Anticipation, design, freedom and relations: a conversation with the futures

In all possible senses, the two years from the pandemic outbreak to the economic, energy and geopolitical crisis are the utmost teaching on the reality that reality has offered us in recent decades. Reality has never screamed so loud of being unstable and irreducible to any fictive control, and those involved in design, innovation, change and the future can only stay convalescing at home in the throes of delirium tremens. In today’s complexity, we have experienced singular events, non-thinkable or comparable to anything else. The “old” reality is shattered by the entrance of the infamous and elegant swans — white, black, purple and orange, more similar to chaos than discreet points just outside the gaussian deflections of some curve — “hyper events”, let’s say, made of simultaneous cause and effect.

So what? Human being— as an enclosed advanced entity, only returns to tremble. In such a time, it would seem wiser — but perhaps more useful? — renounce any reduction of closing, defining, and determining entities. Agency, is flourishing as concatenations that the more they are researched, the more they appear infinite, extended, and distributed. A shockingly generating chaos. Tremendously out of any cyber control. A mass of forces that contribute to the actualization of an event resonates with the event itself and perhaps prevents us from entering any last instance of anticipation. Wait, really? That is, from an anthropocentric and anthropomorphic viewpoint, do we have to give up all our design skills practically? We also think about management, planning, and governance, because here, they are by no means secondary issues. Where are we, and what equipment do we have?

Let us ask what reality really is

What does reality tell us? Perceptions, information, models, social entities, physical and otherwise. A mass of relationships held together by competing forces, a competition that decrees their shape and duration, that could establish or degrade the mass. Here, “metamorphosis” and “transformation” are watchwords — as Latour, sadly just passed away, would probably have said. In the structural disorder of reality, mediation is the biological departure of any entity. Agency is so if it can transform, mediate, or “transport”.

Again, if reality is a resonance between events of action, driven by the coexistence of the diversity of things in conservable or degradable transitory configurations, how can we think or act in any agency if we do not account for all the other events that contribute? A whole flat and relational panorama contrasts with an organized world, structured by categories and hierarchical scales ranging from nature to culture. What counts is not a definitive scheme but unique transformations, mediations, and associations. Is reality a process constantly repeating itself and held together until it deviates?

Let us ask how we can know such a reality

Any knowledge endeavour seems vain. At this point, even science has to rethink itself, primarily based on the past rather than on the future. How does our knowledge of the given change if the given has become an increasing, emerging, continuously transitory and degradable process?

Following the forces becomes a great work of unfolding and unveiling how these clusters hold together. By means of passive intermediaries or actual mediations? We can really imagine how our creativity and imagination are made in these intrinsic design processes and ecosystems and in dialogue with what exactly? How to account for that place? Here too, this feverish question is resumed, standing there, motionless, looking at us; how can we know something if we don’t know what it can do, actually? Seriously, how can we act? We are faced by a tangle of extended, distributed combinations. Yet this place, although practically infinite, we impose on our cognition as finite. Complexity is more than very-very-difficult, isn’t it?

Let’s ask how we work with the future

Thus, it may not be possible to arrive at any classification of the world’s entities. A position like this, somehow radical, dismantles a few of the great promises of modernity — the reality is whispering. We are in a new place, in some ways unknown to us, if not for some arts that do not rely solely on rationality. Therefore, there is no separation between agents capable of intentionality and value and “unaware” or “unconscious” agents. Now, any human design and planning practice is not moral-free or neutral. The enormous system of choices, assumptions and values ​​is politically active and grounded. And the participatory processes of creation, imagination, modelling and simulation are the pre-political experience of the future. They carry the divergence pastiche towards different futures rather than converging towards a probable one, but trembling then? Fake stable? And more or less — sometimes, naively desired.

Here, the principles to implement must be understood, tested and overturned. They are, by nature and culture, linked to an agenda. But which? Do we know it? All at the same time? But which one are we serving when we all are extended, situated, and embrained in the process? The whole creative class must understand and use its political posture; until this is not understood, it will always be a “class” as someone else’s tool.

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Reality is devastated and devastating. Anticipation and design are the practices of a millennial Vitruvian man who has emancipated himself in all respects but is starting to degrade? A refined aesthetic range that perhaps has a limit. The singular future does not exist at all, indeed. That is why it cannot be envisaged in its entirety. Working with the future is a liminal space with a boundary beyond which unpredictability reigns — namely, the concrescence of associative forces. We need to stick to a position that recognizes the ontological diversity change-by-nature of agencies.

From Spinoza to Deleuze, arriving at the new realism, with the wave of diversity introduced by art, speculativism and post-humanism, it is precisely the future that is directly speaking to us of its irreducibility. And perhaps, on the other side, of its imaginative limitation. How can we think and act employing given basic entities? How can we really work on our anticipatory systems and processes? Based on what? Is the stability of reality a horrible effort and, at the same time, a grand illusion?

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I thank professors Roberto Poli, Roumiana Gotseva, Kwamou Eva Feukeu and Riel Miller for having triggered these profound reflections following their contributions at the Foundation of Future Studies school, held at the University of Trento (Italy) — October 2022.