Anticipatory Ontologies: Prefiguring the Necessary in the Chthulucene

Abstract

Contemporary critical theory is caught in a double bind: radical diagnoses of anthropocentrism and planetary crisis tend toward paralysing stasis, while mainstream normative ethics (utilitarianism, egalitarian contractualism, capability approaches) dilute transformative demands into incremental reforms that remain internal to the onto-epistemology they seek to challenge. This paper proposes a third path: anticipatory ontology. Drawing on feminist new materialism, posthumanities, and queer ecologies (Haraway, Barad, Tsing, Bennett, Braidotti, Povinelli, Stengers), anticipatory ontology refuses both apocalyptic waiting and reformist gradualism by prefiguring, here and now, modes of existence that dominant assemblages still code as impossible at scale. Through practices of speculative fabulation, prefigurative enactment, and minor ontogenesis, it treats art, architecture, dietary reconfiguration, and micro-communal experimentation as material-semiotic technologies for partially inhabiting necessary futures in the present. The paper maps the contemporary impasse, articulates the core operations of anticipatory ontology, and answers objections concerning symbolic inefficacy, elitism, and political quietism. It argues that anticipatory practices do not await favourable conditions but seed new capacities to affect and be affected, thereby widening the range of the possible when dominant arrangements begin to falter. In an era of closure, keeping alternative worlds alive is already a form of power.