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Contemporary anticipation methods––such as scenario-planning or even public-sector design which are ubiquitous in our contemporary political landscape––are often understood as deeply apolitical or even anti-democratic. As a matter of course, such practices are associated with instrumental rationality and technocratic governmental forms which are opposed to genuine political practices. I contest such conventional interpretations of contemporary anticipatory practices and offer a genealogical inquiry into what became known as aporetics: a set of methods and procedures developed to address the fundamental aporias in political epistemologies of postwar American (R&D). Tracing the development of future-oriented methods like the Delphi method or strategic gaming, I argue that what they have in common is a procedural orientation towards the orchestration of contestation. Contemporary anticipatory methods that inherit this quality are therefore marked not by an absence of authentic politics understood as agonism but rather by a fundamental transformation in what it means to be political when facing uncertain and plural futures.