Between responsibility and escape: The future as an object of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences

Abstract

The future has been a central object of inquiry in the twentieth-century social theory. In this essay, a first generation of intellectual concern with the future is represented in the post-war turn towards a hermeneutics of time and reflections on modernity in the writings of conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck and philosopher Paul Ricoeur. In their writings, the future was both essential reflection on the limits of human existence and a fundamental liberation of political potential. As such they situated the future in what was defined as historical time. A second wave of scholarly thinking came in the explosion of a post-war field of futures studies. The future, to post-war futurists, was a loss of telos and an indication of the fundamental immaturity and hubris of the human subject. History was a cumbersome remnant of past destruction, and the imperative was to move beyond. In a third generation, currently taking form, the future is considered as part of a postmodern, indeed posthuman existence. ‘There is no such thing as humanity’ makes human history impossible and opens the question of whether it is even possible to engage with the future without a clear anchoring in the history of what it is to be human.

The future has been a central object of inquiry in the twentieth-century social theory. I include in this essay central aspects of philosophies of history and time (I exclude arguments that are about issues of future concern, but not about the object of the future as such). As an object of inquiry, the future is inherently about forms of temporality and configuration. As such it is directly entangled with (mainly) secular notions of fate and destiny, but also responsibility and human reach. While the idea of future responsibility is in itself a product of the twentieth-century social theory and critical future-oriented social movements, other forms of theorizing disregard responsible action and stress the future as human escape – with both utopian and dystopian charge. I explore these dimensions by considering how three particular generations of social theory with deep relevance to our present have approached the future. A first generation of intellectual concern with the future is represented in the post-war turn towards a hermeneutics of time and reflections on modernity in the writings of conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck and philosopher Paul Ricoeur (to these may be added Norbert Elias, Emile Durkheim or Edmund Husserl, but I have not included them here). These scholars, writing between 1930 and 1960, identified a separation of social, political, cultural time from natural and biological processes and saw modernity as an acceptance of the charge of secularizing the future in societies turned towards acceleration and intensification. In their writings, the future was both essential reflection on the limits of human existence and a fundamental liberation of political potential. As such they situated the future in what was defined as historical time.

A second wave of scholarly thinking came in the explosion of a post-war field of futures studies – bridging theorizing with key forms of activism and repertoires of engagement that set their mark on the post-war period. Here, a key concern was the future problems that high modernity had caused – indeed the idea of catastrophic risk and end to human civilization. The future, to these thinkers, was no longer a civilizational problem, but a loss of telos and an indication of the fundamental immaturity and hubris of the human subject. As they attempted to rehumanize this human subject by shaping new forms of inscription in time, these scholars introduced problems to social science and humanistic thinking that arguably were not resolved, and have not been resolved, but remain relevant concerns as a kind of phantoms of the present. History, to these thinkers, was a cumbersome remnant of past destruction, and the imperative was to move beyond.

In a third generation, currently taking form and lacking perhaps direction in something of a mirror image of the deeply fractured nature of contemporary future politics, the future is considered as part of a postmodern, indeed posthuman existence. In the words of Zoltan Simon, the challenge of posthumanity is a weirdly dialectical one: posthumanism postulates a key break with Enlightenment legacies all the while apparently reproducing some of the very worst aspects of Enlightenment thinking: the hyperrationality of technological engineering, eugenics and species annihilation. As such, ‘there is no such thing as humanity’ makes human history impossible and opens the question of whether it is even possible to engage with the future without a clear anchoring in the history of what it is to be human (Jordheim, 2022; Simon, 2019). Arguably, the discomfort with the idea of a human future makes the humanities and social sciences badly equipped, in the present, to participate in a democratic dialogue with the problem of the future. It seems important therefore to put posthumanism in the context of other historical traditions of linking future and human being, in ways that did not foreclose but open for humanistic questions of being and acting responsibly in the world.

These three generations are not coherent intellectual canons or social fields; rather, they mark distinct interventions into constructing the future as social theory. They are separated here by considering the role of future time in relation to problems of human being in the world. Distinguishing these traditions of thought offers a future genealogy of sorts in an intellectual history repertoire for how the future has and presently is constructed in social sciences and humanities thinking. The concluding section returns to what I think is the central problem of removing the concept of responsibility from social theory, which is the inability to view the future as part of our social world. Here, the present marks a striking gap between the return of futures critical activism and militancy not least in youth movements – and a reduction of the human subject in posthuman theorizing.

