Improbable Potentialities

On posters and digital displays, propaganda for potentiality litters airports and university campuses, fitness studios and city streets. Last spring, Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit decked its halls with posters sporting the slogans “Unlock your potential” and “Unlock our potentials” (with the plural version raising questions about grammar and agency). At nearby Schiphol Airport, travelers were instructed by adverts to “face the future with confidence” courtesy of Ernst & Young’s platform ey.ai, whose holy trinity was composed by the terms “confidence/value/potential.” The company wants to “empower responsible transformation,” “optimize performance,” “create exponential value,” and “augment people potential” by creating “a future where seamless people-AI collaboration achieves extraordinary outcomes.” Whereas a poster for a fitness watch simply exhorts the subject of interpellation to “become your potential,” presenting the watch merely as a tool, the more sophisticated forms of “potentialist propaganda” celebrate forms of human-AI collaboration, or merger, in the shape of optimized neoliberal cyborgs.

To some extent, such campaigns are the offspring of Microsoft’s decades-old slogan “Your Potential. Our Passion.”1 They are also in keeping with an ideology known as “longtermism,” or “effective altruism,” which originated at Oxford University and is lavishly funded by tech billionaires.2 Longtermism involves calculations that purport to quantify the future lives that may be lost due to the wrong decisions being taken in the present; juggling astronomical amounts of “potential lives,” longtermists are concerned with making sure that these lives are not lost.3 One patron of longtermism, Elon Musk, is obsessively focused on stemming what he sees as the threat of global human population decline—with an obvious racist and classist subtext, as some individuals and cultures enjoy privileged status in the minds of Musk and the fascists he hobnobs with.4 While the Muskian specter of the AI Singularity haunts longtermism, this school of thought is nonetheless predicated on an expansive conception of “intelligent life.” Longtermists such as Nick Bostrom and William McAskill not only advocate Musk’s pet project of space colonization, arguing that “the potential for approximately 1038 human lives is lost every century that colonization of our local supercluster is delayed,”5 but are also open to the future development of “software lives.”6 Thus, they use more encompassing terms such as “Earth-originating intelligent life” or speculate on future forms of “digital sentience” that “would have at least comparable moral status to humans.”7

Oliver Ressler, Not Sinking, Swarming, 2021.

For longtermism, the “potential of software minds and space colonies dwarfs every other pressing issue of the present,” as one critical observer puts it.8 One radical strand of modern historical thinking could be termed “potentialism”—a form of historicism that is open to unprecedented actualizations and long latencies, to events transcending their conditions, and to processes of becoming that are not always reducible to classical conceptions of class. Now that it has been recaptured and refunctionalized in the service of algorithmic governance by a planetary elite of AI-pushing space invaders, what potential does the concept of potentiality still hold? How to propagate a potentialism of deviation and divergence, of the improbable-but-necessary, in opposition to the techno-dystopian future that is being made today in Silicon Valley?

Leviathan and Multitude

In his video Not Sinking, Swarming (2021), the artist Oliver Ressler shows footage of activists preparing a climate protest to “offer a real insight into the processes of climate movements’ self-organization.”9 Ressler hides the organizers’ identities, either by filling in their outlines with images of the subsequent protest or through pixelation. At one point, a pan of Abraham Bosse’s frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan fills the screen. In this icon of political theory, the sovereign’s body politic is constituted by, or subsumes, the mass of the people. Ressler accompanies it with a text on assemblies and swarms of disobedient bodies as constituting a counterpower to past, present, and future Leviathans, anchoring his film in ongoing debates on (state and anti-statist) power. In Sandra Leonie Field’s words, Antonio Negri and many in his wake pit “Spinozist constituent power potentia against Hobbesian constituted power potestas.”10 As the perpetual potential of human creative force, constituent power is thus categorically distinct from actualized constituted power, which tends to become formalized and detached from any popular base—becoming sovereign power.

