CERTAIN UNCERTAINTIES Character 1: Uncertainty is a groundless foundation which allows reconfiguration of the state of things. Working from uncertainty as a basis demands the production -and reproductionof renewed paradigms. Character 2: Working from uncertainty as a basis, renders the growing precarity of life and work conditions. Uncertainty turns thus into a control and weakening mechanism. If there’s nothing to be foreseen, then future can only be understood as a blurry image where the power of our actions is fully diminished and neutralized due to the short-term effect to which they are condemned. Character 1: But uncertainty considered as an epochÊ, as a state of suspension, turns productive, becomes a fruitful space, a huge Mardi Gras where rules are still to be written. Uncertainty can be then understood as the place of the unwritten. Uncertainty is the realm where possibility reigns as the main and sovereign principle. Character 2: Suspension is a tool for domination, and helplessness is its consequence. Uncertainty is the state under which dominant powers write their rules, the suffocating atmosphere where all-that-couldbe and all-possible-worlds turn into an onlypossible-world. Character 1: But nevertheless, still remain spaces which confront the idea of totality, spaces which face the notion of a whole monolithic and unidirectional space: heterotopies. Heterotopic spaces -defined by Foucault in the late sixties, which eliminated and blurred prehierarchies in space and forms of power and knowledge- have extended their physical fields. Loopholes appear thanks to the growing dimensions of the world. Character 2: Perhaps the heteronomy and immediacy of networks have produced an alteration in the relationship between space and function. The possibility of juxtaposing different spaces and uses in one place has increased.
Nevertheless, growing confusion is not neutral. As it happens with increasing undistinction between work and life, workplace and home. Even free time has turned to be understood and presented under productive terms. Character 1: After years of self-absorbed Architecture, where image prevailed over any discourse, maybe it is necessary to define an architectural response to the needs of a heterotopic society. Fortunately, more than ever, space has lost all connection with a unidirectional use and become thus a field of possible actions where everything can happen at the same time. Can this be one of the positive faces of uncertainty? Character 2: Architecture should bring an ad hoc order to allow things to happen. Architecture becomes in this sense an organizer of relationships, capable of generating potentialities. It’s not about what it is, it’s about what it can be. Character 1: Space as an always unfinished matter. Character 2: Architecture as an order for disorder.