Future as hermeneutics and human condition: Being in time

Andersson’s 2018 book The Future of the World argued that the modern concept of the future is intimately related to the conceptual construct the ‘world’, and to conceptions, related to this world construct, of what it means to be human in this world (Andersson, 2018). To be is of course a major philosophical question, and we shall not revisit it here, but from an historical viewpoint, being is a genealogical problem, a problem indeed of manifold stories of humanity (Simon, 2019). Periods of crisis in the twentieth century have seen ideas of deep fracture in this triptych relationship – a rupturing in the understanding of what links humans to world to future of this world. Such understandings have often linked ideas of fractures in the human inner self to ideas of a fracture in the world, either in terms of war and conflict or in terms of planetary environmental destruction. Not least in humanities thinking, periods of intellectual innovation have seen bouts of scholarly thinking trying to resuture this fractured relationship. To bring the future back to humans is to settle the continuity of time by remaking the world in the image of a (better) human. It is impossible, in short, to take the future out of the modern condition (Arendt, 1954, 1958).

The ‘modern condition’ was indeed a marker of an important debate on the future in the 1950s and 1960s. It was marked by a rejection of the idea of the future as dialectics, and a corresponding move away from the idea of utopia as it had predominantly been understood, in other words as an endpoint in human time and a kind of rationalization of progress towards that end (Siebers, 2021). There was a liberal and conservative tilt in these interpretation – liberal thinkers proposed to remove the future from the endpoint to an idea of secular progress in ideas such as the ‘end of ideology’ and the ‘poverty of historicism’; in hermeneutics, other liberal and conservative scholars found room for a description of a human engagement with time that was not lawbound but deeply concerned with reflexivity and meaning. Fundamentally influenced by the war time experience, this was a concern with what the future meant to the fact of being human, and what being human was in a larger concern for humanity which, these writers thought, necessarily passed through history. As such they contained rejections also of the kind of aggressive, technologically tuned futurism of the interwar years. It was, in their writings, of importance that the future was human, secular, political and social time – distinct from other forms of time and therefore a matter of sociology, history and philosophy.

Meanwhile, a certain dialectics remained in a stress on the future as both a disciplining factor and source of organization and civilization, and, as a form of liberation. The experience of time was being, in other words all reflections on the future were projections of human aspirations and meaning making to the temporal limits of human life. For both Koselleck and Ricoeur, this observation led to an understanding of history as a set of conceptual and narrative practices around the problem of the experience of time. In these narrations, humans operated a hermeneutic between the human inside/outside world and turned time from an imperative of technology, economy or biology into existential reflection on the temporal limits of existence. In the arguments of both Riceour and Koselleck, future is thus the result of a hermeneutic between past experience (vécu) and expectations or ‘horizon of expectation’ (Bedarida, 2001; Holden, 2019; Ricoeur, 1982). Both emphasized this process as open – the human experience of time was not total, but always incomplete, but the future could nevertheless not be grasped beyond the experience of time past and moving away from history would have implied a rupture in the human being.

The concept of future was of particular importance to Koselleck (Ewing, 2018; Jordheim, 2011; Koselleck, 2004). In Futures past, a collection of essays published in the 1980s, Koselleck argued that the contemporary meaning of the future, captured with the German term ‘Zukunft’, was a product of a specific kind of modern, Enlightenment thinking. With this thinking came the idea of historical time, a unified projection into time which Koselleck discussed as History with an H and thought of as a Kollektivsingular, a monumental description of a human trajectory. To Koselleck, with arguments that were, as Niklas Olsen has shown, directly influenced by German hermeneutics in Gadamer, but also Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, the future was thus a conceptual and mental unification of all the multiplicity of human time, and a separation out of historical time from other forms of biological, geological or natural time (Olsen, 2022). Koselleck was never clear on what this process of modernity did to the future as such. He emphasized that the discovery of the horizon of the future had enabled a secular liberation of political will, after ancient regime era of divine time and moral virtues. This made the future as ‘horizon of expectation’ into a promise of change, and a necessary element in a turn to the political. Olsen argues insightfully that this description contained Koselleck’s rejection of utopian thinking as relying on precisely such a History and unified process, resembling the rational Plan. I would suggest that he mainly emphasized the invention of the future as a process of liberation, a great opening of a temporal universe in which human beings became masters of time, which indeed was an ambiguous description (Koselleck, 2004). Olsen proposes that Koselleck linked this to the idea of human responsibility and that the idea of a human engagement with time was a recurrent theme in Koselleck’s emphasis on multiple temporalities, but Koselleck made only minor comments on the way in which the displacement of the responsibility over time also placed a certain burden of destiny onto (a) Man suddenly charged with his own fate. The ‘End of ends’ to Koselleck left a conflict ridden and dangerous opening, in which the political was born (Hölscher, 2016; Olsen, 2012). Another central Koselleck scholar, Helge Jordheim, has recently proposed that a later transformation in Koselleck’s thinking included multiple timescales that involved also natural and geological planes of time – but Jordheim bases this mainly on Koselleck’s concern with photography and images of colliding timescales and the argument, while important, does not seem clear. Yet other scholars have underlined that Koselleck, in his identification of a future as Zukunft, heavily laden with Prussian constructs, viewed a modern future as a distinct Western prerogative (other historians of the political at the same time did too). When establishing the so-called Geschichtliches Grundbegriffe, Koselleck did not consider that time, globally, is a diverse affair – even though this had been pointed out time and again by anthropologists, for instance, and his silence on both this and the in the 1980s already present concern with climate and environment is noteworthy (Appadurai, 2015; Fabian, 2014).

