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The Future
For Marc Augé, best-selling author of Non-Places, the prevailing idea of “the Future” rests on our fears of the present. It is to the future that we look for redemption and progress; but it’s also where we project our personal and apocalyptic fears. By questioning notions of certainty, truth, and totality, Augé finds ways to separate the future from our eternal, terrified present and develops a way of thinking about the future that is liberated from constricted concepts of time.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
112 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2012
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500 people want to read
About the author
Marc Augé
117 books173 followersMarc Augé is a French anthropologist. His career can be divided into three stages, reflecting shifts in both his geographical focus and theoretical development: early (African), middle (European) and late (Global). These successive stages do not involve a broadening of interest or focus as such, but rather the development of a theoretical apparatus able to meet the demands of the growing conviction that the local can no longer be understood except as a part of the complicated global whole.
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November 27, 2019
There are books I sometimes think of as white-board books. It is like someone has put a mind map up on a white-board of all the things they can think of on a particular topic and then used that as the basis to write their book. A book I read years and years ago called Adam’s Navel was just this. I barely remember it now, but I think the author had something wrong with him and so was trapped in bed for months and while there he tried to think of all of the parts of his body and all of the curious facts he could dredge up from memory about them – like the religious dispute about whether Adam had a navel or not. You know, since Adam wasn’t ‘born’ he wouldn’t have needed a navel. Writing this just now I thought that if god did give him a navel, god must have known Eve would tempt Adam with an apple and therefore bring about the fall – so, the free will of Adam in eating the apple didn’t really exist, because, by giving Adam a navel god had already predetermined the fall. You see how the simplest of things can quickly get out of hand when you start thinking about all things religious? And people wonder why there are so many wars…
This book obviously had ‘the future’ written in the middle of the white-board. I guess the pivotal chapter here is the one where he discusses Madame Bovary as that most paradoxical of things, a novel ahead of its time. But a paradox lies at the heart of just about any discussion of time. What is the past, for instance? Mostly, the past is a somewhat convenient and coherent narrative we tell ourselves that bares only a passing resemblance to ‘what actually happened’. I mean, you could be nasty and say this is because we are so precious that we constantly rewrite the past to make ourselves look better than we really were – and there is obviously some truth to this – but I think the real problem isn’t that we lie to ourselves as much as we do to others, but rather that we have a driving need to make sense of the past, and we need the past to be composed of a consistent narrative. But we forget bits and confound others and then, to make the whole thing work, we have to ‘reconstruct’ how the pieces fit together with each retelling. Sometimes I’ve heard people get upset when they’ve heard someone else tell the same story twice, but that the second time key (and favourite) details in the story have changed. But such is the nature of being human. The fault is not in our intention, it is in our desire to make sense. There is a lovely bit in this book about the nature of repetition and how repetition is (as Pina Bausch makes clear in her choreography) never the same twice. An exact repetition of something simply does not mean the same thing the second time as it did the first – merely by being a repetition. And this is something we learn when we rewatch a favourite film.
The present is just as bad as the past, of course. It snaps at our feet and increasingly so. But the worst of it is that the present has become ‘global’ – in the sense that the ‘things that happened today’ are rarely things that happened to us. The things that happened today mostly include the latest bizarre fantasies of Trump – yesterday he gave a dog a medal – or today the ranking British Rabbi effectively called on Jews to vote for Johnson. At least in Marx’s day we were given the seriousness of tragedy before we moved onto farce. Some satirical sites I see on my feed now seem to have given up and just state what has actually happened in the news – you know, as if they’ve said, ‘how the hell do I satirise this shit?’. It is not so much that the world has become post-satire, but rather I guess inter- or omni-satire. Even before the assaults of The Donald and Boris the present had lost much of its meaning for us. I know many people who refuse to watch the news, and it is hard to blame them.
He starts this by saying that an idea of the future of us alone – outside of others – is not only unimaginable, but also a kind of vision of hell. The future implies others. But almost immediately also says that a future where the collective imposes its will upon the individual is totalitarian. I guess we are looking for a kind of Aristotelian ‘golden mean’ here for the future. And that will require us to carefully define our terms. The future can be perceived as a continuation of the present– which gives us a rather conservative vision – or an inauguration, or it can provide a break from the past. He also proposes a kind of magical invocation, reserved for religious fanatics and revolutionaries – those who cast spells like necromancers, even if these spells all too often end up having us dancing with the devil across endless acres of dead bodies.
