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Contribution to the forthcoming Handbook of Futures Studies, edited by Roberto Poli – author’s preprint
Liberating the Human Imagination:
Futures Literacy and the Diversification of Anticipation
Riel Miller
Abstract:
What does it mean to ‘liberate the human imagination’? First it does not mean, from
the point-of-view of this article, somehow inventing wilder or wackier or unique
descriptions of the future. Nor is it about more credible forecasts or visions that are
so believable they launch a thousand ships. Here, freedom of the imagination
emerges from the capacity to understand the different reasons and methods people
use to describe situations that are not in the past or the present. The human
imagination, like freedom more generally, needs to be exercised to reach its
potential. Aptitude is not enough. Potential needs to be realized by taking the
opportunity. And such expression can only occur by cultivating, through experience
and theory, a deeper understanding of the subject, in this case: the attributes and
functioning of human anticipatory systems and processes (ASP). To be futures
literate, to enable our imagination to wander with confidence, creativity, and
openness, is to embrace both knowing and not-knowing. In practical terms, from an
ASP perspective, this means being able to grasp two fundamental enabling
distinctions, the difference between: a) ‘anticipation-for-the-future’ and ‘anticipation-
for-emergence’; and b) perception and choice. Today’s dominant conventions and
habits reduce these four categories into two and as a result inhibit and diminish the
ability to sense and make-sense of difference in the present.
Keywords: anticipation, anticipatory systems and processes, complexity, foresight,
futures studies, futures literacy.
“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found
himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-
like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly
domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able
to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully
thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he
looked.”
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis, 1915, Project Gutenberg eBook, translated by
David Wyllie, 2002
Section 1: Perception First
The stakes are high, but as Bayo Akomolafe’s trickster whispers, with the
nimbleness found in liminal zones, “times are urgent, slow down” (Akomolafe, 2020).
And so, I turn to the horror of Gregor Samsa’s plight to make the case for
anticipation without action. It may be a self-serving interpretation of Kafka’s tale, but I
have always felt that Gregor turned into a cockroach because when he woke up on
that fateful morning he was perceiving his present through the frame of his
imagination – he anticipated the coming day’s toils as a travelling salesman and,
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without taking any action, or making any choices, or trying to influence the later-than-
now, he perceived himself as an abominable insect.
There is no way around it, perception precedes choice and the imagined later-than-
now precedes perception. Imagination kindles consciousness (Asma, 2022) and
consciousness is entangled with imagination (Humphrey, 2022). Gregor did not act
on the basis of his imagined future, he perceived. Upon awakening his imagining of
the day to come manifests as a loss of his humanity. No longer a ‘free’ human
Gregor sees himself as a bug. Kafka ably dramatizes what it means to have ‘no
future’, Gregor cannot imagine anything other than being confined to the obligations
and repetition of his life as a travelling salesman. Trapped in his futures illiteracy,
Gregor appears to himself and everyone else as a cockroach. In one terrifying
fictional gesture Kafka encapsulates the alienation of ‘modern’ human life.
Of course, from the outside it is easy to imagine that Gregor does have choices.
Indeed, the narrative tension of the story revolves around the reader’s anxiety and
hope that Gregor will find a way out of his plight. But in the end, he is unable to
imagine another life. Not even his imminent death can inspire him to rebel or imagine
an alternative. Looking at this fable from the perspective of anticipatory systems
theory (Poli, 2019; Rosen, 2012; Louie, 2010; Nadin, 2010) provides important
insights into the distinctions and dynamics of the human imagination. As Poli
explains in Introduction to the Ontology of Anticipation (Poli, 2010), there are weak
and strong forms of anticipation. The strong form of anticipation involves tangible
action or “coupling between the system and its environment” remaining “below the
threshold of consciousness” (Poli, 2010). When a tree reacts to an anticipatory
trigger and loses its leaves as winter approaches there is sensing and anticipatory
action, but there is no intervening awareness of conscious perception. So, part of the
difference between unconscious biological anticipation and conscious human
anticipation involves the introduction of an additional step between anticipation and
action: perception. For humans the sequence is anticipation, perception, and then
maybe causal/reactive choices/actions. Thus, weak forms of anticipation do not have
the same ‘automaticity’ or unmediated sequence: trigger - anticipatory reaction –
action.
