Experimentation and the future(s) of political hope

Abstract

Against pessimistic trends in social and political theory, this article argues for the indispensability of hope in conceptualizing the future. Such hope, however, does not need to be beholden to a unitary vision of the future, as with traditional metaphysical or Enlightenment notions of progress, but should instead accommodate a multiplicity of possible better worlds. Pluralizing the future links it to diverse nonsynchronous temporalities of past and present and emphasizes the roles of contingency, action and experimentation in concrete aspiration. Immanuel Kant and Ernst Bloch here offer philosophical foundations for this perspective.

Introduction

Karl Marx’s ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ opens with two of the more arresting lines in a corpus replete with them. First, Marx (2000c, p. 329) famously (albeit erroneously) ascribes to Hegel the idea that ‘all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’. ¹ A few sentences later, he puts the past’s baggage in oneiric terms, colouring his observation that humans make history ‘under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past’ with the comment that ‘[t]he tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’ (Marx, 2000c, p. 329). In times of uncertainty, not to mention revolutionary moments, when ‘creating something that has never yet existed’, we ‘anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past in [our] service’: with inherited symbolic moulds, we have no choice but to interpellate present progressive moments under the sign of the past perfect.

In a less renowned passage shortly afterwards, however, Marx demands that we awaken from this nightmare and find terms that express the novel possibilities of the current temporal moment. ‘The social revolution of the nineteenth century’, he writes in his own present,

cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future…Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. (Marx, 2000c, p. 331)

This invocation of poetry notwithstanding, the muse of the future remains stubbornly silent even here. Indeed, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’ remains in thrall of the past despite itself, unable to escape its spectre despite calling for prophecy; as its title suggests, Marx throughout analyses the 1851–1852 social upheaval in France in the light of the advent of Napoleon Bonaparte’s dictatorship in 1799. Such a revolutionary rendering of the present in the shape of the past is a well-worn tendency in moments of social disruption: the Framers of the US Constitution draped themselves in Roman robes, just as Russian Populists, Bolsheviks, Social Revolutionaries and Anarchists alike fancied themselves inheritors of the French Commune, the French Revolution and earlier Russian rebels. ² Hegel may be dead and buried, but Geist lives on.

Of course, the very word ‘revolution’ reflects the difficulty of a final rupture with the past, literally encoding a cyclical phenomenon, a harkening back rather than a true break (Koselleck, 2004, Chapter 3). The literary power of Marx’s prose also suggests as much. Indeed, there is a special irony in borrowing the words of the biblical Jesus (‘let the dead bury their dead’; Matthew 8:22) to suggest the past can be done and dusted, for, like Marx, their speaker only became even more consequential in death. Thrown into a world we did not build and a language we did not invent, the poetry of a genuinely novel future must perhaps always remain inscrutable.

Insofar as time passes and life moves forward, however, there is also a sense in which we have no choice but to attempt to descry it despite ourselves. And in this regard, Marx’s comment about the burden of the past can still give a clue as to what a sensible perspective on the future might require. Written in the shadow of ancient Greek Nous, Christian God, Enlightenment universal history, Hegel’s Geist, and the ‘Mind’ of his contemporary Victorians, Marx’s words render the countless generations who preceded him as a single tradition distilled into a single nightmare for a single brain. Breaking with such univocality is one key to prefiguring the future anew in a present grown sceptical of the possibility of universal progress. To put this another way, ‘the future’, like ‘the past’, as such, does not exist in anything but a formal chronological sense. As the meaningful time of historical events, however, it is necessarily plural, replete with what Ernst Bloch called the ‘non-synchronicity of the synchronous’ (Bloch, 1991, p. 104), or the simultaneously present cross-cutting temporal vectors, speeds as well as both established and emergent material tendencies. ‘The rigid divisions between future and past’, Bloch (1986, pp. 8–9) writes elsewhere, ‘thus themselves collapse, unbecome future becomes visible in the past, avenged and inherited, mediate and fulfilled past in the future’. Time, that is, is always out of sync with itself, and the futures that may arise from the present are multiple, even practically infinite. We are unavoidably downstream of the past, and the question is not then whether we can do away with thinking forward, but how we come to negotiate the myriad currents that flow, some continuously, some evanescently, some forcefully, some eddying, some dissipating, that batter the ever-changing present. ³ The danger is to become static, to be presentist, to pretend that the banks are all that matter rather than the dynamics of the currents themselves.

