What agency do emotions have in forming futures?

Abstract

Emotions have agency in futures formations. Futures are formed through access to resources such as power, knowledge, and technology. One of the possible ways to rearrange these frameworks is to renegotiate the meanings associated with future alternatives. This is reached through the fluidity of inner life. The shift in the understanding of how emotions work can be seen as with possibilities to that fluidity. Emotions are constructs that have been formed with culture and our experience. We are in a constant learning process with them in relation to what they mean to us and others. As a phenomenon, emotions have intentionality, and they work between us all. They are attached to a cultural sphere through the naming process and can be seen as identity-forming entities. Some emotions have more specific functions than being part of creating inner fluidity by interpersonal qualities. Of these, care was first introduced as a giver of direction to our intentions. Care then gave direction to optimism and pessimism as ways of relating to the future. The specific field of Black pessimism does not validate historical, present or future suffering as an enabler of a better future. Black pessimism offers the strategies of empathy and resignation to the suffering. Hope is an emotion that is strongly connected to the future, but it can turn into a self-image project if not connected to action. Lastly the text looked into the feminist idea of wonder as a future opening emotion. It too can be seen as both activating and possibility opening or merely a self-image project. The writer suggests to let the empathetic attitude towards suffering push against wonder to activate it. Emotions as futures forming agents are not without their pitfalls and dangers. To evade those dangers, they seem to need the company of each other as well as a cognitive understanding on how they work. In the end, is there something that conceptual visual art could offer in this relationship of emotions affecting futures formations? There is a difficulty of escaping the pull of the present when using a descriptive method of creating utopias and dystopias. The answer could lie in allowing more than one element at a time to be at work. Visual art can talk about more than one thing at a time, and expose what happens in the intersection of those things. It can also engage the viewer in a process that orients them towards the future. Alisha Wormsley manages to do this in her work. Wormsley’s practice does not isolate itself but engages with the community whose narrative she wants to reframe. Her practice manages to create fluidity in the inner life of the viewer. This is not a comfortable position, especially paired with the contemporary understanding of variety in emotions. We are left with a very solitary position in relation to shifting reality, with the consolation that we are not the only ones in that position.