Yesterday’s Futures: Global consistency in the recurring tropes of the modern social imaginary

Gerald Argenton

Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia, Annual Conference

Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA, Australia

From the times when the early modern yearnings for utopian places were replaced by the promise of the light of Progress, modern society became increasingly interested by the way its orderly, peaceful, harmonious future would be shaped by the benevolent forces of reason, science and technology. With the advent of mass media, the social imaginary was given a medium to expose those visions, through novels, magazines and various illustrations. This presentation will focus on the graphic representation of the modern social imaginary through three sets of materials from France, Japan and the United States of America, ranging from late 19th Century to the 1960s.
The point of the presentation is to compare the materials within each set, and with each other to observe the recurring tropes, whether it be historically or culturally.  For each of these futuristic projections have somehow the mark of their epoch still stamped into it. That is, a certain kind of consistency that, while projecting technology into the future, still keeps it familiar in the context of their respective time periods.
The titular “Yesterday’s Futures” is, quite ironically, our past. None of these materials ventured to imagine the world past the year 2000. This presentation will also be an opportunity to question “why is it so?”


Keywords: social imaginary, the promise of Progress, future, trope, familiarity