At one point he discusses the differences between ambiguity and ambivalence. A thing is ambiguous when it might be one thing OR another, and possibly both. But it is ambivalent when it is not quite one thing nor another, and so probably neither. The desire for the future to be certain is confounded by these kinds of confusions and uncertainties. We are back to paradoxes again.
The problem is that we seem to be working to eliminate the future. That might sound a bit daft – and he doesn’t mean it in the sense that Fukuyama meant it in his End of History. He means we seem to have reached a point where the struggle to sustain ritual and rites of passage, where all of our attempts to escape – like those of Madame Bovary – become tedious and merely entrap us even further – and so the real horror of our existence is its hollow emptiness. As he says at one point, Madame Bovary was a novel about nothing – which therefore meant it was also a novel about everything.
There is a nice financial metaphor that he ends the book with that sums up this paradox. He says our world is dominated by two paradoxical financial instruments: insurance and credit. We use insurance to seek to control the future – so that ‘if we die, at least THEY will be left with something…’ The desire to militate against the risk of loss of what we have in the present by using insurance is hardly surprising in such a precarious world. But this risk averse vision of the future is the opposite of that provided by ‘credit’. Credit implies a certainty and assuredness with regards to the future. We only take out credit if we believe will be able to pay our debts, and if we can, then we might as well have our rewards now!
I think this provides him with the best quote from the whole book:
“By satisfying a desire immediately, credit eliminates it from view, consumes and corrodes it. It kills the imagination twice, by laying the mediocrity of our wishes for the future before our eyes. A car or a house, once they are no longer an aspiration or project, enter the domain of harsh everyday reality. Instead of dreaming, you have to run them, manage them…and repay the loan.”
It is all too much like that song by Queen: I want it all and I want it now. Except, credit means we forget the joy of desire. The point of desire is that it is, like credit and insurance, future oriented. We do not desire what we already have, we can only desire what is currently beyond our grasp. And so credit kills desire – by giving what we want to us immediately. Desire is difficult to sustain in any case. The human condition is depressing in most senses when we think of the future. Not least since ultimately the future will be without us, and so perhaps this is what justifies the desire of the suicide bomber – dying for a cause becomes an affirmation beyond the limits of the ‘self’ – an affirmation of a greater good that lives on beyond us. Something most of us do not have the ‘faith’ to sustain. I don’t think of that as a bad thing, by the way. Such a desire for self-negation we sometimes contrast with the affirmation of love – as if love had a redemptive power beyond self-negation because of its positing of ‘the other’. But even here he can be pretty depressing. As he says at one point, “Even in the most successful lives, no willpower can prevent love from subsiding into affection, passion into politeness or anger into resignation”.
The bit of this book that offered some hope – and, if you are at all like me, you might be in need of a bit of hope right about now – is in the second last chapter: An Educational Utopia. It proposes that we move away from the ‘vocational’ fixations we have developed around education (where we seem to spend much more time at school now than ever before, but we come away knowing less than ever before about what a ‘good life’ might look like, beyond earning money. A vocational education is one directed at finding how you will fit yourself within the economic world after school. This seems self-centred, but it could hardly be less so, it is very much ‘other directed’. But a purely individualised education seems hardly possible either. He ends by calling for a re-evaluation of the utopia that education might offer – one that actively seeks to resolve the contradiction between the universal and the singular – between individual desire and social need, between vocation, duty and hobby.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of this short book – but it certainly has made me think.
This book obviously had ‘the future’ written in the middle of the white-board. I guess the pivotal chapter here is the one where he discusses Madame Bovary as that most paradoxical of things, a novel ahead of its time. But a paradox lies at the heart of just about any discussion of time. What is the past, for instance? Mostly, the past is a somewhat convenient and coherent narrative we tell ourselves that bares only a passing resemblance to ‘what actually happened’. I mean, you could be nasty and say this is because we are so precious that we constantly rewrite the past to make ourselves look better than we really were – and there is obviously some truth to this – but I think the real problem isn’t that we lie to ourselves as much as we do to others, but rather that we have a driving need to make sense of the past, and we need the past to be composed of a consistent narrative. But we forget bits and confound others and then, to make the whole thing work, we have to ‘reconstruct’ how the pieces fit together with each retelling. Sometimes I’ve heard people get upset when they’ve heard someone else tell the same story twice, but that the second time key (and favourite) details in the story have changed. But such is the nature of being human. The fault is not in our intention, it is in our desire to make sense. There is a lovely bit in this book about the nature of repetition and how repetition is (as Pina Bausch makes clear in her choreography) never the same twice. An exact repetition of something simply does not mean the same thing the second time as it did the first – merely by being a repetition. And this is something we learn when we rewatch a favourite film.