Future as crisis of modernity – atomic era thinking

While a first generation of key thinkers on the future in the humanities and social sciences stressed the future as an inherently anthropocentric object, product of human existence and key to the modern sense making of secularization, democratization and politics; later thinkers on the future came to identify a human future blindness in the very imperative of future as a realization of human meaning. Koselleck’s understanding of the End was that transcending it meant the birth of the modern political, all the while emphasizing that the End of the end meant a constant human concern with how to make sense of the necessarily bounded temporal horizons of existence. Other scholars of the post-war moment would reconsider what a human subject unbound by limits in time and space had/could be(en). Hannah Arendt, in a 1950s set of essays, put words on a larger preconception of the Atomic era that only beings that had lost contact with the limited nature of the human universe, and no longer understood themselves as situated in both time and space, could have developed and continued to explore the atom (Arendt, 1954). The atom, as further excavated in arguments by Lewis Mumford, Robert Jungk or Gunther Anders, became the metaphor/artefact for thinking the future: in the split of the atom was both the great explosion of the physical laws of the universe and a concrete tampering with the human inner makeup.

Inside their arguments came a central emphasis on reconstituting the boundaries for human agency. This reconstitution took many different forms. To Arendt, reconstituting humanity in space and time was a pre-eminently political process – a matter of reasserting citizenship and belonging to a political community crushed by the rise of totalitarianism. Arendt defined this as telos, the sense that community could only be restored through an idea of the future (Arendt, 1954, 1958). Lewis Mumford, in The Pentagon of Power, argued that humanity could only be healed in its fractured relationship to time and being by a reinvented relationship to technology and rationality (Mumford, 1946, 1970). Mumford was an early proponent of the idea of futures literacy – arguing that a central role of the humanities and social sciences in the post-war era had to be to create the conditions for a pedagogical reform of the human subject. He described humanity as a ‘petulant child’. The gap between reason and wisdom had never been so large, said Mumford, and thought that mankind had proven his fundamental psychological immaturity in the making of the bomb. Similar notions came from Erich Fromm. Robert Jungk, author of Brighter than a Thousand Suns, a major post-war bestseller that influenced the making of the global struggle against the bomb, developed his future workshops as a variant of a future-oriented psycho analysis, by which human futures could be freed from the grip of the Cold War logic (Jungk & Galtung, 1968). In the future workshops, the task was to verbalize better collective objectives, shared utopias of sorts and through group exercises identify the steps through which they could be reached. It was group therapy and liberation eschatology. In other forms of future enactments that also proliferated at this time, futures were exhibited in new museums of Peace or showcased in planetary models. Here, the point was, as Kenneth Boulding put it, to place the future sufficiently out of temporal reach so that the very act of conjuring it or thinking about it would infer a form of radical transcendence. To Boulding, empirical social science could perform this transcendent task, by for instance analysing the logic of the armaments struggle, and situate a new objective of human welfare beyond this present in such a way as to illustrate how the structures of the present fundamentally impeded this goal (Andersson, 2018).

In these arguments was a hope to perform a radical transformation of human being and recreate the world in the image of a more sane collective singular, Humanity. The idea of this united Humanity resulting from myriads of reformed future-oriented people was often at this period in time expressed with the notion Mankind, as in the UNESCO preamble or the Union of Associations (Andersson & Duhautois, 2014; Jaspers, 1961). It signified a moving beyond a world split in two, by positing human engagement beyond the bipolar nature of the Cold War, and often, by including the third world, thought to represent a future untouched. Many of these kinds of optimism died with the erosion of hope in the UN system in the 1960s and 1970s. The historical window of globality was short – and arguably, globality contained its own global fractures (Chakraborty, 2009).

Before moving on, we might recall that other futurists thought mankind could not and would never reform and hence that the future had to be dealt with by forms of political, legal or technological self-binding. Such were the arguments for instance of Gunther Anders, well-known theoretician of the (anti)bomb, who argued that resuturing the gap between human beings and the future could only come from a kind of world government over the bomb (Anders, 1956). Hans Jonas, father of the so-called precautionary principle, wrote his book The Principle of Responsibility, in response to Bloch’s The Imperative of Hope. Hope was out of time, thought Jonas, in a world moment when technology had reached world destroying proportions (Jonas, 1979). Man, Jonas said, was the only animal (sic) capable of using the powers of imagination in order to foresee consequences even far into time. With this faculty – a not unimportant development of Aristotles’ animal politique – came the principle of responsibility, but Jonas thought this implied judicially and politically binding regulations, and possibly, infringements on mass democracy.

