A Little Fear: Rethinking Scapes, Structures, Time and the Ordinary

Treating fear as a kind of scape risks overlooking its peculiar temporality. Fear is, we argue, only ever established as a motivator, for social change for example, after the occurrences that gave rise to it, hence at some point in the future. This retro-clarity poses problems for the commonplace practice of treating fear as a causal explanation for things. Following this warning, we explain fear’s peculiar temporality. Fear is, we argue, only ever constituted at the moment of its commission. Indeed, it is this present-ness of fearful events that accounts for the very things that make them so fearful – their appearance as emergent, chaotic and unexpectedly obtrusive within the normalcy of everyday life and the normal flow of time. Finally, we argue, this calls for reconceptualization of fear within Future Studies, away from a focus on fearful future dystopias towards recognition of how the fearfulness of events arises precisely from their present-ness and un-anticipatability.