Thinking Backwards. Stitching the Breach of Time, Reclaiming Uncertainty

In an age governed by predictive systems, uncertainty is treated as a problem to be managed, calculated, and reduced. From algorithmic recommendation and behavioural analytics to predictive policing and AI forecasting, contemporary forms of governance operate by transforming open-ended futures into probabilistic trajectories. But what if uncertainty is not a deficit to overcome, but a condition to defend?

This talk revisits the philosophy of Henri Bergson to argue that uncertainty is not merely a temporary lack of knowledge but a constitutive feature of reality itself. Drawing on Bergson's concepts of duration, novelty, and attention, I explore how modern regimes of prediction rely on a deep habit of thought: the assumption that the future already exists as a field of latent possibilities waiting to be extracted, modelled, and optimized. Against this logic, Bergson proposes a radically different understanding of time as the continuous creation of the unforeseen.

Thinking backwards, in Bergson's sense, becomes a way of reversing the habits through which we spatialize time, reduce becoming to calculation, and mistake prediction for knowledge. At stake is not simply a philosophical account of time, but the possibility of reclaiming uncertainty as a political resource and preserving the conditions through which genuinely different futures may emerge.