The arguments of these scholars were differentiated and various, but they represent, I argue, a major shift in the epistemological boundaries of post-war humanities and social sciences. In many ways, the future was the blind spot of the kind of Cold War liberal, end of ideology arguments of post-war political science, economics and philosophy. Barbara Adam has pointed out that the turn to facticity, empiricism and logical thinking through scholars such as Max Weber removed the space for thinking about the future. Arguably, this space shrunk again with the American influence over European knowledge production in the post-war era – the ‘after utopia’ described by Judith Shklar led away from the normative engagements that had characterized European political science, philosophy and history before -45. In its stead came the direct identification in the humanities and social sciences between future and progress, reflected, as we have seen, in Koselleck’s equation between Zukunft and ‘an end to ends’. Popper did assert that the future was the domain of an irreparable ‘poverty of historicism’. Koselleck never commented on the contemporary critique of that precise identification, for instance in the German futurist and émigré scholar Ossip Flechtheim’s work, History and futurology. Flechtheim argued that the idea of progress had become a totalizing liberal evangile. Flechtheim’s ‘futurology’ was the act of critically scrutinizing the logical endpoints of such hidden teleological reasonings so that a more open future could emerge (Flechtheim, 1966).

The attempt to integrate the future as part of a new kind of human engagement with being – in the world – in the post-war period brought out at least three core epistemological principles, that were not easily dismissed even while futurology itself struggled to create a space in the halls of academia. The first principle was indeed a central rejection of both Newtonian science and Weberian social science in the claim that futures are knowable and have a form of existence. This did not imply that the future can in itself be an object of direct observation, but major efforts after 1945 went into identifying how particles or pieces of future developments could be reliably turned into the basis of forms of useful prediction. The second principle was that a systematic study of the future had as its main purpose not the perfection of forms of long-term planning but the widening of the scope for future choice. A central notion here was that consequences of decisions could be placed, through forms of forecasting for instance, within the act of decision itself, and evaluated in relation to whether the decision would over time increase human freedom or not. One might easily consider this principle applied to CO₂ emissions, as indeed done in the 1972 Club of Rome report, and imagine that the failure to act on its findings back then led to a significantly reduced room of manoeuvre over time (Meadows et al., 1972). A third principle, derived largely through the body of thought called systems analysis, was that the future is a systemic and holistic logic and product of manifold and often overlapping or even contradictory tendencies and feedback loops. It is important that these three principles were the result of forms of interdisciplinary thinking, not least between the humanities and social sciences but involving new sciences of systems analysis, ecology and life science too. Arguably, these perspectives revolutionized post-war social science by bringing back the problem of time and by linking time to spatial dimensions and interrelations in holistic views on human beings as parts of a larger system of technology/economy, sociopolitical and cultural dimensions and geological biological trends. Here was indeed a beginning of our concern with not just the global, but the planetary scale. At the same time, systems analysis was deeply fractured between accounts that, on the one hand, viewed futures as products of forms of economic or technological determinism, and those who emphasized human creativity and will. It raised the question of the determined or open nature of the ‘system’. And who was in charge? Consider the two, radically different, Spaceship Earth metaphors: Kenneth Boulding’s emphasis on the mad cowboy-pilot that had to be radically enlightened in order to change his ways was a thoroughly different conception of the role of the human pilot in the system than Marshall McLuhan’s high-tech space ship chauffeur (Boulding, 1956; Höhler, 2015). Hazan Ozbekhan’s first draft of the Predicament of Mankind-model for the Club of Rome – which emphasized the need to engineer a kind of global human value change and stressed notions of global justice within planetary boundaries, was much different from the input-out climate model written by MIT economist Jay Forrester, which laid the basis for the model that produced the overshoot and collapse scenario, and the conclusion that this could only be altered by technological improvement (Ozbehkan was a forgotten forecasting genius and software engineer, Vieille Blanchard, 2014). While systems analysis had very complex genealogy and influences from many different disciplines including chemistry and physics from late nineteenth-century thinking, its post-war divisions reflected age-old questions in the humanities and social sciences on human beings, their worldly inscription and the system as a reflection of an outer or inner logic.

