Robin Mackay
Introduction
Is the despair attending the much-vaunted impossibility of imagining a world
outside of capitalism—the conviction that the time of competing alternatives
is over and that all possibilities converge upon the actuality of this world—so
great that we have finally given up on the task of constructing any
alternative? In any case, where the idea of other possible worlds is
mentioned, it is increasingly not in connection to a programme or project, but
in the hushed and wistful tones of those for whom it suffices to guard the
guttering flame of hope, perhaps looking back to unrealised ‘futures past’ or
scrutinising the world for signs of a collapse that would let something else
through. There is certainly an appetite for other possibilities—for a different
world that would not simply be more of the interminable production of
capitalist difference-within-the-same. Undoubtedly, ‘if you build it, they will
come’—yet this precisely begs the question of construction, and many of
today’s calls for the collective imagining of other possible worlds ring hollow
because they provide no ground plan, suggest no tools beyond imagination
and hope and, while critiquing the existing world, rarely specify what part its
residual artefacts will play in the construction of the edifice of the new—for,
as Nelson Goodman reminds us, every making of a world is a remaking.
Building on the work of several multidisciplinary research workshops, this
volume brings together contributions from philosophers, artists, musicians,
and architects addressing the task of not merely imagining, aspiring to, or
hoping for possible worlds, but of determining the conditions for their
construction. Examining the reasons why so many projects that aim to mine
other possibilities collapse back into the dominant logics of actuality—
something that could almost be a definition of the condition of contemporary
capitalism—demands a broad philosophical reassessment of some
fundamental concepts: possibility, probability, project, speculation. The
volume commences with historical and philosophical examinations of the
entangled notions of possibility, probability, and contingency, and it will be
noted that throughout, our contributors’ attention returns to two specific
philosophical sequences: one concerned with the very notion of consistently
thinking worlds that are possible but not actualised, and the struggle to either
reconcile logical discourse with modal concepts or to expel them; the other,
in particular in the work of Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom, concerned
with the emergence of the space of the conceptual that endows us with our
capacity to negate the actual and participate in thinking the possible. These
two tasks—a genetic account of our ability to enter possible worlds, and the
intra-conceptual legitimation of modal thought—address the question of the
construction of possible worlds at the most fundamental level. But equally, in
the essays that follow, contributors draw upon the problems encountered by
their own specific disciplines in envisioning alternative possibilities, and
examine the constraints under which they currently labour. Appraising the
nature of the present impasse, reexamining the tools at hand, reevaluating
inherited attitudes, and alerting oneself to new circumscriptions of the
possible imposed by the ingress of technology—these are the tasks at hand
here, on the level of the highest abstraction and the most immediate local
concern alike.
Daniel Sacilotto opens with a panoramic history of the concept of
possibility and its connection with that of contingency, demonstrating the
presence, from Aristotle through to German Idealism, of a pressing need to
legitimate modal concepts twinned with a suspicion of the potential
metaphysical excesses and logical absurdities they may herald. Soon we
arrive at the ‘modal revolution’ which, in the twentieth century, largely
succeeded in overcoming these reservations: finally, rather than being
candidates for elimination or reduction to nonmodal terms, modal notions
such as possibility were consistently integrated into logic. As Sacilotto
shows, however, this war is not yet won, as the admission of modal concepts
opens up an interpretive Pandora’s box from which fly any number of
metaphysical and ontological malaises previously believed to have been
eradicated. Even the boldest attempts to adjudicate the aftermath of this
‘revolution’, such as the very different approaches of Robert Brandom and
Alain Badiou, do not so much resolve the problem as alert us to the high
philosophical stakes involved in the question of the modal, and therefore the
nontrivial work lying ahead for anyone who wants to consistently speak of,
never mind set about the construction of, possible worlds.
Turning from possibility to review the history of modern conceptions of
probability, Adam Berg, setting out from Hume’s problem of induction,
describes how the quantification of the possible into degrees of probability
leaves untouched the conundrum of the ultimate referent of probabilistic
reasoning. Where philosophies of probability have attempted to save our
ratiocinations from falling prey to scepticism, Berg also highlights how the
philosophical interrogation of perception and causation is key to the question
of induction—and only becomes more vexed in the post-quantum age.
