Futures: Necessity, Experiment and the School for Organizing

In this chapter I want to make an argument about what ‘the future’ might look like and how we might get there. It seems to me important to disconnect ideas about the future from the fetish of technology as both the cause and evidence of future making and instead, using Alain Badiou’s framing of ‘the event’, to understand transformation as a way of thinking about changes in social organization. However, to avoid the problems with singular versions of the future I propose a ‘school for organizing’ as a practice which insists on multiplicity - teaching and researching what Roberto Unger calls an experimental approach to organization in order to achieve what Erik Olin Wright’s terms ‘ruptural’ social change. It seems to me that there can be many futures, and human beings must learn to explore and practice their variety, developing a relentlessly optimistic yet conditional approach because only one future will never be enough.