Conscious human anticipation, for instance, is ‘weak’ in Poli’s terminology because it
is characterized by explicit cognitive processes that can not only modify anticipatory
models and processes but also enlarge the scope of anticipatory purposes and
consequences. Anticipation in its weak form applies to everyday lived experiences,
covering everything from the ubiquitous activities of human planning to the pervasive
belief that humans can express agency as the power, at personal and social levels,
to influence the world through direct causal intervention. Poli then goes further,
introducing the notion of organizational layers:
“The main difference between living and non-living systems is that the former require
at least two layers of organization: the layer of the rules governing the system’s
interactions with its environment and with other systems, and the higher-order layer
that may eventually change the rules of interaction. These changes may be purely
random, or they may follow either pre-established or acquired patterns. In this
regard, the hypothesis can be advanced that the main difference between non-living
natural systems, on the one hand, and living natural systems, psychological systems
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and social systems on the other, is that the former systems have only one single
organizational layer of interactions, while the latter have at least two layers of
organization (the one governing interactions and the one capable of modifying the
rules of interaction). This two-layer internal organization is precisely the structural
condition that makes living systems adaptive (Poli, 2010)”.
Taking into consideration the evidence gathered through Futures Literacy
Laboratories (Miller, 2018), that there are many kinds of anticipatory systems and
processes, I believe it is essential to add a third layer or dimension – one that
privileges the role imagination plays in perception, distinct from choice or action.
Distinguishing ‘perception anticipation’ is important because as Gregor’s case
illustrates, he is yoked to a desperate and obsessive kind of weak anticipation – what
I would call the ‘need for certainty’. He believes he must control the future if he is to
assure his family’s well-being and merit their admiration and love. Confined to using
his imagination to predict a ‘sure’ future, limits the why, how and what of his
imagining, to extrapolation of the past.
In one shattering transformation the divide between perception and choice, between
being and becoming, fuses into a monolithic imperative – a future determined and a
determined future! He’s a ‘good man’, swallowed whole by the delusion that certainty
is preferable to uncertainty. His inability to escape the mono-culture of one specific
form of weak anticipation traps him into believing that knowing can, should, must
erase not-knowing. As I will discuss below, in Gregor’s case there is no ‘anticipation-
for-emergence’, only ‘anticipation-for-the-future’. Gregor believes that in order to take
care of his family and himself he must lock down the future – limit his imagination to
a future that is ‘reasonable’ to affirm as known, a socially acceptable ‘sure thing’ –
the only future, an example of an ‘official’ future. Kafka is explicit about this,
“Gregor realised that it was out of the question to let the chief clerk go away in
this mood if his position in the firm was not to be put into extreme danger.
That was something his parents did not understand very well; over the years,
they had become convinced that this job would provide for Gregor for his
entire life, and besides, they had so much to worry about at present that they
had lost sight of any thought for the future. Gregor, though, did think about the
future. The chief clerk had to be held back, calmed down, convinced and
finally won over; the future of Gregor and his family depended on it!”
Section 2: Why Distinguishing Different ASP Matters
Gregor’s condition can be attributed, at least in part, to his ‘futures illiteracy’. A
condition that arguably characterizes much of human history, at least the history of
all those communities that evolved ‘monumentalist’ systems of elite reproduction that
function on the basis of anticipatory systems and processes that privilege certainty
over uncertainty. This is not an argument for a brilliant conspiracy or the genius of
intentionality. Quite the opposite, since the habits, tools, and organization of
monumentalism emerged worldwide and display, at a foundational level, a consistent
propensity to reproduce past power relationships.
Such societal orders sell certainty. Highly seductive and self-evident since certainty
rests on the familiar, what is already ‘known’. This is the commonplace past as
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prelude, the ancestral1 or legacy/heritage source of extrapolatory imagining. Of
course, in such systems the father, teacher, expert, leader knows best. So, it is no
wonder that the incentives and disincentives of learning systems are biased to
reinforce the fears and rewards, familiar from childhood experiences with a set of
specific weak type anticipatory systems and processes. Who can object to abiding
by the ‘reasonableness’ and ‘security’ promised by reproducing the past. “Keep your
feet on the ground”. “Stop dreaming, be practical.” “That’s not realistic, you’ve got
your head in the clouds.” All common adages to keep our imagination truncated and
reinforce the need to reproduce the familiar – or improve on the familiar.
