Colebrook, on the "Future"

One way to pose the question of the unacceptable is to consider what we, as a species, might affirm as our own or reject as inhuman. This is a standard and complex border, played out in the thought experiments of monstrosity and the genre of the supposedly post-apocalyptic. If we imagine a future where certain aspects of humanity take over then we may adjust ourselves accordingly. Dystopias are warnings or cautionary tales in which a tendency of the present may be averted. (This is perhaps why many post-apocalyptic dystopias have considered unacceptable solutions to the problem of energy (ranging from the cannibalism of Soylent Green [1973] and Kenneth Cook’s Play Little Victims [1978] to the faux humans bred for maintaining the rest of us in Brave New World and Moon [2009].)

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Such dystopias would, presumably, act as salutary cautions against us fol- lowing the course of our current actions to the nightmarish conclusions that would follow. If we imagine another species—vampires—who are defined by a certain inhumanity that has manifested itself in the human species, then the battle for humanity as life becomes a figural war against the future. The vampiric or zombied other is an allegory for humanity gone awry, the bad humanity from which we can save ourselves in order to emerge as properly and justifiably human. That is: we imagine what it might be for the inhumanity within ourselves—a rapacity, ruthlessness and consuming rage—to become a species in its own right (figured as the dystopian man of the future). Rather than deal with humanity’s war on itself we have narrativized and figured the horror of humanity into some distant other. We imagine that it is in the future that man becomes can- nibalistic, void of empathy, ruthlessly calculative, and so dependent on technology that he ceases to think; in this exercise of the imagination we preclude considering all the ways in which this ‘other’ dystopian ‘man’ has already (and has always already) arrived.
The supposedly future narratives of the post-apocalyptic are counter- futural. We represent the future as possibly overtaken by destruction, can- nabilism, zombies, violent technocracy or the invasion of mindlessness; in so doing we present as possibly futural and counter-human just those tendencies that have marked the species to date. In so doing—for all our post-apocalyptic or techno-utopian posthuman imaginings—we remain tied to a nostalgia for the properly human that has supposedly been threatened by an inhumanity that may appear from without. We remain in a state of denial or reaction towards the future in two senses: human- ity’s end presents itself to us, and rather than ask the question this poses we instead imagine external threats to the species that are then warded off in a clear species-species agonistics. (One would not want to read too much, or perhaps anything at all, into the current vogue for vampire fic- tion, except perhaps to note that like late eighteenth-century gothic it occurs alongside the frenzied affirmation of the life of man against vari- ous forms of threatening transcendence.) We also war against the future by presenting the world of the present—a world of species self-annihi- lation and global rapacity—as a future dystopia, or as a possibility that may occur unless humanity saves itself. What we do not ask, and herein

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would lie a possible acceptance of the future, is not whether man ought to survive, but why this question is so unacceptable as to be constantly displaced and dis-figured.