Speculative Geographies: Ethics, Technologies, Aesthetics 9811906904, 9789811906909

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Speculative Geographies Ethics, Technologies, Aesthetics Edited by Nina Williams · Thomas Keating

Speculative Geographies

Nina Williams  •  Thomas Keating Editors

Speculative Geographies Ethics, Technologies, Aesthetics

Editors Nina Williams School of Science University of New South Wales Canberra, ACT, Australia

Thomas Keating Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA) Linköping University Linköping, Sweden

ISBN 978-981-19-0690-9    ISBN 978-981-19-0691-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 Chapters 1, 3 and 4 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapters. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: The Other Place, Form Exploration, Parametric Series II.3 (Cotsaftis, 2021). This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

This edited collection is an entirely collaborative affair. The ideas presented here are the efforts of different communities of ideas and thinkers. Therefore, we want to recognise a collective authority over the ideas presented in this text attributable to the exciting collection of authors within this book, as well as the materials, ideas, references, and broad ecologies of transdisciplinary thinking that make the event of reading this book what it is. Given this opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate the communities of thought we are immersed in, as editors, we would like here to pay our acknowledgements to the interlocutors that have been particularly important for motivating Speculative Geographies. Firstly, this collection emerges from the postponed and then rescheduled conference session on ‘Speculative Thinking’ at the Royal Geographical Society with the IBG Annual International Conference in September 2021. The session aimed to cultivate new techniques and methods of geographical thinking in the context of diverse ecological crises, and invited contributions developing a sense of openness within modes of thought against a growing backdrop of false problems. Speculative Geographies is a cumulative effort commencing with those who submitted abstracts for this session. Many of those contributors already appear in this book; however, we would also like to recognise others who were part of the session but not included here, namely James Ash, Sarah Mills, Rachel Gordon, Sasha Engelmann, and William v

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Jamieson, who presented their work as part of the session and who, in doing so, have helped reshape the direction of the collection, and our own ways of thinking about speculation. Our thinking on speculation also developed through a range of discussions on the nature of speculation itself, which took place during the session, and we would like to thank all those in attendance as well as those who offered further questions or comments, including Isabel Cornes, Thomas Dekeyser, Tim Edensor, Nicholas Ferguson, Gary Kass, Ruth Machen, Anita McKeown, Robert Shaw, Paul Simpson, Shanti Sumartojo, and Vickie Zhang. Second, the collection is a product of our joint affinity towards ways of researching and ways of theorising that resist the false certitude of received habits of thinking and which, therefore, demand speculative ways of writing the world. In this regard, we are inspired through our training as cultural geographers and, to name some of those who have been particularly formative, we would like to thank J.D. Dewsbury, Merle Patchett, Maria Fannin, Andrew Lapworth, Tom Roberts, Joe Gerlach, Thomas Jellis, and Anna Storm. We are also grateful to colleagues who have inspired us to pluralise the ways we think with theory during reading group discussions at the University of Bristol’s School of Geographical Sciences, University of New South Wales Canberra’s Cultural Geography group, Linköping University’s Stripe group, and RMIT’s Posthuman Creativities reading group. To name a few, thank you to Philippa Barter, Keith Bassett, Sam Berlin, Erik Bertram, Sage Brice, David Clarke, Ollie Dawson, Didier Debaise, Marcus Doel, Franklin Ginn, Carlota de La Herrán Iriarte, Mark Jackson, Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh, Mat Keel, Yi Lan, Dani Landau, Zhe Li, Naomi Millner, Breeze Mojel, David Rousell, Rohan Todd, and George Zou. The collection would of course not be possible without the publishing assistance of Palgrave Macmillan, and we would like to thank Joshua Pitt for his encouragement in the early stages of the development of this work, Divya Suresh for support at the later stages, and Marion Duval for taking us over the line with her enthusiasm. Finally, thanks as ever to Mathilde, Ciara, and George.

Contents

1 From  Abstract Thinking to Thinking Abstractions: Introducing Speculative Geographies  1 Nina Williams and Thomas Keating Part I Ethics  33 2 Redreaming  the Human and the Ethics of Terraformation 35 Jayna Brown 3 Contemporary  Urban Heterotopias: From Fiction to Reality 51 Olivier Cotsaftis 4 Speculations  on Time and Space: Or Zeno’s Last Stand 69 Marcus A. Doel and David B. Clarke 5 Passionate  Speculations | Speculative Passions 87 Joe Gerlach

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6 Th  ree Speculative Dispositions After William James: Towards a Concept of Pre-cursive Faith103 Carlota de La Herrán Iriarte

Part II Technologies 117 7 Towards  Speculative Praxis: Finding the Politics in Speculation with Deleuze and Design119 Kieran Cutting 8 S  peculative Reproduction131 Maria Fannin 9 NeoRural  Futures: Learning Through Embodied Speculation145 Vera Karina Gebhardt Fearns 10 Foley  and Fabulation: The Production of Screams, Sound, and Subjectivity in Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio159 Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh 11 Nuclear  Remains: For a Speculative Empirical Approach173 Thomas Keating 12 Speculating  with Childhoods, Plastics and Other Stuff187 Peter Kraftl

Part III Aesthetics 203 13 Against  the Cynicism of Common Sense: Guattari and the Micropolitics of Expression205 George Burdon

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14 The  Ecosophic Act of Feeling: Poetry, Animism and Speculative Thought219 Oliver Dawson 15 Flights  of Fancy: Speculative Taxidermy as Pedagogical Practice235 Merle Patchett 16 Becoming  Listening Bodies: Sensing the Affective Atmospheres of the City with Young Children251 David Rousell, Michael Gallagher, and Mark Peter Wright 17 Dust  and Soil: Speculative Approaches to Microecological Sensing269 Rachael Wakefield-Rann and Thomas Lee 18 A  fterword: Speculative Earth285 Martin Savransky I ndex299

Notes on Contributors

Jayna  Brown  is a professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University. In addition to numerous essays, Brown is the author of Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008) and Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021). Brown is also co-editor of the journal Social Text. Her areas of research and specialisation include performance studies, black expressive cultures, black feminism, speculative fictions, music, and our changing media landscape. Her work is located at the intersections of science and performance. George Burdon  is an Associate Lecturer of Human Geography in the School of Science at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. George’s research explores contemporary practices of the sonic arts and how they reframe geographic understandings of desire, affect, memory and becoming. Central to George’s work is a critical engagement with conceptual innovations in the social sciences by way of the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza, and Félix Guattari. David B. Clarke  is an independent scholar based in Wales in the United Kingdom. His research focuses on cities, cinema, poststructuralism, ­psychoanalysis, and political economy. His publications include the landmark edited collection The Cinematic City (1997), The Consumer Society and the Postmodern City (2003), and two co-edited interview collections: xi

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Jean Baudrillard: From Hyperreality to Disappearance (2015); Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Culture (2017). He was formerly Chair of Human Geography at Swansea University, UK. Olivier  Cotsaftis  is a post-disciplinary designer navigating the spaces between presents, futures, fictions, and realities. At RMIT University School of Design, his research addresses socio-ecological innovation in bio-urban heterotopias. He has a keen interest in next-gen biopolymers and their application in biophilic architecture and design to create equitable, regenerative, and more-than-human cities. Before joining RMIT, Cotsaftis spent 10 years in industry, working with start-ups, non-forprofits, governments, and blue-chip companies. He was a design lead at Fjord Design and Innovation, the founder and creative director of future ensemble studio, and the co-founder of Melbourne Speculative Futures— the Melbourne chapter of the Design Futures Initiative. Kieran Cutting  is a sociologist and designer finishing his PhD at Open Lab, Newcastle University, UK. His work focuses on the affective politics of possibility, particularly concerned with the use of speculative methods in research and design processes to build and support activist movements. His PhD looks at the emergence of ‘justification practices’ as a result of austerity, the impacts this has on the lived experience of ‘care’ and the production of knowledge, and how prefigurative design methods can be used to build worlds that are ‘radically Other’. He can be found on Twitter as @kierancutting or at his website https://kierancutting.co.uk. Oliver  Dawson is a PhD candidate in the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, UK.  His doctoral thesis ‘Poetic Cartographies and Ecosophic Thought’ draws on the thought of Guattari, Deleuze, and others as a way of rethinking ethics and subjectivity through encounters with poetry and art. Carlota de La Herrán Iriarte  is a PhD student in Cultural Geography at the University of New South Wales Canberra, Australia. Prior to this, Carlota obtained a BSc (Hons) in Geography from the University of Bristol (2014–2017) and completed an Honours degree in Human Geography at the University of New South Wales Canberra (2018). Her research interests lie at the intersection between non-representational

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theory, the contemporary visual arts, and the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Williams James, and Michel Foucault. Combining an innovative conceptual approach with an experimental methodology, her research looks at the transformative potential inherent to the relationship between art, subjectivity, and spirituality in ways that exceed our conventional modes of geographic practice. Marcus  A.  Doel  is Professor of Human Geography and Deputy Pro-­ Vice-­Chancellor for Research and Innovation at Swansea University, UK. His research expertise lies in the fields of the history and philosophy of Geography, post-Marxist political economy, and social and spatial theory, and their intersection with Continental philosophy, particularly structuralism and poststructuralism. He has written over 120 research publications, including eight authored, co-authored, and co-edited books, the most recent of which is The Geographies of Violence: Killing Space, Killing Time (2017). Maria Fannin  is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Bristol, UK. Her research focuses on the geographies of reproduction and feminist philosophies of time and the body. Her interests include the intermingling of corporeal and financial dynamics in the bioeconomy and the social and cultural dimensions of human tissue donation, especially blood, cord blood, and placental tissue. Her most recent projects include interdisciplinary art/science/social science research in synthetic biology and analysis of gendered risk and responsibility in the gambling sector in the United Kingdom. Vera Karina Gebhardt Fearns  is a critical designer, researcher, and educator affiliated with the Nova Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal) as a doctoral researcher and the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) as a visiting researcher. Her research centres around artistic interventions for change and her PhD project explores the practice at the intersection of design and foresight. Previously she worked as a researcher at the Chair for Sustainable Urbanism of the Technical University of Munich and at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD) of the University of Dundee, and held a position as Innovation Manager for Strategic Design at the BMW Group. She studied Design (Free University

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of Bolzano, Italy), Literature, Arts & Media (University of Konstanz, Germany), and Spatial Planning (Vienna University of Technology, Austria). Michael Gallagher  is a reader in the School of Childhood, Youth and Education Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in human geography, with research interests including children and young people, schooling, sonic environments, space and power, methods, and media. Joe Gerlach  is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, UK. Cutting across cultural and political geography, his research interests are centred conceptually on non-representational theory, micropolitics, and geophilosophy. He has had his research published on the concept of vernacular mapping (Progress in Human Geography), the notion of a minor geopolitics (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers), posthuman ethics (GeoHumanities), Spinoza (Environment and Planning A), and co-edited a book on the work of Félix Guattari. Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh  is a PhD student in Cultural Geography at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia, under the supervision of Dr Nina Williams and Prof J.D. Dewsbury. Her work is influenced by non-representational theory, posthumanist thinking, feminism, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. She is interested in engaging these ideas in the context of cinema, dance choreography, and fashion. In her present work, she is interested in exploring how these allow us to think and feel differently, and thus might contribute to ethically meaningful processes of subjectification. Thomas Keating  is a post-doctoral researcher in Technology and Social Change at Linköping University, Sweden. His research intersects cultural geography and process philosophies and engages with problems involving human-technology relationships. He has had his works published on Gilbert Simondon (Cultural Geographies), posthumanism (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers), and on speculative empiricism in conversation with Didier Debaise (Theory, Culture & Society). He is collaborating with Svensk Kärnbränslehantering Aktiebolag in developing

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speculative thinking by exploring how to communicate memory of permanent repositories for nuclear waste 100,000 years into the future. Peter  Kraftl  is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Birmingham, UK. An interdisciplinary scholar of childhood and youth, he is most interested in children’s interactions with material things, environmental processes, and their emotional and embodied lives. He has researched, amongst other things: children’s experiences of urban environments; young people’s understandings of food, water, and energy; plastics; alternative education spaces; and school architectures. Peter is the author of eight books (including After Childhood, 2020) and over 100 articles and book chapters. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK) and has held visiting professorships in several countries. Peter works regularly with local, national, and international organisations—from informing local authorities about building more inclusive urban spaces for children to his role as a co-­ordinating lead author for UNESCO’s current international review of education. Thomas  Lee  is Senior Lecturer in Design Studies in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. His academic work has appeared in numerous peer-­reviewed journals. His 2018 novel Coach Fitz earned him the award of Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist in 2019. He has a manuscript under review with that uses narrative fiction to explore design projects. He is co-editor of After The Australian Ugliness (2021). Merle Patchett  broadly examines theories, histories, and geographies of practice through her research. She is writing a monograph, titled Murderous Millinery, that critically examines the perilous practices of the plumage trade. David Rousell  is a senior lecturer in the School of Education, RMIT University, Australia, and visiting fellow at the Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.  His research is invested in a posthumanist reimagining of education and creativity in the Anthropocene, using speculative empirical approaches at the intersect of environmental art, process philosophy, and social science.

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Martin Savransky  is a senior lecturer and convenor of the MA Ecology, Culture & Society course in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse (2021) and The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He is co-editor of After Progress (2022) and Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures (2017). Working across philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences, he has published widely on pragmatist and continental philosophy, postcolonial thought, ecological politics, and speculative practices. Rachael Wakefield-Rann  is a senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She has a background in the social and environmental sciences, and writes on topics related to socio-ecological system change, and how social practices shape interactions between bodies, pollutants. and microbes. Her forthcoming book is titled Life Indoors. Nina Williams  is Lecturer in Cultural Geography at the University of New South Wales Canberra, Australia. Her research explores conceptual innovations in the fields of non-representational theory, process philosophy, speculative thinking, and posthumanism. In an effort to bring theory into close relationship with practice, a central pursuit of Nina’s research is to foreground the role of aesthetics and creative processes as unique means for understanding social and cultural life. Mark  Peter  Wright  is an artist, researcher, and associate lecturer at London College of Communication. As an artist-researcher working at the intersection of sound, ecology, and contemporary art, his practice investigates relations of capture and mediation between humans and non-humans, sites and technologies, observers and subjects.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 12.1 Fig. 12.2 Fig. 14.1 Fig. 15.1

The other place, Night View (Parametric series II.3) by Olivier Cotsaftis (2021) The other place, The Other Square (Parametric series II.3) by Olivier Cotsaftis (2021) The other place, Aeropark (Parametric series II.3) by Olivier Cotsaftis (2021) Impressions of the intervention during the NeoRural Futures Summer School. Image credit: Speculative Edu (2019) Spike Field (1993) nuclear marker concept by Michael Brill; drawing by Safdar Abidi. Image provided courtesy of the US Department of Energy The plastic objects laid out on the classroom floor before the sculpture workshop began. Author’s photograph Annabelle (the second sculpture referred to in the vignette), part-way through construction. Author’s photograph Emily Dickinson goes to the chemist. From Your candle accompanies the sun: my homage to Emily Dickinson by Sophie Herxheimer (2017) Manucodiata. Woodcut from Conrad Gessner’s Historiae Animalium, (Zurich 1560). Image Credit: Paul D Stewart / Science Photo Library

60 61 61 152 183 193 194 226 240

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Fig. 15.2 Hippomanucodiata Manucodiata. Illustration from U. Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae (Boloniae, 1599). Image source: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/53875607 Fig. 16.1 Children experimenting with sonic affects during a sound walk around Hulme. Author’s photograph Fig. 16.2 Child-led sonic disruptions at the local primary school (left) and university campus (right). Author’s photograph Fig. 16.3 Montage of still frames from GoPro videos created by children during sonic disruptions in the local university building. Author’s photograph

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1 From Abstract Thinking to Thinking Abstractions: Introducing Speculative Geographies Nina Williams and Thomas Keating

Why Speculation? We are bringing this collection together at a time in which speculative ways of thinking appear to be undergoing a reprise across the social sciences and humanities. Whether through engagements with speculative cosmology (Stengers, 2006), speculative empiricism (Debaise, 2017), speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2011), speculative research (Wilkie et al., 2017), or speculative realism (Bryant et al., 2011), what is striking about this moment is that ‘speculation’ is approached as a diverse set of conceptual and empirical endeavours that construct plural rather than singular narratives, recuperate multiple rather than complete forms of knowledge, value holding open what is at stake and can be brought into N. Williams (*) School of Science, University of New South Wales, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] T. Keating Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA), Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden © The Authors 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_1

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purview and, in doing so, intensify alternative possibilities. Central to these endeavours, as Alfred North Whitehead suggests, is the sense that speculation presents a certain form of reason whose “business is to make thought creative of the future” (1929: 82). Thinking with this notion of speculative reason, our motivation for assembling this collection is to assay what this speculative intervention might mean for geography, and how speculation might itself be conceived as geographical. In approaching the relationship between speculation and geography, this collection of essays manifests a collective desire to complicate the modes of thought used to evaluate experience by crafting alternatives, pluralising perspectives, and thereby problematising the immediately given. If speculation has until recently occupied a somewhat marginal position in academia, this might be because it is often considered a form of futile guesswork that, as Alex Wilkie (2018: 347) observes, would seemingly be “the very antithesis of sober empirical research”. More troubling, perhaps, is the sense that speculation implies a zealous celebration of the immaterial and an avoidance of this world’s material politics (Hallward, 2006). With its connotations of abstract thinking, discourses of first principles, and transcendental reasonings, speculation seemingly inherits a sense of detachment from the empirical particularities and differences of this world. Working against these tendencies, in this book we consider speculation as something other than futile guesswork, vague suppositions, or immaterial escape. On the contrary, we insist that speculations expand, complicate, and invent abstractions that modify the possibilities of what thought might become. To ask what thought might become is to cultivate a mode of speculative thinking that is at odds with prophetic positions that are themselves only capable of answering questions posed from within the bounds of the contemporary regimes of knowledge production. Developing this line of thought, the chapters in this book differently, and in their own way, foreground speculation as a style of thinking that prioritises an openness to what thought might become, and which therefore reconfigures the empirical beyond what seems given in an immediate experience. A key motivation of the book is thus to develop speculation as a practice that, in asking what thought might become, reformulates the problems that can be staged as part of empirical enquiry.

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Speculation, we contend, is uniquely placed to problematise the kinds of questions we are capable of asking out of the conditions of thought in the present. As with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1994) ‘geophilosophy’, speculation is a term that engenders a mode of attention to the ways problems are always staged and valued from the bounds of dominant abstractions and territories of thought—and it is through a spirit to cultivate thought in its capacity to think difference that this mode of attention maintains a generosity to the way thinking could be otherwise. Here we take our cue from Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers (2017) in arguing that speculation is concerned with the formulation of problems of a new kind. Debaise and Stengers call for a ‘speculative’ mode of thought capable of responding to a crisis of “lazy thinking”, “false problems” (p.  14) and a rising “inability to think that what we care about might have a future” (p.  18). Speculative thinking, here, is concerned with sensing the virtual possibilities—interpretations, ideas, connections—that saturate any situation. It is a call to develop a sense of openness in the most expanded terms possible to “what, in this situation, might be of importance” (Debaise & Stengers, 2017: 18–19). It is owing to this sense of openness to what thought might become that speculation can be said to complicate certain majoritarian knowledge claims expressed, as they often are, according to normative politics, calculative logics, and risk-management strategies (Savransky et al., 2017). Our contention is that speculation must itself be understood as something that instructs majoritarian political formations concerning how life could, or should, be organised. Put differently, we are less concerned with what speculation imagines for the future than with how, in doing so, it complicates what is deemed important through current epistemic habits. In problematising epistemic habits, speculation presents a renewed understanding of what counts as the empirical that resists reducing and channelling experience according to immediate facts, off-the-shelf abstractions, or clichéd diagnoses. The diverse approaches to speculation developed in this book evince a unique mode of empiricism that is variously concerned with amplifying experience in its pluralism (Debaise, 2017). In seeking to articulate a pluralism of experience, speculation would be something capable of signalling (im)possibilities outside of recognisable ontological frameworks (Brown, 2021: 6), and which diffracts

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in order “to make visible all those things that have been lost in an object; not in order to make the other meanings disappear, but rather to make it impossible for the bottom line to be one single statement” (Haraway, 2000: 105). The empirical emerges here not as something that simply appears to us through perception, but as an experiential event that necessarily exceeds and modifies the frameworks in which it gets placed. Each of these thinkers can thus be said to be elaborating a mode of speculation that, as Martin Savransky writes (2018: 6), dramatises philosophy with the ‘earthly’ such that speculation becomes “an immanent and situated act of creation concerned with whens and wheres and hows, with abstractions and their consequences, with practices and their dreams, with events and the possibles they create”. It is owing to such investments in the relations between thought and the earthly that we are interested here in elaborating how speculation is geographical. Indeed, whilst acknowledging that geographical research has in certain ways always been speculative (see Doel and Clarke, Chap. 4), this is not to say speculation has always been geographical. How might imbuing speculation with a geographic awareness solicit abstractions of thought as they come to force and fruition in relation to diverse ‘earthly’ processes and virtual potentialities? What becomes of the practice of earth writing when it is directed towards a reappraisal of the abstractions it uses to think the experiential? What does it take to leave behind conventional abstractions of thought and instead engage in what Whitehead (1929: 65) terms “the flight after the unattainable”? And how might this pursuit of the unattainable, as it intersects with the mundane, in turn help revaluate those “daily affirmations, which have become too comfortable and prejudice us to a future that has yet to be determined” (Sharpe et  al., 2014: 124)? In posing these questions it is worth adding a note of clarification: this is a book about speculation in a capacity that is resolutely not a transcendent mode of thought that is detached from the world or from contextual placings (whether historical, theoretical, cultural, political, geographical). Nor do we suggest speculation is something without certain limits. For us this mode of speculation, which is attentive to the conditions that produce thought, gains particular resonance in the Leibnizian refrain favoured by Stengers (2005, 2008b) dic cur hic [say why here]: a call for

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precise occasions of decision making such that we attend to the singularity of each occasion in which our thinking takes flight. In other words, dic cur hic states that generalisable justifications provide a shaky cause for our evaluative thinking. In this always situated mode, speculation is thus not simply about hesitant guesswork: our aim in this book goes beyond a celebration of a general sense of uncertainty as part of contemporary scholarly claims, since to argue speculation concerns an openness to what thought might become is not to say it resists scepticism and precise forms of evaluation (Williams, 2022: 10). Instead, we argue that speculation is a method of evidencing precise, albeit diverging, lines of enquiry that need not mean that “every issue is readily decided by recourse to facts currently available” (Connolly, 2019: 10), and thus are no less rigorous than formal calculative or statistical evidence. Far from abstract thinking, then, this is a book about speculation dedicated to the task of thinking abstractions and the forms of value, intellectual horizons, and the modes of existence they give rise to. The remainder of this introduction has three sections: the next section develops the question of ‘who speculates?’ by tracing certain genealogies of speculative thinking; the chapter then develops what it means to think abstractions; finally, we provide an overview of how the three themes of the book—ethics, technologies, aesthetics—speak to the chapters in this edited collection.

Who Speculates? Speculation abounds, whether in the social sciences and humanities, architecture and design, the creative industries, financial markets and urban investments, or philosophy and social theory wherein speculation becomes oriented around a politics seeking to negotiate complex social, environmental, or epistemological change, albeit in very different ways. Speculations are also present, of course, in less formal modes such as those moments when a mind wanders and contemplates something unforeseen: What does the future hold? What is the weather going to be like? Is the universe infinite or finite? What is consciousness? How to distinguish the living from the non-living? To what extent might one

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think different imperceptible relations of sense? (Do you believe in life after love?). Speculations, in this reflective and fleeting mode, do not necessarily concern fantastical visions of the future,  nor privileged moments of discovery, since they “occur all the time” (Parisi, 2012: 237) involving a mediation on abstractions that, in their realisation, pose alternative problems and thus change what appears thinkable and possible. And yet, writing in an era of anti-establishment populisms marked by a cynicism towards expertise, it might be argued that what is required today is more conviction in the value of rigorously evidenced logics. Amidst continued hesitancy by various governments in the face of innumerable ecological and mass extinction crises, what would seemingly be required are deliberative actions that themselves anticipate practical solutions. Speculation, in this context, might appear at once untimely and dangerously impractical. In our reading, if speculation is untimely then it is so only in the sense that Nietzsche argues that philosophy of the future must be untimely if it is to resist the power of facts, the tyranny of the real, or the ‘inadequacy of false problems’ (Gerlach,  Chap. 5). And if speculation is considered impractical, this might be because it is often evaluated through a lens of applicability and its value decided against certain calculated measures derived from extant regimes of knowledge mired by reactionary thinking (see Gerlach & Jellis, 2015; Burdon, Chap. 13). In recognising a certain value in the untimeliness and impracticality of speculative thinking, we are not suggesting speculation is a remedy to all twenty-first-century problems; this collection is not intended as a guide to living on in the Anthropocene not least because speculation here is opposed to that timely ethos of solution-oriented thinking, and resits ‘practico-theoretical’ applications (de La Herrán Iriarte,  Chap. 6). However, what we are interested in is how and why the speculative has a certain appeal in the context of contemporary political, social, or ecological problems precisely as a means of pluralising the onto-epistemologies used to formulate problems in catastrophic times (Stengers, 2015; see also Brown, Chap. 2; Fearns, Chap. 9; Kraftl, Chap. 12). Posing the question ‘who speculates?’, therefore, is also to ask ‘who and what gets to speculate?’, or as Aimee Bahng (2018: 5) puts it, who ‘narrates’ such speculations? Moreover, it at once asks ‘which speculations will be heard?’ since the task of surveying proponents of speculative

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thinking itself risks omitting certain othered voices of speculative thought who are less likely to be cited in academic publications (Oswin, 2020; Müller, 2021). Whilst we commenced with a moment of speculation that has a genealogy in Western philosophy as well as with a distinct disciplinary attachment, we want to be explicit that this collection is indebted to a plurality of forms of speculative thinking. Glancing through the contents page of this book reveals that this is not just a book by or for geographers: it is a collection indebted to different commitments across the social sciences and humanities, including within theories of decolonialisation and post-colonialism, feminist and queer theories, and theories of race and alterity that seek to unsettle universal categories and, in doing so, decentre the legacies of European imperialism and problematise capitalist destruction by listening to a plurality of earthbound onto-­ epistemologies already in existence today (Brown, 2021; Jackson, 2021; Savransky, 2021; Tsing, 2015). Crucially, for us part of this plurality means recognising that speculations are more often than not irreducible to individuated forms of intentionality and decision. Partly, speculations exceed individuated forms because they are often enacted by collections of different bodies and materials (Fannin, Chap. 8; Patchett, Chap. 15; Rousell et al., Chap. 16; Wakefield-Rann and Lee, Chap. 17). To develop this reading of speculation, in what follows we tentatively survey a number of conversations engaging speculative thinking which inform the spirit of this collection. The first of these engagements is the penchant within human geography for assaying and amplifying the plurality of events and experiences as they are constituted through particular spacetimes. The question of spacetimes has long held a prominent place as a geographical concept for approaching certain forms of complexity (Massey, 1999). Recently, for instance, spacetimes have operated as a device for rendering future contingency open to certain logics of preemptive governance (Anderson, 2010), are used to articulate rhythms of exhaustion in practices of work (Straughan et al., 2020), and are developed to reconceptualise relations between technology, media objects, and affect (Ash, 2017), to name but a few lines of enquiry. Whilst ‘speculation’ is not always explicit in the lexicon of these works, this conversation speaks to the notion of speculative thinking at work in this collection since it concerns precisely how

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articulating abstractions of spacetime itself helps think different metaphysical relations between time, space, and matter. By engaging questions of metaphysics, albeit often indirectly, spacetimes have given rise to a concomitant imperative to rethink the boundaries of fieldwork within the discipline (Katz, 1994), such that fieldwork is thought less as bounded space and “more as a series of graspings” (Gerlach & Jellis, 2015: 136–7). Second includes the way speculative thinking is discernible in nonrepresentational theories (Simpson, 2020), including cognate research into notions of the elemental (Engelmann, 2020; Jackson & Fannin, 2011), the atmospheric (McCormack, 2017), the inorganic (Roberts & Dewsbury, 2021; Grosz, 2011), the unsayable (Harrison, 2007), the inhuman (Clark & Yusoff, 2017), the spectral (Wylie, 2007; Enigbokan & Patchett, 2012), the pre-individual (Lapworth, 2020; Keating, 2019), and the aleatory and contingent (Doel, 2004). Throughout, we are drawn to these attempts to admit articulations of experience that may be tensed with affective orientations yet lack any pre-given necessity and meaning: How to write about an impasse of thinking and doing without reducing such moments to universal judgement and justification? And how to speculate elementally, without assuming a fully formed subject or object who carries out such speculations and is able to appraise them as such? By approaching these questions, these engagements with spacetime and nonrepresentational registers seek other ways of thinking experience spatio-­temporally, or what Keith Woodward (2016: 350) refers to in his speculative geography of Orson Welles as those “spaces that are thinkable, but not tangible, visible, or manifest”. Imbuing geography with a certain speculative impulse, then, as Barry et al. (2021: 126) do through the notion of planetary speculative listening, might open geography up to different expressions of experience and thought that “nurtures, cultivates and affirms the potentialities of possible futures”. Thought as forms of speculative thinking, these geographies put forward diverse attempts to think—through the invention of abstractions—something of the invisible, imperceptible, affective, and infra-sensible processes that elide the human sensorium. Third, this commitment within geographical scholarship to render something of those imperceptible and infra-sensible expressions of experience can itself be recognised in line with a set of theoretical speculations

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that have advanced different kinds of processual and relational thinking. Without wanting to blur the distinction between a diverse set of works, we are thinking here of theorisations of matter (Bennett, 2010), ecologies of experience (Manning & Massumi, 2014), assemblage theory (DeLanda, 2006), post-humanism (Braidotti, 2013), plant thinking (Marder, 2013), hyperobjects (Morton, 2013), and perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro, 2014), which engage differing modes of speculation via their attention to dimensions of the world that exceed human recognition. Such theoretical orientations have themselves led to a proliferation of techniques and technologies taken up within research concerned with citizen sensing (Gabrys, 2019, Pritchard & Gabrys, 2016) and the politics and poetics of listening and attuning to nonhuman ecologies (Kanngieser & Todd, 2020; Gallagher et al., 2017; Brigstocke & Noorani, 2016). Across these diverse conversations, there is a speculative impulse that considers alternative forms of experience through the problematisation of anthropocentrism, by attending to the agency of nonhuman processes and technologies, and in grasping subjectivity as embedded in the materiality of the world. The fourth key area of speculative thought informing this collection concerns the way speculative fictions across literature, music, and the arts have been engaged as sites of critical thinking across the humanities and social sciences (Dawson, Chap. 14). From Donna Haraway’s (2013) reading of Ursula Le Guin; Aimee Bahng’s (2017, 2018) work on Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany; Jayna Brown’s (2021) theorisation of Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra; to Kodwo Eshun’s (2018) exploration of Afrofuturist sonic fiction, a central tenet of each of these works is to take speculative fictions themselves as modes of creative and critical enquiry. For example, Elizabeth de Freitas and Sarah Truman (2021: 4) explore “how examples of [speculative fiction] pursue an ecological cosmic sympathy with the non-human, and how close readings of these texts allow scholars to think creatively about new kinds of inquiry in the Anthropocene”. Here, a politics of thinking futurity is palpable that does not cease when one leaves the otherworldly visions presented within speculative fictions. Moreover, it is a politics much more radical than one of being hopeful, since the ways we story the future determines how we invest in the present (Bahng, 2018: 3). Advancing this politics through what she terms Black utopias,

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Jayna Brown liberates the term ‘utopia’ from its connotations of a universal hopefulness; she attests: I am not arguing for life according to a model in which we have been restored to some original state, or for life in which we have been granted rights according to some social contract. I don’t hope for that. In fact, I don’t think utopia needs hope at all. Hope yearns for a future. Instead, we dream in place, in situ, in medias res, in layers in dimensional frequencies. The quality of being I find in the speculations considered here is about existence beyond life or death, about the ways in which we reach into the unknowable, outside the bounds of past, present, and future, of selfhood and other. This is what I call utopia: the moments when those of us untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress here on earth celebrate ourselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium. (Brown, 2021: 1–2)

The fifth engagement includes speculative and critical design practices that produce novel ways of thinking the future as a way of responding to specific ethico-political problems (see Cutting, Chap. 7; Fearns, Chap. 9). As with speculative fictions, such speculations are committed to a politics of this world in their inclination to problematise the kinds of questions that are possible to be posed within the conditions of the present (Malpass, 2013). We see such political propositions in the work that appears on the cover of this book; The Other Place by Olivier Cotsaftis: an urban architectural design that aims to open up different ways of speculating with the future of urban life besides the logics of limitless consumption and, we might add, beyond more troubling capitalistic ‘speculative urbanisms’ (see Woodworth, 2020; Leszczynski, 2016). As Cotsaftis argues (Chap. 3), speculative design pushes beyond the problem-­ solving practices within which design is often confined. Presenting instead a form of speculation that is not directed with utopian ideals, Cotsaftis’ images grasp at ‘alternative nows’ as ideas about social organisation and living that change what appears possible in the present. Far from the production of new possibilities ex nihilo, to focus on alternative nows means thinking speculations that arise instead, as Vyjayanthi Rao (2014: 19) argues, out of an already existing “murky, indeterminate terrain of potential”.

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The sixth and final engagement directly concerns the advancement of speculation and speculative thinking in philosophy. Whilst several philosophers undergo careful attention in this collection as speculative thinkers—including Irigaray (Fannin), Guattari (Burdon; Dawson), Haraway (Kraftl; Patchett), Derrida (Doel and Clarke), Borges (Doel and Clarke), and Spinoza (Gerlach)—most notable for us is to recognise a specific genealogy of speculative thinking linking Whitehead, William James, Stengers, Debaise, and Deleuze. Contrary to the tradition of speculative thinking in philosophy posited as a task of thinking outside of experience and thus beyond the empirical (Kant, 1998), this genealogy develops speculation as a precise task of producing abstractions that ‘thicken’ the category of experience (Debaise & Keating, 2021). If Kantian transcendental deduction insists on a split between noumena and phenomena—of the thing as it is and the thing as it is perceived— speculative reason would be something necessarily opposed to the practical and active. Pursuing something different, the genealogy we are turning to recuperates speculation by insisting that one of the most important problems today is to develop forms of speculative thinking so as to exclude nothing from experience. Whether through speculative reason (Whitehead, 1929), radical empiricism (James, 1996), in characterising immanence as “Spinoza’s speculative proposition” (Deleuze, 1980), or in the insistence of the possible (Debaise & Stengers, 2017), speculation emerges not as something that is ultimately superfluous or marginal to practical action but itself as a process that is precisely capable of problematising the conditions of the present and altering the limits of the calculative logics that characterise it (Wilkie et al., 2017). Here it is worth elaborating two of the ways this reading of speculation is detectable in philosophy and social theory today, and particularly how this mode of speculation comes to rethink what gets counted as the ‘empirical’ besides transcendental limits. On the one hand, this genealogy is crystalised in the Speculative Turn (Bryant et al., 2011): a book developing the value of speculation across object-oriented, correlationist, and panpsychist modes of thought, amongst others. Whilst recognising the diverging approaches to speculative thinking housed within this turn (see Harman, 2011; Shaviro, 2014), at least part of the enthusiasm surrounding this speculative and

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object-­oriented turn, as Povinelli (2016: 84) notes, hinges on the sense that these conversations rethink the relationship between aesthetics and aesthesis to “provide us with a sense-perception of objects independent of our cognitive capture”. In doing so, this recent engagement with speculative thinking might be read as an attempt to stretch the categories of objects and matter beyond the logics of simple localisation that deem them inert, inoperative, and outside of the ontological. On the other hand, this philosophical genealogy also gains expression today through the work of the Groupe d’études constructivistes founded by Stengers and Debaise. Different to the speculative turn, the work on speculation developed out of this group informs a commitment to questions of experience and the production of abstractions that speaks to a number of the ideas expressed by this collection. This community of speculative thought does not advance a new ontology of objects, but directly seeks to reappraise experience as central to a pluralistic universe that is already primed with alternative modes of living and thinking. At the forefront of this work is Stengers’ (2005, 2006) revisitation of Whitehead and development of speculative thinking as it intersects diverse ecologies of practice (see also Landau, 2021; Puig de La Bellacasa, 2017; Savransky, 2021). Refusing to limit thought to toxic modern categories that poison our thinking, and paraphrasing her own appeal to Whitehead’s philosophy, we too are drawn to Stengers’ inventive style that dares “to propose that we [are] not prisoners of those categories” (Stengers, 2008a: 50–1). One notable theoretical contribution here is the way Debaise develops this speculative genealogy through what he terms a ‘speculative empiricism’. Responding to a radical empiricist imperative to excluding nothing from experience, and drawing especially on Whitehead’s (1957) speculative philosophy, Debaise (2017: 164) introduces speculative empiricism as a technical philosophy for contemplating experience besides all a priori limits and dualisms (perception vs the imperceptible, conscious vs unconscious thinking, intentional vs non-intentional, etc.). For Debaise, a speculative empiricism alters the kinds of questions philosophy is able to ask since “the speculative problem is constituted not by an analysis of perceptual experience, nor by a philosophical anthropology, nor by a relation to given experience, but rather by an approach to existence as such” (2017: 116). In rethinking the metaphysical terms articulating existence,

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speculative empiricism responds to a tendency within Western philosophy to assume that the abstractions created to understand empirical things adequately qualify their ontological qualities and possibilities for experience. As Russell Duvernoy (2019: 477) explains, the problem with abstractions in the context of a speculative empiricism is: “What gets left out is the way that vaguely felt or sensed intensities, not subsumable under a category of identity, drive our experience at a subrepresentative level”. Hence, the primary question of a speculative empiricism is to ask: “[t]o what extent do unexamined assumptions about conceptual abstraction hinder, block, or prefigure experiential attention?” (Duvernoy, 2019: 460–461). Questioning the assumptions of abstraction, speculative empiricism insists on the risky imperative of constructing different lines of thought that attend to those elements of experience that are disqualified and deemed not worth paying attention to.

How To Think Abstractions? At the beginning of this introduction, we suggested that speculation is geographical. This claim goes beyond disciplinary implications—we are arguing that speculating is geographical because it demands considered investments in the relations between thinking and the earthly. Speculating is to think-practice the force of abstractions as they register, differently, across various terrains and have the power to transform those settings. Here we delve into this practice of thinking abstractions as a speculative and pragmatic affair concerned with the consequences of abstractions— how they configure the frameworks for evaluating experience and offer opportunities for what Savransky (2021: 25) refers to as a “situated art of noticing”. Speculation, in this manner, is thus pertinent for intensifying aspects of events that dominant abstractions demand we overlook: it “stipulates that we must reject the right to disqualify” (Debaise & Stengers, 2017: 15). Abstractions extract and generalise certain peculiarities or resonances in the world out of broader processes, and therefore enable a consistency of perception in grouping together the disparate in the form of the individual or the similar. As such, we cannot think without abstractions. And

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yet, abstractions also limit thought when such suppositions are deemed to have a self-evidence that gets mistaken for the reality that they represent (see Jeyasingh, Chap. 10)—what Whitehead (1948) describes as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is why Whitehead insists on greater vigilance over abstractions arguing that “a civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility” (1948: 59), or “produces minds in a groove” (p. 196). Thus the task of Whitehead’s philosophy, as Tom Roberts argues, “is to create concepts that go beyond the specialised ‘grooves’ of professionalised knowledge practices” (2014: 973). Whilst Whitehead (1948: 59) maintains that it is philosophy that is the critic of abstractions, the call to be vigilant over abstractions is one that Derek McCormack (2012: 716) has extended in order “to affirm the value of a differentiated sense of abstraction for geographical thinking and research in a world where what counts as lived space is arguably becoming increasingly complex”. Such vigilance is critical if we are to better come to terms with the present in which it has become increasingly apparent that our abstractions, as Debaise and Keating (2021) discuss, have “become machines that have run empty”. The very stakes of this problematic, and precisely why abstractions come to matter in determining not just theoretical choices but what forms of experience are made possible, are explicated by Susanne Langer when writing that: The formulation of experience which is contained within the intellectual horizon of an age and a society is determined, I believe, not so much by events and desires, as by the basic concepts at people’s disposal for analyzing and describing their adventures to their own understanding. (Langer, 1978: 6)

Abstractions in Langer’s account are the conceptual possibilities of an intellectual horizon that condition experience: abstractions matter for determining what, in an era, it is possible to think. The inverse of this is that abstractions equally determine what is made impossible and what is disqualified. To ‘think’ abstractions, then, to take care of what they do and what they restrict—it is to encounter the force of concepts as they effectuate different resonances and different ways of thinking and living.

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Indeed, as Debaise (2017: 23) argues, “it would be no exaggeration to see Whitehead’s philosophy as one of the boldest attempts to give abstractions a fundamental role in experience. Abstractions are neither representations nor generalizations of empirical state of affairs but constructions”. Thinking abstractions, therefore, is a far cry from a mode of ‘lofty thinking’ divorced from a material politics of this world. Equally, thinking abstractions is not merely concerned with circulating new neologisms. To flesh out this position, in what follows we propose that thinking abstractions must instead dismantle the opposition between subjective knowledge and objective fact; fold together theory and practice; and, consequently, reconfigure modes of evaluation. Principally for Whitehead, speculation is a task of developing abstractions that are distinct from the closed perspectives of either primary brute facts or, on the other hand, secondary values. One way to understand this task is the way Whitehead identifies the bifurcation of nature into two distinct realities as a disastrous abstraction for thought. “Another way of phrasing this theory which I am arguing against”, Whitehead writes, “is to bifurcate nature into two divisions, namely into the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness” (1964: 30). Modern thought, for Whitehead, has been determined according to a bifurcation of nature that results in a tendency to explain away that which does not coincide with scientific materialism as simply subjective, secondary qualities. As Stengers argues (2006: 1), this Modern abstraction of nature is reducible to either the values we assign to it through perception (such as, for Whitehead, the red glow of a sunset) or the “dull affair” of material obeying laws of nature (such as the molecules and electric waves through which scientists explain a sunset). Reacting  against the bifurcation of nature, Whitehead dismantles this opposition between subjective knowledges and objective facts. As Whitehead continues: The nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature.

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The meeting point of these two natures is the mind, the causal nature being influent and the apparent nature being effluent. (Whitehead, 1964: 31)

In this proposition Whitehead signals a particularly exciting possibility for thought where, and speaking now in our reflections as cultural geography researchers, we frequently run up against empirical occasions that expose “the sheer ugliness of the opposition between valid, rational knowledge and mere subjective opinion” (Stengers, 2018: 414). For instance,  J.D.  Dewsbury (2000) responds precisely to this problem when staging the intuitive utterances of the ‘performative’—whether in the theatre or scenes of social action—“where the unfounded and unmediated status of becoming is valorised such that society (the objective) and the individual (subjective) are simultaneously enacting a conjunct substantiality” (p. 488). Following Whitehead, we might also refuse in pedagogical spaces to capitulate to the terms of the supposedly more valid objective knowledge of scientific materialism. Crucially, as Stengers (2018: 409) attests, “this is not a formula for a conquering enlightenment but for a cautious, relational exploration, and a situated one, as the effects are never ‘objectively’ good or bad, but are not ‘only subjective’ either”. Whitehead’s philosophy offers a radical refusal of this distinction between the false alternative of subjective and objective that is neither concerned with fading into a universal totality nor clinging to the relativistic knowledge of subjectivity. In refusing this false alternative of the subjective and objective, the call to think abstractions must apprehend thought within the fields in which they gain resonance, to fold together theory and practice. This does not privilege epistemology at the expense of ontology, as with Cartesian, Kantian or phenomenological traditions that tend to be concerned with what we can know at the expense of questions about what there is. Instead, as Steven Shaviro shows, Whitehead adopts a radically speculative position: “I do not come to know a world of things outside myself. Rather, I discover—which is to say, I feel—that I myself, together with things that go beyond my knowledge of them, are all alike inhabitants of a ‘common world’” (Shaviro, 2014: 3). Here, ideas and abstractions come about through engagements with the world, a folding together of theory and practice, such that any speculative adventure, as David Rousell (2021: 1) suggests, must refuse “to cleave the activities of thought from the activities

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of sensing, feeling, moving, and living”. Philosophy after Whitehead is thus a matter of feeling as knowing. In exposing the limits of disqualifying, empty categories, thinking abstractions involves an intensification of experience vis-à-vis the potential manners through which we apprehend it, which become indistinguishable from each other. As Andrew Lapworth (2015: 5) argues, “Whitehead’s philosophy thus implicates the becoming of thought and bodies within the world’s material process, re-directing our attention towards ecologies of nascent abstractions that present opportunities for creative experiment with different immanent forces and potentials”. Thinking abstractions, here, arises as a method of experimenting with ideas in their emergence by way of practices, to sense difference within repetition as Merle Patchett (2016) writes. What, in other words, thinking abstractions necessitates, is an enquiry into modes of evaluation How do we register the force of events according to that which is possible to articulate within certain framings? Which concepts become inscribed and reinscribed as part of the apprehension of experience—and, accordingly, at what point do those concepts run empty? What becomes unknowable or unsayable due to the absences within epistemic habits? Perhaps too, how do we negotiate (and value) the multiplicity of possibilities and alternatives that speculative reason calls to attention? Exposing the limits of critique, whilst also necessarily pursuing its own mode of evaluation, speculation demands that we rethink versions of events that had appeared fixed or singular according to ready-made values and abstractions. At the same time, as a new mode of evaluation—now more situated and immanent—speculation might register the alternatives of such events. Evaluation itself, as Williams (2022: 11) suggests, must speculate with its own pluralism, thus “holding open the possibility that something different might arise out of this world or this event”.

The Collection The collection is grouped into themes which situate this speculative imperative to think abstractions across three domains: ethics, technologies, aesthetics. In what follows, we tease out each of these themes both

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as possible trajectories for extending the ethos of the book, and to introduce how the chapters in the collection amplify these problematics as components of speculative geographies. The allocation of chapters across these themes is not meant to be exhaustive, and we encourage readers to engage each of these works with a spirit of speculation attuned to what other framings, interpretations, and connections are possible.

Ethics This first theme of the book is concerned with an impulse to take care of the alternative as a way of pluralising experience. Such a focus demands a speculative ethics engaged with the ways “categorical abstractions are something we may fabricate in order for them to fabricate us” (Stengers, 2008a: 51). Taking care of the alternative is a practice of holding open the possibility that we might be able to think the world differently; the point being that the bounds of our ways of thinking are not set in stone. A speculative ethics, in this way, is also a question of analysis and evaluation: it is about how we register the force of the possible as constitutive to what appears materially concrete in the environments we inhabit (Williams & Collet, 2021; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). In holding open the possibility of the alternative, Whitehead is resolute in his claim that speculation has been the salvation of the world, for speculation “made systems and then transcended them” (Whitehead, 1929: 76). What is striking about this sentiment is that it demonstrates a mode of speculation capable of transcending already existing evaluative frames and abstractions, but without itself ever become transcendent. To consider this claim further we turn to the notion of speculative ethics advanced by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa as “everyday ecological doings” (2017: 22), which she contrasts with the transcendent “moralism of anthropocentric ethics” (p.  13). For Puig de la Bellacasa, it is through speculation that we might cultivate forms of ethics beyond the myth of transcendent truths and universalising moralism, which has been catastrophic in its location of ethics in terms of human life rather than across ecological systems, and is moreover deadly in its privileging of particular human lives over others. Speculative ethics, rather than moralistic

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judgements, as Joe Gerlach suggests, can be “considered an ongoing and experimental speculation in how to generate—and attend to—different forms, atmospheres, spaces, affects, bodies, and materialities of existence” (2020: 200). Let us be clear that this is as much about conceptual possibilities as it is about cultivating practical possibilities in the form of new behaviours and activities. We would go so far as to say that the two are inseparable for, as Whitehead argues, “[a]s we think, we live” (1968: 63). As Melanie Sehgal suggests (2014), we might see Whitehead as cultivating a renewed form of ethics that is concerned with being lured into non-conformity with environments that shape us according to modern habits of thought. Speculative ethics, therefore, is a mode of thought capable of getting us outside of the toxicity of dominant abstractions in order to construct different ways of knowing and living. Situated as part of this question of ethics, in Chap. 2 Jayna Brown develops an ethics of terraformation capable of troubling assumptions about humans and their relationship with broader ecologies. Turning to the speculative visions of Black and Indigenous women directors, Brown suggests that—at a time of planetary crises—possibilities for renewal must involve reconceiving the very criteria through which the human is defined. Brown traces a connection between the racial, gendered, and ableist category of the human within European thought, and the expression terra nullius, in order to problematise the role of this violent abstraction in colonial devastation. In Chap. 3, Olivier Cotsaftis presents The Other Place: a speculative ‘urban heterotopia’ that problematises resource-intensive and human-­ centred forms of urban design and living. Commencing with a discussion of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, Cotsaftis examines the innovations staged through a series of experimental cities and the possibilities for urban life they give rise to. Recognising a certain failure of these examples, however, Cotsaftis emphasises the potential for biophilic design principles as well a ‘pluriversal’ politics. A central proposition of the chapter, and one which we might consider a form of speculative ethics, is to insist on the importance of a practice of thinking the alternative as part of speculative architectural and urban design.

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In Chap. 4, Marcus Doel and David Clarke question the pursuit of speculative geographies through the writing of Jacques Derrida and Jorge Luis Borges, amongst others. In doing so they evocatively address how Zeno’s paradoxes provide ways of thinking relations of space and time that are no longer defined in terms of their real or speculative qualities. The authors foreground an impossible space and time that endures in spite of both British idealist attempts to position movement and space in terms of its ‘unreality’, and in recent attempts to think space and time as relational and speculative; neither satisfy Zeno’s paradoxes, leaving behind only a certain unthinkability of space and time. In Chap. 5, Joe Gerlach proffers a gentle insistence on Spinoza’s passion as capable of intensifying the ethical import of the speculative. Putting forth the unique coupling of Whitehead’s process philosophy and Spinoza’s substantialist monism, Gerlach suggests that both thinkers practice an attentive ethics: “to dismiss nothing from their enquiries, but to instead afford the same philosophical dignity and gentleness to all modes, material and immaterial”. Speculative ethics, here, is indebted to a commitment to passion and passionate forms of reason—a technique for confronting false problems, which emphasises that how one conceives of, and negotiates, the problem of the false problem matters. Problematising the idea that speculation is reducible to ‘practico-­ theoretical tools’, in Chap. 6, Carlota de La Herrán Iriarte insists that speculation must become an experimental, micro-subjective venture if it is to amplify the pre-cursive, and not pre-meditative, registers of the world. The chapter draws primarily on the notion of faith within the radical empiricism of William James, and skirts around the speculative question of what it might mean to take a leap of faith—as one such experimental venture. Constructing some precise opportunities for such an approach, de La Herrán Iriarte theorises three speculative dispositions which engender a particular openness towards novel and unforeseen connections.

Technologies The second theme aims to grasp the force of speculation as it arises through particular technologies and techniques, wherein speculation is understood to be modified, at least in part, by the operations and

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mediations of technical things capable of enacting certain kinds of spatio-­ temporal exteriorisation. The motivation here is to explore what kinds of techniques and technologies might complicate dominant abstractions that risk disqualifying and deadening experience. This attention to the technological is critical because, if speculative thinking comes to refer just to the speculations of a particular subject, we might ask: what privileges are enforced when researchers appeal to the importance of their singular views? Our aim to understand speculation besides the interiority of the subject is thus because the alternative approach tends to locate speculative thinking within human experience—experience that, more often than not, is itself primarily derived from exteriorisations of technical processes of perception (Stiegler, 2010). In arguing that speculation is not limited to the perceptive registers of human subjects, we are thus interested in exploring the interconnections between speculative thinking, technological systems, and experimental techniques. There are a number of ways in which we can gauge the significance of this focus. For example, when in Cosmopolitics I Stengers (2010) develops the idea that the ‘neutrino’ particle has a paradoxical mode of existence, in doing so she is not just merely drawing attention to the non-objectivity of scientific knowledge practices but is instead developing the case for thinking the neutrino as a technological speculative entity par excellence. As Stengers observes, the neutrino—this “genuinely phantom particle, which ignores walls and barriers”—is of interest, at least in part, because it is “an object that is difficult to observe” (2010: 21). On one level, the neutrino is difficult to observe because it exists in an empirical reality in the sense that it is something made evidencable through certain technologies of observation: the neutrino requires “an enormous number of instruments, interpretations, and references to other particles” (Stengers, 2010: 21) that makes it possible for this theoretical particle’s existence (its mass) to be classified as part of the empirical real. And yet, on another level, the neutrino exists in a speculative reality that is something open to certain kinds of theoretical thinking prior to its discovery as a thing with an observable mass: the neutrino “had been postulated, for theoretical-aesthetic reasons of symmetry and conservation, long before the means for ‘detecting’ it were created” (Stengers, 2010: 21–22). Insofar as it had been postulated, theorised, and used

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operationally in technical thinking prior to its actual discovery as an observable entity, the neutrino is a unique way of thinking about how technologies offer opportunities to mediate abstractions that engage in different modes of thinking the experiential. As one instance of thinking the interconnections between speculation, technologies, and techniques, then, the process of thinking the unobserved neutrino in a speculative reality is possible precisely because it involves the technological production, movement, and circulation of certain abstractions. In Chap. 7, Kieran Cutting presents how a workshop card game acts as a set of deterritorialising forces and techniques that modifies a subject’s sense of the future. The chapter theorises the notion of ‘speculative praxis’ by turning to Deleuzian engagements with speculation in the context of youth workshops organised in collaboration with UK charities. Uniquely, by considering some of the productive tensions between capitalist realism (‘there are no alternatives’) and speculative praxis (‘other futures are possible’), the chapter gathers impressions of other material futures: futures that, whilst being enacted through the semiotics and affects of the card game, remain stubbornly irreducible to pre-conceived calculative logics. In Chap. 8, Maria Fannin questions how traditional notions of time become modified by technologies of gamete freezing that are able “to arrest, reset, and restart the time of fertility”. Advancing this as a practice of speculative reproduction, the chapter advances the concept of ‘speculative time’ as a way to understand precisely how speculative reproduction involves certain leveraging of human biological risk. Problematising the idea that speculative time would merely reinforce neoliberal logics, Fannin argues that a more affirmative reading is possible through the emerging possibilities speculative reproduction offers for “non-normative reproductive arrangements”. In Chap. 9, Vera Fearns examines the potential of speculative design in education, and specifically for the task of thinking about planetary futures. The chapter presents a set of immersive and experiential activities that took place as part of the NeoRural Futures summer school in Rome in 2019—including examining resources for ‘signals’ as matters on the margins of dominant modes of thought, and constructing figurative ‘amulets’ as speculative technologies for future scenarios. The chapter thus seeks to reinvigorate traditions of both speculation and educational

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work via a commitment to aesthetic and embodied practices, which are capable of making the abstract seem more immediate. In Chap. 10, Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh brings Deleuze’s concept of fabulation together with Berberian Sound Studio by Peter Strickland, a film notable for its playful illumination of Foley work—the post-­ production tactic whereby a film’s sound effects are re-created through various materials for the purpose of enhancing audio quality. Challenging the idea that Foley work is valuable simply as a means of creating more accurate encounters with the sounds of cinema, Jeyasingh demonstrates how the audio-image of Berberian Sound Studio mediates between reality and unreality and, in so doing, poses speculative questions about the generative potential of cinematic encounters in producing a people to come. In Chap. 11, Thomas Keating asks, ‘what remains of nuclear remains when the human no longer remains?’. In doing so, the chapter considers how the concept of remains opens thought up to the speculative qualities and materialities of nuclear waste. Arguing for a speculative empirical approach to thinking nuclear waste futures, the chapter focuses on the way nuclear semiotics—specifically, the Spike Field nuclear marker concept by Safdar Abidi and Michael Brill—highlights the value of pre-­ individual expressions of sense, which may prove important for transferring memory of nuclear permanent geological repositories for nuclear waste 100,000 years into the future. In Chap. 12, Peter Kraftl thinks speculatively about geographies of childhoods, plastics and other ‘stuff’. Drawing on Haraway’s (2011) speculative fabulation, the chapter evokes two events: on the one hand, an event of sculpture making from scavenged plastic and, on the other hand, a gathering and analysing of microplastics through nanoscience biosampling. Across these events what emerges is a way of making palpable, at different registers of experience, the multiple entanglements of a child’s life with plastics. Significantly, the chapter attends to plastics as technologies for constructing different stories that, through their performative manifestation, produce alternative dispositions for thinking human and nonhuman life differently.

