Disconnective futures: Uncertainty, unfathomability, and the collapse of narrative crisis management

Abstract

Abstract The article explores the exhaustion of narrative as a cognitive instrument in trying to make sense of the “disconnective futures” of the Anthropocene and runaway technological imaginaries. Having its point of departure in the organic ties between narrative form and modern historical understanding, the article’s argument begins by sketching how the modern idea of a historical process entails constant crises of uncertainty, on the one hand, and functions simultaneously as the manager of the very crises it brings about, on the other. The means of this crisis management consists of crafting historical narratives which tame uncertainty and smooth ruptures in time into deeper continuities. It is this narrative crisis management of establishing connections between past, present, and futures, which breaks down when encountering the temporal disconnections of the Anthropocene and technological prospects. Narrative crisis management was created to attend to crises of uncertainty, but it is inadequate to cope with disconnective futures which are not merely uncertain, but unfathomable. Based on a distinction between uncertainty and unfathomability, the article argues that efforts to project narrative connections over disconnective futures produce cognitive failures, and concludes on a note of potential resolutions, hinting at the development of non-narrative and yet historically-minded cognitive instruments attuned to making sense of temporal disconnections.