G. Wells, “The Door in the Wall,” cited in Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 30.
[73] Derrida, Specters of Marx, 46.
[74] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 76.
[75] Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 8.
[76] Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 13. My emphasis.
[77] Michael Löwy, “Walter Benjamin.” Platypus Review 5 (2008). https://platypus1917.org/2008/05/01/walter-benjamin/
[78] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Classics, 1985), 79.
[79] China Miéville, A Spectre Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), 104.
[80] Miéville, 104.
[81] Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Why Class Struggle is Central.” Against the Current no. 10 (1987): 7-9, here 9.
[82] Wells, The Time Machine, 234.
[83] Wells, The Time Machine, 207.
[84] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology: Corrected Edition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 5.
[85] Aaron Irion, “The Future, Again.” The Future, Again. February 13, 2026. https://thefutureagain.substack.com/p/the-future-again#_ftn2
[86] se146np, “The Late Show - Special - Eric Hobsbawm - Age of Extremes.” YouTube. The quote can be found at 14:13.
[87] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), 322.
[88] Berardi, Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility (London: Verso, 2019), 14.
[89] Berardi, 3, 170.
[90] Berardi, 1.
[91] A genuine movement is “the process of society: the cultural process that makes possible the political unity of different social actors who are in conflict in public space.” A movement must be conscious and collective. Berardi laments the absence of a genuine movement: “At the end of the zero zero decade, for the first time in my life, I’ve been obliged to recognize that the actor is absent: you see actions, but you don’t see an actor. Action without an actor play out on the ground of social visibility, but they don’t create any common ground in the space of consciousness and affectivity.” Berardi, After the Future. Though not identical, this rhymes with what Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics.” See Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences (London: Verso, 2026).
[92] Liza Thompson and Hannah Wilks, “Editor’s Note,” in Slavoj Žižek, Against Progress (London: Bloomsbury, 2025), viii.
[93] Žižek, 31.
[94] Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 31.
[95] Jameson, Postmodernism, 62.
[96] Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (in three volumes), Volume 2 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977): 178-245, here 224.
[97] Berardi, Futurability, 98.
[98] Berardi, 101.
[99] If I may rely on Berardi once more, it is worth quoting him at some length: “My basic assumption is this: notwithstanding the darkness of the present, notwithstanding looming war and widespread resentment, notwithstanding the impotence of political will, a possibility lies in the structural constitution of the present world. It is a possibility of emancipation, enrichment and peace. This possibility is stored in the cooperation among the knowledge workers of the world.” Berardi, 161.
