The revolutionary task of thinking (if it still has one) is not so much to see into the future - the grossest speculator can do this - but to see the present as if from the future. Adorno 's essay on Benjamin (from Prisms) makes the point -
He is driven not merely to awaken life in petrified objects - as in allegory - but also to scrutinize living things so that they present themselves as being ancient, 'ur-historical' and therefore abruptly release their significance.' & again, 'He viewed the modern age as archaic not on order to conserve the traces of a purportedly eternal truth but rather to escape the trance-like captivity of bourgeois immanence.'
This ability to see the present from elsewhere is, perhaps, impossible, but it is also necessary if one wishes to understand the world not just pragmatically and from the inside. To see the past as already historical does not imply a viewpoint outside history, however, merely one outside the present. One stares at things so intently that they wither into history. The ability to construct an 'elsewhere' whether conceptually or imaginatively is surely the primary task of any serious thinking. And no, irony - the default mode of the contemporary subject - no longer counts.
It is worth adding to Benjamin's point that not only ill the present one day be seen as past, as a 'period' with tis own ethos and historically relative prejudices, which perhaps only a few managed to really see, but that the present was once an imagined future, albieit compromised, diverted, stymied by reaction etc etc..