Oceanic Uncertainty

Oceanic Uncertainty examines uncertainty as an irreducible condition of existence, knowledge and experience. Moving between philosophy, the social sciences and quantum physics, the chapter distinguishes uncertainty from calculable risk and traces the historical erosion of determinism, culminating in the onto-epistemological implications of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The oceanic metaphor opens a counter-metaphysics of uncertainty, understood as a vast, relational and generative condition through which contingency, agency and potential emerge. The chapter also interrogates the political consequences of managing uncertainty through pre-emption, prevention and precaution, and the neoliberal appropriation of uncertainty as a resource for creativity, productivity and optimization.

It makes a case for cultivating hesitation, ambiguity and not-knowing as ways of reclaiming time, resisting the capture of potential and keeping alternative futures open.