The governance of possible futures and the regime of modern historicity: Critical theory and the modality of possibility

‘Gouverner, c’est prévoir’

Although the link between the art of governing and forecasting is an age-old one, it was between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries that new, more scientifically legitimate forecasting skills took hold at the highest levels of government. They were based on the science of statistics, which really took hold in Europe after the Napoleonic wars and the beginnings of the English industrial revolution. This new knowledge was not only the source of new fundamental discoveries – in mechanics, in the kinetic theory of gases and, later, at the end of the nineteenth century, in sociology; it also laid the foundations for a new art of governing (Desrosières, 2001; Hacking, 1990). Statistical measurements first became central to the description of realities such as mortality, unemployment, poverty and fertility. Uncertainty and chance were gradually recognised as fundamental facts of nature and society (Daston, 1989; Hacking, 1975; Kruger et al., 1987). The discovery of the law of large numbers by Poisson (1837) and of the mean by Quételet (1845) led to a redefinition of causality and responsibility. From chaotic or apparently disordered phenomena, such as crime, Quételet sought to establish stable relationships that he called ‘constant causes’. Little by little, the calculation of probabilities became part of the language of statistics, and their history became intertwined, as the French historian of statistics Alain Desrosières has written, with ‘the problems of the State and of decision-making’ (Desrosières, 2001, p. 13). Probabilities offer a model for reading the regularities revealed by statistics. In this way, the idea that our relationship with the future can be rationalised by science was developed.

In France, the first such connection was made in the 1830s and 1840s, when statistical series – of marriages, crimes, suicides, etc. – were used to create frequency tables (Desrosières, 2001, p. 81). Probabilistic reasoning then became widespread in the quantitative social sciences, the insurance business, epidemiology (to implement preventive action) and clinical medicine (to assess the therapeutic effectiveness of a treatment). A second important link between statistics and probability was made around the 1930s around the notion of the representative sample, which was decisive not only in social science methods but also in the development of surveys, market research and electoral forecasting (Desrosières, 2001, p. 285). Probability calculations applied to statistics also spread within an increasingly varied set of technologies, both learned and political, as in econometrics, for example, with the aim of optimising decisions.

The descriptive aim of these new instruments for building and steering companies and businesses is inseparable from their prescriptive dimension.

Desrosières writes

The originality of probabilistic language stems from the fact that it is not only a now well-axiomatised area of mathematics, but also a flexible argumentative and decision-making resource that can be used in a wide variety of ways, in constructions that are fundamentally different from one another. This crossroads language was to be involved in several ways in the development of econometrics in the 1930s and 1940s, by providing ways of dealing with random shocks, measurement errors, omitted variables and the irreducible variability of economic situations. (Desrosières, 2001, p. 355)

A few years after the economic and financial crisis of the 1930s, Keynesian macroeconomics, estimates of national income and other mathematical techniques such as linear algebra and matrices, probability techniques and national statistics in the United States, particularly within the Cowles Commission, contributed to the invention of macroeconomic modelling (Fourcade, 2009). The establishment of welfare States and planning practices after 1945 encouraged the institutionalisation and dissemination of these techniques for forecasting the future and defining possible futures within public authorities and their administrations.

Macroeconomic models could only remain relevant if their accounting and behavioural assumptions were invariant over time. This naturally made medium- and long-term forecasting difficult (Andersson & Prat, 2015). Foresight techniques have developed on this time scale. These techniques take into account the possibility of critical events, breakthroughs and historical bifurcations, by looking at a multitude of possible futures. Each of these futures is the subject of a scenario, in other words a set of hypotheses for change, accompanied by a narrative that incorporates their consequences. Even if it is not really different in nature from a formal, mathematised model, the epistemological status of this narrative is more fragile and its legitimacy weaker, as an in-depth study of the public reception of the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would no doubt show. Be that as it may, the slow decomposition of the forecasting system associated with the Fordist regulatory regime of capitalism and the welfare States cannot be understood without taking account of the new centrality of the category of risk – particularly health and climate risks – in political and managerial discourse and in public and private government action (Beck, 1992).

Societies of anticipation?