Following Field’s analysis, both Spinoza and Hobbes were responding to medieval scholasticism: essentially a Christianized Aristotelianism. In Aristotle’s hylomorphism, form comes to play the part of a thing’s essence, its “primary substance”: it is only by being in-formed that matter amounts to anything.11 In such a framework, matter is potentiality and only attains actuality through form; nature is the process of the actualization of possibilities.12 In a diachronic interpretation of substance as contingent upon realization, dunamis and energeia (potentiality and actuality) can thus be seen as a temporalization of hyle and morphe (matter and form). Building materials are a potential building, but the form must be brought out in the process of construction.13 The scholastic conception of natural philosophy revolved around the progressive actualization of potentialities, with the “set of potentiae belonging to each individual” ultimately being grounded in its specific “substantial form.”14 In Aquinas’s philosophy of nature, “the stone’s substantial form explains why it falls to the ground, but equally the acorn’s substantial form explains why it grows to be an oak tree. When natural change occurs, this is conceived as a potentiality being actualized, or a power being put in act.”15

Oliver Ressler, Not Sinking, Swarming, 2021.

From Aristotle onward, human beings were a particularly knotty case study for hylomorphic theory; after all, what is the human substantial form? It should not be mistaken for some archetypal form of the human body. What eluded analysis was a principle that makes the human being more than a corpse, or a zombie, or a statue. For Aristotle, “the body as such only potentially has life and it is the presence of soul that fulfils this potentiality.”16 The hylomorphic tradition from Aristotle to Aquinas and beyond is marked by a series of complex debates on the soul, seen variously—or simultaneously—as a set of potentiae or as “the actual formal principle making embodied living substances to be the kinds of things that they are.”17 In contemporary thinking, the focus is less on houses, oak trees, or even individual humans and more on political form and political power.

Whereas much early modern philosophy tried to shed scholasticism as so much dead weight, Hobbes and Spinoza both détourned the notion of potentiality rather than jettisoning it altogether—politicizing potentiality as a form of power. Matters are more complicated than a clear-cut opposition between Spinozian multitudinous potentiality and Hobbesian sovereign potency, between amorphous social matter and institutionalized form. In his work, Hobbes himself articulated a dialectic of potentia and potestas—though he did in fact privilege the latter. In keeping with medieval thought on the problem of the King’s Two Bodies—i.e., on institutions as being separate from the people that embody them—Hobbes focused on the “body politic” as a fictitious body that could be analyzed as analogous to scholasticism’s theorization of natural entities in which “the proper power of an entity should generate behavior” along predictable lines, without the whims of free will.18

Hobbes thus based his theory of human institutions and sovereignty on scholastic natural philosophy, at least in early work such as De Cive (1642). While Hobbes’s hostility to the inchoate multitude and his championing of law and order were constants in this thinking, he would abandon the juridical naturalization of constituted sovereign power that marked his early work. Leviathan (1651) proposes what Field terms a “relational” rather than an essential or natural conception of power.19 Leviathan theorizes a variety of artificial personas and forms of personation, in which power is delegated to some agent. Hobbes does not deem sovereignty to be fundamentally different from this, as the sovereign’s power is also supposed to be the result of some—hypothetical—agreement among the people to delegate their potentia, transmuting it into the ruler’s potestas.20

Hobbes’s conceptualization of sovereignty has an incisiveness that makes it more than mere ideology. It is possible to think critically with Hobbes—or indeed to work critically with Abraham Bosse’s famous frontispiece for Leviathan. In Ressler’s film, the image of Leviathan’s crowned head fades into footage of a pixelated multitude. Hobbes dissolves into Spinoza, or into Spinoza as read by Negri. If Spinoza introduced the multitude as composed of pluriform potentiae, Negri identified the multitude with the proletariat—a notion which he in turn distinguished from the industrial working class, giving it a post-Fordist slant.21 There is, to be sure, a tension between what Negri and Hardt term an “ontological multitude,” sub specie aeternitatis, and a historical or not-yet multitude that needs to be organized as a political project. However, these two multitudes, “although conceptually distinct, are not really separable. If the multitude were not already latent and implicit in our social being, we could not even imagine it as a political project; and, similarly, we can only hope to realize it today because it already exists as a real potential.”22

Actualizing this potential would indeed mean that—as Rodrigo Nunes glosses this passage—people become “conscious of its latency,” which requires a political project.23 Thus the multitude’s incarnation could be coalitions of climate action groups, as in Ressler’s video. To be sure, Ressler’s use of “swarming” in the title raises questions: Does this not evoke the Silicon Valley discourse on swarm intelligence and hive minds?24 The swarm is a key figure of emergent behavior as something that can be modeled and predicted—and manipulated, as in fascist mobs springing into action thanks to AI-generated content distributed by bots.25 However, Ressler’s multitude may yet have surprises in store—swerves and feints that challenge the rule of probability and predictability.