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Aesthetics The final theme explores the styles of thought within artistic and creative practices that, like any proposition in Whitehead’s terms, serve to lure feeling. In following Whitehead, as Lapworth suggests, “we might reframe the transformative potential of art in terms of its capacity to disrupt habitual modes of experience, acting to “lure” thinking and feeling beyond the representational territories of the already familiar” (2015: 4). To be clear, ‘feelings’ for Whitehead are not limited to conscious states: “they strive towards the feeler, towards the subject, and yet they do so only insofar as the latter is presented as a virtual form of existence” (Debaise, 2017: 70). In this section, we consider aesthetics as a domain that is uniquely capable of intensifying or animating such virtual forms of subjectivity. We want to insist on a certain coupling between such manners of intensification and the abstractions available across histories of practices. Tarrying with the task of thinking abstractions, speculative aesthetics is concerned with the particular problems that are being animated by the arts, such as the universes of reference (values, norms, institutional codes, etc.) that characterise a given era or milieu. To give an example: in the context of the genre of ‘abstract art’ of the twentieth century the predominant problem will likely be that representational painting does not get at the experiential—indeed, we might argue that it is owing to a refusal to represent ‘reality’ in any concrete way that abstract art transforms virtual subjectivities. The activity of looking at a painting and being modestly transformed, then, is always scaffolded according to a whole other set of abstractions that permeate an artwork in ways that are not necessarily visible or recognisable. Such scaffolds might be an encounter with impressionism, the beauty ascribed to geometry in Greek philosophy, or the unacknowledged influence of non-European art. Lures for feeling within aesthetic practice are situated then—they inherit a history and a socio-cultural context—and, thus, it is imperative to acknowledge how aesthetic transformations are conditioned according to the abstractions of a particular milieu, and also to examine the particular problems that animate those aesthetic practices. And yet, such

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practices are also irreducible to their singular situation. Returning to the proposition of feeling with which we started this theme, they are irreducible to a particular situation because they animate virtual subjectivities and sensibilities. A vital proposition as part of speculative aesthetics then, as Stengers suggests, is to “say why you choose to tell, or to do, this, on this precise occasion … do not shield yourself behind general justifications that block pragmatic imagination, the envisagement of the kinds of difference this choice is liable to make here and now” (Stengers, 2008b: 29). In Chap. 13, George Burdon insists on the importance of Felix Guattari’s philosophy for speculative thought insofar as it challenges us to think outside of the comfortable and predictable style of thinking that he terms ‘common sense’. Common sense, for Burdon, is at the core of a contemporary spirit of cynicism by which thought recuperates the similar over the greater challenge of harbouring the different and the unforeseen. Introducing us to the sonic experiments of Irish composer Jennifer Walshe, Burdon alerts us to the generative potentials of novel incorporeal universes—what we might conceive as lures of feeling—emergent through aesthetic practices. Also turning to Guattari, in Chap. 14 Oliver Dawson theorises the notion of ecosophic acts of feeling as speculative and aesthetic intensifications of experience. Dawson presents an encounter with artist and poet Sophie Herxheimer, whose poems, collages, and cuttings, Dawson suggests, pivot more on a certain transformation rather than any imitation of a world ‘out there’ and, as such, expand what counts as experience. Deftly weaving together vignettes of Herxheimer’s work with the ecosophy of Guattari, as well as theorisations of Amerindian animist subjectivities, Dawson makes explicit a speculative propensity of aesthetics to produce intensities with which to feel the future into the present. In Chap. 15, Merle Patchett advances speculative taxidermy as a pedagogical tool for thinking in risky and creative ways about histories and futures beyond the human. Patchett takes us through a speculative workshop of artefacts of the plumage trade, including pages from fashion or anthropological magazines, a piece of Paradisaea apparel, and natural history illustrations—all of which themselves played a key part in the formation of the particularly peculiar abstraction of the Apoda myth: a legless, perpetually in-flight, bird-of-paradise. Working through these materials,

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the chapter problematises the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and names in scientific nomenclature, and offers alternate ways of re-writing and re-enchanting human-avian histories. In Chap. 16, David Rousell, Michael Gallagher, and Mark Peter Wright present the Listening Body: a series of experimental sound walks organised with children attending a community arts programme in Manchester, UK.  In retelling this series of events, the authors demonstrate how learning can take place speculatively through shifting affective atmospheres that are irreducible to singular enclosure since they envelop bodies, environments, histories, discourses, feelings, sensations, and ideas. There is, moreover, a micropolitical intervention highlighted here, where—in discussing some acts of humorous rebellion by the participants—the authors recognise how sonic experiments might disrupt spaces of pedagogical authority and social stratification. In Chap. 17, Rachael Wakefield-Rann and Thomas Lee survey the dominant abstractions used to define dust and soil since the nineteenth century. Whether understood as amorphous containers of other (unhygienic) things, and despite research into the composition of these substances during the technoscientific orientation at the molecular scale in the twentieth century, the authors maintain that dust and soil are not readily sensed or specified. In response, they turn to citizen-sensing projects that make the microbial dynamics of these substances more legible. Introducing ‘exposme’ and ‘senstance’—concepts that might lure different ways of feeling—Wakefield-Rann and Lee speculatively transform how we think about soil and dust.

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Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Part I Ethics

2 Redreaming the Human and the Ethics of Terraformation Jayna Brown

It seems we have reached the end of the world. Floods destroy, fires rage, and pandemics spread, catastrophes that may only increase in frequency and intensity. But the end of the world is not news. For those whose bodies have been the objects of exploitation, and environments that have been the objects of extraction, apocalypse is not an event but a structure, not a sudden catastrophe but a chronic condition. Humans must make a radical change in their practices of inhabitation on this wasted planet earth. I use the term “human” carefully, remembering that it is a historically bounded concept. As Sylvia Wynter (2003) explains, the term human was conceived by Europeans as a category of exclusion, developed in tandem with systems of slavery and settler colonialism, and now extending into the afterlives of these formations. As Mel Y.  Chen elucidates, the concept is fundamentally hierarchical, and produces racial, gendered, and ableist taxonomies (Chen, 2012) There are some beings who were deemed provisionally human, somewhat human, by these taxonomies, J. Brown (*) Brown University, Providence, RI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_2

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but they were “without history,” as Georg Hegel put it, unable to move civilization forward, namely indigenous and sub-Saharan African peoples. These peoples were categorized as the fauna, part of the animal world, and all their ways of being considered prehistory. They joined with the flora, the lands, and waters, as fungible resource. The term human led to the emptying of the world, the creation of terra nullius. There is a turn in black feminist art and speculative scholarship to reconceive the very terms of the human. Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes in her introduction to M Archive, “I do not seek to prove that Black people are human but instead call preexisting definitions of the human into question. [Beings are] on the verge or in the practice of transforming into something beyond the luxuries and limitation of what some call the human. Will the future witnesses of this crossing know themselves as human? This book offers the possibility of being beyond the human and an invitation into the blackness of what we cannot know from here” (M Archive: xi). This embrace of our beyond humanness is not a dismal nihilism. It is an opening up of potentiality. We can’t know the result of transformation from where we are situated now, as true change requires a complete paradigm shift. The human episteme may indeed be too limited to accommodate what we could become. Speculative fictions offer particularly prescient visions of our post-­ apocalyptic condition. They conjecture modes of being shaped by this condition and terrains made inhabitable to humans. Embodied in music, art, film, and literature, these fictions also envision dreams of inhabitance, here on earth or on other planets; the idea of the earth’s end welcomes dreams of a future in interplanetary settlement. I make a leap in this paper from the earth into the vast universe, and contemplate the possibility for an exodus to the stars. But what would be the ethics of such extraterrestrial relocation? In this chapter I consider works of speculative media by black and indigenous women. I focus on three multi-media short films as prescient visual thought experiments about planetary renewal and terraformation. The format of the short films I focus on provide space and vocabulary to envision a world built otherwise. Their short formats are composed to provoke questions, to suggest and point toward, rather than answer and predict, total worlds.

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Looking beyond the human involves nonwestern ways of thinking and being, on and with the planet. Works by the black and indigenous women artists I consider interpret and predict the apocalyptic effects of climate change and biotechnology. First, I consider Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu’s short science fiction film Pumzi (2009) and Navajo director Nanobah Becker’s The 6th World (2012). These films gift their protagonists with the mystic power and agency to bring about fundamental change, potentially offering a counter narrative to that of the white male savior and settler colonial so central to tales of frontier settlement. The films replace the linear, narrative expectations of such tales with visual meditations that end with ambiguity, an open question mark, a provocation to imagine human relations with the land that are untethered from paradigms of conquest and dominance. Second, I consider Kenyan multimedia artist Wangechi Mutu’s short film The End of Eating Everything (2013). A grim geography of extraction and disposability are the ground in much of Mutu’s work, where we are stripped of the hope for ecological renewal or the chances of extraterrestrial redemption. Her works’ terrain gives a glistening oily surface and depth to the devastation of the ecological world. Yet amidst the detritus and effluvium created by industrial capitalism, Mutu’s works evoke an insistent, fiercely organic response to apocalyptic devastation. Her human beings are irrevocably affected, transmogrified by an ecologically destroyed environment. Yet wondrous interspatial beings, snakes, fungus, fish, and birds spring forth, dismembered, and recombined with human forms. The painting, multi-media installations, and digital media projects of Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu ask that we think about species transformation in this grim and beautiful cosmos. Grim geographies of extraction and disposability are the ground in much of Mutu’s work. They give a glistening oily surface and roiling depth to the devastation of the ecological world. Yet amidst the effluvium created by consumptive capitalism, Mutu’s works evoke an insistent, fiercely organic response to apocalyptic devastation. Her human beings are irrevocably affected by a destroyed environment. Wondrous interspatial beings, snakes, fungus, fish, and birds spring forth, dismembered, and recombined with human forms. In this paper I focus on the transmogrifying women from her short films The End of Carrying All (2016) and The End of Eating

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Everything, which offer an ambiguous imagining of evolutionary processes following the apocalypse. Human supremacy structures the very foundation of Western knowledge production. Thus, to “know” the world is to assume mastery, understood as the often violent but necessary paradigm of historical advancement. From one perspective, science conquers: both land and people, discovered, as knowledge advances, are assessed, surveyed, cataloged, parceled out, fought over, and extracted from. The terrible terra firma we have beneath our feet today has been created through these particular kinds of cultivation. Such has been the husbandry of the planet by so-called humans, a toxic kind of care. Moral and ethical reform has led to a kinder form of mastery; humans are promising to be kinder guardians of the known, and unknown, world. But what if we shifted our relationship from one of ownership to one of reciprocality, not just between live beings, but also with the land itself? As Jodi Byrd et al. ask, “what happens when land is understood not as property or territory but as a source of relation with an agency of its own? Is there a way for land itself to serve as an ontological condition for a different concept of the political that refuses conquest, doctrines of discovery, and the propriations of the propertied self?” (2018: 11) Many indigenous peoples—in North America I am thinking of peoples including those belonging to the Diné, Nishnaabeg, Chickasaw, and Seneca nations— have lived according to an ethos of co-inhabitance with the land, and situated themselves as part of wider ecologies. Indigenous epistemologies have been suppressed and erased by Western epistemological domination, what Boanaventura de Sousa Santos calls “a form of epistemicide.” De Sousa Santos includes African ways of being in his assessment: The epistemological privilege granted to modern science from the seventeenth century onwards, which made possible the technological revolutions that consolidated Western supremacy, was also instrumental in suppressing other, non-scientific forms of knowledges and, at the same

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time, the subaltern social groups whose social practices were informed by such knowledges. In the case of indigenous peoples of the Americas and of the African slaves, this suppression of knowledge was the other side of genocide. (2008: xviii)

African descended subjects have experienced different yet intertwined forms of forced relocation and alienation.1 They may share a great sense of grief over the loss of a relationship to land, to home. African colonial subjects, such as those referenced in the films and art works I look at, have also been the subjects of such epistemicide, with systems of settler and franchise colonialism stripping them of their ways of being with the land. What Indigenous and African artists, scholars, and activists suggest is that there is potentially a great freedom in recalibrating these older epistemologies, as well as in co-creating new affiliations and ways of being in the universe not based in possession, but in coexistence. This is not to say we should aim to return to a pretechnological age. But ever-developing technological complexity is not progressive triumph, as nineteenth century notions of evolution, with which we still live, assume. Our current instantiation is what we call media; we are swimming, or drowning, in the data streams and algorithms of late capitalism. Some of us are looking to what it would mean to shift human’s relationship to the planet, but we know that technology is here to stay, as long as humans are. And I wouldn’t agree that forms of restored knowledges need to eschew the scientific. What I and others, including Katherine McKittrick, suggest is an expansion of what is meant by science and a rearticulation of its methods (McKittrick, 2021). I think that science may have to learn to include what N.K.  Jemisin calls magic, which I interpret to mean the unknown and perhaps unknowable phenomena Western science cannot explain, thus demanding a certain speculative mode of thinking (Jemisin, 2016). Even Charles Darwin, in what are often forgotten passages in his work, marvels at the world’s complexity, and admits to its unexpected and mysterious processes (Darwin, 1859).  Jodi Byrd understands the entanglement of these histories in the context of the U.S. “U.S. imperialism relied upon both horizontal and vertical axes of colonization, slavery, racism, North, South, East and West to structure and suture itself to the notion that its very foundational democracy was antithetical to colonialism and imperialism, slavery and incarceration” (2011: 12). 1

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Alternative, nonwestern epistemologies and forms of knowledge production may offer the science we need. In his article “Rethinking Repair,” media scholar Steve Jackson (2014) argues that, in the twenty-first century, we are living in a “broken world.” Jackson calls for “new and different kinds of research, new and different kinds of politics, in media and technology studies today” (p. 221). However, when Jackson speaks of “repair” he is thinking of what he calls “complex sociotechnological wholes,” and “re-establishing social order” (p. 223). We need to consider what such universalities occlude. From a black and indigenous perspective, a broken world is not a novel idea; we have survived in various states of brokenness since long before the twentyfirst century. I suggest we look to create a world where repair is not synonymous with return, but requires altogether new paradigms of existence. The speculative fictions of African and indigenous media makers I look at offer particularly prescient visions of post-apocalyptic condition, as well as possibility. While science fiction has long been concerned with the effects of science and technology on humans, there has been a sea change in speculative work. The literatures and art considered below are concerned with de-centering the human, being on the planet in new ways, and to looking instead with awe at the vastness of the universe and our enmeshment with it.

Pumzi Before making the short speculative fiction film Pumzi, Wanuri Kahiu made a documentary about the Kenyan ecological activist Wangare Maathai, titled For Our Land. Maathai spent her life advocating for the environment. Her first organization, the Green Belt Movement, was organized around planting trees in Kenyan forests, which had been first the object of British colonial deforestation and then unethical postcolonial land development. In 1997 Maathai and her fellow activists stopped the construction of luxury homes in Karura forest, one of Kenya’s most important public lands. In 2004 Maathai was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Maathai’s focus on reforestation, first in Kenya and then in the Congo Basin, resonates with the theme of Pumzi.

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In For Our Land Maathai explains that deforestation in Kenya and other regions in Africa began with the British. For the British, development meant clearing the bush. The British replaced indigenous forests with pines and eucalyptus, used to build colonial settlements, and in doing so destroyed Kikuyu water catchment areas and the land’s biodiversity. The fig trees, considered sacred by the Kikuyus, were cut down to make way for tea, and Kikuyu people bound to a system of peonage. Eventually, the stripping of the land led to desertification, the creation of vast, arid tracts of land. The continued devastation of the land is also the result of the rapaciousness of some post independent governments, in tandem with the extractive practices of multinational corporations. The short film Pumzi, the title of which translates from Swahili into English as “breath,” is set in the desert of a post-apocalyptic waterless East Africa, 35 years after World War III, also known as “the Water Wars.” The film points to the possibility of such a war, which could perhaps be started by a combination of climate change and water privatization, agribusiness, toxic waste, and corporate control of access to potable water. In the midst of the vast desert is a carefully self-monitoring community, cloistered inside a spindled and domed structure, named Maitu (which means seed of truth in Kikuyu). It is a scientific achievement made of what looks like glass and metal. The people within Maitu survive by extreme measures of water conservation and enforced social conformity. All citizens are mandated to recycle every drop of urine and sweat from their bodies. Water is not a commodity, but the subject of authoritarian control and distribution. While it may reference the terrors of global capital, the film is a critique of authoritarianism familiar within the genre of science fiction. Often its visions of repressive collectivist societies are lifted into a highly technologized future. With its mandatory dream suppressants and holographic surveillance officers, Pumzi is reminiscent of cold war films like George Lucas’ and Frances Ford Coppola’s 1971 film THX1138. In this and other classic critiques of communist and socialist regimes, collectivity is depicted as totalitarian, dissent is associated with individualism, and freedom is found through the central characters’ escape from the engineered society.

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Asha works in a natural history museum, and receives a mysterious life-sustaining soil sample accompanied by a written set of coordinates. Soil here is life; thinking of soil enlivens and complicates how we think about land, as it is where the distinction between animal and inorganic dissolves. I am inspired here by the fabulous work on soil by Kimberly Bain. As Bain explores, soil is made from the forms of life that emerge, eat, defecate, decay, and die; substances pass through bodies, are metabolized, and given back. It is inhabited by insects and worms that burrow within it, with spores, mildew, and mushrooms, which are neither plant nor animal. Provided there is some source of water, it is process and transformation itself. Asha experiments with the soil sample by placing in it a kikuyu seed from the museum’s collection. The seed quickly sprouts. Defying the laws of her repressive society, fueled by a series of prescient dreams of a magnificent tree, Asha escapes and ventures into the vast desert to plant the seed. Asha emerges from the safety of the dome, dropping out through a waste pipeline. She struggles through the sand, bare feet wrapped in rags, with nothing but a compass and her seedling. We are surrounded by a forbidding expanse of sand and rock. The wind blows past an old sign, warning of a nuclear contaminated river. This land is inhabitable. But we can pause here to think more about sand and rock. They are also capable of and in the processes of transformation, with time operating at a much longer and slower scale. Sand turns into glass, coveted stones like diamonds are made; the bones of various life forms turn to stone as fossils, a beautiful archive. Asha trudges through the sand, under the scorching sun. Finally, she sees the same lush, green tree ahead of her that she had seen in her dream. Yet when she approaches the tree she finds it is actually dead and withered. Sinking to her knees, she unwraps her shawl, gently places the seedling in the ground, and uses the last of her water, including her sweat, to feed it. We know that her self-sacrifice is imminent. She wraps her body around the seedling, shrouding it from the harsh sun. Asha’s body then dissolves, and a tree grows out of the soil her body produces. As the camera lifts up and the credits begin to roll, we see just over the hill a sea of green forest.

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The film’s ending is ambiguous; the forest is either waiting there, just beyond Asha’s reach, or it is a vision of the future, a vision of what her sacrifice made possible. Well-worn tropes of the feminine-as-nurturer bear the burden of utopian possibility. The film would seem a simple tale of a woman’s self-sacrifice, or an anthropocentric rendering of the earth as a mother. Our protagonist could be read as the seed-carrying promise of fecundity and rebirth. Or she could be read as the virgin mother figure inherited from Christianity, guided by vision and giving birth to the god’s will. She could be interpreted, as women often are, as the standard bearer of tradition, ensuring that sacred rituals stay alive. While the film reaches to envision what it would mean to begin again after the apocalypse, it seems to be narratively bound by these notions of how change can be imagined. Yet something more complex than such familiar references is made possible here. As Asha’s body is absorbed back into the earth, we see a beautiful dissolution into an ambiguous future. In the broad expanses of sand and rock, in the absence of all humans and human settlement, in the tiny speck of a tree and the sweep of a forest just over the hill, there is a glimmer of a world made again, not formed around human need, but around a wider ecological potential, that may eventually not include the species, as we know it, at all. Rather than the familiar imagery of a personified earth, we might say the film manifests an “earthified” person. To embrace such imagery is not to wish our extinction. Rather, it is a call to release ourselves from anthropocentric ideas of earthly inhabitance.

The 6th World Like Pumzi, Nanobah Becker’s The 6th World invites consideration of revisionary models of human inhabitance. Instead of earthly renewal, this film’s vision is extraterrestrial resettlement. But both films suggest urgent ethical questions of what land inhabitance implies, and how far away from toxic models we are able to move. Set in “the Future,” The 6th World is subtitled An Origin Story, linking it as a continuation of the Creation story of the Diné peoples. In this cosmology the universe is created, and

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humans emerge from it through a series of Worlds, of which the current is the Fifth. The film opens with red rock and sky, from the premonitory dreams of its protagonist, Diné Commander Tazbah Redhouse. This is the morning that she will pilot the spaceship Emergence, the first to colonize Mars. Genetically engineered and hydroponically grown corn has been designed to generate oxygen for the ship and ultimately to begin the terraformation of the planet. Onboard is the fictional General Bahi, there to tour the ship and see the mission off. Bahi bestows Redhouse with a Navajo nation astronaut flag, accompanied by two cobs of sacred, unaltered corn. Bahi tells Redhouse, “Out of all of us, you were chosen to lead our people into the next world. You are from a long line of medicine people and healers. You are protected.” Prophecy and cosmological foresight are part of the Navajo origin story. “Some Navajos believe now marks the end of our time on this world and the beginning of a new one,” Redhouse tells the second mate. The genetically modified corn begins to die, but Redhouse uses the sacred corn cobs given to her by Bahi to save the mission. Redhouse begins to pray, astrally projecting into space as she calls forth her ancestors. As she reconnects with her legacy, it is her traditional prayer that carries the ship to Mars. In the closing shot, set years later, we see the fulfillment of her dream: fields of corn against red rock, sky surrounding a series of large, self-contained metal and glass domed settlements, and fields of corn spreading green across the surface of Mars. The 6th World suggests an alternative world, a different form of settlement than those imposed on the land by settler colonialism. Like Pumzi, much is suggested in the closing shots of the film, and much left unanswered. If land itself is a complex ecology, what are the ways, if any, our species could integrate within another environment? Indeed when, if at all, can a land be judged as empty? The domed settlements suggest that humans have terraformed, creating the possibility of human survival through science and technology. How can technology be ethically integrated within wider ecological systems that have not been formed or mediated by humans? Can we ever know such a thing? We can contemplate this only when we think about the settlement of other planets, the encounter with truly new terrain. There have been such contemplations on the wider politics of terraformation in science fiction.

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As Kim Stanley Robinson explored in his Mars trilogy, many ethical and political questions concerning ecological integrity and human settlement accompany futuristic fantasies of terraformation. In Red Mars, the first book in the trilogy, there is a split between groups of settlers around the issue of terra nullius. One group of settlers, called the “Greens,” believes terraformation on Mars is in the natural order of evolution, for sentient life, particularly human consciousness, is the most advanced phenomena of the universe. As Hiriko Ai, one member with this belief, argues: “The whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life … We are the consciousness of the universe, and it is our job to spread it around, go look at things, live everywhere we can.” To terraform Mars would not be a violation, rather it would add life to, as Ai calls it, “the most beautiful system of all” (1993: 179). This is species exceptionalism, the assumption that sentience is the provenance of humans, and the most important phenomena in the universe. This perspective is challenged by another group, called the “Reds,” who believe in preserving the sanctity of the planet. They have not found any life forms recognizable to humans. The settlers do not know if there is organic life on Mars, or if it may once have supported life, and now be in a fallow period. But their point is that the land is never empty, nor dead. The massive stretch of rock and ice, interacting with the sun, wind, and atmosphere, will change and transform in ways as valuable as the evolution of sentient beings. The inorganic world should be considered as worthy to being left alone as any life form. To introduce terrain life forms would be unethical. It may be interrupting an evolution of the planet that spans millions of years, or imposing our limited idea of what life can mean upon an entirely different ecological system. As Ann, the leader of this latter philosophy, and her followers insist, any terraformation would be an invasion and genocide of indigenous entities, both animate and inanimate. Ann says to a nonbeliever “I think you value consciousness too much and rock too little … we are not lords of the universe” (1993: 178). Ann holds a deep ecological perspective, and asks why carbon-based life forms should be more important than any other mineral composition, and whether the line between them is really as solid as we might presume. What happens if we accept that this line isn’t solid?

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I am struck by the novel’s exploration of the ethics of terraformation. But I am also struck by what is missing in the novel, namely any explicit reference to the history of settler colonialism on Earth for whom indigenous life did not count as life. In Robinson’s worldbuilding, terraformation, making the land livable for humans, involves imposing human will onto the planet. But there are other epistemes for us to look toward for alternatives which would not, like terraformation, maintain a hierarchical relationship with the nonhuman world. For example, certain Indigenous epistemologies understand the web of relations extends beyond the members of the species deemed human; it applies to elements, organic and inorganic, that may exist throughout the universe. Diné scholar Glen Coulthard and Nishnaabeg artist and activist Leanne Simpson call for an ethics they refer to as “grounded normativity.” This is an “ethical way of knowing and being that is more expansive than those ontologies that prioritize the human as exceptional, and it is a placement that extends memory through vast kinship networks that assume life, vibrancy, and agency beyond the limits of enlightenment notions of self, liberty and property” (2010: 254). According to such indigenous epistemologies, kinship is not limited to human relation through reproduction. It involves holding an ethic of connectivity and reciprocity between the nonhuman, the inanimate, organic and inorganic; that is, toward all the elements of the cosmos.

Wangechi Mutu While Pumzi poses reforestation as a speculated recovery of lost ecologies and The 6th World dreams of extraplanetary settlement, Wangechi Mutu’s visions are much less hopeful. Both Pumzi and The 6th World feature women protagonists, and in Mutu’s short films, as in her collage, sculpture, and installation work, women are also the central figures. Their bodies are constructs, fabulations: fractured, dislocated, fantastical. Their dismembered, reassembled forms evoke histories of colonial violence and violation, the systems which alienated selves through the buying and selling of bodies. Mutu’s works often depict a devastated landscape, showing this nexus as the basis for capitalist exploitation of beings and the planet. In her works bodies are not recovered or restored, but re-enlivened,

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interspatial; here a snake adorns the figure’s crown. Often there is a curious relationship to reproduction. Often violently affected bodies give birth to distinctly inhuman forms. At the beginning of Mutu’s short film The End of Eating Everything (2013), black birds sway in a viscous sky. The tentacled head of a woman, played by the singer Santigold, sniffs them greedily, and then with a hollow sounding roar lunges and begins to devour them. Blood dilutes as she chews the birds, and we see her head is attached to a gigantic amorphous form, a toxic planet. Its skin is iridescent with what looks like oil spills and puddles of toxic chemical waste covered in detritus; human arms, waving like cilia or anemone tentacles in the ocean, propel the body along. Its surface is encrusted with tires and other refuse all in various stages of ingestion, decay, and decomposition. This voracious and bloated entity, suspended in some poisonous substrate, seems able to digest everything. At its other end is a great hairy anus; expelling great plumes of toxic gases. As with the metallic scales and skins of many of her mythic beings, Mutu’s textural vocabulary references the technological miracles of the twenty-first century—the shiny products through which capitalism thrives. But Mutu’s landscapes are not celebratory; like the entity in The End of Eating Everything they are filled with the detritus this consumer capitalism produces. The entity’s geographic and geological terrain evokes the existing devastating landscapes created by resource extraction in Africa. For example, the slick iridescent skin created by Mutu is expressive of the vast amounts of oil extracted from Nigeria, from which plastic is made, at the cost of African people’s health. To give another example, the terrain of the being in Mutu’s film may well be referencing the miles-­ wide garbage dump in Mbeubeuss (Mohbohs), in the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal. Called a waste recycling site, Mbeubeuss was formed on a dried-­ out lake and now stretches close to the sea. Here pickers sort through the massive piles of refuse, over 1300 tons of garbage daily, to salvage any useful materials, such as plastic, chromium, and steel. These pickers are so many that they have formed a workers’ association.2  Over 2000 workers formed Bokk Djom, or Our Shared Pride, to defend their interests, yet among the workers are children, who die of pollutants and the underground fires which spontaneously burst forth. 2

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The End of Eating Everything may also be referencing resources extracted from Africa. As well as oil, the materials necessary to build wondrous gadgets such as cell phones and other electronics are sourced in Africa, through the sweat and blood of the land’s inhabitants. In Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics, Cajetan Iheka locates Africa “as the origin and conclusion, the beginning and end, of media matter” (Iheka, 8). Minerals such as coltan, tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold are just some of the minerals extracted by multinational corporations in West and East Africa either at the hands of poorly paid workers (called artisanal) or mechanically. Once obsolete, the computers and phones made from these materials are shipped back to Africa for “recycling.” In Agbogbloshie outside Accra, communities sift through burning mounds of ewaste to extract the copper and other materials they can then sell. The entity in The End evokes this toxic “ewaste” as it is called. In conclusion, lets return to The End of Eating Everything, Pumzi, and The 6th World. As the bloated entity is subsumed by clouds the sky clears and, in stark contrast to the previous environment’s sepia shade of air pollution, we are surrounded by a blue sky filled with and fluffy, white clouds. Emerging from these clouds are amoebic beings, each containing the chattering head of Santigold. Has Mutu’s female figure/planet given birth to a new species? Has life evolved into something new and unexpected? As the central protagonist in Pumzi sacrifices herself for new growth, her dissolving body leaves us with an ambivalence about the place of humans in the cosmos. As we look out over the fields of corn taking root on Mars in The 6th World, we are led to consider what an ethical settlement would look like. Here, are we potentially transformed and born anew? Or do the chattering heads represent nascent humans, who will manifest the same tendencies that have led to the end of this world? Together these speculative multi-media films trouble commonly held assumptions about humans, their relationship with the environments they inhabit, and ecologies in which they are enmeshed. The formats used also reflect our embeddedness in technologies. In this current terrible and terrifying moment for terrain life forms, these films open urgent dialogue about human ethical choices and our mediation by

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techno-­visual vocabularies. How do we practice alternative ways of inhabiting the planet? What does that require of us? Science and its technologies, media and its power, have fundamentally altered the earth. Networked technologies, while tied to extractive economies, are also what make any of the works I have written about possible. There is no return. But, if we are willing to reach into the unknowable, we can create together the conditions for alternative epistemologies of existence to emerge.

References Becker, N. (Director) (2012). The 6th World (FutureStates) Independent Television Service (ITSV). Brown, J. (2021). Black Utopias: Speculative life and the music of other worlds. Duke University Press. Byrd, J. A. (2011). Transit of empire: Indigenous critiques of colonialism. University of Minnesota Press. Byrd, J. A., Goldstein, A., Melamed, J., & Reddy, C. (Eds.). (2018). Predatory value: Economies of dispossession and disturbed relationalities. Social Text, 2(135), 1–18. Chen, M.  Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press. Coulthard, G., & Simpson, L. B. (2010). Grounded normativity/place-based solidarity. American Quarterly, 62(2), 249–255. Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species. John Murray. de Sousa Santos, B. (2008). In B. de Sousa Santos (Ed.), Another knowledge is possible: Beyond Northern epistemologies (p. xviii). Verso. Iheka, C. (2021). African ecomedia: Network forms, planetary politics. Duke University Press. Jackson, S. (2014). Rethinking repair. In T. Gillespie, P.J. Boczkowski, K.A. Foot (eds) Media technologies. Essays on communication. Materiality and Society, 221–39. Jemisin, N. K. (2016). The Obelisk Gate. Orbit Books. Kahiu, W. (Director) (2009). Pumzi. Inspired minority pictures. 20 minutes. King, T. L. (2019). Black shoals: Offshore formations of black and native studies. Duke University Press. Lowe, L. (2015). The intimacies of four continents. Duke University Press.

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McKittrick, K. (2021). Dear science and other stories. Duke University Press. Mutu, W. (Director). (2013). The end of eating everything. 8 minutes. Commissioned by Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University. Robinson, K. S. (1993). Red mars. Del Rey. Tallbear, K. (2020). A sharpening of the already present: An indigenous materialist reading of settler apocalypse 2020. Speaker Series, Department of Political Science, University of Alberta, October 2020. https://www.ualberta.ca/ political-­sci… Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. New Centennial Review, 3(3), 258–337.

3 Contemporary Urban Heterotopias: From Fiction to Reality Olivier Cotsaftis

 n the Spectrum of Topias and the Need O for the Alternative From the seminal 1805 prose poem Le Dernier Homme by Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville, to contemporary cult classics such as the 2014 post-apocalyptic motion picture Snowpiercer by Bong Joon-ho, creative works about the end of the world are a pop culture staple. Climate apathy, narcissistic leaders, hostile invaders, pandemics... In each instance, a different method for world destruction is portrayed, amplifying and distorting slivers of contemporary realities. These works of fiction have one thing in common: they are all dystopias, a word created from the Greek prefix dys (bad, difficult) and the root tópos (place). Dystopias are places characterised by human misery. Places, for example, in which one’s freedom is compromised, or where the environment is no longer able to

O. Cotsaftis (*) School of Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Authors 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_3

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sustain life. Most importantly, they act as a conduit to reflect upon, and ultimately shape, society. In this way, dystopias encourage us to make active choices about the kind of futures we want, or act as a warning to face the consequences of our inaction—sometime, someplace, in an uncertain future. On the other end of the spectrum are utopias, a play on the Greek prefix eu (good), the particle ou (no, not) and the root tópos (place). The word simultaneously means ‘good place’ and ‘no place’, implying that utopias are essentially flawless yet do not exist. First referenced in the socio-political satire Utopia (More, 1516/2007), the term describes an ideal place where a community or society possesses a perfect socio-­ political structure—the notion of perfection obviously being subjective to the author’s personal views and limitations. Utopia is used ubiquitously to describe both actual communities that attempt to create an ideal society and fictional societies portrayed in films, books, or the collective consciousness. The former, however, is a misnomer, as these communities ipso facto cease to be utopian upon leaving the fictional world and entering reality. Neither a dystopia nor a utopia, heterotopias are something different altogether. Originally coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault, heterotopias are places that do exist, and that critique the core nature of society. Etymologically, the word is derived from the Greek héteros (other, another, different) and tópos (place); and Foucault defines them as counter-­sites: “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986). As opposed to utopias, however, which aim to present society in its purest form—and which, by definition, do not exist—heterotopias are anchored in reality yet are defined by their otherness. In his 1967 lecture Des Espaces Autres, Foucault defines four types of heterotopias: heterotopias of crisis, deviation, illusion, and compensation—the latter being places that create a space that is other: “another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as the real world is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986). Heterotopias of compensation are the ones I will focus on in this chapter. As for anyone attentive to the development of contemporary societies

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and urban environments, experimentation about the alternative has never felt more critical. It only takes little research indeed to realise that humanity must change and adapt to the current realities of the world or face the consequences of our reckless ways of living. In his book A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing, design theorist and philosopher Tony Fry provides a relevant perspective on how the world we live in has been made unsustainable by our economic, societal, and technological choices (Fry, 1999). Climate change, biodiversity loss, waste accumulation, food insecurity, social inequality, geopolitical instability... We are now living through unprecedented times where the compounded impact of our individual attitudes and behaviours is becoming increasingly visible. In architecture and urban design alone, “buildings and infrastructures are responsible for at least 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions”, writes Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission (2020). And with recent projections showing that global population growth combined with mass-urbanisation could add another 2.5 billion people to urban areas by 2050 (United Nations, 2018), the following questions beg to be asked: What will our cities of tomorrow look and feel like? How will they function? And how will they succeed? Speculative practices in architecture and urban design are well suited to address these questions (Babkin, 2017; Dobraszczyk, 2019). Instead of providing a response that fits squarely within the boundaries of existing systems of thinking, they help investigate alternative scenarios for our cities. It is through this attention to the alternative that we can conceive of a speculative ethos tied up with the discussion of topias in this chapter. In what follows, I aim to examine such an ethos with a specific examination of alternatives, staged through architecture and urban design. Recent research is telling us, however, that the world is warming up faster than anticipated; and that the planet will breach the threshold of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels anytime between 2027 and 2042, significantly worsening the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat, and poverty for hundreds of millions of people (Hébert et al., 2021). Thus, my speculations are short-term—speculative presents or alternative nows, contemporary urban heterotopias rather than utopian future cities.

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 n Place and the Otherness O of Heterotopian Cities Undeniably, place is of critical importance in the investigation and understanding of societies and social constructs. At the dawn of the twentieth century, for example, sociologist Emile Durkheim (1912/2008) described the instrumentality of physical spaces in the articulation of First Nations peoples’ consciousness and social relations. A few decades later, Foucault again (1975/2020) explored the power structure associated with specific designs and how buildings inherently fashion roles and ranks within society. Meanwhile, radical thinker and artist Guy Debord was advocating for the practice of psychogeography, that is, the creative and playful exploration of the urban environment to reveal the impact architecture and spaces exert on our attitudes and behaviours (Debord, 1955). A multitude of psychogeographic practices predate or follow Debord: Nick Papadimitriou’s deep topography the conscious walker for instance, or Lauren Elkin’s feminist derive the flâneuse; but what differentiates these terms beyond activities and intellectual idiosyncrasies is far less evident than what unifies them (Overall, 2015). Indeed, at its core, psychogeography raises the following question: how does place shape society? In truth, place shapes society through speculation as much as it does through the physical world, and the re-experiencing or (re-)imagining of place as championed by psychogeography or speculative architecture and urban design practices is an overlapping characteristic of these disciplines. Through the rejection of conventions and society’s dominant logics, they propose an alternative to the status quo, jolting the rest of society into self-awareness. The heterotopian settlement of Penedo in Eastern Brazil, for instance, illustrates this thinking. Set up in 1929 in the aftermath of World War I, the collapse of the Russian empire, and the Finnish declaration of independence, this Finnish colony had the ambition to provide its citizens with a life free from the social and political turmoil that was plaguing Europe at the time. Penedo, in a sense, represents the materialisation of a social discontent as well as the physical removal from a situation that is

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no longer acceptable; leaving the rest of society pondering the possibilities of what could be. The early and mid-twentieth century was in fact rife with movements that explored ways of unleashing the subconscious imagination while critiquing cultural and political conservatism—the Dada and surrealist art movements, the Queer ball culture, and the US Beat Generation, to name a few. Counterculture and anti-establishment thinking synchronously permeated the fields of architecture and urban design. As an opposition to modernism (c. 1900–present), whose architecture emphasises function and attempts to provide for specific needs rather than connect with nature, many heterotopian cities of compensation were established across the world. I would like to discuss here below three case studies that I believe have historical relevance in the context of this chapter, that is, heterotopian cities that were designed, yet failed to address at scale the growing societal and/or environmental issues of our times. Auroville—Inspired by the teachings of Indian philosopher and guru Sri Aurobindo and spiritual leader Mirra Alfassa—also known as the ‘Mother’—a heterotopian city was established in 1968 near Pondicherry in southern India. Its mission: “to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics, and all nationalities” (Auroville, n.d.). Today, nearly 3000 people from over 100 countries and all the Indian states are calling Auroville home; forming a dynamic and continuously experimenting community that strives to live in accordance with its original mission. Eventually, the township may reach 50,000 residents, which the Mother considered an adequate number for this experiment to realise its full potential. Auroville’s humanistic vision came about as an opposition—or compensation—to capitalism and communism, the two dominating, yet opposing, ideologies of the time. In the words of the Mother, “there should be somewhere upon Earth a place that no nation could claim as its sole property (…), and where relations between human beings, usually based almost exclusively upon competition and strife, would be replaced by relations of emulation for doing better, for collaboration relations of real brotherhood”. In many ways, this goal is still aspirational, but the impetus to move in that direction is still very much alive (Kapoor, 2007).

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Arcosanti—Just a couple of years later in 1970 America, the Cosanti foundation began construction of Arcosanti, another heterotopian city of compensation located on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, about 100 km north of Phoenix, Arizona. The foundation and city’s name come from the portmanteau composed of the Italian words cosa and anti, meaning ‘against things’—a deliberate critique of the pervasive culture of consumerism that architect Paolo Soleri, founder of the Cosanti foundation, saw taking over the world. In similar fashion to Auroville, Arcosanti is an experiment; an imaginative and provocative place exploring a built world working in balance with the environment and embodying a radically different aesthetic (Carter, 2019). As described in Arcology: The City in the Image of Man, Soleri designed Arcosanti for thousands of people but the city is seldom occupied by more than 100 people at any given time. Regardless, the city remains a pioneering vision for sustainable architecture, which seeks to work as an alternative to urban sprawl and the erosion of communities while enriching the lives of its residents (Soleri, 1970). In Soleri’s words, which still resonate true today: “the problem I am confronting with is the present design of cities only a few stories high, stretching outward in unwieldy sprawl for miles. As a result, they literally transform the Earth, turning farms into parking lots, wasting enormous amounts of time and energy transporting people, goods, and services over their expanses” (Arcosanti, n.d.). Masdar City—In more recent times—2006—a green tech city broke ground in the Emirati part of the Rub al Khali desert, just East of Abu Dhabi. Designed by British international architecture firm Foster + Partners, Masdar City is self-described as “a hub for research and development, spearheading the innovations to realise greener, more sustainable urban living” (Masdar City, n.d.). Notwithstanding critiques of the term ‘sustainability’ and its association with uncritical notions of modernity and progression, sustainability has been a key framing principle of the Masdar City concept. Claims for the zero-carbon, zero-waste city are realised thanks to the use of vernacular technologies, the provision of clean energy from renewable sources, minimising greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere—the city is car-free—and a comprehensive city waste recycling system. A 40,000-resident neighbourhood was also

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included in the masterplan (Lee, 2016). The city, however, is yet to reach full capacity, with only a couple of thousand people currently living on site (Cipolla, 2020). Conceptualised as a speculative model for an oil-free future, Masdar City also classifies as a heterotopian city of compensation. In sharp contrast to the previous two examples, however, the city primarily focused on realising its vision through technology, with little consideration for the lived-in experience. In a way, this approach to city design empirically demonstrates the importance of the two-way relationship between place and people in societal formation; and provides a critique against techno-­ heterotopias by highlighting their limitations. Mainly, technocratic heterotopias do not consider the needs, aspirations, and cultural aspects of a given population in their designs (Vanolo, 2016; Bina et al., 2020; Cotsaftis, 2020). Despite these differences, one trait unifies these three cities with most heterotopian cities that have been built across the world. They somehow inevitably fail; or fail to scale up. Why? From my perspective as a designer, I would like to suggest three main reasons for this: 1. First, heterotopian cities suffer from a lack of popular appeal. As we’ve discussed above, heterotopian cities typically emerge within counterculture movements, as an opposition to the establishment and to certain type of social, political, and economic ideologies. They also emerge as technocratic speculations that are disconnected from social needs and aspirations. Either way, they do not appeal to mainstream society. Their difference is daunting, and their lack of history and culture is far from the cosmopolitan appeal provided by stalwart cities such as Paris, Cairo, or Tokyo. In addition, their laser-focused vision, purpose, and values further limit their mass appeal, especially in today’s pluriversal context where minorities and socio-cultural groups are—rightly so—longing for cultural reckoning and for cities that reflect their identities (Qadeer, 2014). 2. Second, heterotopian cities can only thrive in collectivist societies. Collectivist societies emphasise the needs, wants, and goals of the group over those of individuals. In these cultures, social behaviours tend to be directed by the attitudes and preferences of the whole rather

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than the parts. Meanwhile, research is showing that individualism increased by 12 per cent worldwide since 1960; and that the rise of individualism is linked to the adoption of Western socio-economic models (Santos et al., 2017). As a result, individuals within contemporary societies are more likely to develop stand-alone alternative modes of housings rather than set up heterotopian cities, which rely on the continuous drive and efforts of a peer-group to succeed. 3. Third, and possibly most importantly, heterotopian cities are typically not well designed. By design, I do not speak of aesthetic or function alone; but design in its broader sense, where the desirability, feasibility, viability, and even materiality of a system should be realised to its maximum relevance and effectiveness. Unfortunately, and to the best of my knowledge, this outcome has not been achieved yet in heterotopian cities.

 owards Building Contemporary T Urban Heterotopias In October 2020, the European Union launched its New European Bauhaus, an ambitious environmental, economic, and cultural project with the goal of making Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050 (von der Leyen, 2020). More recently, we also saw celebrities such as Robert Downey Jr deciding to finance this bold new world (Giles, 2021). What such investment and incentivisation often fail to address, however, is that technology was never an issue (Cotsaftis, 2021a; Hill & Conway, 2021). We must remind ourselves that we already have a wide range of design and fabrication solutions to address issues of sustainability, yet the limited distribution and utilisation of this knowledge are slowing down our collective journey towards equitable and regenerative futures. The opportunity for design remains extraordinary. But no matter how aspirational, “delivery must not become utopian, distant, and siloed” (Hill & Conway, 2021, n.p.). This is not design as usual—for example:

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1. We must decentre the human from the design process. Due to the impact of the climate crisis and our manic consumption behaviour, it is becoming increasingly important to look beyond human needs and consider the roles and perspectives of nonhuman species to both regenerate the environment and protect biodiversity. As such, decentring the human from the design process to benefit all living species needs to become a core skill of every design practice (Cotsaftis, 2019). 2. Design must also become carbon-neutral, or, even better, carbon-­ negative, as well as circular or zero-waste. In that regard, biomimicry, biophilia, and biodesign are contemporary, yet underutilised, approaches to design and fabrication with significant potential to regenerate our wounded planet. But whereas the former—biomimetic and biophilic design—refer to the production of materials, objects, and systems either inspired or better connected with nature, biodesign provides a more elegant and relevant answer by using biomaterials and living organisms as core components of the finished work (Cotsaftis, 2021a, b). 3. Finally, design must become pluriversal to ensure equitable futures for all; that is, design must exist outside of dominant Western design cultures. Thus, designing with communities must go beyond tokenistic consultations and become a key focus of contemporary design work. Going back to the words of Dan Hill and Rowan Conway: “creating genuinely participatory practices might reveal that questions of technology, built environment, product, material, and service design are not unrelated to those of culture, identity, and governance; but rather they are symbiotically linked: each unlocks the other” (Hill & Conway, 2021: n.p.). Putting theory into practice, I designed The Other Place—a contemporary urban heterotopia that works as a response to today’s environmental and societal challenges. We have today a much better idea of the kind of urban environments people like or find stimulating. For example, it is known that people respond positively to complex and intricate building facades but are negatively affected by the monotony of modern urban environments (BMW Guggenheim Lab, 2013). Another well-known point relates to urban greening. From native pause-points to micro-­ forests,

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bringing back nature in the built environment has been found to benefit both human health and urban biodiversity (Kondo et al., 2018; Braun, 2020). Neuro-spatial studies even show that the “visual complexity of natural environments acts as a kind of mental balm” (Bond, 2017). Based on this knowledge, The Other Place is cladded with an intricate biophilic and parametric green skin designed to reconnect residents with nature in an all too often barren urban landscape (Figs. 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3). This green envelope also provides an ecological corridor to non human species and fosters interspecies cooperation towards protecting the environment. Luckily, this message seems to already have permeated governmental and other decision-making spheres as many such urban greening and rewilding projects are currently underway across the globe. Moving on to the need for design to become carbon neutral or negative as well as circular, the building’s core feeds a meshed network of biosystems with organic waste. This biodesigned, zero-waste approach to city living generates renewable energy and fresh water, as well as biodegradable organic materials for the on-demand production of everyday objects and construction materials. Meanwhile, a biomimetic and responsive natural ventilation system limits the building’s energy demand for

Fig. 3.1  The other place, Night View  (Parametric series II.3) by Olivier Cotsaftis (2021)

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Fig. 3.2  The other place, The Other Square  (Parametric series II.3) by Olivier Cotsaftis (2021)

Fig. 3.3  The other place, Aeropark (Parametric series II.3) by Olivier Cotsaftis (2021)

cooling and warming. Technologies enabling The Other Place to work already exist but are yet to be prototyped at scale or used in combination in contemporary architecture and urban design (e.g., anaerobic digestion, production of bio-based materials from organic waste, passive

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cooling, etc.). At the time of writing, coincidently, the world’s first triple net-zero development across waste, energy, and water in Albany, New York, United States, has just been announced (Thukral, 2021). These carbon neutral/negative, circular, and triple-zero design strategies must become the norm for our future cities if we are serious about tackling the human-made climate emergency we are currently living in. The Other place also touches on the need for architecture and urban design to become pluriversal and meaningfully address human and societal needs. According to the London-based Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health, contemporary urban living is linked to a 39 per cent increase in mood disorder and a 21 per cent increase in anxiety (UD/ MH, n.d.)—the main trigger appearing to be the lack of social cohesion in neighbourhoods (Bond, 2017). Intuitively, we all know that good design alone will not solve urban loneliness, but researchers in the field of speculative and neuro-architecture are nonetheless looking to address this last point. Montgomery, who co-led the BMW research cited above, writes: “as suburban retailers begin to colonise cities, block after block of bric-a-brac and mom-and-pop-scale buildings and shops are being replaced by blank, cold spaces that effectively bleach street edges of conviviality” (BMW Guggenheim Lab, 2013). This may seem like a rather tired insight, but the following is worth repeating. Big corporate chains are not that exciting in the urban landscape. As such, The Other Place offers resident-owned commercial floors, but the street-level real estate typically leased to commercial retailers is used instead to create a novel urban space. The Other Square is a large and covered public space promoting social engagements and respect for nature while connecting the building to the neighbourhood (Fig. 3.2). Together with the Aeropark—a semi-private and secluded elevated park (Fig. 3.3)—The Other Square offer citizens and residents new spaces to meet, as well as a respite from air pollution and our increasingly unstable climate.

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From Fiction to Reality Back in the 1950s, Debord and his psychogeography wanted to revolutionise the experience of place, making architecture and urban design less functional and more open to exploration so that people would feel some sense of control over it. Fast-forward to 2021 and this message is still relevant. In today’s world, rationalist logic elevates economic and technological over cultural and ecological design; and as a result, the world has been made unsustainable by our design choices (Cotsaftis, 2021a). Designing the alternative, however, is a societal choice. With The Other Place, I aim to showcase what this alternative could be; but one question remains. Would such a design provide a blueprint for a successful heterotopian city? As such, let’s revisit the reasons discussed above for Auroville, Arcosanti, and Masdar City‘s lack of popular appeal. Most, if not all, heterotopian cities have been built in remote places, physically removing themselves from the exact places they contest and oppose—their settlers hoping for a new beginning. This strategy not only requires more resources to start with but is also somewhat idealistic in contemporary societies considering the interconnectedness of our global supply chains and financial systems. Positioning The Other Place at the heart of an existing major city, on the contrary, increases the project visibility and likelihood of provoking reactions, promoting conversations, and gaining support. Being immersed in a global city also increases the chance of finding the boundary-pushing individuals and organisations that could spearhead such a project to success from a financial and leadership perspective; as well as the future residents that would collectively contribute to the project through shared values and collaboration. Considering that The Other Place is designed accordingly to the equitable and regenerative principles detailed above; is not a technocratic utopia; and is speculatively located in a densely populated urban area, it is my belief that such a heterotopian city would have more chance to succeed where its predecessors have failed. Design is not just a form-based or problem-solving practice. As the urgency to address global issues becomes pivotal, designers increasingly

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move towards discursive design practices. Critical and speculative designers build worlds filled with new products, spaces, and services to explore the environmental, social, cultural, and political impact of design. These designs either provide a critique of the status quo or bring ideas to life to help us think through the futures we need—and are proposing. Acknowledgements  The author would like to acknowledge Suri Adlina Ilham for her assistance in the production of the visual assets depicted in this chapter.

References Arcosanti. (n.d.). Arcosanti. https://www.arcosanti.org/ Auroville. (n.d.). Auroville, the city of dawn. https://auroville.org/ Babkin, S. (2017, June 1). What is speculative architecture? FAQ by Liam Young. Strelka Magazine. https://strelkamag.com/en/article/what-isspeculative-­architecture Bina, O., Inch, A., & Peirera, L. (2020). Beyond techno-utopia and its discontents: On the role of utopianism and speculative fiction in shaping alternatives to the smart city imaginary. Futures, 115, 102475. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102475 BMW Guggenheim Lab. (2013). A psychological study on city spaces and how they affect our bodies and minds. http://cdn.bmwguggenheimlab.org/TESTING_ TESTING_BMW_GUGGENHEIM_LAB_2013_2.pdf. Bond, M. (2017, June 6). As more of us flock to urban living, city designers are rethinking buildings’ influence on our moods in an era of “neuro-­architecture”. BBC Future. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170605-­the-­psychology-­ behind-­your-­citys-­design Braun, S. (2020, July 7). Biodiversity blooms in cities when green spaces go wild. DW. https://www.dw.com/en/green-spaces-flora-fauna-­wild-nativewildflowers-insects-­dublin-­dessau-­wilderness/a-­53955388. Carter, C. (Ed.). (2019). Repositioning Paolo Soleri: The city is nature. PS Studio/ Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Cipolla, A. (2020, July 26). Masdar City, the ecological city of the future that hardly anyone visits. Latin American Post. https://latinamericanpost. com/33769-­m asdar-­c ity-­t he-­e cological-­c ity-­o f-­t he-­f uture-­t hat-­h ardly-­ anyone-­visits

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Cotsaftis, O. (2019, October 22). Speculations on the future of design. https:// medium.com/this-is-hcd/speculations-on-the-future-of-design-1b1fed938943. Cotsaftis, O. (2020, August 5). Speculative BioCities. https://medium.com/this-­ is-­hcd/speculative-­biocities-­bf64e1302590. Cotsaftis, O. (2021a). The politics of biodesign. Biodesigned, 5. https://www. biodesigned.org/ollie-­cotsaftis/the-­politics-­of-­biodesign Cotsaftis, O. (2021b, March 30). If silicon-based solar panels are so clean, why do they produce so much toxic waste? https://futureensemble.medium.com/ if-­silicon-­based-­solar-­panels-­are-­so-­clean-­why-­do-­they-­produce-­so-­much-­ toxic-­waste-­6ee429b146fc Debord, G. (1955). Introduction to a critique of urban geography. http://library. nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/2. Dobraszczyk, P. (2019). Future cities: Architecture and the imagination. Reaktion Books. Durkheim, E. (Ed.). (2008). The elementary forms of religious life (C. Cosman, Trans.) (Abridged ed.). Oxford University Press UK. (Original work published 1912) Foucault, M. (2020). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Penguin. (Original work published 1975). Foucault, M., & Miskowiec, J. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648 Fry, T. (1999). A new design philosophy: An introduction to defuturing. University of New South Wales Press. Giles, M. (2021, January 27). Robert Downey Jr. unveils two venture capital funds at Davos to help clean up the Earth. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/ sites/martingiles/2021/01/27/robert-­downey-­jr-­unveils-­venture-capitalfunds-­at-­davos/?sh=23e46f5f12d3 Hébert, R., Lovejoy, S., & Tremblay, B. (2021). An observation-based scaling model for climate sensitivity estimates and global projections to 2100. Climate Dynamics, 56, 1105–1129. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382020-­05521-­x Hill, D., & Conway, R. (2021, January 22). Can the New European Bauhaus reorient design to tackle the climate crisis? https://medium.com/iipp-­blog/ can-­the-­new-­european-­bauhaus-­reorient-­design-­to-­tackle-­the-­climate-­crisis-­ e99b045003a2 Kapoor, R. (2007). Auroville: A spiritual-social experiment in human unity and evolution. Futures, 39(5), 632–643. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2006. 10.009

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Kondo, M. C., Fluehr, J. M., McKeon, T., & Branas, C. C. (2018). Urban green space and its impact on human health. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(3), 445. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ijerph15030445 Lee, S. (2016, September 19). Welcome to Masdar City: The ultimate experiment in sustainable urban living. The Conversation. https://theconversation. com/welcome-to-masdar-city-the-ultimate-­e xperiment-in-­s ustainable-­ urban-­living-­65575 Masdar City. (n.d.). Masdar City. https://masdarcity.ae/ More, T. (2007). Utopia. Tark Classic Fiction. (Original work published 1516) Overall, S. (2015). The walking dead: Or why psychogeography matters. https:// repository.canterbury.ac.uk/download/ef7c739b64bd03fad9b7214c 0b3498c447eaf88f4cb41f2dd00639865810d390/162992/13859.pdf Qadeer, M. A. (2014). Viewpoint: The multicultural city. Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 23(1), 116–126. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26195271 Santos, H. C., Varnum, M. E. W., & Grossmann, I. (2017). Global increases in individualism. Psychological Sciences, 28(9), 1228–1239. https://doi. org/10.1177/0956797617700622 Soleri, P. (1970). Arcology: The city in the image of man. MIT Press. Thukral, R. (2021, April 10). The world’s first triple net-zero development is here to push the boundaries of sustainable architecture! Yanko Design. https:// www.yankodesign.com/2021/04/10/the-worlds-first-triple-net-­z erodevelopment-­is-­here-­to-­push-­the-­boundaries-­of-­sustainable-­architecture/ UD/MH. (n.d.). Facts and Figures. https://www.urbandesignmentalhealth.com/ facts-­and-­figures.html United Nations. (2018). 68% of the world population projected to live in urban areas by 2050. https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-­ revision-­of-­world-­urbanization-­prospects.html Vanolo, A. (2016). Is there anybody out there? The place and role of citizens in tomorrow’s smart cities. Futures, 82, 26–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. futures.2016.05.010 von der Leyen, U. (2020). A New European Bauhaus. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/AC_20_1916

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Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

4 Speculations on Time and Space: Or Zeno’s Last Stand Marcus A. Doel and David B. Clarke

Speculation … has its own runaway logic. (Baudrillard, 2002: 28)

Speculation, Geography & Co. Speculative Geography. A chance to profit at last. In theory at least. Ruin more likely than not. We wager that Geography has never been anything other than speculative, profiteering in theory and practice. Risky business, every speculative adventure—especially for the world as its oyster. Obviously, the blood-soaked history and philosophy of Geography should be X-rated (Livingstone, 1992). Later, when we advance seemingly bloodless speculations about the impossibility and unreality of this,

M. A. Doel (*) Swansea University, Swansea, UK e-mail: [email protected] D. B. Clarke Swansea University, Swansea, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Authors 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_4

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that, and the other, and hedge our position by way of Borges and British idealism, bear the political economy and libidinal economy of geographical speculation in mind. The speculators advance their wagers, banking on a return, while the regulators and thought police rig the game to mitigate against absolute loss and systemic collapse, as the House of Reason “works the ‘putting at stake’ into an investment, as it amortizes absolute expenditure” (Derrida, 1978: 324). Theses, hypotheses, postulates, conjectures, and suchlike are put into play, perhaps even tested to destruction (Ronnell, 2005), but the result, even when falsified and nullified, is destined to return to the profit of reason. The House always wins. This is both tragic and comic. “What is laughable is the submission to the selfevidence of meaning, to the force of this imperative: that there must be meaning, that nothing must be definitely lost” (Derrida, 1978: 325). Speculative Geography banks on interest, both in senses relating to a right to participate or share (a concern, a claim, a stake, an entitlement, a responsibility, an accountability) and in senses relating to compensation for injury, detriment or damages, especially with respect to loans, debts, and other losses. There is no such thing as ‘idle’ or ‘wild’ speculation because speculation always plays itself out to the advantage of reason. The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy succinctly sets out the House rules: “speculative adj. 1 theoretical (in contrast to practical). 2 non-empirical (in contrast to empirical). 3 conjectural, uncertain” (Mautner, 2005: 584). Hereinafter, one must speculate within reason, since reason is what extends speculation its line of credit and judges its worth. Speculation must return to reason, to which it remains permanently indebted. In short: reason dictates—that speculation is not without reason. And logic dictates—how speculation ought to reason. “Logic lays down norms— standards of correctness—for right reasoning” (Goldstein et  al., 2005: 12). Consequently, speculation makes a faux pas (false step) when it tries to step (not) beyond (pas au-delà) or outpace what reason and logic mandate (Blanchot, 1992; Derrida, 2011), perhaps in pursuit of a real that stands (up) to reason, as if one could step over one’s own feet or reach a real that “carries its place stuck to the sole of its shoe” (Lacan, 2006: 17). In his deconstruction of the theory/practice dualism, Derrida (2019) notes how Aristotle not only confined speculation within reason, but also restricted its purview to contingency.

