Speculation

This paper maps the intersection of affect theory with literature and art through the revision of the question of representation. I argue that affect theory reinvigor-ates the problematic of representation by turning it into a debate about mediation, producing two main critical gestures when in contact with literary and artworks. On the one hand, scholarship has stayed "between representation" by taking affect as excessive of cognitive processes in order to analyze and expand how affect influences our representations of these processes, both when doing literary and art criticism, and when elaborating epistemological paradigms. On the other, theory has also stepped "beyond representation" by looking at affect as an autonomous entity in mediation whose capacities affect and surpass human cognition. In treating affect as a new capacious entity, critical concerns revolve around ontological questions, and they prioritize what affect is and does to bodies more than what it means.

The present catalogue text discerns between two kinds of eco-centric works the Austrian artist Herwig Scherabon presented in his latest solo exhibition “Against Nature“ (July 2021, Berlin Neukölln): landscapist and objectivist. Whereas Herwig's landscapist works are both nets-of and knots-in, and thus ontology-wise rather conventional; his objectivist works are ontologically most striking as they exclusively are nets, but no knots. For this reason, they are focused on here. The artist conjures these singular existences by means of black space that is isolating, yet not weakening, but rather empowering, even “monstrouizing“ them. In so existing, they emit an ontologically provocative statement: Distance is not debilitating, but rather an invitation to become.

Debates about Fundamentalist Christianity as anthropology’s “repugnant other” have provided a lively set of reflections since Susan Harding’s influential article was published in 1991.  Anthropologists wishing to study fundamentalist Christians have struggled to legitimise this interest to their peers. Similarly, liberal theologians regard the emergence of prosperity theology as a form of sanctified greed. For those concerned with the ecological crisis, as an endorsement of the very values of commodification that disturb the proper relations between God, people and planet.  Both anthropologists and theologians have placed the prosperity gospel on the margins of their projects of inquiry.
This paper seeks to explore the apparent gap between liberal intellectuals and populist Pentecostal practice by considering the dynamics of fast money schemes in Papua New Guinea (PNG). These Ponzi schemes spread through Christian churches both Pentecostal and mainline, using the language of prosperity theology. Their success indicates a broad reach of these ideas that includes some more liberal Papua New Guinean intellectuals and makes them a “mainstream” phenomenon within PNG. My anthropological analysis of middle class Christian investors in fast money schemes indicates deeper and more philanthropic moral engagements than is commonly thought possible by critics of the prosperity gospel who see it as motivated by individualistic greed.

It's 2021 and we're amid multiple pandemics that are revealing the structural failures, challenges, and opportunities facing the nonprofit theatre. Where do we go from here? What are we bringing with us through the portal, and what are we making anew? The Devising Our Future series asks theatremakers to consider a future theatre field where resources and power are shared equitably in all directions, contributing to a more just and sustainable world. This series is curated by HowlRound Theatre Commons as part of our tenth anniversary celebration.

Catalogue essay for Limitaction, Charlotte Warne Thomas, Window Space Gallery, London Metropolitan University (2015)

Charlotte Warne Thomas often uses gold in her work as a means through which to complicate concepts and measures of value. What happens to gold - as concept, sign and measure of value - within a speculative financial context, when markets pin value more to prospective future profits than to bullion in reserves? What happens to city spaces, and labour conditions, within such speculative contexts? Warne Thomas’ work, I argue, suggests the need for a theory of speculative labour to account for all of the work required, in our neoliberal moment, in order for people - and properties - to appear valuable as future assets.

Science-fiction comics and graphic novels portray realistic scenarios of how our cities may evolve. These are based on the extrapolation of present trends as well as speculation, “what if” scenarios that can inform us about past, present and future. The objective of this paper is to study these and assess how they can change the way we think about future cities in design. This will be achieved by studying 15 comics and applying a four matrices onto them. A spatiotemporality matrix will be applied as well as a thematic matrix which will be a first comparative analysis to understand how these worlds are constructed. A city type matrix and a matrix of extrapolation and speculation will form a second comparative analysis which will determine what we can learn from the types of cities depicted as well as the methods to reach them.

