Start with mess
Mess has never been far away in my own profession of policy analysis and public management, which is full of wicked policy problems, muddling through, incrementalism, groping along, suboptimization, bounded rationality, garbage can processes, second-best solutions, policy fiascos, fatal remedies, rotten compromises, coping agencies, crisis management, groupthink, and that deep wellspring of miserabilism called, simply, implementation.
The more mess there is, the more reliability decisionmakers want; but the more reliable we try to be, the more mess produced. The more decisionmakers try to design their way out of policy messes, the messier actual policy implementation gets; but the messier the operations at the micro level, the more decisionmakers seek solutions at the macro level. Since this does not augur well for the future, that future becomes much of the mess we are now in.
But what is post-now?
As everything critical happens in real-time–in this “constant-present”–then post-now is by definition outside now-time. For example, if the mess we are now in is largely the difficulty of predicting the future(s), then post-now has nothing to do with those futures that matter to us in now-time. Post-now isn’t about such anticipations.
So what is post-now? It’s where you cannot not want to be because you have no need to anticipate anything in being alive there. It’s like a report from a distant planet, wholly like ours, except its present has fast-forwarded in a way unimaginable, and predictably so, for us, at least for now.
What then is “predictably unimaginable”?
In answer, turn to an insight of literary critic, Christopher Ricks, drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):
‘Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.
Christopher Ricks (2021). Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240
The notion that some humans started with “unthinkable” is suggestive: We first confront unthinkable disasters and then think our way to making them more or less imaginable.
Current practice is we start with the worst-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. In this way, we end up with disproportionate contingencies and aftermaths about which we have no real causal understanding.
Let’s suppose, however, we started with disasters so indescribably catastrophic that we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order to even think about the worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened. Here we can end up with possibilities, instead of contingencies, and impacts instead of aftermaths, about which we have some knowledge even if little causal understanding. In this way, we approach a “predictably unimaginable” that is not oxymoronic.
But you have to remember that imagining is not predicting, and both are downstream of the case-specific granularity
–Consider the following example:
Once an artificial island, the ancient site of Soline was discovered in 2021 by archaeologist Mate Parica of the University of Zadar in Croatia while he was analyzing satellite images of the water area around Korčula [Island].
After spotting something he thought might be human-made on the ocean floor, Parica and a colleague dove to investigate.
At a depth of 4 to 5 meters (13 to 16 feet) in the Mediterranean’s Adriatic Sea, they found stone walls that may have once been part of an ancient settlement. The landmass it was built upon was separated from the main island by a narrow strip of land. . . .
Through radiocarbon analysis of preserved wood, the entire settlement was estimated to date back to approximately 4,900 BCE.
“People walked on this [road] almost 7,000 years ago,” the University of Zadar said in a Facebook statement on its most recent discovery. . .”Neolithic artifacts such as cream blades, stone [axes] and fragments of sacrifice were found at the site,” the University of Zadar adds.
accessed online at https://www.sciencealert.com/road-built-7000-years-ago-found-at-the-bottom-of-the-mediterranean-sea)
This discovery is also part of an on-going installation work by German filmmaker and moving image artist, Hito Steyerl, and described in a recent article as:
In The Artificial Island, the work traces a submerged Neolithic site off the coast of Korčula, discovered in 2021 by archaeologist Mate Parica. The site, originally connected to the mainland by an ancient road, now lies four to five metres beneath the Adriatic Sea, submerged by rising waters that speak both to geological deep time and contemporary climate upheaval.
accessed online at https://aestheticamagazine.com/flooded-worlds-parallel-realities/
After being primed by the two texts, take another look at the photo. You can see the submerged island, see its causeway to surface land, and imagine how the still-rising waters will submerge even more settlements ahead in the climate emergency.
–The problem here arises when the preceding “imagine” becomes a prediction about what is to happen, now and ahead.
I wager that no reader primed as above asks first: “What about the presettlement template displaced by the Neolithic roadway and settlement?” Or from the other direction, “What about what’s been preserved from having been submerged for so long? What does this tell us about how the retreat from rising sea level was managed?”
That is, no one, I wager, reads the above text and looks at the photo and immediately asks: “What happens next here?” I mean that literally: “What happens next at and around these submerged sites? Are they to be protected (that is, why these sites and not other worthy candidates for protection in the face of the climate emergency)?”
More formally, you may imagine this example entails or otherwise predicts the need to do something with respect to the climate emergency elsewhere and over the longer haul. I am suggesting that really-existing accomplishments that happen next and at that site go to reframe the pertinent issues. People already understand what are case-specific accomplishments in ways that broader progress and success are understood by others only later on.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 