When using the future prioritizes the search for certainty, the meaning of ‘better’
leads directly to the kinds of ‘solutionism’ or repairing or ‘reforming’ of what needs to
be ‘fixed’ in order to ensure continuity of control over the future. As the 20th Century
dramatically demonstrated, so called ‘revolutions’ end up reproducing similarly
structured hierarchal power systems – even if those romping around in the
penthouse changes. Why? Because the challenge remains the same – using
hierarchy and administrative institutions of many different flavors to colonize the
future. Human anticipatory systems and processes are narrowed down to serving
causal agency, the quest to control tomorrow on the basis of the past. ‘Man as god’
(or as a representative).
Lacking diversification this bias in the use of human anticipatory systems and
processes is conveniently hostile to the kinds of changes that might disrupt the
reproduction of the familiar. Improvement, reform, better – yes to all of that, but not
paradigmatic discontinuity in the emergent, novelty infested present. Uncertainty,
and its corollary change, are the enemy, and the goal is to eliminate such
‘disturbances’ as much as possible. Continuity enabled by best laid plans must,
should, can prevail. Great leaders, great experts, great visions will carry the day.
Particularly alien and frightening are changes that alter the conditions of change. A
bias that is wonderfully convenient for those who do not want to see experimentation
or discontinuity in the organizational foundations of the community (or meaning in
ephemerality) – just a change in who’s on top.
And so it unfolds, almost mysteriously, ‘radical’ changes that appear to overthrow
existing power structures fade into circular patterns, from one czar, like Nicholas to
others, like Lenin and Putin – more recently strung along a trajectory that moves
exploitation to ever larger scales (thank you industrialization). And it isn’t just the
overarching ‘commanding heights’, everywhere we look we see the reign of
administrative and absolutist regimes – within families, schools, hospitals, firms,
governments, and empires – displaying a dizzying variation on the same antagonism
to the indeterminism of a novelty abundant creative universe. At a foundational level,
the constraints put on imagined futures play a central role, even in the garb of calls
for ‘revolution’, in reproducing the familiar through constant efforts to colonize
tomorrow according to the latest or victorious flavor. It is the promise of a better
tomorrow that sets up a deep conceptual-psychological framework – usually deemed
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inevitable, part of ‘human nature’, etc. – one that pits humans against the creativity of
this universe.
In this context, sanctity and sacrilege, heritage and legacy, leadership and heroic
genius, the promise of better… all belong to a mono-culture of the human
imagination. One that gives rise to the truncated notion of life as the pursuit of
immortality – the narcissism and selfish drive that insists on the known and knowable
forever. Desperate efforts to establish or re-establish bubbles of ‘safety’ against non-
knowing and not-being. Delusions that depend on humans not actually being part of
this particular universe. What is striking here is that this is not the perpetuation of
continuity arising from either clever strategy (genius leaders) or effective causal
manipulation (conspiracies) that somehow enable humans to control the future. No.
At many different locations and points in time the same bureaucratic, hierarchical
‘operating system’ has prevailed.
No-one invented this brilliant plan. Asserting that ‘father knows best’, when best is a
better future – when better is inherently attached to making what is known better –
turns out to be an almost invisible way to ensure thousands of years of patriarchy
and elite rule. Chaining the human imagination to certainty just becomes part of the
“isn’t it obvious” ‘living culture’ – a powerful implicit sensing and sense-making that
harnesses perception and logic, evidence and action, to recreating the conditions –
not of any specific obedience/authority regime but the general one that strives for
organized conquest of whatever. The domination of the mono-culture of the
imagination, subtly – comfortably confined by the paradigmatic boundaries of
perception and the ways in which experience is given meaning - ends up casting
humans in a deeply distorted and destructive position. Incapable of even perceiving
the creativity of this particular universe.
