Culture as a Lens on the Future

In my piece on the New Economics of Manufacturing (November 2015), I mentioned Jacques Attali's idea that culture can provide clues about the future.

For Attali, music is not simply a reflection of culture, but a harbinger of change, an anticipatory abstraction of the shape of things to come. from a review of Attali's 1985 book Noise

I have now been reading about a research project in Germany, which used literature, not to predict the future exactly, but to identify potential trouble-spots. The project was led by Jürgen Wertheimer, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Tübingen, and part-funded by the German Ministry of Defence.

The project was able to detect weak signals of sociopolitical and ethnic conflict, not only from contemporary novels but also from the cultural response they generated. For example, by analysing relevant fictional material, they were able to demonstrate worsening sentiment between the Albanian and Serbian communities more than ten years before the Kosovo crisis of 1998. Applying the same technique to Algeria, they picked up weak signals of impending crisis two years before the events of February 2019. They also provided advance warning of conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.

If verbal conflict provides advance warning of real conflict, can literary action also be used to defuse conflict? Governments clearly think so, intervening with positive propaganda to promote the desired messages, as well as censorship, exile or worse for writers who touch a sensitive nerve. But not only is this intervention often counter-productive, it also helps amplify the warning signals for those such as Professor Wertheimer who are looking out for them.

There is a simplistic view that media and culture can cause social and political events - this is known as the media effects narrative. For this reason, political actors often wish to control media and culture, as a way of managing social and political change. Does the control then become the message?

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Philipp Oltermann, ‘At first I thought, this is crazy’: the real-life plan to use novels to predict the next war (The Guardian, 26 June 2021)

Studienprojekt Cassandra - not to be confused with the US Project Cassandra (Wikipedia)