Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Spanish National Research Council: “On collective unpredictabilities, or the arts of politics for otherwisefactuals”

Abstract
In urban conditions where there is no conceivable way of working around the costs that the predicted abstractions of humanity wrought, the right to be human is either buttressed at all costs or abandoned all, together. Ethnographic scholarship has alternative shown how counterplanning, everydayness or the incidental often conjure unpredictable worlds. In both cases the predictable and the unpredictable are imagined as declinations of the adventitious: temporal and spatial assemblages of the probable, the plausible or the unforeseeable. But what if the unpredictable was not an expression of futural agnosticisms or indeterminacies, a curated hermeneutics of factuals vs. counterfactuals, but the collective accrual of surplusfactuals? What may it mean to speak of unpredictability as an arts of politics for otherwisefactuals?

Bio
Alberto Corsín Jiménez has an interest in the anthropology of cities and the anthropology of traps. Recent representative publications in each genre include Free Culture and the City: Hackers, Commoners, and Neighbors in Madrid, 1997-2017 (Cornell University Press, 2023) and “Three Tales on the Arts of Entrapment: Natural Contracts, Melodic Contaminations, and Spiderweb Anthropologies” (2024). He is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Spanish National Research Council and co-editor of Cultural Anthropology.

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