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He … distinguished two parts of the soul, logon echon (which has reason) and alogon (irrational). Pursuing that division, he distinguishes, within logon echon, two parts: that is where the theoretical and practical appear (inside the logos, then). One of the rational parts of the soul allows us to look at [theoroumen: the translation says ‘contemplate’ …] ‘the kind of things whose principles [archai] cannot be other than they are’ [very important for how the theoretical is constantly defined: can’t intervene in or change what it looks at for it is dealing with what cannot be otherwise …]. The other part of the soul as logon echon is the part that knows contingent things. … Aristotle calls that part logistikon (logistical, calculating, deliberative), for one can calculate and deliberate on only contingent things, … and he calls epistemic, scientific, epistemonikon, the theoretical part dealing with the necessary and immutable. (Derrida, 2019: 81)

Hereinafter, speculation is free to roam within the confines of the Prison House of Reason, limited only by the double bind that keeps it firmly in its padded cell and the inescapable obligation to submit to logic and reason. Roam where? Amongst the antinomies. With Kant, it is the ‘interest of reason’ that arrests the vacillation of pure speculative reason through an appeal to practical reason. Kant asks: what would a man do if he could emancipate himself from every interest and remain indifferent to all the consequences of theses and antitheses. … Such a man would follow only the principles of reason wherever they led him, taking into account their intrinsic value alone, their value as rational principle. … He would be, Kant says, in a state of ceaseless vacillation. … The double bind, which is the … double obligation to follow contradictory rational principles, … would here be rational and based on principle. … How to escape from this theoretico-speculative double bind? Well, replies Kant, … Practice is the rational solution to the visionary effects of theoretical speculation, of pure speculative reason. (Derrida, 2019: 33–34)

On Derrida’s reading of the theory/practice dualism after Kant, via Marx’s (1946 [1845]) Theses on Feuerbach (“All mysteries which lead (veranlassen) [or rather ‘mislead’ (verleiten), if you prefer Engels’ posthumous correction of Marx’s notes: entice, seduce, lead away from the

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correct path, lead astray] theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice”) and Althusser’s (1979) Theory of theoretical practices (a guard-rail ensuring theory and practice follow the correct path without deviation or depravation), the comeuppance is that while “it is good to develop theses and antitheses freely, free from threat” (Derrida, 2019: 34), this liberty must be kept in check—disciplined, says Whitehead (1929)—by the interest of reason, by practical reason, to avoid falling prey to vacillation and hallucination. Speculation owes it to reason to practise self-restraint; to resist the temptation of Theoretical deviation (error and errancy) and ‘pure’ speculation; and to submit itself to all of the correctional facilities that reason has at its disposal for dealing with errant, deviant, and vagrant thoughts. This submission is well illustrated by Freud. In ‘Speculations—On “Freud”’ Derrida discusses Freud’s investment in a series of ‘speculative’ works, especially Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1955), which “promise[d], on the threshold of the ‘loosest hypothesis,’ an inexhaustible reserve for speculation” (Derrida, 1987: 280). One can understand the lure of such untapped wealth, but also the risk of mania and the fear of returning with fool’s gold. Freud vacillates. On the one hand, he says that he has “given free rein to the inclination, which I kept down for so long, to speculation” (Freud, quoted in Derrida, 1987: 272). On the other hand, Freud says: “I should not like to create an impression that during this last period of my work I have turned my back upon patient observation and have abandoned myself entirely to speculation” (Freud, quoted in Derrida, 1987: 265). This peculiar libidinal economy brings into play that other House of Reason, which Derrida (1987: 281) wryly likens to “a free zone, a place of free exchange for the comings and goings of speculation,” a brothel-house for “duty-free” speculation that would owe nothing to the pimps of reason. Much could be said about the House of Reason as a brothel-house (Deleuze, 1989; Derrida, 1986; Lacan, 2006 [Kant with Sade]), but we will limit ourselves to Lyotard’s account of Theory’s “compulsion to stop” (Lyotard, 1993: 250). “What does the theoretical text offer its fascinated client? An impregnable body” (Lyotard, 1993: 246). Goldstein et  al. (2005: 14) express it thus: “The logician’s Holy Grail is a notation for formulating thoughts clearly and unambiguously, and an inference

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machine that is guaranteed to reason unerringly. This was Leibniz’ vision: a characteristica universalis and a calculus ratiocinator.” Such is the desire of the theoretical: a closed system in perpetual motion. “It is not what is spoken of that becomes immobilized by discourse,” adds Lyotard; “it is discourse itself, a system of acceptable statements within the ‘chosen’ set of axioms, which strives to come to rest” (Lyotard, 1993: 247–248). Now, there are few more arresting theoretical bodies than the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea (fifth century bce), which have kept philosophers and mathematicians puzzling for over two-and-a-half millennia—not only in seeking to refute or evade them (usually in vain), but also in seeking to reconstruct them from the fragments relayed by Aristotle, Plato, and Simplicius. This all stems from Zeno’s attempt “to justify the contention of his master Parmenides, that Being is one and unchanging, by showing that multiplicity and motion led to contradiction, and were therefore mere appearance” (Smith, 1983: 257–258). While this may sound obscure, the consequences have proven devastating for Western thought. It is towards these paradoxes, which seem to outstep, outpace, and outsmart both reason and logic, that we now stride.

Stirring Still The paradox of Zeno … is an attempt upon not only the reality of space but the more invulnerable and sheer reality of time. … Such a deconstruction, by means of only one word, infinite, … once it besets our thinking, explodes and annihilates it. (Borges, 1999: 47)

A strong family resemblance marks all four of Zeno’s paradoxes—‘The Dichotomy,’ ‘Achilles and the Tortoise,’ ‘The Arrow,’ and ‘The Stadium’— which “turn on the problems of the infinitely small magnitude and the infinitely large number. They demonstrate that movement is a contradiction, as is the indefinite divisibility of space and time” (Smith, 1983: 258). Aristotle—perhaps wilfully misrepresenting Zeno’s intent—cast them as examples of fallacious reasoning.

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First is the argument that says that there is no motion because that which is moving must reach the midpoint before the end. … It is always necessary to traverse half the distance, but these are infinite, and it is impossible to get through things that are infinite. (Aristotle, Physics; cited in Curd, 2011: 68)

This, ‘The Dichotomy,’ whose endless divisibility of space opens up an infinite abyss that is uncrossable, covers similar ground to ‘Achilles and the Tortoise,’ which pits two infinite series against one another: “the slowest as it runs will never be caught by the quickest. For the pursuer must first reach the point from which the pursued departed, so that the slower must always be some distance in front” (Aristotle, Physics; cited in Curd, 2011: 68–69). Each time fleet-footed Achilles reaches the spot where the plodding tortoise once was, the tortoise will have advanced a little further, and so on ad infinitum, in an ever-decreasing two-step that will approach but never reach its limit. With ‘The Arrow,’ Aristotle (Physics; cited in Curd, 2011: 69) candidly complains that: Zeno makes a mistake in reasoning. For if, he says, everything is always at rest when it occupies a space equal to itself, and what is moving is always ‘at a now,’ the moving arrow is motionless. … This follows from assuming that time is composed of ‘nows.’ If this is not conceded, the deduction will not go through. (Aristotle, Physics; cited in Curd, 2011: 69)

Zeno argues that at every instant the arrow is motionless since it occupies a space precisely equal to itself; it cannot move in (or at) an instant. And since the whole flight is composed of nothing but instants, the arrow must remain motionless; it cannot move between instants. Finally, ‘The Stadium’ concerns the relative motion of moving and stationary bodies, demonstrating “that half the time is equal to the double” (Aristotle, Physics; cited in Curd, 2011: 69–70). Suffice to say that Zeno’s paradoxes are remarkable for their resistance to countless supposedly ‘definitive’ refutations that keep on coming, in part because their purpose has been variously interpreted as demonstrating a fault or faults in reasoning, in reality, or in both (whether relatively, as a mismatch, or absolutely). Borges (1999: 43) declared ‘The Achilles’ “immortal.”

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To cut to the chase, consider the contention that Zeno’s paradoxes were finally solved by nineteenth-century mathematics, specifically “when Cauchy clarified such fundamental concepts as functions, limits, convergence of sequences and series, the derivative, and the integral; and when his successors Dedekind, Weierstrass, et al., provided a satisfactory analysis of the real number system and its connections with the calculus” (Salmon, 1980: 35). To gain a sense of what this purportedly achieved, consider ‘The Dichotomy,’ in which the space to be traversed is repeatedly halved in a geometric progression that appears endless. Any finite distance can be infinitely divided. To move any distance whatsoever therefore requires an infinite number of steps: an impossible feat. Such is the paradox of the ad infinitum, the logic of which applies equally to time as to space. Motion in time and space is impossible. Almost everyone down the ages has agreed that these conclusions are absurd. “The Cynic Diogenes of Sinope is alleged to have refuted them by taking a stroll” (Kołakowski, 2007: 15). Some have argued that an indivisible element would put a stop to division (atomism); others refused to believe that the abstract notion of infinity could actually exist. While a single step could be infinitely divided in theory, it could not in practice. Nineteenth-century mathematics reputedly resolved the ‘Dichotomy’ and ‘Achilles’ paradoxes by recasting the ad infinitum as ‘at the limit’ rather than ‘without limit.’ Mathematics did not so much refute Zeno’s paradoxes as try to evade them. For while it is true that one cannot complete an infinite series of steps—a so-called ‘super-task’—such as counting an infinite series of numbers or passing through an infinite series of points, the infinitely many terms of a convergent series have a finite sum. Whilst it is impossible to count an infinite series of zeros one by one, it certainly amounts to zero. Likewise, one cannot find a finite solution to summing an infinite series of ones (1 + 1 + 1 + …) but the sum of the dichotomizing progression, ½ + ¼ + 1/8 + 1/16 …, converges on 1. For Borges (1999: 44), “[t]hat methodical dissolution, that boundless descent into more and more minute precipices, is not really hostile to the problem; imagining it is the problem.” The need for Achilles to cover an infinite number of distances does not require him to cover an infinite distance. Nevertheless, “passing from the series to its limit … is precisely … where the difficulty lies” (Cajori, 1915: 256); “the chasm … had in some mysterious way to

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be leapt over” (Ernest Hobson, 1902, quoted in Cajori, 1915: 216). For Bertrand Russell, this leap amounts to the completion of a super-task—a leap of faith that has sparked interminable debate (Grünbaum, 1969) and huge speculative interest in so-called infinity machines (Black, 1951). Russell applauded the nineteenth-century arithmetization of the calculus, which had previously rested on the vaguest of spatio-temporal intuitions: the ‘infinitesimals’ and ‘differentials’ that Newton and Leibniz defined as infinitely small numbers (approximating zero without being zero), parodied by Berkeley as spectral apparitions—the ‘ghosts of departed quantities.’ Weierstrass, by strictly banishing from mathematics the use of infinitesimals, has at last shown that we live in an unchanging world, and that the arrow in its flight is truly at rest. Zeno’s only error lay in inferring (if he did infer) that, because there is no change, therefore the world is in the same state at any one time as at another. (Russell, 1943: 347)

Russell’s interpretation—which casts motion-in-an-instant as a contradiction in terms, and regards ‘instantaneous velocity’ as necessarily relational, derived in relation to neighbouring points in time—does not actually amount to a declaration of an ‘unchanging world.’ It amounts to a denial that things change by changing or being-in-flux (possessing an intrinsic state of becoming), thus viewing change as merely a matter of comparative states of being at different instants. The so-called ‘at–at’ theory of motion exemplifies this conception: matching positions in space with points in time is all that ‘motion’ entails (Salmon, 2001). Henri Bergson (1910: 115), most famously, objects “that we cannot make movement out of immobilities, nor time out of space.” Hence his denunciation of the ‘cinematographic illusion,’ which tries in vain to reconstitute real movement and concrete duration from a succession of snapshots or immobile instants (Bergson, 1911; Deleuze, 1991). One cannot simply rewind and replay time in the manner that Russell’s account assumes. Likewise with Zeno’s conflation of an indivisible action (movement) with the infinitely divisible line that movement traces over space. “The mistake of the Eleatics arises from their identification of this series of acts, each of which is of a definite kind and indivisible, with the homogeneous space

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which underlies them” (Bergson, 1910: 113). Despite all the fancy footwork, the ground of Zeno’s paradoxes remains undisturbed. After an exhaustive survey of countless mathematical and philosophical attempts to solve Zeno’s paradox of Dichotomy, all of which came to naught, Cajori (1915: 215) argued that a final solution required two ideas and a diagonal argument that only emerged in the 1880s–1890s after Georg Cantor: the existence of actual infinite aggregates and a connected and perfect continuum. And yet, the posing and deposing of new diagonal solutions have continued unabated, such as conceiving of instants not as points but as neighbourhoods of infinity (Reeder, 2015). “The proposed solutions to the logical paradoxes haven’t removed the contradiction[s], they have just moved them,” says Vandycke (2007: 321), risking a contradictio in adjecto. This is, perhaps, apt given Hegel’s insistence on movement as the realization of contradictions. In some respects, Bergson echoes Hegel’s objection that “[m]athematical cognition … as an external activity, reduces what is self-moving to mere material, so as to possess in it an indifferent, external, lifeless content” (cited in Smith, 1983: 264). Russell (1908: 242) is disingenuous in claiming that: “In Hegel’s day, the procedure of mathematicians was full of errors, which Hegel did not condemn as errors, but welcomed as antinomies.” For Hegel criticized the notion of infinitesimals as an impossible “intermediate state … between being and nothing”: “the unity of being and nothing … is not a state. …[O]n the contrary, this mean and unity, the vanishing or equally the becoming is alone their truth” (Hegel, cited in Smith, 1983: 262). “It is … because infinity is a contradiction that it is an infinite process, unrolling endlessly in time and in space,” says Engels (1939: 62): “The removal of this contradiction would be the end of infinity. Hegel saw this quite correctly.” In short, a real contradiction differs from a logical impasse. This is the basis of Priest’s (2006: 131) dialetheism, which “allows time to be both inconsistent and real.” On this conception, a body in motion “does indeed occupy the spot s, but, equally, since it is in motion, it has already started to leave that spot; hence [it] is not still there” (Priest, 1989: 396–397). The arrow is truly both there and not there, in a state of real contradiction and intrinsic flux, just as time itself embodies this inconsistent state, its contradictory status betokening a state of becoming.

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The Unreality of Unreality If the stone-in-motion is not in some way different from the stone at rest, it is never in motion (nor for that matter at rest). (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 268)

In the manner of a film montage featuring a map, a biplane, and changeable atmospheric conditions to signify a truly astonishing passage of time and traversal of space, let us begin by splicing together some quotations to signal a shift of position. “[B]efore the last quarter of the nineteenth century it was the prevailing view that Zeno’s arguments were merely interesting fallacies” (Cajori, 1920: 12). “Aristotle and subsequent Greek writers … expended their mental acumen in attempts to point out the real nature of the fallacies” (Cajori, 1915: 39). Whatever the practical efficacy of Diogenes’s famed refutatio ambulando, many modern thinkers have wrestled with the fact that the paradoxes appear to be “flawless in logical rigor” (Cajori, 1915: 39). It has therefore been a Herculean effort to force Zeno’s fallacies “to surrender their secrets” and “enter the group of ‘problems of the past’” (Cajori, 1915: 39). Characterizing his ironically titled ‘A new refutation of time’ [1947; ‘after Bergson’] as an “anachronistic reductio ad absurdum of an obsolete system,” Borges (1999: 317) punctures such confidence in the defeat of Zeno. Already in his 1929 essay, ‘The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise,’ Borges (1999: 47) had declared that “Zeno is incontestable, unless we admit the ideality of space and time. If we accept idealism, … then we shall elude the mise en abîme of the paradox.” Perhaps idealism is itself incontestable: “And yet, and yet …” (Borges, 1999: 332). Recall, for instance, Dr Johnson’s response to “Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal” (Boswell, 1945: 130). As Boswell (1945: 130) relates: “though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus’.” From Diogenes to Johnson, hard-hitting refutations such as the refutatio ambulando scarcely keep our feet on the ground (Ingold, 2004). Hence Borges’s proposition:

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Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities which confirm that nature. We shall find them … in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno. … We have dreamt [the world] as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false. (Borges, 2000: 208)

Is Borges disingenuous in proposing that no idealist has sought out the unrealities that might confirm the hallucinatory nature of the world? The constraints of space and time allow us to do little more than gesture towards the neglected tradition of late-nineteenth-century and early-­ twentieth-­century British idealism (Boucher & Vincent, 2012; Priest, 2022), with its particular stress on unreality. One should note more generally, with Dunham et al. (2011: 4), that “the idealist, rather than being anti-realist, is additionally a realist concerning elements more usually dismissed from reality. … Idealism … is not anti-realist, but realist precisely about the existence of Ideas.” Let us motion, therefore, towards McTaggart’s (1908, 1927) demonstration of the unreality of time; Bradley’s (1893) neo-Hegelian-cum-neo-Kantian speculations on the unreality of both space and time (Mander, 1994); Oakeley’s (1930, 1946–7) challenge to McTaggart and to Leibniz (Thomas, 2015); and Alexander’s (1920) cosmological divinations, which might be profitably considered alongside Whitehead’s (Collingwood, 1945; see also Brettschneider, 1964; Fisher, 2021; Stiernotte, 1954). To provide at least some detail, first consider Tiles’ (1989: 13) state-of-the-art reconstruction of Zeno’s paradoxes (after Owen, 1957–8). Against Aristotle’s emphasis, read it as a challenge to pluralism rather than motion: an assertion of the One, not the Many; a demonstration of the absurdities accruing from a failure to detect the underlying unity hidden by the diversity of the world of appearances, the world of experience. Thesis I Neither space nor time are pluralities. For if they are pluralities it must be possible to specify the units (atomic parts) of which they are composed. But

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Thesis II Any attempt to treat space or time as composed of atomic parts leads to absurd conclusions. For suppose they are composed of atomic parts, then a space or a time must either be divisible without limit or there must exist limits of division. (A) Suppose they are divisible without limit, then 1. a runner cannot complete a racecourse, and 2. Achilles cannot catch the tortoise. (B) Suppose there are limits of division, then either these have size (magnitude) or they do not. (a) Suppose they have size, then 3. the paradox of the stadium. (b) Suppose they have no size, then 4. the arrow paradox Thus the alternatives lead to absurd conclusions, and neither space nor time are pluralities. (Tiles, 1989: 13) Zeno’s paradoxes depend on time and space being countable (denumerable)—one step, two steps, ad infinitum—which is to say, divisible (halve, halve again, ad infinitum). Taking as read a certain familiarity with “the difficulties that have arisen from the continuity and the discreteness of space,” Bradley (1893) repeats what we may presume to be Zeno’s strategy in demonstrating, by means of a series of reductiones ad absurdum of opposing points of view, that space is mere appearance—unreal. Bradley (1893: 36) enquires of space per se “whether it contradicts itself ”; setting out the issue “in the form which exhibits” not only “the root of the contradiction” but “also its insolubility”: to wit, “[s]pace is a relation—which it cannot be; and it is a quality or substance—which again it cannot be.” He proceeds to demonstrate, with equal conviction, that “[s]pace is not a mere relation”—“[b]ut space is nothing but a relation” (Bradley, 1893: 36 and 37, respectively). Bradley’s argument cuts across the longstanding debate between absolute (substantialist) and relative (relationalist) conceptions of space by means of a series of arguments concerning the infinite divisibility and infinite extension of space,

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ultimately leading us to conclude that space can be nothing other than the contradictory rational principles of the world qua appearance. Bradley’s parallel stance on the unreality of time, as Borges (1999: 331) puts it on his behalf, is “that if the now is divisible into other nows it is no less complicated than time, and, if it is indivisible, time is merely a relation between intemporal things.” Whereas Bradley “denies the parts in order to deny the whole” its reality (time as such; space as such), Borges (1999: 331) rejects “the whole in order to exalt each one of the parts.” Lest this sense of unreality induces anxiety or provokes laughter, there is a parallel sense in which reality and unreality, materialism and idealism, matter and antimatter, are embroiled in the same logic. To approach things from another direction, the sense of unreality bequeathed by British idealism is no more (and no less) than what Lacan (2015: 52) refers to as “the inexplicable nature of the real”: the ‘real as impossible.’ This may seem at odds with the speculative spirit of Debaise and Stengers (2017), or those caught up in the wake of the ‘speculative realist’ turn (Bryant et al., 2011). Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari (1984: 27) directly rebut Lacan: “The real is not impossible; on the contrary, within the real everything is possible.” But as Lacan (2018: 112) notes: “A step had already been taken by Parmenides in this circle where, all in all, it is a matter of knowing what is involved in the real.” As Rosset (2012: vii) reminds us: “There is nothing more fragile than the human faculty for consenting to reality, for accepting unreservedly the imperious prerogative of the real.” Hence the proclivity for replacing the obdurate real with one of its purportedly more amenable doubles—which are nonetheless destined to ramify, not resolve, the original problems: to infinity and beyond! When all is said and done, then, a certain something remains. But one cannot count on it, no matter how sure-footed one’s certainty appears to be. “[P]hilosophy has always started by taking a very curious form that it will never abandon, namely, the paradox,” says Deleuze (1980). Zeno, for example, “certainly knows that Achilles catches the tortoise. He certainly knows that the arrow hits the target.” So why does Zeno stubbornly refuse to listen to reason? “It’s not that the movement as a movement ‘is not’ as many commentators have him say. That’s foolish. It is that movement as movement cannot be thought. … A paradox states the

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unthinkability of a be-ing [étant]” (Deleuze, 1980). Sudden flash. Unthinking Geography. Unthinkable Geography. Perish the thought.

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5 Passionate Speculations | Speculative Passions Joe Gerlach

Introduction Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite. (Eliot, 1872: 196)

Cosseted by Cartesian suspicion, passion makes for uneasy reasoning and unsettled thinking; kryptonite to the formation of clear-and-distinct ideas. Evaluate the evidence dispassionately, implores judge to jury; “every ordered society puts the passions to sleep” (Nietzsche, 2001: 32). Passions, argues George Eliot, “do not live apart”, and yet the history of modern western philosophy is littered with their excised remains. How and why, then, might passion underscore contemporary gestures towards speculative modes of thought? Tentative responses to this question lie in a return to Spinoza’s impassioned rationalism. Indeed, when invoking passion, J. Gerlach (*) School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_5

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Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), writing  under her  pen name, George Eliot, is not drawing on tropes immured in literary romanticism, but is instead revealing a conceptual indebtedness to Spinoza (see Carlisle, 2020a, b; Calder, 2015). To this end, it is the recent publication of Eliot’s English translation of Spinoza’s Ethics that provides the impetus for this chapter. Specifically, whilst this particular translation spotlights a number of salient matters,1 it is precisely Eliot’s peculiar and inconsistent translation of the Latin term affectus to either passion or emotion (Carlisle, 2020a) that warrants a revisiting of Spinoza’s take on the former, a move that might otherwise appear incongruous given the rationalist’s own ambivalence towards passion. Beyond an immediate and narrow appeal to passion, the spectre of Spinoza’s monist metaphysics continues to charge the intellectual field of posthumanism and its attendant projects in renaturalisation and in the cultivation of an a-moralistic ethics (see, for example: Sharp, 2011; MacCormack, 2012; Grosz, 2017; Braidotti, 2019a). In short, the ethical gambit of posthumanism is its decoupling from transcendental systems of valuation and  orfrom behavioural norms orientated by way of obligation. Trading consequence for speculation, Braidotti’s (2019b) ‘affirmative ethics’, for example, demurs from universes of moralistic reference contrived in response to ‘false problems’, themselves treated “as if they were drawn out of ‘the city’s administrative filing cabinets’” (Deleuze, 1988: 15). So far, so speculative, but how can bodies keep up with the immanent demands of a posthuman ethics? What are the lures for recuperating what Deleuze (1995, 176) says we lack most, namely, “a belief in the world”? How might passion prompt such a recuperation? These questions are, of course, themselves mired in the tumult of manifold crises: climatic, viral, others imperceptible. Add to the mix an uptick in political mediocrity and post-truth denialism (Connolly, 2019), one begins to question how and why anyone would act in the amelioration of social, environment and psychological ecologies. This is where passion returns  Inter-alia, the nascent Spinozism running through Eliot’s literature and the pernicious, gendered occlusion of what is possibly the first English translation of the Ethics. Had it been accepted by the publisher, there is a reasonable chance that Eliot’s translation would have been the first version of Ethics in English, period. Carlisle (2020b, 598) comments, “Eliot was more intimately acquainted with Spinoza’s Ethics than anyone else in England in the mid-nineteenth century”. 1

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to the fold. Whilst speculative philosophy helps to generate space for a productive indeterminacy in thought (Stengers, 2011), I argue here that it is a gentle insistence on passion that intensifies the ethical import of the speculative. I do so, firstly, by essaying Spinoza’s passionate reason, and secondly, by assaying the onto-ethical properties of speculative passions.

Passionate Reason To reiterate my argument, speculative modes of thought require passion and passionate forms of reason. Passion underscores the gentle insistence needed for speculative thought to counter ‘inadequacy’ and the production of false problems. Whilst the speculative thought of Alfred North Whitehead (1978) departed from Spinoza’s on the degree of metaphysical substantialism accorded to nature, both were nonetheless perturbed by the  ingress of ‘inadequacy’ into thought and philosophy. Inadequacy constitutes a marked preoccupation with false problems, those that comprise “insignificant scholastic quibbles, where nothing of life or of experience is at stake” (Bennett, 2018: 179). Inadequacy is also characterised by a dearth of affective sensibility or passionate awareness, akin to a kind of ignorance of stupidity, animated once again by Eliot: If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. (Eliot, 1872: 230)

Despite facing a series of imperceptible crises, we remain to this day tied steadfast to the other side of silence, held in abeyance by a machinic ignorance towards intensity. To this end, false problems are very much allied to Spinoza’s own formulation of ‘inadequacy’ and his thesis on ‘inadequate ideas’—genres of thinking and concept formation disambiguated both from understanding their cause and from a recognition of the immanent relations in which they are entangled. In this respect, inadequacy threatens to undermine the speculative capacities of thought

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because they are, themselves, productive of a misunderstanding of the relational connections between bodies to the joy and sadness—to the passions—of others. Speculative thought, Didier Debaise (2018: 25) avers, involves an evaluation, not of experience itself, but of, “the capacity of a theory, a way of thinking, a philosophical scheme, to account for what insists, to account for the often-hidden insistences which at any moment risk sinking into indifference”. Capacities and insistences are the stuff of passion, and it is passion which determines their respective amplification and/or diminution. A commingling here of Whitehead’s speculative thought and Spinoza’s substantialism may appear odd given divergences in their respective metaphysical commitments. It is true, for example, that Whitehead finds Spinoza’s substantial monism stifling, seemingly rendering the properties and capacities of modes (bodies) inert, such that he is left to conclude that whilst he admired its anti-Cartesian elegance, Spinoza’s project “does not lead us to the discovery of any higher grade of reality” (Whitehead, 1978: 7). This aside, given  that Whitehead’s process philosophy is an explicit inversion of Spinoza’s substance-mode dependency dyad, it strikes me that the propagation of Whitehead’s speculative philosophy is nonetheless and intractably dependent on Spinoza’s monism. Moreover, Spinoza’s  substantialism is not quite as inert or undifferentiating as Whitehead describes. Spinoza in the Ethics diagrams an active nature, natura naturans, or nature naturing, always coming into being, composed of infinite as well as finite modes; composite bodies whose properties are not essential, but conative, that is to say, unfolding and indeterminate. Passions, as strange and troubling expressions of this unfolding substance, are inductive of speculative becomings and are in themselves, as conative modes, speculative. Contra Descartes, Spinoza took them seriously. Here, Whitehead and Spinoza share an assiduously practised ethic; to dismiss nothing from their enquiries, but to instead afford the same philosophical dignity and gentleness to all modes, material and immaterial. If, as Whitehead (1978) makes patently clear, that a speculative philosophy cannot exclude anything from its ambit, whether that be the dance of fairies or Christ’s crucifixion,2 then it stands to reason that passion forms  “Philosophy cannot neglect the multifariousness of the world—the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross” (Whitehead, 1978, 338). 2

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an important contour to indeterminate modes of thought, and for this reason a turn to Spinoza is needed. Long before Deleuze pronounced Spinoza the ‘Christ’ of philosophers, it was Young Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach (1983 [1842]: 156), who identified the Dutch rationalist as “the originator of speculative philosophy”. Spinoza’s diagramming of nature as an expressive indivisibility of thought and matter transformed the space for an affirmative ethics, one now oriented towards speculation instead of one freighted upon obligation. However, whilst Spinoza’s conjuring of an immanent and indivisible onto-ethical field in the Ethics explains the possibility of and for speculative thought, the role of passion in all of this is less clear, particularly in the context of Spinoza’s own Cartesian-inflected rationalism. As philosopher Andrea Sangiacomo (2019: 1) remarks, “since antiquity, reason has been often conceived as somehow contrary to desires and passions. Far from supporting reason, passions and desires have often been presented as something that should be restrained and mastered through the power of rational knowledge”. What is the case, then, for the advancement of a ‘passionate reason’ as part of a broader ecology of speculative thought? A misreading of Spinoza implies that whilst he does not seek to decry passion analytically (insofar that he treats passions like any other mode of nature, namely worthy of rationalist attention), he nonetheless concludes that a life of freedom is one governed not by passion, but by reason. This is to miss the mark. Spinoza does, of course, demonstrate a predilection for rationalist techniques of thought, but only on the explicit premise that they are understood to be intimately tied to oscillations in passion. To imagine that reason is immune from the vicissitudes of passion is to invite another form of inadequacy into the picture and, in turn, risks an enslavement to an error of illusory proportions. On the contrary, all reason is, always and already, passionate reason. Passion, from the Latin passionem or passio, is etymologically indexical to a form of endurance or a register of suffering, one typified, in an evocation of Whitehead’s earlier claim, by the passion of Christ. Indeed, passion is marked, in Spinozist terms, by a conative drive3 to strive and to persevere—to surge and  “The multiple manifestations of desire are collectively signified by the term conatus” (Zovko, 2014: 140).

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ebb—though neither in a unidirectional or teleological sense. In editing George Eliot’s translation of Ethics, Clare Carlisle (2020a: 63) notes the dissonance in Spinoza and Eliot’s use of the term, affectus, whereby Eliot proffers, variably, either ‘emotion’ or ‘passion’, whereas Spinoza, “distinguishes between affectus and passio, since the latter is a species of the former: a passion is a passive emotion”. The slippage and apparent haphazardness4 in Eliot’s translation affords a recasting of Spinoza’s passion as a mode that exceeds its definition in Ethics as a passive externality that serves only to either augment or diminish bodily capacity and its attendant expressive potential. In Eliot’s translation, passion is not merely adventitious, but an active force of becoming, one commensurate with the development of speculative modes of thought. Passion is active insofar as it lends precision to the fomenting of thought, thinking and theory; “passions foster cooperation among individuals, which in turn is expressed under the attribute of thought as strengthening the mind’s power of thinking (namely, of forming ideas of reason)” (Sangiacomo, 2019: 148). Passion and reason, then, are coterminous. Deleuze perhaps does more than most to liberate passion in Spinoza’s philosophy, and to disarticulate passion from its assumed passivity and conceptual inertia. Indeed, Meiborg and van Tuinen (2016: 15) indicate that in respect of the risks of inadequacy, for Deleuze, the inseparability of passion and reason is “critical, since it protects reason from its self-imposed stupidity (bêtise) by relating it to the unthought, i.e. the distinct but obscure forces that condition it”. In Deleuze’s ethological diagramming of an expressionistic Spinoza, even the passive qualities of passion have active implications: To the linkage of feelings with ideas, we must add the further linkage of desires with feelings. As long as our capacity to be affected remains exercised by passive affections, our conatus is determined by passions, or, as Spinoza puts it, our desires themselves ‘are born’ from passions. But even in this case, our power of action comes into play. For we must distinguish what determines us, and that to which we are determined. (Deleuze, 1992: 231)

 In contrast to what Jason Read (2016: 105) describes as the “absolutely and rigourously consistent” use of the term affect by Spinoza himself. 4

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In this respect, the speculative moment arises not as an enquiry into the nature of the various passions,5 but emerges instead in the attempt to essay the distinction between how bodies compose passionate determinations and how they themselves might be determined/terminated by passion. This speculation, of course, transposes into the well-rehearsed Spinozist diagramming of ethical relations between passion and action, namely that joyful passions enhance powers of action and conversely, sad passions negate that self-same power of action. A surfeit of passions, however, whether joyful or sad, does not necessarily yield a more enlightened existence. “A sum of passions …”, Deleuze (1992: 274) emphasises, “does not make an action. It is not enough, then, just to accumulate joyful passions; we must find the means, through such accumulation, to win the power of action and so at least experience active affections of which we are the cause”. This, as Tom Roberts (2019) remarks, is a mysterious move on the part of Deleuze. It also inflects a classical interpretation of Spinoza’s ethical project. It was never a simple case of only advocating for the collection and aggregation of joyful and amenable encounters to build towards an ever more adequate intellectual understanding of God—an amor dei intellectualis. More than this, and at the heart of Spinoza’s ethics is the encouragement towards a passionate reason, a passionate mode of speculation, the cultivation of what one might call an amor speculationis—a love of and for speculation. A love embodied, perhaps, by the figure of the speculator, “the one who observes, watches, cultivates the signs of a change in the situation, opening themselves to what, in this situation, might be of importance” (Debaise & Stengers, 2017: 18). For Nietzsche (1878), an on-off Spinozist of sorts, passion is its own insistence, its own impatience (Ansell-Pearson & Ure, 2013). Its imprudence is a speculative motor of thought, and to that end: thought always begins with the passions. These are the beliefs, perceptions, representations, and opinions that attach us to the world and that, by giving us an initial orientation, force and enable us to think. From language to consciousness, everything finds it basis in passion, which makes up the  The taxonomic graft of assaying the various passions (and their relations) is undertaken by Spinoza (1677) himself in Part III of the Ethics. 5

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very material of which our lives and thoughts are composed. (Meiborg & van Tuinen, 2016: 11)

This is not to say that there are not times when passion goes too far, when passions inflame far beyond reasonable control or instead are held hostage to interests outside the realms of speculative thought. For example, there are few corporate outfits left around the globe that have not, at one time or another, enrolled ‘passion’ into a commercial strapline.6 The usual suspects. All seemingly overcome with passion. Therefore, in much the same way Debaise & Stengers (2017) caution against an all-inclusive, ‘anything-goes’ approach to speculative thinking, so too might one apply generative constraints to passionate reason. Not that such constraints or limits are from without. Passion is its own constraint and friction, which is not quite the same as saying that passion has limits or termini. These constraints and frictions are generated, in part, by passion’s oscillation between activity and passivity; speeds and slownesses across transversal registers. Endogenous constraint is also a consequence of passion’s vague and transgressive naturing—neither solely human nor exclusively inhuman. Dislocated from what George Eliot in the aforementioned Middlemarch quote describes as ‘locked chambers’, passions, passionate reason and their epistemic uncertainty offer, therefore, important, albeit tentative, orientations in support of speculative modes of thought.

Speculative Passions To me, of the things outside my power, I esteem none more than being allowed the honour of entering into a pact of friendship with people who sincerely love truth; for I believe that of things outside our power we can love none tranquilly, except such people. (Spinoza qtd in Curley, 1985; Letter 19 to Blijenbergh)

 To identify two somewhat parochial examples: (1) Pret-a-Manger (UK-based sandwich shop franchise): passion is officially designated a ‘core behaviour’ of all its employees; and (2) SEAT, S.A. (Spanish automobile manufacturer): “we are passionate perfectionists, emotional technologists”, see: https:// seat-avto.ru/assets/files/windscreen_tte.pdf. 6

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Spinoza’s generative mode and method of passionate reason was forged in the seventeenth-century religious tumult of the Reformation and during the existential precarity of the Dutch Republic (1588–1795). For Spinoza, passionate reason was the necessary and adequate gesture with which to confront both a strange desiring for seemingly perpetual belligerence and a pernicious anti-intellectualism. Such concerns are, of course, anything but anachronistic, perhaps the only difference between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries is a burgeoning of mediocrity in the latter; a mediocrity in liberal politics and mediocrity in affective attachments to the, likewise, mediocre. We live, Judith Butler (2020) argues, in anti-­ intellectual times.7 A Spinozist insistence, therefore, on passionate reason is arguably one that could steal a march on contemporary forms of mediocrity. As Whitehead (1967: 2) himself remarked, “every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas”. This protest can manifest in the form of speculative reason per Spinoza’s method of passionate rationalism, but it is also a potential protest galvanised by certain kinds and modalities of passion—or rather by certain intensities of passion. Reason on its own, even in its passionate guise, cannot act as a guarantor to speculative thought, in part owing to the risk of propagating a rational insularity. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 130) ask, “[i]s there a colder, more extreme, more self-interested passion than the Cogito?”. What kinds of passion, then, might be understood as ‘speculative’? What would count as a ‘speculative passion’? Put differently, “how do we extend the passions, give them an extension that they do not have of themselves?” (Deleuze, 2004: 167). This is not a modest undertaking. To ‘extend the passions’ is to liberate them from the matrices of law, bureaucracy, rights and contract. Tied to these institutional frameworks or tethered, instead, to emotions, passions lose their speculative ambit. It is clear from the outset that certain passions, indexical to passive affects, simply  The apotheosis of this anti-intellectualism was expressed during a speech delivered in December 2020 by (at the time of drafting) the UK’s Secretary of State for International Trade (and now, at the time of editing, unfathomably, a candidate to be the UK’s next Prime Minister), Liz Truss, in which Michel Foucault was erroneously traduced as a ‘post-modernist’ and held accountable for the ‘failed ideas of the left’. The speech, originally published on an official government website, was subsequently redacted from the public record. 7

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will not do. Fear, for example, insofar as it inhibits powers of knowing and curtails powers of understanding cannot be regarded as speculative. Likewise, hope, a passion underscored by doubt and inconstancy (Spinoza, 1677) lies someway from the threshold of the speculative. In this respect, both fear and hope are tethered to a register of sadness that, whilst not anti-speculative per se, is nonetheless freighted to a diminution in power or potential. Turning to shame or guilt is no more speculative. Chastisement, as evoked in Claudia Rankine’s essay-poetry (2020), cannot be conflated or confused with learning; “we can dispose ourselves either to understand better and so become more active, or to wallow in ignorance and suffering” (Gatens & Uhlmann, 2020: 360). This peculiarly taxonomic search for a speculative passion is in itself something of an uncertain and indeterminate struggle, “a passional struggle, an inexpiable affective combat in which one risks death, in which signs confront signs and affects clash with affects in order that a little joy might be saved that could make us leave the shadow and change kind” (Deleuze, 1997: 145). This appears to invite and involve a little more agonism, even a little more insistent aggression, than perhaps this chapter had anticipated. The point being that speculative passions do not correspond with positive or negative passions in of themselves; a speculative passion is not predicated upon the harmonised existence of a joyful encounter. Indeed, moments of disagreement and dissonance can, themselves, be productive of joyful passions insofar that when bodies disagree with one another, they are reminded of each other’s distinctiveness and, thus, affirmed in their power of becoming and capacity for difference. These differential and speculative capacities are at the dynamic core of Spinoza’s passional and expressive substantial monism in its active register, natura naturans; nature becoming, nature changing itself. This is Spinoza’s Nature folding an infinite array of attributes, refusing, per Whitehead, its translation into modes of experience and perception (Debaise, 2017). It is this active form nature’s substantial unfolding that undoes the act of ‘fixing’ particular passions as notionally speculative, just as it is ontologically incommensurate to attempt to ascribe an ethics based on code or stricture. Therefore, the creation of speculative passions at this register would be to work at the intensive level of micropolitics, “in which consensus and dissensus come into being as coeval powers of

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contagion, negotiation, fostering and invention” (Rousell, 2020: 1402). In the realm of speculative passions this does not mean that anything goes. Whist speculative passions do indeed follow the speculative maxim that “philosophy can exclude nothing” (Debaise, 2017: 162), they otherwise refuse to imbibe a dubious nostalgia for eras and values long since passed (Debaise & Stengers, 2017). An ostensibly passionate yearning for an imagined past is not, in actuality, anything to do with passion in the first place, but rather with inadequate notions of cause. It is this inadequacy, this abrogation of a pragmatic responsibility for thought, that populates the aforementioned ranks of the mediocre moderns. The force of speculative thought is charged by its refusal of first principles. On what indeterminate topologies of ‘ungrounding’, therefore, might speculative passions arise? Where, in that geophilosophical stratification of territory and earth, might the magmatism of speculative passion be traced? Spinozist geographer, Sue Ruddick (2020), in assaying the potential of an ars vivendi—an art of living well, or an artful cultivation of a mutual care for self and others—suggests that such productive passions are not located solely in the place of joyful encounters but are also emergent from more circumspect geographies. This is to account for both difference and “the ambivalence of the multitude” (Ruddick, 2020: 34). In so doing it throws into question the geopolitics of speculative thought. What kinds of affinities or constituencies of bodies—or aggregations/ disambiguation of intensities—would be needed to propagate speculative thinking? The intimation earlier in this chapter was that certain forms of inadequacy need to be countered by an engagement with passionate forms of reason, although it was not inevitable at that point that a turn to passion would ensure the decomposition of false problems. Indeed, the point of insisting on a turn to passionate modes of reasoning is not to destroy false problems since to do so would be to enter into another kind of inadequacy. On this point, Ruddick makes clear, [r]evolution in social organization and in thought appears not in dismissing the false problem, but by establishing the conditions of its conscious actualization. The challenge is not to avoid the sad passions but to engage them actively, to uncover the role they can play in the production of

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thought, following Spinoza’s invocation to explore the meaning of all emotional intensities. (Ruddick, 2020: 35)

In short, how one conceives of the problem of the false problem matters. Moreover, sad passions are not, by default, a roadblock to speculative thought. Following Dekeyser and Jellis’ (2021) compelling critique of affirmationism, it might be argued that an assenting orientation pre-­ disposed to joyful affects can dampen the analytical potential of speculative thought. If nothing else there needs to be a reckoning with the “moments when we are faced with a present whose values, truths, ideals, and privileges are entirely foreign if not hostile to us” (Dekeyser & Jellis, 2021: 5). Negation, as much as affirmation, has the inductive power of a shock to thought and the force to cultivate forms of compassion, a mode of feeling with, making kin, feeling and thinking with those who nevertheless remain ‘other’ in order to discover and invent relevant and novel contrasts and dimensions that are brought to our thinking and understanding by creatively exploring our differences and divergences. (Savransky, 2018: 15)

Tensions will undoubtedly arise from a reading here of Spinoza’s passionate reason in which space is made for negation.8 By way of brief explanation, this gesture does not involve a deliberate courting of the negative or the sad passions for negation’s sake but is simply to suggest that Spinoza’s own affirmation of passionate reason as a pathway to adequacy, or at least towards less inadequacy, is not the same as cultivating positivity or joy in its breezy, vulgar or cliched form.

Conclusion It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into  Tensions that are consonant with others in respect of a contemporary vitalist pushback against ‘negativity’ (see, for example, Roberts & Dewsbury, 2021). 8

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the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. (Eliot, 1872: 329)

If speculative philosophy after Whitehead (1978: 3) concerns a “coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted”, then crucial to this endeavour is the need for its attendant empiricism to be both ‘applicable’ and ‘adequate’. Here, adequate does not denote an idealised resemblance to an ostensible externality but speaks of “a relation between areas of experience” such that adequacy and adequation can be understood as the “relational capacity” of a speculative philosophy (Debaise, 2017: 12 and 13). Therefore, this chapter has argued for a reading of ‘passion’ as in itself speculative, and thus comprising a forceful aspect of speculative thought, both in the fabulation of a passionate reason—a technique for confronting false problems—and in the cultivation of speculative passions. Passions are not merely the passive afflictions of experience, but the active and indeterminate folds of becoming that bring us to our power of knowing and that raise speculative philosophy to the realm of a processual ethics. It is the inadequacy—in Spinozist terms—of speculative passions in all their manifold forms that augments the adequacy—in Whiteheadian terms—of speculative thought and philosophy.

References Ansell-Pearson, K., & Ure, M. (2013). Introduction: Nietzsche and the Passions. Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 44 (1), 1–5. Bennett, M.  J. (2018). Deleuze and Heidegger on Truth and Science. Open Philosophy, 1, 173–190. Braidotti, R. (2019a). Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2019b). Affirmative Ethics and Generative Life. Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 13 (4), 463–481. Butler, J. (2020). In conversation with Alona Ferber: Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”. New Statesman, 22 September 2020. Last accessed December 02, 2020, from https://www.

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newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-warsjk-­rowling-­and-­living-­anti-­intellectual-­times Calder, S. (2015). George Eliot, Spinoza and the Ethics of Literature. In B. Lord (Ed.), Spinoza Beyond Philosophy (pp. 168–187). Edinburgh University Press. Carlisle, C. (Ed.). (2020a). Spinoza’s Ethics: Translated by George Eliot. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carlisle, C. (2020b). George Eliot and Spinoza: Philosophical formations. Victorian Studies, 62 (4), 590–615. Connolly, W. (2019). Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Debaise, D. (2017). Speculative Empiricism: Revisiting Whitehead. Edinburgh University Press. Debaise, D. (2018). The Minoritarian Powers of Thought: Thinking beyond Stupidity with Isabelle Stengers. SubStance, 47(1), 17–28. Debaise, D., & Stengers, I. (2017). The Insistence of Possibles: Towards a Speculative Pragmatism. Parse, 7, 13–19. Dekeyser, T., & Jellis, T. (2021). Besides affirmationism? On geography and negativity. Area. 53 (2) 318-325 Deleuze, G. (1988). Bergsonism. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (1992). Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations: 1972–1990. New  York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1997). Essays critical and clinical (D. W. Smith & M. A. Greco, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2004). Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Eliot, G. (1872). Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. London: Collins’ Clear Type Press. Feuerbach, L. (1983). Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy. In L.  Stepelevich (Ed.), The Young Hegelians (pp.  156–172). Cambridge University Press. Gatens, M., & Uhlmann, A. (2020). Editor’s preface to special issue of Intellectual History Review on Spinoza and Art. Intellectual History Review, 30 (3), 359–361. Grosz, E. (2017). The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

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MacCormack, P. (2012). Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural theory. Farnham: Ashgate. Meiborg, C., & van Tuinen, S. (2016). Introduction. In C. Meiborg & S. van Tuinen (Eds.), Deleuze and the Passions (pp.  9–20). Goleta, CA: Punctum Books. Nietzsche, F. (1878). Human, All Too Human. London: Penguin. Nietzsche, F. (2001). The Gay Science. Cambridge University Press. Rankine, C. (2020). Just Us: An American Conversation. London: Allen Lane, Penguin. Read, J. (2016). The Affective Economy: Producing and Consuming Affects in Deleuze and Guattari. In C. Meiborg & S. van Tuinen (Eds.), Deleuze and the Passions (pp. 103–124). Goleta, CA: Punctum Books. Roberts, T. (2019). In Pursuit of Necessary Joys: Deleuze, Spinoza, and the Ethics of Becoming Active. GeoHumanities, 5 (1), 124–138. Roberts, T., & Dewsbury, J. D. (2021). Vital aspirations for geography in an era of negativity: Valuing life differently with Deleuze. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (6), 1512–1530. Rousell, D. (2020). Doing Little Justices: Speculative Propositions for an Immanent Environmental Ethics. Environmental Education Research, 26 (9–10), 1391–1405. Ruddick, S. (2020). Against a Fatal Confusion: Spinoza, Climate Crisis and the Weave of the World. Intellectual History Review, 30 (3), 505–521. Sangiacomo, A. (2019). Spinoza on Reason, Passions, and the Supreme Good. Oxford University Press. Savransky, M. (2018). Introduction: Isabelle Stengers and the Dramatization of Philosophy. SubStance, 47 (1), 3–16. Sharp, H. (2011). Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Spinoza, B. (1677). Ethics. London: Penguin. Spinoza, B. (1985). Letter 19: B.D.S. to the very learned and prudent Willem van Blijenbergh. In E. Curley (Ed.), The Collected Works of Spinoza (Vol. 1, pp. 357–361). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stengers, I. (2011). Thinking with Whitehead: a Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. New York, NY: The Free Press, Macmillan Publishing. Whitehead, A. N. (1967). The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York, NY: The Free Press, Macmillan Publishing. Zovko, M-É. (2014). Impassioned by Passion: Knowledge and Love in Plato and Spinoza. Dionysius, 31, 140–172.

6 Three Speculative Dispositions After William James: Towards a Concept of Pre-cursive Faith Carlota de La Herrán Iriarte

Introduction: Taking a ‘Terrible’ Leap Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and you have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things that you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll into the abyss. (James, 2009: 119)

Within the last decade, the notion of speculation has attracted widespread attention within geography and the social sciences. Previously confined to the conjectural and divinatory practices of scholastic philosophers and ancient Greek seers, geographers and social scientists are C. de La Herrán Iriarte (*) School of Science, University of New South Wales Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_6

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developing innovative, conceptual and empirical approaches to speculation in relation to a range of topics, including cinema (Woodward, 2016), material design (Roberts, 2014), smart city urbanism (Tironi, 2018), environmental sensing (Gabrys, 2017), post-crisis capitalism (Bear, 2020) and activist philosophy (Massumi, 2011), amongst others. Instead of complacently reifying our pre-established, all too human habits, a speculative mode of thought calls us to attend to that which cannot be known, calculated or acted upon in advance (Duvernoy, 2016). As the word’s etymological definition suggests, from the Latin verb speculari, meaning ‘to look from above, to observe’ (Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d.), this is about actively looking for, as opposed to passively looking at, the “differences, relations, novelties and potentialities” that incessantly impregnate a concrete empirical situation (Savransky, 2021: 155). Following the hypothetical example that James describes in the quote above from The Will to Believe, speculation, just like when you climb a mountain, entails a risk, for which, as well as having to be physically and mentally, or in this case, theoretically and methodologically prepared, we must take a “terrible leap” of faith (2009: 119). In this example, however, faith does not adhere to the doctrinal prescriptions traditionally upheld by religion. Rather, in conceptualising it as the micro-subjective, spiritual force that makes us think, believe and act, James reworks faith pragmatically (Lapoujade, 2019). Coming before we have laden it with our subjective expectations, this kind of faith serves as the essential, ‘pre-cursive’ and not pre-meditative condition, which induces us to speculatively explore and experience new and unforeseen connections with the world, yet without determining how or why (James, 2009: 69). If we decide then to embrace such pragmatic perspective on faith as a starting point, how might we understand speculation today? And what might this entail for our geographic and social scientific engagements with the speculative? In this chapter I address such questions. Despite having undergone “something of a renaissance” in social theory, the work of American pragmatist William James, together with that of other American pragmatists such as John Dewey and Richard Rorty, remains significantly under-examined within the research field of speculation (Savransky, 2017: 26). Reversing this trend, Debaise and Stengers (2018), as well as Savransky (2017), have examined the speculative

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potential inherent to James’ philosophical preoccupation with the ‘practical consequences’ that our thinking might have, beyond any prior representational considerations. Particularly, in emphasising how our thoughts are immediately felt and not dogmatically held, such endeavours have further argued for the necessity of coming to terms with the processual conception of experience that James articulates through his radical empiricism. Indeed, understanding experience as a constant flux, which is neither subjective nor objective, psychical or physical (Lapoujade, 2019), James’ radical empiricism provides the means through which to sidestep the fallacious, bifurcated vision of the world that an experimental form of speculation stands against (Savransky, 2017). After James then, speculation does not presuppose an isolated, thinking subject. Rather, by binding us to the present and heading us towards a future, without guarantees, speculation testifies for a transformation in our ways of thinking, validating and acting (Stengers, 2008). In taking this “apparent unnatural marriage” between the speculative and the pragmatic further (Debaise & Stengers, 2018: 19), this chapter seeks to explore how we might rethink speculation as having more to do with an experimental, micro-subjective venture than with a specific method or practico-theoretical tool. Combining James’ radical empiricism with some aspects of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, which similarly advances an immanent approach that prioritises those intensive moments, which erase any prior subject-object distinction, the chapter will present three speculative dispositions through which to amplify our openness towards an indeterminate, unfinished world: (1) an aesthetic sensibility towards sensation; (2) a testable attitude towards genuine problems; (3) a pre-cursive faith in the in-between. As highlighted by the biographical details about James provided at the beginning of each of the sections that follow, it is important to be clear that what is at stake here is an alternative way of thinking, one which seeks less to instruct and more to “learn with and from” the thinkers engaged (Stengers in Savransky & Stengers, 2018: 131). In doing so, my aim is to examine the ethico-­ political implications that moving towards a concept of pre-cursive faith might have for geography, the social sciences and beyond.

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An Aesthetic Sensibility Towards Sensation Son of American theologian Henry James Sr and brother to the renowned American novelist Henry James, William James was born into a family of intellectual privilege. As a result of this, since an early age, James received a complete and varied education in continental languages, religious studies, the sciences, and the humanities (Kaag, 2021). Particularly, amongst the diverse intellectual interests that he developed, James had a strong passion for painting, which, even if he did not pursue professionally, provided him with an aesthetic sensibility towards the world that would later become the cornerstone of his “pluralistic philosophy of experience” (Savransky, 2021: 146). Challenging the absolutist assumptions that pervaded nineteenth-­ century psychology and science, James articulates a pluralistic philosophy of experience, which no longer reduces it to a static set of observable facts. Rather, by resisting any absolutist reference to the one or the many, James conceptualises experience as a patchwork of conjunctive and disjunctive relations, which grows by its edges (Lapoujade, 2019). As he sets out in his essay Does Consciousness Exist? such conceptualisation of experience constitutes the basis of his renewed, radical version of empiricism. Defined as that which “neither admits into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor excludes from them any element that is directly experienced”, radical empiricism asserts the primacy of those immediately felt events, processes and series that precede our conventional conceptual representations (James, 2010: 44). Specifically, in unsettling the classical empiricist separation between the psychical realm of the knowing subject and the physical realm of the known object, this corresponds to the immanent view of the world that Deleuze advances through his transcendental empiricism (Duvernoy, 2016). As Bignall et al. (2014) argue, it is precisely here, where we can see the strong influence that James, via the studies on Anglo-American philosophy of his university teacher Jean Wahl and the works of Henri Bergson, had upon Deleuze’s thinking. Whereas James focuses on articulating a processual interpretation of consciousness, which exceeds all received psychological forms, Deleuze (1997) theorises a plane of immanence that is immanent

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in itself and not to an already constituted, transcendent subject. Ultimately though, both empiricists enact the same operation, which is to extract the pre-individual and impersonal zone that lies at the “genesis of sensibility and thought as such” (Heaney, 2018: 376). Given the pre-individual and impersonal zones that James and Deleuze move us towards, how might we frame the relation between speculation, as a mode of thought, and the material drops and connections that continuously stretch the tissue of experience? Clearly, such relation cannot remain subordinated to the authority of an all-knowing, “man [sic] in isolation”, who merely worships “the thoughts of another man [sic] in isolation” (Koopman, 2014: xi). Responding to this challenge, James introduces the notion of ‘ambulatory cognition’, whose nature, as opposed to the ‘saltatory cognition’ that he associates with transcendental philosophies, is inherently speculative. Rather than being governed by a “common superior form”, an ambulatory cognition generates itself transversally, as it de-ambulates across those intensive moments of ‘pure experience’ in which the thought-of-an-object and the object-thought-of double up (Lapoujade, 2019: 44). Likewise, for Deleuze, in being neither subjective nor objective, neither mental nor physical, but also “both at once, simultaneously, albeit still virtually”, such moments emphasise the central role that sensation plays in the emergence of thought (Lapoujade, 2019: 17). Indeed, in his study of Francis Bacon’s paintings, Deleuze (2003) tells us that sensation has the capacity to ‘violently’ stimulate our neural pathways, spiritual energies and bodily movements before we have time to register such effects. As James further adds when describing a reader’s immanently ‘pure’, as opposed to phenomenologically intentional, experience of a room, sensation captures: the that in short (for until we have decided what it is it must be a mere that) is the last term of a train of sensations, emotions, decisions, movements, classifications, expectations, etc., ending in the present, and the first term of a series of similar ‘inner’ operations extending into the future, on the reader’s part. On the other hand, the very same that is the terminus ad quem of a lot of previous physical operations, carpentering, papering, furnishing, warming, etc., and the terminus a quo of a lot of future ones, in

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which it will be concerned when undergoing the destiny of a physical room. (2010: 34)

Thus, by prioritising the demonstrative that over the interrogative what, James’ (2010) radical empiricism points us towards a mode of thought which thinks less in terms of the cognitive capacities of an individual, human subject and more according to the felt, “physical-mental material” virtualities and relations that render it indistinct from a concrete empirical object (Lapoujade, 2019: 3). After James then, speculation can be reconfigured as a ‘virtualised’ kind of experimental endeavour, which, in order to carry out without falling back on any given divide between the dogmatic and the experiential, requires us, both geographers and social scientists, to cultivate an aesthetic sensibility towards sensation.

