In this remarkable and innovative collection of essays, the authors give renewed

value, meaning and, above all, empirical relevance to the practice of speculation.
Speculation is rescued from the hands of the speculators!
Andrew Barry, Professor of Human Geography, University College London

This beautifully written collection of essays represents an exciting exploration of

the contemporary importance of making speculation centre stage. The book is a
landmark in the philosophy and methodology of social science. It does not just
illuminate the value of process philosophy – it also provides methodological and
practical approaches to doing socially significant research. It is a must read for
anyone that wants to take the turn to ontology and affect seriously.
Joanna Latimer, Professor of and Chair in Sociology, Science and Technology,
University of York

Speculative Research is a truly unique collection that offers much needed inspira-
tion for thinking beyond present conditions and the futures they seem to make
impossible. It invites us to engage with a generative tradition of speculative
thought that has yet to fulfil its radical practical potential. The stimulating contri-
butions to this volume offer remarkable examples of what thinking speculatively
can mean in encounters with specific research fields and problems – faithful to
the empirical but not bounded by it, an adventurous yet careful inquiry. In com-
posing this volume, Wilkie, Savransky and Rosengarten have achieved both a
generous prolongation and innovative experimentation with speculative thought.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Associate Professor of Science, Technology and
Organisation, University of Leicester

Speculative Research is a remarkably prescient book that opens up new vistas of

experimental thought and practice for contemporary social and cultural research.
In reclaiming the question of the speculative from its more recent and notorious
variants, this collection crystallizes how the possibilities of more-than-human
futures can be engaged with empirical and conceptual assiduousness without
relinquishing the challenges and risks of what is to come and what is possible to
the logics of the probable. As the editors and contributors insist, developing a
speculative sensitivity involves the care for and acceptance of knowledge prac-
tices that are part of the cultivation of new futures.
Antoine Hennion, Professor and Director of Research, Centre de Sociologie
de l’Innovation, Mines ParisTech, Paris

Redeeming speculation against its negative connotations, this exciting book

exhibits the multiple potentials of speculative social research. Engaging in a
struggle against the deadening effects of probability and inevitability, it opens up
for thinking and making alternative futures, inducing readers to come along for
the ride.
Casper Bruun Jensen, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology,
Osaka University
Speculative Research

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 strat-
egies are, have become key concerns of recent social and cultural research
addressing a diverse range of fields of practice and experience. Exploring ques-
tions of speculation, possibilities and futures in contemporary societies, Specula-
tive 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.

Alex Wilkie is a sociologist, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Design and

a Co-Director of the Centre for Invention and Social Process, Goldsmiths, Uni-
versity of London.

Martin Savransky is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Director of

the Unit of Play, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he teaches philo-
sophy, social theory and methodology of social science.

Marsha Rosengarten is Professor in Sociology and Co-­Director of the Centre

for the Study of Invention and Social Process, Department of Sociology, Gold-
smiths, University of London.
Culture, Economy and the Social
A new series from CRESC – the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-­cultural
Change

Editors: Professor Tony Bennett, Social and Cultural Theory, University of

Western Sydney; Professor Penny Harvey, Anthropology, Manchester Univer-
sity; Professor Kevin Hetherington, Geography, Open University

Editorial Advisory Board: Andrew Barry, University of Oxford; Michel Callon,

Ecole des Mines de Paris; Dipesh Chakrabarty, The University of Chicago; Mike
Crang, University of Durham; Tim Dant, Lancaster University; Jean-­Louis
Fabiani, Ecoles de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; Antoine Hennion, Paris
Institute of Technology; Eric Hirsch, Brunel University; John Law, The Open
University; Randy Martin, New York University; Timothy Mitchell, New York
University; Rolland Munro, Keele University; Andrew Pickering, University of
Exeter; Mary Poovey, New York University; Hugh Willmott, University of
Cardiff; Sharon Zukin, Brooklyn College City University New York/Graduate
School, City University of New York

The Culture, Economy and the Social series is committed to innovative con-
temporary, comparative and historical work on the relations between social, cul-
tural and economic change. It publishes empirically-­based research that is
theoretically informed, that critically examines the ways in which social, cultural
and economic change is framed and made visible, and that is attentive to per-
spectives that tend to be ignored or side-­lined by grand theorising or epochal
accounts of social change. The series addresses the diverse manifestations of
contemporary capitalism, and considers the various ways in which the ‘social’,
‘the cultural’ and ‘the economic’ are apprehended as tangible sites of value and
practice. It is explicitly comparative, publishing books that work across discipli-
nary perspectives, cross-­culturally, or across different historical periods.
The series is actively engaged in the analysis of the different theoretical tradi-
tions that have contributed to the development of the ‘cultural turn’ with a view to
clarifying where these approaches converge and where they diverge on a particular
issue. It is equally concerned to explore the new critical agendas emerging from
current critiques of the cultural turn: those associated with the descriptive turn for
example. Our commitment to interdisciplinarity thus aims at enriching theoretical
and methodological discussion, building awareness of the common ground that has
emerged in the past decade, and thinking through what is at stake in those
approaches that resist integration to a common analytical model.
Series titles include:

Theorizing Cultural Work: Labour, Culture as a Vocation

Continuity and Change in the Sociology of Career Choices in
Cultural and Creative Industries Cultural Management
Edited by Mark Banks, Rosalind Gill By Vincent Dubois
and Stephanie Taylor
Topologies of Power
Comedy and Distinction: The By John Allen
Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’
Sense of Humour Distinctions of the Flesh
By Sam Friedman Social Class and the Embodiment of
Inequality
The Provoked Economy: Economic By Dieter Vandebroeck
Reality and the Performative Turn
By Fabian Muniesa Infrastructures and Social
Complexity
Rio de Janeiro: Urban Life through A Companion
the Eyes of the City Edited by Penny Harvey,
By Beatriz Jaguaribe Casper Bruun Jensen and
Atsuro Morita
The Routledge Companion to
Bourdieu’s ‘Distinction’
Speculative Research
Edited by Philippe Coulangeon and
The Lure of Possible Futures
Julien Duval
Edited by Alex Wilkie,
Devising Consumption: Cultural Martin Savransky and
Economies of Insurance, Credit and Marsha Rosegarten
Spending
By Liz Mcfall Coming soon

