Futurity/Futurism

I have leftover questions about Marez’s concept of futurity, as opposed to futurism, in the introduction we read of Farm Worker Futurism.

Marez defines the distinction like this: “I draw a distinction, however, between futurism – the projection of a particular, determinant future social order – and futurity as open-ended desire for a world beyond the limits of the present” (9). He draws on Jose Muñoz’s Cruisng Utopia to describe futurity as “desire for something beyond the here and now, ‘desire for both larger semiabstractions such as a better world or freedom but also, more immediately, better relations within the social that include better sex and more pleasure.’” (10). Queer futurity, Muñoz writes, is actually in the present: Muñoz draws on CLR James, who draws on Hegelian dialectics to argue that the “affirmation known as the future is contained within its negation, the present” (10). The example James uses (that forms the basis of Muñoz’s sense of what futurity is, which forms Marez’s understanding of it, as distinguished from futurism – just to keep all the ducks in a row) for understanding the future is “an actually existing socialist reality in the present,” a factory where a disabled worker’s colleagues have organized their own labor so that while he maintains his job, he effectively has almost nothing to do.

The first question that came to mind after reading this clarification of futurity was: okay, then what makes the quality of ‘futurity’ different from any other form of political theory? Don’t all modes of political theory/critique implicitly – or actually, explicitly – express desire for something beyond the here and now? Or to put it differently, why call it “futurity” and juxtapose it – and imply it shares a special forward-looking quality – with futurism, if all political theories and movements are definitionally forward looking? I know that Marez uses the world “futurity” to discuss the critique elaborated by the farm worker visual primarily because he looks at political art in the genre of speculative science fiction. But the point would be that either these works engage in futurism – albeit a different, more progressive kind than the farm worker futurism he critiques – or they use science fiction to engage in what is at root critique, a critique no more and no less forward-looking than critiques that use other images.

Also: James’ understanding of what Muñoz calls futurity feels strongly reminiscent of Foucault’s “heterotopia.” Heterotopias, Foucault writes, are “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (“Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” 3). Heterotopias are real sites that act as utopias – “sites with no real space” – and as critical challenges to the broader normative space of society. Which is all to say that the question after “why call something futurity that grounds itself in the present” is “why conceive of our critical/utopic ideas as temporal, as opposed to spatial?” (for the record, Foucault does ground the idea of heterotopia in time, but the article is premised on the (less than rigorously justified) idea that we have entered the ”epoch of space”). Or, more broadly: where do we ground our theory, or how? Could we go around and say of all the theories we read – even the less obviously historic, or speculative, or located ones – where/when they are oriented spatially and temporally?