One radical strand of modern historical thinking could be termed “potentialism”—a form of historicism that is open to unprecedented actualizations and long latencies, to events transcending their conditions, and to processes of becoming that are not always reducible to classical conceptions of class. Now that it has been recaptured and refunctionalized in the service of algorithmic governance by a planetary elite of AI-pushing space invaders, what potential does the concept of potentiality still hold? How to propagate a potentialism of deviation and divergence, of the improbable-but-necessary, in opposition to the techno-dystopian future that is being made today in Silicon Valley?
III. Speculative Futures and Fabricated Memories: Maha Maamoun, Larissa Sansour, and Neïl Beloufa
II. Existential Frontiers: Ben Rivers and Claire Denis
Gary Zhexi Zhang: Catastrophe Time!