Fiction Forced Futures

Tony Fry

What I have to say is formed from overarching content converging with a position of speech.

It is becoming clear, but by no means universally, that our species now exists in a condition of betweenness. A short way to express this is as collectively being positioned between “the end times” and “the time to come.” The actuality of this situation is of envelopment in the complexity of the compounding crises of the present as it portends an epochal change of life on planet Earth. Attempts to characterise this moment by listing specific crises, and by mobilising an overarching concept – the Anthropocene – do not capture the scale, intertwined dynamics and trajectory of this moment. All available modes of representation fail to gather (bring together and comprehend) what is in process. While it is not possible to fully recognise and represent the “complexity of the complexity” of this tumultuous unsettling transition it can be suggestively indicated with a revisable narrative.

Obviously, there is no external point of view from which to contemplate such a complexity, yet it needs to acknowledged and registered. Know it or not, we are all individually situated epistemologically and experientially in relation to it. I know heat, drought, flood, conflict, the abject and the displaced, and this experience insinuated itself into what I think, read, say and how I view the continued asserted authority of the Eurocentric voice. So framed, the condition of crisis is not reducible to just objectified conditions but enfolds a “crisis of crisis” predicated upon a disjuncture between an imperative to understand and make present and then to act in time. Such a failure is fundamental and constitutes a lacuna that is intrinsic and that now divides the absolutely critical from institutionalised politics and governance. It can also be said to be the conjuncture demanding to be addressed by the academy that poses a major challenge to its now hegemonic instrumentalism.

So framed, what I have to present considers three linked issues: abandonment; cosmotechnics, and a reconfiguration of the global south as they enfold into each other. They do not represent the compound problem, and the notion of “complexity of the complexity” (understood as the overdetermining condition of the ontic unreachability of “the now”), but they do aim suggestively evoke and ground a fragment of it.

The resulting narrative from weaving these issues together is hybrid. It is formed by sound predictive data and well considered speculation. The adopted perspective is drawn from second order cybernetics. As such the narrative created emanates from observations that themselves invite being critically observed. The point of the recursive process of articulation, revision/correction is to incrementally build an understanding, sensibility, and an accommodation of those element of absolute complexity that can by “grasped” and responded to (in contrast to being reductively posited as problems to resolve).

Tony Fry, PhD., is director of The Studio at the Edge of the World (Tasmania), Adjunct Professor, Architecture and Design, University of Tasmania, and Visiting Professor, University of Ibagué, Colombia. He is an award-winning designer and held academic positions internationally. Tony is currently working collaboratively on writing projects with colleagues at the Bauhaus University, Weimar, and the Technical University, Berlin. He is a facilitator for a major project on a national strategy for “Relocating Australian Communities at Risk” from climate impacts, this with a team from the Australian National University, University of Canberra, Western Sydney University and the University of Technology, Sydney. Tony directed a three-year post-conflict research project in Timor-Leste (2009-12) and has worked post-conflict related projects in Colombia since 2015. He has written extensively on design, design philosophy, conflict and politics. Recent publications include, A New Political Imagination, Making the Case (with Madina Tlostanova), Routledge, 2021, and Writing Design Fiction, Relocating a City in Crisis, Bloomsbury, 2022. His latest book, Political Breakout is currently going to press.