There is no way to know if the disproportionately large proportion of humanity now
imprisoned in this mono-culture of the imagination can break the vile cycle that
sustains a world that pits human against human and human against ‘nature’. Can we
dispense with the delusion (worse, aspiration), put in such vulgar but honest terms
by Wall Street barons, that we are (or want to be) “masters of the universe” or a
Donald Trump who wants to “make America great again”? Or Elon Musk who wants
to colonize other planets, knowing full well the abominations committed in the name
of colonization. What would it take to accept that the uncertainty and novel creativity
of a complex universe cannot be banished, overcome, or controlled? To become
more humble, more present, able to savor the spontaneity and constant surprise of
being alive?
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Section 3: “Walking on Two Legs”
I do have a speculative response – one out of an infinite number of hypothetically
imaginable scenarios, framed by three dominant attributes or anticipatory
assumptions. The first primary anticipatory assumption is about the purpose of
imagining the future – part of what I call the ‘narrative frame’ (Miller, 2018). In this
case the purpose is not to use-the-future to realise a goal or prepare for some
eventuality. Instead, the scenario of sometime later-than-now is imagined without
giving direct consideration to either its probability/plausibility or desirability. This is a
powerfully structuring component of the scenario’s narrative frame – or how the
‘story’ is created and recounted. The second set of assumptions determine attributes
of the analytical frame or points-of-reference for describing the imaginary not-past,
not-present. For the scenario space I’m framing here, the assumption pertains to the
choice of ‘subject’ or terrain for engaging in descriptive invention/imagining –
specifically the diversity of actually functioning anticipatory systems and processes.
The third anticipatory assumption is part of the narrative frame and has to do with
change. In this scenario I seek to describe (imagine) changes in the conditions of
change. In other words, I want to describe a world that is unknowable in the present
because the conditions for its being do not exist, and may never exist.
These three sets of anticipatory assumptions, narrative and analytical, lay out the
dual frame that I want to use to imagine scenarios of the relationship between
human capabilities and futures studies. Specifically, I want to elaborate a scenario in
which the study of anticipatory systems and processes deepens and broadens the
‘discipline of anticipation’ (DoA) such that people are able to become more futures
literate. One way to share what I am imagining is to draw a comparison to a
phenomenon that is likely to be familiar to everyone – such as the commonplace
activity, walking-on-two-legs. With a tip of the hat to Mao Ze Dong, who used this
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metaphor to describe the relationship between peasants and workers in
revolutionary2 China. This is an image (see above) that cleaves to my personal path,
as it tickles specific sensibilities I acquired over a lifetime – the life of a highly
privileged and lucky white male born in the mid-20th Century in the ‘dominant’ English
speaking North. Isolating this specific Maoist reference tells the tale of my efforts to
wrestle with the odd, very 19th Century proposition that to create a ‘better’ society
(flavors of communism, or non-capitalism) there needed to be a proletariat.
What I find interesting or inspirational about this debate within revolutionary
movements of the 19th and 20th Centuries is the question of why and how to connect
two paradigmatically distinct groups, urban industrial workers and rural village
farmers. Is there a way, as Mao’s ringing slogan asserts, to get the two paradigms,
workers and peasants, to work together, striding forward as the two legs of
revolutionary change? This is a Kuhnian (Kuhn, 1962) bifocal or bipedal metaphor
that is highly suggestive of what it might be like to comprehend and deploy two
distinct sets of human anticipatory systems and processes (ASP) as presented in the
Futures Literacy Framework (FLF) developed in Transforming the Future (Miller,
2018). The theory of anticipatory systems and processes presented in the FLF
consists of two distinct ‘legs’, one is ‘anticipation-for-the-future (AfF) and the other
‘anticipation-for-emergence’ (AfE). Much is at stake in the distinction between AfF
and AfE. It isn’t just a way of enhancing process design and the analytical
clarity/ease for participants and observers trying to understand ASP, there are
crucial issues related to defining and discovering the meaning of non-colonizing and
pluri-epistemic ways of being in the world. Hence, before diving into the details of the
Futures Literacy Framework, as one avenue towards researching and cultivating the
capabilities that enable such dual paradigm agility, it is worth clarifying a few
terminological issues.