Industry and Work in Film Criticism as a Cultural

Contemporary Capitalism: Global Institution
Models, Local Lives? Crisis and Continuity from the 20th to
Edited by Victoria Goddard and the 21st Century
Susana Narotzky By Huw Walmsley-­Evans

Lived Economies of Default: Unbecoming Things: Mutable

Consumer Credit, Debt Collection Objects and the Politics of Waste
and the Capture of Affect By Nicky Gregson and Mike Crang
By Joe Deville

Cultural Pedagogies and Human

Conduct
Edited by Megan Watkins, Greg Noble
and Catherine Driscoll
Speculative Research
The Lure of Possible Futures

Edited by Alex Wilkie,

Martin Savransky and
Marsha Rosengarten
First published 2017
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 selection and editorial matter, Alex Wilkie, Martin Savransky and
Marsha Rosengarten; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Alex Wilkie, Martin Savransky and Marsha Rosengarten to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
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without intent to infringe.
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ISBN: 978-1-138-68836-0 (hbk)

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Typeset in Times New Roman
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Contents

List of figures xii

Notes on contributors xiii
Acknowledgements xviii

1 The lure of possible futures: on speculative research  1

M artin  S a v ransky , A lex  W ilkie and
M arsha  R osengarten

Part i
Speculative propositions 19

Introduction: speculative propositions 21

M artin  S a v ransky , M arsha  R osengarten and
A lex  W ilkie

2 The wager of an unfinished present: notes on speculative

pragmatism 25
M artin S a v ransky

3 Speculative research, temporality and politics 39

R osalyn D iprose

4 Situated speculation as a constraint on thought 52

M ichael H alewood
x   Contents
Part II
Speculative lures 65

Introduction: speculative lures 67

M arsha  R osengarten , M artin  S a v ransky and
A lex  W ilkie

5 Pluralities of action, a lure for speculative thought 71

M arsha R osengarten

6 Doing speculation to curtail speculation 84

A lex  W ilkie and M ike  M ichael

7 Retrocasting: speculating about the origins of money 98

J oe D e v ille

Part III
Speculative techniques 111

Introduction: speculative techniques 113

A lex  W ilkie , M arsha  R osengarten and
M artin  S a v ransky

8 Sociology’s archive: Mass-­Observation as a site of

speculative research  117
L isa A dkins

9 Developing speculative methods to explore speculative

shipping: mail art, futurity and empiricism 130
R ebecca C oleman

10 Creating idiotic speculators: disaster cosmopolitics in the

sandbox 145
M ichael  G uggenheim , B ernd  K r ä ftner and
J udith  K r ö ll

11 2Sweet2Kill: speculative research and contributory action 163

M ichael  S chillmeier and Y v onne  L ee  S chultz
 Contents   xi
Part IV
Speculative implications 181

Introduction: speculative implications 183

M artin  S a v ransky , A lex  W ilkie and
M arsha  R osengarten

12 On Isabelle Stengers’ ‘cosmopolitics’: a speculative

adventure 187
Vikki  B ell

13 Aesthetic experience, speculative thought and civilized life 198

M ichael L . T homas

14 The lure of the possible: on the function of speculative

propositions 210
D idier D ebaise

Afterword: thinking with outrageous propositions 218

M onica  G reco

Index 228
Figures

8.1 Day Survey 216 written by a Mass-­Observer in 1937 125

9.1 Selected postcards: front 138
9.2 Postcard: instructions 139
9.3 Postcard: back 140
10.1 The sandbox 148
10.2 A start 149
10.3 Another start 150
10.4 Origins 151
10.5 Dice and ship 152
10.6 Pigs deliberate 153
10.7 A wise elephant 154
10.8 Props 154
10.9 Diagrammatic space 156
10.10 Neighbours 157
10.11 Everything in the sandbox 159
10.12 A cosmic unitary mass 160
10.13 Attractive props 160
11.1 PP/S porcelain PPK, strewn flowers, tea cup and saucer 167
11.2 PP/C-­G golden chocolate gun 168
11.3 Schoko kid M (from the series 2sweet2kill) 169
11.4 Schoko kid L (from the series 2sweet2kill) 173
11.5 Schoko kids_2 boys 175
11.6 Schoko kid S 176
Contributors

