One of the biggest disillusionments of the age we live in stems from our inability to understand the future – it hovers over us, looming ever closer, and yet remains formless and unpredictable. Dr Nayanika Mookherjee, Professor of Political Anthropology at Durham University, and Dr Mark Lacy, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at the University of Lancaster, spoke about this evasive nature of the future in relation to their fields of interest – anthropology and international relations – in the first R and D Lecture of this semester at the department. After Prof. Jyotirmaya Tripathy, co-convener of the R and D Lecture for the academic year 2018-19, extended a note of welcome to the speakers, Prof. Mathangi Krishnamurthy introduced them to the audience.
Dr Mookherjee then began her talk titled ‘Ethnographic Futures: Perspectives on future in the anthropological field’. Her area of research revolves around the anthropological study of war crimes and sexual violence in Bangladesh, and the idea of ‘futures’ in the anthropological field. She touched upon three primary aspects that she wished to elaborate further: Sexual violence during conflicts, War crimes tribunals and aesthetic expression, and States and their aspirational futures. She spoke of the idea of hope and how it can be seen as temporal – it stems from the past but is also about the present. She referred to Hope as a “political aesthetic”, and explained that it is a longing which is primarily born out of loss.
Her talk was centered around the specific context of Bangladesh, as it has been the focus of her research for the last two decades. She also used the example of the Birangonas, a title given by the Bangladeshi government to the women who were raped in the Bangladesh Liberation War, as a way of illustrating her point about the relationship between time, justice, and the future. The image of these women in mainstream discourse has been constructed by them receiving the status of “war heroines” by the Government, which was unprecedented, since these subjects are usually considered taboo and suppressed. Birangonas have been the subject of various expressions in popular culture, including rickshaw art, advertisements, movies, plays staged in the UK as well as Bangladesh, and genre photographs – most importantly the famous “hair photograph” (right) taken by Naibuddin Ahmed. The raped woman in this context becomes a kind of domesticated trope. Specifically in terms of the art depicted on the back of rickshaws with the Birangonas as their subject, she explained how it was triggering too much foreign interest – these women’s identities were intrinsically tied up to the horrific incidents of their past, and that the subjectivies of that past get lost or forgotten. She cited the example of the women that she encountered and interacted with as part of her research, and spoke of how people assumed that they would be seen as banished or ostracized, but the actual reality was that these women actually came forward themselves to represent their stories, and that many of them were supported by their families.
With regard to Bangladesh’s aspirational future and the kind of nation that it wished to become, she spoke of how its nationalism was itself produced in a space of melancholic loss. It has currently become an angry state that does not tolerate criticism, as evidenced by the detention of 22 protesting students and the arrest of Shahidul Alam, the Bangladeshi photojournalist, after his interview with Al Jazeera in which he criticised the government’s violent response to the recent road safety protests. In this case, the move towards an aspirational future coexists with an intolerance to criticism, bringing into light the various complexities involved in the process. The question of the just-passed past then brings up a lot of interesting ideas in the way that it is represented in the move towards the future. She summed up by saying that Bangladesh’s citizens are struck with a sense of paralysis since they are in a state of waiting for something to arrive but it never does. This case hence shows an idealization of the future which is born out of melancholic hope but also tainted with pleasure and coupled with this sense of paralysis.
Dr Mark Lacy then began his talk titled Future Proof: International Relations and the ‘Futures Turn’ with a brief introduction to an interdisciplinary faculty called ‘Security Futures’ that he had helped set up at the University of Lancaster around 5 years ago. The objective of this interdisciplinary faculty was to create a space for students of Science (computer science, in particular) to interact with students of the Social Sciences, which would contribute to more sophisticated analyses and ways of thinking within both disciplines. The birth of a requirement for such a faculty, says Dr Lacy, hinges on the fact that we live in a time of rapid technological change. This is fertile ground for technology optimists to further their propaganda of ‘progress’ through predictions of an amazing technological future, but there is also scope for others to administer fear into the masses by creating panicked visions of the same.
