Historical Futures

History and Theory, 2024

With a touch of irony, the project-closing piece of the "Historical Futures" collective research endeavor pulls together the threads of its four years of explorative work by showcasing an opening of historical futures. Against the persisting myth of the closure of the future in contemporary societies, it claims that, as long as the future remains contested by virtue of the multiplicity of historical futures that societal practices and discourses entail or advocate, there can be no closure of the future. In support of this claim, the project-closing piece outlines the reasons why the future is more radically open than ever and surveys the findings of the project contributions with the frame provided by the contemporary opening of historical futures.

2022

In this chapter, I argued that while “make America great again” and “Friday’s for future” point in opposing directions in terms of politics, they are very much alike with respect to their shared concepts of time and their combination of past, present, and future. This also applies to optimistic and pessimistic views on the future, which, in general, share the same basic narrative: that the future has to be “modeled” on decisions taken today, that narratives about the past inform decisions about the future. Modern utopias and dystopias offer a solution to the same problem: they provide strong narratives that “channel” the radical openness of time in all three directions (past, present, and future). In doing so, they provide the present with an enormous power not only over times to come, but also over the past. However, modern historiography since its early days has written about breaks, about new epochs, even, and establishing analogies is its favorite way of doing so. “Analogy” does not mean that history repeats itself, but, so the story goes, ruptures do. In a way, they become less intimidating, because something similar already occurred “back then”. Nevertheless, the event as such is exposed as a rupture, and if “the present” is in the middle of a rupture or an epochal shift, phrases like “we do not know how the world will look tomorrow, after the event” are often heard. No comfort here. In the course of argumentation, I made three points: first, within a fractioned society, history is becoming increasingly important, inside and outside academia. Second, from a medieval perspective, and in line with Simon (2019a), I discussed how modern historical time considered as a process tames the future. Third, with a processual understanding of time during the Sattelzeit comes the break, the rupture, the epoch, even, and what follows is not the outcome of a development. There is some taming here, too, by pointing to analogies in history. However, even analogies underline that unexpected ruptures have taken place and will take place again, without foreseeable consequences.

Historical Understanding: Past, Present and Future. Ed. by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Lars Deile. London: Bloomsbury, 2022

This chapter is an attempt to think about history and historical understanding from the future. My excuse for choosing such a big and speculative topic for a very short essay is mostly tactical – it is written as a sort of prelude, to sketch out main themes, put forward key concepts, and see if and how readers would react to them. The main argument I propose for discussion is that our contemporary regime of historicity is producing new modalities of the future that have, retroactively, an important impact on our historical thinking. Put differently, my interest is in discussing how to make sense of the past in a world where the future is not what it used to be.

Futures & Foresight Science, 2020

This commentary is written as much for individuals already established in the field as it is for scholars beyond the relatively small world of futures studies. In addition to underscoring the programmatic agenda for research implied by Schoemaker’s (2020) new work and the curricular implications of the article for how students of futures and history are trained, our reply provides additional context regarding the scholarly conversations and scientific controversies that animate and bring meaning to research in futures studies and provides us with our collective sense of self as an academic community. At core, the notion that learning about the construction of history aids in constructing futures (e.g., through scenario planning), and, in parallel, that learning about the construction of futures aids in (re)constructing the past (e.g., through historical assessment), implicates a symbiotic analytical and academic practice world at the interface between history and futures studies that has yet to be realized through intensified intellectual traffic between these two mutually reinforcing enterprises.

2016

Kalle Pihlainen Editorial: Futures for the past (‘This is a stub’) pp. 315-318 FREE E-PRINT ACCESS TO EDITORIAL HERE: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PyzssC93QB7GtHArZRMi/full * Hans Kellner Narrativity and dialectics revisited pp. 319-333 * Martin L. Davies Cognitive inadequacy: history and the technocratic management of an artificial world pp. 334-351 * Berber Bevernage Tales of pastness and contemporaneity: on the politics of time in history and anthropology pp. 352-374 * Jonas Ahlskog Michael Oakeshott and Hayden White on the practical and the historical past pp. 375-394 * María Inés La Greca Hayden White and Joan W. Scott’s feminist history: the practical past, the political present and an open future pp. 395-413 * Kalle Pihlainen The distinction of history: on valuing the insularity of the historical past pp. 414-432 * Ilkka Lähteenmäki and Tatu Virta The Finnish Twitter war: the Winter War experienced through the #sota39 project and its implications for historiography pp. 433-453 * Ketil Knutsen A history didactic experiment: the TV series Anno in a dramatist perspective pp. 454-468 *

Histories of the Future, 2005

Oxford University Press eBooks, 2002

Does history have to be only about the past? "History" refers to both a subject matter and a thought process. That thought process involves raising questions, marshalling evidence, discerning patterns in the evidence, writing narratives, and critiquing the narratives written by others. Whatever subject matter they study, all historians employ the thought process of historical thinking. What if historians were to extend the process of historical thinking into the subject matter domain of the future? Historians would breach one of our profession's most rigid disciplinary barriers. Very few historians venture predictions about the future, and those who do are viewed with skepticism by the profession at large. On methodological grounds, most historians reject as either impractical, quixotic, hubristic, or dangerous any effort to examine the past as a way to make predictions about the future. However, where at one time thinking about the future did mean making a scientifically-based prediction, futurists today are just as likely to think in terms of scenarios. Where a prediction is a definitive statement about what will be, scenarios are heuristic narratives that explore alternative plausibilities of what might be. Scenario writers, like historians, understand that surprise, contingency, and deviations from the trend line are the rule, not the exception; among scenario writers, context matters. The thought process of the scenario method shares many features with historical thinking. With only minimal intellectual adjustment, then, most professionally trained historians possess the necessary skills to write methodologically rigorous "histories of the future."

Just when they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of themselves and their material surroundings, in the creation of something that does not yet exist, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they timidly conjure up the spirits of the past to help them; they borrow their names, battle slogans, and costumes so as to stage the new world historical scene in this venerable disguise and borrowed language.

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature Revue Canadienne De Litterature Comparee, 2011

The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility. Edited by Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2018

The humanities and the social sciences have been hostile to future visions in the postwar period. The most famous victim of their hostility was the enterprise of classical philosophy of history, condemned to illegitimacy precisely because of its fundamental engagement with the future. Contrary to this attitude, in this essay I argue that there is no history (neither in the sense of the course of human affairs nor in the sense of historical writing) without having a future vision in the first place. History, its very possibility, begins in the future, in the postulation of a future where further change can take place. Our notions of history, change, and the future are interdependent, they come as one package, meaning that the abandonment of one entails the abandonment of the other two. As to the current situation, although lately it became a commonplace to diagnose our age as presentist, Western societies are deeply engaged in a vision of the future revolving around artificial intelligence and the prospect of technological singularity. This technological vision is best characterized as the prospect of unprecedented change, substantially differing from Enlightenment and nineteenth-century developmental visions of future. If our notions of history, change, and the future are necessarily interdependent, and if we have a characteristically new future vision, it follows that our historical sensibility is already transformed and is accommodated to the prospect of unprecedented change. The ultimate aim of this essay is to outline this transformed historical sensibility of our technological age.