Based on historical and theoretical reflections it is argued that speculation cannot be eradicated from psychology and that it is a necessary part of empirical research, specifically when it concerns the interpretation of data. The quality of those interpretative speculations of data is particularly relevant when they concern human groups and differences between them. The term epistemological violence (EV) is introduced in order to identify interpretations that construct the ‘Other’ as problematic or inferior, with implicit or explicit negative consequences for the ‘Other,’ even when empirical results allow for meaningful, equally compelling, alternative interpretations. These interpretations of data are presented as ‘knowledge’ when, in fact, harm is inflicted through them. Examples of EV in the context of ‘race’ are briefly discussed. The concept of EV also demonstrates that the traditional separation of ‘is’ and ‘ought’ is problematic. Reflections on epistemological-ethical issues are provided.

One of the challenges of contemporary music composition is to speculate upon "possible worlds" as a counterpoint to our contemporary understanding of place, where the lyrical impulse in music is sensitive to relations between human impact and presence in the more-than-human world. Such sensitivity arises from a compositional superfluity where subjectivity is " dislocated presence " for new modes of perception to appear that resist representation, conceptualisation, enframing, quantification and instrumentalisation. Music composition today should ask listeners to listen beyond anthropocentric terms, including the ways in which the resistance of the world—its conflicting and dynamic materiality—exceeds both conceptual thought and technological control. This " speculative turn " in music composition is indeed not to excise music's resemblance to language, and by extension music's capacity for expression, but to decentre music's humanised expression from its privileged position for the possibility of a music independent of from language, thought and intentions, where music's materiality can exceed human agency. Such music would suggest a critical materialist sound—a sound world outside of consciousness rather than a sound world fully endowed with consciousness, thus placing the listener in a space where they are required to rethink their personhood within a larger domain of life.

Contemporary art is brimming with images of a future shaped by environmental destruction, technological innovation, and new forms of sociality. This article looks beyond the content of such images in order to examine the infrastructures that underpin them. Paying attention to two key infrastructures in particular—the Cold War faith in prediction and the extraordinary explosion of scenario planning in the years that followed—the article explores the ways in which speculation was transformed into a tightly defined field of expertise straddling military, policy, and corporate worlds. No longer the preserve of prophets or mystics, the speculative infrastructures incubated within organizations such as the RAND corporation were underwritten by cybernetics, game theory, and systems analysis, all of which helped give prediction a veneer of scientific credibility. And yet, as the planning tools of the postwar era lost their predictive edge, new techniques came to exert influence in a world dominated by the uncertainties of looming environmental catastrophe. The future was no longer thought to emerge from the present in a linear fashion but unfold along a series of branch points that allowed decision makers to navigate through a landscape of uncertainty. Tracing the genealogy of forms of prediction and scenario planning from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, this article places futurological tools in the context of an expanded field of speculative practices that include works of art. Projects by the likes of Stephen Willats, Experiments in Art and Technology, the Harrisons, and others not only generate alternative images of the future but also rework the infrastructures by which such images are conceptualized and produced.

Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is a remarkably creative piece of writing that came down to us from the middle ages. It has been considered a classic of medieval Islamic philosophy, and a classic of Arabic novels that had a great influence on the medieval and renaissance west.
The theme of East and West is given prominence in this paper. The first part of my argument concerns the ideological and cultural coloring of the context in which this novel was written. The second part deals with the point of intersection of contesting ideologies in the novel. It also deals with the astonishing variety of conclusions the novel has yielded.
In estimating the novel as both philosophical literature and literary philosophy, which as I argue, cannot be studied in isolation from the famous translation movement (from Greek into Arabic in the middle ages), I would not exclude another possibility that Ibn Tufayl benefited from stoicism. This presupposes Ibn Tufayl's acquaintance with the stoics.
There are also similarities between Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and the cosmogony of the first book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, in relation to his account of the creation and early history of man, which was influenced by the Epicurean Roman poet Lucretius.
I would suggest that there might have been a common Greek source, read by Lucretius, Ovid and Ibn Tufayl (in translation in the last case).
Although, in a way, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan was a direct consequence of Greek thought translated into Arabic, Ibn Tufayl, however, pursued his own Islamic way of reconciling philosophy with religion.