In addition to pluralizing the future along with past and present, then, a proper orientation towards it must also embrace experimentation as the basis of its dawning. To experiment in this regard does not subject one to the antiseptic logic of the laboratory, but to expressively create with the variety of untapped categories and institutions of the past as well as the present, to draw out and bring forth, to reconstruct and reconfigure our world drawing on the panoply of possibilities that have lain dormant unrealized or incomplete, to unlock tendencies that could be actualized in diverse ways rather than feeding a historically presumed unitary telos of history’s grand sweep. The future is dead, long live our futures.

These remarks point towards a future or indeed the futures of hope, a hope oriented not towards the continued unfolding of a single great historical tapestry whose revelation has been interrupted by scepticism, but one that can admit many plausible and even compelling trajectories, trajectories which themselves can be reoriented or fragmented during their course as yet new possibilities come into being. Hope so entertained is not admittedly entirely new – what could be? – but is reawakened and reconstructed on the back of previous attempts. Moreover, this vision is also one encoded in other contemporary thinkers seeking a new lease on the future, albeit inflected with less pragmatic attachment to the function of experiment in drawing out the world’s dormant possibilities, what the cultural theorist Franco Berardi (2017) has recently termed its ‘futurability’. Indeed, the perspective I entertain offers a double critique; against presentists and pessimists alike, I will argue for the actuality of hope and the future; against a number of contemporary thinkers wrestling with the same, however, I will argue for the actuality of pragmatic vision in effectuating these appropriately pluralized ends. To do so, and with no claim to exhaust the possible sources for this perspective, ⁴ I will return here to some tributaries of that much maligned and ostensibly unitary Enlightenment progressivism. Against a good deal of contemporary social theory, then, I will argue (1) that hope is an indispensable principle of political action and (2) that some influential contemporary voices which have sympathy for this perspective nonetheless operate on an idealist plane despite themselves, and that the focus should be on practice rather than theory, on inquiry and action rather than analysis and moralization.

In what follows, I first offer a view of recent pessimistic trends in the life of the mind and suggest they manifest what historian François Hartog has called the ‘presentist’ regime of historicity. The next section reaches then to recover and pluralize some pre-presentist accounts of the future, reprising a familiar figure, Immanuel Kant, albeit from a phenomenological perspective, along with a few less familiar ones, namely William James and August Cieszkowski; despite entertaining the same problematic world-historical and universal-historical content, the pragmatic manner way they envision the future sets hope on formally useful footing for our own uses. I conclude, pace thinkers who deny the future and see hope as antithetical to action, by insisting on the former’s actuality and the latter’s indispensability for the creation of miraculous possibilities, not invented out of whole cloth, but out of collaborative experimentation that draws out what is latent in the world, thereby rendering it and making it transformable.

Pessimism, presentism and the loss of the future

Future scepticism is rife in today’s political theory, and pessimism suffuses influential recent works. ⁵ Insofar as hope has often been associated with optimism, the pollyannish expectation of a better world despite the evidently smouldering present, it too has been a casualty of the supposed death of the future. Moreover, this association has doubly harmed hope; not only is it associated with a singular future, drawing on both a messianic religious legacy oriented towards salvation in Christ and an approximately messianic secularized Enlightenment legacy of salvation through mastery of the world, it also suffers from an association with idleness, in which the conviction in ultimate salvation is itself a salve distracting subjects from action. Hope is wrong in content and in form, turning us towards false idols and fetishistically assuring us that the God(s) they represent will do the hard work of positive social transformation. Thus Wendy Brown (2018, p. 20), perhaps the most prominent contemporary political theorist writing in this vein, comments despairingly that not only is it ‘hard to have hope’ but expressly contrasts it to action, to wit that ‘we need grit, determination, and responsibility instead of hope’.