A. Futures Studies, Futures Literacy, and the ‘discipline of anticipation’: An
approach to defining and researching the ‘two-legs’
“Ontology and epistemology are now entirely entangled: the terms used to
describe entities can no longer be separated from the terms used to account for
how to access them or make them visible; the way of being of entities cannot be
disconnected from the way of knowing them.” (Latour, 2004, p. 246).
All fields engage in terminological wrangling. Some debates are territorial, as one
person or school of thought tries to claim or defend terrain against other schools.
Other debates are essential for a field to advance and reflect the evolving nature of
research and understanding of a subject. Recently researchers and practitioners in
the field of Futures Studies have been debating what distinguishes anticipation from
futures literacy from a variety of flavors of foresight? In my view, one way of
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resolving at least some of the sources of these debates is to adopt the following two
definitions.
First, that the subject of Futures Studies is the study of the manifestations of the
human imagination’s attempts to describe (in a variety of forms/methods) the not-
past, not-present (i.e. the future)3. Avoiding the direct use of the word ‘future’ can be
helpful because it offers one way to overcome a confusing conflation of what exists
(in practical terms) with what does not exist. Thus, efforts to imagine the future exist
(as anticipatory activities, systems and processes), while the ‘actual’ future is not
practically accessible in the present. The goal is to avoid the confusion, common
when the ‘future’ is invoked in everyday conversation and reflection, that the future is
something that exists, even though we all know, implicitly or explicitly, that it is only
anticipatory activities that exist in the present.
Second, the subject of Futures Studies, the human imagination, is inherently pluri-
epistemic. Simply put, the human imagination cannot be grasped or researched on
the basis of only one way of knowing (Archambault & Venet, 2007). The not-past,
not-present imagined by humans consists of many dimensions, from emotion and
physical sensation to numerical and visual scenarios. There is no way to ‘know’ the
imagination in its richness if the methods for knowing are restricted to, for instance,
numerical extrapolation or Hollywood movies.4
Now, on the basis of the two preceding definitions, one approach to distinguishing
anticipation from foresight and foresight from futures literacy, including the notion of
‘walking-on-two-legs’, is to attempt to describe the differences in terms of
'anticipatory systems and processes' (ASP). Adopting this terminology has its
strengths and weaknesses. To start with the weaknesses, like any effort to map and
categorize phenomena there is a need to abstract from the details that characterize
the observable world. The map is not the world. Still, maps and categories are quite
helpful since humans are not able, and perhaps this universe is not amenable, to
‘groking’ (Heinlein, 1987) it all at once.
On the positive side, ASP inherently combine both the systemic and procedural
aspects of imagining. This seems important because the imagination bounces back-
and-forth between the what and the how, the frames and the methods (Langer,
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1967). The goal is to anchor futures studies on a foundation that seeks to
encompass as much as possible the immense diversity of reasons, methods, and
contexts for conscious human imagining of the not-past, not-present. The concept of
ASP claims such an all-inclusive definition, one that rests on the observation that all
living organisms anticipate, in one way or another (Miller & Poli, 2010). Making
biology the point of departure would seem to be a logical way to be open about the
sources and diversity of ASP, given that living creatures evolved in a context where
time plays a role. All living organisms are an evolutionary expression of complex
emergence – incorporating, one way or another of taking time, the later-than-now,
into account – incorporating different kinds of ASP.
Anchoring the theory of ASP in evolution and biology offers a strong reason to go
hunting for a diversity of ASP, conscious and non-conscious, given the diversity of
living organisms. For the purposes of this text, the focus is on conscious ASP,
specifically those of humans. So, the foundational hypothesis, the one upon which
the ‘theory of the future’ offered here rests, is that the future is incorporated into the
present by the operation of ASP in living organisms. For humans the functioning of
conscious anticipation is enabled by the capacity of humans to imagine. When
humans imagine the later-than-now they collate different kinds of descriptions of
something that does not yet exist, the imaginary not-past, not-present. These
descriptions can take many forms and pose a set of questions that I suspect are not
only intriguing to me but to the broader research community as currently defined
(Poli discusses bringing anticipation into all of the social sciences (Poli, 2014)) and
more widely to all humans – given that all humans ‘use-the-future’.
