Future Perfect

It is only man, so far as we can conceive, who has the means of altering his world by resort to "if"-clauses, who can generate such clauses as: "if Caesar had not gone to the Capitol that day." It seems to me that this fantastic, formally incommensurable "grammatology" of verb-futures, of subjunctives and optatives proved indispensable to the survival, to the evolution of the "language-animal" confronted, as we were and are, by the scandal, by the incomprehensibility of individual death. There is an acute sense in which every human use of the future tense verb "to be" is a negation, however limited, of mortality. Even as every use of an "if"-sentence tells of a refusal of the brute inevitability, of the despotism of the fact. "Shall," "will," and "if," circling in intricate fields of semantic force around a hidden centre or nucleus of potentiality, are the pass-words to hope.

-- George Steiner, Grammars of Creation

Confident and unafraid, we labor on -- not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.

-- John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address
American University, 1963

Hope and fear contain the specters of one another in the forms of hypothetical successes and failures. Steiner writes that the two "are as indivisible from each other as they are from grammar. Hope encloses a fear of unfulfillment. Fear has in it a mustard-seed of hope, the intimation of overcoming." This entanglement holds true in thought and speech as well as in action. Any time we speak, constatively or perfomatively, we admit the presence of this two-headed monster: we hope to be understood and fear that we will not; we hope our proposals we be accepted, and fear they will be denied; we believe our marriage vows declare their own immutability, but always fear the dissolution of our bonds. Hope might be embodied in the Christ of Revelation, who assures us he is the alpha and the omega. As Steiner says, "The future tense of the verb inhabits nearly every saying of Jesus." We find the fear in the form of Cassandra, the prophetess of Troy, whose warnings were cursed to be unheeded. Freud understood, in his analysis of dreams and literary production, that in these realms we traffick routinely in fears and desires; desire for attainment, fulfillment, or plenitude; the fear of failure, inadequacy, and death.

Political rhetoric finds its daily bread in the future tense. We see it in campaign slogans, political speeches, and even the names of our military operations. Consider the latest "strategery" for subduing Baghdad, the policy of clear and hold, otherwise known as "Operation Forward Together." In Israel, the party whose tragic decline mirrors, perhaps, that of its founder: Kadima, meaning forward. Our current President is inordinately fond of the future tense, unfortunately to the detriment of the Present one. His ignorance of the past tense is well-established. As Maggie Howell has pointed out below, the President's fetish for the future tense is ever on display:

The war is not over -- and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious. If we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons. We are in a war that will set the course for this new century -- and determine the destiny of millions across the world.

The President, like all Presidents, likes to talk about "our children." He also likes to talk about "destiny," which others have described as fate. I suppose the difference, if I might make a broad and possibly facile claim, is that destiny tends to sound a lot more positive -- at least a lot more Christian. Destiny, destination: a place we want to go. From fate we get notiong but fatal, fatality, fatalist -- none of which, I imagine, does well in the focus groups.

Fatality sounds like mortality, which is precisely the opposite of what the salesmen are selling. One wonders what policy would look like if that word carried a little more weight. Freud put it bluntly:

If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons -- becomes inorganic once again -- then we shall be compelled to say that 'the aim of all life is death'...

Camus perhaps more so:

Il n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux: c'est le suicide.

(There is but one philosophical question of any real seriousness: that is suicide.)

Borges once imagined a world in which the future tense was irrelevant, incoherent -- as was the past tense. He does so by eliminating the connections between time and space, and therefore removing the concepts of movement or change via causation:

It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time. Spinoza ascribes to his inexhaustible divinity the attributes of extension and thought; no one in Tlön would understand the juxtaposition of the first (which is typical only of certain states) and the second - which is a perfect synonym of the cosmos. In other words, they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas.

This monism or complete idealism invalidates all science. If we explain (or judge) a fact, we connect it with another; such linking, in Tlön, is a later state of the subject which cannot affect or illuminate the previous state. Every mental state is irreducible: there mere fact of naming it - i.e., of classifying it - implies a falsification. From which it can be deduced that there are no sciences on Tlön, not even reasoning. The paradoxical truth is that they do exist, and in almost uncountable number. The same thing happens with philosophies as happens with nouns in the northern hemisphere. The fact that every philosophy is by definition a dialectical game, a Philosophie des Als Ob, has caused them to multiply. There is an abundance of incredible systems of pleasing design or sensational type. The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one such aspect. Even the phrase "all aspects" is rejectable, for it supposes the impossible addition of the present and of all past moments. Neither is it licit to use the plural "past moments," since it supposes another operation... One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

Borges's ironic purpose here is to be entirely contradictory -- since it is clear that the study of "psychology" in the world of "Tlon" runs absolutely counter to all of our pedestrian experience. We believe in causality, and are always trapped between our regrets or nostalgia about the past, and our fears or desires for the future -- as Derrida put it in his treatise on painting, trapped between memory and anticipation.

Our subject today is really just the latter of these: anticipation in all its forms. The GOP has, for the past several years, monopolized and capitalized upon the rhetoric of fear, while dressing it up for the camera in the garb of some kind of hope. This strategy has led them, this week, to what one might consider a new low, releasing a campaign advertisement written by Zawahiri and bin Laden, "an advertisement featuring Al Qaeda leaders threatening harm to the United States amid dark footage of explosions, fires, and terrorists in action." Bush and Cheney prattle on and on about the imminent threats to our existence. I've written enough about his already, so I will simply offer up an example of an alternative. If we cannot release ourselves from our covenant with the future tense, perhaps we could at least adopt it to our best purposes, hitch it to our better natures. It has been done before:

What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children - not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women - not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

The endless war the neocons advocate is, of course, dressed up in the language of peace -- but this language is transparently inadequate, proffering hope while immediately quashing the means to achieve the hoped for result. One reason for this is that the method is exclusive. The President claims to want to bring freedom and democracy to others -- but does so not out of altruism but out self-interest, and enforces this interest with the barrel of a gun: "a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war." When Bush says we "fight them over there" so we don't have to "fight them over here," he reveals his true purpose, and commits what Emerson called blasphemy:

Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity—anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.

Beyond praying for a "particular commodity," the policy of remaking the Middle East in our own image fails to recognize the problem of irreducible difference. As Borges noted that Spinoza noted: "all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger." These longings can never, of course, be realized. The stone withers and the tiger dies, and both become the earth upon which a traveller may later come along to tread -- like Whitman says:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

As representative men and women have known since the beginnings of language, all things, as Emerson says of language itself, are "fluxional." But it is a kind of hubris to enforce a change to which the subject is inherently resistant. As Derrida has noted, it is folly to attempt to efface difference. Kennedy understood this as well:

So, let us not be blind to our differences - But let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

We are all mortal. Can anyone imagine such a phrase being utterred in a public, political space today? That we are all mortal is, as Steiner understands, the fact that generates the future tense in the first place. This fact is no mean or unfortunate thing, but rather a liberating one -- it is a good fact, like all facts, and like all times; as Emerson says, in a bold deployment of the if-clause:

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.