ABSTRACT
As Walter Mignolo suggests in The Darker Side of Western Modernity, ‘the illusion that Western Civilization could create the problem and solve it is facing its limits’. In the discursive move from Foresight to Anticipation – and by discursive, I mean rhetorical, theoretical and commercial – there is an opportunity to anticipate the past and future of this transition. Anticipation can move beyond what I call the ‘Corporate Imagination’ of the futures industry, and what Mark Dery calls ‘the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set-designers – white to a man.’ The emerging discipline of anticipation will need to include methods such as Foucault’s Genealogy, or what Nietzsche called wirkliche Historie (effective history) to crack open occulted forms of knowledge production. These occulted forms of knowledge production of the future include the seamstresses who made the spacesuit for astronauts landing on the moon, to the community futures of Black Quantum Futurism’s Black Space Agency. Anticipation will require stitching together the material of a new chronopolitics as an emergency response to time broken by injustices. This anticipatory chronopolitics involves practices of the ‘other-wise’ that deviate time, to save future-space from being already occupied and colonized by the corporate imagination and its imperial avant-garde.