One of the first questions, assuming the acceptance of the proposition that ASP exist
and can be detected, created, analyzed, and comprehended, is how to gain a better
grasp – conduct ‘scientific’ research into the attributes, functioning, implications of
ASP? No doubt there are many different avenues, including vast amounts of already
familiar and well-established research spanning every academic discipline into the
many manifestations of our imagination – from stock market prospectuses and
Hollywood blockbusters to eschatological promises and declarations of ‘true love’.
However, as I will try to explore in the next section there are aspects of ASP that
remain unfamiliar for a variety of reasons – including one that is a ‘prior condition’ – if
people are unaware of their ASP it is rather hard to: a) directly inquire about the
subject; and b) there are certain ASP that cannot be manifested without those doing
the imagining acquiring the ability to scaffold or avail themselves of affordances and
aspirations that only appear on the basis of experience/skill.
B. And what are the two legs…
Well firstly, two is not one. Meaning if we are going to pursue the theory and the
evident implications of the metaphor it is central to distinguish one leg from the other.
What makes them different? Well, when it comes to our legs it may seem obvious.
One is on the left and another on the right. Still, watching a baby learn to walk and
knowing the different abilities of our different legs, makes the case for identifying
genetic, experiential, and practiced differences. Keeping one’s balance or scoring a
‘free kick’ are not just the work of one leg or both, it’s a whole set of elements,
including the surrounding context. Perhaps, pushing the metaphor to its limits, we
might consider distinguishing our right and left legs on the basis of the different
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reasons, different methods, and different contexts in which we use them.
Categorizing, the right-footed striker or ambidextrous one on the basis of why they
took a kick at the goal with one leg or the other, using a particular method – side or
front of the foot – in a specific context, like where the goalie happens to be.
Turning back to the topic of the future, assuming one accepts the idea that
anticipatory systems and processes (ASP) are the source or frames for all imagined
futures – then the challenge of categorization might be addressed in a manner
similar to that of our two legs. Indeed, this is what the Futures Literacy Framework
(FLF), outlined in Transforming the Future (Miller, 2018), tries to do. The FLF
proposes to distinguish ASP on the basis of different kinds/sets of ‘anticipatory
assumptions’ (AA). With AA differentiated on the basis of why and how people
imagine the not-past, not-present. The FLF provides a matrix for sorting ‘uses-of-the-
future’ into two overarching categories – legs – ‘anticipation-for-the-future’ (AfF) and
‘anticipation-for-emergence’ (AfE). The legs are further divided into 6 different sets of
‘anticipatory assumptions’ (AA). AA are distinguished on the basis of the ontological
and epistemological choices that define key parameters of the ‘narrative frames’ that
people use when imagining the future. On the basis of these different sets of
reasons/methods/contexts for imagining futures it is possible to specify the following
initial framework for seeking evidence of different categories of ASP.
(Miller, 2018)
Like any new framework it is crucial to not only revise it as the evidence and
relevance of the different categories are tested through research and practice, but it
is also important to recognize that there is a difference between early and later
phases in the development of ideas, habits, and institutions. In my view the field of
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Futures Studies is evolving as efforts are made to explore ASP, identify and
categorize AA, and learn from the reflexive dance between evolving theory and
evolving practice. FS as the study of ASP enhances FL - and can include expertise
in different bundles of ASP that change over time and that can be labelled in various
ways like foresight, forecasting, fantasy, and much more. Thus, at the moment, the
theory and practice of most work going on within the label ‘foresight’, belongs within
AA1 and AA3 of the FLF. Key parameters of the narrative – such as using the
imagined future as a goal – are common to most foresight activities and therefore
such activities fall within AA1 and AA3. These AA are expressions of quite familiar
and institutionally/organizationally dominant uses-of-the-future (ability to imagine)
that enable humans to attempt to plan or colonize the future for the purposes of
either ‘optimization’ (getting to a ‘better’ result) or ‘preparation’ (getting ready for a
specific future imagined on the basis of the past).
