World Futures

In the 1950s and 1960s a vast number of Anglo-American institutions and strategic planners began turning more aggressively to the question of the future. This new field was called futurology. But as recognizable as the future might have been conceptually to the new discipline, to frame the period in these terms may actually conceal the most transformative quality of the discipline's discursive practice. Here, Williams, wants to argue, rather, that people can more productively refer to this period as having initiated a new mode of ostensibly secular prophecy in which the primary objective was not to foresee the future but rather to schematize, in narrative form, a plurality of possible futures. This new form of projecting forward posited the capitalizable, systematic immediacy of multiple, plausible worlds, all of which had to be understood as equally potential and, at least from our current perspective, nonexclusive. It is a development visible, for example, in a distinct terminological transition toward futurological plurality and its correlates.