Speculative Research

The Lure of Possible Futures

Alex Wilkie, Martin Savransky, Marsha Rosengarten, Alex Wilkie, Martin Savransky, Marsha Rosengarten, Alex Wilkie, Martin Savransky, Marsha Rosengarten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134890705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Is another future possible? So called 'late modernity' is marked by the escalating rise in and proliferation of uncertainties and unforeseen events brought about by the interplay between and patterning of social–natural, techno–scientific and political-economic developments. The future has indeed become problematic. The question of how heterogeneous actors engage futures, what intellectual and practical strategies they put into play and what the implications of such strategies are, have become key concerns of recent social and cultural research addressing a diverse range of fields of practice and experience. Exploring questions of speculation, possibilities and futures in contemporary societies, Speculative Research responds to the pressing need to not only critically account for the role of calculative logics and rationalities in managing societal futures, but to develop alternative approaches and sensibilities that take futures seriously as possibilities and that demand new habits and practices of attention, invention, and experimentation.

1
The lure of possible futures

On speculative research

Martin Savransky, Alex Wilkie and Marsha Rosengarten

Introduction: beyond the impasse of the present

Is another future possible? It appears that we inhabit a peculiar time, somewhat suspended in its own frantic movement, where the future has never been more present, yet the present keeps prolonging itself, insisting, with its own order of continuity, on a time that does not quite seem to pass. The world is witness to a proliferation of crises of diverse orders and scopes, from the financial crash of 2008 that plunged it into a global economic crisis that still persists and threatens social, political, and economic futures today (Mirowski, 2014), through new and ongoing global health challenges, to the proliferation of environmental disasters and the planetary problem of climate change in an age that some refer to as the ‘Anthropocene’ (Crutzen & Stroemer, 2000) and others as the Capitalocene (Moore, 2015), to name but some of the most obvious ones. Despite this, the dominant modes of response to the futures that these transformative events generate still largely privilege a ‘business-as-usual’ approach that reduces futures to matters of anticipation, calculation, management and pre-emption of risks and uncertainties in the present. An approach, in other words, that cannot engage possible futures without simultaneously submitting them to the logics, rationalities, and habits that govern the problematic of the present.

In some respects, there is something anachronistic about the impasse that characterises what we may nevertheless call our ‘contemporary’ situation (Savransky, 2012). For the sense of an immutable present, whereby knowledge of what has been, and anticipation of what is yet to come, remain connected through a kind of temporality ‘in which nothing essentially new could occur’, was a central feature of what conceptual historian Reinhardt Koselleck (2004: 58) calls the ‘horizon of expectation’ of the West before the French revolution. In this understanding, it is the revolution itself, as an inaugural event of European ‘modernity’, that marks ‘the start of a future that had never before existed’ (ibid.: 59). One whose most distinctive signature was that of an ever increasing acceleration of social, political, economic and natural life that contracted the horizon of expectation and abbreviated time by exposing the present to ever new, and unexpected, historical events. Perhaps it is true, then, that we have never been modern (Latour, 1993)?

And yet what is distinct about the current impasse, modern or not, is that what restores linearity to the present is, paradoxically, a pervasive concern across all fields of practice and knowledge with anticipating the future. The immutability of the present, in other words, is no longer a taken-for-granted historical experience, but becomes the achievement of complex, laborious and uncertain human and other-than-human practices aimed at knowing and securing the future. It is in contrast to the dominant modes of futurity involved in what we have associated with the impasse of the present, that Speculative Research seeks to make an intervention.

This edited collection constitutes an attempt to offer some conceptual, methodological and practical tools that can contribute to confronting the challenge of articulating a response, however partial, to this suspension of time and, in doing so, may enable social and cultural researchers to be lured by the possibility of futures that are more than a mere extension of the present. Gathering together a range of engagements by social and cultural researchers with questions of speculation, possibilities and futures in contemporary societies, Speculative Research responds to the pressing need to not only account for the role of calculative logics and rationalities in managing societal futures, but to develop alternative approaches and sensibilities that take futures seriously as possibilities that demand new habits and practices of attention, invention and experimentation.

Modes of futurity: risk, temporality, speculation

As the poet Paul Valéry (1988: 192) famously put it, the problem with our times is that ‘the future, like everything else, is not what it used to be’. ‘We have’, he said,

lost our traditional means of thinking and foreseeing: [. . .] our deepest habits, our laws, our language, our sentiments, our ambitions, have been engendered and sedimented in a time that admitted longue durées, that was founded and thought over an immense past, and which pointed to a future measured in generations.

