Movements currently underway.

Trajectories are the specific movements of change that are traceable in the world right now — silhouettes of new forms emerging from old ones. They are not predictions or prescriptions but observations: lines of movement that are already underway, already being felt and lived by many people, even if not yet fully named or institutionalized.

Each trajectory described here is a movement from one form toward another — from an existing pattern that is becoming unstable toward a new one that is beginning to take shape. They are held here as open inquiries rather than conclusions, and each one will be developed further as the project deepens.

Modern society has organized itself through functional differentiation — the separation of life into autonomous spheres, each with its own logic: the economy, science, law, politics, education. This has produced extraordinary capabilities alongside a profound fragmentation of knowing, doing, and living. The trajectory toward creative integration is a movement in the other direction: toward forms of life and organization where these dimensions begin to cohere again — not by collapsing their differences but by finding new ways to hold them together.

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The representational idiom treats knowledge as a picture of a pre-given world, produced from a position of distance and objectivity. The performative idiom understands knowledge differently: as something that participates in and helps bring forth the realities it describes. This trajectory — from representation to performance — has implications across research, politics, art, and everyday life. It points toward a different understanding of what it means to know, and what it means to act.

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Contemporary society operates through dynamic stabilization — a logic that requires constant growth, acceleration, and innovation simply to maintain itself. Hartmut Rosa proposes resonance as the alternative: a different relationship to the world characterized not by control and acceleration but by genuine responsiveness, attunement, and being-affected. This trajectory points toward a different quality of life and a different understanding of what flourishing means.

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One significant trajectory concerns the organisation of political and economic life at the scale of living systems rather than nation-states or global markets. Bioregional governance names a movement towards forms of collective self-organisation rooted in the particular ecological and cultural conditions of a place — its watersheds, soils, climates, and histories — rather than imposed from administrative or economic logics external to it. This is less a blueprint than a direction: a gathering sense that the scale at which decisions are made matters enormously, and that viable futures may depend on re-learning how to inhabit and govern from within a place rather than over it.

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The modern worldview has tended to assume a single world — a single reality, a single framework of knowledge, a single trajectory of development. The movement toward pluriversality — many worlds — challenges this assumption, proposing that many different forms of life, ways of knowing, and modes of being in the world can and should coexist. This is not relativism but a genuine openness to the diversity of human and more-than-human life.

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Mark Fisher named capitalist realism as the pervasive sense that capitalism is the only viable form of social organisation — that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The trajectory named here moves in the opposite direction: towards what might be called imaginal realism, a recovery of the capacity to imagine and inhabit genuinely different social forms. Imaginal realism is not mere utopianism; it takes seriously the constraints and textures of the present while refusing to treat them as permanent. It draws on the imaginal as a genuine faculty — the capacity to sense what is not yet fully actual but is nonetheless real as a possibility, a tendency, a pull.

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Drawing on institutional theory and its notion of institutional logics — the taken-for-granted rules, values, and assumptions that organise different fields of social life — this trajectory names a movement away from the particular family of logics that has organised euromodern societies: logics of individualism, commodification, instrumental rationality, and linear progress. These logics are not universal, though they have often presented themselves as such. The trajectory points towards a plurality of families of logics — drawing on indigenous, non-western, and otherwise marginalised ways of organising collective life — not as a wholesale replacement but as a genuine opening of the field of what is possible and liveable.

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This trajectory names the long and still-unfinished movement away from the structures, habits, and imaginaries of imperial organisation — not only as political and economic systems but as ways of knowing, valuing, and relating. As Frantz Fanon understood, decolonisation is never merely a transfer of power from one set of hands to another; it is a remaking of the human itself — of what counts as fully human, who is accorded that status, and on what terms. Postcolonial life is therefore not simply what comes after empire in a temporal sense, but a practice of actively remaking the conditions that empire installed, including within thought and self-understanding. This involves attending to what was suppressed, distorted, or made invisible by colonial logics, and learning — often from those who carried that knowledge through — how to organise life differently.

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The scientific method, as it has come to be institutionalised, tends to begin with a hypothesis: a question already framed, an answer already anticipated in outline. The trajectory named here moves towards what might be called the natural method — a three-stage process of sensing, identifying threads, and following those threads. Rather than beginning with a fixed question, the natural method begins with open attention: a careful, patient sensing of what is actually present and moving. From that sensing, certain threads begin to emerge — patterns, resonances, tendencies. The third movement is to follow those threads, remaining attentive to where they lead rather than directing them towards a predetermined end. This method has affinities with Goethean science, with phenomenological inquiry, and with the wayfaring orientation that runs through much of this project.

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The forms of social life that have come to dominate are organised, broadly speaking, around a logic of wicked correspondence — relations of extraction, acceleration, and instrumental use, in which things, places, and people are encountered primarily as resources to be drawn upon rather than presences to be met. Correspondence in this mode is one-directional: the world is addressed but not genuinely answered; contact is made but not sustained. Drawing on both Ingold and Simondon, a different trajectory becomes visible. For Ingold, correspondence is the fundamental mode of genuine relation — not the transmission of information across a gap, but a mutual answering, a following of one another's movements through a shared world. For Simondon, the conditions for new forms of relation emerge through metastability: a state in which existing structures are holding tensions they can no longer contain, and in which something new propagates itself through those tensions — not as rupture, but as resolution into a genuinely different structure. Graceful correspondence names the quality of relation this resolution might carry: attentive, reciprocal, unhurried, organised around encounter rather than extraction. It is not a return to some prior wholeness, but the emergence — at many different scales and sites simultaneously — of social forms capable of genuinely answering the world they inhabit.

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See the Lines page for specific threads and artifacts that illuminate these movements →