Regimes of futurity: Progress, catastrophe, and historicity in the Anthropocene

Abstract

The (question of the) future is not what it used to be. In an age of irreversible planetary instability, what was once a source of hope and aspiration, and a problem of anticipation, imagination and the fabrication of alternatives, has become precarious, a source of fear and dread, and a problem of finitude, catastrophe, and adaptation. What becomes of the idea of the future on an earth rendered forever unstable and unsafe? This, the article argues, is the key question of a transdisciplinary futures studies in the Anthropocene. At a time when planetary upheavals throw its guiding idea of “alternative futures” into disarray, the task is not, however, to hang on to the fundamental openness of the future as an article of faith. The task is to reckon with the historical nature of the (open) future in the first place, critically interrogating the future’s (and futures studies’) own historicity and modern conditions of emergence in order to devise ways of attending to emerging and historically shifting relations to the future in the planetary present. Bringing recent debates on the crisis of futurity in futures studies and scholarship on historical futures into a conversation about the shifting historicity of the future in the Anthropocene, this article proffers the notion of “regimes of futurity” as an organising heuristic to reassess the stakes and reimagine the task of a future futures studies.