Sherryl Vint’s 2015 Paradoxa issue, The Futures Industry, moves this vital conversation forward in a noteworthy way. Vint proposes that the future has become a site of crisis, both in the sense that real devastation looms on the horizon (as a consequence of climate change and economic instability) and also in the sense that we seem to have collectively lost the ability to imagine futures that offer plausible alternatives to the seemingly unstoppable trajectory of the apocalyptic present. Vint’s introduction to the issue contrasts the film Tomorrowland (2015) against artist-activist Banksy’s satirical Dismaland Bemusement Park (a dystopian anti–theme park that was open for one month in Somerset, England, in 2015): if Tomorrowland offers a strained nostalgia for seemingly innocent 1950s visions of the future, Dismaland bitterly exposes the exploitative corporate fantasies and totalitarian inclinations of the industry-oriented future imaginings of Disney’s Tomorrowland and the World’s Fairs that inspired it. [...]
O’Connell’s essay exemplifies the kind of work that Slavoj Žižek calls for in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009) when he suggests that, in order to challenge the seemingly unshakable future unfolding before us, we must “mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past.” If the future seems locked into a dismal trajectory, it is because our sense of the past is fixed and static: the present seems to be the inevitable product of a singular history just as the future seems to be the unwavering continuation of the apocalyptic present. In order to disrupt the paralysis of such totalizing inevitability, we need to view the past as a multitude of alternate possibilities rather than remaining locked into an unshakable historical determinism. According to O’Connell, fantastic postcolonial trains insert new potentialities into the past in a way that forces us to “reconsider the narrative of history’s triumphant resolution in the present moment as capitalist realist closure.” These narratives suggest that there are, and always have been, alternatives.
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