The intertwining of current environmental, technological, political and philosophical processes and conflicts raises the problem of their description and of the action within them. In modernity, diversity and uncertainty were organized through planning and projects, but today this seems insufficient. We call these intertwinings “complex scenarios”, situations in which a group of tensions can become both a system and a conflict or controversy.
Following post-normal science, we can say that when uncertainty and stakes increase we enter a state of complexity that exceeds existing knowledge and institutions. Complexity necessarily implies ambiguity from the political point of view, that is, a plurality of perspectives. A complex scenario can present itself as a moment of collective ignorance, a kind of ontological void, or as a clash of types of knowledge, even as a clash of epistemes.
We have developed certain attitudes towards complex scenarios, a kind of methodology. One of these involves paying special attention to each actor and each tension at stake, understanding their provisional identity. Thinking of the whole situation as a metastability, that is, a system, or the prelude to a system, with several possible states of equilibrium and with different trajectories to reach them.