The study of the future, promising as it had been, got caught up in the Cold War logic that it had identified as the main threat to the human existence. I have argued before that Cold War futures studies were co-productive of a turn to globality, in its desire to predict and capture the whole world and its production of manifold factoids and artefacts describing world futures. But within globality were also the seeds of what is currently referred to as the planetary. In their idea of the need to posit a new psyche in a reinvented human subject beyond the present, some futurists arguably laid the basis for a present-day concern with transhumanism, as well as for a posthuman engagement between the human being and a natural but also technical world (below). At the same time, by insisting on the need to make futures visible to the present, futurists intended to underline complex issues of the relationship between knowledge and action, reassert ideas of human responsibility in a high-technological world and bring back a normative engagement with a future ethics of existence. These questions were, arguably, not resolved, and instead, futurism collapsed into a striking dualism – on the one hand those, like Jonas, who thought the world needed a new legal global structure of self-binding in order for a future to exist, and on the other those, not least in the United States, who, as Patrick McCray has shown, ventured deep into their exploration of the human psyche by exploring both space travel (radical extension!) and LSD (radical introspection) (McCray, 2016). The global future, meanwhile, kind of lost out. A somewhat existing global political space around the idea and hope of a united mankind rapidly closed in the 1980s and 1990s, not least due to the rise of regional rivalry and economistic and technocratic visions of globality.

Futures beyond – posthuman futures and the return of time

Historians have argued that the 1980s and 1990s were characterized by a pervasive presentism, a relocation of the future from a coming temporal horizon to an ever-growing present accompanied mainly by a sense of nostalgia and loss (Hartog, 2003). I think that it can be rather argued that the postmodern or neoliberal future was one in which ideas of being responsibly disappeared, and in which forms of escapism abounded – be it in the form of limitless financial growth, globalization or ecomodernist technological improvement. The holistical and interdisciplinary turn that had marked forms of systems analysis also fragmented and scattered. This is no longer so. From the 2000s on, a manifest interest in the future has again characterized the humanities and social sciences, leading to the constitution of new fields of social theory in which themes of anticipation, prediction, configuration or simply futurity have become markers (sometimes of genuine attempts to construct new fields of inquiry, sometimes mere labels). The turn to the future in the present is evidently a reflection on the present sense of a rapidly approaching and even surpassing future, and a corresponding wish to provide theoretical meaning to a concept that had mainly had a very minimal standing in the twentieth-century social science. At the same time, the contemporary concept of the future lacks a coherent theoretical meaning, and in my view, its epistemological status is unclear. Part of the lack of clarity is precisely in the failure to reactualize principles of human action, consequence and interaction in a temporal field in which future is still largely separated out from present concerns, rather than integrated into the very notion of being. Of course there are constructive examples – some important fields of study again stress the link between future and being responsibly in the world, for instance in the return of ideas of prefiguration and futurizing in the study of social movements and emancipation (Altstaedt, 2023; Oomen et al., 2022; Reckwitz, 2016). But important sections of the humanities and historical thinking have turned away from a perhaps morally charged notion of responsibility, and from the link between future and political action, and focus either on problems of expectation and anticipation, often with an emphasis on stabilization rather than transformative change, or, on phenomena that largely exceed human future horizons, as in the concern with deep history and deep time (below). Current social theories of the future also seem to reenact an historic dilemma between observations of future problems and active interventions in and onto coming time. The link between social theory and social movements is an important one, but arguably there is also a striking return of a kind of technologically hypercharged futurism, at the expense of humanistic and democratic reflection. In this, the current turn is not unlike Cold War futurology, and it again raises the issue of how to differentiate between efforts that bring the future to our humanistic investigation, and what turns it over to various forms of escapism and dehumanization – all at a moment in time that again poses the question of survival.

It is from this perspective, of challenging our capacity to consider the future as part of a social theory that does not back away from the question of being responsibly in the world, that I think we should pay critical attention to the growing field of posthumanism. It involves central challenges to philosophies of time, and it is arguably also highly involved in an ongoing reordering of the social world, in which the future is paradoxically removed from social and political conflict and handed over to dreams of a rejuvenated human subject. But which subject? A central move in interests in the posthuman has been to again link the human timescales of social, political and cultural time, to biological, geological and climatic processes. Indeed, histories of the Anthropocene have shown that early observations of geological archives took place in direct proximity to observations of human-made Antique archives and challenged that human science ever really separated the two (Heringman, 2015; Honenberger, 2016; Shryrock & Smail, 2011). The bringing back of forgotten knowledge of climate change as man-made has been a central part of historically oriented Anthropocentric studies – in ways that have underscored human failures to act responsibly (Bonneuil, 2015; Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016). Tying the timescales back together was in other words of significance. Related to this epistemological move of collapsing the timescales has been the rejection of binary categories such as realism/constructivism or indeed living/non-living – also important ideas for our concern with the future object, because of the often heard ‘modernist’ claim that the future neither exists nor lives (which surely now is a manifestly monstrous idea that needs to be debunked). At the same time, collapsing the timescales and rejecting binary categories in order to resituate humans in their world has reproduced paradoxical reiterations of essentialist categories, such as ‘epoch’ for the contemporary era of manmade climate, or ‘species’ to describe the human subject, both notions at the antipodes of the hermeneutic engagement of Ricoeur and Koselleck and both concepts also, possibly inadvertently, throwing Jonas’ notion of the future responsible human being out with the bathwater.

