ABSTRACT
History scarcely takes place as predicted or expected. Wherever, exceptionally, a forecast is still available or an expectation still remembered at the time when they have either come true (or failed to do so), one notices not only that the distance between facts demanded and facts supplied is generally unbridgeable, but more precisely that there is no common dimension, that they are incommensurable. The blame for the gap is mostly put on the method used, the level of competence involved, or in particular (for undeniably good reasons) the bias induced by the undeclared presence of strategies, as for instance the feed-back related strategies which have been popularized, a long time ago, under the heading of a self-fulfilling or, respectively, self-defeating prophecy, and which today, increasingly pre-select the media availability and distribution of news. Yet there is a sense in which the responsibility for the fact that there is nothing less likely and more exceptional than a prediction that ‘materializes,’ and that a vast majority of predictions prove as incommensurable as inapplicable, has absolutely nothing in common with any of those deficiences, or with any particular deficiency at all, and appears rather as a matter of course. What one needs to remember is that a prediction, every prediction, when it comes of age, has necessarily fallen out of its framework, situational horizon, world. A multitude of small events has occurred, and their common result is not a stunning ‘big change’, but a more uncanny and imperceptible thing, which happens all the time, and which can be described as the disappearance of one world and the appearance, in its place, of another, unrelated world. It was foretold, yesterday, that a particular facial muscle will move on the ‘face of the whole universe’ (Spinoza). Today, the universe has a different face, and the forecast, disconnected from all that which had made its importance and urgency, displays that specific combination of mystery and triviality which gives things from yesterday their inimitable flavour. Orwell’s novel 1984 is an obvious example here – not in its intuitions and demonstrations about totalitarianism, which still today distinguish the book’s admirable insight, but in its (unintended, apocryphal) quality as a forecast of things to come.
