From the Future Past

In some languages, including German and English, there is a tense that is rarely used but which opens up a particularly interesting perspective on time and our relationship with it: the future perfect. We use it to express the assumption that an action will already have been completed by a certain time in the future, and to speak of events as though they had already happened, although they are yet to come. So we are not merely predicting that something will happen but transporting ourselves mentally to a point even further in the future and looking back from there to imagine a future that is already complete. In a sense, we travel through time to create a future past in which expectation and memory overlap and intertwine.

By thinking about and talking about how something will have happened, the future no longer seems like something that just befalls us. Rather, it becomes something we foresee and shape ourselves: we assume that something will have been as we imagine it to be. Because when we use the future perfect tense, we are usually fairly certain that what we are saying will actually become a reality: we formulate assumptions, form plans, make predictions and decisions. In this way, we somehow make things that do not yet exist tangible and comprehensible, create certainties and, in so doing, ground ourselves again in the here and now. 

Perhaps that is also the reason why we keep some things and not others: we already have a sense of how we will view them one day, we decide what we want to take with us into the future, what we would like to remember and what we would rather forget, believing we know what will have been important. Objects we attach meaning to and associate with particular people, places or moments. They become repositories of memories and reminders, without which we would hardly be able to remember anything. They not only make our relationship with the past more tangible, they also shape our outlook on the future: with them, we build our story, shape our identity and continue to write our biography. 

On a small scale, they can be found in very personal collections. Shells from the beach that we brought home from a trip, a handful of concert tickets kept as mementos, a photo album in which several generations of a family come together, or the camera roll of a smartphone filled with memorable snapshots alongside seemingly trivial visual notes and snippets of everyday communication. They tell of important experiences, encounters or turning points in our lives, or are closely linked to moments and impressions that are almost impossible to capture: a smell, a feeling, a fleeting moment.

On a larger scale, these repositories of memory are generally hidden away behind closed doors: in archives, libraries, museums or other institutions that preserve material artefacts and the historical records of entire societies, thereby safeguarding parts of their cultural memory for future generations. These are stores that are designed and built to last for eternity; they are monumental and somehow mysterious. Because you can’t really fully grasp what’s inside. Objects, documents or data which might be worthless elsewhere, or which currently (still) seem useless to us, are gathered, sorted, categorised, packaged, catalogued and stored here. Removed from their original contexts and functions, they become time capsules that preserve the past and keep it available for an unknown future. 

These places not only bring together different timelines and varying perspectives on history. At the same time, they reveal a selective approach that shows that these places do not preserve everything; that they are always incomplete and never neutral. This reflects the political and social structures, hierarchies and dynamics that determine what was considered worth preserving and was recorded at a particular time and in a particular place, and what was not: historically entrenched patriarchal and colonial power structures that exclude the experiences of marginalised groups or only document them fragmentarily; or events such as ideological upheavals, revolutions, regime changes and wars, which have destabilised, reordered, reinterpreted or even destroyed and erased existing historical narratives. Preservation can be seen as a complex and political act that determines who is part of the official memory and who has access to which stories, which narratives are passed down and shared with the outside world, and which traces fade and are lost. Thus, the archive[1] reveals itself to be more than just a static repository that merely accumulates, immobilises and freezes the past(s). Rather, it is a living place that rearranges memories, making experiences both visible and invisible. It thus becomes a place that has to be constantly questioned and reassessed: Which voices and perspectives are missing? Which realities of life are not in the picture, have been left out – and why? What are the archives not telling us?

As dynamic places, they also have the potential to change perspective and to reorient themselves. They make it possible to question existing social narratives and to create new versions of the past. Thus, with the help of eyewitness accounts, personal documents or alternative archives, history can be written “from the bottom up”. However, fiction and speculation can also fill the gaps left by undocumented experiences: what could it have been like, and how? asks Saidiya Hartman referring to the history of enslaved women in the Atlantic world. Based on fragmentary archival material, she constructs a counter narrative that uses imagination and the subjunctive mood, in which language thus becomes a tool which gives a face to lives that have passed “without a trace”.[2] It allows us to express wishes and possibilities, to imagine stories that have not (yet) been told, and thus to make them tangible. 

With archives, we trace our history while simultaneously constructing it, shaping identity and continuing to write it – and in doing so, we also produce our future. Building on shared memories and experiences, we safeguard values and truths that we have agreed upon and which, at the same time, need to be continually renegotiated. Especially in an age when content is increasingly blurred by artificial intelligence or rewritten by fake news, political propaganda and historical amnesia threaten fundamental democratic values, preserving collective memories seems an absolute necessity and a responsibility in order to counteract the forgetting and distortion of history. (How) do we even want to imagine a future without memory? What would a future without archives look like? 

Looking to our immediate future, the question as to what might be significant and worth preserving seems rather clouded. Crises, wars, pandemics, economic uncertainties and the immediate effects of global climate change mean that fears and worries about the future are omnipresent: how can we look to the future when faced with this? What do we want to take with us into this future? What will have been important? Or perhaps it is precisely in the face of this uncertain and fragile future that the central importance and necessity of preserving memories once again becomes apparent: they enable us to hold on to the things that seem important to us; they give us a sense of stability and a promise. They allow us to preserve visions and dreams, and to create spaces for possibilities. They give us the impression that we can control space and time and determine what is to come. What do we want to remember tomorrow, and how do we want to be remembered? How will collective memories develop in future, and what will our shared archives of the future look like?

[1] In the context of cultural and media studies, the concept of the archive was expanded by the poststructuralist archival turn in the early 1990s. This approach sees the archive not just as an institution, but also as a concept, and asks how knowledge is organised and under which conditions it is passed down. See Knut Ebeling, Stephan Günzel (eds.), Archivologie. Theorien des Archivs in Philosophie, Medien und Künsten, Berlin 2009.

[2] In her essay “Venus in Two Acts” from 2008, the author describes her methodology as “critical fabulation”; see Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”, in: small axe 26 (2008), pp. 1–14.