Beyond the Promise of Security: Uncertainty as Resource

The paper addresses the problem¬atic relationship of the economy with uncertainty. Uncertainty concerns the future, and the fundamental tool of the modern economy— money—can be seen as a means of managing in the present an unknowable future. Finance takes this temporal logic to extremes. Based on the use of models and sophisticated techniques of predic¬tion, the present management of the future promises to offer a form of security that turns out to be incapable of managing just the most fascinat¬ing aspect of uncertainty: the continuous production of an always open and unpredictable future, which depends on present decisions and actions but is not bound by them. The article proposes an alternative approach to dealing with uncertainty, valorizing it as a resource rather than considering it as a threat to be eliminated.