Politics without Possibility (History without Limits) | Brian Massumi | Virtual Futures 1995
Channel: Virtual Futures
Date: 29/12/2016

"It is not that the possible comes to be realized; rather, it is the real that makes itself possible." With this formula French philosopher Henri Bergson rejects wholesale a philosophical presupposition that is no less ingrained in contemporary cultural theory than in common sense thinking about change: that alternative possibilities pre-exist the real, and that freedom is a choice, for the future, of one possibility from among the alternatives. Bergson's rejection of the classical concept of possibility has the opposite intent from the one that might be expected from a cursory reading. The intent is not to close off the future, to enclose us in our present. On the contrary, it is the doctrine of the possible that relies on closure: for a set of alternative possibilities to coexist in the present for the future, they have to have been determined as possibilities by a past structure, which lives on through the realization of one of its permutations. In other words, the concept of possibility functions against a background of determination. It boxes us in our past, in the form of a limitative set of already-possible permutations in relation to which we can do nothing more active than choose. The doctrine of possibility attempts to add freedom to a bedrock of determination.

Bergson denies possibility in order to bulldoze the bedrock, for the sprouts of invention. In his view, the possible arises from the real, from its emergence, always new and unforeseeable. It is this self-organizing emergence that creates its own possibility, retroactively, in a kind of temporal backwash (what Bergson calls the "retrograde movement of truth"). The emergence of the new, of which possibility is a retrospective reflection, is an openness more radical than choice. Bergson calls that inventive indetermination the "virtual." This paper explores the consequences of the Bergsonian critique of possibility for contemporary cultural theory, and in particular for identity politics and its aftermath. Its central concern is to distinguish the virtual from the possible, and to free social constructivism from its foundation in theories of determination. Chaos theory will be used to show that the concept of objective indeterminacy is not necessarily inconsistent either with autonomy or operations of power.

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Footage kindly provided from the archive of Michael Carr.