Heli Paalumäki:

"Imagine a Good Day" -- Bertrand de Jouvenel's Idea of Futuribles and the Fictitious Histories of the Future

"When we think about the future our minds cannot comprehend what will actually happen but what could happen, possible futures." In the 1960's, this idea was central to the texts of a French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987). Since then, the so-called humanistic or hermeneutic futures studies have regarded writings like L'art de la conjecture 1964 (transl. The Art of Conjecture) as classic texts. After the Second World War, the first phase of futures studies was characterized by positivistic and even technocratic ideals. They implied an idea of future as an almost complete territory which could be known with certainty. Bertrand de Jouvenel, however, stated that there is not only one but indeterminately many possible, historically alternative, futures. The French term futuribles, he adopted from Luis de Molina, a 16th-century modal theologist. According to Jouvenel, the futures studies or futurology, as it was sometimes called, was by no means an objective science but an art, a composition of imagination and assumptions of subjective certainties. Additionally, the futuribles were to be presented as a narrative that begins in present and ends in future.

Interestingly enough, it has been common to think that the literature is concerned with human possibilities. When considering the difference between history and poetry, Aristotle argued that history describes "what has happened" but poetry "what may happen." Thus, in his Poetics, Aristotle seems to think that poetry is more serious and higher than history: it tends to express the universal whereas history deals with the particular. By the universal he meant "how a person of a certain type on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity." Especially, the issue of possibilities has been elemental in the interpretations of utopian literature. In 1950, the French critic Raymond Ruyer defined a utopian mode as "mental exercise on lateral possibilities." Consequently, what arises is the question, how the traditions of fantasy work in relation to the narratives of possible futures and what could be, after all, their relation to written history.

In this paper I shall deal with the relationship between the real and the imagined in the descriptions of future of Bertrand de Jouvenel. This theme is essential in my thesis but, simultaneously, so complicated that here my intention is not to present any final picture of it but, instead, open some points for discussion. My presentation has two focal points, firstly, the meaning of images of future and, secondly, the plausibility of the narratives in relation to the present, the existent.

A Future imagined

The images of future are closely linked with the use of imagination, whose role here can be summarized by referring both to its importance in the making of actual realities and to the broadening of the understanding of the present situation. In The Art of Conjecture, Bertrand de Jouvenel stresses greatly the importance of images in the active shaping of future. According to him, there are two kinds of images, representations of past or present things and pure fictions that do not represent any reality, neither past nor present, but are created by imagination. Moreover, some of these fictions play a capital role in our lives because they may motivate action. Thus, fictitious images situated in the future may actually call out a future reality by acting as the basis of intentional projects.

Accordingly, Jouvenel, sometimes considered as an idealist, can be associated with the tradition where creativity and subjective ideas are greatly valued. In his opinion, images of future are the essence of ego, the consciousness of one's ability to influence the environment. After all, he writes, only the images turn the ego into a creator of possible futures. Thus, by underlining imagination, Jouvenel lays emphasis on the undetermined aspects of human action. Imagination is closely tied up with free will as well as responsibility for the possible consequences. In the works of Jouvenel, the more images and goals are designed by free imagination, the more the person is the true author of future history.

Interestingly, and he was not the only one, Jouvenel seems to have worried about the matter that, in contemporary society, there was a lack of images because of the new kind of fatalism caused by technology:

"It is not clear to me that because we can now build supersonic transport planes we should, therefore, hasten to build them - many other things are more pressing for human convenience. [...] The lack of any clear images of the style of life we are building is a cause of anxiety. This anxiety is revealed in the most characteristic literature of our time -- science fiction. This displays what might be called a new Fatalism, a feeling that our ways of life are being determined entirely by technological advances, through no choice of ours. Such a feeling is widespread, and fed by many incautious expressions." (Jouvenel: Utopia for Practical Purposes. -Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. by Frank E. Manuel 1966, 226)

In essence, Jouvenel seems to have had nothing against science fiction, on the contrary. In his memoirs he notes that HG Wells's stories can be read as descriptions of possible futures. What is important here, in my opinion, is the obvious desire to bring some of the classic means and purposes of fictional stories to the use of the scholarly study of future. Those are, firstly, the wider and holistic understanding of human life in its environments and the many possibilities that depend on creativity and, in an ideal case, on democratic choice. Jouvenel expressed a need to think about a future man's life in its entirety instead of cutting up the problem of existence into discrete problems. The task should be, not to prophesy, but to imagine what makes "a good day":

"Thus we come to see that what we need is to address ourselves to the ordinary day of the ordinary man. Take this man when he wakes up, follow him through to the time of sleep. Plot, as it were, the sequence of his pleasurable and unpleasurable impressions, and now imagine what "a good day" should be. Picturing this "good day" is the first step into a modern utopia; then you will have to seek the conditions which can bring about this "good day"."(Jouvenel 1966, 229)

The idea to look at the ordinary life in its entirety makes an interesting mate to contemporary historiography in France, the Annales school which also, in its strive for total history, emphasized ordinary life. The difference is, of course, that the futures studies lay more stress on subjectivity but, still, comparing the ideas of historians and futurologists could be worth while.

