2016_williams_World Futures - Énergies, Temps & Cosmotechniques

World Futures === > [!tldr] Tags > #type/journalArticle > [!info] Meta Data >**FirstAuthor**:: [[Williams, R. John]] > **Title**:: World Futures > **Year**:: 2016 > **Citekey**:: [[2016_williams]] > **itemType**:: journalArticle > **Journal**:: *Critical Inquiry* > **Volume**:: 42 > **Issue**:: 3 > **Publisher**:: The University of Chicago Press > **Pages**:: 473-546 > **DOI**:: 10.1086/685603 > **ISSN**:: 0093-1896 > > [!Cite] > Williams R. John, « World Futures », _Critical Inquiry_, mars 2016, vol. 42, no 3, p. 473‑546. > > %%[@2016_williams]%% > **URL**:: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/685603 . > > **Related**:: . > > **Attachment**::[PDF](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/S4CRASIX). --- > [!important] Synthesis > **Contribution**:: > > [!Abstract] >> --- # Note. --- # Annotations%% begin annotations %% ### Imported: 2026-09-24 10:54 am Quote > futurology. Quote > to frame the period in these terms may actually conceal the most transformative quality of the discipline’s discursive practice. Quote > a new mode of ostensibly secular prophecy in which the primary objective was not to foresee the future but rather to schematize, in narrative form, a plurality of possible futures Quote > it would be wrong to think of this new temporality as having emerged wholly within the domain of Western rationality and establishment conservatism Quote > much of the discursive power of this transition had to do with an overarching countercultural commitment to the presumed nonlinearity of “Eastern” temporalities and their role in philosophically engaging institutional commitments to World Futures Quote > as Orientalist and literary as it was computationalist and organizational—the combination of which, I argue, has come to constitute a pluralist temporality of global capital Quote > abandoning the “futile” univocality of Llull’s Christian theology (today, he explains, we might enter into the mandala categories like “Entropy, Time, Electrons, Potential Energy, Fourth Dimension, Relativity, Protons, Einstein” ) Quote > FIGURE 1a. Google Ngram visualizations showing frequency of letter, word, and phrase combinations between the years 1800 and 2000 among more than twenty million books. Note that while the word future as for “the future” (not shown here) remained more or less constant, its plural variants increased dramatically after the 1950s. Also, although the individual data sets graphed for the plural futures are smaller than for the singular future (notice the percentages to the left of each graph), the transformation illustrated here in terms of future as worldenvisioning ontologies is even more dramatic considering the fact that most of the pre-1900 usages of future graphed here had to do with the grammatical tenses (future perfect, future progressive tense, and so on). Quote > what are we to make of the fact that a quasi-religious regime of World Futures has come to dominate the business landscape at precisely the moment when it has become clear that our planet—and its rapidly changing climate—is headed toward a singularly and catastrophically fiery future? Quote > We can track the development of World Futures, roughly, in two interrelated phases: the first (perhaps predictably) computational, rationalist Quote > secular, and cybernetic; the second (more surprisingly) narratological, charismatic, avant-gardist, quasi-religious, and generally committed to various Oriental philosophies—a development I will refer to as the rise of Oriental Systems Theory. Quote > the calculations on which the earliest computers cut their teeth were not only military/industrial but intrinsically futurological as well.13 Quote > inspired a growing confidence that future possibilities could be measured, analyzed, and managed, the overarching ambition of their early designers and operators was still firmly rooted in the desire to locate a single, most likely future Quote > working on Monte Carlo algorithms, these computerized systems analyses eventually came to seem like precisely the wrong approach insofar as they reflected the attempt to locate a single, most-likely future, when what they more accurately reflected was an inherent plurality. 18 Quote > Kahn Quote > Kahn’s characteristic irony, the fact that what he is actually pushing back against is the very notion of computationalist dominance in the complicated field of prediction and strategy—instead arguing for a more interrogative and narratological model of systems analysis and futurological projection Quote > the most famous of which is Edward Lorenz, who, while processing meteorological data on what was at the time a cutting-edge computer at MIT in 1961 Quote > casually rounded off a few decimal points (.506127, for instance, entered as .506), Quote > assuming the difference would be negligible in his modeled forecasts.20 Quote > Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (1960; Princeton, N.J., 1967), p. 119. Quote > Edward N. Lorenz’s own reflections on the process in “On the Prevalence of Aperiodicity in Simple Systems,” in Global Analysis, ed. M. Grmela and J. E. Marsden (New York, 1979), p. 55 and The Essence of Chaos (Seattle, 1993), p. vii. See also Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York, 1988), pp. 16–31. Quote > turbulent paths, he later explained, had already been determined by an acute sensitivity to initial conditions—a sensitivity that, when applied to complex atmospheric conditions, made accurate long-term futurological thinking impossible.21 Quote > Thomas P. Weissert, “Representation and Bifurcation: Borges’s Garden of Chaos Dynamics,” in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles (Chicago, 1991), pp. 223–43 Quote > Stephen H. Kellert, Borrowed Knowledge: Chaos Theory and the Challenge of Learning across Disciplines (Chicago, 2008), pp. 130, 144–45 Quote > Decades before these more recent iterations of