The future has become problematic. Indeed, the question of how heterogeneous actors engage futures, what intellectual and practical strategies they put into play and what the implications of such strategies are, have become crucial scientific, technological and societal concerns (e.g. Adam & Groves, 2007; Brown, Rappert, & Webster, 2000; van Lente 1993). Nevertheless, as Valéry (1988: 195) also noted, our attitude towards the future remains fundamentally inadequate, for ‘we enter the future backwards’. In the social sciences, much of the concern with futures testifies to Valéry’s diagnosis. Until recently, futures had been largely addressed from the point of view of the ways in which societies deal with their threats and uncertainties. According to sociologists of risk (e.g. Beck, 1992, 2008), for example, risk analysis, calculation and the management of uncertainties have become the defining features of late modernity, where hazards and risks have proliferated as an upshot of modern ideals of progress notably including social and economic processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and globalisation. In this view, and in contrast to the early modern era where threats and dangers posed to societies were largely the outcome of natural causes, human practices and inventions now figure as the primary sources of risk-generation as well as the primary sites of responsibility for their coordination, minimisation and amelioration (Rosa, Renn, & McCright, 2014).

Other theoretical approaches to social futures have challenged both the epistemological and historiographical assumptions that underpin the concept of the ‘risk society’ (Adam, Beck, & Van Loon, 2000). In addition to socio-cultural (Douglas, 1992) and systems theories of risk (Luhmann, 1993), the critical social constructivism of the ‘governmentality’ school has approached the question of risk and the calculation of futures not as a logic inherent to an age of proliferating uncertainties, but as a neoliberal rationality of government that displaces its focus of attention from the disciplining of individuals to the management of entire populations. In this view, new modes of neoliberal governance operate through the institution of, and reliance on, an indefinite number of precautionary factors that seek to measure, organise, tame and influence the conduct of the population (Baker & Simon, 2002; Miller & Rose, 2008; O’Malley, 2004). Notwithstanding their theoretical and historiographical differences, such approaches seem to share the sense that ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ – but also unacknowledged ‘indeterminacy’ (Wynne, 1992) – constitute the defining keystones by which contemporary societies conceptualise and negotiate the relationship between present and futures. Risks are said to pervade all aspects of life, from financial and insurance practices (Baker & Simon, 2002, de Goede, 2004), the politics of security and war (Ericson & Doyle, 2004, Larner & Walters, 2004), environmental forecasting, regulation and disaster prevention (Lash, Szerszynski, & Wynne, 2000) and scientific and technological innovation and governance (Flynn & Bellaby, 2007; Kerr & Cunningham-Burley, 2000), to processes of governmental and individual decision-making and regulation regarding health (Petersen & Wilkinson, 2008), education (Brynin, 2013) and everyday life (Tulloch & Lupton, 2003).

The lesson that such accounts yield, however, is more paradoxical than might appear at first sight. As many of their proponents also attest, and as has become particularly salient in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and in the so-called ‘Sociology of Expectations’ (Brown et al., 2000, van Lente, 1993), techniques of forecasting and risk-management do not operate merely to represent and know the future. Such studies detail how, for instance, the hopes and expectations associated with biotechnology and genetic engineering, the institutional deployment of future forecasting techniques such as Delphi and Foresight (De Laat, 2000), the financial commoditisation of the future and the identification and indemnification of risks and uncertainty associated with modern industrial society, and even the routine material practices of the designers of computational technology (Wilkie, 2010), such as prototyping, become part and parcel of routine scientific, technological and policy practices. Insofar as they inform decision-making processes through authoritative knowledge-claims (Selin, 2008) or through the construction of expectations about futures (Brown & Michael 2003; Michael & Rosengarten 2013; Wilkie & Michael 2009), such practices orient social action in the present. Thus, more than providing reliable knowledge of the future, these practices become factors in the constitution of a yet-to-come, a not-yet that, as we have intimated above, too often strives to coincide with the ‘already’ on which it is based.

