Enframing the present with futures-forecasting habits defuses the shock of imagined catastrophe

Evidence

The accumulation of books like Future Shock, the incorporation of habits of “futurology” into our everyday life, the modification of our perception of things to include their “tendency” and of our reading of time to approximate a scanning of complex probabilities — this new relationship to our own present both includes elements formerly incorporated in the experience of the “future” and blocks or forestalls any global vision of the latter as a radically transformed and different system. If catastrophic “near-future” visions of, say, overpopulation, famine, and anarchic violence are no longer as effective as they were a few years ago, the weakening of those effects and of the narrative forms that were designed to produce them is not necessarily due only to overfamiliarity and overexposure; or rather, this last is perhaps also to be seen as a modification in our relationship to those imaginary near futures, which no longer strike us with the horror of otherness and radical difference. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 624

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to reification/periodization of the present: the process this section describes mirrors how the novel itself reifies its 1950s present into history. Connects to reader’s core task of mapping their own position via style. — connects to: An open project enfolds future modifications, so catastrophe feels fated rather than surprising; Thinking the future beyond ‘what is to come’ dissolves time as ordered moments — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 210; The future is neither wholly invisible nor foreseeable but surprises by precipitation — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1239 (+3 more)
• ADDENDUM: Speaks to the framing in ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ about shifting perceptions of what is present versus latent — the colonization of the present by futurology parallels the grafting of futurity onto living infrastructure.