The subject and the discipline: what history tells us about doing futures

G — Why does history matter?

P — History is the study of humans set on a timeframe. Everything we do is cumulative in some way and comes from a narrative somewhere and somewhen. Becoming a historian made me realise that everything is a process and there’s a reason for why things are, and they always change. Nothing is set. A good example of this is explored in Eric Hobsbawn’s classic The Invention of Tradition. We think of traditions as being an object to be preserved — but they are continually being moulded and shaped.

G — Exactly, we inherit traditions but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be critical of them. Martin Hägglund says in *This Life* that “We never start from the beginning — we always inherit a tradition that tells us what we ought to do — but it is not given how we should take up the tradition in question”. I love futures projects that explore diverse traditions and customs — because what we do with our inheritance is up to us to create, but that we will inherit **structures and narratives from the past is certain.

P — As historians, we study the time that has happened. We can’t change the past, but the stories we put into the world do change things and that’s why it’s important we try to do history well. Changing history to suit your agenda is an easy and dangerous trick. You will always be able to find something that supports your thesis or narrative. A good historian is scientific and critical. Continuing discussion and new research is paramount, that’s why there are hundreds of biographies about Hitler and not just a single story.

G — HG Wells talked in 1902 about a “systematic exploration of the future”. A lot of the futurists I know are working at an intersection of creative storytelling and methodical rigour and it’s a challenge to meaningfully integrate those approaches. The future can be an empty space to project onto but it’s also a realm with physical laws and probabilities and cultural forces that can be critically analysed.

P — People use the word history as synonymous with the past but history is a discipline. You have the past and history, and you have the time that lays ahead and futurist study. Everything you can think of in the future is a concept coming from a historical perspective.

The web of objects: working with sources and artefacts

P — Every object has a story — it is up to us to find it and apply context to it. A games console or telephone or the internet tell us stories about the recent past, the same as a shard of pottery from Greece tells us something about the far past. If you want to place something in context you need some embedding in the time before that but also enough distance to see where it goes. It’s about the context you can bring to it

G — how do you approach an object?

P — You look at what the object tells you about the systems around it — trade, economics, habits etc. Random objects are not important unless you place them in the context of other objects around it. The object sits in a web. Imagine what is needed to create a tool like a knife. Then ask how, why, when it got to that location. A single object can tell a story — multiple objects and voices will give you a narrative.

G- the historical object is a point in time, it’s a moment, and from that there are several other timelines that feed in and out of it. Like with future prototypes and concepts, they only really become meaningful when we investigate the connections they help us make. And that investigation never really stops.

P — For a long time historians didn’t use art as historical objects, that was left to art historians. The disciplines didn’t mix. Now they do and that’s fortunate. If we look at the study of old maps — for a long time historians were only looking at the image of the map, the method of making it and the purpose. But they weren’t looking at the actual letters and the legend and the accompanying text. People thought it wasn’t really significant. They were ignoring that the map is a system. Now, I would also read it and understand how it was really used. An interdisciplinary way of thinking takes us further and is easier to do now we’re connected between institutions

G — yes, in the futures field interdisciplinary thinking takes us further because the future is not just about Technology or architecture, it’s also about economics and DNA and climate and theology etc . It’s our job to be brilliant synthesisers of contexts.

P — and as a historian you need to always be aware of your own place and time and the object you’re studying. In Dutch we’d call this standplaatsgebondenheid, ‘tied to place-ness’- a form of historical empathy. In history you have the subject but then you have the meta approaches, for instance Peter Burke’s Cultural Turn, Marxist, the French Annales School which is about the *Longue Durée* — looking at the long term contextual factors shaping human history like deep geological time and belief systems etc. These are ways of thinking, they’re vantage points on the same sources.

G — I love the idea of cultivating a ‘futurist empathy’, in the futures field we need to be more aware of our own vantage point and to ask deeper questions about the context of our sources and ‘signals’

The explosion of context: navigating connections

G — In futures practice we talk about there being multiple possible futures — the futures cone model depicts past as linear and then expanding divergently from the now

P — but history is also plural. In schools we learn through chronological “windows” into history, a canonisation of things that have happened. But I’ve never been a fan of focusing on dates and years for historical practice, they are useful to string together a series of events and cause and effects, but that’s about it. If we broaden the perspective we can see more useful connections. The connections might be parallel or much further back in time. Johan Huizinga wrote about the historical sensation — the feeling you get when you’re in a historical place; touching a ruin in Pompeii evaporates two millennia of historical distance, it completely draws you in. Time is looping back.

G — I think about the significance of sensation and memory in the future. How will it feel, and **can we explore futures in an embodied way?