Speculative Mode Research Articles

African Literary Future/isms: Collective and Speculative Approaches

This article assesses how the ‘collective’ and the ‘speculative’ emerge as intertwined conceptual models for imagining and concretising notions of the ‘future’ in contemporary African literatures. We argue that contemporary literary production from the continent is engaged in acts of conceptual and linguistic-decentring, or what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has developed as a theory of ‘globalectics’ (2012). Beginning with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s channelling of a Pan-African collective consciousness in her keynote address to the European Conference on African Studies (2023), we move on to explore three aspects of African literary futures/isms: first, the idea of historical repair and the notion that the speculative mode often hinges on multidirectional community-making by reconfiguring the past; second, the way speculative ventures establish new material networks and readerships through South–South translation projects that themselves project speculative cartographies of connection and the revival of historical ties; third, how continental African speculative fiction disrupts the binaries between the local and the global by creating new spatial imaginaries invested in cosmological and philosophical materialities. We conclude that such a diverse focus allows us to open out the terms of our discussion to the wider implications of decolonial future-making from the perspective of a de-hierarchical, globalectically oriented view of contemporary African writing. As such, we imagine this article as an act of collaborative co-creation which is in conversation with two contemporary African writers – Novuyo Rosa Tshuma and Wole Talabi – whose works are among those discussed in the piece. Their interviews form the ‘Appendix’ to this article, and offer new directions for creative and critical re-negotiations of African literary futures.

Speculative Capture: Literacy after Platformization

ABSTRACTThis conceptual article examines the role of speculation in driving responses to generative AI platforms in literacy education and the implications for research, pedagogy, and practice. Our focus on “speculation” encompasses two meanings of the term – each of which has inspired lively lines of inquiry in literacy studies and transdisciplinary research on artificial intelligence, respectively. In the first sense, literacy scholars have recognized literacy education as a speculative project – one characterized by the cultivation of particular reading and writing practices in order to prefigure different imagined social futures. In the second sense, scholars of media and computational cultural studies have theorized a different kind of speculative logic that underwrites the design and functioning of AI platforms – one characterized by extrapolative prediction and algorithmic reasoning. Investigating the evolving relationship between these modes of speculation, we argue that the former has allowed literacy education to be uniquely susceptible to the influence of the latter; and likewise, that the latter exerts its influence in ways that remake the former in its image. We theorize this relation as a process of speculative capture, and we highlight its stakes for equitable literacy education. We then conclude by providing provocations for researchers and teachers that may be of use in preempting the collapse of these speculative formations into one another; and perhaps, in mobilizing a conception of the speculative that works productively toward alternative ethico‐political ends.

Public land, value capture, and the rise of speculative urban governance in post-crisis London

The capture of value from public land has emerged as a central concern in recent scholarship on urban financialization. Drawing on the case of local authority housing companies in London, this paper explores why and how the local state is engaging in an increasingly speculative mode of land development, and with what effects. By conceptualizing state-led value capture as a political technology of risk management that operates across scales, I develop two key arguments. First, I argue that struggles over the allocation of the risks and costs of public debt have shaped local authorities’ speculative engagement with land. Unlike the case of US municipalities that are structurally reliant on private bond markets, I show how local authorities’ growth politics have been underwritten by the central state and accelerated by budgetary austerity. Second, I argue that this translocation of risk at the scale of the local gives rise to a form of state power organized around the allocation, production, and constant monitoring of financial and political risks. The politics of risk that underpin municipal experiments in state-led value capture combine an embrace of uncertainty and value expansion, with the principles of austerity budgeting, downscaling, and retrenchment. Ultimately, the effects of this form of state intervention are a heightening of uneven development, an exacerbation of local fiscal crisis, and a weakening of democratic governance.

Futurity, the life course and aging in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Abstract Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) in this article, we bring the perspectives of aging and posthumanist studies together to explore how the novel helps us to rethink our being and relationality in time beyond the boundaries of the human. In particular, we are interested in the novel’s critique of the anthropocentric privileging of youth and progress in the ways in which we imagine the future. Central to this form of imagination are generational continuity and the symbolism of the child: a new generation as a promise of the future, or rather, a better human future. Nevertheless, this novel does not simply employ the trope of generational futurity; instead, it interrogates and draws attention to the exclusionary way this type of thinking functions. Through its blurring of human and AI “child”, ultimately, Klara and the Sun suggests the dangers and the limits of a generational imagination that seeks to reproduce the same, progressive narrative of the future through the image of the child not “growing up and growing old” (Woodward 2020: 55; italics in original). Our analysis then suggests how fictional speculative modes might both engage with and yet also force us to reflect critically upon that form of future-orientated thinking.

