Future World

Abstract

Using the 2010 film Into Eternity as a springboard for thought, this article considers how archaeologies of the future might help us make sense of how to seek commonality and take care across vast temporal scales. The film, about a nuclear waste repository in Finland, addresses the impossibility of communicating across millennia. In thinking with this film, we engage with recent responses to the post-human call, arguing that they are inadequate in dealing with the new questions that are asked by post-human thought. Instead, we attempt to engage the work of Spinoza and Sloterdijk in rethinking the human as a strategic position or point of purchase amongst the shared materiality of present and future worlds. We offer the concepts of the materially affective and atmosphere in order to identify points of connection, drawing on moments in Into Eternity to work through these arguments in a tentative repositioning of the human as a site of concern

Archaeological encounters: Ethics and aesthetics under the mark of the Anthropocene

“…Some of this we have explored in our own work (Figs. 1–5), through attendance to oceanic drift matter with unclear origins and biographies and with equally uncertain futures and destinations (Pétursdóttir 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021), through dilapidated architecture blending any comfortable categorization of nature and culture and of heritage and waste (Pétursdóttir 2013; 2014; 2016; Sørensen 2015; 2016; 2017a; 2017b; 2021) and through nuclear waste repositories planned on the basis of timescales beyond any human grasp (Dawney, Harris and Sørensen 2017; Sørensen 2018). What we gather from these empirical experiences is that any form of reaction to current environmental challenges – in the broadest sense of the expression – necessitates a concern not only for human being and human agency, but unavoidably also a sensitivity to how non-human beings affect and endure in the world.…”

Nuclear memory: Archival, aesthetic, speculative

“…As a mode of aesthetic nuclear memory, what is noteworthy about this example is the way it draws on certain affective tendencies of matter to instil atmospheres of inhospitality and fear – affects aimed at not the human subjective today, but of any subject whatsoever in the future (Bains 2002; Keating 2022a). As Dawney et al (2017, 114) notes, such “affective engagements open up new (speculative) possibilities for exploring the shared spaces occupied by humans in the present and future”.…”

“…In doing so, we assay recent advancements in nuclear cultures research and suggest avenues for future work in geography. To date, relatively little has been said about how geographical concepts help advance and respond to the problem of communicating memory of nuclear waste materials into the future (though see Dawney, Harris and Sørensen 2017;Doel 2019;Engelmann 2022;Keating 2022a;Storm 2019). This relative lack of geographical engagement is perhaps surprising because engagements with nuclear waste futures (Brylska 2020;Harrison 2016;Joyce 2020;Masco 2021) invoke questions of landscape and heritage process, non-human materiality and agency, world-making, as well as affective and non-representational modes of expression that have become key geographical concerns.…”

Anticipated futures? Knowing the heritage of drift matter

“…Other responses rather consider how environmental unrest also unsettles understandings of heritage and even urges a profound rethinking of the ontology grounding it (e.g. Solli et al 2011;Robin et al 2014;Fredengren 2015;Harrison 2015;Olsen and Pétursdóttir 2016;Dawney, Harris, and Sørensen 2017). Here, an important trope is how the current climate unsettles rigid Cartesian oppositions, where the distinction between Nature and Culture is the most pronounced.…”