In this connection, however, I would like to pay more attention to the relationship between fiction and futures thinking and, thus, come to my second point. Stories of possible futures can be equated to historical, literary or cinematic fiction in respect that they may act as critique of present state of affairs and motivate change. As in utopias or science fiction, especially, this happens by showing the probable unpleasant outcome of the present intentions or, respectively, the alternative ideal picture. As such, their purpose is not to forecast but to emancipate from past or present. Jouvenel, as several of his contemporaries, argued that the final purpose of futures studies is to make the most wanted alternative to come real. Futures studies were, thus, presented also as an openly political tool for decision-making and, as such, intended against the technocratic and totalitarian temptations of the time. This feature also arouse criticism and dislike from several directions at the time.

Plausibility of the stories

Significantly, the narrative of the possible future is not the mere form but the essence of the understanding of the future, just like it is agreed to be the case with historical narratives, as well. This is especially true in the case of the possible futures because the pictured events have no counterpart in any reality, that is, the stories are no "representations" in the way historical narratives, anyhow, are. Thus, futuribles are, in my opinion, the narratives. The plot of the narrative of a possible future can be defined, shortly, as the construction of stages from the present to the future end. There is, of course, plenty of literature written by futures experts concerning the scenario building. Here, instead, I consider the narratives of possible futures in the context of history and the fictitious histories of the future.

Accordingly, as in the quotation above, after imagining "the good day", the conditions of its fulfilment have to be put forth. This is, naturally, where the question of plausibility comes in. It can be argued that the there is both more freedom and more limitations in the composing of possible futures compared with the drawing up of historical narratives. As Bertrand de Jouvenel stated, human beings are free to imagine anything and situating their images to the future. Surely, it is possible to do the same with the past, but there is always someone asking whether it is "really true" or not. Even the authors of historical fiction have to embrace some epochal features to meet the readers' expectations of a believable story. But, traditionally, the most free have been the writers of fantasy, utopia or science fiction, because they don't have to submit their story to any preconditions of the historical world but they may create a world of their own. Interestingly enough, this genre has often been characterized as speculation concerning the limits between the possible and the impossible.

The narratives concerning possible futures can be situated somewhere in between the categories above. As argued by Jouvenel, human beings cannot grasp what will happen, the future history, but only things that could happen. The possible futures have to be descendants of the present just like the present is an actualized possible descendant of some past situation. Consequently, the imagined future has to be historically plausible to become attributed into the narrative. Nevertheless, the demanded connection to the actual reality is also a limitation. History, a historical novel or a film can tell about finished developments and ended civilisations: they may not have any connection to the present state of affairs except our curiosity and need to remember. In the history of a futurible, the present has to be somehow included. This also distances the possible futures from intentionally fictive descriptions of future which may, in fact, not situate in historical time at all. The fictitious histories of future could, indeed, be sorted according to their degree of historical plausibility. After all, it is the reader’s task to give the narratives of future a final meaning.

Epilogue

This paper could be summarized by arguing that, in the 1960's, the modern dichotomy between reality and fiction was questioned by Bertrand de Jouvenel and the other so-called hermeneutic scholars in a way that brought the futures studies closer to the fictitious stories of the future. It was not only about defining anew the boundaries between different genres and different situations of communication but also reconstructing the "culture of futures" after the Second World War. This would be interesting to compare to the changes in historical culture at the same time. It seems that, however, during the years of fast modernization, the disengagement from the past was quite obvious and, simultaneously, there was a sense of decline in the alternatives of the future, even from the global point of view.

Consequently, Jouvenel' s ideas can be seen as critique to deterministic and fatalistic tendencies of the time. Instead of aiming to control the world by means of knowledge and technology, Jouvenel stressed the critical understanding of the past and present and insight into the future. Like utopias since the 17th century, stories of possible futures were intended to influence the real events. Nonetheless, whereas the possible futures always imply an historical connection to the present, the fictitious histories may even sometimes wonder at the impossible.

Heli Paalumäki
Department of History
20014 University of Turku
tel. +358 (0)2-333 6260, fax. +358 (0)2-333 6560
E-mail: heli.paalumaki@utu.fi