The present is just as bad as the past, of course. It snaps at our feet and increasingly so. But the worst of it is that the present has become ‘global’ – in the sense that the ‘things that happened today’ are rarely things that happened to us. The things that happened today mostly include the latest bizarre fantasies of Trump – yesterday he gave a dog a medal – or today the ranking British Rabbi effectively called on Jews to vote for Johnson. At least in Marx’s day we were given the seriousness of tragedy before we moved onto farce. Some satirical sites I see on my feed now seem to have given up and just state what has actually happened in the news – you know, as if they’ve said, ‘how the hell do I satirise this shit?’. It is not so much that the world has become post-satire, but rather I guess inter- or omni-satire. Even before the assaults of The Donald and Boris the present had lost much of its meaning for us. I know many people who refuse to watch the news, and it is hard to blame them.
He starts this by saying that an idea of the future of us alone – outside of others – is not only unimaginable, but also a kind of vision of hell. The future implies others. But almost immediately also says that a future where the collective imposes its will upon the individual is totalitarian. I guess we are looking for a kind of Aristotelian ‘golden mean’ here for the future. And that will require us to carefully define our terms. The future can be perceived as a continuation of the present– which gives us a rather conservative vision – or an inauguration, or it can provide a break from the past. He also proposes a kind of magical invocation, reserved for religious fanatics and revolutionaries – those who cast spells like necromancers, even if these spells all too often end up having us dancing with the devil across endless acres of dead bodies.
At one point he discusses the differences between ambiguity and ambivalence. A thing is ambiguous when it might be one thing OR another, and possibly both. But it is ambivalent when it is not quite one thing nor another, and so probably neither. The desire for the future to be certain is confounded by these kinds of confusions and uncertainties. We are back to paradoxes again.
The problem is that we seem to be working to eliminate the future. That might sound a bit daft – and he doesn’t mean it in the sense that Fukuyama meant it in his End of History. He means we seem to have reached a point where the struggle to sustain ritual and rites of passage, where all of our attempts to escape – like those of Madame Bovary – become tedious and merely entrap us even further – and so the real horror of our existence is its hollow emptiness. As he says at one point, Madame Bovary was a novel about nothing – which therefore meant it was also a novel about everything.
There is a nice financial metaphor that he ends the book with that sums up this paradox. He says our world is dominated by two paradoxical financial instruments: insurance and credit. We use insurance to seek to control the future – so that ‘if we die, at least THEY will be left with something…’ The desire to militate against the risk of loss of what we have in the present by using insurance is hardly surprising in such a precarious world. But this risk averse vision of the future is the opposite of that provided by ‘credit’. Credit implies a certainty and assuredness with regards to the future. We only take out credit if we believe will be able to pay our debts, and if we can, then we might as well have our rewards now!
I think this provides him with the best quote from the whole book:
“By satisfying a desire immediately, credit eliminates it from view, consumes and corrodes it. It kills the imagination twice, by laying the mediocrity of our wishes for the future before our eyes. A car or a house, once they are no longer an aspiration or project, enter the domain of harsh everyday reality. Instead of dreaming, you have to run them, manage them…and repay the loan.”
It is all too much like that song by Queen: I want it all and I want it now. Except, credit means we forget the joy of desire. The point of desire is that it is, like credit and insurance, future oriented. We do not desire what we already have, we can only desire what is currently beyond our grasp. And so credit kills desire – by giving what we want to us immediately. Desire is difficult to sustain in any case. The human condition is depressing in most senses when we think of the future. Not least since ultimately the future will be without us, and so perhaps this is what justifies the desire of the suicide bomber – dying for a cause becomes an affirmation beyond the limits of the ‘self’ – an affirmation of a greater good that lives on beyond us. Something most of us do not have the ‘faith’ to sustain. I don’t think of that as a bad thing, by the way. Such a desire for self-negation we sometimes contrast with the affirmation of love – as if love had a redemptive power beyond self-negation because of its positing of ‘the other’. But even here he can be pretty depressing. As he says at one point, “Even in the most successful lives, no willpower can prevent love from subsiding into affection, passion into politeness or anger into resignation”.