As Sacilotto demonstrates, the problem of possibility—how things that do
not in fact obtain may yet be ‘possible’—passes through a singular point in
Leibniz’s ingenious philosophy of possible worlds. While his ontologising of
the possible ends up, radically, bringing God’s actions under the aegis of
Reason, it also implicitly inaugurates the modern shift toward locating
possibility in subjective epistemic frailty rather than in the (or a) world. It is
only the positing of God’s infinite intellect, capable of grasping the necessity
of those things we register as contingent, that prevents contingency from
tainting reality with incurable uncertainty; once this last bulwark is removed,
we are left with only the finite human intellect, as powerless to divine the
reason behind contingencies ‘in one stroke’ as it is to calculate the inflection
of a curve down to the nth-order differential.
What steps in to compensate for this epistemic debility is, of course, the
armoury of predictive instruments that will increasingly define a
technologically mediated world obsessed by the calculative management of
the unknown. In her text Anna Longo addresses the apparent counterfinality
effect of these tools for combatting uncertainty: we have passed into a
situation where the very computations devised to enhance our forecasts,
through their continuous intervention, continuously perturb and render
unpredictable the world they were supposedly to predict and control.
Drawing again on the problem of induction, the history of probability theory,
and developments in modal logic, Longo places the emphasis on the latter’s
connection to game theory, in the shape of David Lewis’s ‘solution’ to
Hume’s problem. Here the acceptance of a logic of possible worlds goes
hand-in-hand with the hypothesis that worlds are collectively generated as a
way of coordinating the actions of a number of agents. As Longo points out,
the apparent opening this may seem to provide for the creation of different
possible worlds is shut down drastically when we take into account the reality
of the situation and its agents. The ‘game’ today consists of extremely
complex systems incorporating many agents who do not enjoy complete
information and are continually hypothesizing about the hypotheses of their
fellow agents. Rather than favouring a tendency toward equilibrium or
offering a basis for coordination, such a situation exacerbates ‘generalised
uncertainty’ and promotes complex divergence. Moreover, the governing
principles of the ‘information economy’ actually demand such divergence
and the production of unpredictability—the ‘condition of contemporary
profit’, of course, is information asymmetry. Here Longo not only gives us a
portrait of the seemingly inescapable global game we are summoned to play,
but also highlights how, if the game-theoretical conceptual schema fails to
adequately capture this world, it also limits our capacity to imagine other
possible worlds.
In two contributions that set out in different directions from the world of
pop music and the culture industry, Mat Dryhurst and Amanda Beech
develop critiques of suppositions and inherited attitudes liable to vitiate
artists’ attempts to manifest other worlds or to alter the conditions of this one.
In a highly pragmatic vein, in an interview Dryhurst discusses his findings
on the disparity between the prevalent powers and mechanisms in today’s
music world, and a strangely persistent imaginary that hails from another era.
Strategically poised between a distrust of utopian visions and an optimism
about the possibility of other modes of operation, Dryhurst gives us a
diagram of a culture industry turned upside down, an industry whose greatest
product is the image of itself it sells to artists prepared to pay in the hope of
being heard. This is a bracing call to ‘kick the machine’ and take stock of the
fact that, even if the music industry has since its inception been in the
business of selling hopes and dreams, the model has taken some profoundly
new turns in the twenty-first century.
Setting out from a pop icon of earlier vintage, Beech uses an analysis of the
motives behind David Bowie’s invention of Ziggy Stardust as a way to
interrogate a number of assumptions that contemporary artists have inherited
from the impasse of negative dialectics and the excesses of poststructuralism.
Bowie’s identification with the alien, she argues, was a way to respond to the
impossible choice of seeing pop as consigned to an eternal rehashing of
already-existing tropes, or resigned to a zombie-like ironic declaration of its
own death. As Beech argues, the acceptance of this exclusive choice, and the
effects it has upon the artist’s conception of what their own languages are
capable of, also indicates more profound dangers in relation to the possibility
of a politics. Is it possible to escape from the double bind and to discover
languages which, via an identification (rather than an identity) with the alien
—the outside—would be capable of envisioning other possible worlds?