Historical Potential

Like Negri, Giorgio Agamben sides with potentia over potestas, but insists that we cannot be content with identifying potentia with constituent power, and celebrate the latter. Agamben conceives of sovereign power as “[dividing] itself into constituting and constituted power” and insists that the relation between these two is

just as complicated as the relation Aristotle establishes between potentiality and act, dynamis and energeia; and, in the last analysis, the relation between constituting and constituted power (perhaps like every authentic understanding of the problem of sovereignty) depends on how one thinks the existence and autonomy of potentiality.26

Following Bartleby’s refrain of “preferring not to,” Agamben foregrounds the power to not-be (like that). Since actualization means running the risk of slipping into actualized potestas, Agamben advocates a new “ontology of potentiality” that replaces “the ontology founded on the primacy of actuality.”27 He therefore insists on the need to explore forms of “destituent” power that resist being captured and constituted. In this, he takes cues from Friedrich Schelling.

While the early modern politicization of potentia as a form of power thus resonates strongly in contemporary thinking, a second moment also needs to be addressed. In the transition from German idealism to materialism, certain philosophers and political radicals sought to side with history as becoming, and as repository of un-actualized possibility and potentiality. Schelling is key here. In his later work, he latched on to the Aristotelian temporalization of ontology in his attempts to counter Hegelian dialectics for remaining merely logical; insofar as there was any congruence between this philosophy and reality, this was accidental. Schelling obsessively attacked the problem of being, that which precedes any philosophy. In doing so, he historicized the ontological. This resonated at a moment marked by the decline of idealism and its transformation into early materialist philosophies of praxis, and it became relevant again in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when the poverty of orthodox Marxian dialectics—especially as codified in the Kojèvian reading of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic—was increasingly apparent.

Evelina Mohei, scarf for Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus, 2023.

“Late” Schelling differentiated between what he termed “negative” and “positive” philosophy. Negative philosophy is logical, rational—which was the case for Hegel’s dialectic, in Schelling’s diagnosis. Positive philosophy (which has nothing to do with positivism whatsoever) concerns actual being, that which precedes and exceeds logical thought. As Peter Dews notes, in the transitional Weltalter (1811), Schelling used the terms “logical” and “historical” philosophy for what he later termed “negative” and “positive”—though the entire system, as constituted by these dialectical counterparts, is itself profoundly historical in nature.28 Historicizing Aristotle’s dunamis and energeia, Schelling charts the dialectic of potentiality and actuality in the registers of both negative and positive philosophy. In the mode of negative philosophy, the dialectic starts with pure potentiality, being-able-to (Seinkönnen); the next steps involve that potentiality’s actualization into a kind of inchoate and generic being (Sein); this must in turn be re-potentialized, infused with freedom and form. In the register of positive philosophy, the starting point is not pure potentiality but rather what Schelling calls “unvordenkliches Sein,” an “unprethinkable” and undifferentiated “being.”29 This is precisely what was lacking in Hegel: Hegel started with the idea, and even its dialectic self-alienation in nature remained a mere philosophical concept. The question for positive philosophy is how this aboriginal being can become becoming. How to infuse being with potentiality, which is to say with freedom, historicity, futurity?30

When the possibility of being other, of being otherwise, reveals itself within immemorial being, it raises itself to the status of potentia potentiae—a potential potency that does not yet pass into actuality.31 Once this actualization finally happens, we are dealing with the first proper potency in Schelling’s triad: das Seinkönnende, which was the starting point in the merely logical realm of negative dialectics; here, in the positive register, it reveals itself as a differentiation from inchoate Ursein. The second potentiality, also called the Seinmüssende, that which cannot help but be, infuses direction and purpose into the potentially equally random and boundless creation that is the Ursein; the third potency, the Seinsollende, or selbstbewusstes Können, is a potentiality to be that never spends itself fully in being, that always maintains an essential freedom in and from being.32 This is Spirit: a re-potentialization of being, a reopening of creation. In a Christian register, these three potencies become the personalities of the Trinity: the Father who creates the world by positing a being distinct from Himself, by self-othering (“Gott ist das Andere”); the Son who reinjects divine Logos into a fallen world; and Spirit as free subjectivity in a transformed (transfigured) creation.33