The bit of this book that offered some hope – and, if you are at all like me, you might be in need of a bit of hope right about now – is in the second last chapter: An Educational Utopia. It proposes that we move away from the ‘vocational’ fixations we have developed around education (where we seem to spend much more time at school now than ever before, but we come away knowing less than ever before about what a ‘good life’ might look like, beyond earning money. A vocational education is one directed at finding how you will fit yourself within the economic world after school. This seems self-centred, but it could hardly be less so, it is very much ‘other directed’. But a purely individualised education seems hardly possible either. He ends by calling for a re-evaluation of the utopia that education might offer – one that actively seeks to resolve the contradiction between the universal and the singular – between individual desire and social need, between vocation, duty and hobby.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of this short book – but it certainly has made me think.
May 1, 2021
Uno sguardo in avanti
Breve ma molto denso questo testo del grande etnologo francese, nel quale riflette sul concetto di futuro. La trattazione è sempre precisa ed attenta alle parole, fin dalle prime mosse in cui si distingue tra il concetto di "futuro" e quello di "avvenire" - idea un pò ostica per noi italiani, per i quali i due termini sono in effetti sinonimi, mentre in francese hanno sfumature di senso più distinte.
In ogni caso Augè ha un pensiero molto "spesso" che nasce dalla sua competenza di antropologo, dalla sua esperienza di studio e dal suo notevole bagaglio culturale.
Secondo l'autore, esistono due atteggiamenti verso il futuro: la "messa in intrigo" dove il futuro è compimento del passato e svelamento di un senso progressivo della storia e la "inaugurazione" dove il futuro è salto, nuovo inizio, rottura e rinascita. La trattazione procede attraverso la discussione di Madame Bovary di Flaubert e della sua forza rivoluzionaria contro il sistema contingente, l'analisi del concetto di innovazione e si conclude con una proposta utopica ma pratica per un possibile futuro migliore per la comunità umana.
L'analisi è precisa e chiara, con alcuni punti molto interessanti ed originali, come l'appello per una "vigilanza intellettuale" contro i luoghi comuni verbali: L'uso sistematico di parole di cui non si domina il significato, l'utilizzo meccanico di frasi fatte, è proprio della magia ; il riconoscimento del rischio di scivolare verso un'oligarchia del potere, del denaro e del sapere; la distinzione chiara tra società politeiste come società del senso e società monoteiste come società della fede.
Si vede che Augè è un pensatore di razza e, nonostante tutto, una mente scientifica che si fida del metodo scientifico (inteso come assenza di certezze immutabili e di apertura al cambiamento di pensiero) come possibile cifra per un futuro sostenibile ed auspicabile. l'uomo ha come vocazione essenziale la conoscenza, la conoscenza di ciò che è, la conoscenza di chi è
Forse l'unica critica è un eccessivo francocentrismo in cui ogni riferimento culturale e scientifico si rifà alla nazione transalpina, ma tutto sommato un'ottima lettura con spunti davvero utili e interessanti.
Breve ma molto denso questo testo del grande etnologo francese, nel quale riflette sul concetto di futuro. La trattazione è sempre precisa ed attenta alle parole, fin dalle prime mosse in cui si distingue tra il concetto di "futuro" e quello di "avvenire" - idea un pò ostica per noi italiani, per i quali i due termini sono in effetti sinonimi, mentre in francese hanno sfumature di senso più distinte.
In ogni caso Augè ha un pensiero molto "spesso" che nasce dalla sua competenza di antropologo, dalla sua esperienza di studio e dal suo notevole bagaglio culturale.
Secondo l'autore, esistono due atteggiamenti verso il futuro: la "messa in intrigo" dove il futuro è compimento del passato e svelamento di un senso progressivo della storia e la "inaugurazione" dove il futuro è salto, nuovo inizio, rottura e rinascita. La trattazione procede attraverso la discussione di Madame Bovary di Flaubert e della sua forza rivoluzionaria contro il sistema contingente, l'analisi del concetto di innovazione e si conclude con una proposta utopica ma pratica per un possibile futuro migliore per la comunità umana.