A Testable Attitude Towards Genuine Problems The late 1860s marked a turning point for James. Having struggled with some physical and psychological impairments throughout his youth, in 1869, James fell into a deep depression, which eventually drove him to the edge of suicide. Overwhelmed by the terror that struck American society during the civil war (1861–1865), James had for a long time been carrying within him a profound despair towards life. Brought up as a Christian, such despair was further aggravated by the fact that he was not finding comfort within his own religion that “had little to offer beyond the usual negative, ‘Thou shall not’” (2009: 85). As Kaag suggests, this awoke within James an insatiable thirst for “modest, testable beliefs and truths” (2021: 6) upon which he would later base his pragmatic critique of determinism: It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. The future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb; the part we call the present is compatible with only one totality. Any other future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and

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welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning. (2009: 67)

Understanding reality to be continuously in-the-making, James puts forward a pragmatics of thought, which seeks to depart from the rigid deterministic position described above. Particularly, in evaluating ideas at the level of their practical consequences and not of their abstract codifications, James’ pragmatics reconsiders the question of truth. Throughout much of the history of Western scientific thought, the search for truth has acted as the universal standard upon which scientists and other deterministic thinkers have relied to validate their claims, beyond all doubt. Yet, as opposed to conceptualising it according to what it is in opposition to falsehood, James focuses on how truth “happens to an idea” as it verifies itself virtually within experience (in Lapoujade, 2019: 33). Thus, if taking forward such pragmatic account of truth: what kind of alternative criteria might we apply to validate our own geographic and social scientific speculative efforts? Through his discussion of Pascal’s Wager in The Will to Believe, James (2009) gives us some hints. Formulated by seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal in his Pensées, Pascal’s Wager offers us a pragmatic argument for the existence of God. Even though having reservations about the transcendental assumptions, specifically those of Catholicism upon which the argument is framed, James and likewise Deleuze in his cinema books re-appropriate the wager immanently. Conceiving it as more than a mere debate around “belief, non-­ belief or abstention” (Cullen, 2020: 216), this responds to the immanent privileging of choice over causation that both thinkers pursue. On the one hand, in James’ case, via his critique of Clifford’s evidentialist theory of belief, and on the other, in Deleuze’s, via his adoption of Nietzsche’s concept of the dice throw (Bogue, 2006). Instead of reasserting the rigid principle of cause and effect, typically associated with the deterministic view which states that “the dice are already cast, that one is unable to change anything, to make a difference”, choice makes chance an inherent pragmatic criterion for the production of knowledge (Stengers, 2009: 3). In this way, what matters is not whether we can predict with certainty why a situation will unfold in a particular way, but rather how we can

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come to know what it might demand from us, when affirming an “unstable, indeterminate world” (Lapoujade, 2019: 62). As Savransky (2021) highlights through his re-reading of the Jamesian notion of the genuine option, this entails attending to those genuine, or empirically significant, problems that force us to think and believe, without knowing before whether they are true or not. However, instead of providing a totalising solution, which merely imposes a pre-defined pathway for action, James urges us to experimentally test ourselves through the multiple, unforeseen possibilities generated by such problems. Following Cullen (2020) then, the emphasis is not placed upon the individual terms that constitute problems, but rather upon the concrete interrelations between the “laid down” and the ongoing and unfinished that reconfigure both options as equally genuine (James, 2009: 67). Thus, by reworking the production of knowledge itself as a wager on the hypothetical, indeterminate, or virtual, James’ pragmatics of thought foregrounds an alternative method of validation, one which validates experience less according to an abstract form of truth, and more according to the chance of the conceptual-empirical moment in which we throw the dice and the dice falls back, specifying a new mode of existence (Bogue, 2006). Consequently, if we wish to more effectively appreciate the “differences, relations, novelties and potentialities” that problematising the speculative might lead to, it is important for us, both geographers and social scientists, to cultivate a testable attitude towards genuine problems (Savransky, 2021: 155).

 Pre-cursive Feeling of Faith A in the In-Between In August 1870, James went through a psychologically and spiritually transformative experience while coming across French philosopher and mystic Charles Renouvier’s second Essais (Kaag, 2021). Indeed, insisting upon the importance of acting upon one’s free will, Renouvier gave James the courage he needed to regain the “healthy love of life” that he had previously lost (James, 2009: 298). As Lamarre remarks, this evolved into

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a continued reference to “the inner”, “inwardness”, “personal religion and individual experience” (in Lapoujade, 2019: 99), which would become key in fostering the pre-cursive “feeling of faith” that saved him (Lapoujade, 2019: 35). Interested in exploring that something ‘more’ and besides ourselves that relates us to the world, James develops an individualised approach towards religion. As he announces at the start of The Varieties of Religious Experience, such approach is not concerned with “religious institutions” (James, 2002: 40). Instead, by complimenting it with his long-time fascination for altered states of consciousness and psychic phenomena, James, who would become the father of American psychology, focuses on those often invisible spiritual feelings, impulses and passions, which shape our religious and psychological experiences at a micro-level. Comparatively, in corresponding to “the order of dreams, of pathological processes, of esoteric experiences, of drunkenness, and excess” characteristic of Deleuze’s plane of immanence, this speaks to the simultaneous folding of the inside and the outside that underpins a micro-subjective sense of self (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 41). While for James, such sense of self involves a persistent reliance upon the individual as his preferred method of access, Deleuze associates it to a non-psychoanalytic, and thereby non-individuated, conception of the unconscious (Smith, 2007). Despite their conceptual and methodological differences, both thinkers seek to liberate us from the “stable, established dogmas” that prevent us from establishing and experiencing novel connections with the world (Lapoujade, 2019: 62). Therefore, the question for geographers and social scientists is: what role do such micro-subjective, spiritual aspects play within our speculative endeavours? For James, the answer to this question lies within his pragmatic notion of faith. Defining it as “a lawful and possibly indispensable thing”, James provides an understanding of faith which does not respond to doctrinal readings of it (2009: 63). Indeed, even if embracing a “limited (Christian) God”, James takes faith beyond the religious sphere (Connolly, 2011: 75). Linking it to a general architecture of belief, which encompasses the spiritual powers inherent not only to religion, but also to the arts, to nature and to love, faith can be seen as the micro-subjective, spiritual force that binds us to the world. Similarly to Deleuze’s conception of

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desire (Smith, 2007), faith has the capacity to reconcile our innermost needs with their empirical context, making us think, believe and act without enforcing a pre-determined goal or purpose (Lapoujade, 2019). As Stengers argues through her examination of the mountaineering example quoted at the beginning of the chapter, faith is then “what is required” when no assurances are offered (2009: 16). This is not to say however, that faith is “some abstract notion” to which we can hold on blindly (Halewood, 2018: 5). Rather, in emerging in-between the psychical and the physical, faith after James serves as the “pre-cursive” and not pre-meditative condition (2009: 62), which speculatively induces us to take the terrible leap into the unknown and indeterminate that will save us from rolling “into the abyss” (James, 2009: 119). Ultimately though, as James (2009) realised when asking himself again the question, ‘Is life worth living?’ in 1895, whether you succeed or not and thereby have faith or not in your own abilities and those of the world in which you apply them depends upon your power to choose. Responding to what Bogue conceptualises as an “immanent ethics of ‘choosing to choose’” (2006: 33), such power addresses the risk that you, both as a liver and as a gambler in your own life, are willing to take when choosing to invest in the possibility of a transformed future: he who makes the leap, or Pascal’s gambler, he who throws the dice, are men of a transcendence or a faith. But they constantly recharge immanence: they are philosophers or, rather, intercessors, conceptual personae who stand in for two philosophers and who are concerned no longer with the transcendent existence of God but only with the infinite immanent possibilities brought by the one who believes that God exists. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 74)

Thus, by placing us in-between the conjunctions of the psychical and the physical that arise within a concrete empirical moment (Halewood, 2018), James’ concept of pre-cursive faith bespeaks of an alternative model of action, one which acts less upon our pre-meditated, rationalistic calculations, and more upon the micro-subjective, spiritual forces that implicate us in a mental/physical world. As such, if we wish to enhance our speculative capacity to act, which involves us ‘choosing to choose’

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between one mode of life over the other (Bogue, 2006), there is a need for us, both geographers and social scientists, to cultivate a pre-cursive feeling of faith in the in-between.

Conclusion: Faith as a Veritable Aesthetic Of course, we continue to act as we always do, and undoubtedly even with a considerable ‘return’, but do we still believe in our actions? With what intensity? Do we still believe in the world that makes us act? How can we feel faith in others have faith in ourselves, and even have faith in the world? Which philosophy, which doctrine, will restore our faith? (Lapoujade, 2019: 6)

Taking James’ pragmatic notion of faith as a starting point, this chapter has sought to rethink how geographers and social scientists might approach speculation today. Even if writing at a time when the thought of American transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, who preached on the faith of the individual in the “power of Nature”, was on the rise, James does not stand by such transcendentalist project (Lapoujade, 2019: 4). Rather, as I have highlighted through the risky mountaineering example that James describes at the beginning of The Will to Believe, faith can be reworked as the essential “pre-cursive” and not pre-meditative condition, which speculatively induces us to take the ‘terrible’ leap into the unknown and indeterminate yet without determining how or why (2009: 62). Thus, if we understand speculation as having less to do with a specific method or practico-theoretical tool to apply within concrete empirical settings such as: smart city urbanism (Tironi, 2018), environmental sensing (Gabrys, 2017) or post-crisis capitalism (Bear, 2020), and more with an experimental, micro-subjective venture within an unstable, unfinished world, what kind of ethico-political implications might moving towards a concept of pre-cursive faith have for geography, the social sciences and beyond? In his recent book Sick Souls, Healthy Minds How William James Can Save Your Life, Kaag (2021) helps us to think through such question. Although criticised by some for being yet another attempt at “peddling

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philosophy to the masses” as “spiritual therapy” (Eagleton, 2020: n.p.), Kaag (2021) shows us that James provides the ethico-political means through which to restore our faith in this world and not in another. As Stengers further suggests when stating that his pragmatics favours “the refusal of certain effects, accepted as perfectly legitimate by many ‘ethical’ philosophers”, James develops a way of thinking which is not merely intellectual (2009: 9). Indeed, by demanding we, both as researchers and as livers, attend to those “moments of energetic living” in which the spiritual force of a particular artwork, natural landscape or romantic feeling revitalises you both psychically and physically, such way of thinking proposes an alternative ethos of life (James, 2009: 144). Likewise Deleuze, in endorsing faith as a “veritable aesthetic”, such ethos is one which strives to give us the courage to not be afraid of choosing how we want to live (1994: 57). The point then is not to think, validate and act according to our “stable, established dogmas” (Lapoujade, 2019: 62). Instead, as I have argued in this chapter, it is about cultivating the speculative dispositions which amplify our openness towards the novel and unforeseen connections that can radically transform, at the micro-level, our research experiences and more importantly, our daily lives.

References Bear, L. (2020). Speculation: A political economy of technologies of imagination. Economy and Society, 49(1), 1–15. Bignall, S., et al. (2014). Deleuze and pragmatism. Routledge. Bogue, R. (2006). Choisir de choisir—croire en ce monde/To Choose to Choose—To Believe in this World. Cinémas: revue d'études cinématographiques/ Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, 16(2–3), 32–52. Connolly, W. E. (2011). A world of becoming. Duke University Press. Cullen, J. (2020). Deleuze and ethology: A philosophy of entangled life. Bloomsbury e-book: GB. Debaise, D., & Stengers, I. (2018). The insistence of possibles: Towards a speculative pragmatism. Parse Journal, 12–19. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. Trans. by P.  Patton. Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1997). Immanence: A life … theory. Culture and Society, 14(2), 3–7.

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Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation. Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press. Duvernoy, R. J. (2016). “Pure experience” and “planes of immanence”: From James to Deleuze. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 30(4), 427–451. Eagleton, T. (2020, 7 May). Sick souls, healthy minds by John Kaag review – can William James save your life? The Guardian. Accessed on 15 January 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/07/ sick-­s ouls-­h ealthy-­m inds-­b y-­j ohn-­k aag-­r eview-­c an-­w illiam-­j ames-­ save-­your-­life Gabrys, J. (2017). Citizen sensing, air pollution and fracking: From ‘caring about your air’ to speculative practices of evidencing harm. The Sociological Review, 65(2_Suppl), 172–192. Halewood, M. (2018). A question of faith?: Stengers and Whitehead on causation and conformation. SubStance, 47(1), 80–95. Heaney, C. (2018). Pursuing Joy with Deleuze: Transcendental empiricism and affirmative naturalism as worldly practice. Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 12(3), 374–401. James, W. (2002). The varieties of religious experience: A centenary edition: A study in human nature. Routledge. James, W. (2009). The will to believe: And other essays in popular philosophy. Longmans, Green and Co. Accessed on January 6, 2021, from https://www. gutenberg.org/files/26659/26659-­h/26659-­h.htm James, W. (2010). Essays in radical empiricism. Longmans, Green and Co. http:// www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32547 Kaag, J. (2021). Sick souls, healthy minds: How William James can save your life. Princeton University Press. Koopman, C. (2014). Preface. In S. Bignall et al. (Eds.), Deleuze and pragmatism. Routledge. Lapoujade, D. (2019). William James: Empiricism and pragmatism. Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2011). Semblance and event: Activist philosophy and the occurrent arts. MIT Press. Online Etymology Dictionary. (n.d.) Speculate. Retrieved February 11, 2021, from: https://www.etymonline.com/word/speculate Roberts, T. (2014). From things to events: Whitehead and the materiality of process. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(6), 968–983. Savransky, M. (2017). The wager of an unfinished present: Notes on speculative pragmatism. In A. Wilkie et al. (Eds.), Speculative research: The lure of possible futures (pp. 43–56). Routledge.

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Savransky, M. (2021). The pluralistic problematic: William James and the pragmatics of the pluriverse. Theory, Culture and Society, 38(2), 141–159. Savransky, M., & Stengers, I. (2018). Relearning the art of paying attention: A conversation. SubStance, 47(1), 130–145. Smith, D. W. (2007). Deleuze and the question of desire: Towards an immanent theory of ethics. Parrhesia, 2, 66–78. Stengers, I. (2008). Experimenting with refrains: Subjectivity and the challenge of escaping modern dualism. Subjectivity, 22(1), 38–59. Stengers, I. (2009). William James: An ethics of thought? Radical Philosophy, 157(September/October, 2019), 9–19. Tironi, M. (2018). Speculative prototyping, frictions and counter-participation: A civic intervention with homeless individuals. Design Studies, 59, 117–138. Woodward, K. (2016). The speculative geography of Orson Welles. Cultural Geographies, 23(2), 337–356.

Part II Technologies

7 Towards Speculative Praxis: Finding the Politics in Speculation with Deleuze and Design Kieran Cutting

Introduction There is a growing tendency to refer to Whitehead’s speculative philosophy as the central source for understanding and theorizing the purpose and potentials of speculation (Debaise & Stengers, 2016; Mazzei, 2020). Whilst Whitehead’s philosophy may “encourage[e] us to think and act in ways that we might not have done otherwise” (Shaviro, 2019: 2), it contains an understated political imperative. There is no sense of political necessity in Whitehead’s philosophy, but an ethical call to explore alternate ways of being and other ways to live well (Savransky et al., 2017). Engaging with Whitehead’s focus on alternate ways of being, in this chapter I focus on two alternate modes of speculation—one from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the other from the design tradition of speculative design. These alternate foundations ask different questions of our speculative practices and call more sharp

K. Cutting (*) Open Lab, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_7

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attention to the politics of speculation. Many of Whitehead and Deleuze’s key questions remain the same, after all: How is it that there is always something new? How are novelty and change possible? How can we account for a future that is different from, and not merely predetermined by, the past? (Shaviro, 2007: 23)

Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of multiplicity, virtuality and novelty might therefore act as a generative entryway for speculation. For Whitehead, novel propositions are valuable for how they might make us think differently about the world. For Deleuze and Guattari, though, the value of an alternative is in its politics: how can we conceptualize novelty at a time when the desire-producing forces of capitalism are producing the new to enclose and accumulate ever more? Deleuze and Guattari thus direct us to consider the nature and purpose of our speculations. Rebecca Coleman’s work (2017) has shown the importance of thinking through Deleuzian empiricism—which focuses on the production of the new (i.e. novelty and creativity)—in thinking speculatively. Here, I want to think about Deleuzian speculation to develop a praxis that can be used to actively improve material conditions. For Deleuze, praxis is not merely an enactment of theory, but an attempt to “break through” the problems and walls encountered when applying theories outside of the limited domains they were originally developed within (Deleuze, 2004: 206). To develop a speculative praxis, then, is to engage in “the ongoing creation of further relations of possibility” through deterritorialization (Colebrook, 2020: 365), and to use these possibilities to political ends. In parallel, speculative design has been gathering momentum for the past few decades. As with critical design and design fictions, the purpose of speculative design is to “allow critical reflection through future narratives … often mediated through objects” (Forlano, 2013). These artefacts deal with the ambiguous and liminal space of the potentially fictional, exploring how audiences make sense of “hypothetical possibilities … utopian concepts and dystopian counter-products” (Auger, 2013). Speculative design is explicitly centred on how we might use speculation as a practice to “collectively define a preferable future” (Dunne & Raby, 2013: 6). More recently, the framing of speculative interventions has

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begun to circulate as a way to describe speculative projects which are done “through design, not necessarily for design” (DiSalvo, 2016: 140). These interventions enable participants to experiment with different potentials, to determine whether they might want to live in a given future, or whether they are comfortable with what that future suggests about their present. Here, I consider how we can draw on Deleuzian speculation and speculative design to develop a speculative praxis. I begin by theorizing how a speculative praxis might work by thinking through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization, and how it might apply in the context of anti-capitalist design practice. I then reflect on the use of these methods within a three-year participatory design and ethnography project. In this project, I developed a card game designed with the mechanics of deterritorialization in mind to support young people to imagine meaningful futures for themselves. I detail how the card game functions and show how the game enabled the enactment of a speculative praxis through the imagining of new potential pasts, presents and futures. In doing so, I highlight the uses of a Deleuzian and design-led approach to speculation and suggest how its playful yet political orientation might be generative.

Locating Speculation in Deleuze and Design In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari (1987) portray deterritorialization as an experience of the oncoming horizon of ‘the new’. When a novel element enters a system, it may attempt to either incorporate it or reject it entirely. If the system attempts to incorporate it, a moment of deterritorialization occurs that expands its range of potential classifications and meanings. This is always accompanied by a (re)territorialization, which contracts the potentials, creating new and different boundaries. For Deleuze and Guattari, this is inextricably political, as capitalism represents the “generalized decoding of flows” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 153) and is thus constantly searching for ways to incorporate any new elements and (re)territorialize them with its own agenda of accumulation and value-extraction. It is precisely the constant (re)territorialization of these capitalist agendas that creates the conditions for

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what Mark Fisher refers to as capitalist realism: “the widespread sense that … it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to [capitalism]” (2009: 2). Capitalist realism guides towards an understanding of the dangers and difficulties of resisting capitalism’s plasticity. Shonkwiler and Berge (2014: 6) describe these as the ability of capitalism to: • constantly revolutionize its sources of and strategies for accumulation, developing new configurations of activity; • have an economic, social and affective life that has vast consequences for our lived experiences; and • transform this constant change and lived experience into a widely accepted brand of Gramscian “common sense”. Considered through the lens of (re)territorialization, we can understand capitalist realism as a tightly territorialized system in which ‘the new’ can never be authentically produced because capitalism is able to project its own agendas onto it. Herein lies the political dimension of speculative thinking: if our ability to produce ‘the new’ is cut off by a tightly territorialized capitalist system, then we become stuck inside of existing ways of being and doing, unable to articulate or enact alternatives. Following O’Sullivan and Zepke, then, the question for Deleuzian speculative thinking becomes “how can we achieve and maintain … the genuine production of the new”, and how can this work as “the means and end of a practical philosophy?” (O’Sullivan & Zepke, 2008: 1). If we attempt to turn the production of ‘the new’ into a practical philosophy, we necessarily find ourselves considering questions of praxis— how can a theory of deterritorialization become actionable? Deleuze maintains that praxis is not a strict application of theory, but instead posits that theory and praxis have a “fragmentary and partial” relationship to each other, whereby praxis is a “network of relays from one theoretical point to another” and theory “relays one praxis to another” (Deleuze, 2004: 206). Theory and praxis, then, are mutually enmeshed in each other, and finding ways to interrupt the processes of deterritorialization and (re)territorialization before capitalism projects its own agendas onto it thus asks us to construct a speculative praxis. Such a praxis

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would use deterritorialization as a method to begin imagining alternatives to capitalist realism, whilst remaining mindful of capitalism’s plasticity and thus ability to negatively (re)territorialize towards commodification and alienation. This is not to say that capitalism is keeping humanity from some essential nature that needs recovering, but that capitalism is preventing humanity from “mov[ing] towards something radically Other … about which we cannot know how and what it will be” (Foucault & Trombadori, 1991: 121). Such a speculative praxis is already being advanced by speculative designers. Speculative design is an approach to design practice based in “creat[ing] spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being” (Dunne & Raby, 2013: 2). Like other traditions that eschew the conventions and constraints of market-driven design practices, speculative design uses fiction, diegetic prototypes and an orientation towards the future (Auger, 2013) as methods for creating believable portraits of alternate worlds. These worlds might be a possible future, a critical portrayal of the present, an alternate history or even a fictional world bound by different constraints than our own. In creating these alternatives, speculative designers hope to create situations that reveal unexplored tensions, unarticulated problems, and mediate discourses for potential social change through the reframing of desires, habits and values (Tironi, 2018; Williams & Collet, 2020). As a practice, then, speculative design engages in the work of surfacing political ideas and ways of being through the creation or use of artefacts. Yet speculative design need not be limited by its design framing. DiSalvo (2016: 140) explains that speculative designs are themselves a kind of ‘intervention’, in that they are performed “through design, not necessarily for design”. Speculative interventions are both “descriptive and generative” in that they create an event which is also “an imaginative conjecture of a design future” (DiSalvo, 2016: 147). Speculative design, therefore, uses processes of design to embody and enact potential futures, enabling experimentation and highlighting potential conditions that we might wish to work towards or avoid. Yet these experiments can also become longer-term socio-political configurations through prefiguration. Prefiguration is resurgent as an idea within both geography (Jeffrey & Dyson, 2020) and design (Asad, 2019) and calls attention to how political movements can embody the “forms of

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social relations, decision-making, culture and human experience that are the ultimate goal” of the movement through their “ongoing political practice” (Boggs, 1977: 7). Prefigurative design, then, asks how the politics and sociotechnical arrangement of an imagined future might be expressed within a design process rather than just the artefact, system or service that is the end of that process (Asad et al., 2017: 2304). Prefigurative speculative interventions can act as a practical tool for creating new futures and working towards new social arrangements. In doing so, they actively engage with the forces of deterritorialization, seeking the creation of authentically new things and then creating socio-­ political configurations. Though this may sometimes necessitate the creation of artefacts, systems or services, it may equally require using the tools and methods of design to structure an environment that makes the creation of new futures possible. In the next section, I consider the potentials and opportunities of a speculative praxis centred on prefigurative interventions by reflecting on an event held in October 2019, designed to help young people with lived experience of oppression and trauma reflect on their experiences and imagine new futures.

 uild the Future: A Prefigurative B Speculative Intervention As part of a longer-term participatory design and ethnography project with The Charity,1 I created and ran a prefigurative workshop called Build the Future1 in October 2019. Build the Future was the first opportunity I had to trial design methods developed to enact a speculative praxis. The Charity was interested in understanding what young people wanted for their futures at a time of socio-political change in the UK, including the EU membership referendum and its associated parliamentary turmoil. They felt that young people had been overlooked through their inability to participate in formal political processes and wanted to put the needs  The Charity is a fictional amalgamation of several charities that I have worked with. Build the Future is a pseudonym for a project undertaken with The Charity, to ensure the anonymity of those involved. 1

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and wants of young people back on the policy agenda. Eighty-five people attended Build the Future—a mixture of young people with lived experience of oppression and trauma, frontline workers and ‘civic leaders’.2 The event was held across five hours and centred on a card game designed to support the process of enacting a speculative praxis. The day had four components, detailed below, with each lasting roughly an hour. 1. What would transform your life? Participants were invited to write on three blank cards something that would completely transform their lives if it happened in the next five years. These cards were collected, shuffled and dealt back out to participants. Taking it in turns, participants could then either play a card, and explain why someone might think that is important, or connect a card, and explain why those issues are related. This process was designed to connect participants that had never met each other before by building solidarity between them. It also enabled them to find shared issues of concern that would form the basis of the future they were imagining in the rest of the day’s activities. This acted as a counter-­articulation, a moment of shared novelty. 2. How are things now? Participants took the shared issues that they identified in the previous activity and used these as a way to think about a possible past. This activity asked the participants to think backwards and identify who or what might have been involved in making things the way they are now with regards to their shared concerns. For example, if a group’s shared concern centred on climate change, then this activity would ask how the world might have arrived at a situation in which anthropogenic climate change was a threat to their futures, who might have been involved, and what they might have done. This activity was designed to reveal a sense of contingency and fluidity.  The Charity framed the individuals involved as ‘civic leaders’. Attendees of the event were incredibly varied, from senior civil servants to influential individuals in large multinational corporations and CEOs of charities, hence why I have opted to refer to these subjects as ‘civic leaders’. 2

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3. Dreaming the future Participants were presented with everyday activities—such as going to the cinema, walking around a park, or travelling to visit friends— and asked how these activities might be different in a world that had made the changes that they wanted for the future. This activity was designed to articulate a shared vision of the future—to explore what this might feel like in order to make it seem possible. It aimed to supplant the capitalist realist imaginary that ‘there is no alternative’ and offer a practical vision of how everyday life might be different. 4. Building the future Participants were invited to make the connection between their everyday life and their future by thinking of practical changes they could personally make to get closer to that world. As groups were composed of young people, frontline workers and civic leaders, this activity was informed by a variety of identities and positionalities. Participants then wrote these actions on ‘Blueprint for the Future’ cards and took these home with them as a reminder of their commitment to continued action. This final activity was intended to complete the loop, ensuring that the intervention rounded out with practical actions that would help to build the material conditions to support the futures that participants had collectively imagined.

How Does Speculative Praxis Operate? The central purpose of Build the Future was to centre the experiences, wants and needs of young people with lived experiences of oppression and trauma. Children and young people are often positioned as “powerless and vulnerable” (Cutting & Peacock, 2021: 2) within both policy and research, and are frequently side-lined in discussions around the future. Most visions of the future which circulate in contemporary society are those of adults with little experience of oppression or trauma— often focusing on technosolutionistic ‘fixes’ to social problems (see Keyes et  al., 2019). Instead, by creating spaces for young people to imagine coherent alternatives to our current reality, they deterritorialized these existing visions of the future, displacing them by producing ‘new’ visions. This is a view of speculative praxis (and thus deterritorialization) which

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functions like minor theory (Katz, 1996): the production of ‘minor’ knowledges which rework the very notion of marginality by decomposing the majority view. Through the four components of the workshop, speculative praxis focuses on identifying practical methods of producing alternate modes of going on through processes of deterritorialization. For Deleuze, deterritorialization occurs when a novel element enters a system and the system attempts to incorporate it into itself, expanding its range of potential classifications and meanings in the process. In Build the Future, every aspect—from the framing of the event, to the form of materials used, to the methods themselves—was built around speculative praxis. If territorialization is a process of capitalist realism, speculative praxis cannot simply produce ‘the new’: it must identify ways that the new can meaningfully develop, continuing to exist without being commodified by an infinitely plastic capitalism. Within design, cards are well known for their ability to become shared objects of discussion through their mobility, persistence and annotatability, alongside the turn-taking behaviour that they invoke (Lucero et al., 2016). They also function as boundary objects—weakly structured, adaptable to the needs and experiences of individuals, but simultaneously able to maintain a common identity (Bowker & Star, 2000: 297). As such, we used cards to create spaces for participants to develop their imagined futures. Their weak structuration and annotatability means that participants could find a common core to their experiences without having to reduce them to abstractions. As such, they remained specific, preventing the “decoding of flows” Deleuze and Guattari cite as a key ability of capitalism’s plasticity (1983: 153). By focusing each activity on a different temporality of past, present or future, we created a sense of contingency about contemporary reality. This sense of contingency deterritorialized the capitalist realist notion that there can be no alternative. Different, plural, minor futures appear more possible, and the range of potential meanings of the past and present is increased. Simultaneously, the final activity acted as a prefigurative intervention, ensuring participants could identify ways to start building the worlds they imagined. This prefigurative intervention enacts a (re) territorialization, helping participants to focus on a specific possible future by choosing what to work towards. In doing so, it further prevents

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capitalism from projecting its own agendas onto it and ensures that speculative praxis can fulfil its purpose: to imagine alternate futures as a material reality. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of deterritorialization highlights the political importance of speculation, providing a framework to begin developing ways to perform political speculations. Speculative design suggests ways that we can begin to materially enact speculation, and the generative effects and affects of imagining life in new and different worlds. Whilst Debaise and Stengers—champions of Whitehead’s speculation— warn us of thinking of the “irresistible nature of unbounded capitalism” as an immutable destiny (2016: 18), by engaging with Deleuze and design we might create and use a speculative praxis that enacts alternatives to this unbounded capitalism. Acknowledgements  The data this chapter is built upon would not have been possible without the hard work of my co-facilitators at Build the Future: Daniel Parry, Emily Barker, Sean Peacock, Sarah Armouch, Mohaan Biswas and Velvet Spors. The ideas developed here have been on a long trajectory that started with curious conversations with Dr Joanie Willett and Dr Karen Scott and were shaped along the way by Dean Pomeroy, Christian Kitson and Dr Jan Smeddinck.

References Asad, M. (2019). Prefigurative design as a method for research justice. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 200:1-200:18. doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/3359302. Asad, M., Le Dantec, C.  A., Nielsen, B., & Diedrick, K. (2017). Creating a sociotechnical API: Designing city-scale community engagement. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2295–2306). doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025963. Auger, J. (2013). Speculative design: Crafting the speculation. Digital Creativity, 24(1), 11–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2013.767276 Boggs, C. (1977). Marxism, prefigurative communism, and the problem of workers’ control. Radical America, 11(6), 99–122. Bowker, G.  C., & Star, S.  L. (2000). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. MIT Press.

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Colebrook, C. (2020). The future is already deterritorialized. In R. Harrison & C. Sterling (Eds.), Deterritorializing the future: Heritage in, of and after the anthropocene (pp. 346–383). Open Humanities Press. Coleman, R. (2017). Developing speculative methods to explore speculative shipping: Mail art, futurity and empiricism. In M. Savransky, A. Wilkie, & M. Rosengarten (Eds.), Speculative research (pp. 1–8). Routledge. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­98390-­5_118-­1 Cutting, K., & Peacock, S. (2021). Making sense of ‘slippages’: Re-evaluating ethics for digital research with children and young people. Children’s Geographies, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2021.1906404 Debaise, D., & Stengers, I. (2016). The insistence of the possible. For a speculative pragmatism. Multitudes, 65(4), 82–89. Deleuze, G. (2004). Desert islands and other texts, 1953–1974. Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. DiSalvo, C. (2016). The Irony of drones for foraging: Exploring the work of speculative interventions. In R. C. Smith, K. T. Vangkilde, M. G. Kjærsgaard, T.  Otto, J.  Halse, & T.  Binder (Eds.), Design anthropological futures (pp. 139–152). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003085188-­11 Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming. The MIT Press. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? John Hunt Publishing. Forlano, L. (2013, September 26). Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design? Ethnography Matters. https://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2013/09/26/ ethnographies-­from-­the-­future-­what-­can-­ethnographers-­learn-­from-­science-­ fiction-­and-­speculative-­design/ Foucault, M., & Trombadori, D. (1991). Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. Semiotext(e). Jeffrey, C., & Dyson, J. (2020). Geographies of the future: Prefigurative politics. Progress in Human Geography, 0309132520926569. https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132520926569 Katz, C. (1996). Towards minor theory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 14(4), 487–499. https://doi.org/10.1068/d140487 Keyes, O., Hutson, J., & Durbin, M. (2019). A mulching proposal: Analysing and improving an algorithmic system for turning the elderly into high-­

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nutrient slurry. Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp.  1–11). doi:https://doi. org/10.1145/3290607.3310433. Lucero, A., Dalsgaard, P., Halskov, K., & Buur, J. (2016). Designing with cards. In P. Markopoulos, J.-B. Martens, J. Malins, K. Coninx, & A. Liapis (Eds.), Collaboration in creative design: Methods and tools (pp.  75–95). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­29155-­0_5 Mazzei, L. A. (2020). Speculative inquiry: Thinking with Whitehead. Qualitative Inquiry, 1077800420934138. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420934138 O’Sullivan, S., & Zepke, S. (Eds.). (2008). Deleuze, Guattari and the production of the new. Continuum. Savransky, M., Wilkie, A., & Rosengarten, M. (2017). The lure of possible futures: On speculative research. In A.  Wilkie, M.  Savransky, & M. Rosengarten (Eds.), Speculative research (pp. 1–8). Routledge. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­98390-­5_118-­1 Shaviro, S. (2007). Deleuze’s encounter with Whitehead. 26. http://www.shaviro. com/Othertexts/DeleuzeWhitehead.pdf Shaviro, S. (2019). Defining speculation: Speculative fiction, speculative philosophy, and speculative finance. ALIENOCENE, 1(6), 12. Shonkwiler, A., & Berge, L. C. L. (2014). Reading capitalist realism. University of Iowa Press. Tironi, M. (2018). Speculative prototyping, frictions and counter-participation: A civic intervention with homeless individuals. Design Studies, 59, 117–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2018.05.003 Williams, N., & Collet, C. (2020). Biodesign and the allure of “grow-made” textiles: An interview with Carole Collet. GeoHumanities, 0, 1–13. https:// doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2020.1816141

8 Speculative Reproduction Maria Fannin

This chapter tracks the articulation and transformation of speculative visions of reproduction and reproductive technologies. Drawing on the dual senses of speculation as imaginative mode of doing and thinking and as risk-hedging strategy in sectors of the bioeconomy such as the fertility industry, I signal how the multi-valent purposes to which speculative thinking and doing are put call for a rethinking of reproductive time. Speculation in its economic dimension means buying or selling to profit from fluctuations in value—to exploit these fluctuations in market value at great risk but with the possibility of considerable profit. It is, in Laura Bear’s (2020: 1) definition, “future-oriented affective, physical and intellectual labour that aims to accumulate capital for various ends.” Anticipating future gain and making plans in the present based on a calculus of risk and risk tolerance, speculation shapes finance and the financialisation of everyday life; speculation also promotes risk-calculus as a mode of living. Hedging one’s bets, wagering on the future, taking a risk:

M. Fannin (*) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_8

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these are all measures in the contemporary moment of an imperative to make the most of opportunities for a life best lived. Alongside these modes of economic speculation, speculation also entails the anticipation of a future and the work of thinking and contemplating. In a world of uncertain political, ecological, and biological events that raise the question of what future will be left for the planet and its inhabitants, speculation is imagined as an orientation appropriate to the uncertainties of the present. However, as philosopher Luce Irigaray (1985: 182) cautions, speculation is also inextricably bound up with the work of vision and the primacy of sight—the specular—in the representational economies of European philosophy, where the self-representation of the masculine subject reflects its own image back to itself, disavowing the presence and indeed the ‘debt’ owed to the other: a “speculative act of denial and negation that serves to affirm his autonomy.” Speculation must therefore grapple with this legacy if it is to raise a different set of questions about the future. I explore how these modes of speculation in the present shape and are shaped by imaginaries and material-technical realities of reproduction and reproductive labour. Speculation carries with it as many varied and multiple valences as reproduction itself: reproduction can be the production of a copy, but also the bringing into existence, forming and creating again, both in consciousness and in fleshly, bodily presence. Reproduction is, too, the production of new organisms and individuals; in evolutionary terms, reproduction ensures the perpetuation of a species and, in political economy, reproduction is defined both as what enables production and the productive economic activity. Speculative reproduction as a compound thus invites thinking on the many combinations at work: the contemplation of bringing into existence, and the risk (and potential gain) of species-perpetuation; the mingling of risk-taking and enabling activities that motor economic activity; and the intermingling of the financialised and the biological in the reproductive economy. The essay tracks across these cultural and economic dimensions of speculation to explore how fertility has become speculative. That is to say, the chapter explores how the linear and chronological time of development that underwrites dominant notions of reproduction and fertility has been transformed by the advent of means to arrest, reset,

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and restart the time of fertility through the technology of gamete (sperm and egg) freezing into speculative time. The emergence of gamete freezing as an increasingly available reproductive technology points to how new technologies are shaping ‘species-­ reproduction’ and also the agencies through which speculation as an orientation towards the future is taking shape and becoming normalised. I draw specifically on Lisa Adkins’ (2017) notion of “speculative time”— as both a socio-technical and an economic imaginary—to inform this reading, arguing that Adkins’ elaboration of speculative time as the mode through which financial instruments such as securitised debt operate informs how the speculative time of reproduction is taking shape.

Fertility and the Time of Developmental Life The ability to arrest, manipulate, and restart the development of human cells long predates the application of such technologies to human reproduction. Tissue culture techniques, as Hannah Landecker’s (2007) ground-breaking work demonstrates, permit the growth and cultivation in vitro of animal cells. The application of these techniques to humans has shifted the temporal development of human cells from that of a fixed and seemingly linear timeline to that of a more malleable and flexible mode. As in vitro reproductive technologies developed, it was clear that the ability to freeze embryos at a very early stage of development in order to time their implantation into a human body would enable the manipulation and modification of reproductive processes, and would make possible the storing and transporting of such materials over distances in order to accommodate the desires of intending parents. Yet, until fairly recently freezing techniques for human gametes were still fairly unreliable. Sperm could easily be frozen, but eggs could not. The high liquid content of eggs makes them vulnerable to damage through the formation of ice crystals and many of the early efforts to freeze human eggs failed (Kuleshova & Lopata, 2002). The low likelihood of successfully freezing and thawing eggs meant efforts to do so were carried out primarily for patients undergoing chemotherapy or for whom any effort to salvage eggs might be worth trying. Yet the failure

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rate for egg freezing was high, and most fertility treatments relied on ‘fresh’ eggs only recently extracted to increase the chances of a successful pregnancy. All of this changed with the introduction of flash-freezing techniques, also known as ‘vitrification,’ the aim of which is to “induce a glasslike solidification inside cells to protect them from damage by ice crystals at all stages of cryopreservation” (Kuleshova & Lopata, 2002: 450; see also Kuleshova et al., 1999). Vitrification permits eggs and sperm to be frozen effectively by mixing them with high concentrations of chemical agents and rapid cooling methods. Given the different biological limits of the health of eggs and sperm—while new sperm are produced regularly throughout life from puberty onwards, ovaries contain all of the eggs at birth they will ever have—the ability to ‘freeze fertility’ by preserving both eggs and sperm promised to open up new avenues for planning and anticipating one’s reproductive future (van de Wiel, 2020). Enabled by the development of flash-freezing techniques, and the expansion of fertility services around the globe, gamete banking is now a multimillion-dollar industry. Arguably, the focus of this industry is not only or simply the production of a child but rather, as Lucy van de Wiel (2020) explains, the creation of an investment sector that views the present and future fertility of consumers of services, such as gamete banking as a product itself. Or stated another way, the products of this new sector are not the frozen gametes themselves deposited by clients into one of the many new gamete banks, but rather the anticipation of a future decline in fertility and insurance against the diminishment of one’s reproductive capacities. Gamete freezing, and especially egg freezing, respond to the desire to hedge one’s bets against future infertility by banking one’s gametes now. Aimed at persuading new clients to begin banking their sperm and eggs, fertility clinics in the US offer free ‘fertility health checks’ that test an individual’s sperm or eggs for signs of decline. What van de Wiel (2020) reveals through her examination of this and other efforts to promote egg freezing by the gamete freezing industry is that, whatever the results of the test, gamete banking is the ‘solution.’ If one’s gametes are deemed ‘healthy,’ then banking now before fertility begins to inevitably decline is the best option for preserving gametes for the future.

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Alternatively, if one’s sperm and eggs are showing signs of deterioration or decline in quality (low sperm motility, ageing eggs), then banking one’s gametes now is promoted as the best way to ensure one’s potential for infertility declines no further. Either way, the gamete health check offers no plausible reason for not preserving one’s fertility, whether it’s abundant or scarce, using their services. The best moment to think of, plan for, and attend to one’s future fertility is the immediate present. Thus, the freezing and saving of one’s gametes for future use could be described as speculative reproduction par excellence. The time for investing speculatively in one’s reproductive future is always now, and, indeed, the efforts to exhort young adults and increasingly younger cohorts of teenagers and pre-teens to view their reproductive health as a priority suggest that speculating on one’s future reproductive desires is telescoping further back in time, even into childhood. ‘Pre-pregnancy’ health promotion campaigns in the US are aimed at all young people, not just young women. Young women have long been exhorted to view their bodies as potentially, and primarily, reproductive; today, notions of reproductive potentiality increasingly define how young men are encouraged to think about their future fertility. In this imagined, speculative future everyone is reproductive. The growth of the gamete banking industry thus corresponds to a dynamic in the political economy of health analysed by Joseph Dumit (2012) in the pharmaceutical industry: increasing numbers of US consumers take drugs not to treat health care conditions they currently have, but to reduce the risk of developing health care conditions they do not have yet. Pharmaceutical production is thus geared towards selling drugs to individuals taken for the rest of one’s life to reduce risk, and these “drugs for life” are more lucrative than therapeutics developed to treat a single acute disease condition (Dumit, 2012). Gamete banking follows a similar logic: in anticipation of potential future infertility, young people are encouraged to save their healthy cells now, at a cost, and without any guarantee that they will ever be used.

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Speculative Time and the Reproductive Economy The first successful pregnancy after egg freezing was reported in 1985 in Australia in a patient who had unsuccessfully undergone surgical treatment for infertility (Chen, 1986). Subsequent efforts to achieve high rates of successful pregnancy after egg freezing were uneven and the procedure was recommended primarily for patients before undergoing medical treatment (e.g. chemotherapy) that might affect their fertility. By 2012, after several decades of research and increasing refinement of the technique by fertility clinics, the Practice Committees of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology published a joint statement deeming that “Evidence indicates that oocyte vitrification and warming should no longer be considered experimental” (Practice Committees, 2013). This change from experimental to standard treatment encouraged insurance companies, who provide access to most medical care for the US population, to cover the procedure, making it cheaper and more accessible to US employees. The subsequent announcement by Facebook in 2015 that egg freezing would be included in its employee health coverage received intense media coverage in the US and around the globe, a development welcomed by the commercial egg banking industry (Freedman, 2014; Tran, 2014). The role of the gamete banking industry in extending the time of reproduction beyond the time of natural fertility has been widely acknowledged. This is especially the case with the transformation of egg freezing (oocyte cryopreservation) from an ‘experimental’ to a widely accepted practice and a service offered by fertility clinics to healthy individuals. However, the notion that egg freezing has disrupted the linear temporality of reproductive time has not fully grappled with what Adkins (2017) writes are the speculative dimensions of time at work in the contemporary moment. Adkins argues that the financialisation of the economy has induced a shift in experiences of time, where the financialisation of the economy is taken to mean both the emergence of the financial services sector as the engine of global economic growth, surpassing the

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industrial sector in both size and scope, and the infiltration and reshaping of aspects of the self. The financialisation of the economy also hinges, importantly, on the role of debt in driving economic activity. Echoing Marcel Mauss’ theorisation of a phenomenon seen to shape social, spiritual, and cultural life, Adkins (2017: 449) writes that debt has become a “total social fact.” The pervasiveness of the structure of debt now shapes economic subjects in both wealthy and poor economies: most households in the wealthiest nations live with long-term indebtedness whether for education (student loans), housing (mortgages), and everyday consumption [the opening up of mortgage and consumer credit to most women in the 1970s, the expansion of consumer credit to more ‘risky’ consumers, and the increasingly accessible forms of such credit, for example, the short-term instalment payment credit offered through online retailers, and marketed especially to young people, by Klarna, a Swedish fintech startup; in poorer nations, microcredit has been touted as an effective route out of poverty for the most economically vulnerable (Roy, 2010)]. These forms of indebtedness, it is argued, are differently structured from previous forms of debt. The loans required to pay for education or housing are long-term forms of debt, and, unlike an earlier generation of homeowners who either purchased homes outright with savings or fully expected to be able to pay off their mortgage within their working lives, today’s mortgage and student loan borrowers might imagine a lifetime— or beyond—of indebtedness. Debt itself is also now a financial instrument through the process of securitisation, that is, the transformation of debt that is monetised, sliced, grouped, and repackaged to be bought and sold by investors. In contrast to the claims of theorists of the debt economy that orientation towards debt erases time, Adkins argues that the debt economy instead induces a new experience of time that she calls speculative time. Speculative time, Adkins (2017: 458) writes, is “a time in which pasts, presents and futures stand not in a predetermined or pre-set relation to each other, but are in a continuous state of movement, transformation and unfolding.” This form of speculation is not future-oriented towards the production of the new, but rather is non-linear, “non-chronological and non-determinate”: the past, present and future can be arrested,

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re-ordered, “sped up, slowed down, delayed, reorganized and reversed” (ibid.). She calls this form of time—continuously moving, unfolding, and refolding—an intensification rather than a hollowing-out of the experience of time. Adkins contrasts this notion of speculative time to the theories of time that suggest time is “neutralised” by indebtedness, as in Maurizio Lazzarato’s (2011: 47) argument that the structural relations of debt generate “the strange sensation of living in a society without time, without possibility, without foreseeable future.” For Lazzarato, debt seeks to neutralise the “open temporality” of the future that presents the subject with choices and “existential risks” (70). In contrast to this notion of neutralised time, in which the future is already determined, the subject of Adkins’ (2017: 458–459) speculative time experiences “intense activity in regard to time, a time in which presents, pasts and futures and crucially their relations to each other are open to a constant state of revision: they may be drawn and redrawn, assembled and disassembled, set and reset.” Rather than experiencing time as empty, this intensive activity is also excessive: Adkins writes that the subject of speculative time has “too much time” (2017: 459, emphasis in original) because the experience of time is constantly shifting and adjusting to the re-ordering of past, present, and future. What Adkins signals in her theorisation of speculative time suggests that the experience of speculative time in a financialised and securitised economic system is that of constantly recalibrating one’s financial risk status, and where the constant reorganisation of the very structure of debt service involves an ongoing folding and refolding, setting and resetting of time (rather than orienting towards a future endpoint of full debt repayment) in new forms of profit-making. In comparison to this intensive activity of debt, the developmental time of reproductivity seems almost anachronistically linear and out of step with the set and reset time of securitised economic life. Yet the efforts to rethink the speculative time of debt in relation to reproductive technologies suggest the setting and resetting of one’s biological clock or ‘chronology’ is also one of the goals of gamete banking. It is the capacity of speculative time to intensify one’s experience of time, to “constantly adjust to recalibrations of pasts, presents and futures, as well as to changes in the relations between and across

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these states” (459) that are revealed by the efforts to arrest, restart, and re-order the developmental time of reproduction. Adkins’ reading of speculative time departs from other more affirmative invocations of speculation and ‘speculative reproduction’ as that which resists the linear temporality of neoliberalism (Neimanis, 2014). Whereas neoliberal temporal imaginaries are viewed as “linear and spatialized,” speculative time is “deep, thick and transcorporeal” (Neimanis, 2014: 117, citing Colebrook, 2009, 2012), suffused with memory, bodily exposure, genetic inheritance, and other “entanglements” (Neimanis, 2014: 115). However, this understanding of time perhaps cleaves too much to the notion that, once preserved in a biobank, bodily materials are fully removed from temporality and liberated from linear time, rather than placed onto another non-linear, set-and-reset temporality alongside the subject from whom they are derived. Adkins’ work to delineate how speculative time resists linear temporality is not to suggest that speculative time cannot also offer more affirmative possibilities for resisting chronological time. The resetting of reproductivity as temporally speculative rather than linear and chronological has arguably opened up the possibility for non-normative reproductive arrangements. Van de Wiel (2020) writes that oocyte freezing has also permitted trans men to save their eggs before undergoing hormone therapy. But speculative time—the seemingly infinite variability and refolding of time without any guarantee of the new or of relief (from debt, from one’s destiny to reproduce)—also brings with it an exhaustive sense of being always obligated to service, to serve one’s debt, and to serve the biopolitical imperative to reproduce.

Refusing Speculative Reproduction If the speculative time of reproductive technologies asks consumers of gamete freezing to imagine a future time in which their productive and reproductive labours will align, one response has been to seek to disrupt the temporality of hyper-productivity that underwrites contemporary labour patterns. As critics of gamete freezing services have noted, the onus to adapt one’s bodily patterns to the rhythms of capitalism have

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meant that reproduction (i.e. non-productive activity) is delayed into one’s 30s and 40s, when fertility has already begun to decline. Recent studies of young people’s perception of fertility suggest that the visibility and widespread availability of fertility services are shaping understandings of reproductive time and of the likelihood of becoming pregnant: young people over-estimate the likelihood of pregnancy in their 20s and 30s, and far under-estimate the likelihood of becoming pregnant in their 40s (Hashiloni-Dolev et  al., 2011). The call to re-organise productive labour around the responsibilities of reproduction, including pregnancy but also infancy and childhood, by feminists over generations has done little to restructure demands on workers. Indeed, developments early on deemed beneficial to parents (especially mothers), such as the growth of part-time and flexible work, have only succeeded in creating a new class of hyper-exploited ‘precariat.’ If the speculative reproductive future of gamete freezing imagines everyone as reproductive, either anticipating reproduction or opening up a moment in which to reset reproductive time, other imagined futures of reproduction offer up ‘monstrous’ figures that alter not the temporality but the spatiality of the reproductive body. The controversies and imaginaries surrounding technologies of womb replacement, of three-parent children, and of cloning reveal anxieties over the stopping and restarting of reproductive time but also the disruption and reconfiguration of bodily spaces of reproduction (reproduction outside the body). Critics and commentators imagine the reproduction of the future as ‘monstrous’ insofar as these technologies enable reproduction to exceed the body’s limits (artificial womb), exceed the limits of reproductive difference (one egg and one sperm become something more multiple), or refuse reproduction as difference (cloning as the repetition of something that has already happened) (Dahl, 2018; Lewis, 2019). An alternative imaginary of non-reproductive time is, however, also expressed through the negative—not the yes to excessive time that Adkins outlines, but the no to species-reproduction—embodied by the ‘birth strike.’ The publication of Jenny Brown’s (2019) book Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women’s Work garnered immediate attention by labour studies scholars and activists for its efforts to bring pregnancy and birth firmly into the conversation about the political economies of

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reproduction. While it might seem self-evident that reproductive labour includes the labour of pregnancy and birth giving, scholars writing on reproductive labour have long tended to speak of ‘social reproduction’ in its broadest sense as caring, clothing, feeding, and educating labourers (young and old) obscuring, if not directly avoiding, discussions of pregnancy and birth that are sometimes differentiated from social reproduction by an uneasy reference to ‘biological’ reproduction. While this may have been a strategy to avoid accusations of essentialising the gender differences that shape understandings of productive and reproductive labour, the effect was relative silence about how pregnancy and birth figure into economic dynamics and processes. Brown’s book on the Birth Strike seeks to direct attention to reproductive labour back to the bodily processes of pregnancy and birth and, in doing so, places these ‘biological’ processes into their proper social context. For feminist geographers and social reproduction scholars calling for accounts of the body, bodily processes, and embodiment alongside more familiar accounts of labour (see Strauss & Meehan, 2015) Brown’s book addresses the ‘crisis’ of declining population growth and its socio-­ economic implications with an eye to how twenty-first-century US women describe their decisions not to reproduce. What differentiates the accounts of women in Brown’s book from previous articulations of women’s efforts to limit or avoid pregnancy is her attention to the thwarted aspirations of women who want to have children but feel they cannot afford to support childrearing given the lack of supportive policies from the state or from employers. While Brown’s birth strikers are not possessed (yet) of the collective consciousness that would transform their reproductive power into a properly political force, the invocation of a ‘birth strike’ in the UK responds to a different crisis, not of labour but the devastating effects of human-induced climate change. A generation of young people have articulated their efforts to avoid having children out of concern both for the impact of having children on a warming planet and for the effects of climate change those children might experience. The No Future, No Children and BirthStrike movements seek to bolster the decision to be childfree (as opposed to childless, a category which could include those who are involuntarily without children) as a response to climate change.

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This withdrawal of reproductive labour is a political position akin to Donna Haraway’s (2016) exhortation to feminists to “make kin, not babies.” Although Haraway’s phrasing appeared in a text devoted to thinking about the speculative/science fictions of connecting across species boundaries, its ethos was not roundly received as a radical call to create new multispecies connections. Feminist and critical scholars attuned to the neo-eugenicist and population control narratives of contemporary environmental movements voiced concerns that Haraway’s “make kin, not babies” would again position mothers on the wrong side of feminism, and procreation in general as an act of planetary violence. Despite these criticisms, which ultimately led to the end of the official campaign by BirthStrike in the UK (see Garget, n.d.), concerns over the health and sustainability of the environment resonates seem to shape delaying or avoiding having children for a substantial number of young people (Helm et al., 2021). For those articulating the intention to not conceive out of political commitment to environmental concerns over a warming planet, and for those assessing the possibility of materially supporting children in an environment hostile to any form of social support for reproductive labour, the concept of ‘speculative reproductive labour’ described by Atkins provides a critical insight. At the heart of these two different, but not entirely dissimilar, political positions regarding reproductive intention, volition, and ‘choice’ is a speculative reproductive concept of the embodied process of pregnancy and birth. The birth strike represents the imagined future without humans, where reproductive labourers say ‘no’ to the exploitation of their labour in the service of the species and ‘no’ to the production, not of future workers who will transform the world with their labour, but rather of future consumers who will destroy the world with their interminable desires for more goods and resources to consume. In seeking liberation from species-reproduction as an act of resistance to the anthropogenic devastation of ecologies and the exploitation of reproductive labour, birth strikers respond to the exhortation to reproduce and the expectation of future reproduction promoted by gamete freezing services. These contrapuntal modes of reproductivity—the future reproductive plenitude promised by gamete freezing, and the absence or negation of

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reproductive potential expressed by the birth strike—point to how reproduction is now oriented towards the speculative. The ability to fold and refold reproductive time, to set, reset, arrest, and, in doing so, reorient reproductive life to other timescales—the time of economic productivity or the time of planetary change—signals how future-oriented labour has also come to shape reproductive life.

References Adkins, L. (2017). Speculative futures in the time of debt. The Sociological Review, 65(3), 448–462. Bear, L. (2020). Speculation: A political economy of technologies of imagination. Economy and Society, 49(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/0308514 7.2020.1715604 Brown, J. (2019). Birth strike: The hidden fight over women’s work. PM Press. Chen, C. (1986). Pregnancy after human oocyte cryopreservation. The Lancet, 327(8486), 884–886. Colebrook, C. (2009). Stratigraphic time, women’s time. Australian Feminist Studies, 24(59), 11–16. Colebrook, C. (2012). A globe of one’s own: In praise of the flat earth. SubStance, 127(41), 30–39. Dahl, U. (2018). (The promise of ) monstrous kinship? Queer reproduction and the somatechnics of sexual and racial difference. Somatechnics, 18(2), 195–211. Dumit, J. (2012). Drugs for life: How pharmaceutical companies define our health. Duke University Press. Freedman, D. (2014). Perk up: Facebook and Apple now pay for women to freeze eggs. 14 October. Accessed August 10, 2021, from https://www.nbcnews. com/news/us-news/perk-facebook-apple-now-pay-women-freezeeggs-­n225011 Garget, J. (n.d.). When are you going to have children? Accessed 14 July 2021, from https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/havechildren Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press. Hashiloni-Dolev, Y., Kaplan, A., & Shkedi-Rafid, S. (2011). The fertility myth: Israeli students’ knowledge regarding age-related fertility decline and late pregnancies in an era of assisted reproduction technology. Human Reproduction, 26(11), 3045–3053.

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Helm, S., Kemper, J. A., & White, S. K. (2021). No future, no kids–no kids, no future? Population and Environment. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11111-­021-­00379-­5 Irigaray, L. (1985). Speculum of the other woman. Cornell University Press. Kuleshova, L., & Lopata, A. (2002). Vitrification can be more favorable than slow cooling. Fertility and Sterility, 78(3), 449–454. Kuleshova, L., Gianaroli, L., Magli, C., Ferraretti, A., & Trounson, A. (1999). Birth following vitrification of a small number of human oocytes: Case report. Human Reproduction, 14(12), 3077–3079. Landecker, H. (2007). Culturing life: How cells became technologies. Harvard University Press. Lazzarato, M. (2011). The making of the indebted man: An essay on the neoliberal condition. Trans. J. D. Jordan. Semiotext(e). Lewis, S. (2019). Full surrogacy now: Feminism against family. Verso. Neimanis, A. (2014). Speculative reproduction: Biotechnologies and ecologies in thick time. Philosophia, 4(1), 108–128. Practice Committees of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. (2013). Mature oocyte cryopreservation: A guideline. Fertility and Sterility, 99(1), 37–43. Roy, A. (2010). Poverty capital: Microfinance and the making of development. Routledge. Strauss, K., & Meehan, K. (2015). Introduction: New frontiers in life’s work. In K.  Meehan & K.  Strauss (Eds.), Precarious worlds: Contested geographies of social reproduction. University of Georgia Press. Tran, M. (2014). Apple and Facebook offer to freeze eggs for female employees. The Guardian, 15 October. Accessed August 10, 2021, from https://www. theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/15/apple-facebook-offer-freeze-eggsfemale-­employees van de Wiel, L. (2020). The speculative turn in IVF: egg freezing and the financialization of fertility. New Genetics and Society, 39(3), 306–326.

9 NeoRural Futures: Learning Through Embodied Speculation Vera Karina Gebhardt Fearns

A Pluriverse of Rural Futures Contemporary art and critical design practices ask to what extent various forms of embodiment and materialisation result in other ways of thinking and learning about future worlds. However, the body and its relation to speculation, aesthetics, and geographies remain a relatively under-­ investigated field (notable exceptions include Escalante & Mortimer, 2021; Hawkins & Straughan, 2016). This lack of attention to embodied aesthetic speculation becomes even more prominent when looking at education, which is still too often understood as a rational and abstract process, or as a set of reasoned and logical practices where neither aesthetics nor the body takes a prominent role when it comes to future-focussed thinking. This position stands in stark contrast to efforts by educators and practitioners from the fields of Futures Studies, Design, and

V. K. G. Fearns (*) Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_9

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Architecture, who see an urgent need to “encourage people more viscerally in futures conversations” (Candy & Dunagan, 2017: 2) to learn about and address planetary problems. Together they have challenged the prominent assumption that more quantitatively measurable approaches are needed and called for a ‘speculative’ mode of thought that they perceive as more capable of addressing the complexity of the challenges we are facing. They argue that there is a: 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. (Wilkie et al., 2017: 2)

As a result, some have begun experimenting with a range of aesthetic and imaginative methods to address future challenges (Dunne & Raby, 2013; Lury & Wakeford, 2012; Marres et  al., 2018; Tharp & Tharp, 2019). One of these creative approaches can be summarised under the term ‘Speculative and Critical Design’ (hereafter SCD). Countering the sense that today’s design practice far too often only focuses on pleasing business and consumerism, SCD proposes to use design as a means of speculating about how things could be different by imagining possible futures and representing them through material artefacts. By addressing aesthetic dimensions of everyday life, SCD practitioners and educators are advocating to understand “design for debate rather than production, implications rather than applications, and provocation rather than innovation” (Helgason et al., 2020: 386). While SCD approaches are widely discussed in design and human-­ computer-­interaction disciplines, there has been less discussion in the context of pedagogical practices. To close this gap, the Speculative Edu project, funded by the European Erasmus+ Programme, aimed to understand and strengthen contemporary speculative design education. By collecting and exchanging existing knowledge and developing new approaches, a consortium of leading European design schools asked how we might use design to speculate about the numerous planetary futures and to critically reflect on the impact that our actions today might have

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on the future. One part of the project was the NeoRural Futures summer school, which was set up as an “immersive, experiential and performative educational experience” (Iaconesi & Persico, 2020: 8) where the organisers engaged the participants “through practice and concrete situations” (ibid.) to the topic of rurality and the diverse meanings and feelings connected to it. Rurality is often linked to an absence of something—a lack of people, infrastructure, work, services, entertainment, education, opportunities. At the same time, rurality is also conventionally imagined as a paradisiacal place of silence, slowness, and relaxation or a place where the world is ‘in order’. Based on this plurality of understandings that inform a variety of concepts around rurality, the organisers selected five different locations for discussion in the summer school: Arjeplog, Sweden; Lushoto, Tanzania; Caselle in Pittari, Italy; the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone across Ukraine and Belarus; and the Moon, the most radical interpretation of rurality in this context, yet however, one where speculation is a common tool to address, for example, how life, business, and culture might be reimagined. These example sites were chosen because they face diverse future challenges and because they seemed promising for reflecting upon critiques that practitioners working with Speculative Design are currently confronted with (see Iaconesi & Persico, 2020).

