Comments on: One-A-Day: Oona Strathern, A Brief History of the Future https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2008/02/07/one-a-day-oona-strathern-a-brief-history-of-the-future/ Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:21:44 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.15 By: The Constructivist https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2008/02/07/one-a-day-oona-strathern-a-brief-history-of-the-future/comment-page-1/#comment-4947 Fri, 08 Feb 2008 07:25:09 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=518#comment-4947 Tim, maybe there’s a book opportunity for you in her failure. I’ve always found your history of the future stuff fascinating, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’m teaching science fiction this semester and I’m using Delany’s “significant distortion of the present” idea to structure the first half of the semester. I’m trying to get the students through the arguing over the author’s choices in the invented future stage and into the what do those choices reveal about his/her perspective on his/her own times–and our own on ours–stages. Teaching Earth Abides this week reminded me of some of our earlier discussions of The Years of Rice and Salt–the plot that gets mapped out (whether near future or alternate history) reveals more about the author’s assumptions/theories of how history works than anything else. So I guess I’m wondering which SF writers you feel have an interesting take on that issue, either for students or scholars or both. and if you have any suggestions on what to assign or recommend to students to get them better informed about the state of the future in the immediate post-W.W. II years, I would owe you more than one.

]]> By: Cosma https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2008/02/07/one-a-day-oona-strathern-a-brief-history-of-the-future/comment-page-1/#comment-4941 Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:30:00 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=518#comment-4941 I confess to a morbid curiosity as to how she deals with the objections that predicting future technology is impossible in principle, since it demands predicting what we do not yet know. (This goes back at least to Popper and is, IMHO, completely sound.) I am not quite morbidly curious enough to actually read the book, though…

]]> By: jpool https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2008/02/07/one-a-day-oona-strathern-a-brief-history-of-the-future/comment-page-1/#comment-4938 Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:07:24 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=518#comment-4938 I like the “junk DNA” phrase. When I think about the cultural history of ideas, I tend to go back to Gramsci’s discussion of the history of what he called “common sense” in terms of the sedimentation of different philosophical movements. Ideas that are long dormant can be brought back to the surface as people find new utility in them for reflecting on their changing material circumstances (among other things), but this is not the same thing as their having been there all along, awaiting their triumphal reemergence. I get particularly annoyed with accounts of Greek philosophy as the basis of Western civilization. Well, yes, but only because we decided retroactively that they should be, after largely forgetting about them for a millenium or more.

I think that you’re right to point to the History of Science parallel and the general problem with the urge to create histories/mythologies of ascension. I wonder, though, what you think this shows about the larger cultural conflict between disciplinary history and futurism (most historians being futurism skeptics at best). My own thoughts on this are not entirely clear, but I guess I’m asking, do you see a connection, here or more generally, between bad history and bad science.

]]> By: Brian Ulrich https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2008/02/07/one-a-day-oona-strathern-a-brief-history-of-the-future/comment-page-1/#comment-4937 Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:43:33 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=518#comment-4937 I had a similar experience earlier this week when I read Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, hoping it would be a good book to use in a course on the history of monotheism. I didn’t bother finishing it, but social contexts were, as far as I could tell, completely irrelevant aside from some obligatory bows toward the nature of Bronze Age Middle Eastern polytheism.

]]> By: swiers https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2008/02/07/one-a-day-oona-strathern-a-brief-history-of-the-future/comment-page-1/#comment-4936 Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:24:02 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=518#comment-4936 s Kunstwerk der zukunft (1850) to Disney. It’s no coincidence that all Triumphalist Futurists seem to exemplify your notion above, that “the march of time has beat a path to the writer’s very own doorstep”. (Instead of ‘writer’, insert anarchist, composer, athlete, software mogul, dictator, you name it.). And while I’m no connoisseur of capital-H Histories, it seems to me that anyone who writes one is practically a T-F- by definition. Check out any review of Taruskin’s recent: History of Western Music (OUP), esp. the tone of reviews that describe it as a self-styled epic. It’s a hazard of the genre. And BTW-if the future really was invented in the 19th c., please do us all a favor and keep it there while you’re at it. Garden variety futurists, no problem; it’s the futurists with VISIONS that you have to worry about. Not that I’m against political candidatess for their rhetorical or musical skills, if those help create the vision (and vision, here, instead of illusion, deception, or sheer negligence). also OK--syncretic futurists, for example, Mel Gibson, who in @Signs, plays off aliens against, as far as I can tell, high Episcopalianism. Whaddaflick. Or Presbyterianism, the differences are subtle.]]> Or, to push the future back, the history that links Wagner’s Kunstwerk der zukunft (1850) to Disney. It’s no coincidence that all Triumphalist Futurists seem to exemplify your notion above, that “the march of time has beat a path to the writer’s very own doorstep”. (Instead of ‘writer’, insert anarchist, composer, athlete, software mogul, dictator, you name it.).

And while I’m no connoisseur of capital-H Histories, it seems to me that anyone who writes one is practically a T-F- by definition. Check out any review of Taruskin’s recent: History of Western Music (OUP), esp. the tone of reviews that describe it as a self-styled epic. It’s a hazard of the genre. And BTW-if the future really was invented in the 19th c., please do us all a favor and keep it there while you’re at it.

Garden variety futurists, no problem; it’s the futurists with VISIONS that you have to worry about. Not that I’m against political candidatess for their rhetorical or musical skills, if those help create the vision (and vision, here, instead of illusion, deception, or sheer negligence).

also OK–syncretic futurists, for example, Mel Gibson, who in @Signs, plays off aliens against, as far as I can tell, high Episcopalianism. Whaddaflick. Or Presbyterianism, the differences are subtle.

]]> By: Sisyphus https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2008/02/07/one-a-day-oona-strathern-a-brief-history-of-the-future/comment-page-1/#comment-4932 Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:00:49 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=518#comment-4932 Speaking of the future, or futurism, or something, I had a lot of fun reading _Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, The Crisis of Race, and the Advent of End Time_ for an undergraduate research project. I don’t know if it really does what you’re looking for either, but it does have a great story about Ronald Reagan quoting from the bible and then talking about impending alien invasions when someone brings him a flaming bananas foster dessert. Fun and terrifying!

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