Futures Literacy Laboratories (FLL) (Miler, 2018) are one tool or technique for
revealing AA. Labs reveal the AA used by participants in the Lab. Thus, Labs can
help participants and researchers to identify the attributes of AA used by the
participants to imagine the future and to discern the sources/origins of AA. FLL, by
exposing why and how participants are imagining the future provides ‘data’ on the
AA that shape what people imagine. Then, on the basis of the awareness/data
generated in the Lab regarding AA and the different kinds of futures people imagine,
it becomes possible to sort uses-of-the-future into different variants of narrative
frames belonging to AA1 or 2 or 3, etc.
Identifying and categorizing the differences that distinguish narrative frames that
belong in AA1 from those that belong AA6, or AA2 vs AA5, etc., can serve a variety
of purposes. By-products of exploring and categorizing AA include the learning
voyages and/or research processes that develop futures literacy as a capability and
contribute to Futures Studies as a coherent research field or discipline. Labs can be
co-designed to achieve numerous objectives for researchers, participants,
organizations, etc. Some of these ‘outcomes’ are the familiar ones related to
planning the future or gathering information on the sources and uses of the future in
a particular community. Running Labs also helps to refine this tool as a technique for
cultivating and exploring ASP, hence building the theory and practice of FL.
FLL, by revealing AA, contribute to awareness of ASP as constituted by the AA that
make up the narrative and analytical frames that enable imagining. FLL are useful
because by revealing AA people are better able to use-the-future – better able to
understand why and how imagined futures are created and used to shape BOTH
what we perceive and do. In practical terms, to use one obvious ‘use-case’, FLL help
to democratize the generally very elitist and technocratic use-of-the-future to
perpetuate the past. Cultivating FL enhances the capacity of communities to
understand their hopes and fears, motivations and expectations, conceptions of
agency and relationships to the world. Like with any capability, knowledge is power
and enhancing the power of humans to use their imaginations is – according to some
scenarios – particularly relevant for current transitions.
Better understanding ASP, cultivating the conditions for greater futures literacy,
changes what we can see and do in the present, regardless of ‘consequences’, if
any, for the future. Enabling a diversification of why we use the future from the
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current pre-occupation with the future-as-goal to a more balanced appreciation of the
role imagined futures play in perception and the ability to sense and make-sense of
novelty – the emergence of phenomena that express the creativity of a universe
where the only certainty is uncertainty. Practically, in the present, this makes it easier
to appreciate change and break the barriers (alienations) erected (reproduced) by
the fear of losing superiority (control) over the universe and each other.
Section 4: What’s in a name?
When I was a first-year undergraduate, back in 1974, I took Economics 101. Our
textbook, at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, was ‘Lipsey, Sparks and Steiner’
(Lipsey et. al., 1973), and our professor was aptly named Smith, although his first
name wasn’t Adam but Douglas. Anyhow, in that first-year course I was introduced
to a definition of the field of economics, following Paul Samuelson’s (Samuelson,
1948) pervasive and persuasive phrase – as the study of the allocation of scarce
resources, in its many dimensions (as long as it could be accounted for in monetary
terms). No one told us that the term ‘economics’ was defined first and foremost by
the study of individual economic actors, meaning micro-economics was paramount,
nor that macro-economics, the study of aggregates, was the overarching category of
economic analysis. No. Economics was understood as a general moniker for the
field because in both its micro and macro dimensions it was about understanding the
same topic, the allocation of scarce resources, but from different perspectives.
Furthermore no one tried to argue that if you became more knowledgeable about
macro-economics and began to ply your specialized expertise that you were not an
economist – even if you did dig deeper into one or the other of the silos of the field.
I tell this story because it appears to me that current debates within the multiple
communities of ‘futurists’5 are sowing needless confusion and detracting from the
rigor and insight that could belong to the field of Futures Studies by engaging in a
non-sensical, anachronistic, and territorial debate about the term foresight. I’ll chalk
it up to inertia, the field’s past constraining next steps. Not unusual, happens
regularly in many spheres of human endeavor, but it can be somewhat tedious and
counterproductive. My proposition is quite straightforward – for many reasons our
societies privilege planning the future above other reasons and methods for
imagining the not-past, not-present. As a result, efforts to use-the-future are
clustered around various aspects of planning the future. This specific category of
activities, in its theory and practice, has been called by various names at different
times and places, but at the moment the term foresight, with various modifiers, such
as strategic or participatory, is the most commonplace.