Amid extensive urbanization and growing weather emergencies, this paper directs its attention to the changing politics of ecology in India’s urbanizing frontiers. I focus on the city of Gurgaon, where over a hundred water bodies have disappeared in two decades, and track the life and death of one lake, Ghata Jheel. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and engage first with the challenge of mapping a water body and argue that there is nothing natural about disappearing lakes or urban ecologies at large. I then describe the imbrications of land and water in an arid terrain and show how in this moment of urban transformation the overlapping processes of property making, urban planning, speculation, and ecological restoration erase, obscure, and remake local ecologies. Finally, I emphasize the urgent need to take local hydrologies and geologies as well as the uneven social-political terrain of caste and class into consideration to ensure cities of tomorrow are livable and equitable.

Bengaluru, the capital of Karnataka state in southern India, has undergone rapid transformation in recent decades, from ‘Pensioner’s paradise’ to ‘The city of the future’. At present, its kinetic landscape reflects the competing aspirations of an array of global investors, entrepreneurs, local politicians and would-be real estate moguls. But what of those who lay the foundations for this possibility? By focusing on the lives and labour of women and their families working in construction, this thesis sheds light on a frequently overlooked demographic of co-contributors to Bengaluru’s growth.

Attending to the precarity experienced by interlocutors, this thesis situates
women’s endeavours to establish familial forms of permanence through an ethic of pragmatism. Illustrating how such projects are strived towards, it examines the cultivation of pragmatism to navigate various aspects of the city, and beyond. By acknowledging the resources long-term resident communities may acquire in the city, this thesis also examines the contrasting liminality experienced by migrant workers, who have scant
access to these. In doing so, it attends to the ways in which urban precarity is shaped and harnessed by real estate developers seeking to maximise profit and devolve the financial risks of industry speculation. Illuminating how hegemonic masculinity informs these actions and subsequently, who is able to speculate, this thesis attends to the gendered relations that belie economies of extraction. Making visible employer strategies to maintain flexible labour, it also explores workers’ efforts to counter precarity via the state and their own forms of collective organisation.

Utilising ethnographic data collected during fieldwork between October 2014-May 2016 and August 2016-February 2017, this thesis provides a nuanced perspective of the gendered relations of production and social reproduction; and the political life that unfolds between them. Attending to the intersectionality of precarious labour conditions, it contributes to the overlapping fields of the anthropology of work, gender, and economics.

The paper explores the dynamics of speculative development and the emergent moral claims and collective aspirations associated with housing and homeownership in Spain in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Our focus is on El Quinon, a massive residential complex targeted at middle income working families aspiring towards a spacious and affordable home. The complex, which is located in the township of Sesena outside Madrid, was only one-third finished when the housing market collapsed, leaving basic infrastructure incomplete and half of the finished apartments unsold. The developer was later forced to hand over the project to the banks and, in the process, the apartments were transformed into "toxic assets" that were eventually sold by the banks at one third of the original price to new homeowners. While El Quinon came to represent the malaise of speculative practices along with other cases in Spain and elsewhere, it also attracted unprecedented public attention after its developer was accused of cutting numerous illegal deals with local authorities in order to secure construction licenses. These revelations incited condemnation of corrupt officials as well as of the anarchic nature of Spain's speculative boom predicating on the absence of proper planning and concern of real housing needs of citizens. Despite its negative image and ongoing legal challenges, El Quinon has become fully occupied in the last few years and its residents are apparently content with their new environment. By tracing the shifting perspectives and moral claims of different stakeholders associated with El Quinon, this paper elucidates the peculiarities of speculative development shaped as much by global flows of capital as by longstanding institutional and social practices specific to the Spanish context.