Since the 1990s, the technological and economic transformations signalled by the development of the internet, the proliferation of information on individual behaviour and the opening up of ‘data’ have also had a new impact on the government of possibility and of the future. They have altered its scope and power more than they have changed its spirit. To describe the purpose of the data collection and processing tools associated with these metamorphoses, some people have suggested talking about ‘algorithmic governmentality’ as the effect of new techniques of knowledge and power that seek to ‘model, anticipate and affect possible behaviours in advance’ (Polsky, 2019; Rouvroy & Berns, 2013). Many of these technologies are in the hands of large multinationals, the Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, along with their satellite companies, but they are also used by public administrations. With them, an industry of individual profiling and behavioural prediction is emerging, with countless applications ranging from elections to penalties, from intelligence to health policies and including marketing and targeting in all their forms (Zuboff, 2019).

The sum total of data collected on hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide is estimated at nearly 30,000 attributes per person. However, it would be a mistake to see the rise in power of algorithms as a sign of absolute power. To do so would be to confuse ‘the things of logic’ with ‘the logic of things’, to give in to a form of technological determinism and functionalism of the worst kind, insensitive to the concrete uses of technology by individuals and to the actual disorder of the real practices of economic or political power. The empirical examination of acts of government reveals their constitutive hybridity, in which several reasons for action and means of steering are mixed together. The transformations in the relationship between power and possibility over the past few decades have resulted in an accumulation, diversification and dissemination of anticipation technologies.

In this magma, specialists in the sciences of government usually distinguish three families: ‘forecasts’, which are based on the past and the present in order to develop ‘logical futures’, all other things being equal; ‘predictions’, which aim to identify ‘possible futures’ that are excluded from the simple continuation of past trends; and ‘explorations’, which aim to objectify the ‘desired futures’ of different protagonists, inside or outside the State apparatus. The technical support they use includes cost–benefit calculations, statistical methods, modelling, linear and dynamic programming, systems analysis, simulations for forecasts and predictions, which generally concern projections of no more than 10 years. There are also scenario-based techniques and expert consultation methods for explorations, which generally cover a longer time horizon. The final feature of these methods of constructing the future is that they are used to identify problems that are relevant to public action, but they are also used to anticipate the effects of existing or planned public policies. They are therefore applied to both society and the State itself.

Recent empirical research into the way in which States share the possible and design their action strategies in the face of more numerous and more radical uncertainties and risks confirms the pluralisation of their tools. Based on a field study conducted in Washington, at the heart of the American government complex, the French political scientist Ariel Colonomos has shown the importance, in terms of geopolitics and defence policy, of the profession of what he calls the ‘experts of the future’ (Colonomos, 2014). Their profiles and ways of working vary; some construct indicators, others equations, still others fictions and, why not, science fiction, but they all populate administrations, think tanks, security agencies and public agencies. In Washington, as in other capitals, this social world has become partly autonomous and is even tending to diversify, because it does not reduce the uncertainty that justifies it. On the contrary, explains Colonomos, ‘expertise, through its imperfections, reinforces this feeling of uncertainty’ and therefore sustains the demand for experts on the future and the possible (Colonomos, 2014, pp. 62–63). The survey also shows that expertise on future dangers is generally conformist and restricted. Like the algorithms of new technologies, listening to experts also leads to a reduction in the possible worlds available for reflection. Whether the projection is highly technological or human, whether it is algorithmic, modelled or literary, a large proportion of the possibilities of the present and the future remain invisible.

Far from leading to the image of an omnipotent State or capitalism, of an implacable governmental control over individual thought and behaviour, the exploration of the legitimate relationship towards possibilities under the current norms of governmentality would, if completed, highlight the tensions, grey areas, failures and dead ends. Possibilities and the methods for constructing them are proliferating all the more now that the same sense of unpredictable crises and non-probabilisable uncertainties that emerged in the 1970s is spreading and of which the latest global pandemic provided a new example.