To Ireland in the end times: figuring the future in contemporary Irish fiction

ABSTRACT This article examines a new strand of speculative Irish fiction that has emerged in the post-Celtic Tiger era. Focusing on novels by Kevin Barry, Sarah Davis-Goff, Catherine Prasifka and Danny Denton, I analyse how the speculative mode, with its ontological obliquities and temporal distortions, is particularly commensurate to the environmental and socio-economic complexities and predicaments facing Ireland at present. Specifically, these novels centre on problems and crises that have national and regional manifestations, but are ultimately global in scale and extent: ecological degradation, sea-level rise, food scarcity, pandemics, and the social and psychic effects of neoliberalism and surveillance capitalism. In coming to terms with such issues, particularly the hyperobject of climate change, these novels are often at their most effective in moments that de-privilege anthropocentric perspectives by establishing existential intimacies and political affinities with the natural and non-human realms.

Wayward Fables, Poem-Life Experiments: Foucault and Hartman in the Archives

ABSTRACT This article explores Saidiya Hartman’s speculative mode of narration with respect to lives whose only record is their judgment by power. The author interprets her insights in productive tension with Michel Foucault’s concerns about the violent will-to-know and the possibility of conveying the poem-lives he finds in archives. Hartman’s method primarily diverges from Foucault by exploring the possibilities of literary close narration, that is, “critical fabulation.” While telling stories of “the nameless and forgotten” can neither change nor do justice to what happened, Hartman suggests that exploring these counterhistories contributes to what Foucault also called a “history of the present.”

Speculative Ephemera: Reimagining Racialized Embodiment in Korean American Family Photographs

Abstract This article uses personal family photographs to explore a framework of speculative looking. I begin by considering the category of Asian/American woman not as a knowable entity but as an analytic. I then consider family photographs and alternate modes of speculation to further consider Asian/American gendered subject formation. Using photography, I autoethnographically close read images while thinking about the many afterlives of the Korean War in relation to gendered migration, assimilation, and family formation. I argue for a speculative looking that creates new bonds and possibilities for care by insisting on alternate temporal knowledges across time, allowing visibility to become a site of contestation and possibility. Photography has historically functioned to discipline Asian bodies into racialized and gendered subjectivities to monitor citizenship. The ephemerality of family photographs offers a way to think about the nonlinearity of memory and the everyday presence of violence alongside enduring forms of care.

ECS-Ecrea Early Career Scholar Prize winner - An astrological genealogy of artificial intelligence: From ‘pseudo-sciences’ of divination to sciences of prediction

Algorithmic media have adopted and adapted divinatory practices and vernaculars of prediction, prophecy, probability, fortune-telling and forecasting – suggesting a possible link between artificial intelligence and pre-scientific modes of speculation. Statistical thinking and magical thinking, too, can be recognised as closely correlated epistemological systems for governing societies and ways of life. In fact, primitive astrological practices of looking up at the stars may represent one of the earliest statistical projects involving sophisticated calculations and data sets. Such pattern-making techniques could even be considered precursory to machine learning. As a point of departure for exploring these eclectic relationships between stars and data, magic and machines, I use a media archaeological methodology to question the historical roles of both astrological and computational divination in mediating methods of control, surveillance and knowledge production across transforming societal contexts. This methodology is especially relevant for examining historical narratives in the field of cultural studies as it makes apparent the hyper-connectedness between objects, cultural representation and sites of hegemonic contention. My findings reveal relationships between celestial pattern recognition and efforts to exert control over and manipulate the natural environment and its populations, the historical impact of meteorological and climatological practices for predicting and influencing future events with artificial intelligence, and links between statistics and algorithmic data biases. This article suggests a speculative genealogy of astrology and artificial intelligence, as well as a genealogy of the theological, scientific and machinic unconscious.

Empire, Infrastructural Violence, and the Speculative Turn

Abstract: This essay analyzes the function of speculative fiction in the ecosystem of literary attempts to understand the imbrication of infrastructure with racial and colonial violence. While the task of making infrastructural violence apprehensible may seem more suited to realism (the literary mode designed to make legible "what is"), I trace a largely unrecognized strand in Johan Galtung's original theorization of structural violence to argue for the importance of "what is not": the potential realizations of human flourishing that are foreclosed by empire's infrastructural violence—potential realizations that can only be grasped through an act of speculation. I make this argument through a reading of Toni Cade Bambara's 1980 novel The Salt Eaters , which begins in a mostly realist mode that captures empire's violent distortions of Black and Native lives through infrastructural violence before transitioning into a more overtly speculative mode towards the end of the novel. Bambara's formal enactment of the speculative turn, I argue, evokes the potential realizations of Black and Native life that have been foreclosed by empire's infrastructural violence and entrains readers to see the world not just as it is, or as it could be, but as it might have been and might yet be. I close the essay with a discussion of the broader speculative turn in anticolonial Black women's fiction, suggesting that both the rise of speculative elements in more realist novels and the efflorescence of Black speculative fiction can be seen as deploying the affordances of speculation to capture the realities of colonial infrastructural violence in the US.