Lisa Adkins is an Academy of Finland Distinguished (FiDiPro) Professor and

the BHP Billiton Chair of Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Aus-
tralia. Her contributions and interventions in the discipline of Sociology lie in
the areas of economic sociology (especially the sociology of labour), social
and cultural theory and feminist theory. Her recent research focuses on the
restructuring of labour, money and time in post-­Fordist capitalism. Publica-
tions from this research have appeared in a number of journals including
South Atlantic Quarterly, Feminist Review and Social Epistemology. Her next
book The Time of Money extends this work. Key publications include The
Post-­Fordist Sexual Contract: Working and Living in Contingency (with
Maryanne Dever, 2016); Measure and Value (with Celia Lury, 2012); What
is the Empirical? (with Celia Lury, 2009); Feminism After Bourdieu (with
Bev Skeggs, 2005); Revisions: Gender and Sexuality in Late Modernity
(2002) and Gendered Work (1995). She is joint Editor-­in-Chief of the journal
Australian Feminist Studies (Routledge/Taylor & Francis).
Vikki Bell is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She
is the author of four monographs, including Culture and Performance
(Bloomsbury, 2007). Widely published in peer-­reviewed journals, she has
written extensively on the thought of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt,
and addressed questions of ethics, aesthetics, subjectivity and politics across
the social sciences and theoretical humanities. Recently her work has
explored cultural-­aesthetic aspects of transitional justice in Argentina, where
her research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
and, currently, by the Economic and Social Research Council. The most
recent publication from this project is The Art of Post-­Dictatorship: Ethics &
Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina (Routledge, 2014).
Rebecca Coleman is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department, Gold-
smiths, University of London. Her research and teaching focuses on visual
and sensory sociology, bodies and materiality, temporality, especially
presents and futures, and feminist and cultural theory. She recently led the
ESRC Research Seminar Series on Austerity Futures: Imagining and Materi-
alising the Future in an ‘Age of Austerity’ (2012–2014), and is currently
xiv   Contributors
working on publications and projects concerned with the significance of tem-
porality in contemporary socio-­cultural life. These include: editing a collec-
tion on futures; papers on the affectivity of austerity futures, and on the
temporality of the surface; and projects with academics, artists and designers
to develop interdisciplinary methodologies for researching temporality.
Recent publications include, Deleuze and Research Methodologies (edited
with Jessica Ringrose, 2013, Edinburgh University Press), Transforming
Images: Screens, Affect, Futures (2012, Routledge) and The Becoming of
Bodies: Girls, Images, Experience (2009, Manchester University Press).

Joe Deville is a Lecturer at Lancaster University, based jointly in the Depart-

ment of Organisation, Work and Technology and the Department of Soci-
ology. The primary focus of his work to date has been the encounter between
defaulting consumer credit debtor and debt collector, which was the subject
of his first book Lived Economies of Default, published in the CRESC series
in early 2015. Further areas of interest include technologies of disaster pre-
paredness, the material politics of issue formation, comparative and digital
methods, behavioural economics and theories of money. He has published
single and co-­authored articles on these and related issues in the Journal of
Cultural Economy, Consumption Markets and Culture, Cultural Studies and
Sociological Review, as well as in two Routledge edited collections. He has
also co-­edited a Special Issue of Cultural Studies, a forthcoming book exam-
ining the practical work of social scientific comparison, and a forthcoming
book in the CRESC series examining techniques of market attachment. He is
an editor at Journal of Cultural Economy and a co-­founder and editor of both
Mattering Press, the recently launched Open Access book publisher, and the
online consumer studies research network Charisma.

Didier Debaise is a researcher at the FNRS and teaches contemporary philo-

sophy at the University of Brussels. His main areas of research are con-
temporary forms of speculative philosophy, theories of the event, and links
between American pragmatism and French contemporary philosophy. He is a
member of the Whitehead Research Project, the editorial board of the jour-
nals Multitudes and Inflexions. He is the author of a book on Whitehead’s
philosophy (Un empirisme spéculative, 2006), and the editor of volumes on
pragmatism (Vie et expérimentation, 2007) and on the history of con-
temporary metaphysics (Philosophie des possessions, 2011. He has written
numerous articles on Bergson, Tarde, Simondon, Deleuze and Whitehead and
he is currently working on a new book entitled Sujets de la nature.