Schellingian potentiality is power over possibility; as such it is a form of sovereignty, perhaps the highest form. As opposed to constituted and enshrined potestas, it is the power to become, which means: to be other than what already exists. This is how potentiality first manifests itself in aboriginal being. It introduces a difference.34 Yet Schelling is not an unqualified productivist of potentiality, and this is where Agamben draws on Schelling—siding with the power to not-be, the refusal to actualize. As Agamben argues, his proposal to think an immemorial being “that presupposes no potentiality” is a rare attempt “to conceive of being beyond the principle of sovereignty.”35 To be sure, within Schelling’s system this state must be overcome; things need to start happening. Nonetheless, he is reluctant to argue that potencies must always pass into actuality, and spends many pages discussing potentialities that refuse to budge. Thus Agamben can rightly emphasize “the potentiality to not-be,” which “can never consist of a simple transition de potentia ad actum: It is, in other words, a potentiality that has as its object potentiality itself, a potentia potentiae.”36

The ontological turn in leftist theory has been a mixed blessing. Often resulting in grand debates between the “line of immanence” (Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, Agamben) and the “line of transcendence” (Laclau, Mouffe, Badiou, Žižek), these debates are self-perpetuating and unresolvable as both sides overeagerly map ontologies that are “both fundamental and contestable” onto questions of political organization and action.37 Agamben is not the least problematic in this regard. The halting and compromised historicization of ontology in Schelling is mirrored by an all-too-coherent ontologization of the historical in Agamben; a lack of mediation between the ontological and the political has led to increasingly dubious polemical interventions on his part, as when he saw Covid-prevention measures exclusively through the prism of sovereignty and the state of exception, without any allowance for the contingencies and dialectical complexities of history.

Deleuze’s version of Schellingian potentialism offers a productive alternative here. At times, he uses “potentiality” and “virtuality” as synonyms, yet he is concerned with conceptions of potentiality that confuse it with mere possibility: “The possible is opposed to the real; the process undergone by the possible is therefore a ‘realisation.’ By contrast, the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself. The process it undergoes is that of actualisation.”38 This is not mere semantics; Deleuze insists that the point is that the actual does not resemble the virtual. Rather, actual forms emerge in a process of differentiation that can produce the unprecedented:

To the extent that the possible is open to “realization,” it is understood as an image of the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible. That is why it is difficult to understand what existence adds to the concept when all it does is double like with like. Such is the defect of the possible: a defect which serves to condemn it as produced after the fact, as retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles it. The actualisation of the virtual, on the contrary, always takes place by difference, divergence or differenciation. Actualisation breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle.39

There are shades here of Gilbert Simondon’s critique of hylomorphism, and especially of those versions in which “form is an a priori UFO that lands on raw matter.”40 Such versions of Aristotelian hylomorphism might be said to be covertly Platonic; the morphe here functions like a preexisting idea. Deleuze’s virtuality goes against all philosophies of preexisting forms, including modern conceptions of heredity, just as it opposes the reduction of the potential to the possible. This is not to say that Deleuze’s virtual constitutes a conceptual break. Rather, it is an attempt to salvage potentiality from its degraded versions—as is apparent, for instance, from his appreciative remarks on Schelling, who “brings difference out of the night of the Identical,” and in whose work “A, A2, A3 form the play of pure depotentialisation and potentiality, testifying to the presence in Schelling’s philosophy of a differential calculus adequate to the dialectic.”41

If potentiality and actuality both partake in the real, the question is how to practice actualization—a practice that may also entail refusals to actualize, moments or long periods of preferring-not-to. As suggested by Hardt and Negri, a version of Jameson’s historical consciousness is key, and this involves the action of naming: naming the multitude as a concept and a potential political reality is a speech act that may help to actualize it.42 Performance trumps ontology, and immanence becomes immanent critical practice—a project that will generate contradictory and imperfect forms, divergent forms of identification and transindividuation, collaboration and collectivity.