A few popular optimists notwithstanding, then, we are well at the end of an era of presumptive progress. ⁶ The idea of ‘a future that transcend[s] the hitherto predictable, natural space of time and experience, and thence – propelled by its own dynamic – provoke[s] new, transnatural, long-term processes’ (Koselleck, 2004, p. 22) the historian Reinhart Koselleck’s characterization of modernity’s principle temporal mode, is over. Instead, in the words of philosopher of history Chris Lorenz (Lorenz, 2014, p. 46, cited in Tamm, 2020, p. 448), ‘[t]he dominant time conception has changed from a linear, irreversible and progressivist time conception to a non-linear, reversible and non-progressivist one’. This shift, I hazard, is ethically salutary in that it rejects a developmentalist triumphalism that dismisses the massive costs of supposed progress – as Walter Benjamin famously wrote, ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ – and epistemologically salutary insofar as it rejects the homogenization of meaningful time into a single universal history, thereby opening space once again for the pluralization of pasts, presents and futures. The pessimism of much contemporary political thought, often a direct response to the (often exaggerated) hyperbolic optimism of the Enlightenment, hardly exhausts the modalities of time looking forward, however. Indeed, pessimism in the hands of contemporary scholars does not tend towards the sort of narratives of decline that would simply invert the optimistic frame, and which might lead from the despair in the efficacy of social action to paralyzing existential despair, full stop. Rather, it tends towards the assumption that hope for any permanent change for the better is as unrealistic as it is irrational, a perspective that accords with Hartog’s ‘presentism’, a temporal mode in which the current moment is taken to exhaust the world’s possibilities and the horizon is viewed as a hard limit instead of a threshold. Its semantics of historical time – to borrow the subtitle of Koselleck’s epochal study – rely on a grammar in which the simple past tense dominates at the expense of both the present progressive and the future. Quietism ensues, as politics comes to function as a domain of conservation rather than aspiration.

Hartog argues that Western historical temporality since the ancient world has been largely characterized by three successive ‘regimes of historicity’, which he (2015, p. 9) defines broadly as ‘the modalities of self-consciousness that each and every society adopts in its constructions of time and its perceptions’. The first, roughly from the advent of early modern humanism to the French Revolution, was oriented towards the past, ‘to which one should aspire through imitation and example’. The past was hence superior to the present, and the notion of the future was taken in light of the retrieval of this former glory. In the modern period, stretching roughly from the French Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union, ‘hopeful expectation was directed toward the future’ and progress was the order of the day; the present was considered inferior to the future, and the generally accepted goal was to accelerate time and hasten the latter’s arrival. Finally, today ‘enlightenment has its source in the present, and the present alone’; put otherwise, nowadays ‘we are always looking both backwards and forwards, but without ever leaving this present that we have made the limits of our world’ (Hartog, 2015, p. 203). Koselleck (2004, pp. 259–261) posits that temporal consciousness is constituted by a tension between the ‘space of experience’ – or what is present from the past – and the ‘horizon of expectation’ – or what is anticipated from the future. According to him, under modernity’s sign of progress, the space of experience increasingly separated from the horizon of expectation (Koselleck, 2004, p. 263). Extending these reflections further, Hartog (2015, pp. 17, 203) argues that we now find the complete divorce of the space of experience from the horizon of expectation such that both terms collapse into an omnipotent present. In presentism, he (2015, p. 203) writes, ‘there is neither past nor future nor historical time’ altogether, just an eternal now. While the past is buried, it is refracted only through the present – and the future is perceived primarily as a threat, not as a promise (Hartog, 2015, p. 191). In line with philosopher Hans Jonas, whose The Imperative of Responsibility was written as a direct response to Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, ⁷ we entertain a principle of responsibility attuned to the fragility of the achievements of the present rather than a principle of hope that beckons towards a not yet realized better world. Since it can only imagine the future according to the eternal now of the contemporary moment, Hartog (2015, p. 113) claims that presentism is ‘oppressive and without hope’.

This is powerful stuff, and while not disputing Hartog’s basic insight, a growing recent literature has raised various challenges to his account. ⁸ A host of questions concern Hartog’s deployment of the notion of a regime of historicity, described by him as an ‘artificial construct whose value lies in its heuristic potential’ (2015, p. xvi). These arise with regard to both synchronicity and diachrony, in terms of the dynamics within and around any regime as well as in terms of the interplay between multiple regimes, namely how they interweave, develop, transform, circulate and get diffused. Perhaps the biggest issue is how dominant and lasting a regime – presentist or otherwise – may be. While Hartog (2015, p. 106) states that regimes are unstable (‘no sooner does a regime of historicity become dominant than it is challenged, and in fact it can never…be secured’), his expository focus solely on the succession of dominant regimes gives the impression that each is in essence the only game in town, leaving alternatives out of the view of both actors and commentators. ⁹ As for the question of a regime’s durability; whatever challenges presentism endures, by the end of Hartog’s work this ‘monstrous time…that we have made into the limits of our world’ (Hartog, 2015, p. 203) appears to have for that very reason an indefinite lifespan: for the foreseeable future, that is, the future will ever be foreseeable only as present. ¹⁰ Genuine historical otherness becomes unfathomable.

