Eshun does not conceive the future as radically open. Nowadays, it has become a space that is under a constant threat of being colonized:

“In the colonial era of the early to middle twentieth century, avantgardists from Walter Benjamin to Frantz Fanon revolted in the name of the future against a power structure that relied on control and representation of the historical archive. Today, the situation is reversed. The powerful employ futurists and draw power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past. The present moment is stretching, slipping for some into yesterday, reaching for others into tomorrow.” (Eshun 289)

He distinguishes three groups of cultural objects through which this colonization takes place: mathematical formalizations, science fiction, and hybrid forms between them. As long as these projections are uncritically received, these projected images of the future appear to be the causal result of the present. Eshun therefore proposes three chronopolitical practices that try to counter the colonization of the future: a theoretical practice that critically reads these produced futures, an artistic practice that constructs alternative images of the future, so-called counterfutures, and finally an archeological practice that analyzes past counterfutures.

Strangely enough, Eshun observes, that historically there has been a taboo on creative reflections on the future exactly by the proponents of countermemory.

Because the practice of countermemory defined itself as an ethical commitment to history, the dead, and the forgotten, the manufacture of conceptual tools that could analyze and assemble counterfutures was understood as an unethical dereliction of duty. Futurological analysis was looked upon with suspicion, wariness, and hostility. (Eshun 288)

Through its reluctance to engage the future, the practice of countermemory unwittingly fortifies the existing power relations

The following analogy might help to clarify Eshun’s argument. The function of the future in history, I would argue, is identical to that of a vanishing point in painting. While a vanishing point makes it possible to combine different elements in a single scene, this heterogeneity does not constitute multiple perspectives. On the contrary, it captures these diverse elements in a single image and includes them in a single point of view. The pluralizing of elements depends on a fixation of the perspective. Understood like this, a vanishing point is not an element in the scene – not even a special one – but an operation. One that simultaneously has a totalizing and a pluralizing effect.

The future conceived as a single point functions in exactly the same way. It actually enables the inclusion of multiple stories in a single history. Without a pluralized account of the future, countermemories do not offer alternative views on history; they only contribute to an all-encompassing vision.

Paradoxically, though, opening up the future can only occur by critically investigation objects from the past. Eshun thereby creates a new category of cultural objects. That of past images of the future: counterfutures. It would be a mistake to confuse this new category with that of utopia (or dystopia for that matter).

Science fiction

What actually happens, is that Eshun simply reverses the temporality. Whereas in the practices of countermemory, the past is pluralized by fixating either the present or the future, he proposes to do exactly the opposite. The future is pluralized through the fixation of an (not the) image of the past.

“The field of Afrofuturism does not seek to deny the tradition of countermemory. Rather, it aims to extend that tradition by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective.” (Eshun 289)

In order for this practice to function, however, it is necessary to constantly shift between operations that invoke countermemories and those that produce counterfutures. Otherwise, it remains impossible to pluralize perspectives on history. Eshun implicitly argues for a plurality of operations. As long as a single operation dominates practices – in this case emancipatory ones – cannot avoid totalization, in spite of its good intentions. Totalitarianism resides on the level of operations rather than content.

This text is a (very, very early) draft. Please do not quote from it!