This uncertainty around and the obsession with the future is what Dr Lacy attempted to break down in the course of his talk. Just as our whole idea of watching TV has radically changed in the short span of three decades – Netflix, Prime and other online platforms have taken over the traditional satellite channels – the future in all other areas of life may also be transformed beyond recognition. It is not just the technological future that one must be worried about, for ecological and geopolitical futures are just as fraught with tension and apprehension. The tangible change in the European summer has created worry and disquiet among the residents of Europe. The rapid rise in populism in the West and the existence of China as a non-liberal-democratic state have quashed all claims of an ‘end of history’ with the proliferation of liberal democracy and reinforced the unfathomable nature of the future. American sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson has, on multiple occasions, asserted that the future is ‘radically unknowable’. Governments spend a lot of money on the future but are still worried. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has expressed that the pace of change has never been this fast and will never be this slow. French President Emmanuel Macron has articulated his concerns over the rate of acceleration of the AI technology and how it will end up in a winner-takes-all market that can prove to be detrimental to society.
Amidst all these questions and concerns that surface, the one important, concerning, and perhaps easier question to answer is – ‘what can IR scholars do?’ IR has always talked about the future and attempted to divine the future too, there having been a time in the past when academicians would write omniscient predictions. Now, however, all written academic work on the future is humbler and less full of tall claims. Outside the academic world, books such as Harari’s Sapiens and Douglas’ The Age of Earthquakes have bred discussion on the connections between the digital world, ecology and the future. Given this context, Dr Lacy posited three perspectives that are predominant in IR’s discourse around the future: managing the future, creating a protopia, and the future as an accident.
The question of ‘managing’ the future becomes more relevant from a military perspective. Countries like the US are driven by the objective of staying at the top of the world’s political scenario, and thus their investments in the future – say, in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning – are driven by the anxiety that the military, which has until now been the ground source of all trailblazing inventions including the internet, is no longer the source of innovation. Also, the reduction in the technological gap between state power and non-state actors (like terrorist organisations) makes managing the future all the more complicated. The rampant presence of crimes like cybertheft means that innovation can be easily stolen, leading to an infringement of Intellectual Property Rights and casting doubt upon how much control anyone can have over the future.
From another more optimistic perspective, however, shared by the likes of Steven Pinker, our journey towards the future is marked by a sociological transformation that is gradually getting rid of violence from the human condition. Pinker provides data to back this rather optimistic view. Kevin Kelly, editor at the Wired magazine, proposes a new way of looking at the future: protopia, or the state of becoming. He believes that the future will generate as many new problems as it solves. So even if technology can transform violence and make violence more humane, say, by the introduction of drone warfare, a new set of problems will be created that would require even newer technological solutions – and this leads to a cycle of constant progress, where the saturation point is in no clear vicinity.
The third perspective looks at the future as exponential chaos. People who share these sentiments – the ‘tech-pessimists’, as it were – blame technology for rising class divisions and poverty. Jobs being replaced by automation has its impact on sectors of the economy and these accidents, for the tech-pessimists, have a cascading impact on human life as a whole. Europe still witnesses the effects of the financial subprime mortgage crisis in the US that occurred almost a decade ago. Added to all this is the impending ecological crisis, which, once it tips over the balance, will produce further accidents with cascading impacts and cataclysmic effects.
With these three perspectives on the future, Dr Lacy brought his talk to an end, and left the audience to ponder on which one will hold true in the decades to come. The floor was then opened to questions from the audience. Important questions regarding how humans are evolving as a species, how the future is looked at as a projection of our current self and how certain classes of humanity get excluded from discussions on the future were raised, and the lecture came to an end, after a stimulating discussion involving the speakers, the moderators Prof. Sonika and Prof. Mathangi, and the audience.
Article by Sruthi Ranjani and Shravya Chavali.
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