It is, however, not only possible but likely that perspective occludes the multiplicity of historicities within any moment of time. Because of their object-in-view, professional historians writing about the implicit historiography of earlier high culture can miss the rich variety of what one might call folk narratives of the world’s trajectory; scholars attuned to Benjamin may have given up on progress, but the hoi polloi may very well still be in its thrall. The presentist story Hartog tells, while undoubtedly capturing something vital about today, arguably misses the greater range of operative temporal regimes at any moment, that deep down even scholars themselves do not in fact hew to presentism, that old hopes – and ideas of progress – die hard.

Recall again Bloch’s (1991, p. 104) aforementioned ‘non-synchronicity of the synchronous’, a concept to which Hartog (2015, p. 39) gestures but which does not play a significant role in his account. In contrast to the latter’s emphasis on a static present, Bloch posits a plurality of coexisting and interacting historical temporalities at any given time, whose tensions result in new possibilities. Various scholars have followed him in this regard, pointing to the complexity of the psychological experience of time, the material and symbolic sedimentation of historical events and the practically limitless prospect for their reinterpretation, reconstruction and revivification. ¹¹ A more sensible and experimental relationship to the future, Bloch maintains, involves a kaleidoscopic view of the world oriented towards the inchoate possibility of what he called the ‘Not Yet’, that which still lies unrealized before us and within us.

Multiple temporalities and the escape from presentism: Two accounts

Bloch’s non-synchronicity will be the focus of my own understanding of how to think about the future and hope today, but before turning to that, I want to tarry for a moment with two different, promising recent attempts to think beyond the present that take multiplicity seriously but fail to adequately integrate our active agency into effectuating the possible futures still latent in the world: Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation and Franco Berardi’s Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility. The first deals with a moment of settler colonialism, and thus with the exemplary clashes of temporalities that ensue from the homogenizing power of the modern militarized state. The second inquires into the absence of the future as a consequence of radical technological change that overwhelms the traditional autonomous political subject. As metonyms for the post-Westphalian contiguous territorial state and the networked Information Age, respectively, these works mark the solidification and dissolution of Hartog’s progressive, hopeful modern regime of historicity.

Lear’s Radical Hope is a set of reflections on meaning, agency and history centred on the native Crow tribe’s devastation during westward American expansion in the late nineteenth century. Lear (2006, p. 2) explains that his reflections were spurred by a phrase uttered by Crow chief Plenty Coups that once the tribe was confined to a reservation, ‘After this, nothing happened’. While of course chronological time never ceased, and days followed days, in any significant sense the present, and perhaps the future with it, ceased to exist. As Lear reads it, in this moment the Crow suffered the concrete loss of the concepts through their culture had hitherto rendered life meaningful, namely a warrior ethos that esteemed bravery in battle above all else. ¹² Even when working in concert, the Crow and other tribes stood no chance against the overwhelming manpower and matériel of the modern state military apparatus, and hence could not live up to the terms around which they had hitherto organized their symbolic world: suddenly, they were warriors incapable of war, not even registering consideration within their own system of meaning. Capitulation assured the group’s continued physical existence but came at the price of their very sense of identity, leaving them rudderless, adrift in a world where events no longer made sense in light of the enforced loss of their concepts. Nothing more happened; they stood frozen in time as history moved forward according to a logic they found foreign and illegible.

Lear (2006, p. 103) calls the solution, or what allows the Crow to persist in their identity as Crow, ‘radical hope’, by which he means an orientation ‘towards a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is’. Radical hope is effectively second order hope; the hope that the world will some day again have meaning so that one can hope meaningfully. For the Crow, on Lear’s account, radical hope exists as a persistence anticipation of possibility of the world being otherwise than it is now; it is not a grandiose orientation towards some concrete utopian end, but a turn towards the prospect of, as the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel (1944, pp. 53, 52) wrote in a somewhat analogous time of military occupation, ‘piercing through time’, the ‘weaving of experience now in process…in[to] an adventure now going forward’. Radical hope is therefore expressly a hope for the future, not any particular future, but the very possibility of a meaningful future altogether. The future is dead, yet we may hope that someday another future will arrive.

Berardi’s Futurability, ‘an inquiry (or divination) on the social becoming of the psychosphere’ (Berardi, 2017, p. 22), comes at the problem of hope from quite a different perspective yet manages to reach similar practical conclusions. A denizen of European Leftist Autonomist conversations, Berardi is an intellectual world apart from the analytical commentator on the ancient world-cum-Freudian psychoanalyst Lear. Writing as a cultural critic of the present, Berardi is even clearer than Lear on the global end of the future; it is not just a subset of mankind like the Crow that has lost its concepts, but humanity as a whole, in large part because technological transformations have exploded inherited truths about the identity of the human.