Architecture, Jeremy Lecomte convincingly argues, is an inherently
future-oriented practice for which the challenge of projecting possible worlds
is posed the most acutely, but one which generally fails to live up to its own
ambitious, transformational rhetoric. Architecture’s conception of its task
may well still be afflicted by leftover modernist idealisms, yet rather than
dismissing the urban space that is its ‘fundamental horizon’ as simply
synonymous with the existing order, we need to understand the tension
characteristic of architecture: that of a discipline constrained to project other
possible worlds according to the constraints of the one in which we already
live.
The proposition here is that it is the project that must be reconsidered in
order for architecture to move away from mere optimisation of the existing
environment toward the construction of other possible worlds. Drawing, like
several contributions in this volume, upon Nelson Goodman’s discourse on
‘worldmaking’, Lecomte seeks to reorient the concept of the ‘projectile’,
concentrating attention neither on the aim of a project nor on the place from
which it is projected, but on a continuing conversation between the two: a
delicate negotiation between the remaking of what already exists on the
ground and the envisioning of an unprecedented destination. In facing its
past, architecture must therefore understand what we might call its
projectility as a ‘desiring negation’—one that we see emblematised by Mark
Tansey’s portrait of Robbe-Grillet ‘cleansing every object in sight’, in a
desert overpopulated by the remains of prior constructions.
Lecomte notes that the predicament of architecture he describes has been
aggravated rather than cured by the new tools at its disposal in the twentyfirst century: while the computational revolution in architecture theoretically
expands the means of imagining and constructing environments that diverge
ever more extravagantly from their predecessors, the reality of digital
architecture is generally disappointing. On the basis of a similar observation,
Matthew Poole casts a sceptical eye over architects’ digitally enhanced
riffing on the Deleuzian language of ‘the fold’, and sets out to explore the
sources of Deleuze’s conception of the Baroque in relation to Bernard
Caché’s concept of the ‘objectile’. Turning to Mario Carpo’s claim that
Alberti’s break with the ‘allographic’ model of architectural practice and his
pioneering of an ‘autographic’ architecture is now being reversed as
architectural design moves from blueprint to algorithm, from object to
objectile, Poole, in a close and insightful reading of Deleuze’s appropriation
of Leibniz in The Fold, poses the question of whether Deleuze in fact gives
us to see the objectile as a potential liberation—an ‘exorcising of the concept
from the object’ that ‘invigorates the subject’ and suggests the positive
possibilities harboured by an architecture no longer tied to a classical
conception of concept and object. Poole’s tentative suggestion is that the
fluidity of the objectile’s ‘mannerism’ may promise a ‘florescence’ in which
authorship (and architectural auteurship) will become impossible to sustain in
the face of the architect’s complicity in Baroque matter-flows. We find in
Deleuze’s Baroque, then, the vision of a designing of possible worlds that,
while in some sense a ‘return’, would open up imaginative possibilities
inaccessible to the autographical epistemology of an Alberti.
Where Lecomte insists that ‘[a]lternative worlds are already built the
moment they are described’, in ‘The Only Possible Project’ Elie Ayache
deepens his thesis on contingency, the market, and matter in relation to the
‘falling’ of an architectural project that was never built, and that project’s
transmutation into writing. Ayache begins with the trenchant insistence that,
when it comes to building an alternative to the existing world, it is possibility
that must be abolished. In response, that is, to the hopeless sentiment that
every ‘alternative possibility’ proposed today is easily incorporated back into
the world of capital, Ayache targets the recuperative power of possibility
itself. His radicalised Bergsonian argument is that, where all speculation on
possibility inevitably dwells within the light of the actual, thought must adopt
writing as its medium in order to outstrip possibility, the ‘instrument of
confinement within the present world’, and engage directly with the only
world that exists. Building on the operation performed by Quentin
Meillassoux—the ‘untotalisation’ of the possible which yields the necessity
of contingency—Ayache’s position is that this collapsing of the modal
landscape of possible worlds into the one and only single world—namely,
matter—is effectively ‘the only construction’ possible—a construction to be
set against ‘speculation and pure hope’. While perhaps agreeing with
Lecomte that the architect is supposed to ‘build the future in advance’,
‘projecting’ it from the future, by threading this idea through the story of HW
Architecture’s winning and subsequently dismissed proposal for Beirut
Museum of Art, Ayache presents as the perfect project a building that was
demolished before being constructed and, precisely after the exhaustion of its
possibility, was transmuted into writing.