Contemporary social theorists usually conceive of risk negatively. Focusing on disasters and hazards, they see risk as an object of calculation and avoidance. But we gain a deeper understanding of risk in modern life if we observe it in another setting. Futures markets are exemplary sites of aggressive risk taking. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork on trading floors, this article shows how a high modern institution creates populations of risk-taking specialists, and explores the ways that engagements with risk actively organize contemporary markets and forge economic actors. Financial exchanges are crucibles of capitalist production. At the Chicago Board of Trade, financial speculators structure their conduct and shape themselves around risk; and games organized around risk influence the social and spatial dynamics of market life.

Introduction to "Stimmen der Kritik" #4, Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, November 2021.
https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/friedrichschlegel/assoziierte_projekte/Philologisches-Laboratorium/Veranstaltungsreihe-Stimmen-der-Kritik/index.html
https://lcb.de/programm/stimmen-der-kritik-4/

This article weaves together the ascendancy of financial markets and the field of critical criminology. It argues that critical perspectives such as crimes of the powerful and crimes of globalization may benefit from analyzing financialization as a key economic and cultural transformation in today's capitalism. The analysis of financialization is made through the literature that addresses the economic transformations of capitalist accumulation, thus framing finance capital in the post-Fordist regime of production. By using this perspective, this article develops the argument that the cyclical speculative waves of finance are not a congenital pathology of capitalism but its very mode of governmentality. Overall, this article claims the analytic potential of financialization studies to deepen our understanding of the social and environmental harms produced by powerful corporations and financial institutions.

Everyday aesthetics inter alia claims: Also outside of art, there is beauty. The existence of such extra-artistic beauty is taken as a given in this branch of aesthetic research; yet the issue it faces is of a methodological kind: How would it be possible to research ordinary beauties without turning them into extraordinary beauties and thus realigning them to art? The present paper proposes the method of speculation as a possible solution. Speculation is argued to be of aid for everyday aesthetics, because taking a speculative stance on reality means to not intervene in it, but to rather take a step back and respectfully narrate the withdrawing from our human perception that certain aspects of reality undertake. As such, speculation is a possibility to master the paradox faced by everyday aesthetics, which consists in engaging without intruding on beauties hiding within the everyday, and hence of preserving while and whilst researching them.

Abstract
Negli ultimi venti anni la finanza é balzata al centro delle cronache giuridiche, economiche e piú generalmente sociali. Si é assistito al tempo stesso, specialmente in seguito alla crisi globale del 2008, ad una rivisitazione delle strutture concettuali sulle quali si fonda l’apparato operativo della finanza globale. Ció nonostante, il suo modello operativo resta oggi incentrato sulla ricerca del profitto ad ogno costo, nel breve termine, spesso a scapito dell’economia reale, e di altre fasce sociali che con la finanza entrano in contatto. Questo articolo propone alcune considerazioni giuridico-regolamentari, attraverso un’analisi storica e filosofica di aspetti chiave dei rapporti creditizi. Si pone l’accento in particolare su come la finanza possa diventare strumento di sperequazione e prevaricazione, e su come risvolti storici di tali rapporti offrano lezioni importanti al riguardo, specialmente nella misura in cui la finanza ha rappresentato il veicolo attraverso il quale gli istinti umani piú aggressivi hanno trovato sfogo. 
Abstract
Over the past twenty years finance has taken the centre stage in legal, economic and social discourses. Notwithstanding reassessments of the financial system’s conceptual foundations following the global financial crisis of 2008, its operational model is largely unchanged. It remains rooted in the pursuit of short-term profits, ahead of real economy priorities and society’s welfare goals. This article tackles a number of legal and regulatory questions that are grounded on key historical and philosophical aspects of credit relationships. Emphasis is laid on the role of finance as an accelerator of social inequalities, particularly in light of its capacity to attract and channel the most perverse human instincts.