Nostalgia for the Future

Dr Andreas Folkers (Max-Weber-Center Erfurt and Member of the Research Council of Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt)

Chaired and co-organised by Dr Jamille Pinheiro Dias (ILCS/CLACS) and Dr Kasia Mika-Bresolin (Queen Mary University of London)  

Most critical theorists have given up ‘progress’ decades ago but mostly still cling to the notion of an open, contingent future. This has become problematic in times of durable ecological destruction where the future is no longer a ‘storehouse of possibilities’ but becomes a repository of liabilities. Such a fundamental rupture in the material grammar of time calls for a displacement of political ontologies of contingency in favor of a historical ontology of the future. I show how the material state of the planet saturated with the residuals of fossil modernity calls for a new way to understand the entanglement of matter and time and for emancipatory horizons that abandon the nostalgia for the open future.

Part of the Critical Conversations in Environmental Humanities series from the Environmental Humanities Research Hub at The School of Advanced Study.