This is why the possible and the future are a battleground, and why their definition, rather than a problem reserved for philosophers alone, is the object of an incessant war. The study of this confrontation, of these strategies, of the power relations it reveals, is therefore a central and undoubtedly inaugural task for a critical theory of society. In order to counter the power of experts or algorithms in this field, some would like to see the opening up of futures become a public affair, a question of collective intelligence, a major issue in the deepening of democracy. Theory and critical social sciences also have a role to play in moving away from the instrumental knowledge that comes from the same disciplines and that lies at the heart of the manufacture of possibilities and authorised futures. To this end, they can explore, among other subjects, individual, romantic, professional, economic, educational and political aspirations, the life forms of religious currents of messianic or apocalyptic expectation, daydreams, representations of the future, the mechanisms of formation of subjective hopes, the capacity to imagine and the forms of economic forecasting or ecological planning, more general modes of prediction, imaginary or imagined collective experiments and their viability, literary, architectural, artistic, scientific, technical and social utopias, critical events – wars, civil wars, revolutions, revolts, pandemics, economic crises – and their effects on institutions and anticipations and so on. Far from constituting a disorganised list, this area of investigation, once put together, can offer an overview of the immanent possibilities of a society and the conditions for their development in the future (Guéguen & Jeanpierre, 2022). But this is not the only critical strategy. Another strategy is to question the modern historical link between the notion of the possible and the very idea of a future understood as being closely linked to progress or to a teleological orientation of history.

Temporal structures of the possible

In the philosophical history of the concept of the possible, we can schematically identify three major milestones concerning the different ways of representing the link between possibility and temporality, depending on the type of temporal horizon to which the concept is articulated ² :

the imminent future of the action to be carried out within the framework of Aristotle’s practical philosophy, where the concept of the possible (dunaton) is associated with the cardinal concepts of the ‘feasible’ (prakton), ‘what depends on us’ (eph’hèmîn) and the ‘deliberable’ (bouleuton), which in each case refer to the future envisaged in its own contingency.

As the French philosopher Christophe Bouton has shown (Bouton, 2019), the Hegelian treatment of the possible can therefore be analysed in terms of a ‘temporalisation’ (Verzeitlichung) understood in the precise sense that Reinhart Koselleck has attributed to this expression: that of a split between the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectation’ that gives modernity its own normative basis by placing it under the sign of historical progress. If we place this Hegelian moment in the long history of the concept of the possible, it must be understood as a way, in line with Kant’s transcendental recasting, of reconnecting with the temporal content of the possible as it was in Aristotle. This time, the emphasis is not so much on the contingent futures to which the practical possibilities are linked, or on what is ‘feasible’ in a given situation of action, but rather on the tendencies immanent in historical possibilities and their own orientation towards the horizon of progress.

Understood in this Koselleckian sense, the Hegelian temporalisation of possibilities (which permeates the thought of Marx, Ernst Bloch and, more generally, the theoreticians of the Frankfurt School) does not, therefore, lie in having conferred a temporal meaning on the modality of the possible, which was already central in Aristotle. Rather, it has to do with the fact that possibility has been linked to the network of guiding concepts of modernity (such as revolution, emancipation or history), which this process of temporalisation has transformed into what Koselleck presents as ‘concepts of movement’ (Bewegungsbegriffe) referring to the teleological orientation of history. In accordance with such a temporalisation, the Hegelian concept of possibility has a very precise temporal meaning: that of an orientation, detectable within the contradictions of the present, towards a higher stage of effectivity. In this sense, Hegel’s philosophy of history as a whole, and more specifically his original conception of real possibility, can be said to be underpinned by a ‘presentist’ position. Namely, ‘a theoretical position that gives primacy to the present over the past and the future’ (Renault, 2015, p. 11), consisting of relating to history in the mode of a ‘historical diagnosis’ that invites us to interrogate possibilities in the mode not of ‘negative criticism’ or utopianism but of an immanent criticism in which it is the gap between the real possibilities of the present and the current state of affairs that presents itself as the very norm of criticism. The fact remains that such a presentist position does not imply that Hegel is so inattentive to the question of the future and novelty that an author like Ernst Bloch has been able to criticise him. Rather, it involves an original conception of the future, which, far from being seen as radically different from the present, is presented as the horizon of its own immanent development, and where, as would also be the case for the theoreticians of the Frankfurt School, it is seen in the original terms of potentiality and latency (Delanty, 2020, p. 235).

What interests us here, however, is not to return in detail to this Hegelian articulation between real possibility, the future and historical time nor to its various forms of inheritance within the Hegelo-Marxian tradition. Rather, we should focus on what we might call its ‘entry into crisis’, that is, the way in which this conception of the link between possibility and temporality or historicity has been criticised, with the result that the very question of the temporal structure of possibility and, correlatively, of the very way in which the future is apprehended, have been posed on new grounds. Or, to put it another way: to put another way the question of how to represent the nature of the links between possibility, time and the future, and how, in so doing, to rethink the close link that possibility, understood in its ‘not yet’ character, maintains with the future.