It is indisputable that the larger reorientation to taking problems of the future or futurity on board has opened up a paradigmatic revolution in humanistic and social science thinking, promising and problematic as it simultaneously is. It is worth pointing to some of the scholarly engagements that helped pave the way here, because also these contained openings and closures in the engagement with the future. Bruno Latour’s deconstruction of modernist social science, along with Donna Haraway’s Cyborg thinking, indisputably stands at the root of the posthuman reconsideration of the future (not least because of Latour’s claim that since we were never modern, there could also not be any such thing as a more humanistic postmodernity). Central in Latour’s work, not least in his last projects, aimed to redesign the value system of mankind around an idea of the future, was the separation of human made futures, indeed Koselleck’s Zunkunft, from what Latour referred to as l’avenir, that which will come (Latour, 2010, 2011). L’avenir, Latour insisted, has a form of agency of its own because it is made up of all the living and non-living forms and all forms of time. The product of this is something that we used to consider as invisible, but which can manifest itself in startling events that impact human lives. More than any other thinker, Latour gave an interpretation to the decades in which climate change went from being a future spectre to a very real and observable phenomenon, hence ‘bringing time up’ and creating future urgency. What had not been visible became visible, in ways that also transformed Latourian science. The idea that l’avenir has agency in its own because it is all living and non-living forms was a product of Latour’s concern with Lovelock’s Gaia – a human–non-human cosmos (Latour, 2015). Latour was not sensitive to the complex genealogies of the Gaia metaphor – from ideas of universal consciousness such as those professed for instance by the catholic, palaeontologist, thinker Teilhard de Chardin (long before Yuval Harari), to the hypermodernist take in James Cameron’s film Avatar. Latour was also not terribly interested in the social processes of man-made future constructs such as resource extraction or finance capitalism, and he disregarded questions concerning the social struggles on/in the future. In this disinterest for the social and political sphere was much different from post-war future thinkers and disconnected in in my view problematic ways l’avenir from any meaningful concept of the political (Harman, 2009). At the same time, Latour resembled those who in the Cold War era thought that only a fundamental act of reform on the human psyche could save the future (not least in his late in life apparent identification of Greta Thunberg with Jeanne d’Arc or his recurrent use of dancers or actresses to physically represent Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, now turning around to face the future head on). Latour’s disregard of social processes earned him the critique of being a liberal or even neoliberal philosopher due to the way that Latour also included market processes in a flat system in which all social and political hierarchies were, it has to be said, conspicuously absent. There was something to this critique. In 2011, Latour was a listed fellow with the Breakthrough Institute in the United States – for which he wrote the essay ‘Love your monsters’, featuring the phrase ‘love your technologies as if they were your children’. Nature, said Latour, could no more be natural than Frankenstein’s monster, asking also if this was really the moment when ‘chosen by millions of well-meaning souls to flagellate themselves for their earlier aspiration to dominion, to repent for their past hubris, to look for ways of diminishing the numbers of their fellow humans, and to swear to make their footprints invisible?’ (Latour, 2012). Systems ecologist Alf Hornborg at one memorable occasion argued that Latour was more interested in the agency of the CO₂ molecule than in the human, political, economic, ultimately capitalist system that had produced it and placed it at the origin of a perverse global division of labour (see Hornborg, 2014).

