Futures Imperfect: A Reflection on Challenges

Futures are made continuously, across the world, every second of the day. They have been and are produced by the full breadth of social institutions: politics, law and the economy, science, medicine and technology, education and religion. As such, they are constituted at the level of the individual, the family, social groups, companies and nations. These produced futures extend temporally from very short to extremely long periods and spatially from the local to regional, national, international and global level, while materially they stretch from the surface of the earth and beyond to the core of the quantum. As such, these created futures encompass social relations, institutions and the natural environment. Foregrounding the enacted aspect of the future enables us to recognise the future as a realm of actions and deeds under way: not yet materialised as symptoms, not yet congealed into matter and we can appreciate it as a process world in progress, set in motion by socio-political, legal, scientific, technological, economic, educational and everyday enacting practices. Importantly, as I will show, actions and processes associated with this future-in-the-making are ongoing, producing layers upon layers of past futures and present futures, entangled with equivalent layers upon layers of future presents and future pasts.

At the everyday level, life is conducted projectively: imagined, anticipated, expected, planned, designed and actioned within the open and fluid horizon of both past and future. People move in this temporal domain with great competence, encompassing the past and future simultaneously. Without giving much thought to the matter, they operate with equal confidence in the action domains of planning and future making, alternating their perspective between anticipated and enacted futures. In contrast, the temporal orientation of scientific investigation of this social world is focused primarily on completed (past) acts or (present) reported anticipations while social futurity tends to be bracketed or adapted to suit the investigation’s logic and methodology. The disjuncture between the future orientated and future producing subject matter of sociology on the one hand, and disciplinary practice in sociology on the other, therefore, forms an important part of this reflection.

I have been working for my entire academic career on such misalignments of the temporality of everyday action and disciplinary practices. Today I believe that it needs a critical mass of sociologists to recognise the problem and work on it so that our knowledge practices may become more in tune with the futurity of our subject matter and associated socio-environmental effects. ¹ This Special Issue of Sociology is an ideal vehicle for building up the numbers of social scientists engaging with the futurity of social life.

In this short article I argue that engagement with the future is a confrontation with imperfect knowledge, ignorance, even non-knowledge. As such it is a problematic domain for scientific enquiry in general and for sociology as a social science in particular. Conceived as ‘not yet’, the future is inaccessible as evidence, given that it becomes factual only once it materialises in the present. It is possible to produce probability calculations, predictions and models of the future, which are compatible with scientific methods of enquiry. However, given that this way of knowing the future is rooted in past and present actions or events, its results are inescapably past-based simulations, masquerading as ‘knowledge’ of a future – at best imperfect, at worst a contradiction in terms. And yet, despite general awareness of the impossibility and mismatches involved, there is a clamour for such ‘knowledge’ as the basis for choices and actions in the present, be it at the personal, political, economic or (socio-)environmental level. The persistent disjuncture between such wishful expectation and possibility tends to underpin much of the drama of inappropriate responses to contemporary threats such as those associated with climate change, new technologies, novel viruses and globalised markets. Given the many decades these challenges have been troubling contemporary societies, the pitiful lack of progress in apposite responses deserves serious sociological attention, as do efforts to take account of some of the foundational matters that need to be addressed. This is in no way wanting to diminish the achievements of futures work achieved in terms of foresight and scenario building or the intricate and innovative studies presented under the heading of sociology of expectation and anticipation respectively.

However, in my reflections I offer a different perspective on the issues. I present for your consideration a broad-brush overview of some of the issues outlined above as precondition to embracing social future making as a key feature of social theory and sociological research in terms of its scientific practice. I would like to begin by outlining some of the disjunctures associated with (primarily European/western/industrial) implicit assumptions about (contemporary) social futurity as these may help not only to focus attention on the complexities involved but also to explore openings for change.

As I have already indicated, when politicians, policy makers, economists and teachers, for example, want to know what lies ahead they rely on spatial and material knowledge of the past, from which they extrapolate what might be. The scientific mode of enquiry proceeds along similar lines. Here too, the future per se is actually dis-attended. Evidence is gathered from completed acts and events, which can be measured and counted and these in turn are used as a base for models and calculations of probabilities. Social scientists in general and sociologists in particular are no exception to this trend. They too have bracketed social futurity and focus instead on a historically informed social present, made up of spatially and materially extended social relations. This applies irrespective of whether studies are conducted in a functionalist, structuralist or interpretative mode. In each one of these perspectives the future tends to be bypassed with the present-orientated focus on ‘function’, ‘structure’ and ‘meaning’ respectively. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this general situation and I have discussed these extensively in other work (Adam, 2009a, 2009b, 2011; Adam and Groves, 2007). Here I want to focus on some disjunctures and conceptual barriers before identifying some points for departure from traditional practice.

