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Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding, eds. Histories of the Future. Durham: Duke UP, 2005". ix + 35-6 pp. $99.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.
Critical cultural studies tends to have a certain unreflective, unacknowledged teleological stance that at once strives for something better but denies the modernist narrative of "progress." Surprisingly, for all the productive criticism of modernity, there is very little work that tackles our contemporary temporal paradox directly. Narratives of progress find themselves criticized. As do appeals to history. Yet discussions of the intersection of times past and times future tend to deal with the present only in passing. Questions of being are left overwhelmingly to robust thinkers like Nietzsche, Deleuze, Haraway, and others who defer articulating the subject except as something just beyond ourselves-posthumans -whose being is defined by becoming. But for those preoccupied with the singular experience of subjectivity, the question of being as being is a question whose time has come. Although Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding's Histories of the Future is framed as a study of "futurism," it is an important step toward a critical cultural studies of the present at the intersection of two axes: Time, from past to future, and Culture, from traditionalism to futurism.
According to Rosenberg and Harding's Introduction, "The essays that make up this volume are themselves densely interlinked, and the volume is intended to operate as a hypertext, opening up analytic paths among disparate temporal experiences of modernity, links between technology and messianism, life and half-life, panic and nostalgia, waiting and Utopia, conspiracy and linearity, prophecy and trauma" (9). In this respect, the volume is a masterpiece of editorial vision. Initiated in 1997 by Susan Harding for the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Histories of the Future existed first as a research workshop. In 1998, the project was carried forward as the topic of a conference held at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And from there, it was cultivated and nurtured until it was made manifest in the present volume. Each component stands on its own merits, yet read together the...