Speculate This! , livre ebook
126
pages
English
Ebooks
2013
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Découvre YouScribe et accède à tout notre catalogue !
Découvre YouScribe et accède à tout notre catalogue !
126
pages
English
Ebooks
2013
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
25 juin 2013
EAN13
9780822376934
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
3 Mo
Speculate This! is a concise, provocative manifesto advocating practices of "affirmative speculation" over and against contemporary forms of speculation that quantify and contain risk to generate financial profit for a privileged few. This latter mode of speculation is predatory and familiar, its fallout evident in ongoing environmental degradation, in restrictive legal claims on natural resources in distant lands, and in the foreclosures, evictions, and unemployment resulting from the financial collapse of 2007-08. While such exploitive speculation seeks to reduce uncertainty and pin down the future, the affirmative practices championed by the authors of Speculate This! engage uncertainty, contingency, and difference, and they multiply, rather than reduce, possible futures. In these affirmative practices, social relations and the creation of goods and knowledge are not driven by the desire for financial gain or professional status. Whether manifest in open-source software, eco-communes, global activist movements, community credit networks, or experimental art, speculative living affirms our commonality. As a collaborative work coauthored by a group of anonymous scholars, Speculate This! argues for and embodies affirmative speculation.
Voir
Publié par
Date de parution
25 juin 2013
EAN13
9780822376934
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
3 Mo
Speculate This!
Speculate This!
UNCERTAIN COMMONS
Duke University Press ● Durham and London, 2013
© 2013 Duke University Press
Licensed under the Creative Commons Aribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, available athp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/or by mail from Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbo Way, Stanford, Calif., 94305, U.S.A. ‘NonCommerical’ as de-îned in this license speciîcally excludes any sales of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if the sale does not result in a proît by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or NGO.
is book was PrinceXML.
produced
using
PressBooks.com,
and
PDF
rendering
was
done
by
And now for something completely dierent. —Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Prologue: Gambit
1. Prospects
2. Firmative Speculation
3. Aïrmative Speculation
Epilogue: Venture
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Continue the Conversation
v
Contents
6
7
27
72
118
122
124
125
Prologue: Gambit
e future has been sold. Parceled, bundled, and securitized, it serves as the connective tissue for a global system where speculation turns a profit. Projections of beer tomorrows incorporate us in collective îctions: there is always a way to optimize the present, to upgrade and improve what is to come. Endless promissory notes tame uncertainty as risk, even as predato-ry insurance schemes thrive on fears of oncoming deterioration, disaster, or accident. Against such phantasmatic screens of anticipation, this project artic-ulates and practices what we callaïrmative speculation. We are an uncertain commons: a collective of academics, mediaphiles, activists, and dreamers who imagine ourselves as an open and nonînite group. We explore the promises and perils of collaborative intellectual la-bor, combining critical analysis with the playful promiscuity that is intrin-sic to thought. We perform anonymity as a challenge to the current norms of evaluating, commodifying, and institutionalizing intellectual labor. Fi-nally, we contest the proprietary enclosure of knowledge, imagination, and communication, while also aïrming the potentialities of the common.
6
1. Prospects
Speculation occupies the imagination, even the imagination of occupation. Starting in an autumn of discontent, the Occupy movement lives on—and not only in spectral form: tent cities, reminiscent of early selements, pro-testors unseling business as usual, volatile gatherings, occasional îres, live-streaming media events. ere is no telling where a newemer-gence—the unpredictable event, cousin of the emergency—will mushroom. ere is no telling how broad actions against social and economic inequal-ity might mutate elsewhere. ere is no telling when or where insurgen-cies against political repression might are up, fade to embers, or be extin-guished. It is not always clear what the program is or might yet be. ere is no center, no core organizers, no predictable locations, and no overarching agenda. In London they organized against austerity. In Nicosia they occu-pied the UN buer zone to protest the division of the city. In Seoul they objected to free-trade agreements with the United States. In Santiago they took up educational reform. In Rome they repurposed the Cinema Palazzo, and in Mexico they occupied Cine Lindavista. ere has been no singular vision linking these various actions and movements; nonetheless, a glob-1 al imaginary of occupiable common space has emerged. Assemblies, en-campments, and anonymous collectivities continue to erupt everywhere, unexpectedly—online as well as on the ground. ey are mobilized by the pathologies of the present: austerity for the masses and tax cuts for the