Another key influence on contemporary posthuman studies was Donna Haraway, who introduced the idea of the human cyborg in ways that emphasized new human freedoms beyond gender binaries and reproductive risk, but that also, crucially, linked human freedom and the future of human agency inherently to technology. As such, the ‘posthuman’ was addressed by Haraway as a full-of-potential, but also incomplete subject, which had a kind of future imminence in technological liberation. Haraway has often been praised as an emancipatory thinker of queer, and there is no reason to dispute that, but Zoltan Simon proposes, and I think he is right, that there is a definite link between posthuman understandings in the current day humanities and social sciences, and so-called transhumanist concerns with the future of human enhancement (Simon, 2019). This is not dissimilar to how a vulgar kind of futurist activity in consultancy, space travel and so on could proliferate in the Cold War era around some of the postulates of futurism as social theory – for instance the idea of rejecting all limits as ‘future determinism’ or ‘colonization of time’. Posthumanism is, as Apolline Taillandier has shown in a brilliant doctoral thesis, a plethora of complex and contradictory ideas on the future that have in common the fact that they do not emphasize humanity as a ‘pilot’ or ‘steward’ of change, but see the future as embodying a form of agency that far outreaches a limited human cognition (Taillandier, 2021). A core idea in transhumanism is not only that genetic engineering may equip future humans with the possibility to deal with climate change because their cognitive capacities will be improved in the future but also the idea that a new systemic intelligence will emerge in the form of a Singularity or a ‘Futarchy’ – a hybrid form of universal consciousness, human rationality and AI. Zoltan Simon rejects the distinction between critical posthumanism and futuristic transhuman elements such as those advocated, for instance, by Steve Fuller in his proactionary philosophy (Fuller, 2013; Fuller & Lipiska, 2014). While of course posthumanism today includes many arguments that reject the technological determinism in transhumanism, this is a clear fracture in posthumanism as a body of thought. It is not insignificant because it concerns the very view, again, on the links between being human – in the future – in the world – and in time. Posthuman arguments tend to propose that human beings are no longer separate from technology, but part of increasingly interconnected and complex systems (Gaia) consisting not only of microbes, but also of the genome, and of data (the latter two increasingly being the same thing). Freedom of agency in this system could be a chimera, but scholars such as Rosi Braidotti, in Haraway’s following, tend to emphasize that freedom can come from the critical use of technologies as a realization of the potentiality of new horizons of identity, sex, bodily ability and cognition (Braidotti & Hlavahoja, 2018; Braidotti, 2019; Domanska, 2018). Braidotti sees this as hyperdemocratic, as opening up for a new inclusion within ‘humanity’ (a notion that posthumanist scholars bracket, for ‘humanity’ never existed as a singular collective and was always problematic, sic) as subaltern voices and non-living beings become included into a new idea of the world (Herbrechter unpublished). Among posthumans are voices who, along Fuller’s argument, see technological enhancement, either in the form of genetic engineering – for prophylactic or therapeutic purposes – or in AI applications, as a liberation from disability or merely, a promise of an end to a tormented bodily and mental existence. Some, like Nick Bostrom, see it as the promise of a new global revolution of social justice (Bostrom, 2005). Here is of course a clear distinction to be made between arguments of positive eugenics, such as Fuller’s, and those that would reject such applications even when they discuss a technologically modified transhuman (Riggio, 2015). Fuller neatly divided future humanity into two, the to be improved and those that would or could not be improved. Fuller’s ‘preactionary imperative’ was yet a third spin on the Bloch/Jonas dispute – it is useless to hope, thought Fuller, and also needless to assume responsibility, but it is a categorical imperative to, as it were, improve. One has to be historically illiterate to not view this construction as problematic – but, as Simon points out, if there is no humanity, only ‘humanity’ and no history, only a multitude of histories of unclear epistemological standing in a multitude of living and non-living temporal inscriptions, then how to make the distinction between what is problematic and what is not? Is not a human – being – beyond history, yet again a human being unfettered in time and space and without precisely those limits that thinkers such as Arendt argued to be central to the very human condition? Without the sense of limits, Arendt proposed, we would fall headfirst into totalitarian futurism. Can we even think the human future with bracketed legacies of human history?

While much of transhuman/posthuman engagements stress the necessity of a radical epistemological revolution in order to create the conditions for perpetuity, in other words eternal human presence on earth, posthumanism also contains strands in which the end to human life is in itself the only salvation (Bohan, 2022). Posthumanism has got much of its present-day acclaim in the humanities and social sciences from the turn in Anthropocentric studies towards speciesism, which is another complex body of thought. Speciesism argues two things, first: that human beings have enacted, since Modernity (now generally not bracketed) a form of species supremacy and colonization of other life worlds, including through forms of economism that have destroyed any ethical recognition of the rights of non-humans (Bielefeldt, 2021; Kopnina, 2020). Second, that there lies a new kind of futurism in the recognition that as species, Humanity (again un-bracketed, as a collective singular) and human beings have only a limited existence on the planet and History, therefore, is of limited importance on the planetary scale. Posthumanists, post-Anthropocentrist scholars from across the disciplines therefore argue that the recognition of ‘deep time’, which is basically geological time, or the time of the microbe that seems to join the human gut to the cosmos, is key to yet another fracture between human/political/social time and natural time, because human time is simply a ‘blip’ in the larger picture of life on the planet. This time can be in us, but we cannot be it. Another version of this idea is the revived dream of space travel – multiplanetary humanity is, the World Economic Forum argued in 2020, a necessary solution to our planetary conundrum. Multiplanetary humanity is a humanity that has escaped the ruins of earthly existence, ‘protecting the future of the human race and helping humanity explore its full potential’ (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/12/humans-multiplanetary-species/).

