Foreclosures of Possibility: 4 Predictive Violence: The Closure of the Collective Future

If philosophy compressed relation, physics consecrated existence, and method ritualised exclusion, politics and ideology perfected the final act: the systematic foreclosure of collective possibility. Here, the ledger of the actual becomes not merely epistemic, but prescriptive, shaping what a society may imagine, aspire to, or enact.

Forecasting as foreclosure

Predictive frameworks — economic models, demographic projections, algorithmic governance — operate under the guise of foresight. Yet every prediction is simultaneously a constraint. By defining the likely, the optimal, the expected, they delineate the field of potential in advance. To predict is to prescribe; to forecast is to foreclose.

Possibility is retroactively criminalised when it falls outside anticipated trajectories. The collective imagination becomes disciplined, not through coercion alone, but through the authority of certainty. What is expected comes to stand in for what is possible.

Ideology as ontological lock

Beyond models and algorithms, ideology functions as a more pervasive predictive mechanism. Social norms, economic orthodoxies, political doctrines: these encode a fixed map of what is conceivable. They collapse the relational field of collective becoming into categories, roles, and scripts.

The act is subtle but totalising: deviation is pathologised, alternative visions are delegitimised, and emergent forms of social life are erased before they can cohere. Ideology becomes predictive violence — a closure that masquerades as continuity, a constraint imposed in the name of stability.

The symbolic economy of restriction

Education, media, bureaucracy, and law extend this logic. They teach not only what exists, but what can exist. They measure conformity and reward predictability, disciplining the very capacity to imagine relationally. Possibility is reduced to computation, emergence to compliance, becoming to routine.

The relational remainder

Yet, as always, the relational remainder persists. Unpredictable collective acts, subversive creativity, and emergent alignments leak through the cracks of systemic closure. Social formations, like physical or conceptual systems before them, cannot fully eradicate the field of potential.

Understanding predictive violence is not a call to nihilism; it is an invitation to notice the constraints, and to trace where possibility still seeps, unbidden, between the lines. It is in these interstices that the becoming of collective potential quietly endures.