words from the future 04/08/21
proleptic/expansometer
Hello, loves!
Three weeks ago I wrote to you about prefiguration. Very soon after, I was reading a paper my friend Karmela shared with me, co-authored by the genius worldchanging scholar poet Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, and it held this sentence:
We therefore understand learning environments as prefigurative and proleptic spaces—that is, settings that work to enact the future in the present in ways that shape moment-to-moment interaction, connecting micro and macro scales of historical activity, self-determination, and change.
!!!
So yes: Merriam-Webster has “prolepsis” as:
the representation or assumption of a future act or development as if presently existing or accomplished.
Online Etymology Dictionary good as always too:
from Latin prolepsis, from Greek prolēpsis "an anticipating," etymologically "a taking beforehand," from prolambanein "to take before, receive in advance," from pro "before" (see pro-) + lambanein "to take" (see lemma)
Just 100% a word from the future and I love it so much.
And I’ll slide in a recent favorite vision for the future: A People’s Orientation to a Regenerative Economy. I grew up shaped by parents with some radical politics AND by an ambient social discourse that says a different world may or may not be possible, but no one has really thought it through or has any specific designs for it, and whewww that is a lieeee useful to protect a bunch of shitty extractively-obtained wealth but it’s an everywhere lie that needs constant counternarrative, at least for me. I find it so helpful to read things like this Orientation, knowing I won’t retain every policy point but that it will get further into my bones that a) what we are fighting for is not abstract and b) when we fight we win! We gotta take it before they want us to (which is of course never).
And today in proleptic lexicography:
In the future you want to live in/act as if you live in now, what’s this word mean? You could reply to this email or draw a picture or leave a comment or tell some friends <3
I like to imagine that I have an expansometer, in which I can turn up when I need to remind myself that another future is possible, and I can live into it - so that expansometer can be turned up, my a stereo, to help expand my thinking. Like a dial in my brain, maybe. Oh - Aurora - you're thinking a little too narrowly, let's turn it up to 11!