Introduction to a creative philosophy of anticipation

Abstract

There were many anticipations creating this book. We start with the Second International Conference on Anticipation, held at Senate House in London 2017, where we (Jamie Brassett and John O’Reilly) organized and delivered a curated discussion panel – though this is by no means the earliest encounter germane to this story. Anticipation took the form of an atmosphere in this 1930s Art Deco building. Senate House was initiated by William Beveridge when he was elected to the post of Vice-Chancellor of the University of London in 1926. Beveridge’s work anticipated and therefore created a new timeline of the future as the thinker of the welfare state that enabled heterogenous futures. Beveridge also had a different, more homogenous version of the future – like many of the pre-war left in Britain who were motivated by the idea of eugenics, the engineering out of undesired genetic qualities (Freedland, 2012; Renwick, 2019). For Beveridge, the anticipatory power of the welfare state gave way to the predictive power of eugenics. The 19-floor building of Senate House was designed by vegetarian Quaker Charles Holden, a specialist in the atmosphere of the subterranean, having designed over 40 underground stations in London. The slightly dystopic atmosphere generated by the severe beauty of the building’s Portland Stone materials haunted the future in the present in perfectly anticipatory fashion. George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four was modelled on Senate House. The strategy of organizational threat as a mode of political control by Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, anticipates the operational logic behind the strategies of the US and UK governments nearly 20 years after the fictional year of the book – especially with the War on Terror. ‘Fear is the anticipatory reality in the present of a threatening future,’ writes Brian Massumi in his essay ‘The future birth of the affective fact’. He continues: ‘It is the felt reality of the nonexistent, loomingly present as the affective fact of the matter’ (Massumi, 2010, p. 54). In everyday experience such prophecies can become self-fulfilling, but this disguises the affective, material power of threat as an atmosphere. The affective fact, Massumi argues, opens the way to generate and legitimate many different kinds of actions, actors and their networks to pre-empt the Jamie Brassett and John O’Reilly Introduction