Rosalyn Diprose is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of New

South Wales, Sydney. Her books include Corporeal Generosity: On Giving
with Nietzsche, Merleau-­Ponty, and Levinas (SUNY 2002); The Bodies of
Women (Routledge 1994/2007); and the co-­edited collections Merleau-­Ponty:
Key Concepts (with J. Reynolds, Continuum 2008) and Cartographies: Post-
structuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces (with R. Ferrell, Allen
 Contributors   xv
& Unwin 1991). Her current research includes examining issues at the inter-
section between phenomenology and biopolitical theory, including a book
length study of ‘Natality and Biopolitics’ with Ewa Ziarek.
Monica Greco is a Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London
and a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. She has
written extensively on the historical, social and political dimensions of con-
cepts in psychosomatics, on vitalism in relation to health and medicine, and
on health as a vector of neoliberal forms of subjectivity and self-­governance.
She is the author of Illness As a Work of Thought (Routledge, 1998) and is
currently preparing a monograph for Routledge entitled Participating Bodies:
Medicine and the Problem of Subjectivity.
Michael Guggenheim is a Reader at the Department of Sociology at Gold-
smiths, University of London. He has recently (until 2015) directed an ERC
starting grant titled Organising Disaster: Civil Protection and the Population.
Together with the other authors, he was a member of the research group Com-
municating Disaster at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF ),
Bielefeld. He has recently published (2014) the co-­edited volume Disasters
and Politics: Materials, Experiments, Preparedness.
Michael Halewood is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex. His research
interests lie at the intersection of social theory and philosophy. He is the
author of two monographs: A. N. Whitehead and Social Theory. Tracing a
Culture of Thought (Anthem Press, 2011) and Rethinking the Social through
Durkheim, Weber, Marx and Whitehead (Anthem Press, 2014). He has also
written on Badiou, Butler, Dewey, Deleuze and Irigaray and topics such as:
tuning (Equal Temperament) and modernity (History of Human Sciences); the
form and value of things (British Journal of Sociology); entropy and death
(Social Science); conceptions of the self in those diagnosed with Alzheimer’s
Disease (Sociological Review). He is an Associate Editor of the Critical
Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead (Edinburgh Uni-
versity Press).
Bernd Kräftner is an artist and researcher. He has realized numerous transdis-
ciplinary research projects on and at the interfaces of science, society and art.
He is a founder of the research group Shared Inc. (Research Centre for Shared
Incompetence) and teaches at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna at the
Departments of Art and Science and Digital Art.
Judith Kroell is a sociologist and as a member of the research group Shared Inc.
(since 1999) she has participated in various projects at the interfaces of
science, society and art. She is a lecturer at the Department of Social Studies
of Science, University of Vienna and works as a Tomatis Consultant in
Vienna.
Mike Michael is a sociologist of science and technology, and Professor of Soci-
ology at the University of Exeter. His research interests include the relation
xvi   Contributors
of everyday life to technoscience, biotechnological and biomedical innova-
tion and culture, and process methodology. Current research projects focus on
the interdisciplinary use of sociological and speculative design techniques,
the role of aesthetics in technological innovation, and a processual analytics
of everyday life. Among his most recent major publications are (with Marsha
Rosengarten) the co-­authored volume Innovation and Biomedicine: Ethics,
Evidence and Expectation in HIV (Palgrave, 2013), and Actor-Network
Theory: Trial, Trails and Translations (Sage, 2016).
Marsha Rosengarten is Professor in Sociology and Co-­Director of the Centre
for Invention and Social Process, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, Uni-
versity of London. She is the author of HIV Interventions: Biomedicine and
the Traffic in Information and Flesh and co-­author with Mike Michael of
Innovation and Biomedicine: Ethics, Evidence and Expectation in HIV.
Recent articles focus on biomedical research within the field of HIV, ebola
and tuberculosis drawing from feminist and process-­oriented approaches. Her
work offers alternative ways of conceiving intervention, bioethics, random-
ized controlled trials and, hence, the nature of scientific evidence.
Michael Schillmeier is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Philo-
sophy at the University of Exeter. His work combines process-­oriented Soci-
ology, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Empirical Philosophy. He
graduated at the LMU Munich, Germany and received his PhD from Lancas-
ter University. He held a Schumpeter-­Fellowship (VolkswagenStiftung) to
research ‘Innovations in Nano-­Medicine’ in Germany and the UK
(2010–2015). The main focus of this project is to analyse and engage with the
emergence of nanomedical knowledge practices, objects and technologies. He
is co-­editor of Space & Culture. Michael’s empirical and conceptual work is
concerned with the becoming of social relations, actors, practices and con-
cerns whereby the ‘non-­normal’, ‘unexpected’, ‘uncommon’ or ‘unknown’
plays a central part. Linking social sciences, philosophy and art he has widely
written on the material dynamics and heterogeneity of societal orderings and
change. Research topics include STS, dis/abling practices, care practices,
health and illness, human/non-­human relations and cosmopolitics.
Yvonne Lee Schultz is a Berlin based artist who gained her diploma at the
Academy of Fine Arts, Düsseldorf. She has exhibited internationally in group
shows as well as solo exhibitions. In 2012 Yvonne was the winner of the
Light Flatters competition, University of Rostock.
Martin Savransky is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths,
University of London, where he teaches philosophy, social theory and method-
ology of social science. He works at the intersection of process philosophy, the
philosophy and methodology of the social sciences, and the politics of know-
ledge. He has published widely on the ethics and politics of social inquiry,
postcolonial ontologies and social theory. He is the author of The Adventure of
Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
 Contributors   xvii
Michael L. Thomas holds a PhD in Social Thought from the University of
Chicago. His research combines work in process philosophy, social theory
and the arts to address questions of human action, forms of cooperation and
the relationship between thought and experience. Michael’s current project,
undertaken as a research fellow at the Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie
Hannover, uses insights from the Pragmatists, College de Sociologie and the
Frankfurt School to develop a methodology for interpreting sociological prac-
tices as aesthetic phenomena.
Alex Wilkie is a sociologist and a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Design,
Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests combine aspects of
social theory, science and technology studies with design research that bear
on theoretical, methodological and substantive areas including, but not limited
to: aesthetics, design practice and design studios, healthcare and information
technologies, human-­computer interaction design, inventive and creative
practices, user involvement and participation in design, practice-­based design
research, process theory and speculative thought. Alex is a Director of the
Centre for Invention and Social Process (CISP), alongside Michael Guggen-
heim and Marsha Rosengarten, and convenes the PhD programme in Design
at Goldsmiths. He has recently co-­edited Studio Studies: Operations, Topolo-
gies and Displacements with Ignacio Farias (Routledge, 2015) and he is pre-
paring the edited collection Inventing the Social with Michael Guggenheim
and Noortje Marres (Mattering Press). Alex is also a founding editor of Dem-
onstrations, the journal for experiments in social studies of technology.
Acknowledgements

