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Short abstract

Traces how the rise of “wicked problems” and related terms in the 1970s reframed crisis as inherently unknowable and unsolvable, producing neoliberal subjects attuned to uncertainty, permanent insecurity, and the normalization of perpetual crisis.

Long abstract

This talk focuses on the 1970s as a historical moment in which new vocabulary for describing social and political crisis emerged across disciplines including design, economics, management theory, and cybernetics. Whether labeled wicked, wooly, messy, muddy, ill-defined, tricky, or divergent, this new classification of problems signaled the decline of Cold War rationality. The technocratic promise that crises could be diagnosed and solved gave way to a growing conviction that the most pressing problems of the time were resistant to rationalization and technically unsolvable.

By situating this linguistic shift within its broader political and cultural contexts, the paper asks what kind of subjectivity this new problem vocabulary produced. Focusing on the career of the term “wicked”—now paradigmatic in contemporary design and architectural practice, yet circulating far beyond these fields—I examine what forms of perception and intervention it enabled and foreclosed. I argue that wickedness reframed crisis as ontologically indeterminate, structurally unresolvable, and epistemically opaque. Coinciding with the rise of neoliberalism, this framing rendered moderate and instinct-driven approaches sensible and responsible, since definitive knowledge was presumed impossible. Simultaneously, it invisibilized cases in which structural causes were empirically well understood, deflecting systemic critique through appeals to falsificationism and bounded rationality.

I suggest that this historical moment produced a subject constituted by existential vulnerability and normalized insecurity. Revisiting the genealogy of wicked problems thus allows us to interrogate crisis not as an exceptional event, but as a mode of observation that organizes political possibility and continues to shape our contemporary moment.