Of course, naming conventions evolve, reflecting all kinds of changes in fashion,
power, needs, etc. Only at the moment, and in some ways the changes being
wrought by climate change aggravate the situation, there is a mono-mania with
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Contribution to the forthcoming Handbook of Futures Studies, edited by Roberto Poli – author’s preprint
efforts to ‘create better futures’. It isn’t that making bets on the future is an
unnecessary activity, otherwise there’s no dinner or landing on the moon or
exploding an atomic bomb. Furthermore, humanity is currently saddled with an
incredibly powerful and toxic legacy that obscures the use-of-the-future for anything
other than planning, in its many forms. The point here is that the lack of awareness
of the monoculture of the imagination and the obsession with improving the pursuit of
legitimate and credible bets, encourages the formulation of ways of knowing that just
continue the cycle. Betting begets bookies, stock markets, and other efforts at expert
and crowd sourced imaginary futures (like parliaments, political parties, etc.),
typically all efforts to extrapolate the past. Yet, a field like Futures Studies needs to
evolve as both the world changes and new ideas in a wide range of fields, from
philosophy and physics to biology and design, shed light on previously ignored
aspects of the future. For instance, different dimensions of temporality (Adam &
Groves, 2007) and ‘story-listening’ (Dillon & Craig, 2021) or creativity (Sternberg &
Lubart, 1999) and ‘new theories of the social sciences’ (DeLanda, 2006), that also
take on different meaning when assessed from outside the teleological frame of AfF.
All of these different strands of scientific reflection and the challenges posed to the
dominant ways of using-the-future point to the need to find a broad, pluri-epistemic,
and scientifically fertile definition of Futures Studies. Taking the diversity of
anticipatory systems and processes as its foundation sets Futures Studies off on the
exploration of the reasons and methods used to imagine beyond the fences of the
mind created by an obsession with targets and slingshots. Humility and being in the
universe as meaning can be learned, or relearned, even after the millennia of violent
programming of monumentalist social orders on everyone, particularly young
impressionable minds. Without pre-judging the outcome or any specific virtues, other
than an enhanced understanding of the world, this agenda for Futures Studies might
be a way to break the chain by undermining the conditions that reduce and
reproduce anticipation as a colonizing search for certainty. Futures Studies as the
enabler of futures literacy is indeed a transition strategy, it has a goal, but it is a
capability objective, a form of open-ended intergenerational transmission – the gift of
the capacity to be free not the admonition and obligation to goosestep to papa’s
reassuring but delusional and self-serving search for certainties. It’s about
confidence in the ability to learn and take advantage of the creativity of the universe,
not as a master and slave, but as partners in improvisation, spontaneity, and
mystery. Recognizing that modesty is expressed first by claiming to not know and
caring by not imposing or exploiting.
Assuredly these remain rules, but I would appeal to what might seem like a subtle
distinction – these are not rules of obedience to authority or those who claim to know
– to those who would regulate and achieve. Instead, grasped more fully, more
diversly, a fuller appreciation of anticipation and imagination might enable the wings
of perception to meld with the omnipresence of difference and repetition, birth and
death, continuity and discontinuity. Cultivating the capacity to be the changes that
are happening all around us, all the time, the emergent and flowing texture, music,
color, and surprise of a creative universe. Right now, our planet is providing a
message without any intentionality, volition, or purpose – it is feedback that can
either reinforce the frenetic effort to impose outcomes, to conquer tomorrow, or to
begin the experimentalist process of relegating conquest in its many forms to micro-
pretentions like cooking a delicious dinner. And the good news is we can do it by
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Contribution to the forthcoming Handbook of Futures Studies, edited by Roberto Poli – author’s preprint
tapping into something we do day in and day out – which is use our imagination.
Only now, with the aspiration of finding a balance between, on the one hand, yoking
the future to goals, means, and impatience for your lottery number to come up, and
on the other hand, cultivating the magic of non-teleological imagination to fuel the
patience of not-knowing, not-doing, inviting our wings of perception to soar.
Bibliography
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