This collection is the outcome of an adventure in thought that began with a

workshop entitled ‘Speculation and Speculative Research’ in May 2014, fol-
lowed by another ‘Thinking Through Possibilities’ in May 2015. Both were held
under the auspices of the Unit of Play in the Department of Sociology, Gold-
smiths, University of London. We are immensely grateful to the contributors to
these workshops for the dialogue that took place and especially to those whose
work has subsequently contributed to this volume. Along the way we met others
whose interest in speculative thought encouraged us and has further contributed
to the different ways in which speculation takes form in the collection. We are
grateful to all.
Penny Harvey, Professor of Anthropology at Manchester University and an
editor of the CRESC series, welcomed the prospect of this volume with great
enthusiasm, and we would like to return her considerate and careful support with
what we hope is a timely and well-­received volume. Alongside Penny, we would
like to extend our appreciation to the other CRESC editors as well as the
anonymous reviewers of the book’s manuscript, who provided diligent and
cogent advice. Finally, we would like to thank Alyson Claffey at Taylor &
Francis for her support throughout the editing and production process.
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 Euro-
pean ‘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)?
2   M. Savransky et al.
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 experi-
ence, 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 associ-
ated with the impasse of the present, that Speculative Research seeks to make an
intervention.
This edited collection constitutes an attempt to offer some conceptual, meth-
odological 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 specu-
lation, 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 inad-
equate, 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
 The lure of possible futures   3
hazards and risks have proliferated as an upshot of modern ideals of progress
notably including social and economic processes of industrialisation, urbanisa-
tion 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 coordin-
ation, minimisation and amelioration (Rosa, Renn, & McCright, 2014).
Other theoretical approaches to social futures have challenged both the epis-
temological 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 proliferat-
ing 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). Not-
withstanding 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), environ-
mental 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 deploy-
ment 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
4   M. Savransky et al.
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 handker-
chief, 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 tempo-
rality, 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 eco-
nomics, 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 ‘cul-
tural’ analysis and explanation. Speculative Research, by contrast, is not prim-
arily 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 con-
quered by the conceptual and practical tools and methods of the various discip-
lines 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
 The lure of possible futures   5
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, when-
ever 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 unfore-
seen 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 medi-
eval 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 histo-
ries 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 uncer-
tainty and undertake actions often in the absence of any ‘reliable’ evidence
(Ericson & Doyle, 2004).
High finance, however, is not exceptional in its harnessing and exploitation of
logics commonly associated with the speculative. Across fields as diverse as
security and insurance, product development and marketing, environmental and
6   M. Savransky et al.
health forecasting, as well as policy and governance, the very agencies and organ-
isations that create regimes of ‘evidence’ are actively and productively incorpor-
ating what some would refer to as ‘speculative’ forms of data analysis. These are
applications that, informed by new developments in consultancy and information
studies, operate alongside (if not beyond) logics of probabilities by incorporating
algorithmic logics. Unlike conventional probability-­based forecasting, algorithms
rely much less on past historical data and bell curves in order to extrapolate prob-
able futures, and instead operate by making multiple associations and correlations
among contingent and mutable events seeking to anticipate ‘low probability–high
consequence’ future events (Amoore & Piotukh, 2015).
The seeming association with such practices makes the choice of the word
‘speculation’ a dangerous one, to say the least. It poses the danger that a cultiva-
tion of speculative thought and practice in social and cultural research be seen as
making a contribution, however small, to those who, in the face of ‘uncertainty’
as a constraint upon their engagements with futures, would turn such uncertain-
ties into profit. But to reject speculation because of its associations with financial
and security practices poses a different kind of danger, namely, that of falling
into a form of obscurantism that denies the importance of other modes of specu-
lation due to the dangers that the aforementioned practices pose. In our view,
thus, it is not a matter here of seeking a morally and politically immaculate posi-
tion from which to craft a critical stance. Such a strategy would quickly leave us
wordless. Rather, it is about reclaiming this discredited word by drawing
sensitive, and hopefully productive, contrasts with those practices by which it
has been captured, such that a different sense of the speculative may become
possible, and a different, more creative and responsible sensibility may be
cultivated.
An important contrast to be drawn between these different senses of the specu-
lative, therefore, lies in the fact that, even when these financial and security prac-
tices have radically changed the forms of data they operate with, their
infrastructures, and the ways in which such data is analysed; even when they have
loosened the constraints informing judgements on which actions may be enforced;
they still participate in the modern dream of a form of ‘objective’ knowledge that
is precise enough, accurate enough, comprehensive enough and reliable enough
to anticipate the future. As social researchers have made apparent, the speculative
in speculative finance and security practices is understood as an ‘invitation of the
intuitive [. . .] within the calculation of probability that characterises the con-
temporary authorisation of algorithmic judgments’ (Amoore, 2013: 44).
While often referred to as acting on possibilities, algorithms do in fact seem
to act upon ‘a form of probability that is highly sensitive to rapid change,
embraces the subjective [and] allows for discretion of choices on the part of
the observer’ with the purpose not just of preventing but of preempting the
becoming of unwanted futures (Amoore, 2013: 45; Uncertain Commons, 2013).
Consequently, the notion of ‘possibility’ that is employed in such practices by
and large acquires its meaning as the shadow of probabilities, and thus remains
premised upon them. The possible still designates here an image of the future,
 The lure of possible futures   7
however uncertain, however volatile, however ‘unlikely’ from the point of view
of a statistical curve, that can be rendered calculable, manageable, knowable and
actionable. It is still a possible that, as Henri Bergson (2002) would critically
argue, is projected from, and belongs to, the order of what is actual, and thus
prolongs the order of the present.
By contrast, the attempt made in Speculative Research is to cultivate a sense
of the possible that concerns, but does not owe its existence to, the ways in
which the actual determines the distribution of what is probable, either statisti-
cally or algorithmically. As philosopher Isabelle Stengers (2010: 17) has pro-
posed, this alternative sense of the speculative constitutes nothing other than ‘a
struggle against probabilities’. And not because of some humanist prejudice
against quantification tout-­court, or because of a metaphysical commitment that
would denounce the experience of any regular pattern of order as a mere human
illusion. To the contrary, speculation constitutes a struggle against probabilities
in the sense that, while it acknowledges and affirms the existence of such pat-
terns, it also affirms the existence of what any attempt to determine the prob-
ability of a future must set aside, or deem irrelevant – namely, the becoming of
novel and unexpected events that, against all odds, transform the very order of
the possible, the probable and the plausible (Deleuze, 2007; Savransky, 2016).
From this viewpoint, then, rather than partake in the problem-­space of the
normal, the probable and the plausible, speculative possibilities emerge out of
the eruption of what, from the standpoint of the impasse of the present seems, in
all likelihood, to be impossible.
As we proposed above, whenever futures are at stake, it matters what senses
of futurity we bring into play. Throughout the pages that follow, the many
futures to be engaged belong to a temporality that is neither calculable, manage-
able nor foreknown. Rather, the futures to be experimented with are those made
perceptible by cultivating a sensibility to a temporality we shall refer to as
‘eventful’: a time marked not by presuppositions of linearity, or by arrows of
progress, but by the unexpected eruptions of the (im)possible, of social, political,
economic, philosophical and ecological events that cannot be anticipated and
open up possible futures that cannot be managed in advance.
Participating in an eventful temporality forces us to come to resist the tempta-
tion of reducing futures to presents, of entering futures backwards, and requires
that we come to terms with irreducible futures that come into existence through
processes of path dependency (Sewell, 2005), temporally heterogeneous and
emergent causalities (Connolly, 2012) and global contingencies (Serres, 1995).
In other words, an eventful temporality assumes that ‘contingent, unexpected,
and inherently unpredictable events can undo or alter the most apparently
durable trends of history’ (Sewell, 2005: 102), enabling a swerve of possible
futures and creative alternatives to be explored and harnessed. In this way,
futures are fundamentally underdetermined with respect to present actualities,
but inhere in the latter in the form of potentialities to be actualised in practice.
Thus, the ‘speculative’ in Speculative Research does not designate a practice of
subjective anticipations of futures, nor is it a substitute for ascribing unwarranted
8   M. Savransky et al.
meanings to uncertainties when scientific evidence is lacking. Speculating is not
a matter of determining what is, and what is not, possible, as if possibilities
could always be ascertained in advance of events, that is, from the impasse of
the present. By contrast, speculation is here associated with a sensibility con-
cerned with resisting a future that presents itself as probable or plausible, and to
wager instead that, no matter how pervasive the impasse may be, it can never
exhaust the unrealised potential of the present. It wagers that, despite its obses-
sion with securing the future, there are futures that the present could never antic-
ipate, and these already inhere in it as (im)possibilities to be actualised
(Savransky, 2016). In this way, speculating demands the active taking of risks
that enable an exploration of the plurality of the present, one that provides
resources for resistance, one out of which unexpected events may erupt, and
alternative futures may be created.