As he puts it, ‘the future is over’ (Berardi, 2015, p. 27); we must ‘acknowledge that democracy is over, that political hope is dead. Forever’ (Berardi, 2017, p. 39; cf. pp. 98–99). Around the time that punk music arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, the world began to witness the ‘slow cancellation of the future’. This future is a heightened version of Koselleck’s modernity, encompassing

cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak in the years after the Second World War. Those expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever-progressing development, albeit through different methodologies: the Hegelo-Marxist mythology of Aufhebung and instauration of the new totality of Communism; the bourgeois mythology of a linear development of welfare and democracy; the technocratic mythology of the all-encompassing power of scientific knowledge, and so on. ¹³ (Berardi, 2011, pp. 18–19)

Under ‘today’s conditions of hyper-complexity and technological acceleration’, these conceptual frameworks are in the process of collapsing. Consequently, ‘the conceptual and practical sphere of modern politics has lost its ground’, predicated as it was in the progressivist regime of historicity on human will, rationality and capacities of prediction, features which no longer hold. The alternative to the model of political transformation driven by human endeavour is an evolutionary model in which ‘the organism is understood to become attuned to its environment…the relevance and effectiveness of human action no longer occurs at the level of rational knowledge, political decision, and will, but instead at the level of intuition, imagination, and sensibility’ (Berardi, 2015, pp. 27–28). The two actors driving today’s world are ‘the all-pervading force of financial abstraction, the second the proliferation of rancorous, reactive, identitarian bodies’ (Berardi, 2015, p. 338).

While the future may be dead, Berardi maintains hope for a better world by reconstructing social transformation, dispensing with the basal assumptions of the progressive paradigm. In place of the fiction of autonomous subjects working deliberatively in concert, he (Berardi, 2017, p. 191) proposes ‘a morphogenetic description: rather than as [the] field of confrontation between subjects, I suggest a view of the historical evolution as a sequence of entanglements and disentanglements in the process of the emergence of forms’. The rhizomatic social ontology of entanglements bespeaks a novel emphasis on sensibility against rationality, and Berardi (2017, p. 95) strikingly calls for a ‘senile approach to the problem of the future’ that stresses solidarity and sharing rather than competition and individual agency. According to this refigured material and social ontology, the future grows out of the world’s multiple latent possibilities, but whatever traces of the latter we perceive are not prescriptions but openings for further development. Indeed, any conception of latency is, Berardi explains, an interpretation of our percepts. After Marx’s eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, Berardi (2017, p. 235) writes, ‘philosophers changed the world in various ways; the point now is to interpret it’. This entails ‘stubbornly search[ing] for concepts and percepts which may help to develop the immanent possibility inscribed in networked knowledge’.

For Berardi, there is a tension between his disavowal of human agency and his demand for interpretation, something that must in practice be effectuated by a subject. This instability suggests the indispensability of agency despite itself, under new conditions, viewed in terms of its entanglement in networks and swarms. ¹⁴ Indeed, the profusion of suggestive metaphors and examples in his work reflect not so much the exhaustion of the earlier model of agency but the fact that to make sense in a post-‘progress’ era it needs pluralization. Take, for instance, the metaphor of senility that he leans on in Futurability: senile people cannot plan because their predictive rationality has atrophied; instead, they ‘feel’, as creatures of pure sensibility. Whether or not this is an accurate account of senility, it is worth pausing for a moment to recognize that the senile need caretakers to ensure their needs are met – not just for long-term planning but for basic day-to-day functions. Moreover, senescence as a model for political agency would seem particularly ill-suited for ‘futurability’ insofar as demise shapes its imminent horizon. At the conclusion of one of his works, Berardi (2015, p. 331) explains the human predicament as our having ‘already experienced an end of the world’, defined in a spirit strikingly similar to Lear’s moment of lost concepts as ensuing when ‘the signs proceeding from the semiotic meta-machine grow undecipherable for a cultural community that perceived itself as a world’. Like Lear, Berardi (2015, p. 335) argues for a type of radical hope, for embracing the end of the old, for only then ‘can a new world be imagined’. This creation of a new imaginary world and the achievement of that world itself are notably reduced to the same thing. Despite itself, and despite its passive voice, this crafting is an agentive step beyond anything Lear envisions and puts paid to the simple fiat that human action is mute beyond recovery. If the space of agency exists for the creation of new imaginaries is not to be a mockery of effective agency proper, then it must extend to our experimental actions in the world.