Probability and Energy

I have sketched certain genealogies in ways that are no doubt both too simplified and too unsystematic, but I consider a stocktaking of these arcane philosophies of great importance even—especially—in the accelerating catastrophe.43 The politicization of Aristotelianism in early modern thought, its historicization in nineteenth-century (post-)idealism, and the affective turn announced by Kierkegaard all intermingle in sometimes contradictory ways in current thought. One crucial question remains that of the specific forms through which power over possibility can be asserted. Is the theory and practice of potentia as (de-)instituent power from below not stuck all too often in an abstract opposition between the horizontal and the vertical, and hampered by an association of structure or form with constituted potestas?

The chronopolitical and organizational implications of contemporary potentialism are ambivalent, particularly in a context marked by forms of algorithmic management that seek to make potential history contiguous with the present through predictive probabilism—the project of the aforementioned “longtermist” think-tank theory. This is the context for Sean Cubitt’s diagnosis that “potential as the presence of futurity is annihilated” in a world that no longer “distinguishes between real and probabilistic.”44 With the proliferation of “prediction products” based on data extraction, future (consumer) behaviors can become transparent. By processing vast quantities of data, algorithms can detect patterns; a classic example in the relevant literature is “vegetarians miss fewer flights.” It is no longer merely a matter of extrapolation based on past data, but of real-time data mining and pattern recognition allowing for instant feedback. Thus “a handful of now measurable personal characteristics, including the ‘need for love,’ predict the likelihood of ‘liking a brand’”—or voting for a party.45 Algorithmic culture is thus based on a probabilistic logic. On the macro level, forms of social emergence become probabilistic trend forecasting within the Katastrophenmanagement that is contemporary governance. If the climate is such a complex system that weather emergencies such as extreme heatwaves are hard to predict in detail, it is well-known that “the danger of feedback loops” increases the likelihood of such “unexpected events”—so how unexpected are they, really?46

The real disaster is the seeming lack of options, or the reduction of potential forms and histories to a limited set of abstract possibilities, which are then transcoded into statistical probabilities—though certain dramatic possibilities with low probability can come to command much attention and massive resources. What We Owe the Future by prominent longtermist William MacAskill is a case in point. He first paints a grand vista of the “potential future of civilization,” which far outruns that of “the average mammalian species,” due to human reason and technological prowess: “The earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions of years. If we survive that long, with the same population per century as now, there will be a million future people for every person alive today. And if humanity ultimately takes to the stars, the timescales become literally astronomical”—something MacAskill illustrates with rows of Otto Neurath–style figures representing future generations.47 The potential is vast, but so are the risks of AI or bioterrorism snuffing out humankind. One particularly hallucinatory passage is worth quoting in full:

Many extinction risk specialists consider engineered pandemics the second most likely cause of our demise this century, just behind artificial intelligence. At the time of writing, the community forecasting platform Metaculus puts the probability of an engineered pandemic killing at least 95 percent of people by 2100 at 0.6 percent. Experts I know typically put the probability of an extinction-level engineered pandemic this century at around 1 percent; in his book The Precipice, my colleague Toby Ord puts the probability at 3 percent. Even if you dispute the precise numbers, I think that in no way can we rule out such a possibility. And even if the probability is low, it is still high enough that preventing such a catastrophe should be a key priority of our time.48

The juggling of possibilities and probabilities on the basis of phenomenally sketchy sources is used to justify what seems to be a foregone conclusion.49 Artificial Intelligence is key for MacAskill’s vision of “economies [that] could double in size over months or years rather than decades,” though how that would work on a finite planet, before space colonization, is anyone’s guess. MacAskill is particularly slippery when it comes to climate change, doing his best to put a techno-optimistic, greenwashing spin on things: “Decarbonisation is a proof of concept for longtermism. Clean energy innovation is so robustly good, and there is so much still to do in that area that I see it as a baseline longtermist activity against which other potential actions can be compared.”50 However, taking it as a given that decarbonization is going well, MacAskill emphasizes that “moral change, wisely governing the ascent of artificial intelligence, preventing engineered pandemics, and averting technological stagnation are all at least as important, and often radically more neglected.”51