Thoughts that are creative of the future: cultivating a

speculative sensibility
In contrast to its capture by contemporary financial and security practices, then,
the sensibility Speculative Research seeks to cultivate is more akin to that nur-
tured in a field where speculation has enjoyed a much longer and productive
history – namely, in literature, and most notably, in the genre of SF (which
stands variously for Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Sci-­Fi, Slipstream
Fiction, etc.). SF constitutes in itself an immensely heterogeneous field, within
which any single definition of ‘speculation’ remains perennially under dispute,
when not impossible (Gunn & Candelaria, 2004). SF includes traditions of
fiction writing that, in the words of Margaret Atwood (2011: 6), ‘descend from
H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled,
blood-­sucking Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters – things that could not
possibly happen’, as well as others that would ‘descend from Jules Verne’s
books about submarines and balloon travel and such – things that really could
happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books’.
In this literary world, it is not so much the case that the possibility of a future is
ascertained from the point of view of the present, but that reality is always
already entangled with the ‘not-­yet’, the ‘yet-­to-come’, the ‘what-­if ’, the
‘already-­here’, that is, with a sense of the (im)possible. As Atwood (2011: 5)
stresses, ‘the future is an unknown: from the moment now, an infinite number of
roads lead away to “the future”, each heading in a different direction’. SF is sin-
gularly sensitive to the fact it is impossible to know in advance just in which dir-
ection any of those roads may lead. The task, therefore, is to experiment with
them, to see their ground materialise as one travels through them, as one explores
their contours, landscapes, and horizons, as one witnesses such impossibilities
be realised.
As the long history of SF reveals, creating (im)possibles, making possibles
perceptible and experimenting with them, is a collective, transdisciplinary task.
In recent years, such a task has also surfaced with considerable force in the fields
 The lure of possible futures   9
of architecture and design. Forms of visual and material speculation provide an
alternative way of conceptualising and directing the role of aesthetic and techno-
logical design practices, urban visions, propositions and outcomes (Dunne &
Raby, 2013; Lang & Menking, 2003; Rao, Krishnamurthy, & Kouni, 2015;
Wilkie, Michael, & Plummer-­Fernandez, 2015; Zegher & Wigley, 2001). In
challenging dominant user-­centred and functionalist assumptions, and rational
planning in the case of the built environment, that have long guided such prac-
tices, the speculative emerges here as a different sensibility in devising aesthetic
and technical processes, propositions and outcomes. Here, the function of the
speculative is not to provide techno-­aesthetic solutions to pre-­defined problems
or to ‘domesticate’ technical inventions, but rather to mobilise design as a ‘cata-
lyst for social dreaming’ (Dunne & Raby, 2013: 189), the complex genealogies
of which can, in part, be traced to experimental post-­war architectural design
practices (e.g. Gilman & Riley, 2002).
In contemporary continental philosophy, a small but expanding number of
scholars grouped under the label of ‘Speculative Realism’ have recently gained
notoriety in debates around ontology, metaphysics, aesthetics and the philosophy
of science (see Bryant, Srnicek, & Harman, 2011). While the members of this
group openly disagree with one another on key and fundamental issues, they
share a commitment to metaphysical speculation against the modern, Kantian
culture of thought that Quentin Meillassoux (2008: 5) has called ‘the correlation-
ist circle’. In short, this refers to ‘the idea according to which we only ever have
access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term
considered apart from the other’. In an attempt to break away from the anti-­
realist circle where ‘we cannot say that the world either exists or fails to exist
outside human thought’ (Harman, 2013: 23), speculation operates here as a line
of flight into a realm of metaphysical investigation and invention where it is pos-
sible to think the ‘in-­itself ’ of entities and objects without the need to posit them
always already in relation to knowing subjects.
While sharing a common point of departure with the speculative realists in
resisting the bifurcation of the world into subjects and predicates, many of the
chapters in this book engage with a sensibly different tradition of speculative
thought. A tradition that can be traced back to the work of William James and
Henri Bergson (see Debaise, 2009), and was subsequently expanded and system-
atised in the speculative metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, the philosophy
of Gilles Deleuze, and more recently, through Stengers’ philosophy of science.
It is such a genealogy of speculation that the chapters of Speculative Research
seek to make resonate. Making it resonate, however, is not so much about intro-
ducing it to others as it is about finding new and productive ways of appropriat-
ing it, connecting it with other traditions with which it had not been associated,
and above all, experiencing some of its possible implications by putting some of
its concepts, ideas, and proposals, to the test of practical encounters. Thus, while
some contributions explore the speculative through sustained theoretical engage-
ments with the works of Whitehead (Debaise, Halewood, Thomas), Stengers
(Bell, Schillmeier), William James and John Dewey (Savransky), as well as by
10   M. Savransky et al.
making connections to the phenomenological existentialism of Hannah Arendt
and Maurice Merleau-­Ponty (Diprose); others are conversant with some of these
thinkers while seeking to engage with speculation in more practical terrains. In
so doing, they also invite further conceptual and philosophical contrasts – by
way of discussing the work of William Connolly (Bell), Deleuze (Coleman),
Donna Haraway (Halewood), Michel Serres (Rosengarten; Wilkie & Michael),
Marilyn Strathern (Deville), and Gabriel Tarde (Schillmeier & Schultz) amongst
others – to infiltrate the collective site of experimentation that constitutes the
collection as a whole.
More than a uniform ‘school’ of thought or philosophical tradition, thus, a
transversal reading of the chapters of this collection discloses, we hope, a pleth-
ora of situated engagements, pregnant with interesting contrasts, diverse textures
and undertones. At stake here is not so much a common approach or an unwa-
vering allegiance to certain philosophical influences, but the crafting of what
perhaps is a common gesture (Debaise & Stengers, 2015). One way of character-
ising such a gesture is by paying attention to the manner in which the contrib-
utors to this collection seek to make speculation relevant not only to abstract
thought, but also to the empirical challenges of social and cultural research.
Unlike much of the work done under the umbrella name of ‘Speculative
Realism’, for instance, the explorations in this edited collection seek to sidestep
the Kantian problem of correlation not with the aim of affirming the ‘in-­itself ’ of
things, which must necessarily keep experience at arms length, but with the aim
of cultivating what might be called a ‘deep empiricism’. That is to say, an empir-
icism concerned not only with isolated and discrete facts but also with their rela-
tions and forms of togetherness; one for which the world is never finished, once
and for all, but always in the making (James, 2011 [1907]). An empiricism for
which each experience, both human and other-­than-human, simultaneously con-
stitutes a perspective of the world while operating as a novel component of a
world that transcends it (Whitehead, 1967: 228). In this way, speculative prac-
tices themselves become active factors and ingredients in the becoming of the
world. They make thought not the correlate to fact but ‘a factor in the fact of
experience [such that] the immediate fact is what it is, partly by reason of the
thought involved in it’ (Whitehead, 1958: 80). This common gesture, then, might
perhaps be best captured by Whitehead’s (1958: 82) famous formulation, when
he proposed that ‘the business of speculation is to make thought creative of the
future’.

