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Paper short abstract:

The allure of projects is a future made somehow different. This paper, however, provincializes the project form, and its formatting of futurity, through a genealogy of project making and by exploring anti-projects, which refuse projects’ heroic agency and future orientation.

Paper long abstract:

The promise and allure of projects is a future made somehow different. Projects are premised on bring forth something new; they are premised on creation, invention, and improvement. Not surprisingly, then, the project form, with its combination of promissory vision and methodical planning, provides an especially evocative and pervasive way in which social actors imagine and make claims on the future. So ubiquitous are projects that the project form—that recognizable genre of purposive, managed action—often appears as a natural and universal mode of acting in the world.

This paper, however, works to historicize and provincialize the project form and its concomitant formatting of futurity. It first offers a genealogy of project making, showing how the modern conception of the project emerged within a world defined by European colonialism and nascent capitalism. In doing so, I seek to denaturalize the project form and the particular ways in which it formats future thinking. The paper then goes on to explore examples of anti-projects, or modes of action that refuse the heroic, anthropocentric agency and future orientation of projects. Anti-projects “stay with trouble” (Haraway 2016) and flourish at the fringes of dominant social formations. They turn away from the seductions of technofuturism, with its limitless queue of projects, and instead invoke solidarities and mutualities in the here and now. The paper asks: what theories of the future do anti-projects produce? And what kind of ethics and politics might they afford?