Looking at historical accounts of produced futures, we realise that the rise of science is generally associated with the pursuit of progress and both with a dramatic increase in the production of futures (Andersson, 2018; Bell, 2005; Bury, 1955/1932 ; Urry, 2016). However, when this resulted in change, rather than the accustomed stability, it brought with it a significant decrease in predictability. That is to say, while the pace of change was gradual and slow, change could be calculated with reasonable accuracy on the basis of the past. This predictability declined, however, when changes not only stacked up but also accelerated and processes became interconnected, thus mutually implicating, as is the case with the globally networked world. With technological developments ranging from mechanisation and the use of fossil fuels, to heat engines, nuclear power and geno-technology, for example, the temporal reach became extended into ever-longer futures. Regrettably, this expansion of spacio-temporal reach has not been accompanied by an equivalent expansion of a temporal horizon of care and concern. On the contrary, our temporal horizon seems to have been shrinking proportional to the depth of reach. That is to say, in a present overloaded with change and choices to be made, the long-term past and future became crowded out by an overriding need to focus on the Now. Social and socio-environmental horizons tended to shrink to decades or less as socio-technical prowess extended the social reach into an open future of millennia hence.

How then might we address these disjunctures in general and the mismatches between the mode of enquiry and our subject matter in particular? This question takes me to the unlikely focus on assumptions. It is widely known that our implicit assumptions not only frame our world but also shape what we can see on the one hand and what is rendered invisible on the other. Crucially, they delimit the overarching ways we understand facts, materiality and the world of ideas. Assumptions about the future are therefore an important starting point for the process of re-framing enquiry into social futures-in-the-making.

Looking back across time, we find that during the ancient and the not-so-distant past, the future belonged to gods. As such, it was assumed to be subject to the will of extra-terrestrial beings that pre-ordained and pre-destined a fated future for human beings. The future of modernity, in contrast, is assumed to be subject to human influence and effort, to be ours for the making and taking. As sphere of human activity, the modern future is conceived as an open space, an uninhabited territory to be conquered, an empty vessel to be filled with hopes, fears, plans and desires. It is a spatialised future that is to be filled with content, thus subject to shaping and transformation. In contexts of all-encompassing accelerating change, however, the emptiness of the future is compromised. There is increased awareness that the future has become a crowded territory, congested with intended and unintended consequences of contemporaries’ and predecessors’ dreams and desires. It is this filled future, which constitutes the delimiting context for contemporary future-making actions. Moreover, the conventional cluster of this reality-framing web of conceptions tends to be accompanied by an equally deeply embedded everyday assumption, which is the idea that the future is an aspect of the mind. Utopias, hopes, fears, desires, plans, anticipations, expectations, calculations and choices are all conceived as products of our minds, projected into an assumed empty future that is implicitly contrasted with a factual present, where only the latter is seen as the locus of reality.

In a classic work on future studies, De Jouvenel (1967) directs us to the Latin terms facta and futura. Facta, he explains, refer to past acts: done, achieved and completed. The concept of futura, in contrast, refers to that which has not yet come about, something that will become a factum only after it has occurred. While facta have already taken (unalterable) form, futura are still open to influence. Another way of putting the distinction is to say, ‘there are no past possibilities and there are no future facts’ (Brumbaugh, 1966: 649) because the past is closed to influence, thus open to factual knowledge while the future is open to both choice and efforts to colonise and control, thus closed to factual inquiry. This distinction between facta and futura is so deeply taken for granted that it has become naturalised as fact. It is invoked every time we associate the future with the imaginary realm of desire, hope and fear or with anticipation, expectation and projection. This naturalised distinction becomes a problem for any engagements with futures-in-the-making, which may elude factual enquiry but are distinctly not mere aspects of the imagination. Rather, they are processes-in-progress, thus a largely latent and in/visible materiality. The threat of climate change on the one hand and of chemical pollution by Carson (1965) and Colborn et al. (1996) on the other are excellent cases in point to illustrate such futures-in-progress.

Nuclear radiation can be taken as a paradigmatic exemplar: the long-term effects of radiation are processes that are already in progress but have not yet materialised as facts in the conventional sense. With the help of technological aids, these processes are accessible as partial past facts as well as partial projectable continuities from both past and present. Their existence is constituted from an assemblage of near certainties, contingencies, constraints, uncertainties, material indeterminacies and even ‘unknowables’. Unnoticed by our conscious selves, such processes are nevertheless recognised at the level of our cells, where battles with alien intruders are fought, until processes materialise as effects in terms of disease or altered genetic material. At the level of cells, these features of reality, which are empirically inaccessible at the macro level, are setting in motion invisible evolutionary mutations, which will be recognised as facts only once they emerge as outcomes somewhere, some time. When this ‘factual’ process-future-in-progress is recognised and acknowledged, the contradiction between facta and futura loses its meaning.