The process of speculative research: organising the collection

To speculate, then, is to take the risk of developing practices that, by engaging
inventively with (im)possibilities latent in the present, can disclose, make avail-
able and experiment with possible prospects for the becoming of alternative
futures. It is, in Stengers (2015: 19) words, to ‘respond to the insistence of a pos-
sible that demands to be realised’. In so doing, it seeks to furnish social, cultural
and natural histories and practices with new contrasts and propositions that may
 The lure of possible futures   11
enable them to resist, and move beyond, the plausible and probable tendencies
that besiege the impasse of the present.
This is certainly easier said than done. From the beginning, this collection
grew out of a collective, transdisciplinary process of cultivating forms of specu-
lative research, which began with a workshop on ‘Speculation and Speculative
Research’, in May 2014, and another on ‘Thinking Through Possibilities’ in
May 2015, both under the auspices of the Unit of Play in the Department of
Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. In organising these workshops,
we chose to experiment with formats that could allow for a greater space for
exchange and experimentation than one would otherwise normally expect to
obtain in academic settings. This involved bringing together an international
group of scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines (including philo-
sophy, social theory, sociology, science and technology studies, and design) and
theoretical, methodological and practical backgrounds and concerns.
During the first workshop, we asked each participant to submit, in advance, a
paper-­in-process that would allow for their own concerns to resonate with the
following questions:

Can social and cultural research become speculative? What do practices of

speculation consist of and what modes of speculation are there? What are
the implications of allowing for speculation to ingress into the practices of
researching social and cultural change? What might speculative research
offer to the re-­invention of otherwise seemingly intractable ‘problems’?
How can speculation become a productive mode of thinking, feeling and
knowing, and not just a practice of conjecturing and managing
uncertainties?

Rather than structuring the event around individual presentations and the typical
turns of questions and answers upon reception of the papers, we assembled a
programme structured entirely around responses and discussions. That is, each
one of the participants was assigned with the task of constructively responding
to two other papers, such that each paper received, in turn, responses by two
other contributors. After each round of responses, the entire group would join in
for an expanded discussion on the emergent questions, possibilities, challenges
and connections that they saw emerging from the propositions that the papers
developed.
The second workshop, by contrast, involved no papers at all. Smaller, more
experimental still, this forum gathered a number of participants from the first
workshop and some others in an informal setting, to spend an entire day freely
discussing the stakes of cultivating a speculative sensibility to the possible, and
of thinking of research in terms of possibilities, prompted by the following
questions:

What does it mean to undertake research in terms of possibilities? What do

possibilities ‘open up’ and what do they ‘close down’? In what ways are
12   M. Savransky et al.
possibilities ‘real’, and what might it mean for speculation to ‘make possi-
bles’? What ethical, political and epistemological questions might possibil-
ities pose to practices of knowledge-­making?