L'analisi è precisa e chiara, con alcuni punti molto interessanti ed originali, come l'appello per una "vigilanza intellettuale" contro i luoghi comuni verbali: L'uso sistematico di parole di cui non si domina il significato, l'utilizzo meccanico di frasi fatte, è proprio della magia ; il riconoscimento del rischio di scivolare verso un'oligarchia del potere, del denaro e del sapere; la distinzione chiara tra società politeiste come società del senso e società monoteiste come società della fede.
Si vede che Augè è un pensatore di razza e, nonostante tutto, una mente scientifica che si fida del metodo scientifico (inteso come assenza di certezze immutabili e di apertura al cambiamento di pensiero) come possibile cifra per un futuro sostenibile ed auspicabile. l'uomo ha come vocazione essenziale la conoscenza, la conoscenza di ciò che è, la conoscenza di chi è
Forse l'unica critica è un eccessivo francocentrismo in cui ogni riferimento culturale e scientifico si rifà alla nazione transalpina, ma tutto sommato un'ottima lettura con spunti davvero utili e interessanti.
Read
October 22, 2024Supongo que todas las personas, incluso las más inteligentes (tal vez sobre todo ellas), suenan algo ingenuas hablando sobre el futuro.
December 22, 2017
Raises a lot of interesting concepts and there were a handful of lines that I found noteworthy, but overall I found this book to be disjointed and unremarkable
July 24, 2018
Auge, at least in this book, does not present a distinguishable authoring style that you can get used to. This makes the reading experience particularly difficult.
In addition to that, he gives no references and when he gives, it is very difficult to understand what they are or refer to anyway.
If feels like subject-wise his thoughts are all over the place and this ambition and abundance of issues made me feel like I am having five different main courses -cooked for other people- simultaneously.
I don't know whether it is his cooking of my digestion system but I did not like this book apart from some handsome quotes:
'We need meaning, insofar as we need to think through our relation to others (no identity is constructed without reference to otherness). But when all relations are prescribed, freedom and identity can no longer exist: the excess of meaning kills both.'
In addition to that, he gives no references and when he gives, it is very difficult to understand what they are or refer to anyway.
If feels like subject-wise his thoughts are all over the place and this ambition and abundance of issues made me feel like I am having five different main courses -cooked for other people- simultaneously.
I don't know whether it is his cooking of my digestion system but I did not like this book apart from some handsome quotes:
'We need meaning, insofar as we need to think through our relation to others (no identity is constructed without reference to otherness). But when all relations are prescribed, freedom and identity can no longer exist: the excess of meaning kills both.'
April 9, 2012
Lettura abbastanza difficoltosa, almeno fino alla metà del libro, per la forma non proprio lineare ed il protrarsi di argomenti non sempre strettamente inerenti che l'autore poteva risolvere con delle sintesi più efficaci.
D'altronde è indispensabile leggere tutta questa lunga premessa per capire la seconda metà del libro dove i capitoli sono più sciolti ed anche operativi specialmente in ordine all'innovazione e all'educazione. Per l'autore che è un etnologo, infatti, sono capisaldi indispensabili affiché si affronti il futuro con la possibilità di soluzioni originali, impreviste, creative e non solo come conseguenza "intrigante" della lettura che ci viene imposta del presente.
D'altronde è indispensabile leggere tutta questa lunga premessa per capire la seconda metà del libro dove i capitoli sono più sciolti ed anche operativi specialmente in ordine all'innovazione e all'educazione. Per l'autore che è un etnologo, infatti, sono capisaldi indispensabili affiché si affronti il futuro con la possibilità di soluzioni originali, impreviste, creative e non solo come conseguenza "intrigante" della lettura che ci viene imposta del presente.
February 12, 2022
Lo tenia por ahí, ni me acuerdo de cuando lo compre. Me decidí a leerlo porque es corto. Y menos mal, porque menuda perdida de tiempo. Un capitulito sobre la diferencia entre "porvernir" y "futuro", otro sobre Madame Bovary, otro sobre el mismo... Auge seguramente ventilo esto en una tarde, porque vaya sarte de lugares comunes deslavazados sin novedad ninguna. Tampoco ayuda que mi edición tuviera una veintena de paginas en blanco. A evitar.