The historical root of the belief that the present is the (only) locus of reality together with the distinction between facta and futura can be traced back to the 5th century CE when St Augustine came to the conclusion that both past and future had no existence outside the human mind, where they function as memory and expectation respectively. During the 1930s, Mead (1932/1980) seemed to come to a similar conclusion when he argued that the real future, just like the real past, was unobtainable and that the mind therefore was the exclusive passport to the future. Any reality, which transcends the present, he proposed, must exhibit itself in the present for us to know it. Regrettably, Mead’s epistemological point is frequently taken as an ontological statement about the reality status of past, present and especially the future. However, while Mead had said that our access to both past and future is via the mind because the real future is unobtainable by other means, he did not say that the future was an aspect of the mind. Rather, he maintained the distinction between what exists and how we know it. When Mead’s perspective is enrolled for the purpose of studying the future through present images, goals, ideals and values, his methodological challenge of working through the difficulty of accessing the im/material real in the present is left un-addressed. Re-absorbed into conventional approaches, the radical potential to engage with process-futures-in-progress is neutralised and the search for latent facts and potentialities in the empirically accessible past and present continues unabated, uncontaminated by the temporal vastness that transcends the present and is encompassed therein.

Let me use an extended passage from my work that brings to the fore some of the layered complexities involved:

Amidst debates about climate change, civil unrest and financial meltdown, we are beginning to recognise that our own present is our predecessors’ empty and open future: their dreams, desires and discoveries, their imaginations, innovations and impositions, their creations. Our progress as well as our climate change, our colonial and contractual responsibilities as well as our global institutions, markets and corrupt financial systems were their empty, open futures in progress, were their creative imaginations working themselves out in and as our embodied and embedded present. Our war memorials are their political aspirations, their pursuit of ethnic cleansing. Our financial present was their calculated future, exploited for the exclusive benefit of their present. We realize that we are the recipients of their imagined empty-future illusion, which is for us inescapably filled, factual & real in its consequences.

Today their past pretences of emptiness and non-reality are called to account. Accusations accumulate about past wilful blindness, for example, about asbestos, smoking and Thalidomide. Our predecessors’ glorious creations rebound as nightmares: The costs have to be paid, the disasters rectified, the cancers endured. Successor recipients shoulder the burden, are required to forgive and remedy past follies and pretences. Yet, despite all this, we still hold on to the same illusion, still live the same make-belief: the future is empty and open we say. (Adam 2010: 368-369)

Imagined and unreal, therefore, the future exists only in our minds. As social researchers we are charged to address this illusion, take it out of the invisible domain of implicit, naturalised assumptions and raise it to a conscious level of understanding, where it can become available as subject for public debate and alternative practices. Left implicit, assumptions can act as barriers, unhindered and unchallenged. They need to be surfaced, therefore, as a precondition to alternative praxis at the level of both sociology and society. However, explicating them is not enough. For meaningful social science engagement with futures-in-the making there is a further need for conceptual innovation, related to engagement with processes.

As I mentioned earlier, our lives are lived projectively. Understanding and study of this futurity, therefore, requires concern not so much with outcomes and effects but, importantly, with that which brings about the eventual results, that is, with the future as lived process. This means engagement with the affecting and affective world together with its effects. We can draw here on the Latin distinction between natura naturata as the visible, tangible world of outcomes we can study, measure and know and natura naturans as the invisible, intangible world of directional generative processes that we create but can only deduct and reconstitute from the produced results. Importantly, neither exists without the other; the two are inescapably linked: products as facts are the outcomes of processes. To understand them as one, in their interdependency, requires engagements with processes that have tended to be bracketed. These processes have a number of characteristics, some of which I would like to mention here: They are directional and irreversible. Their orientation is towards potential but they simultaneously encompass what has been. They are generative, involving growing and decaying, birthing and dying. They are context sensitive, which means they are responsive to differences in time, space and matter. In addition, they are distinct at different levels of reality: the inorganic, organic and human social. Furthermore, processes are irreducibly interactive, creating networks of multi-layered re-actions that ripple through matter and across time–space. Finally, this networked, directional intangible time–space–matter permeation, in turn, brings with it a potential for long periods of latency. Where effects are stretched across space, penetrate matter and reach into distant times, therefore, culturally created ‘futures-in-the-making’ need to be recognised as both, material reality and latent process-world, invisibly encoded thus beyond reach of the senses.