The NeoRural Futures Summer School The summer school took place 2–6 September 2019 at the RUFA space of the Rome University of Fine Arts in Rome’s San Lorenzo neighbourhood—a refuge in a little parish in the middle of Italy’s buzzing capital. The summer school was set up in form of a five-day workshop, including 40 participants from various disciplines and backgrounds, and a public exhibition on the last day. The first three days were dedicated to inspiration and research, while the last two days focused on producing tangible outcomes that were to be showcased during the exhibition. The brief for the workshop was to create a scenario set in 2030 that would be able to reimagine rurality. Therefore, the organisers suggested creating a character that embodies this future by imagining their everyday life, their

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experiences, and their surroundings, and looking for ways in which the location is affected by planetary issues, such as climate change. The organisers also suggested creating several outputs of the speculative exercise for the exhibition that would express a version of what it means to inhabit rurality in this near future through a particular ‘scenario’ that includes: (1) a digital map that serves as a spatial narrative during the exhibition; (2) an object or some form of prop that is part of the scenario; (3) some form of autobiographical narrative from the protagonist; and (4) a report that brings these different components together. While not explicitly stated by the organisers, I would classify the approach that the workshop followed as Research through Design (Frayling, 1994). Research through Design draws on Design’s strength as a reflective practice of constantly reinterpreting and reframing a situation through the process of making and critiquing (Schön, 1984). New knowledge is generated by investigating the present and then suggesting a possible future state that is represented through some form of designed artefact and thus asks “to investigate the speculative future, probing on what the world could and should be” (Zimmerman & Forlizzi, 2014: 167). This iterative process of exploring, making, probing, experiencing, and reflecting is what I refer to as embodied speculation. It is particularly promising when contradicting facts make it difficult to decide which opinion or decision to listen to (Dunne & Raby, 2013) as it gives space to a debate that is informed by facts, imagination, speculation, and emotions. As one example from the exercise, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a place where irrationalities and paradoxes populate an area, where the post-disastrous and extreme aspects of rurality can be addressed. The following sections document and reflect on the process of speculating about the future of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone from a participatory perspective and then links this to debates around speculation, embodiment, and learning. The focus is on how speculating with and through the body supports understanding and learning about rural futures.

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 peculations About the Future(s) S of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone I was randomly assigned to the group of eight people that spent five days working on the region of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. While the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is in many ways unique, Chernobyl is by no means the only exclusion zone in the world and is joined by a growing number of contaminated spaces: from Fukushima to nuclear waste sites like Gorleben in Germany, and toxic e-waste hubs like Guiyo in China and Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana. As a starting point for speculation, we focussed on the intersection of people, ecologies, and nuclear contamination. After an initial desk research on the area and its inhabitants, we started collecting ‘signals’. Here, signals are defined as: early signs of potentially important developments. These can be weak (or early) signals, trends, wild cards or other developments, persistent problems, risks and threats, including matters at the margins of current thinking that challenge past assumptions. (Cuhls et al., 2015)

Drawing on this notion of signals, we scanned through scientific reports, government statements, newspaper articles, internet forums, literature, folk myths, and cultural events to get a sense of an area that none of us had ever visited. One signal caught our attention  was the story of the blackbird of Chernobyl (Charleston, 2019): a human-like creature with wings that was claimed to have been seen by workers at the Chernobyl plant on the day of the accident. Another stemmed from studies about the flora and fauna of the region where researchers pointed to birds around Chernobyl that are adapting to long-term exposure to radiation and may even be ‘benefiting’ from it (Galván et al., 2014). Another study observed mutations in animals due to the radiation and asked what this can mean for the ecology of the area (Yablokov, 2009). And yet another signal that we found interesting was that, despite the enduring nuclear contamination, both animals and new human inhabitants are moving to the area. In this example, these sense that radiation and long-term

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contamination are difficult to perceive turned out to be one of the most exciting points of speculation for our group: how to speculate about something that is scientifically proven, but people do not immediately feel nor see the impact it might have? What will the future be for a region that looks like an area where nature is thriving but is in fact marked by nuclear radiation? While starting to experiment with ideas around the invisible, intangible, and toxic it was interesting to see how our interdisciplinary group dealt with this tension of, on the one hand, scientific argumentation and, on the other, irrational human behaviour. We centred our speculation around hope and superstition, which have formed an important part of making sense of things that are difficult to understand. In speculating, we kept asking ourselves how far we might stretch these superstitious and absurd notions to envision forms of living that would entangle people and environments in new ways without drifting too far into the fantastic. With this way of thinking we tried to tackle the critiques coming from within the field of SCD that practitioners should focus on, returning back to ‘real’ life and finding ways to accomplish tangible social results (Auger & Hanna, 2019), being response-able (Haraway, 2013), while at the same time “exploring the possible and the impossible, the acceptable and the inacceptable” and the “art of consequences” (Stengers, 2014). We were also inspired by Ursula Le Guinn’s call for “realists of a larger reality” (Le Guin, 2016: 113), and the need for “creative people experimenting with alternative representations of lived experience, unorthodox social formulations to enable hope in dark times” (Ward, 2019). These critical provocations took shape as we were exploring different signals and findings through images, videos, soundscapes, scribbles, and quick prototypes. It was this experience of working with the material representation of the existing geographies and cultures that at one point caused us to think about jewellery. Necklaces, bands, and charms have always been worn as talismans in various cultures to ward off evil—the Nazar, for example, is an eye-shaped amulet believed to protect from the evil eye with a long tradition in Asia and Europe. Speculations took shape in rituals around a mutated swallow, a bird that has become a symbol of resilience and is worn by the inhabitants of the zone in the form of amulets that represent safety and protection from radiation. We started crafting prototypes of

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possible amulets for our scenario out of paper, metal, textile, and trash we found in nearby streets. We put them around our head, neck, and arm and tried to imagine what it would feel like for someone living in the zone. Would we wear it? Would we feel safe? Would we believe in it? Thinking with these questions, our discussion focused on the material and emotional qualities of jewellery, on whether new technologies could be included to help protect against radiation, and whether one single artefact could tell the complex story of our scenario that was yet to be fully imagined. As I have argued elsewhere (Fearns, 2019), multi-layered immersive experiences can engage people’s emotions and make the abstract seem more immediate. In Future Studies, this approach of making scenarios more tangible is called making “experiential futures” (Candy, 2010), describing physical representations of possible future scenarios with which people can interact and become informed through the embodiment of that chosen future. One can imagine it like a movie scene where every object is carefully crafted to tell the story. In developing an experiential future, we ultimately used the amulet as one prop to tell a story and construct another possible world together with other objects that created the scene. As our setting, we imagined and set up a ‘checkpoint’ to the Exclusion Zone in 2030 represented through the office of the ‘gatekeeper’. The checkpoint itself is an ambiguous concept: it is a barrier that exists physically but also abstractly in organising territories. As a subject, the gatekeeper is the embodied personification of this border who operates both inside and outside of the contaminated zone and can inhabit these two worlds simultaneously. For the exhibition, we considered it important to actively enter the scene, to move our bodies around the space in imagining a world in 2030. Therefore, an entry gate marked by a reused plastic curtain was installed to enter our exhibition, with a sign saying “Caution” and a note saying, “I’m back soon, please wait inside”. Behind the curtain was a room with the gatekeeper’s desk and their computer showing an open map, their diary, and a visitor log that showed that people have disappeared. The scenario also included an empty coffee cup and an ashtray where you can still smell that they had just left the office; opposite the desk, one finds a map from the area where they have pinned several notes,

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including different swallow amulets, mutated plants, family histories, and propaganda material for and against scientific findings. In assembling this scene, the idea was that one could interact through the items by imagining and speculating who the gatekeeper is, where they are now and what they might be doing, what the region is like, and how it might look, smell, sound, feel. Returning to the necklace prop in this scene, by physically experiencing what it feels like to wear the protective bracelet, but also what it feels like to walk into the Gatekeeper’s office, wait for them, and immerse yourself in their physical world, the installation, but also the process of iterating and creating it, became an embodied speculation that brought us nearer to the area (Fig. 9.1). With this speculative design exercise, we wanted to explore the area and its society and understand what would bring someone to the zone—be it war, unemployment, scientific interest, or adventuresomeness. We then tried to imagine the

Fig. 9.1  Impressions of the intervention during the  NeoRural Futures Summer School School. Image credit: Speculative Edu (2019)

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implications each scenario might have on the flora and fauna, culture, economy, and the governance of the area. For our final exhibition we did not want to give a single answer but wanted to continue our exploration and pass it on to the visitors. Hence, our scenario was explicitly designed to inspire conversations about what is going on there and about what rurality means in this context. Every item in our scenario had its own story, representing one or several aspects that we found important to address. They were designed to inform, to confuse, and to pose questions.

 eflections on Learning Through R Embodied Speculations As an SCD practice, this embodied exploration of the Chernobyl scenario invited us to investigate phenomena that we would not have otherwise considered. By employing embodied qualities into the process of speculation we anticipated a future irreducible to a structured and calculative logic. This creative process thus provided an added value of information that goes beyond the notion of imagination as a cognitive process and more strongly incorporates an emotional component. According to McKibben (2005: n.p.), these affective speculations, the “goddamn operas”, which show us (im)possibilities and warn us of unwanted future developments, are needed not only to imagine but in order to act in thinking alternative futures. In the process of speculating we also found ourselves confronted with the limitations of our own geographical, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds, which made us think about the future-proofness of our own methods, approaches, and values. However, one must always keep in mind that many of the SCD projects, the summer school included, are the material evidence of a learning process and therefore inherently vulnerable and open to mistakes. In an educational context, SCD approaches can bring new practices and ideas into being while maintaining space for curiosity, critique, doubt, and unintended consequences. They have a quality of interweaving insider and outsider perspectives, and they are by necessity approaches that “resist clarity, mastery and the single point of view, be radically uncertain about scale,

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boundaries and coherence, and favour movement and tension over structure and composure” (MacLure, 2006: 729). By bringing speculation together with artistic approaches, they can “open up strange spaces for difference, wonder and otherness to emerge” (MacLure, 2006: 729). However, such ‘thinking through making’ (Pallasmaa, 2009) can be demanding because the method of finding out about the thing(s), the situation, and the concepts employed to interpret it occur at the same time. This introduces fragility and unpredictability into the process, but also creates sincere moments of discovery where one can glimpse alternative futures and, in doing so, think of ways of making these more tangible. Crafting the summer school as a multi-layered experiential learning space that enabled participants to have certain experiences, the organisers opened a space for learning about alternative future scenarios for rurality. Learning about possible futures through making and embodied experiences can not only enrich classroom experiences to create “capacities for thinking in new ways, developing new vocabularies and cultivating new perspectives” (Forlano, 2021: 12), but also challenge the prominent understanding in geography and neighbouring disciplines that we should strive for a more systematic and quantifiable way of envisioning possible futures to overcome the complexity and uncertainty in rural development. By suggesting “that perhaps it is the expansiveness of our imaginations rather than the sharpness of our analysis that presents the greatest opportunities for destabilising and resisting the existing status quo” (Forlano, 2021: 12), other forms of learning about rural futures can be developed that are not only exciting exercises in embodied speculation but urgently needed alternatives to address our planetary situation. Acknowledgements  I am very grateful for the honest and inspiring exchange with the participants and organisers of the summer school. I especially want to thank my team members for reflecting and discussing experiences during and after the workshop, for sharing their material, and for reading through and ­commenting on this piece: thank you Adam Zeiner, Andrea Cegarra, Barbara Giorgi, Gregory Scott, Polina Veidenbakh, Stef Silva, and Thaifu Zheng.

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References Auger, J., & Hanna, J. (2019). Reconstrained design. Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute. Candy, S. (2010). The futures of everyday life: Politics and the design of experiential scenarios. University of Manoa. Candy, S., & Dunagan, J. (2017). Designing an experiential scenario: The people who vanished. Futures, 86, 136–153. Charleston, L. (2019). The frightening supernatural story of the Black Bird of Chernobyl. https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/the-­ frightening-­supernatural-­story-­of-­the-­black-­bird-­of-­chernobyl/news-­story/7 4ea2f417564e6ca1a289e0813d09341 Cuhls, K., van der Giessen, A., Toivanen, H., Toivanen, M., Erdmann, L., Warnke, P., & Seifert, L. (2015). Models of horizon scanning. How to integrate Horizon Scanning into European Research and Innovation Policies. Retrieved from: https://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/isi/dokumente/ccv/2015/ Models-­of-­Horizon-­Scanning.pdf. Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything. Design, fiction, and social dreaming. MIT Press. Escalante, M. L., & Mortimer, C. (2021). Staying with speculation: Natures, futures, politics. Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs, 11(1–2), 3–9. Fearns, V. K. G. (2019). Experiencing tomorrow: The importance of immersive arts for climate science communication. In K. Kleemann & J. Oomen (Eds.), RCC perspectives - Communicating the climate: From knowing change to changing knowledge (Vol. 4). Forlano, L. (2021). Foreword to part 1. Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs, 11, 11–13. Frayling, C. (1994). Research in art and design. Royal College of Art Research Papers, 1(1), 1–5. Galván, I., Bonisoli-Alquati, A., Jenkinson, S., Ghanem, G., Wakamatsu, K., Mousseau, T. A., & Møller, A. P. (2014). Chronic exposure to low-dose radiation at Chernobyl favours adaptation to oxidative stress in birds. Functional Ecology, 28(6), 1387–1403. Haraway, D. (2013). SF: Science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, so far. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, 3, 1–18.

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Hawkins, H., & Straughan, E. (2016). Introduction: For geographical aesthetics. In H. Hawkins & E. Straughan (Eds.), Geographical aesthetics: imagining space, staging encounters (pp. 1–18). Routledge. Helgason, I., Smyth, M., Encinas, E., & Mitrović, I. (2020). Speculative and critical design in education: Practice and perspectives. DIS 2020 Companion Companion Publication of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 385–388). Iaconesi, S., & Persico, O. (2020). NeoRural futures. A documented case history of a speculative design learning experience. Retrieved from https://www.he-­r.it/ wp-­content/uploads/2021/01/Neorural_Futures_download.pdf Le Guin, U.  K. (2016). Words are my matter: Writings about life and books, 2000–2016. Small Beer Press. Lury, C., & Wakeford, N. (2012). Inventive methods: The happening of the social. In C. Lury & N. Wakeford (Eds.), Inventive methods: The happening of the social. Routledge. MacLure, M. (2006). The bone in the throat: Some uncertain thoughts on baroque method. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19(6), 729–745. Marres, N., Guggenheim, M., & Wilkie, A. (2018). Inventing the social. Mattering Press. McKibben, B. (2005). What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art. Retrieved from: https://grist.org/article/mckibben-­imagine/ Pallasmaa, J. (2009). The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. Wiley. Schön, D. A. (1984). Design as a reflective conversation with the situation. In The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Routledge. Stengers, I. (2014). Gaia, the Urgency to Think (and Feel). Retrieved from: www. osmilnomesdegaia.eco.br%7Criodejaneiro,09.2014 Tharp, B. M., & Tharp, S. M. (2019). Discursive design. Critical, speculative, and alternative things. MIT Press. Ward, M. (2019). Critical about critical and speculative design. SpeculativeEdu.Eu. Retrieved from: http://speculativeedu.eu/ critical-­about-­critical-­and-­speculative-­design/. Wilkie, A., Savransky, M., & Rosengarten, M. (2017). Speculative research: The lure of possible futures (pp. 1–18). Routledge.

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Yablokov, A. V. (2009). Chernobyl’s radioactive impact on fauna. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1181, 255–280. Zimmerman, J., & Forlizzi, J. (2014). Research through design in HCI. In Ways of knowing in HCI (pp. 167–189). Springer.

10 Foley and Fabulation: The Production of Screams, Sound, and Subjectivity in Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh

“Gilderoy, This Is Going to Be a Fantastic Film” Somewhere or nowhere in the middle of 1970s Italy, Gilderoy’s mind is losing and even loosening him. In Peter Strickland’s film Berberian Sound Studio (2012), Gilderoy, a British natural history sound engineer, travels to Italy to work on the post-production of a film about horses only to discover he has unsuspectingly been scouted to work on an Italian giallo1 film called ‘The Equestrian Vortex’. We never see The Equestrian Vortex; we only hear it being recorded and edited, erased and remade. Everything that Gilderoy hears we hear too—Berberian Sound Studio’s audio is completely diegetic, originating from the on-screen ‘reel’ world of the film. Through a manipulation of screams, slashes, and sore throats, both  ‘Giallo’ is a particular genre of Italian thriller-horror films known for slasher violence and eroticism, at the height of its popularity during the 1970s. 1

T. E. Jeyasingh (*) School of Science, UNSW Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_10

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Gilderoy and its audience become transformed by the giallo seeping out of the sound studio. Berberian Sound Studio is a horror film about a horror film without being a horror film—as the director of The Equestrian Vortex, Santini, says to Gilderoy when he first arrives: “horror film? This is not a horror film… Please, please Gilderoy. Don’t call my film ‘horror’ again” (Strickland, 2012, 0:25:26) yet later “Gilderoy, this is going to be a fantastic film. Brutal and honest. Nobody has seen this horror before” (Strickland, 2012, 0:53:01). The film does not have any opening credits: we instead see those belonging to The Equestrian Vortex, demonic and gothic imagery screams out from the projector. Watching over the sound studio, the ethereal presence of the projector problematises the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘reel’ because we only see it in reverse, looking into the light rather than the projection image itself. We never see The Equestrian Vortex, but encounter its violence through the film’s audio, the recording and casting of screams, and the tension and cruelty experienced by the cast and crew in the studio. Rather than just matching the visual-image of the film, the audio-image of Berberian Sound Studio takes on a life of its own, problematising and questioning our interpretation of the film. Indeed, Strickland himself describes the film as “a meditation on sound as much as it is a meditation on violence” (Cummings, 2012). Peter Strickland is a contemporary British film director and screenwriter, whose highly stylised films are known for their genre-bending combination of horror and comedy. Strickland describes how his short film, Cold Meridian (2020a) “weaves in and out of… different realities, both virtual and oneiric until it’s not clear which is which” (Strickland, 2020b). This is a dimension of his work that I argue resonates with his wider cinematic project, too. Strickland’s cinema unsettles established modes of thinking and feeling by distorting both established cinematic conventions, such as credit sequences and genre specifications, and supposedly stable elements of quotidian life. Film critic Mark Kermode argues that Strickland’s manipulations of cinematic conventions are more than just ‘head-nods’ or ‘casual homage’ to established genres—by taking “genres that he understands, turning them upside down”, Strickland’s cinema thus results in something “which perhaps you wouldn’t have expected before” (kermodeandmayo, 2012, 0:04:20). In Berberian Sound

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Studio, it is our connection to seemingly naturalised sound which is the target, distorting what is ‘real’ and what is ‘reel’2 and thus troubling the distinction between reality and unreality for both Gilderoy and us as audience, both of whom struggle to separate the on-screen horror of The Equestrian Vortex from the sound studio’s cruelty and unease. Berberian Sound Studio depicts the range of inventive methods that sound engineers use to produce cinematic audio. Although the film is set in the 1970s before digital sound became the norm, many of the techniques used in the film remain in use today, albeit in different forms. Crucial to these methods is Foley—the reproduction of everyday sound effects using other-than-apparent materials for the purpose of enhancing audio quality: The art of sound began in 1927, when Universal employee Jack Foley helped turn the film studio’s “silent” Show Boat into a full-on musical extravaganza. Because microphones could only pick up on dialogue, Foley had to add in the other sounds later. He projected the film onto a screen and recorded the footsteps, the movement, the props—all in one track. (Williams, 2015)

On a film set, surfaces, materials, and encounters are not as they would be outside the set: marble floors of extravagant banquet halls might be painted plywood, and the roar of terrifying mythical beasts turns out to be baby elephant seals. Foley replaces or enhances the audio elements of cinema using inventive strategies. When Gilderoy is first introduced to The Equestrian Vortex, the film’s Foley artists—Massimo and Massimo— walk through the door, up to the table, and begin choreographing the chopping of watermelons to imitate the sound of mutilating human bodies: “horse riding girl? See, she’s just not horse riding anymore” (Strickland, 2012: 0:07:01). Massimo nonchalantly hands Gilderoy a piece of the watermelon flesh, which he takes nervously, as if contracting to the horrors yet to unfold.

 A distinction between “the ‘real,’ as in that which the camera has filmed, and the ‘reel,’ by which they mean the image on the screen” (Aitken & Dixon, 2006: 327). 2

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A Deleuzian Speculation? Orientated around Berberian Sound Studio, in this chapter I show how Foley and cinematic audio provide a way of thinking through Gilles Deleuze’s (1995, 1997a, 1998) concept of ‘fabulation’ in order to conceptualise speculation as an event which happens to us, in the spirit of Deleuze’s philosophical ethos—rather than as an activity which we orchestrate and take control of. Fabulation refers to the capacity of fiction and stories to do something in the world, regardless of and beyond their relationship to ‘reality’ or ‘truth’. Deleuze’s fabulation is not targeted at a people already in existence,3 but rather towards a ‘people to come’ (1997a: 223): the fabulating function—does not consist in imagining or projecting an ego. Rather, it attains these visions, it raises itself to these becomings and powers. (Deleuze, 1998: 3)

This chapter therefore provides new ways of thinking about fabulation which resist assumptions of truth telling, as if stories and fiction were simply universal truth dressed up in costume, and instead focus on their political significance as capable of creating new modes of subjectivity, indeed, new modes of life. I connect Deleuze’s concept of fabulation with speculation in the spirit of his philosophical task to counter forms of oppression and fascism, which flourish when thought is restricted to that which is “recognisable and knowable” (Carr, 2018: 12). In this chapter, I suggest that speculation is one answer to Deleuze’s commitment to thinking difference rather than the same, in this spirit of his ethos which asks how “we might seek out, experiment with, and amplify moments when life exceeds our capacities for recognition” (Roberts & Dewsbury, 2021: 10) in order to disrupt “sedimented ways of thinking and behaving” (Carr, 2018: 15). I identify a speculative chord throughout Deleuze’s work which is committed to the importance of fabulation (Bogue, 2010; Flaxman,  In comparison, Donna Haraway (2011) introduces her notion of ‘speculative fabulation’ to a multispecies populated planet Earth as a tool to redirect the course of the Anthropocene. 3

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2011). Deleuze never wrote explicitly on speculation; perhaps, for him, the term retained its problematic associations with a transcendent logic of thought, according to which speculation was the task of the privileged human subject who speculated in order to access a higher realm of truth and knowledge (Doucet et  al., 2018). Such a transcendent logic was problematic, for Deleuze, because it flattens the lively potentials of the world to do something: starting “with abstractions such as the One, the Whole, the Subject” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002: vii), which are seen to exist “above or beyond the flux of the sensible” (Carr, 2018: 28), transcendent logic then “looks for the process by which they are embodied in a world” external to them (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002: vii). Because this “merely duplicates the empirical” (Deleuze, 1997b: 4), experience, therefore, ends up conforming to the initial requirements of the speculative thinker, rather than the creation of anything new. In contrast, Deleuze (1994, 1997b) introduces the notion of ‘transcendental empiricism’, which seeks to expand empirical experience itself: “the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002: vii). Therefore, although not a thinker of speculation per se, both Deleuze’s philosophical ethos and his concept of fabulation specifically, align with contemporary speculative philosophy’s celebration, intensification and expansion of experience, making room for the ‘new’ (Debaise et al., 2017), or, the yet ‘to come’. My aim here is to conceptualise speculation as a mode of thought which represents a vector of subjectification because of its ability to draw something out from, create fractures in, and perhaps bend ‘us’, thus, creating a ‘people’ and ‘life’. Of the various habits—“contractions, contemplations, pretentions, presumptions, satisfaction, fatigues” (Deleuze, 1994: 100), which, Deleuze notes, compose us—I recommend ‘speculation’ as a suitable addition. My approach provides distance from an anthropocentric subject who does speculation and instead aligns with the post-humanities’ insistence on subjectivity as produced and “derivative” (Sauvagnargues et al., 2016: 24), always exposed to ongoing metamorphic twists and turns (Deleuze, 1994; O’Sullivan, 2016; Williams et al., 2019). Speculation risks slipping back into anthropocentric assumptions about the world and research via the transcendent model of thought

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which Deleuze sought to depart from, when speculation remains tied to the privileged figure of a volitional human subject who does speculation. In this chapter I seek to re-orientate the relationship between cinema and its audience: it is the film itself that speculates as something involving, yet exceeding, the human. I turn to Berberian Sound Studio (2012) to consider how such manipulation of sound and subjectivity is a creative process which metamorphoses novelty into the world, something yet ‘to come’.

 inema: Fabulous Metamorphosis Is C Yet ‘to Come’… Cinema is one place where stories of metamorphosis and connections to other ways of life seem especially abound: cinema provides a different way of thinking and feeling because it awards a space in which to explore what-else’s, what-more’s, and what-if ’s. Although Deleuze (1997a) valorises all art forms as capable of realising such potentials, cinema is especially capable because it “gives material form to varieties of movement, time, and chance that philosophy may, in its turn, formulate as concepts and interpret as values” (Rodowick, 1997: 140). Cinema, therefore, provides an ideal space in which to consider how Deleuze’s concept of fabulation makes manifest the creative and metamorphic capacities of speculation. Fabulation appears across Deleuze’s oeuvre under various guises—for example, as ‘story-telling’ which feeds off the ‘powers of the false’ in Cinema 2 (1997a); as the creation of ‘a people who are missing’ in Essays Critical and Clinical (1998) and of the ‘people to come’ in Cinema 2; and as ‘legending’ in Negotiations (1995). What connects these is a valorisation of art as active and capable of fostering new modes of life beyond measures of truth and meaning (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). While rejecting the concept of an ideal ‘utopia’, and rather than giving into dystopian visions of the future, Deleuze (1995) chose fabulation as an alternative way to give voice to the utopian impulse for change. He borrowed the term ‘fabulation’ from Henri Bergson (2002), who negatively associated fabulation with myths and religions that held

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“primitive” (p. 103) societies together. Deleuze instead imbrued the concept with positive and “political meaning” (1995: 174). By engaging “the generative forces of metamorphosis immanent within the world”, Deleuzian fabulation seeks to unsettle “the powers that be—their institutions, practices, categories and concepts” (Bogue, 2010: 223) and make room for different potentials to become actualised. Fabulation captures the notion that the power of stories does not depend on them being ‘true’—with fabulation, “the very categories of true and false become irrelevant” (Bogue, 2010: 12) because “stories can be fiction or not. You can make up stories but you can also tell true stories” (Wiame, 2018: 526). This fundamental ambiguity is the source of fabulation’s creative potency: it is not what fabulation means, as if its significance were due to its ability to recourse back to some fundamental or universal reality or ‘truth’, but rather, what fabulation does which is crucial.4 Fabulation “open[s] new possibilities for the future” (Bogue, 2010: 32) by evaluating and enhancing “the potentiality for chance, differentiation, and creative evolution” (Rodowick, 1997: 140). Via Deleuze’s concept of fabulation, I emphasise speculation’s ability to produce new modes of subjectivity, and therefore, new modes of life. With Deleuzian fabulation, rather than speculation being something that we as subjects do, speculation instead can be conceived as an event which happens to us, pushing and pulling on our boundaries, resulting in a never-ending “invention of a people, that is, a possibility of life” (Deleuze, 1998: 4). Ronald Bogue (2010) identifies five capacities of Deleuzian fabulation: becoming-other, experimenting on the real, ‘legending’, inventing a people to come, and deterritorialising language. My focus here is on the invention of a people to come: in other words, how cinema creates new modes of life, new habits and desires. The task of creating “a people to come” means that, rather than reassuringly offering itself to a people already awaiting, or “to a subjectivity already in place” (O’Sullivan, 2016: 80), cinema might instead “[draw] something forth” (82) by creating fractures and bends in the habits, desires, attentions, and fears of  In Deleuze’s reading of Plato, simulacra are things which are neither perfect ideals nor their copies—they are a third, subversive category, which undermine the ideal-copy relationship. Simulacra distort the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ because they relate to each other not through identity, but rather through difference, and in these systems “unfolds the power of the false” (156).

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which we are composed. For Deleuze (1994) there is no static, singular, or self-identical subject who operates as an agent in the world; rather, “selves are larval subjects” (Deleuze, 1994: 100) and so “subjectivity is becoming, change, deterritorialisation” (Rodowick, 1997: 140), continually being shaped and remade. This means that ‘we’ are always already a people, a collective of various constitutive forces, rather than strictly individual (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988); however, the exact nature of this people is not fixed and ready to be understood and known, but is always ‘to come’. Cinema, therefore, represents an important vector in the creation of a ‘people to come’ by providing a different way of thinking and feeling which contribute to ongoing modes of subjectivity: film does something, bigger and beyond truth and meaning. In the following section, I explore how Foley in Berberian Sound Studio constitutes such a creative activity.

“ A New World of Sound Awaits You” (Strickland, 2021, 0:04:45) One might assume that Foley’s role is to improve the sense of reality in a film: intended to slip under the beady eye of the audience by giving a natural and unquestionable status to sound, audio ends up playing second fiddle to the dominant visual-image. In classic cinema, a film’s audio-­ image depends on the visual: narration follows on-screen events and is used to link perceptions, actions, and reactions, whereas music would be something that intensifies these sequences. This ‘classic continuity editing’ seeks to create a seamless flow between shots and events, and, as a result, sound is naturalised as “an extension of visual space” (Rodowick, 1997: 145). Foley might, therefore, seem to be responsible for ensuring a coherent sense of continuity between the ‘reel’ and the ‘real’, contributing to a ‘reality effect’ across a film. Berberian Sound Studio reluctantly drags Foley to the front line, forcefully blurring the boundaries between the film itself and The Equestrian Vortex, between Gilderoy and the rest of the crew, between ‘real’ and ‘reel’, and between different temporal states, through the constant replaying, editing and recasting of sounds. In this film, Foley is not about

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strengthening the reality effect, but rather turns it on its head, cracking it open for further investigation: an unreality effect that feeds on the fundamental ambiguity of fabulation. Even the behind-the-scenes secrets of Berberian Sound Studio we seem to be let into are not free of suspicion, as revealed by Foley supervisor Heikki Kossi: I tried to do something with melons … but it didn’t sound wet enough, so I just used a wet piece of cloth. Then I also wanted to hear some kind of cracking, crashing sound, so I just used a little piece of wood. (Williams, 2015)

Foley in Berberian Sound Studio thus augments “a system of unhooking and interwining” (Deleuze, 1997a: 250): necessarily implicated in, and yet extending beyond, the visual-image, the liberated audio-image of the film returns to unnerve the character’s perceptions, actions, and reactions in such a way that it causes the visual to self-implode. This is witnessed in the scene at the end of the film where Gilderoy walks through a door in his apartment only to find himself transported back to the sound studio watching a film about himself. His halcyonic English countryside, its lazy cows and gentle birdsongs are being eaten away by the blood red acid pouring out of the sound studio. The sound from the studio seeps out of every corner of the film and, where it goes, the giallo follows. Fabulation works through Foley to drive a destabilisation of supposedly solid elements of our experience, issuing forth a warrant for their upheaval, and perhaps the creation of something new ‘to come’. Deleuze (1997a) recognised that with modern cinema, the audio-­ image is able to break away and no longer depends on the visual for its sense of direction. This newly autonomous audio-image returns to the visual in “incommensurable yet complementary” (Rodowick, 1997: 145) ways—film becomes what Deleuze calls “heautonomous” (1997a: 251) meaning the audio and visual-image are no longer linked logically, as they are in classic continuity editing, but rather gain a “new consistency” by means of “a more complex link” between the two (252). In Berberian Sound Studio, rather than relying on an intuitive connection between what we see and hear, the film forces our ears to be on constant alert, for example, connecting the repeated and recasted female characters’

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screaming to the tortuous tactics which fester in the studio rather than the gore of The Equestrian Vortex. The heautonomous image requires “a new Analytic of the image” (Deleuze, 1997a: 245), which is not about seeking to know and understand an image, since ‘true’ and ‘false’ are no longer stable havens, but concerns a process of perceiving the audiovisual image and relinking it to something else. In this way, heautonomous images create the potential for new connections in thought (Deleuze, 1997a). Cinema creatively transforms the world by “forcing us to look at something differently” (Williams, 2016: 1550), inviting whatifs and what-­mores, open to forging new ways of thinking and feeling, and allow us to experiment with and amplify certain potentials, and thus effecting out ways of being and becoming. Berberian Sound Studio offers an insight into how fabulation shapes our collective and ongoing ‘peopleing’. Gilderoy arrives in Italy an altogether British and rather introverted natural history sound engineer, equipped with his recordings of the English countryside and letters from his mother about the nesting birds in their garden back in Surrey. By the end of the film, both Gilderoy and his sound library have been thoroughly decontextualised and revised: detached from their recorded settings, his sound clips become heautonomous audio-visual images, relinked in surprising and previously unforeseeable ways as he recoils at the realisation of his increasing participation in the cruel antics towards the female cast in order to extract the necessary audio for the film. At the end of the film, the last shot is reversed as Gilderoy walks towards the screen to show us the projection itself. However, in place of the anticipated giallo of The Equestrian Vortex, we instead see a shadow of Gilderoy looming upon the blank screen. Gilderoy, the unfinished outcome of a whole host of swarming constitutive forces, has himself been detached and relinked in surprising and previously unforeseeable ways. There are whole hosts of swarming activities taking place beyond levels of representation, cognition, and visuality: we are ourselves always getting lost in the world of giallo, haunted by acidic destruction and creation, acquiring new languages without fully realising it. Subjectification is usually (but not always) a more subtle process, however, the potential of perhaps crudely staging the production of subjectivity as an ongoing and dynamic process through which, as I have analysed here, forces us to

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think about how our subjectivity manifests, a reminder that discussions about the production of subjectivity are not an anti-subject excuse to veer towards the depoliticisation of human life (Braidotti, 2018), but rather require that we expand where we look for the boundaries of ‘us’. Sound, an often unassuming part of our everyday and cinematic encounters, is itself a powerful and creative force that plays an important part in how we understand ourselves and negotiate our given milieux: the way “one ventures from home on the thread of a tune. Along sonorous, gestural, motor lines” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988: 311). In an occult manner, Berberian Sound Studio (2012) is especially telling of this cinematic capacity: its audio-manipulation of sound and subjectivity unsettles established modes of life and cinema in order to make room for something new. By virtue of its lack of concern for what might be ‘true’, Berberian Sound Studio contributes to a ‘people to come’, or, our collective ‘becoming’, by unsettling supposed-givens and forcing us to realise the constituted and processual nature of our subjectivity.

 Meditation on Screams, Sound, A and Subjectivity While others have emphasised this significance of Deleuzian fabulation for resisting the probable and the present (Debaise et al., 2017; Doucet et  al., 2018), in this chapter I have highlighted how fabulation might produce something new via the creation of a ‘people to come’. Conceptualised through fabulation, speculation thus becomes “an addition to the reality it deals with” because “it makes potentialities appear and gives strength to the potentialities it develops” (Wiame, 2018: 531). Berberian Sound Studio creates an heautonomous audio-image that injects ambiguity and chaos into the very distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’, between reality and unreality, therefore freeing the film to do something altogether else—an invention of a people and, indeed, life itself via the production of new modes of subjectivity (Deleuze, 1997a, 1998). Speculation, as I have presented through Deleuze’s concept of fabulation and his more broad philosophical ethos, therefore might prove an ally in Deleuze’s “resistance to oppressive conditions of life” (Wiame, 2018:

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533) because it is capable of introducing novelty into the world through perhaps uncertain and chaotic conduits, as witnessed by Berberian Sound Studio. Rather than returning to a transcendent or rational subject who thinks speculatively, aligning with a Deleuzian philosophical ethos which emphasises thought as experimental and creative, metamorphic and connective, speculation is valorised because it does something: an upheaval and uprooting of supposedly static and natural modes of thinking in order to make room for the what-ifs, what else’s, and what-more’s to perhaps gain shape. Recognising these tendencies of speculation is important because it reminds us that thought processes are neither apolitical nor passive—they contribute to very actual processes, including those which touch our most felt habits, desires, fears, and attentions. Watching cinema and engaging with art, exposing ourselves to different modes of thinking and feeling, therefore, become ethically significant tasks. More than just superfluous and leisurely indulgences, these are valorised as “producing reality” (Deleuze, 1995: 58) by instilling in ‘us’ different ways of thinking and feeling by “bringing something new, something unrecognizable into the world” (Roberts & Dewsbury, 2021: 8). As I have defined it throughout this chapter through Deleuze and Berberian Sound Studio, speculation invites the chance for change, for, perhaps, a different people and life yet to come.

References Aitken, S.  C., & Dixon, D.  P. (2006). Imagining geographies of film. Erdkunde, 326–336. Bergson, H. (2002). The two sources of morality and religion. University of Notre Dame Press. Bogue, R. (2010). Deleuzian fabulation and the scars of history. Edinburgh University Press. Braidotti, R. (2018). Affirmative ethics, posthuman subjectivity, and intimate scholarship: A conversation with Rosi Braidotti. In Decentering the researcher in intimate scholarship (Advances in research on teaching, Vol. 31) (pp. 179–188). Emerald Publishing Limited.

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Carr, C. L. (2018). Deleuze’s Kantian Ethos: Critique as a way of life. Edinburgh University Press. Cummings, B.  L. (2012). Foley cow! Berberian sound studio Director Peter Strickland interviewed [online]. Accessed April 28, 2021, from https://thequietus.com/articles/09874-­peter-­strickland-­interview-­berberian-­sound-­ studio Debaise, D., Solhdju, K., Terranova, F., & Pihet, V. (2017). Speculative narration. Parse Journal, 17, 64–77. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972–1990. Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1997a). Cinema II: The time-image. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1997b). Immanence: A life…. Theory, Culture and Society, 14(2), 3–7. Deleuze, G. (1998). Essays critical and clinical. Verso. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2002). Dialogues II. Continuum. Doucet, I., Debaise, D., & Zitouni, B. (2018). Narrate, Speculate, Fabulate: Didier Debaise and Benedikte Zitouni in conversation with Isabelle Doucet. Architectural Theory Review, 22(1), 9–23. Flaxman, G. (2011). The fabulation of philosophy: Powers of the false (Vol. 1). University of Minnesota Press. Kermodeandmayo. (2012, September 1). Mark Kermode reviews Berberian Sound Studio [Video]. YouTube. Accessed May 24, 2021, from https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Zfl7lyMje78 O’Sullivan, S. (2016). Myth-science and the fictioning of reality. Paragrana, 25(2), 80–93. Roberts, T., & Dewsbury, J. D. (2021). Vital aspirations for geography in an era of negativity: Valuing life differently with Deleuze. Progress in Human Geography, 0(0), 1–19. Rodowick, D. N. (1997). Gilles Deleuze’s time machine. Duke University Press. Sauvagnargues, A., Verderber, S., & Holland, E. (2016). Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon. Edinburgh University Press. Strickland, P. (Director). (2012). Berberian Sound Studio [Film]. UK Film Council, Film4, Warp X, ITV Yorkshire. Strickland, P. (Director). (2020a). Cold Meridian [Film]. Mindwax.

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Strickland, P. (2020b). Peter Strickland introduces his film “Cold Meridian”. Notebook. [online]. Accessed April 28, 2021, from https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/peter-­strickland-­introduces-­his-­film-­col[d-­meridian Wiame, A. (2018). Gilles Deleuze and Donna Haraway on fabulating the earth. Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 12(4), 525–540. Williams, N. (2016). Creative processes: From interventions in art to intervallic experiments through Bergson. Environment and Planning A, 48(8), 1549–1564. Williams, N., Patchett, M., Lapworth, A., Roberts, T., & Keating, T. (2019). Practising post-humanism in geographical research. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44(4), 637–643. Williams, O. (2015). The secrets behind 44 classic cinema sound effects [online]. Accessed April 28, 2021, from https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/cinema-­sound-­secrets-­foley-­artist/

11 Nuclear Remains: For a Speculative Empirical Approach Thomas Keating

What Remains? Nuclear remains concern the materiality of spent radioactive substances and, at the very same time, a question of the abstractions used to think about nuclear materials into the future. As a question of matter, the existence of long-lived radioactive uranium and plutonium deposits means contemplating forms of materiality that often remain harmful to organic life for at least 100,000 years. Countries such as Sweden, Finland, the UK, the USA, and France are now beginning the process of developing so-called permanent underground storage facilities for long-lived nuclear waste, raising the question of how to communicate memory of these storage sites into the distant future. Developing the question of abstractions, archaeologists are increasingly focusing on the need to create alternative techniques for transferring memory of nuclear storage (Holtorf &

T. Keating (*) Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA), Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_11

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Högberg, 2020), including the prospect of communicating with post- or non-human subjects removed from contemporary systems of semiotics. Fields as diverse as nuclear semiotics, future literacy, decolonial approaches to nuclearity, and environmental semiosis together consider how to communicate nuclear waste sites in ways that are no longer founded on human onto-epistemological frames. As long-lived nuclear waste increases in volume into the twenty-first century, nuclear remains emerge today as a problem of how to develop alternative abstractions of thought capable of thinking and communicating radioactive matter into futures far exceeding human life. Despite calls for experimenting with alternative forms of thinking and communicating memory of nuclear remains, the notions of speculation and speculative thinking often appear pejoratively in social science conversations around nuclear waste futures. Speculation, in the context of nuclear waste studies, is routinely posited as an “unreliable” and “woolly” mode of thought (Routley & Routley, 1978: 152) that would inhibit the practical management of radioactive matter (see Joyce, 2020: 66 and 170). In this chapter, and taking inspiration from Marcus Doel’s (2019) writing of the Fukushima prefecture, I consider the value of treating nuclear remains as a speculative problem that demands alternative modes of thought. Drawing on research with the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (Svensk Kärnbränslehantering Aktiebolag), I aim to explore how the problem of communicating memory of nuclear remains might be informed by recent developments in speculative empiricism, understood briefly as an approach to thinking experience in its pluralism (Debaise, 2017). Speculative thinking of this sort, I argue, highlights how any communication of nuclear waste sites into the future involves the creation of abstractions operating besides the logos of the human subject. In what follows, I first consider the conceptual and historical character of (nuclear) remains; second, I develop the relationship between nuclear remains and speculative empiricism; third, I conclude by exploring the value of a speculative empirical approach to nuclear remains through the Spike Field nuclear marker concept.

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Thinking Remains In Athens, Still Remains, Jacques Derrida considers something of the aporetic qualities exhibited by remains. Here, Derrida (2010) derives ‘remains’ from the French demeure, describing at once a site where something resides, such as a dwelling place, a residence, or burial site, but also a duration since remains are also “to stop, to take one’s time or to delay” (p. 9). Split between an individuated quality of a preserved ‘thing’ and a duration of spacetime that ‘acts’, remains reveal multiple and competing forms of sense. Such aporetic qualities, as Jussi Parikka observes, suggest remains are: that which is left behind as enduring legacy that is archived but also that which is left out of the classification or the archive. In other words, to remain and the remainder can paradoxically refer to what is being left as acknowledged but also as the unacknowledged. (2019: 5)

As both object (site) and process (duration), remains are caught between multiple senses of things that have been and are yet to come: remains express at once an archive, the preserved detritus of a body, but also a sense of pausing and residing, a sense of permanence, or a quality of something unacknowledged. Different to ‘ruins’ that might suggest a fall into “a state of contextual irrelevance” (Brodie & Velkova, 2021: 872), remains imply a specific power to endure. Thinking remains is thus to recognise a certain capacity for matter to persist in being left behind. As an expression of something left behind, remains point to an evaluative question of how, and in what manner, material things that are forgotten once again become acknowledged. In the context of nuclear waste, the enduring qualities of remains become notable through long-lived radioactive matter with a capacity to endure beyond the lifespan of the human species.1 Historically, however,  The terms ‘long-lived’ and ‘short-lived’ radioactivity are not without their problems, not least because these thresholds are framed by the lifeworld of the organism. Short-lived nuclear waste, including technological waste in moderate proximity to a nuclear reactor, is so-called because it remains hazardous to organic life for 100–300 years. Long-lived waste, including spent nuclear fuel made up of uranium and plutonium deposits that have undergone fission reaction, far exceeds the life of any organism and is hazardous for anything between 10,000 and 100,000 years, after which it is expected to return close to pre-reaction levels of radioactivity. 1

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the capacity for nuclear matter to remain has not always been widely acknowledged. Upon the first demonstration of a nuclear fission reaction in 1938 by physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, the years proceeding this event were marked by a certain optimism about the future of nuclear energy production. Even with the palpable horrors of nuclear weapon detonation in Japan and elsewhere in the Pacific, it was the USA that led an international movement towards nuclear energy proliferation. One of the hallmarks of this movement included the introduction of President Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme in December 1953 and the subsequent formation of both the Atomic Energy Act in 1954 and the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1957. These events, as nuclear historian Mara Drogan (2016: 950) explains, aimed at creating “a proposal that would offer a sense of optimism and portray the United States as an advocate for peace instead of war”. Crucial to the success of these proposals, as Anna Storm (2018: 60) notes, was the sense that the promise of nuclear science was not limited to boundless energy production, but also extended to spaces of the human body including “truly revolutionary potential for medical and food treatment”. Tempering some of this optimism, however, the growth of nuclear energy production in Russia and the USA in the 1950s also marked the advent of nuclear remains emerging as an international environmental problem. As Macfarlane (2003: 785) describes, “[n]uclear energy development in the USA was allowed to proceed with little thought to the back-end of the fuel cycle and especially the waste”. This seeming carelessness was at odds with the National Academy of Sciences who as early as 1957 recommended the use of long-term underground repositories as the only viable site for nuclear waste disposal. It is unsurprising, therefore, that over the course of the twentieth century the material remains left behind by nuclear energy production became associated with an impending sense of planetary crisis. Yet this is not to say nuclear remains are limited to a question of waste. As Kate Brown (2019: 5) explains, following the explosion of one of Chernobyl’s nuclear reactors in 1986, an estimated “200 million curies of radioactivity dispersed into the environment … comparable to several very large nuclear warheads”. In addition to tens of thousands of human deaths, the radioactive contamination attributed to the Chernobyl explosion also resulted in ongoing transfers

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of radioactivity in various non-human bodies around the earth. One notable example here is the way nuclear radiation today endures in the Red Forest, a 10-square-kilometre pine forest sited within the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The passage of radiation in this forest, which killed most microbial, plant, and animal life, serves as one expression of the multiple ways nuclear matter remains: enduring on in the absence of microbial life, the Red Forest remains today with little visible change, unable to decompose and seemingly frozen in time to the observer (Brown, 2019). In geography, responses to the environmental problems associated with nuclear remains have taken multiple forms. Focusing on the aesthetics of nuclear infrastructure, Leila Dawney (2021: 417) identifies a “politics of endurance” in the nuclear ‘atomgrad’ city of Visaginas, Lithuania, where, despite the social and economic damage caused by the breakdown of nuclear industry, there continues to be “dreams of the good life … figured in the infrastructural remains of the atomgrad on which the contemporary residents of Visaginas stake out their lives”. Similarly, the planetary effects of nuclear remains also gain expression through the singularity of a place that goes on in the wake of a radioactive spill. “Distant attachments undoubtedly remain”, as Marcus Doel (2019: 244) evokes in the context of the Fukushima Prefecture where various manners of living-on endure in the wake of nuclear disaster. In Fukushima, or for those picking contaminated blueberries in the Chernobyl exclusion zone (Brown, 2019: 119), what remains is not only the material presence of radioactivity but also an “inalienable” attachment to a place (Doel, 2019: 261). Albeit difficult to discern, these remains highlight something of the temporal incongruity of a subject’s attachment to a place that is, at the same time, laced with imperceptible, unthinkable, and delayed operations of radioactivity acting over an interval of time exceeding the human lifespan. In other words, these are nuclear remains that express a resolutely unthinkable quality of time—what Derrida (2010) refers to as a “delay before time itself ” (p.  17 original emphasis). This notion of remains, therefore, invites us to consider how the duration of nuclear matter exists in spacetimes that are in certain ways irreducible to conventional human time horizons used to anticipate the future. Treating nuclear waste as a temporal problem of thinking the distant future, recent research intersecting geology, archaeology, and future

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heritage studies has also done much to develop the idea of nuclear remains through the notions of time and temporality. Allied to recent research addressing environmental problems through geological time perspectives (Bjornerud, 2018), Vincent Ialenti (2020) turns to the ‘if/then’ logics informing the management of Finland’s permanent nuclear waste repository into a ‘deep time’ future of 10,000 years. For Ialenti (2020: 87), thinking the “tremendous uncertainties” of deep time requires learning styles of risk modelling that can “make us more sophisticated in thinking in speculative, futurological, imaginative ways”. Similarly, in future heritage studies there has been growing interest in how the existential problem of communicating nuclear waste into the future provides opportunities to revise traditional approaches to memory preservation. Rather than rely on conventional nuclear warning signs and markers, Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg (2020) argue that ‘permanent’ geological nuclear waste repositories require novel forms of heritage capable of communicating knowledge openly and creatively into distant futures  (Storm, 2019). Communication, in this context, is not a question of anticipating a known future but of opening nuclear heritage processes up to multiple senses of the future wherein “people will act as creatively and innovatively as we do, having generated perspectives and perceptions that we cannot even imagine today” (Holtorf & Högberg, 2020: 151). Insofar as they concern different ways of communicating information and signs about nuclear waste repositories, nuclear remains are posited here, albeit indirectly, as something that must be continuously updated to recognise changes in cultural, technological, and semiotic contexts.

Speculative Empiricism Connecting recent engagements with future heritage processes is a concern that the problems posed by nuclear remains—of geological timeframes that appear unthinkable to the human—are at odds with a tendency to imagine environmental problems over much shorter human-­ lifespan perspectives. However, one problem with thinking nuclear

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remains through geological time perspectives, as Joyce (2020) observes, is the danger that the focus on ‘preserving’ knowledge through nuclear markers, archives, or signs effective for communicating 100,000 years into the future risks assuming certain common sense perspectives about the subject of this communication. Such common sense assumptions include presumed future forms of value (the threat nuclear waste will pose or whether it is considered ‘waste’ at all), semiotics (a given language or logos that would be meaningful in the future), or a certain aesthesis (an embodied subject with some anticipated capacity for perceiving environmental stimuli). Thus, rather than rely on an essential set of human perceptual capacities (Sagan, 1978), or a universal human logos, one might instead consider how to think nuclear remains without anticipating the subject of such communication with a knowable criterion of valuation, or an essential capacity for sensing environmental stimuli. Insofar as nuclear remains can be approached as a question of thinking and communicating openly into the future, speculative empiricism becomes notable in this pursuit because it attempts precisely to think the experience of events through time in the most expansive terms possible. The aim of speculative empiricism, as Didier Debaise (2017) explains, is to “elucidate immediate experience in its pluralism” (p.  2), where ‘elucidation’ refers to an “invention of a space at once empirical and abstract…the goal of which is to express what it could mean to ‘have’ an experience without limiting experience by any single definition” (p. 3). Developing out of a genealogy of thought intersecting William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers, and Debaise, speculative empiricism is characterised by a certain ambitiousness: in elucidating experience besides any singular definition, it can be understood as a method for excluding nothing from experience. Crucially, to the extent speculative empiricism can be considered a method it is only in the manner that William James’ pragmatism conceives a ‘method’ as “technique of evaluating ideas” (Debaise, 2017: 9). To develop how speculative empiricism might be understood as a technique of evaluating ideas, it is worth focusing on the following passage from Science and the Modern World where Whitehead elaborates something of this method through the question of ‘abstractions’:

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The disadvantage of exclusive attention to a group of abstractions; however well-founded, is that, by the nature of the case, you have abstracted from the remainder of things. Insofar as the excluded things are important in your experience, your modes of thought are not fitted to deal with them. You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions. A civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress. An active school of philosophy is quite as important for the locomotion of ideas, as is an active school of railway engineers for the locomotion of fuel. (Whitehead, 1949: 59)

The task of speculative thinking, therefore, marks a commitment to revising abstractions to understand experience precisely in terms of all that is excluded from it. If experience becomes sterile when it is derived from an exclusive attention to certain dominant abstractions, this is because these abstractions—such as the notion of the ‘individual’, the ‘subject’, or even ‘nature’—take on such a predominance in thought that they come to disqualify certain kinds of interaction, relation, interconnection, and contingency from what gets counted as the experiential. Far from concerning cursory thought experiments, the aim of speculative thought and empiricism is to critically revise those modes of abstraction through which the concept of experience gets qualified. For Whitehead, revising abstractions demands techniques of thought capable of rethinking certain innate assumptions about the subject’s experience of events and how they take shape through time. As Luciana Parisi (2012: 241) argues, speculation of this sort concerns “not simply the place between the ideal and the material but an abstract spatium of singularities determined by an incorporeal series of effects, which are prior to any bifurcation between methods and objects”. And as a spatium of the singular, rather than the individual or the universal, speculative empiricism as a method thus describes a pluralistic universe of singular modes of expression where philosophy seeks to expand the terms through which the human conventionally thinks and makes sense of spatial-temporal events of experience.

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Speculating with Nuclear Remains One way to gauge the significance of a speculative empiricism is by considering how its emphasis on the revision of modes of abstraction informs a politics of radical difference. If for Whitehead speculative thinking concerns the revision of modes of abstraction rather than merely abstractions, this is because it seeks to alter the very styles of thinking that possess a subject in its apprehension of perceptive experience. For Whitehead (1949), writing in 1925, a revision of modes of abstraction—or, in other words, the processes of thought that qualify and disqualify an experience at its genesis prior to a reflective subject that would appraise it as such— was detectable at the advent of the theory of relativity, which made self-­ evident a certain experience of space and time “not hitherto contemplated” (p. 120). Politically, the implication of revising abstractions is in rethinking experience in terms of a pluriverse of contingent possibilities that “remains impossible for us to envisage yet demands a response … keeping differences proliferating, pouring over, flooding in” (Savransky, 2021: 118). Clearly, then, the task of revising one’s modes of abstraction is not without its challenges: How to account for those modes of abstraction that qualify an experience before it is perceived by an individual subject? How, if at all, does a speculative empiricism help account for alternative forms of experience, and thus seek to elucidate modes of thought conventionally ignored or left unseen? In the context of nuclear remains, engaging in a speculative empiricism would concern a modification those dominant forms of valuation used to make sense of environments. If nuclear remains lend themselves to this task of producing alternative forms of evaluation, this might be because they concern those “unobtainable” (Parisi, 2012) forces of the earth that are difficult to contemplate from embodied forms of thinking and perceiving. Allied to non-representational theory’s engagement with affective “registers of experience” that are “imperceptible, ephemeral, prearticulated, and intangible” (Williams, 2020: 425), speculative empiricism’s focus on an expanded category of experience also helps home-in on certain infra-sensible forms of sense that orientate a subject’s perceptive experience. This focus on infra-sensible experience is important

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because it concerns that which is “subtracted from perception” of the subject and “prior to that which conditions the body through the mediatization of the sensible” (Bonnet, 2017: 23). In this case, it is the infra-­ sensible qualities of nuclear remains that might be said to unsettle conventional frames of reference: just as William Connolly (2013: 89) refers to the way the human body is today maladapted to taste and perceive certain carcinogens in food or in the air, there is also a sense that the human is maladapted to register the qualities of nuclear remains whose radiation exists through durations of time vaster than the lifetime of the ‘human’. Such infra-sensible durations are challenging because they refuse to enter conventional ways of thinking future temporalities as an object of risk management and scenario planning (Ialenti, 2020). Despite this refusal, I suggest that nuclear remains can be productively approached through speculative empiricism to extend nuclear waste studies beyond a focus on preserving knowledge for the future and onto a focus on speculative communication. In doing so, I want to highlight the sense that there are already instances where one can recognise nuclear waste studies as engaging with infra-sensible forms of experience explored by speculative empiricism. One notable example is Spike Field (Fig. 11.1): a nuclear marker concept developed by Michael Brill and Safdar Abidi for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, USA, that arranges certain non-human things—rocks, metal, plants, signposts—to imagine a space that would deter subjects from visiting the land above a geological waste repository through a collective sense of inhospitality. Though by no means the only example to do so, Spike Field is notable because it arranges biological and geological entities not necessarily to preserve knowledge for the future, but rather to create future affective expressions of certain moods and orientations via non-human things. On one level, however, Spike Field might be understood as reproducing certain common sense assumptions associated with social science engagements with nuclear remains (Joyce, 2020), not least through the appeal to representational conventions of inhospitality through the use of various sharp and jagged objects. Indeed, in drawing on a recognisable aesthetics of fear and deterrence, these kinds of representational images are clearly open to risky forms of mis-/re-interpretation, or what Peter van Wyck (2004) refers to as ‘dangerous signs’ that have a habit of taking

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Fig. 11.1  Spike Field (1993) nuclear marker concept by Michael Brill; drawing by Safdar Abidi. Image provided courtesy of the US Department of Energy

on a meaning in the future that is anterior to the intentions of the communicator. And yet, on another level, Spike Field might be read as a minor speculative exercise in revising modes of thinking the world precisely through the way it aims at the production of certain kinds of mood and tendency that collectively orientate bodies in space. As Dawney et al. (2017: 123) develop, nuclear markers like Spike Field involve the creation of certain affective cues that do not necessarily aim at communicating with an individuated human subject but at “projecting a view of ourselves and our own means of communication into a distant, potentially non-human Other, which looks back on us through our material traces”. In other words, it uses the arrangement of matter as devices to produce certain affects, moods, orientations, and tendencies of what a body in its singularity might do without assuming the composition of this body ahead of

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a given encounter. By remaining open to different modes of communicating with a body, Spike Field therefore draws on certain ‘pre-individual’ singular orientations that work to individuate the production of affection and emotion in the immediacy of an event (Keating, 2019). Operating pre-individually prior to an individuated and reflective subject, this form of speculative communication is important because it does not merely preserve memory of nuclear remains for a given future, but draws on affective capacities that produce emotion and feeling openly for any subject whatsoever. Whilst acknowledging the seemingly endless logistical and socio-­ cultural problems associated with maintaining an environmental site like Spike Field for 100,000 years into the future, as a conceptual design its significance is in its development of a particular problem: namely, how might the production of pre-individual affective orientations that may be difficult to detect inform strategies of communicating nuclear waste repositories into the future? As one way to approach this problem in speculative terms, Spike Field helps consider the production of abstractions—in this case, an abstraction that imagines a whole landscape emanating affects of inhospitality—as having a role in modifying, albeit often subtly, what a future body might feel, think, and do. At the level of dissuading and deterring activity, Spike Field can thus be understood to operate speculatively in attempting not at communicating a given message to a known subject (‘do not go here’; ‘you should leave’) but in conveying certain collective orientations and affects at an infra-sensible level of experience. To conclude, in this chapter I have engaged with the relationship between nuclear remains and speculative empiricism in arguing for the need to develop the notion of speculative thinking in social science engagements with nuclear waste futures. Allied to the critique of common sense thinking in nuclear heritage studies (Joyce, 2020), nuclear remains lend themselves to a speculative empirical approach since they concern an existential question of how to communicate knowledge about permanent nuclear waste repositories into distant futures. Considering how remains problematise the human’s sense of continuity before the movement of time itself (Derrida, 2010), I contend that a speculative empiricism provides one way to consider the creation of abstractions as

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central to thinking difference and the future contingency of singular events (Debaise, 2017). There is a pragmatics to speculative thinking of this kind that insists on developing ways of thinking the future in the most open terms possible. If “[r]emains are always in relation to what did not remain and what defined the borders of inclusion and exclusion” (Parikka, 2019: 4) then a speculative empirical approach seeks to elucidate how to rethink these borders through alterations to the subject’s modes of thinking events through time. As a concept involving a degree of speculation, Spike Field can be read as one attempt at communicating something of nuclear remains into the future in the most expansive terms possible—a task that, from the outset, is defined aporetically as resolutely necessary and practically impossible. Acknowledgements  I want to thank Nina Williams, Anna Storm, and members of Linköping’s Stripe and Green Room seminar groups for their help and valuable comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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12 Speculating with Childhoods, Plastics and Other Stuff Peter Kraftl

Introduction This chapter considers speculative geographies of childhoods, plastics and other stuff. It is concerned with storying and otherwise the ‘art of noticing’ encounters between children and material stuff (Tsing, 2015). Geographers and other scholars of childhood have for some years scrutinised children’s engagements with material things. As part of interdisciplinary research about children’s voices and experiences, childhood scholars have examined the use and meaning of variegated material stuff, by and for children (Horton, 2010; Lee & Motzkau, 2011; Lenz-Taguchi, 2014). Critically, theorisations of children’s interactions with nonhuman agents—from toys to pharmaceuticals to animals—have increasingly been characterised by approaches that seek to ‘decentre’ children, to observe either the agency of nonhuman matter and/or the ‘flat’ relationships into which children and matter enter (Prout, 2005; Spyrou, 2017).

