Abstract
Anticipation may be seen as structured by images and representations, an approach that has informed recent work in science and technology studies on the sociology of expectations. But anticipation, as a capacity or characteristic, is not solely manifested in the form of representations, even where such representations of the ‘not yet’ are performative in nature. It also comprises material capacities, technological, biophysical and affective in nature. The politics of anticipation is shaped by how these symbolic and material capacities, and the forms of agency they make possible, are distributed. As anticipation is an environmentally distributed capacity, it is suggested that the politics of anticipation is also an environmental politics. A conceptual framework for analysing anticipation as comprised of environmental capabilities is introduced, and fleshed out using a case study of energy infrastructure planning from the UK. Key elements of this framework include the concepts of anticipatory assemblages and future horizons or ‘styles’ of anticipation. Working through the case study as an empirical example of a conflict concerning the politics of anticipation and of ‘environments’, it is demonstrated how the relationships between styles of anticipation are materially constitutive of such conflicts.
Highlights
The central role of anticipating the future in social life is attested to by recent research in science and technology studies (STS) (e.g. Berkhout, 2006; Jasanoff & Kim, 2009; Ruivenkamp & Rip, 2011)
We have explored how the future is not anticipated through being represented and imagined, but is anticipated through the material organisation of capacities that help to constitute the environment for knowledge and action in the present
How the exercise of these capacities is organised, I have argued, can be understood as exhibiting particular patterns that, following Romanyshyn, Foucault and Deleuze, I have likened to diagrams (Deleuze’s ‘maps of destiny’), abstract orderings which are Please cite this article in press as: C
Summary
Article history: Received 2 March 2016 Accepted 15 June 2016 Available online xxx
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