For all their differences in inspiration and execution, Lear and Berardi nonetheless present parallel attempts to transcend presentism. Both paint pictures in which the future is ‘over’ because the concepts once used to reckon with it no longer obtain, and both acknowledge the need for new practical categories that will allow us to make sense of our meaningful experience within history, and by extension of our own aspirations and concrete hopes for an unavoidable yet also unscripted tomorrow. The future is dead, that is, but hope is indispensable, and indeed the death of the future means that hope – not prognostication – may be all that remains.

For both, inherited notions of agency no longer make sense, and new categories must be created that can give our action purchase in the world. What is striking about Berardi’s and Lear’s solutions, however, is that they effectively do little to get us beyond the present and into the future; Lear’s radical hope, while undoubtedly a basic requirement for human agency, nevertheless leaves subjects impotent, paralyzed in their anticipation of their own novel concepts, asking them to maintain themselves in what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000, p. 7) famously called the ‘waiting room of history’, although here they do not wait for an invitation from the metropole to enter their meaningful homogenized time but instead for an even more strikingly idealist fiction of concepts somehow manifesting themselves to the expectant natives. Novel categories are not to be worked out in practice by the Crow (or anyone else in a similar situation of conceptual loss), but will come to them fully formed, a sort of immaculate conception ¹⁵ forward-looking account of the emergence of guiding frameworks that is itself belied by the historical experience of those whose ethical systems were devastated by the concrete materiality of colonialism. In search of a meaningful future, Lear surrenders action because it cannot be entirely subsumed within one’s supposedly ownmost ethical orientation; as a result, in practice, radical hope on its own is hard to distinguish from resignation, capitulation and even collaboration.

Berardi also ultimately reverts to idealism. First, it is telling that his inversion of Marx’s eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach reverts back – per Marx’s first Thesis – to that hitherto existing idealism that conceives of reality ‘only in the form of the object of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice’ (Marx, 2000b, p. 171), thereby ignoring praxis as the concrete link between ideality and reality. Interpretation can of course be an active process, but in Berardi’s hands it becomes the reconstruction of concepts without an account of their instantiation, or of how reconstruction is an aspirational, expressive and active process as well as a descriptive one. Moreover, despite his trenchant rejection of autonomous human agency in the face of both the swarm and the network, Berardi puts surprising stock in the evidently autonomous human capacity to fashion new categories. On the one hand, then, Berardi denies practice here because he denies agency, and yet agency is nonetheless presupposed by his own account of refashioning. On the other hand, for all his insistence that the future stems from the present, there is little acknowledgement of the fact that any ‘novel’ categories we impose on ourselves and on others will unavoidably be products of a contingent past into which we delve for the raw materials out of which we shape new forms (Brown, 2001, pp. 103, 150, and passim).

The point, then, is not merely to provoke the creation of ‘new’ categories to fit the progressing present, but to make them fitting as tools for creating possible futures. After all, categories, like ideas, have no immaculate conception. The task of making them concrete rather than abstract needs to be anchored in practice, for that is where new forms are educed from the matter of the world. Hope thus needs an experimental orientation lacking in both Lear and Berardi, for our futures will not arrive like driftwood; they lie in action, not merely in wait. In this regard, despite his debt to Bloch, Berardi does not take on one of his most important distinctions, namely between ‘layers’ of possibility, ranging from what may be possibly thought but is in no way real or realizable to what is taken to be possible given the present structure of the social world, to what may yet become possible, Bloch’s own focus, and the substance of concrete hope (Bloch, 1986, Chapter 18). Our hope, and our future(s), should be oriented towards these emerging possibilities, which, moreover, can only be drawn out by action. To explicate this intimate connection between hope, the future and action, I turn to an unlikely source, Immanuel Kant, who points a path despite himself towards multiple futures experimentally drawn out of the present.

Political aspiration and acting as-if

Although a cursory reading can give the impression that Kant is a typical Enlightenment universal historian blinded by enthusiasm for progress, closer analysis reveals him to be a sober philosopher of history well aware of the contingency of events. However, even if empirical reality recommends pessimism, he holds that normative commitment to social amelioration nonetheless permits hope for the future, lest we lose the will to act in service of hope’s objectives. Furthermore, action and hope exist in a reciprocal relationship: hope forms the phenomenological basis for action, while action towards its ends is what ultimately gives one’s hope validity. In short, hope permits us to act as if a better future is ahead, so long as we grasp that the realization of any future whatsoever lies to a good extent in our own actions.