P. Kraftl (*) University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_12

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Certainly, inspired by new-materialist, nonrepresentational and actor-­ network theories, we now know far more about children’s interactions with things—like toys—that present themselves as (fairly) identifiable, bounded ‘objects’. And certainly, those accounts are fairly speculative and experimental, if not post-qualitative, eschewing the conventions of childhood (and other social-scientific) research methods (Hackett & Rautio, 2019; Taylor, 2020). Yet children’s lives are also entangled with more slippery kinds of materials and material processes. These socio-­materialities— like water, chemical pollutants, plastics, energy—do not so readily offer themselves up as ‘things’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Clark, 2016; Horton & Kraftl, 2018). Rather, they are in(di)visible, hidden (to some) in plain sight (Davies, 2019), and/or may even require still other techniques for humans to ‘see’ them. This chapter is concerned with a few such socio-materialities, and with modes of speculative enquiry about how they impinge upon children’s lives. It focuses on a subset of material stuff that is usually considered ‘pollution’: human-produced chemicals, including plastics (especially) and metals. The chapter weaves different elements of speculative enquiry, inspired particularly by Haraway’s (2011) modes of speculative fabulation and Bogost’s (2012) alien phenomenology. Drawing on a project that explored older children’s multiple interactions with plastics and other chemicals, it tells two sets of stories: one about the process of making sculptures out of scavenged plastic ‘waste’; the other about interdisciplinary conversations around determining the presence of chemicals in children’s bodies and environments.

 esearching Childhoods, Plastics R and Other Stuff This chapter is based upon an 18-month research project—called Plastic Childhoods—that examined multiple entanglements of plastics and other chemicals with childhoods. Taking place in the UK in the latter part of the 2010s, it corresponded with a moment of extraordinary interest in, and fear about, plastics. The effects of plastics on the world’s oceans, and their virtual ubiquity in the earth’s systems, were becoming increasingly

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evident (Davis, 2015). The subsequent years were characterised by an intensification in public and scientific debates about plastics (e.g. Liboiron, 2016). Several commentators also pointed out that plastics were only part of the environmental damage caused by humans, with increasing attention also being paid to how other chemicals gradually accumulated in environments and human bodies as forms of ‘slow violence’ (Davies, 2019; Balayannis & Garnett, 2020). Against the backdrop of these debates, the Plastic Childhoods project sought to introduce diverse interdisciplinary approaches—several virtually un-tested, experimental and speculative—to witness the in(di)visible workings of plastics and other chemicals across children’s lives. This chapter focuses on two such methods: the co-creation of sculptures with children, teachers and artists; the collection of biosamples from children’s bodies and environments, in collaboration with environmental nanoscientists (for full details, see Kraftl, 2020; Kraftl et al., 2021). The first method represented the culmination of four months of collaborative research with a secondary school in Birmingham, UK.  We worked intensively with 13 children, aged 11–15, as part of a series of workshops that explored students’ knowledge about plastics and environmental pollution, their everyday encounters with plastics, and encouraged them to (literally) engage with plastics through touch. In terms of the latter, the intention was to consider speculation not merely as narration (fiction) but as a performance, especially since the bodily implications of (for instance) plastics-as-pollutants are potentially so profound. Thus, the final workshop was co-designed with local artists (General Public1), who had spent several weeks collecting ‘waste’ plastic stuff from local public spaces, recycling sites and charity shops. Each item—from toys to plastic watering cans to clothes to garden tools—was punctured with a drill so that it could be placed onto a tall, thin metal spike. The students were then asked to create vertical ‘sculptures’ following different instructions: build a sculpture that looks good; build one that orders stuff from ‘useless’ to ‘useful’; and so on. The research team photographed the  General Public are an artist collaboration based in Birmingham, in the UK. They create a range of public art projects that involve storying, mapping, myth and the reinterpretation of histories and heritage. 1

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sculptures and recorded observations and conversations as they were being constructed. The overall aim was to get students to think again about plastics and their (potentially positive) value, and to engage in speculative acts of creation, imagination, manipulation and story-telling about plastics. The second method was integrated into the programme of workshops. The students took part in an unprecedented programme of biosampling, wherein they took local samples of soil and tap water and samples of their own breath and urine. These non-invasive techniques have rarely been attempted with children—and had been hitherto totally absent from social-scientific research with children—but were designed to determine the possible presence of plastics and a range of 27 other chemical elements (mainly metals) in children’s bodies and environments. The samples were analysed by laboratory technicians and the results were then discussed as part of two of the workshops. This method was speculative in two senses. Firstly, in that it represented a first attempt to ‘decentre’ (Spyrou, 2017) children in childhood studies in a totally different way: by experimenting with technologies that could determine the circulation of non-object-like material stuff through their bodies and environments. This was not to accede to the apparently objective logic of ‘the science’. Rather, it was an attempt to tell utterly different stories about children’s ‘entanglements’ with plastics and other materialities, and to do so through consideration of what I have termed elsewhere, following Bogost (2012) and Bryant (2014), the instrumental interfaces through which childhoods-plastics might become-visible through, in this case, environmental nanoscientific measuring devices (Kraftl, 2020: 176). Secondly, the biosampling was speculative in a more surprising way (surprising at least to me, with my limited knowledge of environmental nanoscience): as it transpired, the limitations of the technology and the properties of plastics and metals are such that it was not always possible to determine precisely the local source of the chemicals we had found (although we could identify the kinds of sources they could have come from far more precisely). As I describe below, we engaged in a series of interdisciplinary conversations—and, sometimes, what could be termed speculations—about the possible specific sources of those elements.

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Speculating with Sculptures The rest of this chapter centres around the telling of small stories (Taylor, 2020) about children, plastics and other chemicals. This section focuses on the plastic sculptures. Like the next section, it is framed by Donna Haraway’s (2011) understandings of speculative fiction and fabulation. The starting point is an understanding of the process of making the sculptures as not necessarily being one of educating the students about plastics, but about generating acts that were “seriously playful and so curious, inquisitive and risky” (Haraway, 2011: 6). In fact, following one of Haraway’s (2016) well-cited idioms, we wanted to unsettle what students thought they knew about plastics by challenging them to re-­ consider what might be the multiple values of plastics: to stay with the trouble. We (researchers, teachers, artists) wanted them to imagine other ways of relating to and sensing plastics. Thus, we wanted them to imagine how they might enter into kinds of queer, chemical kinships with plastics (Davis, 2015; Balayannis & Garnett, 2020). The act of fiction, then, was not just one of creating what were evidently stories about alternative futures—we were not asking them to “point toward future utopia or dystopia” (Haraway, 2011: 6). Rather, fictioning was a kind of disposition that we sought to instil in the whole process of planning, collecting, sculpting, talking, joking and reflecting. To knowingly ‘decentre’ the children’s phenomenal experiences for a moment: a critical part of the workshops was the detailed planning. This comprised weeks of meetings between myself and the artists as we experimented with ideas that might be sufficiently open to recalibrate students’ established views about plastics, but that would be appropriately focused (and fun). We settled on the idea of asking the students to create vertical sculptures out of ostensibly random, scavenged, ‘wasted’ plastics for two reasons. On one hand, the opportunity to place diverse plastics on a vertical plane would enable the students to play with different ‘hierarchies’ (e.g. around what was ‘useful’ or ‘attractive’)—prompting them into developing new relationships, stories or feelings about plastics. On the other, we deliberately chose plastics that were cheap, free or deemed ‘waste’ to draw attention to the multifarious economic geographies of waste in the UK (Gregson et al., 2007) and elsewhere (e.g. to provoke

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discussions about the export of plastic waste from the UK to recycling plants in China, and the health risks posed to those working with that waste; see Davis, 2015). Children were also ostensibly absent from the next phase of workshop planning when the artists spent a fortnight patiently collecting the plastics. We had no firm ‘plan’ in terms of what we wanted—they needed to be diverse, and, ideally, needed to recall aspects of (especially UK-specific) childhoods with which the students might identify. Yet, the process of collecting was itself deliberately both speculative and robust—guided both by serendipity and by careful deliberation as the artists sourced ‘wasted’ plastics from various sites—always with a view to the diversity of the objects and what they might afford for the sculpture exercise. If we recall that even these apparently disposable objects themselves have biographies then it might become possible to begin to care even for those materialities that humans deem most abject (Haraway, 2011). As plastics represent a ‘hyperobject’ in speculative realist terms—both so small (as micro- and nano-plastics in water) and so large (more-or-less globally ubiquitous) that we can in both cases not fully perceive their entirety— the appearance of these plastics, however happenstance, represents what Morton (2013) terms the ‘phasing’ of hyperobjects into and out of human phenomenological frames. Through the speculative disposition we tried to foster, we came, however tentatively, to touch, to sense, to know, and even to care for such matters. How, then, might it be plausible to talk—as does Haraway—about care for the scavenged plastic stuff? Fast forward to the classroom, and the plastics are, initially, laid out on the floor (Fig.  12.1). For the first 15 minutes, we insist that the students cannot touch the objects. They instead walk around and examine them, considering how they sit alongside one another. There is a kind of litanical quality to this process, as students both individually and together begin to make ‘shopping lists’ of which items they would like to experiment with. There is also a list-like quality to the horizontal plane on which the plastics sit: they more-or-less dispassionately lie alongside each other, invoking something of how the laying-out of apparently ordinary objects in an unexpected manner can unsettle our habitual knowledges about and relations to those objects (Harman, 2010; Bogost, 2012).

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Fig. 12.1  The plastic objects laid out on the classroom floor before the sculpture workshop began. Author’s photograph

Following this activity, the students were asked to create several sculptures following different instructions (and none): build a sculpture that you think looks good, build a sculpture that orders objects in order of their value or importance and so on. During the building of the first sculpture, which was focused around value, the team started with the polystyrene block at the bottom, noting that they saw no monetary value but that, structurally, it provided a good base. They then stuck on some plastic cups and pots as they also saw them as little use. At this point the structure began to have a ‘nice’ form and, therefore, the decisions about what to put on next were guided largely by aesthetic choice rather than the brief—creating a slender form to the sculpture apart from a yellow elephant watering can, which sat jutting out in the middle. A form of aesthetic decision-making also applied to the final items, which all agreed had to be clothes as an essential daily item. Finally, the phone was placed at the top as the most valuable object, which was a unanimous decision and there was little explanation for why they saw the phone as most valuable. The totem was named ‘plastic Christmas’ given its Christmas tree-like appearance.

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The next brief was to order the objects by use. The boys very quickly started to pick up objects from the pile and assess their utility in terms of how often they are used and how vital they are to survival and wellbeing. The phrase they began to use was “you can’t have [human capacity] without [object]”: “you can’t have teeth without toothpaste and a toothbrush”, “you can’t see without glasses” and so on. When constructing the sculpture (Fig. 12.2) they first started with ‘useless’ stuff at the bottom—the polystyrene block, again, some bubble wrap, and then the more ‘vital’ stuff at the top: the doll, the glasses, the toothpaste, some medicine, clothes and the phone. The sculpture was named ‘Anabelle’ after the possessed doll Annabelle from the horror film series.

Fig. 12.2  ‘Annabelle’ (the second sculpture referred to in the vignette), part-way through construction. Author’s photograph

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These vignettes give a very brief glimpse of the many ways in which the plastics and the students related with one another during the two-hour workshop. They engaged with the playful, sometimes silly, and often humorous work of sculpting by ‘weaving’ plastics deliberat(iv)ely into the flow of life (Bryant, 2014). There was not necessarily the kind of “move toward multi-species reconciliation” with which Haraway (2011: 8) is concerned but, nonetheless, a “[h]eading off leftfield with minor players” (Taylor, 2020: 344) as “the past, present and future [of plastics] are all very much knotted into each other, full of what we need for the work and play of natural cultural restoration: less deadly curiosity, materially entangled ethics and politics” (Haraway, 2011: 6–7). In the above examples, the work/play of speculation was perhaps more prosaic and introverted, concerned as it was with connecting the second sculpture to a doll from a horror film. It was also fascinating to see how the students created spontaneous hierarchies of ‘value’ and ‘use’, recalibrating what had been four months of generally negative discussions about plastics towards a sense of how humans—especially young people living in Birmingham—would struggle to live without plastics. Indeed, the kinds of entanglements that were itemised through the constant “you can’t …without” formulation offered a striking indication of how so many in the human species are thoroughly entangled with plastics in diverse bodily ways including, as Davis (2015) notes in relation to the ill-effects of plasticisers, the very health and fertility of humans. Finally, the sculptures, and discussions about them, offer a reminder of the metaphorical qualities of Bogost’s (2012) speculative alien phenomenology, which attempts to recount how nonhuman objects encounter the world. Without recourse to a flat ontology of things-in-relation (as with actor-network theory) nor any sense of the ‘truth’ of an object (Harman, 2010), Bogost (2012) asks what it is like to be a nonhuman object. Various forms of photography, cataloguing and measuring equipment may offer insights but so, I argue, might an act of metaphorical experimentation. The students are not necessarily offering insights into what it is like to be a plastic object but, nevertheless, seem to exhibit a certain empathy—often with a dose of humour or satire—by drawing

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out metaphorical imagery: of Christmas trees, for instance, or in the ways in which several of the sculptures (including Fig. 12.2) ended up having bizarre, human-like qualities. There is a distinction between anthropocentric and (in this case) anthropomorphic forms of thinking (Bennett, 2010): the use of figuration and metaphor that is imprecise, experimental and arbitrary. In other words, the end products may have looked somehow human, but this occurred as the students experimented with the qualities of different plastics: how they looked, how they interacted with one another on the pole, how they felt to touch, and so on.

Speculating with Biosamples (and Interdisciplinarity) In this section, I turn to the biosamples. I intimated above that one of the forms of speculation involved in this process was the decentring of children’s voices and experiences in research that was still, invariably, about children. Returning to Bogost’s (2012) alien phenomenology and his open question of what it is like to be a nonhuman thing, the biosampling switched the focus from what children do with and say about plastics to the ways in which plastics and other chemicals themselves appear in children’s bodies and environments. As I have argued elsewhere, key here are instrumental interfaces (Kraftl, 2020): traces of chemicals that present themselves to humans in their interactions with sampling kits, laboratory testing equipment, and, ultimately, as numbers (expressed in parts per billion). These instrumental interfaces are redolent of other forms of post-phenomenological interfaces—such as how humans and media interact with one another in digital worlds (Ash et al., 2018). Here, however, I am more interested in the kinds of speculation that took place after the samples had been collected, analysed and ascribed numerical value. For it is important to highlight the possible significance of interdisciplinarity to doing speculative geographies. Once the biosamples had been analysed, I worked with the environmental nanoscientists to talk through our findings. We discussed relative levels of each element (including aluminium, titanium and boron), as well as the plastics. The

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scientists were, of course, able to speak knowledgably about the 27 elements we found in the samples—their concentration, the level of risk they posed and what we know about their possible sources  (for many elements there are many possible sources). However, when discussion turned to the precise (i.e. local) sources of the elements  we had sampled, it became apparent that it was virtually impossible to be certain. Even if my colleagues could speak highly knowledgeably about where they could have come from, it should be obvious that all particles of aluminium or titanium look very much alike. It is therefore hard to discern precisely how far our specific samples had travelled (e.g. from which specific local source), from where, and where they were going (in other words, to engage in a more thorough-going alien phenomenology). Nevertheless, we then began to pull in other knowledges into our conversations: reading recent academic articles about different elements and their role in air and water pollution to determine likely sources of different trace elements; cross-referencing historical and contemporary sources of pollution (roads, industries) in Birmingham; and, drawing on my knowledge of the areas where the students lived, and what the students themselves had told us about their own routines in other parts of the research. To be clear, whilst adhering to the highest standards of scientific rigour, ethics and risk assessment procedures, none of us ever believed that ‘science’ alone had the answer in this project, which was interdisciplinary and collaborative from the outset. However, it was nonetheless intriguing that this highly engaged form of interdisciplinarity required conversation, some levels of uncertainty and, in some cases, what felt to me at least—even if not to others—like a particular kind very well-informed speculation, in which science and social science were entangled. Even if speculation is not, in fact, the right way to characterise this process, and although we have yet to fully analyse and publish the results of the lab analyses, these conversations enabled the telling of a number of possible, plausible stories about the trajectories of chemicals that were of particular interest (like aluminium, titanium and zirconium)—particularly given the part they may play in air pollution and the proximity of the school (where some samples were taken) to a busy road (see Kraftl, 2020, for detailed examples).

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Ultimately, the stories were perhaps rather different in style and tone from the forms of speculative fiction in which Haraway (2011) has engaged. They do not speak as much of forms of responsibility for future generations. However, they do constitute different kinds of detailed, dialogical, ‘passionate immersion’ (Tsing, 2010) with/in the worlds of material stuff that are in(di)visible to humans without the aid of particular instruments’ interfaces with micro- and nano-scopic matter. They also offer an insight into the kinds of interdisciplinary experimentation, conversation and imagination that might be required in the course of doing speculative geographies. As such, they offer starting points for further, more expansive forms of speculation or political praxis that are more overtly caring and urgent.

Conclusions This chapter has examined some of the speculative geographies of childhoods, plastics and other stuff. It sought to witness some of the manifold ways in which children’s lives, bodies and environments are entangled with material stuff that is in(di)visible: hard to see or grasp; both so small and so large that it eludes human perception (and the more traditional phenomenological methods that have, especially, been a hallmark of childhood studies); and, less bounded, less thing-like, and more processual than the ‘materialities’ that are so often considered within children’s and other (more-than-)human geographies. The chapter’s contribution has been to open out the variegated ways in which speculative geographies of such in(di)visible material stuff might proceed. It also illustrated an approach that witnessed some of the specific ways human subject positions (like childhood, and especially the childhoods of older school students in Birmingham, in the UK, in the late 2010s) may pattern the seemingly dispassionate, ineluctable flows of matters like plastics and other chemicals. The chapter focused first on how the making of plastic sculptures could speak of multiple styles, media and affects that are involved and invoked in doing speculative geographies. Far from ushering in utopian visions of the (environmental) future, the sculptures promulgated diverse small

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stories and performances that were characterised by different affects— particularly silliness, humour and care. Yet those speculative fictions were not merely spoken or confined to the textual: rather, they were expressed through a range of dispositions and media—bodily performances, haptic interactions with materials, and the metaphorical qualities of the sculptures themselves. The sculptures were, at times, unsettling, as objects often classified as ‘waste’ or ‘toxic’ were phased back into human lives as (momentary) queer kin (Haraway, 2016), in the unlikely setting of a school classroom. If the first example was concerned with the collection and litanical display of found plastics, the second sought to open out consideration of a further mode through which speculative geographies might require, in part, the decentring of human subjects. It was concerned with the appearance and flow of plastics and other chemicals—specifically at micro- or nano-scopic scales—into, through, out of and around children’s bodies and environments. Critically, this was an interdisciplinary endeavour; even if the conversations outlined above were not truly or really ‘speculative’ (especially for all concerned), the more important point is that, prompted by our collaborative work, this chapter is, in part, a call to consider what kinds of interdisciplinarity might characterise speculative geographies and vice versa. For, despite the robustness of the environmental-­scientific methods and instruments used to gauge the presence of plastics and other chemicals, and despite drawing on carefully-­ chosen secondary sources and qualitative data from research with children, a healthy dose of speculation is also sometimes required to understand some of the wider social and environmental contexts of what those instruments are saying to us (Bogost, 2012)—such as what the precise local source of aluminium found in a sample of tap water might be, given multiple possible sources for that aluminium. Hence, the methods presented in this chapter, in parallel with and alongside the sculptures, are not somehow ‘truer’ than other forms of speculation. Instead, more important has been a recognition of the kinds of speculative conversations sometimes required in interdisciplinary work about such matters as childhoods, plastics and other stuff. Whilst those conversations may have been open-ended, tentative and experimental to a degree, the coming-together of different forms of knowledge, from different

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‘scientific’, ‘artistic’ and ‘social-scientific’ domains (including the knowledge of children) perhaps afforded a unique (although not necessarily ‘truer’) picture of how childhoods, plastics and other stuff are entangled. They highlight the value of perhaps more ‘radical’ forms of interdisciplinarity for childhood studies and children’s geographies, and for an approach that might sometimes see children themselves move in and out of focus as other nonhuman stuff takes centre stage (see Kraftl, 2020). If it is a truism to say that at least some scholarly work is always to some extent speculative, then it is just as important to recognise that speculative geographies—concerned with questions of care, responsibility and futuring—could particularly embrace, foreground and promote novel forms of (interdisciplinary) experimentation. Acknowledgements  This chapter is based on research funded by Leverhulme Research Fellowship (grant reference 2018-211; title ‘Plastic Childhoods’). I also wish to express thanks to various collaborators: Iseult Lynch, Sophie Hadfield-­ Hill, Chris and Liz at General Public Projects, Ruth Till, Andrew Chetwynd, Polly Jarman, Alice Menzel, Amy Walker, Andrew Jones and, of course, the students at the school.

References Ash, J., Anderson, B., Gordon, R., & Langley, P. (2018). Unit, vibration, tone: A post-phenomenological method for researching digital interfaces. Cultural Geographies, 25, 165–181. Balayannis, A., & Garnett, E. (2020). Chemical kinship: Interdisciplinary experiments with pollution. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i1.33524 Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press. Bogost, I. (2012). Alien phenomenology, or, what it’s like to be a thing. University of Minnesota Press. Bryant, L. R. (2014). Onto-cartography. Edinburgh University Press. Davies, T. (2019). Slow violence and toxic geographies: ‘Out of sight’ to whom? Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. https://doi. org/10.1177/2399654419841063.

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Davis, H. (2015). Life & death in the anthropocene: A short history of plastic. In Art in the anthropocene: Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies (pp. 347–358). Gregson, N., Metcalfe, A., & Crewe, L. (2007). Moving things along: The conduits and practices of divestment in consumption. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32, 187–200. Hackett, A., & Rautio, P. (2019). Answering the world: Young children’s running and rolling as more-than-human multimodal meaning making. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32, 1019–1031. Haraway, D. (2011). Speculative fabulations for technoculture’s generations: Taking care of unexpected country. Australian Humanities Review, 50, 1–18. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Harman, G. (2010). Towards speculative realism: Essays and lectures. John Hunt Publishing. Horton, J. (2010). ‘The best thing ever’: How children’s popular culture matters. Social & Cultural Geography, 11, 377–398. Horton, J., & Kraftl, P. (2018). Rats, assorted shit and ‘racist groundwater’: Towards extra-sectional understandings of childhoods and social-material processes. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36, 926–948. Kraftl, P. (2020). After childhood: Re-thinking environment, materiality and media in children’s lives. Routledge. Kraftl, P., Lynch, I., Jarman, P., Menzel, A., Walker, A., Till, R., & Hadfield-­ Hill, S. (2021). So you’re literally taking the piss?! Critically analysing and accounting for ethics (and risk) in interdisciplinary research on children and plastics. In Children’s geographies (pp. 1–16). Lee, N., & Motzkau, J. (2011). Navigating the bio-politics of childhood. Childhood, 18, 7–19. Lenz-Taguchi, H. (2014). New materialisms and play. In Sage handbook of play and learning in early childhood (pp.79–90). Liboiron, M. (2016). Redefining pollution and action: The matter of plastics. Journal of Material Culture., 21, 87–110. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. University of Minnesota Press. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Clark, V. (2016). Following watery relations in early childhood pedagogies. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 14, 98–111. Prout, A. (2005). The future of childhood. Routledge. Spyrou, S. (2017). Time to decenter childhood? Childhood, 24, 433–437.

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Taylor, A. (2020). Countering the conceits of the Anthropos: Scaling down and researching with minor players. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 41(3), 340–358. Tsing, A. (2010). Arts of inclusion, or how to love a mushroom. Manoa, 22, 191–203. Tsing, A. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

Part III Aesthetics

13 Against the Cynicism of Common Sense: Guattari and the Micropolitics of Expression George Burdon

How can it be understood, for example, that the heterogeneous voices of delirium and of creation are able to cooperate in the lay-out of sense productions beyond common sense which … sometimes allow access to highly enriching existential truths? (Guattari, 1996: 164)

Introduction In this chapter I want to highlight how the work of Félix Guattari offers a generative means for thinking speculatively insofar as it challenges us to think outside of the comfortable and predictable style of thinking that we might here term ‘common sense’. For Guattari, the task that thinking must confront is to break with the prevailing modes of “consensus”, that is, “the infantile ‘reassurance’ distilled by dominant subjectivity” (Guattari, 1995: 117). As such, what Guattari’s work suggests is that this G. Burdon (*) School of Science, University of New South Wales Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_13

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challenge to think differently is an eminently ethico-political one. It must necessarily involve a break from the regime of commonly held beliefs that serve to homogenise and standardise, to shore up extant social formations and practices. In fact, as Gerlach and Jellis (2015) have argued, the drama of his work is accentuated in an era in which thought itself is increasingly captured by capitalist semiotisation. What critical thinking must face up to today is the reduction of thought to its market value, its overdetermination according to logics of applicability and practicality aligned with the status quo. What I refer to here, in other words, is what Marcus Doel (2009: 1054) calls the ascendency of a form of “miserly thinking” that “enjoins us to conserve, constrain, and sustain”, or what Rosi Braidotti (2019: 471) calls a “retreat into the … protocol of commonsensical reasoning” that is nothing more than “the unfolding of established rules of thought”—damning summations of a zeitgeist characterised by a disempowering cynicism, by sad passions, affective disinvestments, that leave thought tethered to ‘what is’. In this context the very sense of the term ‘speculation’ is a site of contestation: Does speculation mean experimenting in thought towards the production of different possible futures (Savransky et al., 2017)? Or does it mean a more cynical exercise in calculation, prediction, even ‘risk-management’? That this latter exists as a possibility testifies to the fact that the term ‘speculation’ is not one that Guattari appeared to have found particularly useful. Aside from his interest in the speculative potentials of the science fiction genre (see Guattari, 2016), the term ‘speculative’, when it does appear in his work, is often applied to that which he critiques, whether that be the stultifying effects of capitalist semiotisation via “financial speculation” (Guattari, 1996: 93) or the “pitfalls of speculative frameworks” of the type used by psychoanalysis (ibid., p. 64)—domains, both, that Guattari argues are underwritten by logics of comparability and anticipation, that universalise what is singular such that it fits within a consensual pattern. Such forms of speculation are for Guattari pernicious exercises of normalisation that produce and sustain ‘common sense’ and that, therefore, serve to capture the future by way of the dominant logics of the present.

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And yet, in today’s context, one cannot but consider that Guattari’s critiques of the calculative, predictive, and homogenising logics of our present times are precisely the point at which his thought becomes a necessary intervention, one that resonates with current endeavours to draw up an affirmative mode of speculation in thought (Brown, 2021; Savransky et  al., 2017). Here, speculation might be reclaimed as an adventure in a different practice of thinking, one that resists a cynical tendency of common sense to valorise thought only insofar as it accords with  a dominant form of subjectivity. Indeed if, as Isabelle Stengers (2021: 72) has recently written, the task of thinking today is to better comprehend “the ‘situational provocation’ of the present”, then it is on this level that Guattari’s work performs a crucial intervention: it demands a constant vigilance that one’s thinking does not fall into the comforting trap of the norms and habits of common sense with its universalising values of commensurability, recognisability and regularity that fail to grasp the present in its singularity. In this context what is imperative for Guattari is, therefore, to practise a style of thinking that “creates trouble out of events that common sense would say were quite unimportant” (Guattari, 1984: 202). In this chapter I examine how Guattari overcomes the homogenising trap of common sense by pluralising our appreciation of the sites and practices by which sense is expressed differently. Insofar as the event of sense’s different expression here is that which reconfigures the relation between thought and the world, such sites and practices are therefore the location of a different kind of politics—a micropolitics of expression. All of this is encapsulated in Guattari’s notion of ‘incorporeal universes’. The remainder of the chapter proceeds in two parts. The first outlines the problem of common sense as that  which reduces the dynamics of the social field to its valorisation according to prevailing beliefs and logics of subjection. The second then looks to Guattari’s formulation of sense as pluralised across multiple ‘incorporeal universes’ as a response to these conditions. Throughout, the chapter is framed in a minor way by an empirical encounter with a performance of Irish composer Jennifer Walshe’s Ireland: A Dataset—a piece of music that pushes common sense to its limits.

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The Production of Common Sense Standing upon a stage bathed in blue light appear five people. Four of them are standing in preparation to sing and one, sitting, holds a soprano saxophone. As the saxophonist begins to play a quaint and vaguely folkish melody, some words appear upon a screen above the performers: “This part was written by AI trained on Riverdance.” A single vocalist, swiftly joined by the others, begins to sing an obscure music, a peculiar approximation of the popular musical number upon which it was based. Immediately what you sense is the uncanny effect of a music out of joint. There are too many dissonant notes for it to cohere around a tonal centre. The melody keeps on twisting and slipping in different directions, as if following an opaque and complex logic. One of the performers sings at an incredibly high pitch. The lyrics, too, are bizarre: “I am the river/I am the ocean/the river I am/the ocean I am…”1

Jennifer Walshe’s Ireland: A Dataset is a set of unusual music compositions generated by an artificial intelligence system trained on various recordings chosen because they embody a stereotyped idea of ‘Irish’ music—the musical Riverdance, some pieces by Enya and sean-nós styles of singing are included, among others—which are then performed by the (human) vocal group Tonnta and saxophonist Nick Roth. In the piece, stereotypically recognisable songs are broken down and recomposed according to the obscure logic of an autonomous compositional system. Melodies slip and twist away from where we feel they naturally should, and the music generally defies any one affective tone. The piece confronts the listener with a strange simulacrum of ‘human’ music. At the very least, the resolute strangeness of this music owing to the fact it was composed by an AI system testifies to how innovations across the social field, such as “the Universes of technoscience, biology, computer technology, telematics and the media … destabilise our mental coordinates on a daily basis” (Guattari, 1995: 119). In Chaosmosis, Guattari (1995) argues that this disjunction between our ways of making sense of the world, on the  The account of this piece given here is written of its performance as part of the online event ‘Machine Listening: A Curriculum’ organised by Australian organisation Liquid Architecture in October 2020. The performance, as well as the rest of the event’s programme, is available to access at https://machinelistening.exposed/curriculum/ (last accessed 15 April 2021). 1

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one hand, and the ways that processes in the world are already transforming us, on the other, is actually much more deeply entrenched than we might at first believe. Moreover, we lack the very concepts required to grasp at this disjunction: As things stand, sociology, economic science, political science and legal studies appear poorly equipped to account for this mixture of archaic attachments to cultural traditions that nonetheless aspire to the technological and scientific modernity characterising the contemporary subjective cocktail. (1995: 3–4)

Guattari is arguing that we suffer from an inability to think our modernity precisely because we remain tethered to outdated conceptual strategies, ‘archaic’ beliefs that move much too slowly amidst an accelerating reality. Before I go any further, however, it should be noted that the polemic tone of Guattari’s work is addressed to the dominant subjectivity. More specifically then, Guattari wants to problematise an enduring attachment to Western Enlightenment beliefs and values, despite the fact that such beliefs are increasingly out of sync with dizzying changes across the social field. The endurance of such ‘archaic’ beliefs and values amidst the context of a modern life characterised by images of accelerating progress is a particular object of suspicion for Guattari. By my reading of Guattari, it is the conservative forces of common sense that mediate this relation; common sense is a mode of semiotisation that tends towards convergence and commensurability as a tactic to fight off the chaos of contemporary innovations that threaten to fragment or undermine our longstanding beliefs about ourselves: “[social] stratifications are set up in a way that avoids, so far as possible, the disquieting strangeness generated by a too marked fixation on chaosmosis”, as he puts it (ibid.: 84). He argues that the problem of this endurance of common sense lies in the institutional fortification of sedimented ways of thinking as well as in the deadening effects of the capitalistic mass media which produces, in his words, “universalising and reductionist homogenisations of subjectivity” (ibid.: 5). This link between capitalist processes and the sedimentation of common sense is not incidental: capitalism requires exactly the kind of

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pragmatics of commensurability and equivalence that characterise common sense in order to function as a system of exchange traversed by the logics of prediction, calculation and comparability (Holland, 2020). For Guattari, capitalism is a process that produces a universal set of values, “a certain universal representation of subjectivity” (Guattari, 1995: 3) that, despite giving the appearance of continuous innovation for consumers, serves to homogenise and stultify by tethering such innovation to a universalised sensibility. It is as though capitalism pulls in two directions at once: an immense deterritorialisation (chaosmosis) of continual innovation that makes up the backdrop of material conditions and, at the same time, a persistent semiotisation of such deterritorialisations to uphold a universal representation of subjectivity (a ‘common’ sensibility). Already with Gilles Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus (1983), written some twenty years prior to Chaosmosis, this tension between, on the one hand, the tumultuous upheavals of techno-scientific modernity and, on the other, the inherence of a strangely stultified sensibility tethered to enduring cultural beliefs is theorised as the characteristic trait of the production of capitalistic subjectivity: “It is no longer the age of cruelty or the age of terror, but the age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety (the two taken together constitute humanism: cynicism is the physical immanence of the social field, and piety is the maintenance of a spiritualized Urstaat…)” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 225). There exists, in other words, a cynicism insofar as the immanence of continual novelty in the social field is reduced to a means towards the production of value, but at the same time there exists a strange piety insofar as the very world of values by which such novelty gains its sense is maintained as something self-­evident, unchanging, and universal (Read, 2008). Common sense therefore inhabits the tension that upholds a pious adherence to ‘archaic’ beliefs amidst the context of certain accelerations in social reality. Thus, why Guattari sees our current conceptual strategies left wanting is because we are unable to adequately comprehend how common sense is directly embroiled with processes of social production. That we remain animated by ‘archaic cultural attachments’ despite the innovative conditions of our techno-scientific modernity is, for Guattari, no mystery but is precisely the result of capitalist production of subjectivity. Therefore, we would do well to understand that there is nothing essentially human

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about common sense, just as the latter is perhaps not so ‘common’ as its name might imply. Accordingly, with Guattari we must begin our thinking from elsewhere: we are situated totally outside the vision of a Being moving unchanged through the universal history of ontological formations. There are singular incorporeal constellations which belong to natural and human history and at the same time escape them by a thousand lines of flight. (Guattari, 1995: 27)

Our contemporary malaise is that we remain unable to think the conservative forces of subjectivity that leave us attached to the vision of a universally sensible Being that inheres, unchangingly, through history. This is as much a philosophical provocation as a political one: the consequence is that we remain unable to think our own singularity. As such, the most vital political task for Guattari is to combat this piety of sensibility, this homogenising “‘spirit of the time’ that leads us to feel we are ‘like everyone else’ and to accept ‘the world as it is’” (Guattari, 2011b: 110). Hence the urgency behind the effort to produce a “resingularisation of subjectivity” (Guattari, 1995: 21), a pluralised sensibility that might allow for a different way of perceiving the world on terms that differ from those of the dominant logics of subjection.

Incorporeal Universes With the notion of the ‘incorporeal universe’, Guattari (1995, 2013) shatters our confidence in the self-evidence of common sense and examines how sense is expressed differently in dynamic processes. Incorporeal universes are diverse domains of processes and practices that express heterogeneous formations of sensibility, value, and reference in a manner that is dynamic and often chaotic. Not least amongst these processes and practices is language—an incorporeal universe that at the same time gives us reference to ourselves and the world, effectuates a particular sensibility, and is inseparable from a specific set of values. But Guattari stresses that incorporeal universes exist in the plural, interacting and overlapping with each other in dynamic processes—the arts, religions, the media, sciences,

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mathematics, and much else all construct their own incorporeal universes. Such universes function as a form of “intensive ordination” that couples them to specific “existential territories” (Guattari, 1995: 28); as Janell Watson writes, a “Universe is constellation of values, of nondiscursive references, of virtual possibility” (2009: 129). Importantly, though, whilst such universes name domains in which sense takes on particular consistencies, this consistency is precarious. The arts and the sciences, precisely because of their use of novel experimental procedures and techniques, are continually plunging sense back into a state of chaos and producing new forms of sense. Incorporeal universes are therefore to be understood as existing at the dynamic threshold, the point of osmosis, between nonsensible chaos and sensible consistency (Roberts, 2019). On this point, Guattari (1995: 5) uses the example of ‘computer-aided design’ that “leads to the production of images opening on to unprecedented plastic Universes … or to the solution of mathematical problems which would have been quite unimaginable a few years ago”. Such developments, Guattari argues, must not be understood as simply niche concerns, the domains of a few specialists. On the contrary, we must understand such developments as effectuating mutations in sensibilities with potentially widespread implications. “Must we keep the semiotic productions of the mass media, of computers, of telecommunications, robotics, etc., outside of psychological subjectivity? I don’t think so” (Guattari, 1996: 194). We can think about this process of mutation in the universe of music, for instance. Hearing music lends a certain tonality of consistency to experience, one to which we might become habituated; certain styles of music become popular and constitute points of reference for collective musical sensibilities, themselves inseparable from sets of values that deem those styles to be ‘good’ at the expense of others. However, even in the most popular and seemingly least experimental genres of music, the universe of music composition is at the same time continually traversed by adventurous and novel turns involving new means of expression, new instrument types, new assemblages and relations of technologies and materials, new techniques and tactics of recording and distribution, and new presentational formats, all of which throw prior modes of musical sensibility, reference, and value into disarray (Born, 2013). Guattari himself uses the example of Debussy’s music as a

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constellation of heterogeneous influences—the music of Wagner, the Javanese music Debussy encountered at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, Gregorian chant, the world of Mallarme, the development pentatonicism, and others—that introduces an element of chaos into musical sensibilities, deterritorialising sense along new lines of flight (see Guattari, 1995, pp. 49–50). Of course, such novel incorporeal universes can be, and often are, captured by capitalist semiotisation—“the music of a great musician used as a signature tune, a ditty” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 302). As such, what is expressive in these novel incorporeal universes might itself merge with the dominant forms of common sense. What is important though, for better as for worse, is the capacity for heterogeneous sensibilities to emerge in the first instance: “At best, it is creation— the invention of new universes of reference; and at its worst, it is the mind-numbing mass mediatization to which billions of individuals today are condemned” (Guattari, 1996: 194). Here, then, we might return to the strange universe of Ireland: A dataset anew: Struggling to orient yourself within this strange music you sense that there is a form emerging to the composition, albeit one that is difficult to follow. The performers, though, move as the music does, animated by its strange power: you cannot help admiring the endeavours of the singers as they gesticulate, dramatically, with much purpose and vigour, with each new sinuous and incoherent phrase that they sing. This continues for a little while, the sense of the music by turns baffling, melancholic, forceful; the performers following the dizzying thread of the tune as it leaps and changes. The saxophone part seems to consist of a continual stream of flourishing embellishments. There is a pause, and what approximates a chorus emerges: with symphonic effect a grandiose arrangement of voices in counterpoint punctuates the piece: the singers launch into a new section of lyrics, just as nonsensical as the previous: “the sigh I have slain/the power of the mushroom/no I am your mother/for I am your daughter of magic and blood”. I cannot help but laugh at this bizarre event I am hearing; and yet at the same time I cannot help but get the feeling that something serious is afoot. Beguiling, grating, perplexing, downright confounding—these are not just descriptions of this strange music but defensive reactions to the unsettling of expectation from its usual co-ordinates. 

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Of all the various incorporeal universes that Guattari mentions, it is perhaps the universes of the arts that fascinate him the most strongly as harbouring the capacity to express radically different forms of sensibility. His essay on ‘the new aesthetic paradigm’ (Guattari, 1995: 98–118) makes the case that the arts are to be understood as fields of minor experiment for the production of new incorporeal universes that tear us away from the coordinates of common sense. It is in this process of rupture from common sense that a politics can be found—not, that is, a politics of content (representational and recognisable significations) but a micropolitics of expression which reveals how the forms of sensibility by which we map our relation to the world are neither neutral nor settled (Lapworth, 2019; Williams, 2019). Rather than a cynical exercise in repeating established rules of thought, Guattari’s argument is that attending to such practices and processes—and, importantly, “[combining them] with social experimentation in these new areas”2 (Guattari, 1996: 194)—actually suggests a much more radical mutation in sensibility that might leave us better able to come to terms with the situational provocations of the present. As Guattari puts it, “artistic practice has both an impact in the domain of the sensible, in the domain of percepts and affects, and at the same time a direct influence on the production of universes of value, universes of reference and nuclei [foyers] of subjectification” (Guattari, 2011a: 41).

Conclusion: Speculating with Guattari Being is like an imprisonment which blinds us to the richness and multivalence of Universes of value which, nevertheless, proliferate under our noses. (Guattari, 1995: 29)

In this chapter I have foregrounded the importance of Guattari’s notion of incorporeal universes, in particular their plural and chaotic character, as a way of rejecting the contemporary reduction of sense to an  At this stage in this short chapter, I can only leave open what such forms of ‘social experimentation’ might look like. One suggestion however might be found in Guattari’s interest in the Free Radio movement (see Berardi, 2008; especially pp. 29–35). 2

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overriding spirit of cynicism. Whereas the dominant subjectivity of the present paints a vision of Being that has only a singular and universal sense, one that cannot be otherwise and that reduces thought to a cynical exercise in recognition and commensuration, Guattari asks that we create trouble with the diverse practices and process that express different incorporeal universes; that we probe the possibilities such universes provide for apprehending the present differently. The notion of incorporeal universes seeks to better conceptualise how sense arises in a process that is anything but universal, and that is instead chaotic, dynamic, and plural. As such, there is a dimension to Guattari’s thinking that is speculative in the strictly philosophical sense, insofar as “it involves speculation from the perspective of a subject about a process that is ‘outside’, comes before, and indeed determines, that subject” (O’Sullivan, 2012: 170). Such a practice of thinking is vital today when common sense is shaped and measured out in a whole assemblage of matters, including the confluence of emerging technological forces, enduring cultural beliefs, surreptitiously monetised practices and novel aesthetic experiences. This is not to overly catastrophise the present, nor is it to remain uncritical in front of it; with Guattari, “we might instead try to find a way out of the dilemma of having to choose between unyielding refusal or cynical acceptance of this situation” (1996: 95). Indeed, where Guattari gives us conceptual tools for understanding these ‘outside’ processes that map out our sensibilities, he also suggests practical means through which we might intervene in them. Consequently, there is also a dimension to Guattari’s thinking that is speculative in a looser, but also perhaps more explicitly political, sense, because “[such] speculation also implies a particular kind of practice, namely, the ‘accessing’ of this ‘outside’ through experimentation—and the concomitant production of a different kind of subjectivity” (O’Sullivan, 2012: 170). Thinking speculatively with Guattari is therefore an endeavour that opens thought onto its reinvention in a resolutely non-cynical manner: it is a munificent practice that seizes upon the plurality of incorporeal universes that inhere in the present such that we might make sense of the present differently.

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References Berardi (Bifo), F. (2008). Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography (G. Mecchia & C. J. Stivale, Trans.). Palgrave. Born, G. (2013). Introduction. In G.  Born (Ed.), Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (pp.  1–69). Cambridge University Press. Braidotti, R. (2019). Affirmative ethics and generative life. Deleuze & Guattari Studies, 13(4), 463–481. https://doi.org/10.3366/dlgs.2019.0373 Brown, J. (2021). Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. Duke University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Doel, M.  A. (2009). Miserly thinking/excessful geography: From restricted economy to global financial crisis. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 27, 1054–1073. https://doi.org/10.1068/d7307 Gerlach, J., & Jellis, T. (2015). Guattari: Impractical philosophy. Dialogues in Human Geography, 5(2), 131–148. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 2043820615587787 Guattari, F. (1984). Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (R.  Sheed, Trans.). Penguin. Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Power Publications. Guattari, F. (1996). The Guattari Reader (G. Genosko Ed.). Blackwell Publishers. Guattari, F. (2011a). On contemporary art: Interview with Oliver Zahm, April 1992. In E.  Alliez & A.  Goffey (Eds.), The Guattari Effect (pp.  40–53). Continuum. Guattari, F. (2011b). The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis (T. Adkins, Trans.). Semiotext(e). Guattari, F. (2013). Schizoanalytic Cartographies (A. Goffey, Trans.). Bloomsbury. Guattari, F. (2016). A Love of UIQ. Univocal Pub. Holland, E. W. (2020). Multiplicities, axiomatics, politics. In R. Przedpelski & S. E. Wilmer (Eds.), Deleuze, Guattari and the Art of Multiplicity (pp. 64–82). Edinburgh University Press. Lapworth, A. (2019). Guattari and the micropolitics of cinema: The desiring-­ machines of Satoshi Kon. In T. Jellis, J. Gerlach, & J. D. Dewsbury (Eds.),

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Why Guattari? A Liberation of Cartographies, Ecologies and Politics (pp. 187–201). Routledge. O’Sullivan, S. (2012). On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation. Palgrave Macmillan. Read, J. (2008). The age of cynicism: Deleuze and Guattari on the production of subjectivity in capitalism. In I. Buchanan & N. Thoburn (Eds.), Deleuze and Politics (pp. 139–159). Edinburgh University Press. Roberts, T. (2019). Guattari’s incorporeal materialism: From individuation to aesthetics (and back again). In T. Jellis, J. Gerlach, & J. D. Dewsbury (Eds.), Why Guattari? A Liberation of Cartographies, Ecologies and Politics (pp. 45–57). Routledge. Savransky, M., Wilkie, A., & Rosengarten, M. (2017). The lure of possible futures: On speculative research. In A.  Wilkie, M.  Savransky, & M.  Rosengarten (Eds.), Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures. Routledge. Stengers, I. (2021). Putting Problematization to the test of our present. Theory Culture & Society, 38(2), 71–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419848061 Watson, J. (2009). Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing Between Lacan and Deleuze. Continuum. Williams, N. (2019). Reframing politics in art: From representational subjects to aesthetic subjectification. In T. Jellis, J. Gerlach, & J. D. Dewsbury (Eds.), Why Guattari?: A Liberation of Cartographies, Ecologies and Politics (1st ed.). Routledge.

14 The Ecosophic Act of Feeling: Poetry, Animism and Speculative Thought Oliver Dawson

An Encounter Summertime in South London. Above the Brixton street of artist and poet, Sophie Herxheimer, the sun has ceded control of the skies and moisture drifts in clumps of grey, daring to combine in another downpour. For the time being, birdsong and a fresh breeze prevail as I knock on the door. I enter into a live editorial session taking place around the kitchen table. Herxheimer and her editors from Henningham Family Press are matching collage cut-outs to poems for Herxheimer's latest book, 60 Lovers to Make and Do. Nothing of the tabletop is visible beneath the seemingly chaotic covering of paper silhouettes, magazine images and fragments of text. What Herxheimer had told me on the phone would be a final editorial meeting to hand over the book looks, to all intents and purposes, like the book’s creative birthing. As new combinations of word

O. Dawson (*) School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_14

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and image are experimented with Herxheimer cannot resist an urge to keep cutting out new options until one of her editors exclaims: “Stop making new things right now!” *** Across Herxheimer’s sizable output, art, text and voice combine in surreal, funny, though often quite serious ways. Drawing on the collective “unconscious patternings of materiality … rolled about for millenia” (2019b) in European folk tales, and mid-century activity books (the latter being the kind frequently aimed at girls and young women and full of “dry yet perky instructions for practical creativity” (2019c)), Herxheimer’s (2019b) work steers between a resourcefulness and a “kind of logic-­ fighting position”. There is a refusal to settle for an approach that might be deemed representational in the sense of imitating a world ‘out there’. Instead, her work pivots on encounters and transformations, taking on a “fantastic materiality, turned on its head” in which mountains can be made of glass, forests out of copper and “people [are] wondering around made out of marzipan, getting off with each other” (Herxheimer, 2019b). Herxheimer’s published output during the last decade includes collections of poetry alongside cuttings and collages (2017, 2019a), stories collected from members of the public via live ink drawings (2015) and several collaborations with poets both living and dead (2013, 2017, Herxheimer & McCabe, 2018). This diverse set of collaborations, media, interests and influences are intensified through Herxheimer’s practice of tuning to the unconscious “as a reality, because I’ve never really been fond of reality itself ” (2019b). Herxheimer’s appeal to a (European) collective unconscious is explored here as a speculative and experimental expansion of what counts as experience. Though Herxheimer herself references Jung as an influence, here I seek to productively align her approach with Guattari’s (2011: 9–10) reworking of the unconscious as “something we drag around with ourselves”; that is to say, something not limited to the individual but instead working through them via objects, gestures, institutions and social formations. Neither fully personal nor explicable via reference to fixed archetypes or symbols, this understanding of the

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unconscious allows for its enfolding through a creative gesture into what one might commonly understand as a subject’s ‘reality’. Herxheimer’s lack of fondness for reality, far from signalling resignation, allows for an experimental capture of unconscious patternings that attend to the production of subjectivity in its nascent state, without recourse to its institutionalisation under the structuring logics of psychoanalysis. An understanding of subjectivity emerges that is both collective and preindividual; that “deploys itself as much beyond the individual, on the side of the socius, as before the person, on the side of pre-verbal intensities, indicating a logic of affects rather than a logic of delimited sets” (Guattari, 1995: 9).

Aesthetic Feeling In this chapter I seek to intensify my encounter with Herxheimer’s practice by putting it into relation with the ecosophic thought of Félix Guattari (1995, 2008). Guattari’s call for an ecosophy that attempts to think subjectivity, society and environment as mutually affecting and conditioning leads him to a reassessment of the unconscious as an ongoing process of aesthetic creation in which ‘cartographies’ of subjectivity are concretely performed, “as in painting or literature” (2008: 40). Out of the power of this “new aesthetic paradigm” emerges the promise of a range of techniques and practices that might counteract the dominance of capitalist modes of subjugation by operating transversally to invent new forms of ‘resingularised’ subjectivity at the level of individuals, groups and institutions (Guattari, 1995: 107). As Guattari (2008: 51) writes: It seems to me essential to organise new micropolitical and microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic and new analytic practices regarding the formation of the unconscious. It appears to me that this is the only possible way to get social and political practices back on their feet, working for humanity and not simply for a permanent reequilibration of the capitalist semiotic Universe.

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For Guattari, aesthetic practices involve powers of creation that engender heterogeneous processes installed transversally at the level of subject, society and environment. These processes may not straightforwardly link up with large-scale political or social struggles but this is the point: they avoid falling back into transcendent structures of thought and grids of interpretation that would fix and determine what is possible—“the pervasive atmosphere of dullness and passivity” (Guattari, 2008: 69). To avoid such pitfalls, Guattari’s thought is simultaneously speculative and (im)practical in nature, guided by an ethos of micropolitical experimentation (Gerlach & Jellis, 2015). Aesthetic practices, and the ‘machinic’ processes they work with and are worked by, “return to the point of emergence of the production of subjectivity” to inaugurate “mutant ways of seeing, of feeling, of being affected” (Guattari & Zahm, 2011: 41). Guattari (1995: 11, 117, 127) stressed the importance of thinking transversality not only as a speculative proposition, but as that without which the production of subjectivity becomes closed in on itself, consigned to ‘personological’ accounts reliant on identification, identity and a unified self. Existing at the interface between existential territories of lived experience and infinite virtual universes of reference, transversal processes of subjectivation operate machinically to grasp new virtualities of thought and feeling that are ‘trans-monadic’, indexing them to bodies to produce new cartographies of becoming (O’Sullivan, 2010). The production of subjectivity under the aesthetic paradigm is thus “animated by a mutant creationism, always to be re-invented, always about to be lost” (Guattari, 1995: 116). Aesthetic powers of feeling, which Guattari distinguishes from thinking philosophically, knowing scientifically, and acting politically, are therefore not limited to an individual recognising and accounting for ‘their’ feelings but can be understood as a speculative ‘feeling towards’ affective capacities present in a given milieu. In this way, aesthetic feeling offers geographic thought and practice new ways for grasping the production of subjectivity as an immanent process of composition—speculative, yes, but engaged with and open to modulations from each of the three ecologies. As Stengers (2011: 141) notes, aesthetics under Guattari should refer to a pragmatic undertaking of creation that “crucially depend[s] upon actually being put to work in

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cartographic operations, diagnosing new psycho-social types, experimenting with new tales and modes of intervention”. The point here, then, is not a critique of speculation, per se, but rather to highlight how Guattari proceeds with his speculative thought as an inventive, immanent activity, retaining an openness to chaos and the cosmos. By locating my enquiry within Herxheimer’s work, and specifically her collaboration with Emily Dickinson (United States, 1830–1886), I want to trace how the former’s grasping of virtual forces and affects present in European folklore and practical activity books from the mid-twentieth century draws together pragmatic and animistic techniques to actualise new vectors of subjectivity. This orientates attention to how aesthetic forces can produce a shift in emphasis from discrete units of being—an ontological principle of equivalence that separates humans from their environment—to the manner of that being as it is engendered through its relations. As a prerequisite for ecosophic acts of feeling, I want to suggest that attending to the aesthetic in encounters allows for an ontological ambiguity through which materiality becomes ‘subjectified’—that is to say, subject to variation. Through this materialisation of subjectivity in aesthetic personae, animated objects and fantastic landscapes, Herxheimer draws new cartographies of becoming that resist the imposed logic of the same in favour of a restless exuberance of materiality differing from itself. It is through such speculative intensifications of experience that new ethico-­ aesthetic subjectivities can emerge and respond to Guattari’s (1995: 20) call for a “new art of living in society”. To provide existential support for my speculative engagement with Herxheimer’s work, I draw on recent theorisations of Amerindian animist subjectivities as a set of critical tools for thinking subjectivity in ways that are multiple, differential and compositional. To do so is not to claim the ‘discovery’ of an interpretive model that might supplant the many other ways of understanding Herxheimer’s practice. Nor is it to take up indigenous thought as though it were readily assimilable into a western ontological context (Bignall et  al., 2016). Rather, by drawing on Amerindian epistemologies to spotlight, following Lazzarato and Viveiros de Castro, the ‘machinic animism’ at play in Guattari’s writing to the extent that “subjectivity is not an exclusive human property, but the basis of the real” (Melitopoulos & Lazzarato, 2012: 241). Viveiros de Castro’s

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(2014: 187) speculative approach of “treating indigenous ideas as concepts” is acknowledged by the author as a kind of fiction, but its aim is not to interpret or explain indigenous thought. Instead, it becomes a way of expressing possible worlds from within a western philosophical framework—a way of multiplying our world (Viveiros de Castro, 2014: 196). It is this commitment to an expansion and intensification of experience, realised through (im)practical and non-philosophical techniques, that for me signals the unruly speculative nature of Guattari’s writing.

