To-Day and To-Morrow, Literature, and Modernism

This chapter investigates the two-way traffic between To-Day and To-Morrow and modern literature and the arts. The preliminary section considers three outstanding volumes: Scheherazade; or, The Future of the English Novel (1927) by ‘John Carruthers’; Geoffrey West’s Deucalion; or, The Future of Literary Criticism (1930), which contrasts John Middleton Murry with I. A. Richards; and John Rodker’s The Future of Futurism (1926), which discusses Anglo-American literature. It argues that the series’ largely undervalues modernism, and barely attends to the visual arts or to modern music. It surveys the volumes dealing with English, poetry, drama, music, and censorship. The major section is devoted to other ways in which the series is relevant to modern and modernist literature, looking at how other writers responded to it. It turns out the series was followed by a surprising number of important literary figures. The key case studies here are Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, Joyce, Eliot, Lewis; and Waugh.

‘The machine man of 1925’

This chapter moves beyond the human sciences, to develop the exploration (launched in the Introductions and Chapter 1) of the re-imagining of human nature and potentiality. It investigates the representation of the machine in the series, contrasting the volumes concerned with the dehumanizing effects of mechanized mass production with those taking a more nuanced and original line, arguing that the machine liberates human thought and creativity (a topic of evident relevance to today’s discussions of human-computer interaction and AI). It argues that To-Day and To-Morrow’s presentation of technology as prosthesis offers a more benign vision of mechanized futurity than the ‘prosthetic modernism’ of writers like Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis. H. Stafford Hatfield’s Automaton: or, The Future of the Mechanical Man (1928) is examined for the way in which it floats the possibility of a ‘mechanical brain’, yet is indicative of a general inability to predict the imminent electronic computer—thus raising a question of the limits of prediction in relation to thought-paradigms. A line is suggested from the series’ running together of technology, media and psychology, to the development of media studies, especially as articulated by Marshall McLuhan.

Human Sciences

This chapter focuses on the ways in which the scientific paradigm gets invoked and applied across a range of volumes dealing with topics other than science; specifically those that tend now to get grouped together under the heading of the human sciences. The influence of the logical positivism of the Vienna School is considered, not only on To-Day and To-Morrow but on Ogden’s other major publishing ventures. Volumes on criminology, the sociology of religion, psychical research, Eastern civilization, politics, education, and sexual morality are explored. Also considered are those volumes offering resistance to the scientific paradigm, notably one by Robert Graves on humour, and another on nonsense. Concludes with a discussion of the place of psychology—conceived by Ogden as the master-discipline—in the series.

Conclusion

This steps back from the series in two respects. First, it assesses its broader reception, looking at its sales as well as reviews. It considers why it ended when it did. And it considers why it is not better known. It then assesses the significance of the project. Taking issue with Paul Saint-Amour’s study of interwar literature, Tense Future, it argues that the series’ futurological orientation offered a means of keeping a utopian hope alive in the face of anxiety about future catastrophe. It draws on Saint-Amour’s taxonomy of ‘critical futurities’, which assembles three currents of thought: ‘nuclear criticism, queer temporalities scholarship, and work that strives to re-emplot or reactivate futures past’. I argue that while the series most obviously falls into the third category, it also anticipates the others. This is demonstrated via a discussion of Haldane’s imagination of global annihilation, and the non-normative temporalities of a number of the volumes. A contrast with the 1999 collection Predictions reveals To-Day and To-Morrow’s success in anticipating future futurology. Ultimately, the series is posed as not merely offering some of the best writing on the individual topics, but as offering, collectively, a major documentation of how the interwar period thought about time, modernity, life, art and science. In doing so, it transforms our sense of modernism and modernity.

To-Day and To-Morrow, Cultural Studies, and Everyday Life

Taking up the suggestion at the end of Chapter 4, this one proposes that an important effect of the concerted futurological project was to place a novel emphasis in the series on everyday life; and that this in turn contributed to the development—already in embryo—of cultural and media studies. After a discussion of these emerging disciplines, volumes are analysed dealing with advertising, the press, communication and travel, the home and the family, law, the environment, and leisure. A key volume in this discussion is C. E. M. Joad’s Diogenes; or, The Future of Leisure (1928), which moves wittily between a satire of contemporary pastimes and a consideration—via G. B. Shaw’s ‘metabiological’ suite of plays, Back to Methusaleh, of a possible evolutionary future that informs the one imagined by Bernal. The chapter ends by discussing the volumes on labour and sport, and concluding that the series’ vision of everyday life is one profoundly conditioned by the experience of the recent war as giving a new valuation of life in all its forms.

Conflict, Connectivity, and the Tropes of Futurology

The relation of the series to the First World War, and anxieties about future war, is the starting point for this chapter, which examines the language and rhetoric of futurology in the series. It explores how its narrative and discursive forms relate to its politics, especially in its discussions of the state, race, and war. It also considers how such debates relate to Ogden’s work on language, communication and meaning. Two tropes are identified as characteristic. First, the figure of ‘future history’. Second, a rhetoric of increasing technological interconnection. Both tropes are antithetical to the anxiety or disillusion of war, implying that, for all its follies and self-destructiveness, humanity nonetheless has a future. The chapter ends with a discussion of an idea drawn upon by many of the volumes, H. G. Wells’s notion of an ‘open conspiracy’ working towards a world state. The geopolitical contexts of post-Versailles diplomacy and Imperial tensions are considered, as are the anticipations in the series of Wells’s prediction of a ‘World Brain’.

Introduction

Multiple introductions are warranted to this complex and unusual series. The first section describes its origins, its polymath editor C. K. Ogden, some of his related editorial ventures, and the books by some of the more prominent contributors. The distinctive futurological angle is discussed, together with its generally progressive orientation, and commitment to intelligent debate. The importance of the scientific approach is introduced, as a main thread running through the series and this study. Two superb, influential science volumes are introduced: the initial book, J. B. S. Haldane’s Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1923); and J. D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1929). Some cardinal intellectual contexts are established: how the series addresses time, eugenics, and modernity. Its organization is considered. The contemporary impact is assessed, leading to a discussion of the value of studying past predictions for thinking not only about the past but about the nature of prediction. The second introductory section places the series in the history of futurological thinking from the fin de siècle to the present. It starts from a contrast between today’s data-driven professionalized group foresight exercises and individual imaginative projections.

‘A Scientific Age’

This chapter focuses on the volumes on science. An introductory discussion of popular science writing leads to more detailed analyses of Haldane’s and Bernal’s key volumes. Their projection of biotechnological and bionic interventions in the human are examined as pioneers of trans-humanism. Their imaginative audacity is contrasted with the bland norms of contemporary futurology. They are seen as representative of the series in several ways: for their radical intellectual approach; their placing of science in relation to the arts and humanities; their commitment to public debate and education; their concerns with language and communication; and with psychology. The section concludes by establishing an essentially scientific paradigm (derived from Haldane and Bernal) for the whole series, arguing that this paradigm represents a transformation by science and technology of every aspect of life, from our experience of change, to a sense of agency, our politics, modes of thinking and feeling, and our ways of thinking about and expressing our imaginations of the future.