August 16, 2015
Interesting, but also depressing. More later.
August 15, 2016
Mega revelador respecto a ciencia y futuro. Se va por las ramas y me encanta, de alguna manera mete a Madame Bovary en el análisis de capitalismo y tecnología. Seco
January 18, 2022
This book talks about the future from the philosophical, affective, and political aspects. I find the epistemological dissection of the future, mainly in the first 2 chapters, intriguing. The rest is just okay. And as we go deeper into the book there are lots of hot takes made from a bubble or at least a partially informed position. Or maybe I just can't agree with the writer on some polarizing topics.
For example, Augé disagrees with the loose usage of scientism term. It's either no scientist falls under scientism if it is totalitarian, or it shouldn't be used at all if scientism refers to human's capability to learn with indefinite progress. The first point generalizes all scientists to the highest ideal and does not account for the existence of scientism in the non-scientist of his assumption. The second point renders scientism indistinguishable from science. But it isn't. People can in fact excessively believe in science so much like a superstition. Some people treat big names in science like prophets and act defensively to any disruptive findings. Science is essentially falsifiable, thus maintaining such close-minded behavior is not scientific at all. I reckon that this is one sign of scientism. Susan Haack (2012) proposed 6 signs of scientism namely: "the honorific use of “science” and its cognates; using scientific trappings purely decoratively; preoccupation with demarcation; preoccupation with “scientific method”; looking to the sciences for answers beyond their scope; denying the legitimacy or worth of non-scientific (e.g., legal or literary) inquiry". Not all scientists are scienticist but scientism does exist among the infinite spectrum of people. His argument for scientism is not well laid out and anywhere convincing. If anything, it just makes him rather scienticist. He still said that we should approach the notion of progress with science in view, not in the name of science as there is no absolute original knowledge, which I concur. But his hasty conclusion of scientism doesn't sit right with me and my valuation of his overall writing.
Also, he asserted that science is the inverse and opposite of all fundamentalism including creationism. Such a notion is made under his own assumption of what the fundamental part is, which I wouldn't dare to guess, but probably of a stagnant and imposing nature. This is a strange supposition from an outsider of the belief. As a creationist, I just have to say that the fundamental part is pretty simple, e.g. there is a creator, and everything else is creation. This includes the law of nature and everything we can deduce with science. I'm not sure in what ways science is an inverse of creationism, but I'll take it into biology as a microbiologist. The common belief is that creationism is at least the opposite of evolution, but I beg to differ. I do believe that Adam and Eve are exceptions. But as the order of chemistry and physics is a creation of omnipotence, the inevitable mutation of each nucleotide in DNA can very well be the start of creation. A creator's existence doesn't imply a rigid concept of creation. It can be the fixed law of nature, and it can be the ever-changing species in space-time. As nature and creation are essentially the same, they won't get in the way of each other. The pursue of science itself is an attempt to read and venerate the creation in association with the creator. Humans might fall short in the interpretation of God's will, or finding the gaps of science. But it only requires us to postpone the conclusion, and remain open to a future truth, instead of burning the bridge and judging them as opposites.
Disagreeing with the writer doesn't make the book bad. Contrasting views are actually quite nice as a stimulation for a discussion. It's an opportunity for me to construct my own position of the issue, without which I would just feel iffy abstractly. It's also quite interesting to see a French political view. But well, there's just nothing very exceptional besides the philosophical bits at the beginning. And it's quite reaching for some chapters to be a talk of 'The Future', making this book rather not cohesive. Apparently, this book is a part of a Futures series. As an everything time-related stan, I'm looking forward to what the other 5 books have to offer.
Reference
Haack, Susan. "Six signs of scientism." Logos & Episteme 3.1 (2012): 75-95.