Speculative Research is thus the result of a process of thinking collectively

through the possibilities, difficulties, opportunities and challenges, the hopes,
dreams and fears, of cultivating a speculative sensibility to research. Indeed, the
many chapters that compose this collection explore, by way of their own situated
engagements, diverse aspects of the process of nurturing speculative research. It
is thus by attending to such questions and concerns, to both the requirements and
obligations of such a process, that we have decided to organise this collection in
four parts.
The first part, titled ‘Speculative Propositions’, gathers together chapters that,
in different ways, open up and explore the stakes of a constructive reappraisal of
speculative practices as modes of thought that may animate experimental
engagements with (im)possibilities inherent in the creative dynamics of social
and cultural change. In so doing, a series of pressing questions come to the fore:
how can speculative thinking be pressed into the service of empirical research
despite its anti-­empirical associations? How can the speculative help to under-
stand the novel interplay and emergence of interests and the transformation of
habits of those concerned with the question of how to think, imagine and act for
the future? If the speculative is not to be reduced to what is merely groundless,
far-­fetched or fanciful, then what are the constraints of the speculative and how
can these be grasped for the purposes of research? The chapters in this part take
these and other questions up in different ways by devising propositions for spec-
ulative practices of thought, action and care.
Unlike other future-­oriented modes of thought, the aim of speculative prac-
tices is not that of evoking an abstract, normative future that could finally be rid
of all compromises, of everything that inheres in the present from which a con-
crete form of experimentation with possibles might seek to depart. Speculative
propositions, Whitehead (1978: 256. emphasis added) suggested, are ‘tales that
perhaps might be told about particular actualities’. It matters what those actuali-
ties are. The second part, ‘Speculative lures’, takes up this challenge, and asks
what might act as a lure for speculation in actual, empirical situations in the
fields of global health, commercial design and in debates about the origins of
money. Contesting the need for a framing of research where knowledge is deter-
mined in advance and where political, ethical and medical achievements risk
becoming insensitive to the rich differences that are afforded by the open prac-
tice of inquiry itself, the chapters in this part wonder about how to tell alternative
tales about particular actualities, tales that could make available ways of resituat-
ing and relating to the empirical. In this way, this part takes up the challenge of
intervening speculatively in a situation with the aim of shifting the intensities
with which a future may be felt in the fugitive present.
Engaging with speculative thought also entails questions around what com-
prises and counts as the empirical and the methods, instruments and ‘devices’
 The lure of possible futures   13
used to relate to it (cf. Adkins & Lury, 2009). The third part, ‘Speculative tech-
niques’, takes up this challenge. Recently, the social sciences have become pre-
occupied with the constitutive, ‘performative’ and ‘non-­representational’
dimensions of research methods as well as the acknowledgement and inclusion
of non-­human agency (Back and Puwar, 2012; Law, 2004; Lury & Wakeford,
2012; Wilkie et al. 2015). Much of the work and debates in this area have also
touched upon questions around interdisciplinarity and the broadening of the
techniques through which the ‘social’ may be grasped as a relational, processual
and indeterminate reality. This part explores how, on the one hand, approaches
inspired by speculative thought resonate with contemporary methodological
debates in social and cultural research. On the other hand, it describes how a
shift to the speculative register forces one to come to terms with the constructive
nature of a process that resists pre-­defined research questions and actively for-
mulates and risks asking alternative questions and devising research techniques
anew. The chapters in this part, then, detail how the speculative can inform
inventive approaches to the tuning of research techniques through three interdis-
ciplinary empirical cases.
We have said that, in a sense, this collection constitutes the outcome of a
process of responding collectively, and experimentally, to the insistence of the
possible by seeking to cultivate forms of speculative research. Simultaneously,
however, our hope is that this collection may also serve as an opening, an invita-
tion for other social and cultural researchers to engage their own questions, prob-
lems and research situations with a renewed curiosity, and with new challenges
that seek to take seriously the (im)possibilities latent in the present. The fourth
part, ‘Speculative implications’, takes up the task of exploring some of the
possible consequences that these engagements with speculative research and
possible futures may enable for rethinking broader political, ethical and aesthetic
questions. What might, after all, be the function and role of speculative proposi-
tions, and what are the implications of cultivating a speculative sensibility to the
world? Indeed, what might it mean to ‘live speculatively’? By returning to some
of the philosophical sources that provide inspiration for the development of more
practical and empirical forms of speculative research, and engaging with their
more general, philosophical implications, the chapters in this part provide a
series of meditations on the relation between speculation and the art of life: that
is, the political, ethical and aesthetic task to live, to live well, to live better
(Whitehead, 1958). As such, the chapters in this part offer important and wide-­
ranging insights on what may be at stake in cultivating speculative orientations
to thought, to research, to the future and to the world.
Finally, the collection ends with an afterword by Monica Greco, who reflects
on the collection as a whole, and contributes to the opening it seeks to create by
wondering about the double challenge, at once ethical and political, of specula-
tive research. That is, that of developing propositions that take the (im)possible
seriously – and may thus risk sounding ludicrous, even outrageous, to those who
do not – while simultaneously caring for what Isabelle Stengers (2000: 14) calls
‘The Leibnizian Constraint’ – the one that demands that philosophy, as well as
14   M. Savransky et al.
social and cultural research, ‘should not have as its ideal the “reversal of the
established sentiments” ’. A constraint that ties together:

truth and becoming and assigns to the statement of what one believes to be
true the responsibility not to hinder becoming: not to collide with estab-
lished sentiments, so as to try to open them to what their established identity
let them to refuse, combat, misunderstand.
(Ibid.)

It is under the sign of such a constraint, then, that we hope Speculative

Research may itself constitute a proposition to our readers. A proposition whose
only chance of inducing a becoming of the established patterns of thinking,
knowing and feeling that affect our practices must be not that of a general denun-
ciation of what it addresses, but that of a risky attempt to attract their interests –
to become capable of luring them to the adventures that possible futures
open up.

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 The lure of possible futures   17
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social theory. London: Sage.
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and London: Duke University Press.
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London and New York, NY: Routledge.
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Melchior-Bonnet, S. (2001). The mirror: A history. New York, NY; London: Routledge.
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NC and London: Duke University Press.
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