The Future: A Retrospective
Drowning out the morning birds
With the same three songs over and over
I wish I wrote it, but I didn’t, so I learn the words
Hum along ’til the feeling’s gone forever
—Phoebe Bridgers, “Chinese Satellite” (Punisher, 2020)
Many of us, these days, seem to have trouble seeing the horizon — we seem no longer able to imagine a future, or even to say what “the future” is. Our working rubrics of history, futurity, crisis, and so on no longer feel apt. We seem condemned, as Phoebe Bridgers sings, to drown out signs of the outside world with the same three songs over and over.
Perhaps, then, it is time to find the edges of our concepts of history and futurity — to look at where they came from and how they’ve taken form over time, lay out their tacit assumptions, and look for new ways of reasoning about the constellated unfolding of events.
The Future: A Retrospective is an experiment in contextualization — but equally in tactical hope. Please join us.
In Preparation
For each 70-minute session we’ll offer a couple things to glance at or listen to by way of a prompt. You do not need to have gone through the prompts to participate! Please come and just listen, or stream us in the background, or offer thoughts — meet us wherever you are that day. The prompts are just to get us started. They’ll be light — 10 pages here, an LP there — and chosen with a view to making the whole experience a pleasure.
MAY 4. The California Strain
Joan Didion, “Quiet Days in Malibu” (1978) (background)
Selections from Michael Crichton, Electronic Life (1983)
MAY 18. The Closed Loop of Desire
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964), chapters on “Television” and “Automation“
Selections from McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (1967)
JUNE 1. The Same Three Songs
Sun Ra & His Arkestra, Space Is the Place (1972)
Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer (2018)
Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher (2020)
JUNE 15. Varieties of Capture
Cristina Rivera Garza, “City of Men” (2008; trans. 2022)
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “Identity Politics and Elite Capture” (2020)
For the Crichton and McLuhan, you’ll receive instructions on how to access the prompts when you register.
Your Hosts
Joanna Radin is a historian of biomedical futures. She is Associate Professor of the History of Medicine at Yale University, coeditor of the series Science as Culture at the University of Chicago Press, and the author, among other things, of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood.
Carla Nappi is a historical pataphysician and avid space gardener. She holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in History at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is also Co-Director of the Humanities Center. Her most recent book is Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities.
Josh Berson is a novelist and anthropologist. He has held appointments at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Berggruen Institute, among other places, and is the author, among other things, of The Human Scaffold, The Meat Question, and the forthcoming Waking Paralysis.
About Time Kitchen
Time Kitchen is a studio for exploratory thinking.
We use conversation, observation, and experiments with ephemeral artifacts to elicit insight into how conventions of value emerge and evolve. We are in the business of imagining new forms of life.
Fees
There are none. Come as you are. Donations welcome (see the button under Hosts, to the right).