MacAskill briefly considers the “low-probability but worst-case climate scenario,” but fails to see how “even this could lead directly to civilizational collapse.” The real risk, he thinks, is the depletion of fossil fuels in this century, as in that case “we would use up a resource that might be crucial for recovery after the collapse of civilization” (due to nuclear war or bioterrorism, rather than climate change).52 In the subtext of What We Owe the Future, then, we find a different conception of potentiality: the potential (fossil) energy needed to fuel the process of accelerating economic innovation. Andreas Malm’s study of the adoption of the steam engine and the emergence of “fossil capital” in Britain around 1800 teems with references to the “potential energy” contained in water power and coal. This is potential energy in terms of horsepower. How much quantifiable horsepower does the heat of combustion of a certain amount of coal generate? Any comparison is ultimately complex and involves social and political factors.53 These days, the hidden ecological costs are increasingly coming to the surface: whether wind power is more expensive than coal, oil, or gas also depends on whether the ecological consequences are factored into the equation.

As MacAskillian slogans greet us from the billboards of potentialist propaganda, it is urgent to reclaim, rethink, and reimagine potentiality itself. What the likes of MacAskill will not admit is that the catastrophe is already here. How’s that for predictability? The inhabitants of this planet are already in the storm—some perhaps trying, as suggested by Aimé Césaire in a passage glossed by Malcolm Ferdinand, to get to its center, to the eye of the hurricane.54 We are immanent to the catastrophe, and cannot dialectically magic our way out of it in one fell swoop. Obviously, some are much more affected by the accelerating slow violence then others—but the LA fires drive home the point that privilege can be surprisingly shaky, and this can be one prompt for politicization, for forming coalitions. In Fred Moten’s delightful gloss on remarks by the Black Panthers’ Fred Hampton:

The problematic of coalition is that coalition isn’t some­thing that emerges so that you can come help me, a maneu­ver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?55

In the face of the longtermists’ lavishly funded ideological dross, we need to develop a potential politics, or politics of potentiality. Such a project refuses to limit human and social potential to the mathematical sublime of vast sums of future human lives. and tries to reassert power over possibility. This would indeed amount to a potentialism against probability, as T. J. Demos suggests: “It’s against probability that we must now act, for a future of disruption, and for the emergence of the possible beyond the emergency of the present.”56 Here, a slogan from a 1908 publication which has been excavated by the team of Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus—a social and cultural center in Stockholm—and knitted into scarves designed by Evelina Mohei is rather to the point: “Everything that is necessary is possible.” Another phrase form the Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs (1986) was recently quoted by Natascha Sadr Haghighian: “In time, we will demand the impossible in order to wrest it from that which is possible.”57

Suggestive and inspiring as such slogans may be, the obvious question is how they can become truly performative speech acts rather than impotent incantations. They need to be complemented by hard questions. Are there ways of intervening actively in processes of emergence—in forming them? What of truly different forms and relationships—emancipatory and redistributive forms and relationships? Preserving potentiality and preventing it from slipping into constituted and actualized form has become such a preoccupation that the dialectic of potentiality and actuality, and of potential form and actual organization structure, has atrophied. Just how can potentialities beyond and against the merely probable be actualized? How do we organize potential political form into relations, organizations and coalitions—which, from the vantage point of the present, appear as so many improbable possibilities?

Vrije Universiteit restroom door, 2024. Photo: Nicoline van Harskamp.

In the spring of 2024, a vision of Gaza in 2035 drawn up by Benjamin Netanyahu’s office was made public: digital renderings of a Dubai-style free-trade zone with skyscrapers, high-speed train lines, highways, and a booming port—bereft of any traces of Palestinian lives. A longtermist utopia, this chilling vision of extraction and extermination will likely strike the Muskian tech broligarchy as a promising model.58 At the same time, artists and activists have proposed and proliferated other images of Palestine and the Levant, as well as enacted divergent social relations in doing so: by circulating texts, producing zines, and organizing reading groups, by producing films and hosting screenings.59 In the process, improbably—seemingly even impossibly—potential histories are opened up, with Peter Linebaugh’s essay “Palestine & the Commons: Or, Marx & the Musha’a” being turned into a zine by the Learning Palestine collective as well as being incorporated in the “slow-growing reader” of printouts and photocopies produced in the context of Marwa Arsanios’s project Usufructuraties of earth at BAK. Here, a theoretical and artistic engagement with a form of common land use in the Ottoman Levant becomes a way of imagining potentiality otherwise, in forms that preenact (im)possible actualizations.