7
8 Speculate This!
rich, tuition hikes and dwindling school budgets, rapacious banks, fore-closed homes, communities displaced in the name of development, hawk-ish intellectual property laws, corporate determinations of government, states turned against their citizens, and of course predatory forms of spec-ulation. And yet what really brings them together, beyond the endemic restlessness, discontent, and distrust, is an inchoate sense of potentiality, an opening to the future, in other words, speculation of a dierent kind. Speculation is our zeitgeist. We live in a world shaped by practices of speculation, from probabilistic sciences (risk analysis, predictive ge-nomics) and anticipatory techniques (înancial arbitrage, technological forecasting) to forward-looking institutions (the Intergovernmental Panel 2 on Climate Change, the World Health Organization). More and more, it seems, the future is imported into the present, bundled up, sold o, in-strumentalized. Some eagerly buy into these futures markets, placing their bets; others imagine things dierently. All in all, nothing more than spec-ulation and nothing less. Etymologically speaking,speculationcomes from a series of Latin verbs, which all stem from a Greek root, in turn deriving from Sanskrit (spàsmeaning to spy, see, or observe). In this lineage the word suggests an act of mastery over the object observed—aer all, speculation and spec-tacle have the same origin. In its modern European linguistic variations, speculation derives from the late Latin nounspeculatio(observation, con-templation), itself deriving from the classical Latin verbs and nounsspecere (look),speculari(observe, examine, explore), andspeculum(looking glass, mirror). e Sanskrit root verbspàsis the fountainhead of a range of words that variously mean to observe and ascertain something not readily evi-dent, to perceive clearly, to obstruct, to undertake, to string together, and, importantly, to touch, feel, or aect (spàrsa). e etymological links be-tween sight and touch, clarity and obfuscation, turn us toward not only speculation as thought but also speculation as a pressing toward an appre-hension of the unknown. is complex etymology frames our capitalist present of speculation. Even through millennial as well as planetary vicissitudes, the etymological concatenation or signifying chain remains remarkably consistent: what all
Prospects 9
roots share in common and what binds them across time and space is a privileged relation to vision, sight, and seeing. Notably, it is also in the ear-ly seventeenth century thatspecies, derived from the Latinspeciẽs(linking tospecêre) for outward appearance and form, comes to signify coin, money, or bullion. For the moment, this is what concerns us: the etymon linking speculation to vision and hence to representation gives rise to a modern ambivalence, namely, a structural oscillation and internal chasm between thoughtandmoney. Speculation has two distinct semantic-conceptual registers: cognitive and economic. To speculate may mean to contemplate, to ponder, and hence to form conjectures, to make estimations and projections, to look into the future so as to hypothesize. And it may also mean to buy and sell so as to proît from the future rise and fall of market value, to invest in the hope of proît but with the risk of loss, and hence, more generally, to engage in business transactions of a risky nature that may yield unusually high returns in the future. e bridge that spans across the two registers of modern speculation and that binds them indissolubly to one another con-sists of a certain conception of the future: both intellectual or înancial in-vestments project into and stake claims on the future. Whether the lasso thrown across time is thought or money, speculation always constitutes an attempt to draw the future fully into the present. Both registers index an attempt to represent and calculate a future that is unpredictable, unrepre-sentable, incalculable by deînition; both registers index an aempt to îx and capture a potential future in and as the actual present. Such, then, is speculation: a modern technology for the absolute actualization of poten-tiality without remainder, a modern apparatus for erasing the future by re-alizing it as eternal present. But just how modern is this technology for seeing, representing, and possessing the future that we are calling speculation? As Sigmund Freud points out ine Interpretation of Dreams, the “belief that dreams foretell 3 the future” is ancient. More generally, the art of divination by whatev-er means is indeed an ancient art. Our provisional answer is that, unlike ancient divination, modern speculation knows no bounds and is limitless: it operates as if there were no limits to the annexation and incorporation
