The recurring seam: Why cultures recurrently distinguish the manifest from the possible

Abstract

For at least twenty-five centuries, distant traditions have produced structurally comparable figures: a reality divided between a manifest region and a not-yet-manifest region, an operational passage between the two, and the recognition that what is most fundamental in the second region cannot be fully captured by the instruments of the first. This essay does not interpret the recurrence as direct transmission, mere coincidence, or perennial truth. It proposes instead that meaning-producing systems, when reflecting upon their own structure, tend to rediscover the seam between actuality and possibility. From this standpoint, futures studies is not only a methodology for dealing with uncertainty. Its refusal of the singular future is the contemporary disciplinary form of an older recognition: the not-yet-actualized is not nothing. Scenario work, anticipation, and plural futures thus appear as modern protocols for keeping the possible articulate without collapsing it into prediction.