Intimately related to the materiality of process-futurity is the implication and enfolding of pasts and futures in the present. I want to contend that all of the past is gathered up and features not just in the present but also its future. If just one dinosaur, for example, had not become extinct the world would be different. Equally, if one of my ancestors had not lived, I would not exist. Thus, all of the past matters and features in our present and future, in the same way as all process-futures-in-the-making matter and are already enfolded in our present as an invisible im/material real. To recognise this inescapable temporal connection is essential for knowing our connection not just into the open past but also its equivalent future.

What additional shifts in understanding and approach may be needed and what aids might be usefully employed to achieve access to this enfolded, invisible, im/material process world? I have found memory a useful heuristic for this task. As supports for the task of recovering the past, memory and remembrance might include the following visual aids: photographs to keep memories alive, written records to locate actions in the public domain, film to capture and hold ephemeral events and processes and/or carbon dating to provide clues about the very distant past. This might be best illustrated by work of anthropologists exploring life in the Neolithic, for example, where pasts are sketchy and knowledge is partial. Their modes of inquiry demonstrate how available traces are utilised and gaps in knowledge filled with experience, existing knowledge and a significant dose of imagination. Given that knowledge of the future is by definition patchy and partial, techniques of accessing the hazy distant past promises to be equally applicable to opaque futures-in-the-making, as these require a similar mix of experience, existing knowledge and imagination. To aid our imagination in the realm of the future, I therefore want to argue, requires projection aids analogous to those that assist extension into the near and distant past.

Before concluding these reflections, I would like raise one last issue. It concerns the standpoint researchers take with regard to the potential permutations of past–present–future relations and their inescapable normativity. The first distinction to mention here is between present futures and future presents ² as these two combinations refer to rather different standpoints and approaches to the future. The present future is the most commonly used position. Here, investigators take the standpoint of the present when approaching an opaque ‘not yet’ that is planned, budgeted for, borrowed from and (attempted to be) controlled for the benefit of the present. For sociologist and social scientists more generally, the present future tends to be the primary imagined immaterial ‘not yet’. In contrast, concern with the future present is the standpoint for tuning into and accessing successors’ future present as the domain of potential outcomes of present actions. It is concerned with the timeprints ³ of action, thus with both the effects and the extent of the reach of present actions. An additional permutation relates to the distinction between past futures and future pasts. Past futures are routinely accessed through literature and recorded memories, plans, aspirations, hopes and fears. They require taking the standpoint of predecessors oriented towards their future. In contrast, engagement with future pasts necessitates taking the standpoint of successors looking back at us in terms of their past. The latter is an inescapably normative position that takes on board questions about what might be right, just and good present actions. As you will appreciate, what we can see and understand by taking these different standpoints depends fundamentally on assumptions about the reality status of the future, that is, whether we accord the future processual reality status or bracket it as an immaterial realm of ideas only.

As researchers of completed acts we can amass evidence rooted in the past and present. This is clearly not the case for the future. However, as long as futurity is bracketed and the process-future-in progress is negated, we lack not just the tools to access such futures-in-the making but also the means to actively work towards socio-environmentally just transformations, that is, to help make the world a better place. Yet, is that not the ethos of sociology, not the reason our students join the profession? To use our sociological imagination and memory for the good, not just of contemporary but also successor societies, demands commitment to a thoroughgoing futures perspective that takes account of both current footprints and timeprints of present (non-)actions on future worlds and their inhabitants.

To recognise the need for a shift in perspective requires our knowledge practices to be changed. This would entail that we render the invisible visible, make future presents tangible, give form to the ‘not yet’ and provide analyses that take the future seriously in all its permutations as supreme realm of social practice, transaction, negotiation and transformation. Where effects of present (non-)actions are stretched across space, permeate matter and reach into distant times, it would involve recognising futures-in-the-making as both, material reality and encoded latent process-world, that is, an invisible reality beyond the reach of the senses.

It would necessitate learning to move freely between the various futures modes: remembering past futures and extending ourselves to future presents and future pasts, thus enlarging professional practices with the everyday skills of agile movement in the temporal domain, that is, the taken-for-granted competences in the dance of time, the pirouetting and swivelling, which enables us to encompass both past and future while keeping us grounded in space and matter. Memory of and for futures can be helpful in this endeavour as it alludes to the implication and interpenetration of past and future and it reminds us that both depend on the fusion of minds and morals to activate them into presence. To take on this challenge of ‘minding’ futures will not be easy and it will unsettle sociology to the core. But it will be worth it. It will revitalise the discipline and ensure its relevance for the demanding times ahead.