The crisis of modern historicity

We can see that what is being called into question here is, more fundamentally, the modern ³ ‘regime of historicity’ which, as Hartog himself has shown, following in Koselleck’s footsteps, consists in betting on a teleological sense or orientation of history and consequently linking possibilities to that historical dynamic which, at the very heart of the present, proves to be the bearer or promise of progress. Now, as Hartog himself points out, insisting on the purely heuristic or ideal-typical character of the notion of a regime of historicity, it is important to specify that such a questioning is in fact far from new, but that what is implied by the fact that the future ceases to be the dominant reference is nothing other than a ‘crisis of time’ (Hartog, 2015, p. 15) taking the form of a ‘crisis of the future’ (Hartog, 2015, p. 3).

On the one hand, because it was from the very beginnings of modernity, understood in the Koselleckian sense, that the idea of a march towards progress was subjected to criticism. This is particularly true of Rousseau’s two Discourses (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 1750, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 1754) – that is, even before what Koselleck describes as the ‘threshold’ of modernity (Sattelzeit), which he sees as the last third of the eighteenth century; bearing in mind that this type of modern critique of modernity can be found in other authors, among whom Nietzsche occupies a not inconsiderable place. But also, on the other hand, because it is from the Marxian tradition, or even the Hegelo-Marxian tradition itself, that we see, from the first half of the twentieth century, with Walter Benjamin, a dismantling of the belief in an automaticity of progress which, in an author like Adorno, as Iain Macdonald (2019) has shown, goes hand in hand with a critique of the Hegelian conception of the possible and of its own dependence on the idea of progress.

Recalling the relative antiquity of this crisis of the modern regime of historicity therefore invites us to specify what is truly new about the current situation, which in our view has to do in particular with the way in which the current ecological catastrophe has come to render the very idea of an indefinitely open and ‘available’ future – to use the Koselleckian category of the ‘feasibility’ (Machbarkeit) or ‘availability’ (Verfügbarkeit) of history – eminently problematic.

Towards other regimes of temporalisation of the possible?

To what extent does this ‘crisis of time’ introduced both by the defeat of the modern regime of historicity and by the Anthropocene oblige us to rethink the links between possibility and temporality and, more specifically, between possibility and the future? For heuristic purposes, we propose to present the three main paths or strategies that can be identified, and it should be made clear from the outset that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

A first strategy – which could be described as pragmatic or neo-Aristotelian – consists in reviving a practical conception of the possible and considering its orientation towards the future on the basis of action itself, and the way in which it is characterised by forms of intentionality that imply relating to the future as something that presents itself each time as the horizon of a given action or situation. This is a path that can be found in particular within the phenomenological tradition, where the question of possibility is apprehended from the angle of a ‘power’ (können) that is always limited and situated, and implies starting from the question of capacities and constraints as much as from the horizons they open up and to which they relate within the action (Ascarate, 2022; Serban, 2016).

And as for the properly political significance of this phenomenological recasting of the notion of possibility, it seems to us that it is in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and in particular in a text like Les aventures de la dialectique, that we find one of the most important efforts to promote a conception of the possible as a ‘future to be made’ rooted in the problems posed by historical situations, without being allowed to cling to answers, solutions or a ‘meaning’ that would already be available or available in advance. Without these various authors explicitly claiming it (with the possible exception of Heidegger), we can consequently see in this strategy a way of reviving what was the very mark of practical possibility in Aristotle, as analysed in the Nicomachean Ethics or in chapter IX of the treatise On Interpretation: its intimate link to the capacities of the agents as well as its link to the contingent futures to which action opens up as much as they authorise it by the very absence of predetermination that characterises them. Indeed, it is striking to note that in Les aventures de la dialectique, as in many of his writings, it is to such a conception of the future that Merleau-Ponty appeals when he intends to break definitively with any teleological philosophy of history: a properly practical conception of the future that invites us to rethink history and the dimension of the future on the basis of what is invented through the deliberations and choices that human beings make in the present as a function of the constraints and possibilities specific to a given conjuncture, and thus on the basis of a full assumption of historical contingency.

