Reading Group: Future Tense. Languages of the Future

This first session will introduce key concepts, ideas, and highlight the importance and urgency of the Research Cluster 'Future Tense: Languages of the Future.' It aims to unpack and contextualise the ‘keywords’ (Williams, 1983) of language(s) and future(s) to develop a shared (albeit multivalent) set of definitions of these concepts to work with. Beginning with Robert Macfarlane and David Farrier to understand the importance of languages of the future by reading one short excerpt from each which explores a case study for future languages. How might we communicate with future descendants to warn of nuclear waste dumping sites? What narratives might be constructed from the fossils we will leave behind, and how might understanding the fossils we will leave behind encourage alternate action? These key questions, introduced through engaging non-fiction material provide the basis for our opening discussion, which is then supplemented with academic material. 

Materials (excerpts from):
Walter Benjamin – "Thesis on the Philosophy of History" 
John L. Austin – How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975
Arjun Appadurai: The Future as Cultural Fact. London: Verso, 2013
Robert Macfarlane: Underland: A Deep Time Journey. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019.
David Farrier: Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
 

This reading group is run by IAS Postdoctoral Fellows Peter Browning, Flora Sagers and Josh Weeks, and aims to provide participants with reading materials that consider the future in a multitude of different ways, and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Whether excavating the past in search of the future, considering apocalyptic understandings of the absence of a future, or thinking through the affects which are future oriented, it aims to provide a number of short extracts per session to accommodate for breadth of knowledge and disciplines and allowing for a depth in our discussions.