Schutz’s argument in “Tiresias, or our Knowledge of Future Events”

The point of this particular posting is to bring to attention some of Alfred Schutz’s writings on the use of ‘futures’. Recently someone pointed me towards it due to my interest in understanding the role of futures in HCI and ubiquitous computing design.

Tucked away at the back of Volume II of Schutz’s Collected Papers is his essay on “Tiresias, or our Knowledge of Future Events”. In this essay, Schutz describes the inherently social ways in which understandings of the future are developed by members of society, as analysed from his phenomenological position. (Reading his work rather reminds me of Goffman’s style — rigorous and relentlessly detailed, drawing extensively from the phenomenological experience of the everyday, but without an obvious scientific ‘empirical’ derivation.)

One of Schutz’s key concept is the ‘stocks of knowledge’ that are developed by members of society in and through their everyday activities. I say ‘stocks’ because these are locally-rational, situationally-generated sets of knowledges that are relevant to the tasks-at-hand.

In this paper his argument seems to be that these knowledges play a fundamental role in the ways that we anticipate, prophesy, predict, forecast, guess, and intuit what will happen in the future and how we plan for those future events and determine their predicted unfolding. These situationally-relevant stocks of knowledge are developed through streams of past and present experiences. Although they are used as a ‘prediction space’ for the future, the same time, these knowledges are necessarily bound (and can only ever be) to the past. As Schutz states:

All projecting consists in an anticipation of future conduct by way of phantasying. It is, to use Dewey’s pregnant description of deliberation, “a dramatic rehearsal in imagination.” Yet projecting is more than mere phantasying. Projecting is motivated phantasying, motivated by the anticipated supervening intention of carrying out the project. The practicability of carrying out the projected action within the imposed frame of reality of the is an essential characteristic of the project. This refers, however, to our stock of knowledge at hand at the time of projecting. Performability of the projected action means that according to my present knowledge at hand the projected action, at least as to its type, would have been feasible if the action had occurred in the past.

It seems to me that the problem he is raising here is that future anticipations are inherently tied to these past and present stocks of knowledge, that that our understanding of the way the future may possibly develop is also bound to how these knowledges developed, but only in the past. Schutz calls this a kind of “anticipated hindsight”, i.e., that future prediction, foresight, forecasting, etc. is nothing less than hindsight transposed to a future framing. Or in other words, “we cannot expect any event of whose typicality we have had no pre-experience”. Instead:

Once materialized, the state of affairs brought forth by our actions will necessarily have quite other aspects than those projected. In this case foresight is not distinguished from hindsight by the dimension of time in which we place the event.

After the future event has (or has not) transpired, these experiences become part of the present-past stocks of knowledge:

Yet because of their very typicality our anticipations are necessarily more or less empty, and this will be filled in by exactly those features of the event, once it is actualized, that make it a unique individual occurrence.

These knowledges are also social, i.e., for them to have utility they must be shared, and known-in-common by members of society. In this way,

validity of anticipations […] is founded on the assumption that some or all of my fellow-men will find in their stock of knowledge at hand typically similar elements, and that these will determine the motives of their action.

This is all pretty abstract. But it can be understood in terms of how it can pose us with some potential problems when we are thinking about what technologies we can, might, or will build, and what the impacts of those technologies can, might, or will be. Perhaps not ‘problems’ as such, but rather necessary restrictions and limitations of the kinds of technologies we can possibly imagine, and how we treat them should they actually ‘arrive’. In my reading, Schutz’s argument gets us to the point where we appreciate that our anticipations and expectations about future technologies are derived from sets of existing typifications that are fundamentally based in the past. These typifications are ‘empty’, and ‘filled in’ with the specificities and peculiarities should the event actually transpire. In this way all visions of future technologies and societies are, and can only ever be, deeply embedded in the past, and the dimensions of feasibility understood as derived from the past. This is perhaps why many visions of the future are so bland and unadventurous.