The Future Imaginary

Cassius Klingenfuss

No one I know — myself included — spends nearly enough time staring at the postered walls in their bedroom envisioning a fireplace with an oversized flatscreen. Similarly, the fact no one is venturing to the mailroom simply because they might have received a love letter strikes me as an unfortunate indication of our reasonable egos. Which is not to say you should shoplift because you might get away with it, but the next time you open the refrigerator you may very well find your roommate has set aside a beer for you. However improbable, these are nice thoughts, and entirely possible ones at that. These possibilities are, to that end, better understood as “lost futures,” to borrow a term coined by cultural theorist Mark Fisher. And I find myself lamenting them more and more, especially when I wander around campus in between classes contemplating my professors’ dire future predictions. 

Recovering these futures requires sophisticated physical technology that today’s Silicon Valley is unlikely to invest in (even if it weren’t such a ludicrous proposition) given their insistence on electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and social media platforms. However, the poet Eileen Myles makes a compelling argument for LSD being the closest and most accessible alternative. 

In a conversation with the Louisiana Channel, they describe tripping at a bar with their girlfriend when the stranger, whom they likened to a tree in their altered states, suddenly began pursuing them. Myles explains: “What I learned [is] that…there [are] all these realities next to each and behind each other,” and further:

There was a way in which I started to understand something when I did drugs that made reality really understandable when I no longer did drugs. I started to understand that if you hang into any state, you’ll start to understand its dimension, its inventory, what it has, and start to understand how to operate there and how to make art there.

So, despite them never actualizing, spending time within these “states” or lost futures is productive for creatives such as myself. In the process of creating, it can be intimidating to stray from concrete subjects — a super new car, for instance, or a field of daffodils — and instead harp on the not merely abstract, but difficult to articulate lost futures that haunt everyday life. This is especially pronounced in the art world where everything is not only pastiche, but referential. How strange is it, after all, to be listening to Greta Van Fleet when Led Zeppelin already came and went. “Futuristic” sounding musical genres, which are mostly electronic genres, provide brief glimpses into the future, but lack audiences as ardent as Swifties or the ARMY. Electronic music also does not account for the futures of the visual, performing or literary arts industries. 

If culture is to be rescued, the avant-garde must become possible across all mediums. And while increased funding for artists and arts institutions is a step in the right direction, the avant-garde needs creatives themselves to sit with their fantasies — which, to my mind, is a type of lost future — and then actualize them through their art. Linger in the undeniable failure of these futures to occur, study its dimension and inventory, insist on making art there. You know your roommate did not save you a beer, so write a poem where he does.