In the present context, the key work is Kant’s late collection of occasional writings The Conflict of the Faculties, which addresses the future head on. In a section concerning the relationship between the university’s philosophical and law faculties, hence between philosophy and politics, Kant turns to the question of whether the human race is ‘constantly progressing’ (Kant, 1996, p. 297 [7:79]). This question is essential for Kant since he holds that ethical motivation requires some assumption of political progress towards a global constitutional order; finite rational beings like humans – we are not saints, but concrete beings unavoidably subject to pathological pressures – need the assurance that moral striving is not entirely in vain. Politics, the domain of coercion, is one tool for the protection of an individual sphere for moral action not wantonly hindered by others; the historical melioration provided by a progressive narrative of movement towards a highest good is likewise a psychological crutch that justifies confidence that one’s own ethical acts have some positive lasting consequence. While these assumptions carry baggage and specifically operate within the meaningful universe of Kant’s Critical System, the upshot goes well beyond these confines: one may entertain, and indeed must entertain, ideas that are scientifically unprovable in order to both make sense of the world and effectuate action. Human freedom, for example, is unverifiable and yet necessary for the existence of morality; likewise, the idea of progress gives legs to political striving for a better world.

Now whether progress in history exists, Kant writes, ‘cannot be resolved directly through experience’ (Kant, 1996, p. 300 [7:83]). Indeed, if we were to look upon any moment in time it would be hard to draw any conclusion other than that ‘bustling folly is the character of our species’ and that ‘the whole traffic of our species with itself on this globe would have to be considered as a mere farcical comedy’ (Kant, 1996, p. 299 [7:82]). Instead, we need recourse to reflective frameworks which we impose upon history that can allow us to make sense of it. As Kant (2006c, pp. 85–86 [8:362]) writes of providence in ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’, ‘we do not actually cognize it as such based on the artifices of nature or infer its existence on the basis of such artifices, but rather…can and need only add it in thought in order to conceive of their possibility according to the analogy of human acts of artifice’. In like fashion, Kant notes in his ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective’ that reading history as progressing allows ‘a consoling outlook on the future, in which the human species is represented at a remote point in the distant future where it is finally working itself toward the condition in which all the seeds that nature has planted within it can be fully developed and its vocation here on earth can be realized’ (Kant, 2006a, p. 30 [8:30]). This outlook, Kant maintains elsewhere, is what undergirds hope for the possibility of a brighter future, by permitting us to ‘take heart in the face of such labors’ that will be necessary for its fruition (Kant, 2006b, p. 35 [8:121]).

To be sure, Kant holds a unitary, developmentalist understanding of this future, and self-consciously writes universal history with which multiple temporalities are difficult to reconcile. ¹⁶ It is, moreover, teleological, predicated on the eventual realization of an innate human moral vocation. ¹⁷ These elements of his content can, however, be jettisoned without losing the insight that the validity of political hope for any meaningful future(s) is bound up with prefigurative action towards it. First, it is important to note that Kant does not insist on his own substantive vision of the future, but merely presents his idea of progress as pragmatically useful, even inviting others to provide different narratives should those better foment action towards cosmopolitan ends (see Kant, 2006a, p. 16 [8:30]). With regard to form, however, and more importantly, Kant holds that humans only have a moral vocation insofar as they are acting as if there is moral progress. Man, he writes in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, is ‘the ultimate end of nature; but always only conditionally, that is, subject to the condition that he has the understanding and the will to give to nature and to himself a relation to an end that can be sufficient for itself independently of nature’ (Kant, 2000, p. 298 [5:431]). The idea of progress is only permissible because it enables us to will the conditions for progress.

Thus we arrive at the crux of the matter: hope for realizing any notion of the future is permissible only with the assumption of human agency, and indeed only with activity towards aspirational ends. The stories we tell ourselves about historical narratives function to stabilize our action; conversely, action is what then brings those speculative narratives to fruition. We get an even clearer sense of this perspective in The Conflict of the Faculties when Kant discusses the possibility of an ‘a priori history of the future’, or what he calls ‘predictive’ (hervorsagend) history. Leaving aside for present purposes the distinctions he makes between types of predictive history, ¹⁸ Kant endorses what he calls ‘divinatory’ (wahrsagend) history, which is knowable because ‘the diviner himself makes and contrives the events which he announces in advance’ (Kant, 1996, p. 297 [4:80]). Prophetic future histories of humanity are permissible if they are literally self-fulfilling; if humans, that is, effectuate the ends they posit.

