recognizing openness
Mar 5, 2012
“Popular science, media representations, pundits, and futurologists all portray our own moment in history as one of maximal turbulence, on the cusp of an epochal change, on a verge between the security of a past now fading and the insecurity of a future we can only dimly discern. In the face of this view of our present as a moment when all is in flux, it seems to me that we need to emphasize continuities as much as change, and to attempt a more modest cartography of our present.
Such a cartography would not so much seek to destabilize the present by pointing to its contingency, but to destabilize the future by recognizing its openness. That is to say, in demonstrating that no single future is written in our present, it might fortify our abilities … to intervene in that present, and so to shape something of the future that we might inhabit.”
Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself.