A Pragmatic Intensity Novel operations of subjectivation through encounter and transformation are particularly apparent in Herxheimer’s collaborations with dead poets. Although these collaborations find expression in a book or artwork, they also exceed the spatial and temporal finalities that such objects typically imply. Herxheimer talks of all her collaborations with dead poets as if engaging another living person on an ongoing basis. This resonates with the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (2014) theorising of subjectivity in Amerindian societies of the Amazon as a political and epistemological operation. In the cosmologies of the Americas, personhood is radically extended to all sorts of agents. Plants, animals, the dead, weather and physical objects or artefacts all have an ontological potentiality to be people. The degree of an agent’s personhood becomes determined by their capacity to occupy a particular point of view in relation to other people. The consequences of this “background cosmic humanity”, Viveiros de Castro argues, are to place a human/nonhuman difference within each entity (2014: 69–70). It is only through relations with other ‘people’ that the common condition of ‘soul’ is affirmed. Different to western epistemologies that rely on objectification (operating under a scientific paradigm), one only comes ‘to know’ through processes of subjectivation that unfold through attending to the affective differential relations between bodies. A relational operation across difference is at work in Sophie Herxheimer’s collaboration with the poet Emily Dickinson (Herxheimer & Dickinson, 2017). Herxheimer related to me the difficulty of working

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with Dickinson who remained “oblique and mysterious ... she won’t let go of who she is and become who I am and vice versa. There’s a sort of reserve that she has which is to do with her being a recluse” (Herxheimer, 2019b). Due to a set of difficult caring responsibilities at the time, Herxheimer was also stuck indoors and unable to work. This problem was resolved when Herxheimer happened upon a book of duo tone alpine landscapes. For Herxheimer this landscape was “like the interior world of Emily Dickinson—huge scale—but in this tiny little lady” (2019b). Herxheimer began making a series of collages alongside reading Dickinson every night before going to sleep. Dickinson “would give me these brilliant lines in the night and when I’d wake up I’d write it all down and choose a little section of it and make it into one of the collages” (Herxheimer, 2019b). In Fig. 14.1 we encounter the impossible scene of Dickinson visiting the chemist. The line “you will never know the full extent of my fineness” expresses both Herxheimer’s own frustrations with her trapped-ness and Dickinson’s own slanted truths. This flicker of conversation combines with the images of the immovable boulders, and Dickinson, stitched in and looking out of the window, to set up a resonance that forces one to think. Herxheimer (2019b) describes this as playing a game, so that the text is doing one thing and telling you one thing, and the picture is doing the opposite and between them you have to find out how you feel about that. Or…kind of almost laugh because you know, well, Emily’s not out and about. Emily never was in this window looking out at those boulders. She didn’t know Mrs. Fry at the Chemists, but I did. And…where are we? Where are we? Where are we? [laughs] Which is something so complicated you can never do it unless you did it in a poem.

Herxheimer establishes a connection to Dickinson through their common position of being stuck indoors. Herxheimer’s frustrations with her circumstances and not being able to do her work find in Dickinson someone whose own stuck-indoors-ness did not prevent her from writing thousands of poems. A relay is established across a difference rather than a straightforward identification. The alpine scenes work with this difference by establishing an in-between space; an oscillating logic of scale

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Fig. 14.1  Emily Dickinson goes to the chemist. From Your candle accompanies the sun: my homage to Emily Dickinson by Sophie Herxheimer (2017)

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(huge/tiny) and positionality (inside/outside) that works as a mechanism of transposition, fed also by the reading of Dickinson’s poems before bed and the practice of writing one’s dreams. Through this suite of techniques, a partial subjectivity is negotiated that is not Dickinson’s but nonetheless carries the affective charge of her writing into the production of Herxheimer’s collages imagining Dickinson the person. What is being granted personhood, to follow Viveiros de Castro, is the collection of affects and forces that constitute the relation DICKINSON-­ HERXHEIMER. It can be figured as an animist practice in the sense that it grants a variable ontology to these relational affects, and it is a pragmatic operation because through this relation a new perspective on subjectivity can take on consistency (see Viveiros de Castro, 2014: 74). One can think of these collages as detached fragments of subjectivity, blocks of becoming that belong to neither individual entirely yet are produced and function through a complex relation of actual lived circumstances, virtual landscapes and encounters with the affects and percepts of art and poetry. Herxheimer’s practice of folding poetry, collage and dreams together is an example of what Braidotti (2011) describes as feminist transposition— a collection of critical and creative approaches that foreground intensive processes of becoming and the ethical transformation of the self through the affirmation of negative passions. This entails an open-ended, perpetual displacement of molar forms of identification, identity and memory in favour of an embracing of collective assemblages that are multiple and impersonal. Braidotti (2011: 163) explains further: In other words, one’s affirmation of the life that one is shot through with is materially embodied and embedded in the singularity that is one’s enfleshed self. But this singular entity is collectively defined, interrelational, and external: it is impersonal but highly singular because it is crossed over with all sorts of “encounters” with others and with multiple cultural codes, bits, and pieces of the sticky social imaginary that constitutes the subject by literally gluing it together, for a while at least.

In the case of Herxheimer’s art, Braidotti’s call to think the subject as a collective assemblage finds its problem in how to affirm the embodied and singular materiality of the former’s own life—the negative passions

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caused by her ‘stuck-ness’ and so on. Through the creative encounter with Dickinson, Herxheimer relocates the self within an impersonal landscape populated by new becomings. Herxheimer and Dickinson, both stuck at home, begin their wanderings across an alpine landscape. This aesthetic process involves a precise grasping of elements present in the assemblage—the weight of the boulders, their size, the breeziness of a conversation at the chemist, the impossibility of being outside, of not doing one’s art and so on—and their creative composition as a block of becoming in which one always speaks, feels and becomes with others. Endurance of the self, belief in this self as embodied and materially located, becomes, paradoxically, about the collective sharing of stories, passions and affects as an ethical act of transformation (Braidotti, 2011: 164). In this sense, Herxheimer’s collages do not simply illustrate a self and its frustrations and desires; they are both a recognition of the impersonal nature of those forces that already compose the self, and an affirmative call for their active composition through intensive cartographies of becoming. Such becomings can only ever be thought of as provisional and open-ended. Their continual negotiation happens through creative practices that produce difference by means of repetition in series (of collages, ink drawings, poetry, etchings, etc.), thereby allowing new vectors for subjectivity to crystallise.

The Lure of the Aesthetic The link Guattari (1995: 102) makes between the “proto-aesthetic” qualities of animist society and the new aesthetic paradigm forces us to think about space and time as something that must be accomplished. Animistic ritual practices create collective existential territories out of transversal becomings with spirits, animals, plants and objects. To combat these forms of belonging, capitalist structures install transcendent ideals of truth, morality and aesthetic beauty. Now, with a return to the structure of archaic societies no longer possible nor desirable, art cannot survive through the folding of a mysterious and infinite soul into finite material bodies. It must diversify and ‘heterogenise’ to become capable of capturing all the points of singularity in the given situation. It is again a matter

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of speculative and pragmatic utility: “What is important is to know if a work leads effectively to a mutant production of subjectivity” (Guattari, 1995: 131). Art becomes capable of producing new existential territories to the extent that what it ‘says’ works to support that which ruptures signification, through postures, spatial arrangements, rhythms of colour and texture—a whole range of a-signifying techniques. Emily Dickinson on a trip to the chemists is precisely such a rupture of sense. The extent of her fineness enters a becoming-alpine; a vast ‘inner’ life made external and immovable. This unframing of the historical Dickinson is done in order to grant her, the artist, and those who encounter the work, a geography made up of supple and rigid lines; trajectories of becoming that reconfigure the subject such that an encounter might “irreversibly date the course of an existence and generate fields of the possible ‘far from the equilibria’ of everyday life” (Guattari, 1995: 131). Referencing another collage where Dickinson’s head is naturally formed by the shape of the mountains “so she’s a god”, Herxheimer (2019b) articulated the importance of this transversal operation: to make her spinsterhood and her loneliness and her virginity into a kind of illumination felt like a really pleasing thing to do. And a radical thing to do for the female artist because, you know, for me a lot of what I make is about the female artist and I was brought up to think that women couldn’t be painters.

If one detects a joyful affirmation in transforming Dickinson’s material conditions it is because it plugs directly into the conditions of Herxheimer’s own artistic practice to open up new affective capacities that had previously been considered foreclosed. Similarly, what I consider to be Guattari’s speculative provocation with the aesthetic paradigm is to take art not from the starting point of its institutions or objects but instead as an emergent manner of experimentation with percepts and affects that exhibits a capacity for inventing “unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being” (Guattari, 1995: 106). It is, as Dewsbury (Jellis et al., 2019: 90) notes, a question of how to grasp the difference that is up for grabs in any becoming. As Herxheimer puts it, in art and poetry an unlatching process mobilises previously rigid structures of

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thought and through this, for example, Emily Dickinson becomes “a good friend in my stuck-ness” (2019b). The ethico-aesthetic promise of art, therefore, lies in its aptitude for traversing capitalism’s fragmented cartographies of the self, and in mobilising potentials within a particular creative instance. This involves leaving behind—if only temporarily and provisionally—the historically individuated subject for an intensive becoming-with. The ethico-aesthetic gesture is one that acts on the present to intensify its indeterminacy as a vital resistance to capitalist modes of subjectivation that would anticipate our futures for us. The becoming that emerges from such creative instances inevitably falls back into the history of our individuated selves, just as art becomes institutionalised, but this does not mean that the force of aesthetic encounters are made redundant (Hynes, 2013). As Sauvagnargues (2016) argues in relation to Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, the virtual diagram of forces a work produces requires history’s milieu of actualisation in order to take form. This diagram belongs not to the history of the artist but to her becoming, yet its actualisation can nevertheless be historically dated. The diagram is what explains this power of rupture as that which doubles and recasts historical succession with a “jolted and non-linear continuity … a ‘redistribution’ of the continuous, according to a new dimension that produces continuity from the contingent eruption of the fracture” (Sauvagnargues, 2016: 182–183). Ethico-aesthetics therefore becomes a way of accounting for the present, of recording both what we are ceasing to be and what we are becoming. Following Braidotti (2019), this ‘we’ is not the reintroduction of a universal subject but the collective and distributed affective and cognitive capacities of the present. The ethical task becomes the formation of counter practices that give “what we may think we are short of … namely, the affirmation of the generative power of the present” (Braidotti, 2019: 479). For what is at stake in ethico-aesthetic acts is precisely the constraints capitalist society puts onto processes of subjectivation as they are lived and felt. Guattari attacks this problem from the ground up: the inherently messy and disarticulated production of subjectivity is shown to be a compositional process whose materials can be re-purposed and resingularised.

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The granting of a paradigmatic role for aesthetics is, therefore, a tactical choice by Guattari; an anticipation that this allows for a different composition transversal to institutions, dominant structures and the three ecologies of the social, mental and environmental. This greatly expanded ontogenetic and quasi-animistic function for aesthetics affords it an ethico-political force by drawing attention to “dimension[s] of creation in a nascent state” (Guattari, 1995: 102), before their capture in pre-established signifying schemas of subject-object relations. This is not to say that encounters with art are reduced to an exemplary yet ultimately ‘safe’ site for exploring subjectivity. This would be to diminish the importance of such encounters, and to misunderstand the transversal gesture of Guattari’s aesthetic paradigm and the ethical impulse of ecosophic thought. The stakes are always immanent because art plugs directly into virtual ecologies that allow for new becomings and new collective productions of subjectivity to emerge. The aesthetic paradigm, in this sense, offers a support for thinking about the propagation of those resingularised productions of subjectivity in art encounters throughout the three ecologies, with the understanding that the singularity of their enunciations invokes an ethical responsibility to that creative instance. With Herxheimer, the frustration at being unable to do one’s art is irreversibly altered as soon as a magazine of duo-tone alpine landscapes proves the final component in an assemblage with Emily Dickinson. A machine of aesthetic creation begins to function, not only because creativity is immanent to the feeling of being stuck, but because the aesthetic machine grasps the transversal support for those elements that the stuck-ness denied existence. Guattari’s machinic thought therefore acts as cartographic tool for mapping new intensities as a refusal of the status quo and its determination of what is important. Similarly, Guattari’s appeal to the aesthetic paradigm is perhaps less of a philosophical principle than it is a lure to leave the territory of philosophy behind. One should expect nothing less from a non-philosopher like Guattari for whom responsibility to the situation at hand requires an experimental suturing of practices and techniques with the sole principle of making something work for itself. It is, to paraphrase Gerlach and Jellis (2015: 140–143), an impractical pragmatics, emphasising

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“speculation over certitude, disorientation over orientation” in a derangement of the subject/object accord that permeates much of social scientific research. Consequently, the speculative gesture under the aesthetic paradigm becomes transformed: one sends out probes, encounters others, affirms failures, enters into becoming-other, all the time mapping a new, resingularised logic of intensities with which to feel the future into the present.

References Bignall, S., Hemming, S., & Rigney, D. (2016). Three ecosophies for the anthropocene: Environmental governance, continental posthumanism and indigenous expressivism. Deleuze Studies, 10(4), 455–478. Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic theory: The portable Rosi Braidotti. Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2019). Affirmative ethics and generative life. Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 13(4), 463–481. Gerlach, J., & Jellis, T. (2015). Guattari: Impractical philosophy. Dialogues in Human Geography, 5(2), 131–148. Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm (P.  Bains & J. Pefanis, Trans.). Indiana University Press. Guattari, F. (2008). The three ecologies (I. Pindar & P. Sutton, Trans.). Continuum. Guattari, F. (2011). The machinic unconscious: Essays in schizoanalysis. Semiotext(e). Guattari, F., & Zahm, O. (2011). On contemporary art: Interview with Oliver Zahm, April 1992. In E.  Alliez & A.  Goffey (Eds.), The Guattari effect (pp. 40–53). Continuum. Herxheimer, S. (2013). Ghost hotel. Self-published. Herxheimer, S. (2015). The listening forest. Henningham Family Press. Herxheimer, S. (2017). Velkom to Inklandt. Short Books. Herxheimer, S. (2019a). 60 lovers to make and do. Henningham Family Press. Herxheimer, S. (2019b, 18 July 2019). Interview with Sophie Herxheimer at her home and studio, Brixton, London. /Interviewer: O. Dawson. Herxheimer, S. (2019c). Sixty lovers to make and do. Retrieved from https:// poetryteapot.wordpress.com/2019/07/06/sixty-­lovers-­to-­make-­and-­do/ Herxheimer, S., & Dickinson, E. (2017). Your candle accompanies the sun: My homage to Emily Dickinson. Henningham Family Press.

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Herxheimer, S., & McCabe, C. (2018). The practical visionary. Hercules Editions. Hynes, M. (2013). The ethico-aesthetics of life: Guattari and the problem of bioethics. Environment and Planning A, 45(8), 1929–1943. Jellis, T., Gerlach, J., & Dewsbury, J.-D. (2019). In T.  Jellis, J.  Gerlach, & J.-D. Dewsbury (Eds.), Why Guattari?: A liberation of cartographies, ecologies and politics (1st ed.). Routledge. Melitopoulos, A., & Lazzarato, M. (2012). Machinic animism. Deleuze Studies, 6(2), 240–249. O’Sullivan, S. (2010). Guattari’s aesthetic paradigm: From the folding of the finite/infinite relation to schizoanalytic metamodelisation. Deleuze Studies, 4(2), 256–286. Sauvagnargues, A. (2016). Becoming and history: Deleuze’s reading of Foucault. In N. Morar, T. Nail, & D. W. Smith (Eds.), Between Deleuze and Foucault (pp. 174–199). Edinburgh University Press. Stengers, I. (2011). Relaying a war machine? In E. Alliez & A. Goffey (Eds.), The Guattari effect (pp. 134–155). Continuum. Viveiros de Castro, E.  B. (2014). Cannibal metaphysics: For a post-structural anthropology (P. Skafish, Trans.). Univocal.

15 Flights of Fancy: Speculative Taxidermy as Pedagogical Practice Merle Patchett

Introduction I have long been on the hunt for fashioned birds-of-paradise. I have met with stored and display-only examples in fashion and textile collections and these encounters have generated the exhibiting and essaying of their biogeographical histories (Patchett et  al., 2012; Patchett, 2019a). However, these eventful yet short-lived encounters only made me want to secure specimens for my own collection. I have since sourced examples of “Paradisaea apparel” (Patchett, 2019a, b) from vintage and antique stores, both off and online, and have used them to facilitate my teaching and outreach activities (Patchett, 2019b). However, as Dydia DeLyser (2015) cautions, anyone adopting the role of “researcher-collector” must also address the concomitant ethical issues involved. During the “Plume Boom” (1880–1914) the business of killing birds for the millinery trade was practised on a global scale involving the deaths of hundreds of

M. Patchett (*) School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_15

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millions of birds in many parts of the world (Doughty, 1975). Birds of all kinds were used for both their feathery and bodily appearance, but birds-­ of-­paradise were particularly sought after because of their ethereal beauty and sumptuous quality. Therefore, although the act of killing is historic, and there are now laws in place to protect species once decimated by the plumage trade, the collecting of preserved vintage bird-parts—particularly those of protected species like the birds-of-paradise—is still ethically questionable. I justify their purchase as in my hands they help to bring the forgotten social and environmental histories of the plumage trade to wider audiences, whilst also enabling me to develop a fresh approach to historical understanding and practice, one that extends “collaborations far beyond the realm of human relationships” (Ruddick, 2017: 120). And this is to acknowledge, after Aloi (2018a: 34) in his book Speculative Taxidermy, that taxidermy objects can be sophisticated “speculative tools” for not only questioning “modes of perceiving, constructing, and consuming animals” but also for "thinking in speculative, risky and creative ways about histories and cultures  that transcend the human" (Aloi, 2018a: 34). Yet, where Aloi attributes the practice of ‘speculative taxidermy’ to contemporary artists in art-gallery settings, my aim in this chapter is to assert and action speculative taxidermy as a mode of pedagogical practice in a university classroom setting. Before doing so, however, I first outline Aloi’s articulation of speculative taxidermy as a methodology for exploring and exposing the co-constitution of human-­ animal histories. Aloi explains that artists working in a speculative mode recognize that taxidermy objects—as hybrid material things—trouble hierarchical distinctions between humans and non-humans and, therefore, histories of human exceptionalism. Yet Aloi (2018a: 21) also recognizes the irony of questioning “histories of representation that have cemented man’s (sic) exceptionalism” using “the very medium through which those histories were written in the first place”. Taxidermy objects certainly have been used historically to evidence and represent hierarchical orderings of the natural world, as well as to separate natural and human histories. Yet taxidermy objects are also associated with histories of pre-scientific enchantment and wonder (Spary, 2019). Indeed, even post-­enlightenment natural history enquiry has a long tradition of speculative enquiry, for

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instance, by producing natural histories using fossil records and specimens (Domining, 1982). Speculation about unobservable natural species and phenomena is, then, already considered a justified practice in scientific-­realist modes of enquiry. However, a crucial difference is that to avoid reducing taxidermy animals to objects of rational study or to symbolic and stilled representations of nature, Aloi draws on speculative realism and its tradition of ontological decentring of the human subject. For geographer Stephanie Turner, Aloi’s aim in engaging speculative realism as a theoretical framework is clear: to show how “taxidermy objects [and artworks] function as active interfaces with which to critically examine the co-constitution of human-animal histories and realities” (Turner, 2019: 224). My aim in engaging speculative taxidermy as a methodology in this chapter is to assert my examples of Paradisaea apparel as “speculative [pedagogical] tools” (Aloi, 2018a, b) for not only examining the co-­ constitution of human-avian histories, but also offering new registers of knowing and relating to birds-of-paradise across time and space as well as states of life and death. The chapter itself will restage a ‘speculative taxidermy workshop’ that centred around one such example. The workshop, in situ and as re-told on the page, serves to problematize the imperial geographies of taxidermy collection by pluralizing historical accounts and exemplifies a speculative methodology pertinent for situating speculative thinking and practice within pedagogical settings. In what follows, I describe what happened when I introduced a group of second-year human geography students to ‘the thing itself ’ and then set them the task of labelling it.

The Thing Itself I begin the ‘bird-of-paradise workshop’ by encouraging a group of second-­ year students to consider the thing itself; the avian accessory is placed in the middle of a table which the students stand around. The students, after being provided with Nitrile gloves, are encouraged to pick up the bird by its metal fastener and take a closer look. DeSilvey (2006: 320 citing Bataille, 1993) observes that aberrant objects can provoke “simultaneous—and contradictory—sensations of repugnance and attraction”.

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Indeed, the students appear reticent to pick up the bird: lying flat against the table, the feathered remains look malformed and macabre. Yet, when picked up, they take on a livelier character—the feathers flounce and flutter and the iridescent plumage glimmers in the light. The students remark on its lightness and are compelled either to run a gloved finger along the flank plumes or to shake their hand to make them vibrate, mimicking what the bird does in life to attract a mate. Even though the feathered remains have been preserved and fashioned into a millinery accessory, they still possess an untamed animal expressivity that inspires affections (and aversions!). The enduring seductive power of these plumes therefore clarifies to the students why “for millennia they have been ornaments, commodities and gifts” (Saldanha, 2010: 69). Having captured their attentions, I then ask the students: “what is it?” This is a deceptively simple question, one that can cause consternation: “well it’s a bird”. Someone else chips in: “but it’s only bits of a bird and it’s got a glass eye and this fascinator thing”. So, then I ask: “is it animal or artefact?” The students ponder this and the curious creature, and opine it is both animal and artefact. They can see that it is the remains of a bird but that the bird has been preserved and fashioned for human adornment. Finally, I ask the students if anyone can tell what species of bird it is. Silence follows, so I ask them to describe its features. They list the colour, “pale yellow”, the iridescent throat plumage and the unusual feather structure. However, rather than limit the encounter to simply a reductionist act of “species-identifying” (Philo & Wilbert, 2000: 6), I tell the students that their puzzlement mirrors that of the first Europeans to encounter this bird when five of its “trade skins” were unloaded from the only ship to return from Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe in 1522. Having made this connection, I introduce the students to the speculative natural histories that emerged in response to encounters with these trade-skins.

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Speculative Taxidermy First, I pass around an image from Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner’s Historiae Animalium (1551–58). Gessner’s image, a woodcut, is quite obviously based on a drawing of a trade skin, one of the few in circulation in Europe. The skin would have been prepared by indigenous Papuan hunters to be worn in headdresses or to be traded and often had their wings and feet removed for this purpose (Swadling, 1996). The skins were also smoked and dried, which had the effect of shrinking the skin and exaggerating the size of the beak and plumes (Wallace, 1869). Gessner’s image of “Di Paradifea” certainly appears shrunken and twisted and I note that the wings and feet are also clearly missing. Given its dismembered and deformed appearance, the students agree that it was no wonder that European ideas about the birds were also oddly shaped. According to Gessner’s speculative natural history for the bird, a translation of which is read to the students, these “Lufftvogels” (birds of the air) did not have feet and spent their lives in perpetual flight, living on air and dew, which led his contemporaries to speculate that they did not even land to breed, the female laid and incubated her eggs on the male’s back (Fig. 15.1). By way of example, I introduce the students to images from Bolognese apothecary Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Ornithologiae hoc est de avibus historia (1599). I tell the students that Aldrovandi, unlike Gessner, had managed to source several bird-of-paradise skins for his collection and appears to differentiate five different species of birds-of-paradise on this basis: prima, secunda, cirrata, hippomanucodiata and vulgaris. However, as the images depict the different species floating legless and drinking rainwater, Aldrovandi’s illustrations, as well as his natural histories accompanying them, do little to counter Gessner’s earlier flights of fancy. The only rebuttal Aldrovandi offers is that the birds cannot live on air and water alone: it is his hypothesis that their “sturdy beaks” are very like those of woodpeckers, and so are “very fit to strike insects” (Lawrence, 2018: 96). This accurate hypothesis aside, Gessner’s and Aldrovandi’s natural histories acutely underline to the students that when taken out of context and without accompanying documentary evidence, collected commodities,

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Fig. 15.1  ‘Manucodiata’. Woodcut from Conrad Gessner’s Historiae Animalium, (Zurich 1560). Image Credit: Paul D Stewart / Science Photo Library

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including natural history specimens, lose indigenous meanings and significance. Indeed, ‘voyages of discovery’ through their very practice and logic of discovery actively erased indigenous histories (  Bolton 1997;  Gismondi, 2019). European ‘discovery’ of the birds-of-paradise and the subsequent mythologising of their habits and haunts, therefore, offer the students an excellent example of what Kristen Greer calls the “avian imperial archive” at work, where “ornithology helped to materialize imaginatively and empirically” “new” lands, in this case Nueva Guinea, and new natural commodities like the birds-of-paradise (Greer, 2013: 1317). At the same time, I underline to the students that Gessner’s and Aldrovandi’s misunderstanding regarding bird-of-paradise anatomy is a striking example of how easily Europeans were misled as a result of the agency of indigenous hunters and therefore how this example also works to complicate simplistic postcolonial interpretations that present Europeans as in control of all aspects of colonial encounters (Fig. 15.2).

Mythologizing Nomenclature Having cautioned the students on the dangers of assuming European dominance, I introduce the task I want them to complete: to make an alternative specimen label for my avian-accessory. A traditional ‘specimen label’ is a label accompanying a zoological specimen, which details (at the very least) the scientific name, sex and location where the animal was found or killed. However, such names and labels can also offer valuable information about how taxidermy specimens have been collected and (mis)understood over time and place, and as such can reveal routes to reframe and retell taxidermy objects and collections (Patchett & Foster, 2008). For example, I communicate to the students that although some complete bird-of-paradise skins arrived in Europe from the early 1600s, refuting Aldrovandi and his peer’s ideas, in 1758 the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, father of scientific nomenclature (Koerner, 1996), knowingly perpetuated the myth by naming the Greater bird-of-paradise (the largest of the genus) Paradisaea apoda, the “legless bird-of-paradise”. The perpetuation of the Apoda myth through its naming and labelling not only underlines the close entanglement of science, speculation and story

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Fig. 15.2  “Hippomanucodiata Manucodiata”. Illustration from U.  Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae (Boloniae, 1599). Image source: https://www.biodiversitylibrary. org/page/53875607

in the making of the avian imperial archive, but also how scientific nomenclature works to erase indigenous names, knowledges and beings. I therefore inform the group that it is incumbent upon European historical geographers to recognize and recover these indigenous (hi)stories. Yet I also note that a politics of ‘recovery’ is also problematic as it suggests that, as European scholars, we have the authority or a certain right to

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speak for Papuan peoples and birds-of-paradise, emphasizing again the relationship between imperialism, power and historical knowledge. To ‘humble’ this positionality, I introduce the students to the work of decolonial scholar Rolando Vázquez who instructs the students that The problem of Eurocentrism is its ‘arrogant ignorance’ and its functioning as a place, which believes itself to be in the present of history and at the centre of geography. The claim of such centrality can only be based on an ignorance of other worlds. It is a single truth that is only sustained by the erasure of other worlds of meaning. (2019: 3)

The Apoda myth embodies this ‘arrogant ignorance’ and evidences the erasure of other worlds of meaning relating to the birds-of-paradise. When confronted with such an example, Vázquez demands that as Eurocentric scholars we ask ourselves: “how can we understand what has been erased, how can we relate to these ancestral memories that are not in the texts or in the archives?” (2019: 4–5). Heeding Vázquez’s words, I give the students a short article to read from Penn Museum’s magazine Expedition entitled History and the Birds of Paradise: Surprising Connections from New Guinea. Despite the colonial overtones of the magazine’s name, the article itself is a sincere and successful attempt at reinstating indigenous histories into the avian imperial archive’s account of the birds-of-­ paradise. Stuart Kirsch (2006: 20) writes that “by paying attention to the relationships responsible for the production of hats decorated with bird of paradise plumes we can suggest alternative understandings of New Guinea’s history” (and the birds-of-paradise).

Mutual Histories In the article Kirsch actions alternative understandings by inviting his readers to understand the practice of Western women wearing birds-of-­ paradise plumes as a “reverse anthropology” of Yonggom men who wear, and have worn for centuries, these feathers during Yok dance performances (2006: 21). In these dance performances Kirsch details that male Yonggom dancers seek to attract the attention of eligible female Yonggom

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by mimicking the bird’s courtship—“lekking”—displays: “In both [avian and human performances], the sublime beauty of the plumes and the rhythmic nature of the dance contribute to the desired effect of seduction” (p. 20). As pages from Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue evidence to the students, Western women in the early twentieth century also recognized and sought to embody the seductive power of bird-of-paradise plumes, which is why Kirsch (2006) argues that although separated along geographical, cultural, racial and gender lines, Western women and the Yonggom were connected through their mutual understanding of the aesthetic power of bird-of-paradise plumes. However, where the Yonggom harvested the birds sustainably, Western women had acquired their birds-­ of-­paradise apparel through the destructive practices and geographies of colonial capitalism: 50,000–80,000 preserved birds-of-paradise were being shipped annually, via the Dutch East India Company, to Europe at the height of the feather-fashion trade (2019a, b). Although acknowledging these necro-geographies is important, Kirsch (2006: 21) also underlines that focusing on difference over connection can “perpetuate Euro-American assumptions about the cultural difference, geographical distance, and historical independence of New Guinea”. By comparison, shared histories—such as Papuan peoples and Western women sharing an aesthetic appreciation for the allure of birds-of-paradise plumes with each other the birds themselves, an understanding which also prompted Western women to ultimately campaign for their protection—have “much to offer contemporary political and environmental debates” (Kirsch, 2006: 21) and therefore the future survival of birds-of-paradise in a time of mass extinction. With these thoughts imparted, I instruct the students they have thirty minutes to make their alternative specimen labels. By way of example, I tell the students about collaborative projects I have worked on that have made playful and subversive use of specimen labels in a bid to indigenize and pluralize the naming and telling of natural history specimens so that more complex histories of human-animal co-existence can be told (e.g. Patchett & Foster, 2008; Patchett et al., 2011). Yet having since reflected on the success of these works, I also warn them that viewing taxidermy objects solely through the lens of postcolonial critique can seriously limit the power of taxidermy objects to speak of/to histories and futures beyond

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the human. To overcome this, and following Aloi’s lead, I introduce the students to Donna Haraway’s concept of speculative fabulation—“in short, crafting new narratives and tales for survival in environmentally precarious times” (Grant-Young, 2021: 217)—in a bid to turn their efforts away from merely writing critical or alternative histories and towards the speculative fabulation of mutually beneficial futures between humans and birds-of-paradise, or what Haraway calls ‘making kin’ (Haraway, 2015). When the finished labels are returned to me, I am pleased to find they not only offer critical commentaries on the entangled histories of humans and the birds-of-paradise but also gesture towards more affirmative lines of flight between our species.

Speculative Fabulation? One label uses a nineteenth-century quote deriding Darwin’s theory of sexual selection—a theory itself informed by Alfred Russel Wallace’s first-­ hand accounts of bird-of-paradise lekking—to pithily suggest that the human obsession with beauty and aesthetics mirrors, and even appropriates, that of the birds-of-paradise: it is absurd to credit birds with aesthetic tastes equal, if not superior, to those of the most refined and civilized human beings. Yet the practice of humans attaching birds-of-paradise to their heads to attract a mate from New Guinea to New York begs to differ.

The label manages to underline shared histories between humans and the birds-of-paradise whilst also offering an animal-inclusive reading of cultural appreciation/appropriation. The remaining three labels play with the indexical conventions of the specimen label for differing purposes and effects. The first responds to contemporary debates around repatriation requests by turning the traditional specimen label into a shipping label: C/O the Yonggom, Western province: Fly and Tedi (Alice) rivers and toward Lake Murray, Papua New Guinea.

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The second turns the specimen label into a clothing label, emphasizing the entanglement of science and commerce in the birds-of-paradise’s transformation into a millinery accessory: Brand: Paradisea Apparel. Colour: Iridescent Black. Designer: Sky Dew Milliners.

The third and final label adheres closely to the layout and conventions of a scientific specimen label; however, the answers it provides to traditional label categories underline the genera’s vulnerability in the ‘Capitalocene’ (Haraway, 2015) and how this might be overcome: Species: Paradisea vulnerabilis. Habitat: Capitalocene. Status: Vulnerable (VU). Conservation Instructions:—for the specimen: remove dust with soft make-up brush, for the species: requires no less than multispecies and multiracial environmental justice.

Although this label provides a suggestion of what is required to reverse the birds-of-paradise ‘flight to oblivion’, none of the labels go as far as to fabulate future convivial relations and worlds between humans and the birds-of-paradise. Given Aloi (2018a) argues contemporary artists often struggle to do this successfully, asking second-year geography students to perform this feat was ambitious. However, when the students place their labels next to the thing itself, the avian accessory reasserts itself again as always more than an object produced or enframed by human desires and designs. According to Aloi (2018a) we can think of this excess as a form of re-enchantment. In the coda of his book, Aloi suggests re-­enchantment “can include appreciation of indigenous forms of knowledges and practice” but just as importantly is about offering “new registers of knowing and relating” (Aloi, 2018b: np). No matter how it is framed, my avian accessory’s resilient animal excess invites ethical and political opportunities to not only re-write human-avian histories but to re-enchant shared

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histories and futures. In this way it is the thing itself, not the artist or archivist, that performs the work of speculative taxidermy.

Conclusion In recounting the bird-of-paradise workshop in this chapter, I hope to have underlined two main points. The first, and to extend Aloi (2018a), is that taxidermy objects can be sophisticated pedagogical tools for getting students to not only question how animals have been perceived, constructed and consumed over time and place, but also for thinking in speculative, risky and creative ways about histories and futures beyond the human. The second is that any speculative methodology should be concerned with pluralizing rather than pinning down. The speculative natural histories Gessner and Aldrovandi produced for the birds-of-­ paradise serve to underline that speculative thinking and practice can be overly and effacingly concerned with the latter project. Instead, I contend speculative thinking and practice, including speculative pedagogy, must be committed to opening up diverse registers of knowing and relating to whatever is at or in hand. By placing an example of Paradisaea apparel in the hands of my students they were introduced to plural accounts of knowing and relating to the birds-of-paradise over time and place and states of life and death. This includes attention to the way Papuan peoples and Western women shared an appreciation for, and were moved by, the aesthetic power of bird-of-paradise plumes, mutual more-than-human histories that might otherwise be simplified and deadened through simplistic postcolonial interpretation. Moreover, even when enframed by human desires and designs, including the student’s own labels, the avian accessory’s enduring animal reality communicated it will always exceed human-centred narratives, which in these environmentally precarious times is vital speculative work.

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References Aldrovandi, U. (1599) Ornithologiae hoc est de avibus historiae libri XII (Vol. I). GB Bellagamba for F. dei Franceschi. Aloi, G. (2018a). Speculative taxidermy: Natural history, animal surfaces, and art in the Anthropocene. Columbia University Press. Aloi, G. (2018b). Speculative taxidermy: Humans, animals, and art. Aesthetics for Birds Bolg. Retrieved from https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2018/08/24/ speculative-­taxidermy-­humans-­animals-­and-­art/ Bolton, L. (1997). A place containing many places: Museums and the use of objects to represent place in Melanesia. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 8, 18–34. DeLyser, D. (2015). Collecting, kitsch and the intimate geographies of social memory: A story of archival autoethnography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40, 209–222. DeSilvey, C. (2006). Observed decay: Telling stories with mutable things. Journal of Material Culture, 11(3), 318–338. Domining, P. (1982). Evolution of manatees - a speculative history. Journal of Paleontology, 56(3), 599–619. Doughty, R. (1975). Feather fashions and bird preservation: A study in nature protection. University of California Press. Gessner, C. (1551–58). Historia Animalium. C. Froschauer. Gismondi, C. (2019). How the Arctic became white: Victorian explorers and the erasure of botany in the Canadian Arctic. Arcadia, 16. Retrieved from http://www.environmentandsociety.org/arcadia/how-­arctic-­became-­whitevictorian-­explorers-­and-­erasure-­botany-­canadian-­arctic Grant-Young, J. (2021). Book review: Giovanni Aloi, speculative taxidermy: Natural history, animal surfaces and art in the Anthropocene. Gothic Nature., 2, 214–220. Greer, K. (2013). Geopolitics and the avian imperial archive: The zoogeography of region-making in the nineteenth-century British Mediterranean. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(6), 1317–1331. Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6, 159–165. Kirsch, S. (2006). History and the birds of paradise: Surprising connections from New Guinea. Expedition, 49(1), 15–21.

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Koerner, L. (1996). Carl Linnaeus in his time and place. In N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, & E. C. Spary (Eds.), Cultures of natural history (pp. 145–162). Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, N. (2018). Making monsters. In H. Curry, N. Jardine, J. Secord, & E.  Spary (Eds.), Worlds of natural history (pp.  94–111). Cambridge University Press. Patchett, M., & Foster, K. (2008). Repair work: Surfacing the geographies of dead animals. Museum and Society, 6(2), 98–122. Patchett, M., Foster, K., & Lorimer, H. (2011). The biogeographies of a hollow-­ eyed harrier. In S. Alberti (Ed.), The afterlives of animals: A museum menagerie. University of Virginia Press. Patchett, M., Foster, K., Gomez, L., & Roe, A. (2012). Ruffling feathers: Exhibiting the monstrous geographies of the plumage trade. Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, 20, 27–54. Patchett, M. (2019a). The biogeographies of the blue bird-of-paradise: From sexual selection to sex and the city. Journal of Social History, 52, 1061–1086. Patchett, M. (2019b). Archiving. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44(4), 650–653. Philo, C., & Wilbert, C. (2000). Animal spaces, beastly places: New geographies of human-animal relations. Routledge. Ruddick, S. M. (2017). Rethinking the subject, reimagining worlds. Dialogues in Human Geography, 7(2), 119–139. Saldanha, A. (2010). Two birds of paradise in North Holland, 1592: The gift in the exotic. Parallax, 16(1), 68–79. Spary, E. C. (2019). On the ironic specimen of the unicorn horn in enlightened cabinets. Journal of Social History, 52(4), 1033–1060. Swadling, P. (1996). Plumes from paradise: Trade cycles in outer southeast Asia and their impact on new guinea and nearby islands until 1920. Sydney University Press. Turner, S. (2019). Artists unsettling anthropocentrism. Humanimalia, 10(1), 222–229. Vázquez, R. (2019). What we know is built on erasure. The Contemporary Journal 1. Retrieved from https://thecontemporaryjournal.org/strands/on-translations/what-we-know-is-built-­on-­erasurean-interview-with-rolando-­vazquez Wallace, A. R. (1869). The Malay archipelago: The land of the orang-utang and the bird of paradise. Macmillan and Co.

16 Becoming Listening Bodies: Sensing the Affective Atmospheres of the City with Young Children David Rousell, Michael Gallagher, and Mark Peter Wright

Introduction Increasing attention has been given to sound in recent studies of children’s geographies (e.g. Philo, 2016; Mills, 2017), including research into the political, aesthetic and cultural implications of the sonic in children’s everyday lives and environments. In some cases this work has figured within a broader turn towards sensory studies in the social sciences (Bull et al., 2006; Gershon, 2017; 2019), with the sonorous qualities of environments offering alternative theoretical and empirical entry points for researchers of childhood seeking to work outside of linguistic and D. Rousell (*) Creative Agency Lab, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M. Gallagher Manifold Lab, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK M. P. Wright Centre for Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice, University of the Arts, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_16

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representational modes of inquiry (Kraftl, 2020). Such work has developed in conversation with philosophical movements associated with affect theory (Thompson & Biddle, 2013), new materialisms (Coole & Frost, 2010), posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013) and non-representational geography (Thrift, 2008; Vannini, 2015). These developments have paved the way for speculative conceptualisations and analyses of the sonic in terms of vibrational affect (Gallagher, 2016), queer ecologies (Truman & Shannon, 2018), racialisation (Henriques, 2011; Stoever, 2016), resonance and indigeneity (Robinson, 2020; Wargo, 2018), justice (LaBelle, 2021; Schuppli, 2020) and performativity (Powell et al., 2017). This chapter contributes to speculative approaches in childhood studies and sonic geographies by exploring sound walking as a method for experimenting with the shifting atmospheres of urban environments. We approach sound walking as a modality of participatory art and pedagogy, which we engaged collaboratively with 25 children (age 5–11) in a project called the Listening Body, carried out at a community arts centre in Manchester, UK. Building on theories of affective ecologies and atmospheric attunement (Brigstocke & Noorani, 2016; Choy & Zee, 2015 Engelmann, 2015; McCormack, 2018), the chapter describes how creative sound walking practices enabled children to improvise with the vibratory affordances of acoustic space, wearable technologies and the sonic milieus of nonhuman creatures. Sound walking is theorised as a speculative-pragmatic strategy for sensing the affective atmospheres of the city (McCormack, 2013), where the speculative aspect “relates to the character of potential native to the world’s activity, as expressed eventfully in the taking place of change” (Massumi, 2011: 12). This necessarily involves a speculative shift in understanding how learning circulates through affective atmospheres that envelop and permeate bodies (Gallagher, 2016), while continuously modulating the environmental milieu through which urban space-times are experientially configured. Breaking with humanistic pedagogic models that typically see children’s learning as being led, facilitated or scaffolded by teachers or arts workers, we aim to develop speculative methods for studying the more-than-­ human dynamics of pedagogy as it takes shape within a much wider range of atmospheric forces and events (Gallagher et al., 2018; Gershon, 2013; Kraftl, 2020; Rousell et al., 2020).

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In what follows, we begin by developing the geographical context of our study within the neighbourhood of Hulme and the significant place of the community art centre within this multi-ethnic community. We then draw on scholarship at the intersections of affect studies and geography to conceptualise ‘atmosphere’ as both a theoretical and methodological analytic for discussing our sound walking practices with children. Importantly, we approach affective atmospheres as transindividual (Keating, 2019); while we acknowledge that atmospheres may be felt and experienced by individuals, our work aims to show how affects circulate through and beyond the corporeal enclosures of bodies, and can therefore bring bodies into relation in ways that can be described as ecological (Anderson, 2009; Manning, 2012; McCormack, 2018; Rousell & Diddams, 2020; Stewart, 2011). In the second part of the chapter, we focus on children’s sonic experiments with balloons as atmospheric objects that began to channel a micropolitical desire to disrupt spaces of pedagogical authority and social stratification. Specifically, we describe how children used balloons to interrupt the cloistered educational spaces of a university campus which had only recently taken over a large block of public space within their local neighbourhood. Through this example, we seek to demonstrate how children’s play with atmospheric objects can critically attend to micropolitical tensions that emerge from within pedagogical events, while also contributing to the development of speculative methods for studying how these events take shape as they do.

Demolition and Renewal in Hulme The Listening Body took place in the urban residential area of Hulme, one of several areas adjacent to Manchester’s city centre which housed the growing working-class population during the city’s industrial expansion in the late 1700s and 1800s. Hulme has remained predominantly working class to the present day. During the 1950s, many Caribbean immigrants from the Windrush generation settled in Hulme and neighbouring Moss Side, creating a vibrant Black community. In the 1960s Hulme’s houses were deemed slums, unfit for habitation, and were demolished

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and replaced with a mass development of low-rise, system-­built modernist social housing constructed in 1971, as part of city-wide plans to improve living conditions. During the late 1970s and 1980s the Hulme flats suffered problems due to poor construction, inadequate maintenance and growing social issues. They gradually became a kind of autonomous zone, squatted by artists, travellers, anarchists, drug users and other counter-cultural groups. Alongside a vibrant culture of reggae sound systems run by the Caribbean community, Hulme provided spaces for a growing independent music scene (the first Factory Records gigs took place there), illegal raves and graffiti art. Through the 1990s, a second wave of regeneration saw yet another demolition of Hulme, but the area retained a reputation for alternative culture, art and music. One of the few buildings to survive these successive demolitions was a church which later became the youth arts centre that collaborated with us on the Listening Body project. This arts centre continues to provide free multi-arts programmes for children in Hulme and surrounding communities. In 2014 Manchester Metropolitan University constructed a new university campus in the middle of this neighbourhood. Its opening marked the latest stage of Hulme’s urban regeneration and constitutes a form of creative gentrification that has drawn majority white, middle-class professionals to work in an area that is predominantly working class and racially mixed (Denmead, 2019). As researchers located within this newly constructed campus, our work in the Listening Body aimed to bring local children together with artists and researchers from the university to collectively map the sonic contours of Hulme as a rapidly changing urban ecology. This was the first in an ongoing series of collaborations with local children and young people associated with the Local Alternatives project (www.localalternatives.org) and led to a series of co-produced community events at the university, local galleries and museums, and other public spaces around Hulme.

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Affective Atmospheres and Urban Ecology Hulme is an urban area characterised by profound multiplicity; a prime example of the multi-layered nature of urban space highlighted by McCormack (2013), albeit one where many infrastructural layers have been largely erased and replaced. Through our project we came to understand Hulme as a posthuman urban ecology, in the sense mobilised in recent years by a number of theorists (Braidotti & Bignall, 2018; de Freitas, 2018) to indicate multi-temporal assemblages that involve differential processes and forces acting on each other, in such a way as to produce dynamic, lively, unpredictable effects. Departing from earlier cybernetic and systems theories which reduce ecological complexity to models of information exchange (Umpleby & Dent, 1999), posthumanist theories of ecology acknowledge the processual, speculative and atmospheric dimensions of life that elude the capture of any system, model or network (Bignall & Braidotti, 2018; Massumi, 2018). Such theories are broadly consistent with recent work in the ecological and biological sciences which emphasise the pervasive and polytemporal dynamisms of eco-evolutionary processes (Protevi, 2013; West-Eberhard, 2003). Building on this work, we approached Hulme as an urban ecology constituted through mutually penetrating atmospheric processes, rather than a set of nodes or components in a system. As Massumi (2018: 10) notes, this hinges on a distinction between the internal/external dynamics of a system and the processual field of life which generates an atmospheric excess over any systematic functioning. Our focus on the processual dimension of urban ecology enables us to consider, for example, historical waves of urban demolition, community building, mass displacement and anarchic politics as elemental forces that continue to haunt the affective atmospheres of Hulme without being captured by any system or model. Much has been written on the concept of affective atmospheres in geography (Anderson, 2009; McCormack, 2013, 2018), but for the purposes of our discussion here, an affective atmosphere can be defined as a shifting field of intensive sensations and environmental elements that generate a shared sense of mutual envelopment in space and time. This

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means that affective atmospheres are by nature unstable and dynamically changing processes, but can also have a climatological tendency to linger, accumulate and (re)turn (Massumi, 2019). While an atmosphere requires the formation of a membrane or envelope of some kind to hold itself together, this membrane is always both porous and provisional, subject to continuous variation, extrusion and rupture (McCormack, 2018). Following McCormack (2018: 9), our work in the Listening Body can be understood as a series of “modest experiment[s] that make atmospheres explicit in different ways while also distributing and stretching capacities to sense their force”. Attending to affective atmospheres involves speculative experiments in modes of collective experience which “never present themselves as fully tangible, discrete, or unified entities” (p. 7). In our project this involved speculative practices of “listening to bodies listening” (Gallagher et  al., 2017), and the exploration of what this excessive listening might produce across multiple registers and modalities of experience. Expanded listening addresses many different registers of sound: aesthetic, compositional and timbral qualities; affective, material and embodied characteristics; the ways in which sound is both spatial and temporal, evoking a sense of time, distance, direction or movement; sound’s capacity to produce knowledge of events and processes; and the semiotic associations produced by listening, including the tendency of sound to trigger memories. (Gallagher et al., 2017, pp. 620–621)

Significantly, this redefinition of listening within an expanded field equally includes those processual aspects of environments which are unheard, inchoate, unformed, imagined, or unconsciously felt, and therefore difficult to register or capture within the gamut of a system. Our use of the term ‘listening body’ therefore gestures towards an atmospheric image of the body itself (Manning, 2012), where the porous membrane between body and environment is always processual and provisional (Frost, 2016), and that which is unheard and unseen still registers as intensity collectively felt, even in its perceptual absence or fugitivity.

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Becoming Listening Bodies The Listening Body took place through a series of eight workshops with primary school aged children who were attending weekly art sessions run by the community arts centre. The workshops involved playful activities in which children experimented with different modalities of listening and sounding, discussed sounds they considered significant within their local area and conducted sound walks in the area where they were invited to both listen and make sounds themselves. These activities were conceived not so much as a way to generate phenomenological, cochlear-centric experiences of auditory awareness, but rather as a speculative, playful pedagogies that—we hoped—would generate new encounters between children, technologies, objects, ourselves as researchers and the wider sensorial environment. Our focus on sound aimed to explore how speculative acts of listening, as an amodal event in which bodies sense and vibrate with one another, can generate all kinds of embodied, multi-sensory, more-than-sonic sensations and affects (Fig.  16.1). Part of this

Fig. 16.1  Children experimenting with sonic affects during a sound walk around Hulme Hulme. Author’s photograph

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exploration involved the use of wearable sensory technologies to augment the capacities of the ‘listening body’ in a variety of ways, including the use of wearable GoPro cameras, condenser microphones and biosensing wristbands that record electro-dermal skin activity, heart rate, temperature and acceleration rate. In the first phase of the project we introduced children to these technologies and explained that they would be used as creative media for making art over the course of the sound walks. Children chose to wear body cameras or biosensors depending on their own preferences. Sound artist and co-author Mark Peter Wright then led an initial series of experiments with the vibrational contours of the labyrinthine interior spaces of the community arts building: an art gallery, a studio, a stairway, a balcony, a theatre, a cafe, a corridor. Each experiment involved different techniques of listening and sounding the environment through the body as a vibrational medium, using everyday objects and materials. In one experiment, children were invited to place cotton string into their ears, hang a metal coat hanger on the string, and then experiment with the vibrations that resulted when the coat hanger was brought into contact with other objects and bodies in playful interaction. Hangers banged chaotically against walls, other bodies, other hangers and the body cameras and microphones that children were wearing at the time. The children described how this practice generated a strange vibratory sensation in the inner ear, which they variously characterised as “a vibration”, “like a drum”, “a clock”, “a bell”, “a body” and “a heartbeat”. The next series of walks began to explore the material and affective qualities of environments around Hulme, including the sonic atmospheres of children’s schools, parks and neighbourhoods. We began in the interior spaces of the arts building and then walked out onto the main road, into a local park, along various side streets, past schools and playgrounds, and then back into the building. As we walked, Mark introduced a variety of interventions into our collective process of environmental listening and sounding. Earplugs were used to disorientate and modulate the sensation of sound and locational awareness. Small bells were placed on the shoes of children, whose steps began to introduce a polyrhythmic syncopation into the sonic field. Yet the sensory atmospheres of these walks were not necessarily dominated by sound. The fluorescent yellow of

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the safety vests worn by children seemed to imbue the walks with its own chromatic imprint, as did the dampness of the Northern England climate, the flashing red lights of GoPros strapped to children’s bodies and the pungent smell of wet autumn leaves. Following these initial sound walks, we held another series of workshops in the building’s creative studio to collectively explore the photographs, GoPro videos and biosensory data that had been recorded during the walks. We experimented with mapping the sensory geography of Hulme through children’s annotations and drawings on printed maps of the local area. This work extended the initial practices of walking, listening and sounding the environment into a collective practice of speculative cartographic analysis and reimagining. Children used the maps to annotate their sonic sensations and imaginaries of Hulme, often developing their own particular modes of cartographic labelling and sonic notation. We also asked the children to highlight places on their maps that could become sites for the next series of walks. These maps then became the entry point for the children to design their own sound walks around Hulme using a variety of materials, media and performative interventions. In some cases, these materials were found in the studio where the maps were being created, such as the cardboard tubes left over from large rolls of drawing paper. In other cases, unusual materials were imagined as media for listening and sounding the environment atmospherically. One child suggested we listen to the sounds of Hulme through a bowl of ‘wobbly jelly’ (a gelatine-based dessert), which we eventually accomplished using a hydrophone and portable amplifier. Another child’s map located a range of sonic qualities and values at his local primary school, including the intimate, scratchy sounds of teachers marking the students’ homework after school. These ideas were eventually incorporated into the next series of afternoon and evening sound walks designed by the children themselves. One walk involved using the long cardboard tubes from the studio to rattle the steel fences surrounding the local school, with the intention of disrupting the private adjudications of the teachers inside. A second walk responded to the children’s desire to enter the MMU university campus at Birley fields and disrupt the educational environment with a series of sonic interventions (Fig. 16.2). One child placed long tubes in a series of holes

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Fig. 16.2  Child-led sonic disruptions at the local primary school (left) and university campus (right). Author’s photograph

in the landscaped park outside the university building, in an attempt to hear and amplify the cries of creatures living underground. Another suggested that we use red balloons to disrupt the sonic atmospheres of the university building itself, which we discuss in more detail below. Following the child-led sound walks we entered a final phase of the project, which focused on the co-production of multi-layered cartographies as a process of speculative analysis. We set up an upstairs space in the community arts centre by covering the walls and tables with drawing paper. Digital projectors were used to project data captured by wearable GoPro cameras and biosensors during the various walks onto satellite images of Hulme. High-fidelity audio recordings of the walks were played through speakers, and photographs from the walks were scattered across the table. This setup came to resemble an interactive installation in its own right and enabled us to create a series of multi-sensory cartographies with the children in a live space of atmospheric immersion. This final phase also involved discussions with children regarding their experiences of participating in and co-designing sound walks, and how their engagement with the project had affected their understandings of sound, art, technology, learning, movement, environment and place.

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 n Atmospheric Turn: When Play Becomes A (Micro)political When given the opportunity to design their own sound walks, we found that children were consistently drawn to the university building that had only recently appeared in the midst of their neighbourhood. Most of the children had never entered the grounds of the university since its construction, and their orientation to the building seemed to be infused with a mix of trepidation and wonder. And yet, their chosen manner of entry into the building was via an act of sonic disruption, employing balloons as atmospheric devices to temporarily rupture the hierarchical stratifications of the university as a place of work and study. It is precisely at this stage of the project that we noticed a palpable shift from playful experimentation towards politically charged interventions in sonic atmospheres. This turn was not something that we, as artists and researchers, were intentionally provoking or fomenting. It really seemed to arise from the affective tendencies and desires of the children themselves, while also carrying a sense of consistency with Hulme’s history of radical politics and community organising that we discussed earlier. We describe this turn as micropolitical not because it is small, but rather because it mobilises a politics that is affective, ecological and intricately connected to the vital forces of the surrounding environment (Rousell et al., 2020). As Rolnik (2017) notes, micropolitics affirms experience as dispersed, atmospheric, affective, and relational, resisting the cut of subjectivity from the environmental forces which are its conditions for life. It is of particular interest to us that the children’s turn to the micropolitical was also marked by the use of balloons, a prime example of an atmospheric object that is often used to calculate the sonic decay time and resonance of acoustic space. As McCormack (2018) writes, balloons hold a particular allure due to their capacity to paradoxically embody a sense of atmospheric envelopment, withdrawn suspension and sensorial dispersal. As a device for experimenting with the micropolitics of affective atmospheres, McCormack (2018: 13) describes how “the balloon moves with the conditions in which it is immersed, offering an image of

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thinking and moving sustained by the currents and trajectories of the atmosphere”. In the Listening Body, these atmospheric currents and trajectories became palpable in a series of film clips captured entirely by children wearing GoPros as they entered the university campus. In these recordings, we follow the adventures of a balloon hovering in front of a child’s GoPro camera, enveloping the field of vision within a tensile red membrane (Fig. 16.3). We hear the screeching sounds of balloons in the voluminous space of the university’s entry foyer, provoking annoyance from students and academics. We follow a young child chasing a balloon that gets out of hand on the staircase, and then again, on the terrace outside the university building. Each time the child nearly falls over as the balloon bounces away, just barely out of grasp. On returning to the community arts centre, we hear children popping the balloons with great

Fig. 16.3  Montage of still frames from GoPro videos created by children during sonic disruptions in the local university building. Author’s photograph

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enthusiasm. One child breaks into tears and hides under a table. She tells us she is terrified because the popping balloons sound like “bodies being blown up”. We suddenly realise this was only three months after the trauma of the Manchester Arena bombing, but we never learn why the exploding balloons terrified this child so much. The children’s GoPro footage reveals a confluence of micropolitical forces and intensities that gather around the balloons as atmospheric objects. This includes a strange and yet resonant confluence (orchestrated by the children themselves) between the balloons and the GoPro cameras as mutually affecting atmospheric media. As sensed through the perspective of the chest-mounted camera as ‘technical witness’ (de Freitas et al., 2020), it is the balloon which increasingly appears to be the protagonist and the affective driver of this event. The children’s bodies appear to follow the currents and trajectories of the balloons rather than direct them, as the balloons shift the event’s affective register from playful experimentation towards politically charged disruptions of social feeling, oscillating between joy, allure, ambiguity and terror from moment to moment. By viewing the event from the speculative, oblique perspective of the balloon as a nonhuman atmospheric thing, we begin to sense how an affective atmosphere can move, gather, rupture and extrude itself without losing its internal consistency and metastable capacity for mutual envelopment. We are fascinated by how children’s play contributed directly to the development of a speculative method in this case, and how their artful use of balloons as atmospheric devices might open new ways of considering nonhuman affects and pedagogies within complex urban ecologies.

 oncluding Thoughts: Towards C an Atmospheric Pedagogy By way of conclusion, we would like to suggest that the atmospheric and micropolitical approaches shared here carry particular resonance for rethinking the role of pedagogy in co-produced projects and artful community building with children. While pedagogy might traditionally be seen as directed or facilitated by the practices of the artist or teacher, our

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work in the Listening Body suggests that a more atmospheric and collectively improvised pedagogic relation is possible (Ellsworth, 2005). This also holds implications for our earlier distinction between systems and processes, to the extent that pedagogy is seen to occupy the “immanent outside” of any system through which it operates (Massumi, 2018: 9). Such speculative pedagogical operations necessarily rely on complex factors of collective improvisation, where the affective charge of atmospheric intensities amongst bodies generates a surplus pedagogical value in/of the event (de Freitas & Rousell, 2021). Through a processual confluence of sensations, concepts, affects and other atmospheric elements of the environment, something is always learned through (and even by) an event as it takes shape in just this way, and no other. Our project suggests that the pedagogical orchestration of atmospheres cannot be designed or controlled by individuals; instead, it shows how atmospheres might be more modestly shaped, played with and tuned through speculative experimentation as a collective ‘listening body’.

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17 Dust and Soil: Speculative Approaches to Microecological Sensing Rachael Wakefield-Rann and Thomas Lee

Soil  The upper layer of earth in which plants grow, a black or dark brown material typically consisting of a mixture of organic remains, clay and rock particles. Dust  Fine, dry powder consisting of tiny particles of earth or waste matter lying on the ground or on surfaces or carried in the air.