Part of the reason for this is that the logics and practices by which futures are reduced to forecasting and risk-management themselves presuppose that futures are ultimately a prolongation of the present. In effect, they are bound to a logic of anticipation whereby future uncertainties and contingencies are calculated, represented and said to be tamed through statistical and modelling techniques that make predictions about likely future scenarios based on knowledge of the present (Adam & Groves 2007). What allows for these probabilistic modes of forecasting is the presupposition that time moves linearly, along a modern arrow of progress, such that the present conditions upon which calculation are drawn will be conserved in the future state which calculative inferences are supposed to provide information about. Crucially, however, as historians and philosophers of science and time have shown (Bergson, 2002; Grosz, 2004; Hacking, 1990; Whitehead, 1967), when engaging with futures, it matters what we take time to be. It matters whether we think of time as extending over a metrical arrow of progress, or whether we engage with it, for instance, in the manner of a handkerchief, to be spread, crumpled and torn, forming a topological image of time (Serres & Latour, 1995: 60). Resisting the modern arrow of time matters because it enables us to consider temporality as it is formed through its own patterns of becoming rather than through the imposition of a preformatted geometry. It matters, moreover, because it enables us to pay attention to, and experiment with, the very processes of crumpling, folding and ‘tearing’ time, and not just to their culmination.

This edited collection takes stock of many of the lessons afforded by the aforementioned traditions of social and cultural research on ‘futures’ and temporality, but it simultaneously departs from them in a fundamental sense. While such studies evince a preoccupation with the temporal patterns and dynamics at play in shaping developments in science and technology, in politics and economics, in education and art, and so on, common to their preoccupations is an approach to futures that regards them as yet another (past) empirical object, to be illuminated through the customary methods and techniques of ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ analysis and explanation. Speculative Research, by contrast, is not primarily about how ‘others’ imagine, manage, calculate, pre-empt, secure, know or speculate about, the future. Throughout the different chapters that compose this collection, possible futures are never simply ‘objects’ of knowledge, to be conquered by the conceptual and practical tools and methods of the various disciplines and approaches they espouse. To the extent that these diverse contributions share a common concern, it is the sense that, to paraphrase Marilyn Strathern (1992), it matters what futures we use to cultivate other futures with. In other words, it matters how we enter the future, what senses of futurity we bring into play, which modes of relating to the not-yet we enable knowing and thinking practices to nurture. Thus, rather than objects of knowledge or thought to be captured by a backward-walking present, possible futures are here engaged as vectors of risk and creative experimentation. It is futures themselves that, whenever one takes the risk of cultivating them, can escape the impasses of the present, and lure our own practices of thinking, knowing and feeling to unforeseen possibilities. Thus, what each of the chapters in this collection attempts, with the means and challenges of its own situated engagement, is to take the risk of experiencing a mutation of the commitments, sensibilities and constraints that characterise their own research practices – as well as other practices with which they are concerned – as they become lured by the possibility of futures that are more than the mere extension of the present.

The politics of the (im)possible: reclaiming speculation

Choosing to characterise this lure as speculative is not, to be sure, without risks of its own. Born of the perplexing and poetic capacities of mirrors (specula), both material and conceptual tools – for speculum was also the name for medieval encyclopaedias – to provoke modes of knowing and thinking that brought together the visible and the invisible and thereby served as a ‘testing ground, providing the clues with which man rises beyond the known to the unknown’ (Melchior-Bonnet, 2001: 113), the notion of ‘speculation’ enjoys a long and complex history in philosophical, theological and artistic imaginations at least since the Middle Ages (see also Hunt, 2011). Nowadays, moreover, such histories are themselves witness to a dramatic explosion, as the term ‘speculation’ proliferates through our contemporary imagination across an impressive range of registers and fields of practice.

In one notorious sense, for example, ‘speculation’ might be seen precisely to conjure up many of the ‘evils’ that have endowed this impasse with a tragic character. For nowhere is speculation currently more present in the media and in popular culture than in its association with the irrational, and irresponsible excesses of contemporary high frequency financial trading practices, market dynamics and stock exchanges (MacKenzie, 2006). Such practices, which seek to bring about and profit from the highly volatile fluctuations of markets and their uncertain futures (Pemmaraju, 2015), are now understood to be acutely implicated in the recent global financial meltdown, as well as in generating ongoing disasters such as algorithmically induced flash crashes (e.g. SECC, 2014). In this sense, speculation seems tied to its modern history as a term of abuse, as that which borders on the suspect practices of those who exploit uncertainty and undertake actions often in the absence of any ‘reliable’ evidence (Ericson & Doyle, 2004).

High finance, however, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The lure of possible futures: on speculative research
• PART I Speculative propositions
• PART II Speculative lures
• PART III Speculative techniques
• PART IV Speculative implications
• Afterword: thinking with outrageous propositions
• Index