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Hello, The following event may be of interest to you: The Thousand and One Futures Thursday, October 30, 2014 Guest lecturer R. John Williams (Yale)From the mid-1940s to the late-1950s, a new mode of ostensibly secular prophecy emerged from within the authoritative sphere of the American military-industrial-academic complex, spreading quickly throughout the world in technocratic and managerial organizations. This new mode of projecting forward was marked by assumptions about the inherent multiplicity of possible futures as distinct from more powerfully singular visions of “the” future. This presentation tracks the development of this transformation in two phases: the first computational, secular, and cybernetic, and the second, narratological, quasi-religious, and generally committed to various "oriental" philosophies. Questions addressed will include: Is the postmodern era, as some have described it, an “end of temporality”? Or is the postmodern narrative condition, rather, an intense multiplication of temporal experience? Is it possible that the sheer number of stories we tell ourselves about the future may not be as progressive a practice as we tend to assume it is? How did we arrive at a present with so many possible futures? Location: Reem-Kayden Center Room 103 Sponsor: American and Indigenous Studies Program; Asian Studies Program; Experimental Humanities Program; Japanese Program; Literature Program Contact: Nathan Shockey. E-mail: [email protected] Phone: 845-758-6822 If you would like to see more events please visit the following URL: http://inside.bard.edu/religion/events/