Monstrous Foresight

A strange thing about foresight is that you rarely hear anything about the future. In the futures work I have looked at and participated in the idea of the future ‘as such’, as the field or medium of our enquiry is, it seems, never mentioned. The future, while being the thing we are concerned with above all else, the thing we are trying to ‘think’ about, ‘debate’ and ‘shape’ in the words of the current European Commission definition of foresight on the foresight unit’s website is never the topic of theory or enquiry: absolutely everything else is, but not that. In fact, it is actually very difficult to say how the future is thought or theorised in most exercises, not at all easy to identify what idea of the future we are working with. At best, in most cases, it seems that it is considered to be unproblematic: a common-or-garden space and or time; empty but not quite a vacuum; waiting to be filled for good or ill by us or by others if we don’t get there first; something that will open up and close like an infinite concertina depending on how hard we push at the walls of it (although it is accepted that things get less clear the more we push); shorter or longer depending on how we chop it up; something that while vaguely way ‘out there’ leads right up to our feet, through us contemporary subjects, back to the past. But mostly there is silence: the future is just a kind of unformed assumption at the middle of the discourse.