A Summary on Excerpts from David Wood’s "On Being Haunted By The Future"
The future beckons, and we answer. Thus is the call of men, lost in their baseless endearments, disoriented from the values in which they came, they are left wary of their ways and long for a return to the future. So onward they march, on the heels of time. In On Being Haunted By The Future, Professor Wood begins by deriving an illustration from Derrida that explains the future as a deferred experience containing the apprehension of messianic faith. This messianicity holds a “universal structure of experience” that provides justification and responsibility to the protention of experience. Protention, or perception of the next moment, functions as an incomplete and temporal phenomenon that lends itself to this “universal structure of experience” that confronts the future as a yearning apprehension.
However, we can intervene events, infusing the future with possibility, by making predictions and taking calculated risks. This changes the ‘universal structure of experience’ that accompanies protention.
According to Wood, these continuous moments that Derrida refers to allows for the creation of new horizons. This supplants ‘recursive resistance’ to rigid values and apathy. The conception of future calls for the suspension of law, of what is ontological, which allows value to flourish. It is during this suspension that the creation of ethics occurs. Wood would like draw our attention away from the conflicts of law and openness, to the purity that is born of an entirely new event, one free from the influence of calculation, strategy, and prediction. Here, Wood says, is where ‘conditions of possibility’ arise, where the relation of subject and object breaks down and opens up room for exploration.
Most people think of approaching the future with the intuitive attitude of expecting the unexpected. More alarming, however, is when we actively unexpect the expected, by turning a blind out of sheer negligence. It is this phenomenon that causes me to fail to do the calculations and make the predictions necessary to address the predictable, the inevitably. According to Wood, the future is a zone of political warfare ‘contesting’ outcomes. It is irresponsible to not do the calculations when reason would have us do other wise. This calculation is what frees mends mind, creates bonds by offering a unifying interest. This gives way to the democracy that Derrida mentions, a democracy of urgency, of diversity to possibilities. This calculation is not about justifications, but of imagination and possibility.
Regarding the realm of Global warming, Wood points out attention to the general agreement about the current trends that scientists agree upon. He points out the there is an inherency of balance forced upon these agreements, fueled by a doubt that divides in order to give a fair trial to voices. This sows the seeds of doubt that creates divides in what is scientifically known, and what the public accepts to be clear cut. One wonders if there is a conscious conflict in what people resist and what they’re natural everyday inclinations would have them do, occupying a space of contradiction.
In the face of the future, truth is presented as a fixture in the present. The idea that lies are in the future doesn’t prevent them from manifesting into truth. In this light, one begins to understand the nature of how ‘men of action’, as Wood describes them, have this ability to conjure the reality of circumstances, no matter how misconstrued from reality they may be. In this vein, one also understands how the nature of all prophetic works acts as a portal, or gateway, into the manifestation of states that only become truth through the reinforced beliefs of men. In the same way we can call the future a mere fiction, we can also call it a truth, beckoning its reality to occupy our place.
Present events serve as omens of the future. Even more so do traumatic events, which claw at inner tranquility and peace, and transform man into an apprehensive and anxious victim of fear. It is in this trauma that man suspend reason and logic, create fantastical delusions that reinforce the anxiety by living into fears that guarantee a certain self destruction. But these events are not without utility, for as we discussed, the future is a contested political arena for men of action to do their bidding and fabricate truths out of half lives by manipulating these fears.
This essay illustrates some of the powers contained in ‘future’. It maintains a dichotomy of contrasts that exist on the periphery of our apperception. It is always waiting to haunt, pervade consciousness and perception, dilute reason and choke truth, yet is met with equal vigor to instill imagination, forge bonds and democratic thought, and light up the horizon of time with brilliant possibility. It is with the understanding of calculability, of responsible prediction, that moments depend on such musings.
William Dare 