Conclusion

Kant sets the course for a pragmatic vision of the future – any future – as an indispensable foundation for social action in service of its realization, against thinkers who posit it merely speculatively or dispense with it altogether. The future looms not as a constitutive threat but as a regulative postulate for orienting practical reason, a vital albeit revisable guide for the creation of a better world. For Kant, one may hope for that to which one actively aspires. Appropriately pluralized and brought down to earth, as it were, we may in like fashion hope for unattained utopias, for possibilities blocked in the past that may still in time become real as well as for the prospect of a brighter tomorrow wrought by action in concert.

Kant laid the groundwork for this perspective, but he was not alone in taking it. Writ small, the sort of generative prophetic hope he suggests appears mundanely in William James’s observation that there are instances ‘where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming’; ‘faith in a fact’, he emphasizes, ‘can help create that fact’ (James, 1979, p. 29, italics in original). Politics, and any collective endeavour for that matter, is an archetypal domain of such hope, for ‘[w]herever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the pre-cursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned’ (James, 1979, p. 29). James’s example is of passengers acting in concert to foil a train robbery; scaled up, democratic participation likewise requires a provisional trust in the capacities of one’s fellow citizens for responsible participation.

Writ large, Kant’s prophetic history offers inklings of the philosophy of history of August Cieszkowski, who projected Hegel’s largely backward-looking Geist into the future. With Hegel, that is, history culminated in his own moment, and the state sketched in his Philosophy of Right reflects a mildly reformed vision of his contemporary Prussia. Cieszkowski criticized Hegel for his myopia, writing that instead of humans enacting a supplied script in the theatre of the world, the true realization of Geist as freedom in the world would involve humans authoring and improvising it themselves in performance. Just as Marx (2000a, p. 82) wrote in his own commentary on Hegel’s political thought that to transcend philosophy means first to realize it, Cieszkowski argued that realizing Geist means transcending its conceptually distinct ontological priority over us, transforming speculation about the future into its active facilitation. In short, the realization of the philosophy of history for Cieszkowski (1979, p. 54), like Kant, means that humans collectively become the ‘executors of history’. ¹⁹

The ultimate upshot is that pace presentism, the resolution to the problem of the forgotten future is to recognize that desired states of affairs cannot be expected to simply happen. Amidst the myriad contingencies and potentiality, interrupted trajectories and synchronicities of nonsynchronous temporal vectors, many futures lay dormant in the present, but not just any future can be realized. If our endeavours are to be anything more than blind groping or shots in the dark, they must connect to prospective tendencies present within reality but not yet drawn out of it; if we are to have concrete utopia it is only through our participation in its effectuation. As Bloch (1977, p. 519) writes in his own commentary on Hegel, whether the actual becomes rational ‘depends on the phenomenology or history of appearances of true action’. ²⁰

Benjamin offers a version of this view in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, a work that is not a testament to historical despair despite its celebrated equation of civilization and barbarism. Rather, it seeks hope in the prospect of reviving the unfulfilled futures of the past, not to reprise them point for point but to take solace and inspiration from their utopias, to read them forward out of the past and into the future. ²¹ For Benjamin (2019, p. 205), hope for the future involves the recognition that history does not occur in ‘homogenous, empty time’ time; instead, it is primed for rupture, ‘filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]’. This ‘now’ is the domain of the instantaneous, of the possible irruption of action, the promise of ‘blast[ing] a specific era out of the homogenous course of history’ (Benjamin, 2019, p. 207). Crucially, while Benjamin (2019, p. 208) describes this other temporality as ‘Messianic time’, the historical continuum is broken not by a supernatural power, but by humans working in concert ²² ; in his case, by the revolutionary working class, who may divine the future because they create and arrange it themselves.

The fact that the time of the erstwhile future, understood solely as the fulfilment of the Enlightenment progressive project, has likely passed (though, to be fair, one could never exactly know this to be the case) does not mean that other possibilities do not remain for the time to come. After all, the world contains multitudes, events flow unexpectedly and the future lasts a long time, even forever. ²³ The question of hope accordingly becomes not merely what stymied-cum-novel interpretations of the world allow us to fully make sense of it, but also, and more importantly, what sorts of experiments can push our world towards rendering these interpretations compelling, to give them more purchase in concrete practice. ²⁴