In order to construct possible worlds, we must first be capable of
manipulating them in language. In his essay Inigo Wilkins recounts in detail
the philosophical controversy over the nature of language that saw a whole
lineage of thinkers attempt to adjudicate between its uniqueness and
specificity to humans, its evolutionary provenance, and its continuity with
animal behaviours—with Chomsky, most famously, refusing any such
continuity. According to Wilkins, it is Wilfrid Sellars who most effectively
points the way toward an account of language that preserves its irreducibility
while remaining committed to a programme of naturalisation. He then takes
up Gary Tomlinson’s remarkable recent account of the emergence of
‘musicking’ to argue that, from an artefactual perspective, such
extralinguistic practices may prove to be essential to any future account of
hominids’ entry into linguistic and conceptual space. Language, then, may
owe a prehistorical debt to music, and extralinguistic practices including
music, certainly, are capable of opening up new possible worlds. As Wilkins
suggests, even the most advanced theoretical accounts of mind stand to
benefit from attending to this broader artefactual perspective on the origins of
language and the entanglement of conceptual with musical spaces of
possibility.
Christine Wertheim extends the artefactual perspective to logic and its
conventional notations, suggesting that the imaginary of prevalent sciencefictional ‘possible worlds’ may be constrained by a reluctance to address the
corporeality secreted in the logical formalisms that underly computational
processes. Wertheim’s essay seeks to undermine the closed and selfsufficient nature of these formalisms with a dual approach: understanding
logical conventions as evolutionary products suggests the possibility of other
logical worlds, while Peirce’s extraordinary Existential Graphs, premised
upon an acknowledgement of their own written materiality, present an
approach to notation that opens onto bodies: a topological ‘image of mind’
quite different from that of classical logical scripts.
In Wertheim’s hands, what may seem like a historical curiosity opens the
way to a deeper consideration of the connection between the inseparably
corporeal-cognitive prehistory of logic and the formalisms embedded within
those artificially intelligent progeny which, according to popular apocalyptic
lore, are set to obsolesce human bodies altogether.
In a programmatic text that closes the volume with the launching of an
ambitious philosophical projectile, Anil Bawa-Cavia and Patricia Reed
offer us in lucid axiomatic form a computational manifesto for worlding that
distils much of what has been discussed in the foregoing texts, informed
again by Goodman, but mobilising the resources of category theory and logic,
and in particular Ruth C. Barcan’s startling claim that any realisable world is
already actual. One need not then have recourse to the dubious realm of the
modal in order to conceive of alternatives; the task is rather one of
developing the means to intuit situated interactions that are already in place
(or rather, out of place) in this world, but which outline another that is yet to
be concretised: shifting frames of reference away from the endlessly iterated
re-cognitions imposed by the actual world, and designing world-models,
languages, and abstractions that are not adapted to the actual, producing new
modes of intuition. It is only through the most precise of manoeuvres that we
are able to ‘bear witness to a world that is not yet concrete’ without falling
prey to the twin snares signalled by many of our contributors: mere wishful
thinking, or inadvertent re-enshrining of the status quo.
The sophisticated framework that Bawa-Cavia and Reed develop here
testifies, as do all of the texts included here, to the contemporary urgency of
the task addressed in this collection and by the ‘Language and its Possible
Worlds’ research programme: that of harnessing all the resources of the
imaginary and the logical, of exploring every cognitive instrument, logical
model, and ‘process-hack’ in order to relieve possible worlds of their
insubstantial, detached, wishful aura and to make them—whether in
language, art, music, architecture, or politics—the object of pragmatic
project(ile)s under construction.