what I am calling Oriental Systems Theory, one of the most striking parallels between the notion of complex, pluralized futurity and the presumably “other” temporalities of Eastern religiosity had already emerged in a crypto-Oriental, guru- authored book: P. D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (1949).36 Quote > To really “ ‘know the future,’ ” Gurdjieff counters, one would have “ ‘to know the present in all its details, as well as to know the past’ ” Quote > Furthermore, any such possibility is complicated not only by the fact that “ ‘at present we have not sufficient material at our disposal to discuss this question seriously’ ”—and not only by the fact that the universe is itself a Quote > series of plural systems (“we live not in one world, but in several worlds,” not “ ‘one cosmos’ ” but several “cosmoses”) Quote > but there is also the problem that the “human machine” (as Gurdjieff repeatedly calls it) is an inherently “plural” entity (ISM, pp. 100, 75, 205, 75; my emphasis).“ ‘People are machines,’ ” Gurdjieff insists, machines marked most fundamentally by an “absence of unity,” with “ ‘no permanent and unchangeable I. . . . There are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small I’s. . . . Man is a plurality. Man’s name is legion’ ” (ISM, pp. 50, 59) Quote > the new temporality offered by this Oriental Systems Theory, Quote > made by one of the most influential business and management experts in the world, Stafford Beer Quote > the particular metaphysics of futurological plurality that emerged in Beer’s attempts to employ cybernetics as a management technology. Quote > all of which employed methods derived from the new cybernetic interdisciplinarity promulgated by Norbert Wiener at MIT.43 Quote > Stafford Beer, Cybernetics and Management (1959; New York, 1964) Quote > When understood in terms of prediction, the exceptional complexity of large, probabilistic systems radically frustrated any attempt at futurological singularity, even if the use of computer models seemed inherently grounded in the need for conjectural precision.46 Quote > Beer’s vision of strategic planning required acknowledging the irreducible multiplicity of possible outcomes Quote > Managers must learn to coordinate, in his words, the “NOW system” with an inherently plural “FUTURES system,” and this in “deliberate contrast to the many schools of thought that base their conception of inventing the future simply on forecasting it” (PFC, pp. 447, 444; my emphasis) Quote > Pickering argues that in Beer’s thinking this pluralized vision of “futures” required a “performative ontology” of systems modeling rather than the presumed finality of epistemological “representation,” arguing that in these situations the systems “are so complex that we can never fully grasp them representationally.” In such situations, “present knowledge is anyway no guarantee of future behavior.” The goal for management, then, was to try “getting along performatively” with systems that resist the meager Quote > cybernetic synergy, or cybersyn, economic program he was employed to develop for Salvador Allende in 1972 Quote > The Western world has largely ignored models of reality from the East (despite their great antiquity, or perhaps because of it).” Quote > Beer’s overarching approach, then, had as much to do with the presumably plural temporalities of an all-encompassing Orient as it did with the calculative disciplines of cybernetic computation and statistical probabilities. Quote > Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain, Quote > Cybernetic Revolutionaries Quote > 1980s Beer set out to develop a proprietary “organizational technology” that would exploit the seemingly cosmic significance of these Eastern insights, a technology he called Team Syntegrity. Quote > It may seem odd to place Fuller within the trajectory of what I have been calling World Futures given his very noble, decades-long attempts to synthesize a global, holistic vision of humanity’s future, but in the context of his “anticipatory design” projects and the pluralistic, ostensibly Einsteinian metaphysics that underscored them, Fuller’s contribution to this discursive transformation should not go overlooked.58 Quote > Fuller, Cosmography : A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity (New York, 1992), p. 18 Quote > Encyclopedia of the Future (1996) Quote > World Game Scenarios Quote > On one level, then, it would seem that Fuller radically misunderstood or at least aggressively bracketed the consequences of his own computerized systems theories’ generating, as they inevitably would, scenario after scenario, with millions of potential outcomes. In a deeper sense, these possibilities for pluralized temporalities and multiple futures were at the very center of Fuller’s metaphysics Quote > Fuller elaborated on what these multiple variables and computer-generated outcomes revealed about the pluralistic nature of Einsteinian reality; the “Universe,” he wrote, “is a sequentially evolving scenario and cannot be conceived in one ‘picture’ or ‘sculpture’ sense.”66 The “Scenario Universe,” was an “aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping events,” a complicatedly nonsingular fabric that could not be contained in any “single picture” because “one frame of the scenario does not tell the story that is told by the scenario. Quote > “Scenario,” Quote > for Fuller, was an inherently plural and “only partially overlapping” series of space-time experiences; scenario always meant scenarios. Quote > a student asked, “Mr. Fuller, if we knew enough, could we not predict the future, of matter and energy, I mean, if our knowledge was great enough?” To which he responded, immediately, “No, because the Universe is a non-simultaneous scenario and not a collection of things. . . . It is an aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping transformations.” %% end annotations %% %% Import Date: 2026-09-24T10:54:05.782+02:00 %%