Deep time, in its different forms, is in my view a deeply fractured idea, for at least two reasons. One central objection would be that indeed, recognizing long time includes an awning and perhaps a reenchanting of life worlds far beyond our own, but also a recognition, through fields such as palaeontology or ‘deep’ archaeology, of the continuity of History as human existence. Barbara Adam has proposed that exactly such a view of the long time of humanity is a key to an ethics of future care – if we see ourselves as the temporary inhabitants of the planet we must care for our past ancestors but also for future generations (Adam, 2005; Adam & Groves, 2007). This to Adam is a form of love, which is not ruptured in time in the way that some philosophers suggest that we cannot recognize our ‘Other’ descendants, but that works on the contrary as an extension of a principle of kinship and family (Adam & Groves, 2007). Adams approach emphasizes the humanities and history as a way to restore such continuity in humanity. How to love the genome, bacteria, data? Because they are part of us or because they are part of the magnificent result of our yet once again demonstrated powers of rationality and technology? And how to love within an extended humanity, if there is no history, no sense of relation to other incarnations of ourselves other than those in a genetic evolution far beyond human will (as suggested by Yuval Harari (2014))? Have we not then, as Mumford would likely have suggested, been fatally separated from ourselves by the powers of our extended rationality? Another central objection is the question of agency – we cannot act on deep time, and it is hard to see within the deep time argument what human agency for our current predicament means, in particular as recent anthropological and archaeological arguments propose that the Anthropocene really began with the human use of fire (Crumley et al., 2015; Hellsten, 2012). Our species is, as some of the more radical arguments would have it, doomed to destroy the Earth, because that is that we do. The salvation of the posthuman future then is the catastrophe, and the return of the, non-bracketed, End (of all Ends). Does that mean that the circle is closed, and the human loop is back at the point of origin, or are we rather at the dead end of scholarly thinking, because we have evacuated not only the hope of thinking humanity differently, but also all memory of the future as a political sphere of hope and struggle?

Conclusion – Epistemologies of escapism

Julia Nordblad suggests in ongoing work that bringing the political content back to historical concern with climate, biodiversity and futurity in the post-war period is key to our navigation of the global/planetary conflict that Chakraborty sets up. At the same time, it is clearly so that the current obsession with the state of the human in humanities thinking has evacuated entire dimensions of social theory, including ideas of the political, of futures as the products of collective action, or of the importance of an ideal of political rationality for projecting aspirations to a better state ahead. In this, the turn to the planetary is both postmodern and postpolitical in ways that, it seems to me, makes the very concept of the future utterly meaningless. If we are but a blip in time or a speck of dust in the universe, how can we relate to the sense of telos and limit that to Arendt was key to exercising citizenship? And if our concern is with the future of ourselves as a new horizon of limitless potential, how to integrate global ecological limits or world (in)justices into new future politics?

There is a gap here. It is a gap in which things are moving, but we do not know how and where to. Koselleck’s original contribution to intellectual history was his argument that in the Sattelzeit, the concepts carrying the modern era were given meaning. Hence the future became important. The contemporary future concept does not have a given meaning, it is up for grabs and its standing in a veritable battle over defining the future horizons of humanity is a very noticeable phenomenon. In the last years, young people in many different places around the world have given futures voice in new social movements, and some of these have also brought Jonas’ idea of a legal covenant to the fore by introducing lawsuits in the name of future generations. At the same time, concepts from more recent social theory fuel future rejection. Teaching a class on the future with master students last semester, I was taken aback by students’ negative reaction to Barbara Adam’s argument of an ethics of care towards the future. Referencing radical feminism and queer theory, they argued that considering care and feminism as ways of opening a human engagement with a longer humanity in a timeline of generations was a ‘dictatorship’ over women’s bodies and also a dismissal of a non-binary world in which one has the ‘human right’ to reject all ideas of reproduction in humanity altogether. The idea that the future is an imminent kind of dictatorship, to which the present has to be opposed, circulates also in a growing netherworld, where half-baked notions of speciesism and Anthropocentrism abound, but upside down. YouTube channels or Instagram accounts of contemporary futurists reveal a weird world in which climate denialism effortlessly coexists with ideas of posthuman cyborgs and rewilded wild beings, projecting a high-tech civilization in a post-Apocalypse world that seems part game, part reinvented settler identity. These spaces are at the same time totally sinister and somehow absurdly hopeful, nostalgic rabbit holes and time warps in one. They are highly reminiscent of what Will Callison and Quinn Slobodian call diagonalism – issues that cut across established political and epistemic sensibilities in ways that emphasize rupture and radical escape (Callison & Slobodian, 2021).