How Much Shall We Bet? Defining Surreal Futures
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HOW MUCH SHALL WE BET? DEFINING SURREAL FUTURES Submitted by John McGhee to the University of Birmingham as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature and Creative Writing, December 2018 1 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms. Under the following terms: Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Notices: You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation. No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material. Abstract This work comprises a critical thesis ‘How Much Shall We Bet? Defining Surreal Futures’, assessing the scope for stronger cross-pollination between poetry and futures studies and examining a potential hybrid poet-futurist praxis; and a portfolio of futures poetry in a range of lyrical and conceptual modes, The Bunny Assembly. Presented prior to the critical thesis, a fragmentary essay ‘Weak Signals’ introduces the main themes of this research through an account of my experiences attending the 2016 annual meeting of the World Futures Society. Chapter 1 describes the origins and rationale for the research, key lines of enquiry and underpinning conceptual frameworks adopted, including a discussion of why the topic was explored using the methodology of creative Practice-as-Research. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the academic discipline of futures studies and assesses how contemporary futures studies balances analytic and imaginative techniques to identify possible, probable and preferable futures, in order to identify any existing links to poetic techniques. Chapter 3 demonstrates how, although the roles of poet and prophet are historically linked, much contemporary poetry has had unexpectedly little to say on the topic of the future. It is shown through a quantitative review of sample texts that where recent poetry has addressed the topic of the future, it has more often presented clichéd declinist or dystopian visions. Sixteen distinct strategies for developing poetic futures are identified in Chapter 4 by combining the steps of a typical forecasting methodology used in futures studies with a simple classification of lyrical and conceptual poetic approaches. These strategies are then evaluated to identify the extent to which they are useful in generating novel and provocative insight about the future. This chapter concludes with discussions of three features which proved effective in writing about the future: ethnographic writing, humour and aphorism. Chapter 5 consolidates poetic and futurist activities into a proposed praxis for the poet-futurist: what one should do differently as a poet if one is a futurist, and vice versa. This praxis is reviewed in the context of competing visions of the future of poetry. To conclude, the thesis assesses the value of systematic poetic investigation of the future with a particular emphasis on the role of poetry in challenging clichéd declinist or dystopian forecasts and inspiring action to realise more hopeful futures. 2 Contents Critical Element – How Much Shall We Bet? Defining Surreal Futures Introduction 5 Prologue: Weak Signals, A Field Trip to WorldFuture 2016 8 1. Researching Poetry and the Future 21 2. Beyond Melt Value: Analytics and Creativity in Futures Studies 29 3. Beyond Fate’s Telegram: How Poetry Talks about the Future 43 4. Beyond the Activation Threshold: Modes of Writing Poetic Futures 57 5. Beyond Hypernormalisation: Proposals for a Poet-Futurist Praxis 84 6. Conclusion: A Necessary Optimism 95 Creative Portfolio – The Bunny Assembly Special Projects 102 The Fire Bee 206 Black List 228 Stacklounge Live 238 Criswell B 242 The Bunny Assembly 249 Works Cited 273 3 Acknowledgements ‘Weak Signals, A Field Trip to WorldFuture 2016’ appeared in The Birmingham Journal of Literature and Language, Vol VIII. Elements of this thesis were presented as papers at the following conferences: ‘What’s Funny About the Future?’, presented to Out of Practice (University of Birmingham, 2016); ‘Ten-Second Essays and One-And-A-Half Truths’ presented to Poetry and the Essay: Form and Fragmentation (Victoria University of Wellington, 2017); ‘The Creative Destruction of Poetry’ presented to Writing Revolutions & Revolutionary Writing (University of Birmingham, 2015). ‘A Natural History’ appeared in South Bank Poetry 22. Earlier versions of ‘His Majesty’s New Wanswuth’ and ‘Street Minus’ appeared in South Bank Poetry 25. ‘131 Ways to Rock Your Personal Brand’ appeared in Under the Radar 17. ‘Everyone’s A Chemist’, ‘Thousands of Books All Over the Place’ and ‘Superkafka and its Impact on Industrial Relations’ appeared in Lighthouse 10. ‘Versioning’ appeared in This is Not Your Final Form: Poems About Birmingham, The Emma Press 2017. An extract from ‘The Fire Bee’ appeared as ‘Swarm’ in Magma 64. 4 Introduction What follows is the output of a research project seeking to bridge the two fields of poetry and futures studies. Regarding poetry, the contemporary transatlantic styles and approaches, including prose poetry and hybrid forms, and various lyrical and conceptual techniques, which I will discuss, are well rehearsed. However, futures studies remains a relatively niche practice, so it is worth taking a moment to orient the reader to its particular scope and concerns. Futures studies is “a new field of inquiry that involves systematic and explicit thinking about alternative futures” (Bell, 2009, p. 2). It aims to be “a coherent body of techniques and knowledge [enabling us] to anticipate many of the risks and opportunities that could confront us in the future, giving us time to decide what to do before we crash into them [and] to develop worthwhile and achievable long-term goals, along with reasonable strategies for attaining them” (Cornish, 2004, p. xi). In perhaps its simplest formulation – “just as historians study the past and journalists the present, so futurists study the future” (Bishop and Hines, 2012, p. 1). At a high level, contemporary futurists agree that although there is no one future that can be predicted, there is value in thinking about and preparing for the future before it arrives, in discussing the multiplicity of potential futures and in understanding what action could be taken now to bring about better futures and avoid worse ones. Emerging at the end of the Second World War, futures studies is no longer a nascent field of enquiry, but despite this, there remains debate and confusion over what it comprises and even what it should be called. Sardar (2010) writes: As a subject of inquiry with a body of learned literature, recognisable knowledge base, and definable contour of concepts, methodologies, practices and processes, futures studies is now well over 50 years old. Indeed, some people trace the history of futures explorations much further. But there seems to be little awareness of this history. The amnesia has led to an identity crisis manifest in the simple observation that we do not even know what to call all those who take the study of alternative futures seriously: futurists, futurologists, prospectivists, foresight practitioners, even horizon scanners have common currency. (p. 178) 5 In this thesis, I will refer to the field of enquiry into alternative futures as “futures studies” and those who undertake this practice as “futurists”, given the drawbacks of common alternative terminologies. “Futurology” manages to summon simultaneously two incompatible and equally unhelpful associations: one of empirical positivism, that the future can be objectively and scientifically studied; the other of quackery, what Sardar refers to as “crystal gazing and fortune telling” (p. 178). Worse still in this context would be to use the term “futurism”, a name taken by the fascist avant-garde art movement of the early 20th century. Put simply, this research assesses the potential for increased cross-pollination between the concerns and techniques of poetry and future studies. Before the main body of the critical thesis, the prologue ‘Weak Signals, A Field Trip to WorldFuture 2016’ introduces key concepts and themes drawn upon later in the thesis. This creative text was written as autoethnography, based on extensive field notes, observations and reflections I recorded while attending the annual meeting of the World Futures Society, a global professional association for practitioners of futures studies, in Washington DC in July 2016. Following this prologue, I will argue in the main body of the critical thesis that: o The cross-pollination between poetry and futures studies is best explored using a Practice-as-Research approach. Chapter 1 describes the rationale for the research and outlines the model of Practice-as-Research that was used. o Futures studies privileges analytical over imaginative techniques. Chapter 2 discusses futures studies and its methods. Whilst the value of creative and intuitive approaches has long been acknowledged by futurists, in practice the tendency has been to revert to more analytic, empirical and evidence-based approaches at the expense of imaginative ones. Discussion of any role for poetry in futures studies has been minimal. o Contemporary poetry has had surprisingly little to say about the future.