For example, Augé disagrees with the loose usage of scientism term. It's either no scientist falls under scientism if it is totalitarian, or it shouldn't be used at all if scientism refers to human's capability to learn with indefinite progress. The first point generalizes all scientists to the highest ideal and does not account for the existence of scientism in the non-scientist of his assumption. The second point renders scientism indistinguishable from science. But it isn't. People can in fact excessively believe in science so much like a superstition. Some people treat big names in science like prophets and act defensively to any disruptive findings. Science is essentially falsifiable, thus maintaining such close-minded behavior is not scientific at all. I reckon that this is one sign of scientism. Susan Haack (2012) proposed 6 signs of scientism namely: "the honorific use of “science” and its cognates; using scientific trappings purely decoratively; preoccupation with demarcation; preoccupation with “scientific method”; looking to the sciences for answers beyond their scope; denying the legitimacy or worth of non-scientific (e.g., legal or literary) inquiry". Not all scientists are scienticist but scientism does exist among the infinite spectrum of people. His argument for scientism is not well laid out and anywhere convincing. If anything, it just makes him rather scienticist. He still said that we should approach the notion of progress with science in view, not in the name of science as there is no absolute original knowledge, which I concur. But his hasty conclusion of scientism doesn't sit right with me and my valuation of his overall writing.
Also, he asserted that science is the inverse and opposite of all fundamentalism including creationism. Such a notion is made under his own assumption of what the fundamental part is, which I wouldn't dare to guess, but probably of a stagnant and imposing nature. This is a strange supposition from an outsider of the belief. As a creationist, I just have to say that the fundamental part is pretty simple, e.g. there is a creator, and everything else is creation. This includes the law of nature and everything we can deduce with science. I'm not sure in what ways science is an inverse of creationism, but I'll take it into biology as a microbiologist. The common belief is that creationism is at least the opposite of evolution, but I beg to differ. I do believe that Adam and Eve are exceptions. But as the order of chemistry and physics is a creation of omnipotence, the inevitable mutation of each nucleotide in DNA can very well be the start of creation. A creator's existence doesn't imply a rigid concept of creation. It can be the fixed law of nature, and it can be the ever-changing species in space-time. As nature and creation are essentially the same, they won't get in the way of each other. The pursue of science itself is an attempt to read and venerate the creation in association with the creator. Humans might fall short in the interpretation of God's will, or finding the gaps of science. But it only requires us to postpone the conclusion, and remain open to a future truth, instead of burning the bridge and judging them as opposites.
Disagreeing with the writer doesn't make the book bad. Contrasting views are actually quite nice as a stimulation for a discussion. It's an opportunity for me to construct my own position of the issue, without which I would just feel iffy abstractly. It's also quite interesting to see a French political view. But well, there's just nothing very exceptional besides the philosophical bits at the beginning. And it's quite reaching for some chapters to be a talk of 'The Future', making this book rather not cohesive. Apparently, this book is a part of a Futures series. As an everything time-related stan, I'm looking forward to what the other 5 books have to offer.
Reference
Haack, Susan. "Six signs of scientism." Logos & Episteme 3.1 (2012): 75-95.
March 1, 2021
Augé philosophizes on a wide variety of subjects, from anthropology and ethnology to the current global state and the way we construct perceptual futures. There are some salient ideas and the book is overall an enjoyable one. The narrative is however somewhat jutted (perhaps due to the translation?) and the writing takes various turns, crossing over a broad range of topics, which may make it a somewhat less than smooth read, although not in the extreme. Particularly enjoyable was Augé's comparison of the concepts of "investment" "adventure" and "credit".
August 18, 2019
While the first several chapters have beats similar to Mark Fisher's Capitalist realism, it follows a singular cultural text for the majority of it's analysis (Madame Bovary) which I found a compelling way to ground his analysis of broader culturally and psychologically imposed narratives.
June 19, 2019
While raising interesting thoughts it certainly misses a good structure and cohesion. Also some references and footnotes could have been helpful.
June 30, 2020
“Y quizás es la conciencia del porvenir común la que puede darle a cada uno la fuerza de vivir este presente en movimiento que llamamos futuro.”
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February 28, 2023Futuro by Marc Augé (2012)
April 9, 2020
The book offers some food for thought and is at times very quotable. Nonetheless, it is deeply lacking in consistency and clarity of thought. The book desperately needs to use proper references as sometimes other authors thoughts used misleadingly or offer incorrect information.
September 25, 2016
"Nor do we know where the adventure of knowledge will take us. ... That outcome will never be known, for knowledge is unending, but we might perhaps focus on the fact that our most spectacular cities, the ones where new cathedrals of mercantile capitalism are clustered, increasingly resemble spaceships out of science fiction or the sort of buildings that man of some still-remote day will construct on other planets. As it we were already busy setting up the background scenery of our future."
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