Futures’ past: A genealogy of the futures
Donncha Kavanagh, University College Cork
Geoff Lightfoot, University of Leicester
Simon Lilley, University of Leicester
I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again ... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul. J.G. Ballard
What is the future? This is the question that interests us. Not, in this instance at least, with what the future holds for us (bleak though that may be); rather, we seek to better understand the meaning of the idea of ‘the future’ – to comprehend the future as a concept. For concepts of the future are deeply embedded in organizational practices – whether directly as in decision-making and planning, or more tacitly as the heart of other practices, such as TQM and scientific management, where a better future is posited (albeit one only achievable through swallowing their prescriptive cocktail).
In this paper, we study the genealogy of the concept of the future and how the future is conceptualised from different disciplinary perspectives. We traverse different understandings of the future, from various religious belief systems, through Greek philosophy, Newtonian physics, complexity theory, sociological treatises, Jungian psychoanalysis, and Hegelian dialectics before culminating with a brief discussion on the idea of the future within art theory.