I was very struck by an idea that came up in class this week: the newness, or strangeness, of the past. As someone who recently opted into history as a discipline, I have thought a lot about what studying the past does or allows for. There’s an element of empiricism to historical study that’s important to me, in that it offers us a way into problems in the humanities that is very different from critique. Like critical making, as we discussed in earlier weeks, historical research ideally offers us a way to evade total reliance on our own ability to analyze and understand individual objects of study, to at least temporarily step outside our own processes of deduction and critical observation and be surprised by something totally unexpected. I often think of Benjamin when thinking about orientations toward history or the past (as does Curtis Marez in the portion of Farm Worker Futurism we read), and I think this view of history has something in common with his idea that to really interact with the past might mean not so much to construct a linear, universalizing, causal narrative as to “take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger” (VI).
What was surprising and interesting to me about our discussion in class on Thursday was what I took to be Professor Jagoda’s extension of this attitude toward the past (that the past can be generative, offer us something new and weird) into a contention about the limitations of the future—the idea that imagined futures are impoverished by the fact that they can only ever be projections and reconfigurations of what is already known. I had been thinking about the limitations of future-oriented thought already this week: In working on a forthcoming editorial for the magazine I edit for, I got into something of an argument with the other editors about futurism, specifically reproductive futurism, a concept that Marez cites in Farmworker Futurisms as well. The subject of the editorial is climate change and how we should orient ourselves to it. It raises the concern that the thought of the end of the world, the potential absence of future generations, is paralyzing, politically and emotionally. I contended that, on the contrary, the thought of the future, specifically the kind of reproductive futurism that structures action in the present around the idea of future children, can itself be politically paralyzing, as I believe people like Lee Edelman and other queer theorists have argued. I think Benjamin supports this contention as well: He suggests that what is truly galvanizing is “the picture of enslaved forebears, not on the ideal of the emancipated heirs" (XII).
In the context of all this, I found the Marez reading deeply interesting, and surprisingly, I thought, much more interested in the kinds of things I study in other contexts than in digital media per se. I wasn’t sure what to make of Marez’s distinction between futurism and futurity, though. When he writes, “By contrast with ‘futurism,’ I use ‘futurity’ to capture the expectation of the future as possibility, not guaranteed but also not foreclosed” (10), it seems as though he’s still pointing to a kind of future-orientation that’s at odds with a Benjaminian focus on what is and what has been. On the other hand, he’s obviously thinking in Benjaminian terms, and seems to be consciously working to rescue the kind of future-orientation he identifies in his objects of study from charges of historicism. In any case, it seems clear that both looking backward and looking forward can be helpful or harmful, politically generative or politically paralyzing, depending on the context. More useful for me than the distinction between futurism and futurity was, again, the idea brought up in class that focusing on the future is limiting and limited for a specific reason: Mostly what we’re going to find in our visions of the future is ourselves, and deep and sustained attention to the past might be the best way (or at least a short cut) for us to actually encounter something else, something new.
Image source:
Aptekar, Ken. "Installation View of Angelus Novus with the Other Klee Painting Walter Benjamin Owned, Presentation of the Miracle, 1916, Museum of Modern Art, NY". In Repainter Diary. July 21, 2016. Accessed December 2, 2018. https://repainterdiary.com.
Works cited:
Benjamin, Walter. "On the Concept of History." Marxists Internet Archive. Accessed December 02, 2018. https://www.marxists.org/.
Marez, Curtis. Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.