Introduction Soil and dust refer to categories of matter that are simultaneously vague, diverse, ubiquitous and essential to life. These largely ‘black-boxed’ substances play a vital, and often oppositional, role in tuning our bodies to R. Wakefield-Rann (*) Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] T. Lee Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_17

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be in the world. Ecologists are increasingly coming to understand that the spatio-material composition of soil is central to how the agricultural systems we depend upon function (Edmundo, 2007). Biodiverse soil also contains many, largely unknown, microbial communities that teach the human immune system to respond appropriately to potential pathogens. Conversely, the dust of modern homes is one of the key sources of irritation to modern human immune systems—containing allergens such as dust mites and cockroach droppings, in addition to countless chemical toxicants and dead cells (Dunn, 2018; Mitro et al., 2016). Early human dwellings, or more accurately, nests, were filled with soil and their attendant microbial ecologies. Our bodies co-evolved with these microbes, leading microbial ecologists to call them our ‘old friends’ (Rook & Brunet, 2005). Since moving indoors over the last two centuries, the microecologies of our dwellings have become predominantly occupied by dust. As our ‘old friends’ do not tend to live in dust, our bodies have been set adrift without their crucial immunological guidance, resulting in a dramatic rise in allergenic diseases (Dunn, 2018). The points at which dust and soil collide tell the story of human habitation and immunity. Despite the significance of these two substances to human and ecological health, they remain conceptually nebulous, obtuse forms of particulate matter, both of which remain vague in the practical deliberation of everyday life. So, what would it take to open the black boxes of soil and dust so that non-scientists can start to more attentively curate (or garden) these ecologies? In this chapter we speculatively explore dust and soil as ‘thinking things’ that may complement other scientific and participatory sensing practices (Connor, 2010). The aim of doing so is to engage with how bodies dynamically relate these forms of matter over time, how these related, albeit dissimilar, substances are sensed, conceived and interacted with differently.

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Ways of Knowing Dust and Soil Dust and soil have historically been considered according to the categories and concerns that dominated in different eras. Within the broadly Western tradition since the nineteenth century, the key abstractions used to think about dust and soil could be described as ‘containers’: static repositories within which things accumulate. This conceptualisation persisted even as the contents of both dust and soil came to be specified through twentieth-century molecular science. The ways of categorising what these substances are made of, and how they come to be, have both opened up new insights and foreclosed others. In this section we briefly consider the conceptual transformation of dust and soil, and the dominant abstractions used to think about them. Dust has been all things. Until the late nineteenth century, the term dust was used across the anglophone world to refer to all that is too small to specify (Amato, 2001). It has been a suffix to gold, space, radioactive, saw, holy and fairy. Like smog, fog, and dirt, dust was an amorphous category of thing, understood more by what it looked, felt and smelled like than what it was made up of. While remaining vague in character, dust within indoor environments became increasingly vilified as its links to disease came to be suspected in the nineteenth century: dust became a container in which germs reside. The English sanitarians consequently declared a war on dust and made it every good woman’s duty to remove it from their dwelling. Dust became a particular target of hygienists in the late nineteenth century when bacteriologists developed the tools to culture pathogens from house dust more easily than other substances. One 1887 household manual explained that “[t]he general acceptance of the germ theory of disease makes it imperative for every housekeeper to guard against all accumulations of dust, since such accumulations may harbor dangerous germs” (quoted in Tomes, 1997: 40). As the early twentieth century progressed, technology and design became increasingly oriented to the removal of spaces, materials and objects in which dust could accumulate. The plush ornamentation that characterised interiors across North America and Europe in the late

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nineteenth century were recategorised as unhygienic due to their dust gathering properties—upholstered furniture with deep crevices, thick carpets, wood and general bric-a-brac became enemies of public health (Tomes, 1997). This aversion to dust and the spaces that encourage it were key motivations for the development of modernist design in the early twentieth century, inspiring architects such as Adolf Loos to write polemics like Ornament and Crime (2019/1931). Over the twentieth century, the character of dust shifted from being an amorphous enemy of ‘hygienic civilisation’ to become a substance viewed in terms of its specific molecular composition. In the early 2000s, Nikolas Rose (2001) used the term ‘molecularisation of life’ to capture the rise of technoscientific practices that refocused scientific understandings of life at the molecular scale. The specification of atoms, germs and genes has redefined the world as specific, unassailable, interacting molecules. Rose emphasised that twentieth-century biotechnology, neurochemistry and genomics have populated the world with not only newly legible molecular entities, but a new style of thinking that “was not merely a matter of the framing of explanations at the molecular level … It was a reorganization of the gaze of the life sciences, their institutions, procedures, instruments, spaces of operation and forms of capitalization” (Rose, 2001: 13). Joseph Amato claims that in the process of greater scientific specification “dust lost its traditional associations with soil, dirt and muck and became a multifaceted object of contemporary science” (Amato, 2001: 12). We would slightly shift this proclamation to retain a category for dust as that which cannot be readily sensed and specified. More specifically, it persists as a general category for that which is hard to know or is unworthy of specification. It remains the stuff that accumulates in the corners of the room: undesirable and undeserving of classification. A parallel can perhaps be drawn between this definition of dust and early categorisations of microbes. When Carl Linnaeus was devising his taxonomy of life in the 1750s he did not see any value in specifying and differentiating seemingly unimportant living things at the microscopic scale. He consequently lumped them all into the phylum Vermes (‘worms’), genus Chaos (formless). Like formless worms, dust is as much a judgement about the perceived uninterestingness and unknowability of this matter as any natural category.

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Soil has undergone a similar conceptual trajectory to dust—from amorphous stuff to a thing that is simultaneously known to scientists by specific molecular characteristics and to the general populous as a vague brown substance. Without tracing the entire complex history of the ways soil has been imagined and conceptualised, we draw attention to one central conceptual transition that has had a profound influence over the way soil has been manipulated and transformed through agriculture, and led to many of the more pernicious and persistent soil health issues globally today. In the mid-nineteenth century the prevailing idea that informed how soil contributed to plant growth was the ‘humus theory’, which held that plants fed off decaying plant and animal material which then transmitted fertility. This theory was roundly dismissed in 1840 by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, who instead proposed the ‘minerality’ model of soil fertility in which agriculturalists were to focus on adding minerals according to the needs of particular plants (Marchesi, 2020). While many of the original details of Liebig’s model have since been superseded, it laid the foundation for the dominant chemical theory of soil and plant growth that persists today. The key conceptual model that underpins Liebig’s understanding is that of a container: soil must contain minimum amounts of specific minerals (or nutrients) in order for healthy plants to grow within it. It follows from this input-output logic that once a certain mineral has been used up, the soil can simply be topped up again. Like other modernist projects of the nineteenth century, it was assumed that optimal mechanistic practices could be applied indiscriminately to different environments across the globe (Nash, 2006). It was thought that all the world could be improved through the application of this singular management strategy. The so-called NPK mentality, which holds that soil health can be effectively maintained through the targeted addition of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K), irrespective of other variables, is based on this model (Marchesi, 2020). Scientific developments over the last 50 years have increasingly suggested the limitations of ‘the container’ as an abstraction for comprehending dust and soil, as it suggests concrete boundaries between objects and systems that do not adequately represent the porous, co-constitutive and dynamic relations between these ‘things’ and their environments.

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These forms of matter are increasingly understood in terms of their dynamic ecologies by specific types of scientists—soil scientists, agroecologists, microbial ecologists. The analysis of dust and soil at the molecular scale made it newly legible to scientists as a substance composed of its surrounds. Outside of the laboratory, however, it remains difficult to know these substances and how they transform in response to practices and processes with which they are bound up. Information about the composition of dust and soil has translated to everyday understandings and interactions with it in a piecemeal and often confused way. For example, in sealed-off high-rise apartments and the international space station, dust is primarily composed of matter and microbes associated with decaying bodily matter, while in spaces that are open to the outside, its composition is more associated with the breakdown or emissions of matter in the broader ecology. This information has not, however, become common knowledge to the general public, despite its potential implications for their health. In the following section we examine some of the practices and technologies beginning to emerge to make these substances newly legible to everyday citizens.

 pening the Black Boxes: Sensing Dust O and Soil A number of community-led ‘citizen sensing’ practices have recently been developed with the purpose of opening up certain types of matter to new forms of enquiry. A key example is the Citizen Sense Dustbox developed as part of a practice-based and participatory research protocol led by Jennifer Gabrys (Pritchard et  al., 2018). The sensors were designed to monitor one of the most hazardous air pollutants, particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) that becomes indoor dust, from the urban pollution associated with traffic, construction and other urban activities. The Dustbox sensors were placed in  locations of concern identified by citizens in Southeast London and recorded data on both the spatial and temporal dimensions of dust flows. This data was brought into dialogue with the sensing

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practices and evidence of regulators, which captured limited flows of pollutants in set locations. Similarly, not-for-profit community organisation such as Public Lab (publiclab.org) offer a number of low-tech or DIY sensing devices that make particulate matter, microbes and other qualities of dust sensible in new ways. By exposing dust in homes to new forms sensing  certain dynamics have become newly legible, including particularmicrobial interactions, and the impacts of activities such as neighbourhood construction and peak traffic flows over time. . The properties and dynamics of soil have also been opened up through sensing instruments and practices that are accessible beyond laboratory settings. Public Lab also offers testing kits that enable people to determine whether there are specific toxicants and other contaminants in their soil. Likewise, Krzywoszynska et al. (2020) has shown in her work, that water, or more specifically homemade water infiltration tests, can attune farmers to the often-ignored qualities of deeper layers of the soil that have typically been neglected by agronomical science focused on the top layer of the seed bed. Innovative agtech projects like Soil Tech (soiltechproject. org) aim to combine soil science research, with digital technology and in-depth knowledge of farmer needs to develop user-friendly, freely accessible digital management tools designed to help farmers to engage with and learn more about their soils in an ongoing capacity. In such projects, the way in which soil attributes are visualised is crucial to how soil becomes implicated in farming practices and imaginaries. One of the key insights to emerge from citizen sensing practices is the understanding that dust and soil are ecologies in flux; they are open systems that respond to and influence their environments on multiple spatio-­temporal scales. While highly valuable, citizen sensing practices that rely on instrumentation are only able to sense materials in a molecular register that is known and able to be measured. This approach is particularly useful when communities want to use their data to convince regulators or contest their evidence in their own language. In the following section we explore some of the ways that these types of participatory technoscientific practices could be complimented by modes of sensing in alternative registers in order to intimate some of the less measurable or more imperceptible qualities of soil and dust. While far from offering a comprehensive illumination and explication, these approaches may help

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render this matter as dynamic, responsive and consequential for the bodies that engage with its processes. In particular, we explore the potential of a perhaps seemingly unusual hybrid of ‘exposome’ and ‘senstance’ as pertinent concepts for expressing dust and soil in new ways. These approaches are both grounded in a visceral register, and attend to how bodies come to know and are shaped by the ecologies with which they interact as an ongoing process.

Exposomic Thinking The first reorientation proposed involves attending to the way that bodies are constantly in a process of being trained by the ecological matter of dust and soil, while in turn shaping its composition. This way of conceptualising environmental exposures is broadly conceptualised as ‘exposomic thinking’. The term ‘exposome’, coined by Christopher Wild (2005), has come to be used to denote the culmination of every exposure of an individual over their lifetime. Exposures are grouped as internal exposures (internal bodily processes), specific external exposures (pollutants, diet and pathogens) and general external exposures (the broader causes of health, such as social and economic forces) (Prior et al., 2019). This mode of thinking marked a departure from other ways of assessing hazard and risk, as it does not focus on the source of the pollutant, but looks at the body or ecology affected by it. While generally applied to the study of how toxicants accumulate in human bodies as they move through different environment over their lifetime, the term has been more recently adopted within fields such as Visceral Geography, as a way of coming to terms with how bodies are trained to sense the world around them, including preferences, aversions and ways of differentiating between materials. Hayes-Conroy (2014: 188) states that visceral reactions “are not natural, pre-political bodily impulses”, nor are they completely socially constructed. Rather, they are more helpfully conceptualised as an emergent and evolving product of one’s genes, cumulative sensory exposures and associative memories. Sensory reactions and preferences are therefore individual, but also intimately tied to place, and its environmental and cultural dynamics.

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The exposome concept may be an equally insightful mode for exploring how different groups currently and might come to apprehend dust and soil. For example, one may have become sensitised to dust via an allergy to dust mites. This increased bodily awareness of dust via allergic responses—sneezes, watery eyes—is likely to be accompanied by a set of other sensory cues—a room smelling musty, a carpet looking discoloured—that others may be oblivious to. An increased sensitivity to dust mites also often results in the enactment of more frequent and vigorous cleaning practices, often using antimicrobial chemicals—a practice associated with increased levels of antimicrobial-resistant bacterial genes in indoor dust (Fahimipour et  al., 2018). This particular patterning of bodily tuning is becoming increasingly common due to the character of late-industrial indoor pathogen ecologies in wealthy urbanised parts of the world. Asthma and allergies have increased exponentially since the 1960s in wealthy urban areas, especially in countries where carpets, dust and dust mites were the most common allergens (Clarke & Aldons, 1979; Smith et al., 1969). Thinking with the exposome concept can encourage a sensibility that moves away from the tendency to theorise industrial landscapes, cultures and production systems “without a body” (Burges Watson & Cooper, 2019: 9) and bodies in the absence of the socio-ecologies within which they have developed. This perspective has important implications for how interventions are designed to encourage people to alter their practices for ends such as health or sustainability. For example, in relation to food systems, Carolan (2015: 318) argues that selecting healthy alternatives to industrially produced food is unlikely if one’s senses are ‘tuned’ to enjoy highly processed food. Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2010: 2963) concur that in “criticizing popular ‘tastes’ for fast or processed foods as uninformed or false, alternative food movements can end up denying the biosocial mechanisms through which fast food actually comes to taste good to some people”. This turn to the sensory and visceral can be understood as part of a broader movement within the social sciences that is beginning to take biology more seriously, rather than conceptualising experiences such as sensing in purely constructivist terms (Meloni et  al., 2016). Burges Watson and Cooper (2019: 4) propose that “in taking a biosocial

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approach… the biological is situated as a partly malleable template on which social, technological and environmental factors are transformative”. In the next section, we look at another concept that, like the biosocial, emphasises togetherness where common modern imaginings of bodies and worlds emphasised separation.

Senstances As West et al. (2020: 305) have noted, despite the widespread recognition in scholarly communities across many disciplines that “humans and nature are inextricably connected”, many researchers are nonetheless obliged to employ vocabulary and conceptual frameworks that continue to imply a primary division rather than connection between these two realms. At best, the culture-nature binary requires a series of nuanced specifications, often involving terms such as “inextricably” or “interaction” that highlight connectedness rather than division. At worst, the older vocabulary prevents new insights about the most pressing contemporary problems. Multiple theorists have attempted to challenge this divide between the cultural and the natural through the introduction of various alternative concepts. Bruno Latour, for instance, conceptualises ‘hybrids’ (1993) and ‘matters of concern’ (2004), Donna Haraway ‘cyborgs’ (2016), and Peter Sloterdijk ‘anthropotechnics’ (2013). Steven Connor’s notion of a ‘senstance’ (2013) belongs to this set of efforts to coin a nomenclature that begins from the connectedness of humans and nature and the various other related binaries of subject and object, and mind and matter. Connor describes senstances as “a sensation made substantial, a substance so closely twinned with a sensation as to have become cosubstantial with it” (2013). He describes senstances as a process in the following manner: A substance (glass, butter, talcum powder) gives us a sensation; as the sensation becomes more familiar, and so may become an object of reflection and reference (“I’ve got an itch”), that sensation seems to turn into a quasi-­ substance, the form, feel and sometimes name of which will typically be borrowed from the substance that gives rise to the sensation. So now the

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substance that originally causes a sensation has come to seem like the imaginary substance of what the sensation consists. (Connor, 2013)

This characterisation offers a certain harmony with the popular concept of a ‘mental model’  -- a concept which has its origins in psychology (Craik, 1943) and has since become influential in the fields of human-­ computer interaction and product design . Mental models are internal representations of ‘in the world items’ that guide people in possibilities for action. In this sense, to use one of Connor’s examples, when humans interact with butter, the substance exists as a mental representation that entails an open set of interactive possibilities (and impossibilities), among which greasing is key. Talk of mental models tends to have a stripped back, mechanical quality—as though the mind were algorithmic—even though the concept allows for incompleteness and ambiguity in the way people imagine things. Connor’s characterisation of senstances, by contrast, frames objects as emergent phenomena that are actively and dynamically shaped by the senses and the imagination. Senstances emphasise the exploratory and the possible in interactions between subjects and objects, rather than parsimonious, functionalist models that seek to explain human behaviour and design for ease of use (see Kieras & Bovair, 1984). Unlike approaches which focus on the elements of primary substances, as we find in pre-Socratic philosophy as well as the more recent adherence to atoms as the base-matter of all things, senstances are not characterised by permanence and immutability but rather by contingency and change (Connor, 2013). There is no ordinary or fundamental substance, but a confectionary of continually evolving senstances that speak of the dynamic relationships between humans and their environments. Concerning the examples of soil and dust, the notion of senstance can help direct people towards the similarly contingent and dynamic ways these apparently small-scale substances become significant as part of extended regimes for sensing and knowing. As noted by O’Brien (2020) with regard to the sensing of soil: Learning to perceive soil integrity and becoming ethically responsive to its condition involves paying attention when soil manifests in surprising ways as well as paying closer attention to soil’s characteristic patterns; its habits

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and forms when freely expressed, while developing empirically adequate and aesthetically rich descriptions of these. (p. 279)

O’Brien lists examples where soil is compared to chocolate cake and is described as fragrant (2020 279), highlighting its perhaps overlooked sensory properties. The concept of senstances can help this process of perceptual learning, particularly through the way it starts out from the premise that substances are always already implicated in our ideas and feelings. In this sense, following from the example of soil as chocolate cake, those who have either a vulgar or an academic concern for soil might benefit from wondering how the senstance of ‘the cakey’ might be used as part of a perceptual learning regime that makes the intricacies of soil more explicit and relatable. While sharing some similarities with the phenomenological approaches advocated by O’Brien (2020: 278), the concept of senstances is designed to be resistant to the separating out of subjective and objective aspects of experience, and in this sense might perhaps be described as a way of doing phenomenology with objects. One conspicuous senstance relevant to both soil and dust is ‘granularity’ or ‘the granular’ (and likewise, while we don’t get the chance to go into it here, the related though interestingly different notion of ‘the gritty’). More exactly, it is through particular manifestations of the granular, whether of the grippy, sticky, moist or smooth variety that an extended appreciation of this senstance might be obtained. Considered as a senstance, the granular does not name a focus that can be identified as belonging properly to the realm of the feeling subject or the object, but to sticky mixture of the two. Soil scientists and farmers practised in the ancient art of soil tasting already possess significant expertise in the granular and, in the absence of a laboratory, have the capacity to extract useful judgements about soil type, using saliva and fingertips to test textures (Latour, 1999). Using the concept of senstance in this instance, we have already moved well beyond the comparatively crude, though often charismatic, semiotic renderings of dirt such as Mary Douglas’ eminently quotable line that “dirt is matter out of place” (2003), and started to involve regimes for sensing that at

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once draw on and reframe the established and advanced nuancing activities in the sciences and related vernacular practices. Senstances gain in purchase when they are used comparatively. In this sense, dust and soil can be played off each other to obtain deeper, more refined understandings of both material ecologies as well as the human perceptual regimes within which they are implicated. Perhaps the most immediately recognisable differences between dust and soil (both verb and noun) relate to weight and mobility, while dust belongs to the imaginary of transience and levity, soil is enduring and heavy. This perhaps offers some insight into why the idea of top soil moving around the globe is such an alarming idea (Salazar et al. 2020). It is fine for the comparatively deathly, inorganic dust to blow where the winds doth take it, soil, however, must stay in place. Indeed, as exemplified by the well-known National Socialist fetishisation of soil, soil makes place and a people. By way of brief conclusion, we argue that speculating with dust and soil through the exposome concept and senstances can offer ways of understanding these kinds of matter as emergent hybrids of sensing bodies and technologies and matter. Like all tools and models, both are used as part of orchestrations of doing and finding out, and in this sense what role they play in how things are made to mean is, in significant part, contingent upon the purposes towards which they are directed or the problems to which they are applied.

References Amato, J. A. (2001). Dust: A history of the small and the invisible. University of California Press. Burges Watson, D.  L., & Cooper, C.  M. (2019). Visceral geographic insight through a ‘source to senses’ approach to food flavour. Progress in Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519890913 Carolan, M. (2015). Affective sustainable landscapes and care ecologies: Getting a real feel for alternative food communities. Sustainability Science, 10(2), 317–329. Clarke, C., & Aldons, P. (1979). The nature of asthma in Brisbane. Clinical & Experimental Allergy, 9(2), 147–152.

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Connor, S. (2013, May 1). ‘Soap, senstance and semblance’, talk at the Blake Society. Downing College Cambridge. Retrieved February 14, 2021, from http://stevenconnor.com/senstance.html Connor, S. (2010). Thinking things. Textual Practice, 24(1), 1–20. Craik, K. (1943). The nature of explanation. Cambridge University Press. Douglas, M. (2003). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Routledge. Dunn, R. (2018). Never home alone: From microbes to millipedes, camel crickets, and honeybees, the natural history of where we live. Basic Books. Edmundo, B. (2007). Soil biota, ecosystem services and land productivity. Ecological Economics, 64(2), 269–285. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. ecolecon.2007.03.004 Fahimipour, A. K., Maamar, S. B., McFarland, A. G., Blaustein, R. A., Chen, J., Glawe, A. J., Van Den Wymelenberg, K., et al. (2018). Antimicrobial chemicals associate with microbial function and antibiotic resistance indoors. mSystems, 3(6). Haraway, D. J. (2016). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-­ feminism in the late twentieth century. In D. J. Haraway (Ed.), Manifestly Haraway (pp. 3–90). University of Minnesota Press. Hayes-Conroy, A., & Hayes-Conroy, J. (2010). Visceral difference: Variations in feeling (slow) food. Environment & Planning A, 42(12), 2956–2971. Hayes-Conroy, J. (2014). Savoring alternative food: School gardens, healthy eating and visceral difference. Routledge. Kieras, D. E., & Bovair, S. (1984). The role of a mental model in learning to operate a device. Cognitive Science, 8(3), 255–273. Krzywoszynska, A., Banwart, S., Blacker, D., Juan, F. S., Céline, G., Matthew, K., & Manuel, T. (2020). To know, to dwell, to care: Towards an actionable, place-based knowledge of soils. In J.  F. Salazar, C.  Granjou, M.  Kearnes, A.  Krzywoszynska, & M.  Tironi (Eds.), Thinking with soils (pp.  89–106). Bloomsbury. Loos, A. (2019). Ornament and crime (original 1931). Penguin. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30, 225–248. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern (Catherine Porter, Trans.). Harvard University Press. Marchesi, G. (2020). Justus von Liebig makes the world: Soil properties and social change in the nineteenth century. Environmental Humanities, 12(1), 205–226.

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Meloni, M., Williams, S., & Martin, P. (2016). The biosocial: Sociological themes and issues. Sage. Mitro, S. D., Dodson, R. E., Singla, V., Adamkiewicz, G., Elmi, A. F., Tilly, M. K., & Zota, A. R. (2016). Consumer product chemicals in indoor dust: A quantitative meta-analysis of US studies. Environmental Science and Technology, 50(19), 10661–10672. Nash, L. (2006). Inescapable ecologies: A history of environment, disease, and knowledge. University of California Press. O’Brien, A. T. (2020). Ethical acknowledgment of soil ecosystem integrity amid agricultural production in Australia. Environmental Humanities, 12(1), 267–284. Prior, L., Manley, D., & Sabel, C. (2019). Biosocial health geography: New ‘exposomic’ geographies of health and place. Progress in Human Geography, 43(3), 531–552. Pritchard, H., Gabrys, J., & Houston, L. (2018). Re-calibrating DIY: Testing digital participation across dust sensors, fry pans and environmental pollution. New Media & Society, 20(12), 4533–4552. Rook, G. A., & Brunet, L. R. (2005). Old friends for breakfast. Clinical and Experimental Allergy, 35(7), 841–842. Rose, N. (2001). The politics of life itself. Theory, Culture & Society, 18(6), 1–30. Sloterdijk. (2013). You must change your life: On anthropotechnics (W. Hoban, Trans.). Polity Press. Smith, J. M., Disney, M., Williams, J., & Goels, Z. (1969). Clinical significance of skin reactions to mite extracts in children with asthma. British Medical Journal, 2(5659), 723–726. Tomes, N. (1997). Spreading the germ theory: Sanitary science and home economics, 1880-1930. In S. Stage & V. B. Vincenti (Eds.), Rethinking home economics: Women and the history of a profession (pp.  34–54). Cornell University Press. West, S., Haider, L. J., Stålhammar, S., & Woroniecki, S. (2020). A relational turn for sustainability science? Relational thinking, leverage points and transformations. Ecosystems and People, 16(1), 304–325. Wild, C. P. (2005). Complementing the genome with an “exposome”: The outstanding challenge of environmental exposure measurement in molecular epidemiology. Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention Biomarkers, 14(8), 1847–1850. Salazar, J. F., Granjou, C., Kearnes, M., Krzywoszynska, A., & Tironi, M. (Eds.). (2020). Thinking with soils: Material politics and social theory. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

18 Afterword: Speculative Earth Martin Savransky

The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. William James, Pragmatism (1975: 62)

Strangers in Flight A flight after the unattainable. This is how Alfred North Whitehead (1929: 65) chose to characterise the “disturbing element,” the generative impulse which gives rise to the singular experience and practice of speculation. Not the conquest of the unknown, not the prophetic mastery over the future, not the progressive composition of a good common world, not

M. Savransky (*) Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_18

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the transcendental access to some great beyond—flight. The world suspended mid-air. Life in the imperfective. An immanent experience of fugitivity and divergence that is engendered in giving oneself over to an imaginative improvisation, to an unsettled dance, to the ongoing and unfinished experimentation with that which escapes even the most capacious of systems and shrugs at the most settled of foundations. Hence Whitehead’s proposition, despite his insistence on the immanent requirements of coherence and logic, that speculation is “in its essence untrammelled by method” (1929: 65). For its function is none other than that of inventing the very methods that here and there push thought and life out of bounds, over the guardrails, to the outlaw edges of the territory governed by the rational, the probable, and the plausible (Savransky, 2022). Its function is to pierce beyond habitual methodologies of life so as to give way to a homeless space that makes of flight itself its groundless ground and makes of the disturbance of the present its precarious chance to attend to that which insists and persists “below the rim of the world” (Whitehead, 1929: 65), in its interstices and crevices, fabricating possibles out of the impossible, inventing forms out of the unformed. To characterise the experience and practice of speculation as a “flight after the unattainable” is therefore to associate it with an attempt to step out of the settled and the bounded, to flee the homeland of the actual and its attendant image of thought in a fugitive act of refusal which enjoins us, to borrow Maurice Blanchot’s (1993: 127) haunting words, “not to be content with what is proper to us (that is, with our power to assimilate everything, to identify everything, to bring everything back to our I).” Refusing to give to our reasons and principles a power they do not have, speculation—“which made systems and then transcended them,” “which ventured into the furthest limits of abstraction” (Whitehead, 1929: 76), which gropes in the dark for insistent possibilities that remain impossible for us to envisage but disturb the terms of order and demand an imaginative response (Savransky, 2021a)—is nothing if not the very name for the event of a becoming alive and present to the forces of an immanent and inappropriable outside: to a kind of exteriority that is infinitely further and infinitely closer than any external world, to a zone of generativity, alterity, and multiplicity which remains unattainable not because it lies beyond, within the confines of some Great Outdoors, but because it is

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radically fragmentary and multifarious, permanently in the making, a groundlessness that rumbles under any precarious ground, a runaway metamorphosis which evades every operation of capture and precedes every taking of form, which resists finality and escapes totality. Isn’t it precisely the attempt to step out from the settled and the ready-­ made, to think from the irrepressible plurality of the present, that Speculative Geographies collectively dramatises? In the wake of its Black and Indigenous SF stories of human habitation in post-apocalyptic presents, of its experiments in heterotopic urban planning and speculative taxidermy and the complex possible historicities of nuclear remains, of its imaginative pedagogies for NeoRural futures and plastic childhoods, of its affirmative excursions into speculative reproduction and philosophies of soils and dust, of its passionate cries against cynicism and calculation and its provocative ventures into sonic atmospheres and the aesthetics of intensification, of its calls for experimentation, for careful abstraction, for passionate thought, for a pragmatics of faith– in the wake of the many declarations and propositions that each of the chapters that compose this book proffer to the world, is it not by way of this free and wild creation of divergent practices, concepts, methodologies and sensibilities that they collaborate in nourishing the growth of a reality of a quite different kind? After all, at stake is nothing less than the permanent pluralisation, intensification, and amplification of what Nina Williams and Thomas Keating (this volume) call “the apprehension of experience.” Nothing short, that is, of the effort to push settled modes of reason and judgement out of their depth so as to give oneself over to an ongoing and unfinished experimentation with other modes of sensation, perception and imagination, with ways of opening the present up to alternative trajectories of becoming, to an immanent outside whose faint murmurs call for the invention of other forms of sociality, of other times to come, of an Earth to be inhabited otherwise. Then again, nothing can protect us from the risks we run in partaking in such a lawless and unsanctioned endeavour. Whitehead (1929: 66–67) may have found some solace in the hope that, thanks to the Greeks’ discovery of an “almost incredible secret,” it was not only possible but entirely reasonable to affirm the possibility of being “bounded by method even in its transcendence,” thereby stripping speculation “of its anarchic

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character without destroying its function of reaching beyond set bounds.” If there’s any evidence for the existence of any such speculative reason, which “appeals to the orderliness of what is reasonable” while expressing “the transcendence of any particular method,” it is surely Whitehead’s own work. And yet his own lukewarm reception in the annals of respectable thought is among the many testaments to the fact that no amount of reasons, of caveats, of methodological or ethical prescriptions, will allay the thundering down of judgements, aggressions, and disqualifications issued by the settler and by the very modes of settlement which speculation disturbs and from which it takes flight. “However modest the demand, it always constitutes a point that the axiomatic cannot tolerate: when people demand to formulate their problems themselves, and to determine at least the particular conditions under which they can receive a more general solution” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 471). Alas, no amount of clarifications and fine-grained distinctions will erase speculation’s enduring association with “the presumptuous, ignorant, incompetent, unbalanced band of false prophets who deceive people,” that “shady lot with a bad reputation” (Whitehead, 1929: 67). So be it. I reckon there is more to be discovered and collectively fabricated amongst a motley crew of wayward seers and failed prophets than amongst those whom Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994: 51) called “functionaries,” those who never venture outside and who, “enjoying a ready-made thought, are not even conscious of the problem and are unaware even of the efforts of those they claim to take as their models.” After all, before the Greeks turned their almost incredible secret into the power of taming the anarchic character of speculation and of regulating the borders of Reason, speculation appeared “in the guise of sporadic inspirations,” through the practices of outsiders, of migrants, of travellers, artisans and merchants, seers, prophets, and madmen– in a word, philosophical labourers who “brought to the world fire, or salvation, or release, or moral insight” but whose common character “was to be the bearers of some imaginative novelty, relevant and yet transcending traditional ways” (Whitehead, 1929: 66). And if speculative thought is a form of flight it is not least because, while philosophy may be Greek, “philosophers are strangers” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 87). They are the “strangers in flight” who broke “from empire and the colonized peoples of

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Apollo” and ventured outside to find in Greece the chance to give oneself over to an archipelagic and plural mode of co-existence, to “a pure sociability as milieu of immanence.” A milieu that, “opposed to imperial sovereignty,” implied no prior interest—“because, on the contrary, competing interests presuppose it.” As such, they found pleasure in forming and breaking up associations, in infinite conversation, in the irreducible sociality of a life and thought lived collectively in the flight after the unattainable, in the ongoing elaboration of sporadic inspirations and imaginative novelties that upend the imperial spatium of the reasonable and the rational by bringing experience and thought, through a speculative mode of apprehension, into an immediate and generative relationship with the rustling murmurs of the outside. All this is to say that speculation is never a matter of right. It is never reducible to a licence or prerogative to indulge in the abstract glories of the upper ether for the sake of theoretical renewal and conceptual rejuvenation. Flight is not tourism. And if speculation is above all an experience and practice of flight after an immanent but unattainable outside, such escape is always a matter of necessity. It is a matter, in other words, of the need to respond to the insistence of a problem which demands to be thought and posed anew yet whose primary power is to precipitate a metamorphosis that dissolves the ground for stable representations and upends the order that would sustain the reproduction of consensual references and invulnerable rationalisations (Savransky, 2021b). Hence Isabelle Stengers’s (2015: 189) proposition, that the act of speculation, as an immanent art of creation, “would be the act of giving to an imperative question the power to claim the concepts it needs in order to obtain its most dramatic, forceful necessity, in order to force thinking in such a way that the philosopher can no longer say “I think,” can no longer be a thinking subject.” Refusing to be content with what is proper to us, with the manner in which the problems that gnaw at the edge of the present are posed, the flight after the unattainable is therefore precipitated not by an “I think” but by the impersonal and singular forces of what William James (1890: 225) called an “‘it thinks,’ as we say ‘it rains’ or ‘it blows.’” And in the wake of the earth-wide homogenisation and ecological devastation that the 500-year history of colonialism, capitalism and extractivism has wrought, what are such forces today if not those runaway

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terrestrial forces that, with the most dramatic necessity, connect manifold “it rains” and “it blows” with the imperative of a speculative “it thinks”? To what would the possibility of a speculative geography respond if not precisely to the very metamorphoses that have made of the Earth itself the unsettled milieu of immanence that dissolves the ground of stable representations and upends the territories of modern forms of habitation?

It Rains, It Blows, It Thinks It cannot be denied that the ongoing dynamics of geological and ecological turmoil and catastrophic change that form part of the current environmental conjuncture—and are coextensive with the history of modernity itself—testify to the geopowers of an imperial project I would call terraforming colonialism, a project which sought to shape vast swathes and strata of the Earth in Europe’s image, just as it became itself shaped by the environments it sought to conquer and subjugate. Terraforming colonialism, in other words, is the name for the world-making project of interiorisation, assimilation and regulation that since the 1440s saw the thorough deforestation of the Mediterranean forests in the making of slave and imperial ships; that harnessed the winds and ocean currents to turn the Earth into means of commerce and an object of government; that precipitated the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Black lives by the million in the extractive projects of geology and in the monoculture world of the plantation; that mobilised an army of European animals, weeds, seeds, and diseases to turn other soils into European soils, other lands into sugar and cotton, other fauna into European food, other mountains into silver, gold, coal; that reduced other forms of life to property and other lives bygone into fuel; that invented ‘Man’ through the inscribing of the geological colour line; that sought to stitch up the fragmented shards of Pangaea and ravaged multifarious places, natures and cultures in the construction of an undifferentiated operation space; that devastated other worlds in the making of the Globe (see Crosby, 1986; Davis, 2017; Ross, 2019; Yusoff, 2018; Wynter, 1994). And this is the project that, in the name of a global alliance against climate change, today gives rise to a geosocial formation that at once

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dreams of a geoengineered Earth and lives off the promise of all manner of practices of planetary management and global government to patrol and regulate Humanity’s fate within the territory which the new earth-­ system sciences designate as “safe operating space” (Rockström et al., 2009). Because this world is the outcome of such a project, because it is in its shadow that the world reproduces itself even as it buckles under its weight, neither can the history of contemporary geological and ecological turmoil be reduced, in relay and return, to a one-way story of planetary humanisation, or of the unfortunate side-effects of a modern pursuit of “progress” on a global scale (Savransky, 2021c; Savransky & Lundy, 2022). For it is the very geosocial consequences of what Sylvia Wynter (2003) calls “Man” as overrepresented geohistorical settler that simultaneously force us to open history and our understandings of it up to the speculative forces of Earth itself, to those metamorphic processes of geohistorical flight by which “planetary dynamics, geological disjunctures and earth-historical trajectories may themselves have left their mark on the social beings we have variously become” (Clark & Yusoff, 2017: 5). It goes without saying that these distinct geohistorical threads interlace in radically uneven and asymmetrical ways. But whatever the rather self-­ flattering evocations of many a narrative sustained under the sign of the “Anthropocene,” the ongoing dynamics of geological and ecological turmoil and catastrophic change that form part of the current environmental conjuncture also make present that we never know what the Earth itself may be capable of in its potential to suddenly shift states, to give itself over to its own forms of flight, to engender ongoing and unfinished experimentations with its own modes of biogeochemical organisation, through the multiple forms of (non-)life that give rise to it and to which it gives rise. In other words, these geohistorical shifts themselves make perceptible what, in Planetary Social Thought, Nigel Clark and Bron Szerszynski (2020: 172) call the Earth’s own “planetary multiplicity”: the immanent outside which renders the Earth restless and rumbling, plural and radically heterogeneous, “self-incompatible, always out of step” with itself, never a self-enclosed object or a homeostatic organism cut off from the outside, but a self-differentiating, multi-layering passage “held far from thermal and chemical equilibrium by constant dissipation, as energy

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from [its] hot interior and [its] parent star passes through the system, preventing any part of it from settling.” Williams and Keating (this volume) are therefore entirely right to suggest that Speculative Geographies is “not intended as a guide to living on in the Anthropocene.” And they are right not least because it is in and through the abstraction of the Anthropocene that the project of terraforming colonialism lives on, that the attempt to interiorise speculative forces—of thought and Earth—is now forged, that the technocratic effort to regulate social and political life within safe operating space is performed, that the imperial spatium of the modern territory holds on. Yet the imperfective runs all the way through. And if it is through such tempestuous shifts and ongoing mutations that it becomes indeed possible and vital to say “it thinks” just as we say “it rains” and “it blows,” it is because “thinking takes place in the relationship of the territory and the earth” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 85). Thought takes the Earth with it. (So too does the Earth.) And when the impersonal event of an “it thinks” is at stake, it is the immanent and impersonal forces of thought as much as the Earth which refuse to be content with what is proper to them, which refuse to partake in the territorial regulation of safe operating space so as to open and respond to an elsewhere, to an outside, so as to merge “with the movement of those who leave their territory en masse, with crayfish that set off walking in file at the bottom of the water, with pilgrims or knights who ride a celestial line of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 85). Not content with what is proper to us, what Speculative Geographies puts forth, what it makes resonate, is at once the possibility and the necessity of what, with Stephanie Wakefield (2020), we might call an ongoing “experimentation in unsafe operating space”: speculatively developing concepts, methodologies of thought and life, strategies, designs and propositions that are not defined by what they oppose, that respond to what is underway without allowing the response to stifle the forces that called for it in the first place, that give to the ongoing dynamics of geological and ecological turmoil the power to activate thought by connecting the “it rains” and “it blows” with an “it thinks.” Indeed, whether it is through a revaluation of the passions or a reclaiming of faith, whether it is through a micropolitics of expression or an ecopoetics of feeling, at stake is always the imperative to give to what

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implicates us the power to claim the concepts it may need, not in order to be finally able to claim “I think,” but to become lured by something else: by the very possibility of making of thought, of the flight after the unattainable, a space of passage and refuge for the invention of other forms of assembly, of other temporalities, of other modes of human and more-than-human sociality as and through the storm that has now become our precarious milieu of immanence. It thus becomes perceptible that the call for speculative geographies today is more than a justification for the alluring title that christens this book. And it is just as evident that the call resounds decidedly outside any attempt to subject speculative experimentation to the disciplining powers of thought and knowledge that the modern process of professionalisation and specialisation brought about and through which the territory of (Human) Geography—and every other discipline—has been drawn (Whitehead, 1967). If the manifold experiments that compose this volume manage to conjure the faint possibility of “speculative geographies” into existence, it is not least because they dramatise the fact that the flight after the unattainable must betray the territory of Geography itself. In other words, it is because they together make perceptible that to step outside is also to step out of the bounds that would bind the experience and practice of speculation to the settled disciplinary histories and the same modes of abstraction that have rendered us collectively unable to fabricate the imaginative novelties that this imperative question now demands. Indeed, if the ultimate aim of speculative thought corresponds to what Didier Debase (2017: 81) calls the intensification of experience, which is to say “to make experience matter, to make it important, to intensify it to its maximum,” it is Geography and its modes of abstraction that must rediscover their passion for the outside, which is also here a passion for those spaces that AbdouMaliq Simone (2019: 14) associates with a “concrete darkness” that makes life in the imperfective a matter of necessity and intensity, that lays waste to every guarantee but “provides a home for impossible socialities that nevertheless assume an inscription, materialize lines of flight, attack, and articulation ‘grooving’ the terrain.” If it is through an attention to planetary multiplicity that, amidst this shifting and multifarious Earth, the fragility of the geohistories that compose the present might become perceptible, it is through such ongoing

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improvisations in the dark that the possibilities that still fester in its interstices and outlaw edges and insist and persist therein might become a lure for feeling. It is by means of such speculative experimentations that we might become implicated in the collective desire and spirit of escape, in the common efforts to pluralise, amplify and intensify divergent experiences as they pass through “diverse ‘earthly’ processes and virtual potentialities” (Williams and Keating, this volume).

Writing Earth Which is why perhaps the single most important proposition of Speculative Geographies is to make of the possibility and the necessity of fabricating “speculative geographies” its very first speculative wager, its first fugitive gesture: one that would seek to give to the imperative questions of a multifarious and diverging Earth the power to claim the concepts they may need in order to obtain their most dramatic, forceful necessity, in order to force Earth-writing to become affected by the fugitive dynamics of Earth writing itself in the imperfective. “What becomes of the practice of earth writing,” ask Williams and Keating (this volume) in a way that lures the other contributors to proffer each their always singular and imaginative response, “when it is directed towards a reappraisal of the abstractions it uses to think the experiential?” Reprising a central theme of Whitehead’s thought, they rightly remind us that speculation is not a protest against abstraction as such, and neither is it an attempt to finally reach a felt, more concrete and experiential Earth. As their question suggests, the experiment instead consists in reappraising abstractions, in revaluating as much the power that is conferred upon them as the manner in which they are brought about. Whitehead (1967: 59) always insisted that, while a “civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress,” one “cannot think without abstractions.” Yet to affirm that one cannot think without abstractions is neither an indictment nor a transcendental limit. We’re not being asked to resign ourselves to the sad but inevitable fact that, as thinking beings, we’re forever trapped within a world of abstractions we can never hope to escape. If Whitehead (1967: 50) simultaneously claims

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that one cannot think without abstractions and that, as such, “it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction,” it is because to abstract is neither to represent or to generalise, nor is it an operation that (human) thought alone performs away from the earth of things and up in the glories of the upper ether. The imperative to revise our modes of abstraction, to burst through settled abstractions and abstract settlements, emanates from the fact that such bursting is already underway across the Earth, that abstraction “expresses nature’s mode of interaction and is not merely mental” (Whitehead, 1927: 26) but characterises entire choreographies of earthly habitation which––in the passage from potentiality to actuality each abstraction engenders––give shape as much to habits as to habitats, to their modes of attention and sustenance, attunement and sensation, to their purposes and improvisations, to their divergent configurations of the within and the without. As such, when it abstracts, “thought is merely conforming to nature– or rather, it is exhibiting itself as an element in nature” (Whitehead, 1927: 26). In performing its lettered abstractions, earth writing stands therefore in an immanent connection with the Earth; it expresses something of the Earth’s own writing of itself. “We rise upon the earth,” writes James (1996: 171), “as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of her soil as leaves grow from a tree.” Yet this is no call for earthly reverence, for a romantic immersion, a becoming-one with the common flesh of the Earth. For indeed, The wavelets catch the sunbeams separately, the leaves stir when the branches do not move. They realize their own events apart, just as in our own consciousness, when anything becomes emphatic, the background fades from observation. Yet the event works back upon the background, as the wavelet works upon the waves, or as the leaf's movements work upon the sap inside the branch. The whole sea and the whole tree are registers of what has happened, and are different for the wave's and the leaf's action having occurred. A grafted twig may modify its stock to the roots:—so our outlived private experiences, impressed on the whole earth-mind as memories, lead the immortal life of ideas there, and become parts of the great system, fully distinguished from one another, just as we ourselves when alive were distinct, realizing themselves no longer isolatedly, but along with

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one another as so many partial systems, entering thus into new combinations, being affected by the perceptive experiences of those living then, and affecting the living in their turn—altho they are so seldom recognized by living men to do so. (James, 1996: 171–172)

To burst through the territory of settled abstractions is therefore to give oneself over to a speculative pragmatics of earth writing: of the divergent practices, concepts, stories, and modalities by which sunbeams are caught or lost, by which waves are made and unmade, by which lives are improvised and concepts are forged, by which possibilities are brought forth and backgrounds are made to fade away; but this is simultaneously an art of consequences, of the manners in which each of these divergent modes of abstraction in turn work back upon the Earth, thereby engendering a transformation of so many partial systems brought into new combinations by the very speculative gestures of imaginative novelty that each form of life, each practice, each concept, each wavelet, add to the becoming of the world. As such, to seek to connect the practices of earth-writing to the fugitive dynamics of Earth, writing, is neither to call upon earth writers to “solve” climate change nor to submit to the settled technocratic abstractions by which terraforming colonialism might become resilient enough to drive catastrophic changes underway to its own ends. As so many experiences of divergence and fugitivity that make of the Earth’s own fugitivity their home and make of the disturbing dynamics of geological and ecological turmoil their chance to attend to that which insists and persists below the rim of the world, what speculative geographies provoke, in the end, in the beginning, is nothing other than the ongoing and unfinished task of daring to write with the Earth in the imperfective, of giving oneself over to an imaginative improvisation that, in joining one’s forces with its forces, seeks to respond to an immanent and riotous outside whose faint murmurs call for the invention of other forms of sociality, of other times to come, of manifold practices of a geosocial otherwise. It rains, it blows, it thinks, it writes. A flight after the unattainable indeed. And yet, Whitehead (1929: 76) put it best: “To set limits to speculation is treason to the future.”

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Stengers, I. (2015). Speculative philosophy and the art of dramatization. In R. Faber & A. Goffey (Eds.), The allure of things: Process and object in contemporary philosophy. Bloomsbury. Wakefield, S. (2020). Anthropocene back loop: Experimentation in unsafe operating space. Open Humanities Press. Whitehead, A.  N. (1927). Symbolism: Its meaning and effect. Fordham University Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The function of reason. Beacon Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1967). Science and the modern world. Free Press. Wynter, S. (1994). 1492: A new world view. In V. L. Hyatt & R. Nettleford (Eds.), Race, discourse, and the origin of the Americas: A new world view. Smithsonian Institution Press. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the Coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black Anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press.

Index1

A

Abstractions, 127, 163, 173, 174, 179–181, 184, 271, 273, 286, 287, 292–296 Aesthetics, 5, 12, 17, 23–26, 56, 58, 105–108, 113–114, 145, 146, 177, 182, 193, 215, 221–224, 228–232, 244, 245, 247, 251, 256, 287 Affect, 7, 15, 19, 22, 92n4, 95, 96, 98, 128, 136, 183, 184, 198, 199, 221, 223, 227–229, 252, 253, 257, 263, 264 Alternative, 2, 6, 9, 10, 12, 16–19, 22, 23, 40, 44, 46, 49, 51–54, 56, 58, 63, 80, 105, 109, 110,

112, 114, 120, 122, 123, 126–128, 140, 146, 150, 153, 154, 164, 173, 174, 181, 191, 241, 243–245, 251, 254, 275, 277, 278, 287 Anthropocene, 6, 162n3, 291, 292 Architecture, 5, 53–56, 61–63, 79, 111 Archives, 42, 175, 179, 242, 243 Art, 9, 24, 26, 36, 39, 40, 55, 97, 111, 145, 161, 164, 170, 189n1, 211, 212, 220, 227–231, 252–254, 257, 258, 260, 262, 280, 289, 296 Atmospheres, 19, 26, 45, 56, 222, 251–264, 287

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6

299

300 Index B

Becoming, 14, 16, 17, 53, 59, 76, 77, 90, 92, 96, 99, 133, 140, 162, 166, 168, 169, 188, 222, 223, 227–231, 251–264, 277, 279, 286, 287, 296 Bergson, Henri, 76–78, 106, 164 Bifurcation of nature, 15 Biodesign, 59 Biophilic design, 19, 59 Bird-of-paradise, 25, 239, 241, 244, 245, 247 Body, 7, 17, 19, 26, 35, 41–43, 46–48, 73, 74, 77, 88, 90, 93, 96, 97, 133, 135, 140, 141, 145, 148, 151, 161, 175–177, 182–184, 188–190, 196, 198, 199, 222, 224, 228, 251–264, 269, 270, 276–278, 281 Borges, Jorge Luis, 11, 20, 70, 73–75, 78, 79, 81 Brown, Jayna, 3, 7, 9, 10, 19 C

Capitalism, 37, 39, 47, 55, 104, 113, 120–123, 127, 128, 139, 209, 210, 230, 244, 289 Carbon, 60 Children, 26, 47n2, 126, 140–142, 187–192, 196, 198–200, 251–264 children’s geographies, 200, 251 Citizen sensing, 9, 26, 274, 275 Climate change, 37, 41, 53, 125, 141, 148, 290, 296 Colonialism, 35, 39, 39n1, 44, 46, 289, 290, 292, 296

Contingency, 7, 70, 125, 127, 180, 185, 279 Cosmology, 1, 43, 224 Cosmopolitics, 21 Creativity, 120, 220, 231 D

Debaise, Didier, 1, 3, 11–15, 24, 81, 90, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 104, 105, 119, 128, 163, 169, 174, 179, 185 Decolonisation, 7 Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 11, 23, 72, 76, 81, 82, 88, 91–93, 95, 96, 105–107, 109, 111, 112, 114, 119–128, 162–170, 165n4, 210, 213, 230, 288, 292 Derrida, Jacques, 11, 20, 70–72, 175, 177, 184 Dystopia, 51, 52, 191 E

Earth (earthly), 4, 10, 13, 35, 36, 43, 46, 49, 55, 56, 97, 162n3, 177, 181, 188, 269 Ecologies, 9, 12, 17, 19, 38, 44, 46, 48, 88, 91, 142, 149, 222, 231, 252, 254–256, 263, 270, 274–277, 281 Education, 22, 106, 137, 145–147 Epistemology, 16, 38–40, 46, 49, 223, 224 Ethics, 5, 17–20, 35–49, 88, 90, 91, 93, 93n5, 96, 99, 112, 195, 197

 Index  F

Feminism black feminist art, 36 feminist thought, 7, 36, 54, 141, 142, 227 Fiction, 9, 10, 36, 37, 40, 41, 44, 51–64, 120, 123, 142, 162, 165, 189, 191, 198, 199, 206, 224 Film, 23, 36, 37, 39–41, 43, 44, 46–48, 52, 78, 159–161, 164, 166–169, 194, 195, 262 Foucault, Michel, 19, 52, 54, 95n7, 123, 230 Future, 2–10, 22, 23, 25, 36, 41, 43, 52, 53, 57–59, 63, 64, 105, 107, 108, 112, 120, 121, 123–128, 131–135, 137–140, 142, 145–154, 164, 165, 173, 174, 176–179, 182–185, 191, 195, 198, 206, 230, 232, 244–247, 285, 287, 296

301

Heterotopia, 19, 51–64 History, 24–26, 39n1, 42, 46, 57, 69, 87, 109, 123, 152, 159, 168, 189n1, 211, 230, 235–239, 241, 243–247, 261, 273, 289–291, 293 Hope, 10, 37, 96, 123, 150, 247, 287, 294 I

Idealism, 78, 79, 81 British, 70, 79, 81 Imagination, 25, 55, 148, 153, 154, 190, 198, 279, 287 Indigenous thought, 223, 224 Intensity, 13, 25, 35, 89, 95, 97, 98, 113, 221, 224–228, 231, 232, 256, 263, 264, 293 Irigaray, Luce, 11, 132 J

G

Guattari, Félix, 3, 11, 25, 81, 95, 111, 112, 119–121, 127, 128, 164, 166, 169, 205–215, 220–224, 228–231, 288, 292 H

Haraway, Donna, 1, 4, 9, 11, 23, 142, 150, 162n3, 188, 191, 192, 195, 198, 199, 245, 246, 278 Herxheimer, Sophie, 25, 219–221, 223–225, 227–229, 231

James, William, 11, 20, 103–114, 179, 289, 295, 296 K

Kant, Immanuel, 11, 71, 79 L

Listening, 7–9, 26, 251–264 Literature, 9, 36, 40, 88n1, 149, 221 Lure, 24–26, 72, 88, 228–232, 293, 294

302 Index

Nanoscience, 23, 190 Natural histories, 25, 42, 159, 168, 236–239, 241, 244, 247 Nature, 15, 16, 52, 55, 59, 60, 62, 78, 79, 81, 89–91, 93, 96, 107, 111, 113, 120, 123, 128, 150, 166, 169, 180, 222, 224, 228, 237, 244, 255, 256, 278, 290, 295 Negativity, 98n8 Non-human, 9, 59, 60, 174, 177, 182, 183 Non-representational theories, 181 Nuclear waste, 23, 149, 173–179, 175n1, 182, 184

Perspectivism, 9 Phenomenology, 188, 195–197, 280 Plastics, 23, 47, 127, 151, 187–200, 212, 287 Pluriverse, 145–147, 181 Poetry, 96, 219–232 Politics, 2, 3, 5, 9, 10, 15, 19, 40, 44, 55, 95, 119–128, 177, 181, 195, 207, 242, 255, 261 Post-humanism, 9 Power, 6, 13, 37, 49, 54, 91–94, 96, 98, 99, 111–113, 141, 162, 164, 165, 165n4, 175, 213, 221, 222, 230, 238, 243, 244, 247, 286, 288, 289, 292–294 Practices, 2, 4, 7, 10, 12–25, 35, 36, 39, 41, 49, 53, 54, 59, 63, 64, 69–72, 75, 103, 119–121, 123, 124, 136, 145–148, 153, 165, 206, 207, 211, 215, 220–223, 227–231, 235–247, 252, 253, 256, 258, 259, 263, 270, 272–275, 277, 281, 285–289, 291, 293, 294, 296 Pragmatism, 179 Pumzi, 37, 40–44, 46, 48

O

R

M

Manchester, 26, 252, 253, 263 Materiality, 9, 19, 23, 58, 173, 188, 192, 220, 223, 227 Micropolitics, 96, 205–215, 261, 292 More-than-human geographies, 198 Music, 9, 36, 166, 207, 208, 212, 213, 254 N

Ontology, 12, 16, 46, 195, 227 P

Passions, 20, 87–99, 94n6, 106, 111, 206, 227, 228, 292, 293 Pedagogy, 247, 252, 257, 263–264, 287

Relations, 4, 6–8, 12, 13, 20, 37, 38, 46, 54, 55, 76, 80, 81, 89, 93, 93n5, 99, 104, 106–108, 110, 120, 124, 137, 138, 145, 180, 185, 192, 195, 207, 209, 212, 221, 223, 224, 227, 230, 231, 246, 253, 264, 273, 277 Rome, 22, 147

 Index  S

Savransky, Martin, 3, 4, 7, 13, 98, 104–106, 110, 119, 181, 206, 207, 286, 289, 291 Sense, 2, 3, 5, 6, 12, 14, 17, 21–23, 25, 39, 54, 58, 63, 70, 75, 81, 92, 111, 119, 120, 122, 125, 127, 131, 139, 141, 146, 149, 150, 166, 167, 175, 176, 178–182, 184, 190, 192, 195, 205–215, 220, 227–229, 231, 255–257, 261, 263, 275–277, 279–281 Soil, 26, 42, 190, 269–281, 287, 290, 295 Sonic, 9, 25, 26, 251–254, 257–262, 287 Space, 8, 14, 16, 19, 20, 26, 36, 44, 52, 54, 62, 64, 89, 91, 98, 120, 123, 126, 127, 140, 147–149, 151, 153, 154, 164, 166, 176, 179, 181–183, 189, 225, 228, 237, 252–255, 258, 260–262, 271, 272, 274, 286, 290–293 Species, 37, 43–46, 48, 59, 60, 92, 132, 133, 140, 142, 175, 195, 236–239, 245, 246 Speculation and embodiment, 148 and modes of thought, 2, 11, 22, 87, 89, 91, 92, 94, 174, 181 new materialism, 252 and politics, 10, 70, 119–128, 198 Speculative aesthetics, 24, 25 design, 10, 22, 119–121, 123, 128, 146, 147, 152

303

empiricism, 1, 12, 13, 174, 178–182, 184 fabulation, 1, 23, 162n3, 188, 191, 245–247 fictions, 9, 10, 36, 40, 191, 198, 199 geographies, 18, 20, 69, 70, 187, 196, 198–200, 287, 290, 292–294, 296 methods, 252, 253, 263 philosophy, 12, 89–91, 99, 119, 163 realism, 1, 237 research, 1 taxidermy, 25, 235–247, 287 thinking, 2, 3, 5–8, 11, 12, 21, 94, 97, 122, 131, 174, 180, 181, 184, 185, 237, 247 urbanism, 10 Spike Field, 23, 174, 182–185 Spinoza, Baruch, 11, 20, 87–96, 88n1, 92n4, 93n5, 98 Stengers, Isabelle, 1, 3, 4, 6, 11–13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 25, 81, 89, 93, 94, 97, 104, 105, 109, 112, 114, 119, 128, 150, 179, 207, 222, 289 Stories, 9, 23, 43, 44, 56, 149, 151, 153, 162, 164, 165, 188, 190, 191, 197–199, 220, 228, 241, 270, 287, 291, 296 Strickland, Peter, 23, 159–170 Subject, 8, 21, 24, 39, 41, 105–108, 125n2, 132, 137–139, 151, 163–166, 170, 174, 179–184, 198, 199, 215, 222, 223, 227, 229–232, 237, 256, 278–280, 289, 293 Subjectivation, 222, 224, 230

304 Index

Subjectivity, 9, 16, 24, 25, 159–170, 205, 207, 209–212, 215, 221–224, 227–231, 261

V

Virtual, 3, 4, 24, 108, 110, 160, 188, 212, 222, 223, 227, 230, 231, 294 von Liebig, Justus, 273

T

Techniques, 9, 20–22, 91, 99, 133, 134, 136, 161, 173, 179, 180, 188, 190, 212, 221, 223, 224, 227, 229, 231, 258 Technology, 5, 7, 9, 17, 20–23, 39, 40, 44, 48, 49, 56–59, 61, 131, 133, 138–140, 151, 190, 208, 212, 252, 257, 258, 260, 271, 274, 275, 281 Time deep time, 178 reproductive time, 131, 136, 140, 143 temporality, 127, 136, 138–140, 178, 182 U

Utopia, 9, 10, 52, 63, 164, 191

W

Walshe, Jennifer, 25, 207, 208 Waste, 23, 41, 42, 47, 53, 56, 60, 149, 173–179, 175n1, 182, 184, 188, 189, 191, 192, 199, 269, 293 Western, 7, 13, 38, 39, 58, 59, 73, 87, 109, 223, 224, 243–245, 247, 271 Whitehead, Alfred North, 2, 4, 11, 12, 14–20, 24, 72, 79, 90, 90n2, 91, 95, 96, 99, 119, 120, 128, 179–181, 285–288, 293–296 Z

Zeno’s paradox, 20, 73–75, 77, 79, 80