A second strategy, which could be described as localist or topographical, consists in remedying the historicist excesses of teleological philosophies of history by placing less direct emphasis on the question of historical time and its immanent orientations than on that of space, and thus replacing the obsession with historical trends and stages with attention to what is played out and invented on the scale of places and their own diversity or multiplicity.

In a well-known 1967 lecture entitled ‘Des espaces autres’, Michel Foucault made this turn towards the question of space the very hallmark of our ‘present age’, noting that: ‘The great obsession that obsessed the 19th century was history (…) the present epoch would rather be the epoch of space’, and specifying that such attention to space and networks (which he links to ‘structuralism’) is not a way of ‘denying time’ but a ‘certain way of dealing with what we call time and what we call history’ (Foucault, 2001, p. 1571). In this respect, we might wonder to what extent the very category of heterotopia is not intended by Foucault to effect this relocation of utopia, which aims to undo the link between utopia and the sense of history in favour of a new knotting with spatiality, which, in Thomas More, was the foundation of the utopian imagination. Relocating the possible (at the same time as utopia) would thus mean reconnecting with the spatiality of utopian projections. But even more than that, it would mean acknowledging the multiplicity of practices and experiments invented in spaces that are always situated, as are the ‘real utopias’ that Erik Olin Wright set out to investigate in his eponymous book (Wright, 2010). To which it should no doubt be added that this reappraisal of the spatiality of real utopias, as carried out by this American sociologist, does not so much imply an occultation of temporality or historicity as it invites us to apprehend possibilities from the angle of the present, of actuality, or of a ‘here and now’ of practices and experiments that enables us to break with any belief in the idea of a ‘great evening’ or any form of wait-and-see attitude.

Finally, we can identify a third strategy, which consists of rehabilitating what we might call the ‘possibilities of the past’ by endeavouring, in the wake of Benjamin’s history of the defeated, to understand the possibilities of the present in terms of possibilities (expectations, hopes, attempts, experiments, struggles) that have been rejected or violently repressed in the course of history. As initially formulated in 1940 by Benjamin in his Theses on the Concept of History, such an approach runs counter to the Hegelo-Marxian method, and in particular to Marx, who, in Le 18 Brumaire and taking up a formula from the Epistle of Matthew (8, 22), noted that we must ‘let the dead bury their dead’, and that the ‘social revolution of the 19th century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future’. It should be noted, however, that Benjamin’s attention to the past or to the history of the vanquished fully embraces the Marxian demand for revolutionary transformation, which invites us to relate to the past not so much in the mode of nostalgia as in that of what Michaël Löwy has called a ‘diversion’ (Löwy, 1997, p. 20), enabling us to start afresh from what, from the past and its vanquished possibilities, continues to haunt or work on the present, and to point the way towards more desirable or less oppressive futures.

It is worth noting that this strategy of ‘detouring’ via the past is proving to be extremely important today, through this way of making the past – whether a very ancient past, as in anarchist anthropology (from Pierre Clastres to David Graeber or James Scott), or a more recent past, as in contemporary work on ecofeminism or communalism – the cornerstone from which to operate a critique of the present and reopen the way to an emancipatory transformation, as in contemporary work on ecofeminism or communalism – as the cornerstone from which to critique the present and reopen the way to emancipatory transformation. It is as if reconnecting with a sense of possibility, without any belief in the march of history, means reconsidering the future on the basis of the struggles and possibilities of the past which, like symptoms in psychoanalysis, continue to work on or haunt the present.

We can see that each of these three major strategies is therefore presented as a means of grasping the future in a different way from the belief in the idea of immanent and inescapable progress and of thinking differently about the very horizon of emancipatory potential. This is why they could be presented as operators of possibility building. But we can also see that each of them raises a certain number of tricky questions – starting with the question of which ‘actions’, ‘spaces’ and ‘pasts’ we should be focusing on, and according to which benchmarks and normative foundations. The fact remains, however, that they are proving to be extremely fruitful in enabling collective and political reappropriations of possibilities at a time when it is no longer acceptable to continue to bank on the immanent and permanent progress of history, and when it is the very definition of the future that seems increasingly to be confiscated from the realm of the deliberable or of political deliberability. Among the various points of convergence that can be identified between these three strategies for redefining the modes of access to possibilities and its own temporal structure, it is also worth noting that in each case it is not so much a question of dismissing the reference to the future as of re-elaborating it in a different way (and thereby reappropriating it).