“[A]n Imaginary Feast”: Hospitality and Health in Margaret Cavendish’s Alimentary Poetics

ABSTRACT As previous scholarship has observed, Margaret Cavendish’s ambitious intellectual project—spanning subjects as dissimilar as fairies and fevers—is driven by fancy, an inherently speculative mode of thought, and her correlation of fancy to women’s work is a stratagem that licenses her writing. Beginning with the evocative image of Cavendish as the host(ess) of “an Imaginary Feast,” however, this essay argues that the pervasive alimentary conceit is not merely functional but that it illuminates the essential materiality of fancy as an object that is produced, consumed, and incorporated via the matter and motions of the mind and body. Cavendish intimates a poetics that is shaped by Galenic dietetics and the holistic view of health that she expounds in her treatises on natural philosophy. Drawing on the symbolism and currency of recipe form and customs of hospitality, Cavendish demonstrates, especially in Poems and Fancies and with regards to poetry, that fancy’s effects are substantial and potentially salubrious.

A multisite focus group study of USadult women's beliefs and assumptions about bladder health and function.

This analysis explored and characterized the ideas adult women have about how the bladder works, the assumptions guiding their bladder-related behaviors, and the beliefs they hold about how their behaviors affect bladder health. This was a directed content analysis of qualitative data from the Study of Habits, Attitudes, Realities, and Experiences, a focus group study conducted at seven United States research centers (July 2017 to April 2018). Participants were 316 adult women organized by fourage categories (age range: 18-93 years). Analysis and interpretation focused on the "bladder assumptions and beliefs" code using a transdisciplinary lens and inductive approach. During their focus group discourse, participants exhibited a speculative mode of thinking about bladder health and function characterized by uncertainty about how the bladder works. They described the bladder as a mechanism for cleansing the body of impurities, viewing it as part of a larger interconnected bodily system to enable the body to stay healthy. They saw it as susceptible to anatomical changes, such as those related to pregnancy and aging. The women also postulated perceived relationships between bladder function and several health behaviors, including eating healthy foods, staying hydrated, engaging in physical activity and exercise, and adopting specific toileting and hygiene practices. The findings underscore the importance of guidance from healthcare professionals and systematic community based educational programs for promoting women's understanding about bladder health and empowering them to exert agency to engage in healthy bladder behaviors.

Blackness and Self-Imaging: Lorraine O’Grady’s Performance as Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire

The continued lack of visibility and representation of Black women in studies of historical and contemporary performance art not only forces their work to exist within the margins, but their exclusion also exposes broader questions around the terrain for decolonising performance histories. In order to begin to recover interventionist performances by Black women, this article focuses on the work of African American conceptual artist and theorist Lorraine O’Grady. It recuperates O’Grady’s performance work and expand Black feminist histography for performance art. In the 1980s, O’Grady created Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83), a series of performative invasions into mainstream art spaces in New York as the persona Mlle Bourgeoise Noire to enable her to become visible in exclusionary spaces. O’Grady’s performances sought to disturb the structures of race, gender and class that excluded her as a Black woman from the mainstream art world. In turn, I argue, her intrusion complicated the already existing and speculative modes of blackness.

Shifting ground: A case study in researching an artist's collection

Writers, artists and academics have long used primary source material to inspire creative projects or uncover new evidence. Over time, different approaches have been taken to investigate and interpret one particular artist's collection, the Daphne Mayo Papers (UQFL119) at the Fryer Library, University of Queensland.1 Mapping the shift in research approaches, using text and image as well as more speculative modes of working, this article provides a case study into the past, present and future adaptation of the Daphne Mayo Papers as physical modes converge with digital ones.

Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible

This essay explores how contemporary Palestinian cultural producers—across literature, art, and film—simultaneously expose and disrupt the chronopolitics of settler occupation. It pairs Adania Shibli's 2002 novella Masās (Touch) with the 2013 short film Condom Lead directed by Tarzan and Arab in order to theorize a poetics of the everyday. Their works generate an ontology of the present eschatologically bound to an emptied future time–space. The essay then turns to Khalil Rabah's conceptual multisite project the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (2003) and Larissa Sansour's science fiction trilogy: A Space Exodus (2009), Nation Estate (2012), and In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015). Their projects engage in speculative modes of world-building that bridge past and future temporalities in order to render legible the unviability of the present. I situate these works, on the one hand, in relation to scholarship on affect and ṣumūd (steadfastness) in post-Oslo popular Palestinian cultural production. On the other, I put them into conversation with theorizations of counter-futurism and Afrofuturism as historical recovery projects. Read paratactically, this body of Palestinian art illustrates the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination.

Multiplicative Speculations: What We Can Learn from The Rise and Fall of Hopepunk

Multiplicative Speculations:What We Can Learn from The Rise and Fall of Hopepunk Cecilia Mancuso (bio) I. INTRODUCTION "The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk / pass it on."1 In August 2017, this two-line Tumblr post by blogger and author alexandra rowland launched a viral campaign for the establishment of "hopepunk" as a new subgenre of speculative fiction. Although the original post was little more than a joke, a play on words, rowland found themselves bombarded with calls to seriously expand on the term and its definition, which they did in a 2019 online article, "One Atom of Justice, One Molecule of Mercy, and the Empire of Unsheathed Knives." Offering itself as a radical but happy medium between the paralyzing resignation and cynicism of nihilist "grimdark" fantasy and the passivity, false sense of security, and [End Page 459] "chosen one" underpinning of "noblebright" fantasy, hopepunk became a rallying cry for a wide range of speculative fiction judged to be weaponizing hope against an overwhelming wave of hopelessness in contemporary media and life.2 groundswell of support that only grew in the following year after journalistic explainers revived the term, earning praise for its self-organization around affects like hope and its proposed mechanisms for surviving and resisting the logics of capitalism. However, hopepunk also garnered several recurring critiques as it grew in popularity, including its incoherency as genre or movement in the traditional sense; the confusion of tones, moods, and affects it purported to encompass; and its failure to acknowledge the indebtedness of its survival mechanisms to the experiences and work of marginalized people thinking and living alternative futurisms. Hopepunk, while imperfectly executed as a phenomenon, nonetheless unearthed important truths about contemporary affect, genre, and the nature of speculation that deserve to outlive it. First, by defining itself in opposition to a current trend of hopeless speculative fiction, hopepunk uses the colloquial language of "hope"—no doubt drawing on the use of this term, at least in the American context—as a rallying point for progressivism, as in the optimistic call to action of Barack Obama's 2008 "Yes We Can" platform. "Hope" also describes/evokes the opposite or antidote to a complex network of hopeless and doomed affects following the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the systematic disassembly of human rights and rule of law that followed. Hopepunk astutely uses this colloquial formation to diagnose something warped in the fabric of contemporary dystopia—a trend only made legible in the scholarly sphere by triangulating the concerns of three scholarly discourses (utopian studies, affect theory, and alternative futurisms) but that nonetheless inspired widespread popular engagement because of hopepunk's accessible colloquial presentation. Second, by proposing itself as a relatively loose collection of texts united by a fluid set of affects and ideologies, hopepunk strives to model one possibility of what categorical intertextual relationships might look like in a postgenre world [End Page 460] that is moving away from traditional spatial and mutually exclusive models of genre and toward defining textual identity and relationships in terms of what texts do or enable for their readers. However, as previously stated, hopepunk's vital contributions are mired almost inextricably in its blind spots and weaknesses as a phenomenon. The rise and fall of hopepunk occludes a larger issue at stake within contemporary modes of speculation—namely, that there is a great schism in contemporary dystopia, with various factions vying to mandate the goals of dystopia as solely utopian, anti-utopian, or anti-anti-utopian under the guise of aesthetic judgment. First, through a synthesis of popular, journalistic, and scholarly engagements with hopepunk from its inauguration through its heyday, I identify the factors that made hopepunk virally resonant. Next, through an equal and opposite analysis, I identify the shortcomings that ultimately hamstrung the fledgling movement. In order to make clear hopepunk's position in and contribution to a larger sine wave phenomenon between dystopianism and utopianism, I reframe this longstanding back-and-forth as one between future-multiplying and future-limiting impulses within speculative media over time. I then turn to developing terminology to support this lens, defining "multiplicative speculation," speculation which expands one's future imaginaries, in opposition to "predictive speculation," which...

The Rio Grande as It Could Be: Beatriz Cortez's The Underworld

The Rio Grande as It Could Be:Beatriz Cortez's The Underworld Carolyn Fornoff (bio) On June 24, 2019, twenty-five-year-old óscar alberto martínez ramírez and his toddler valeria drowned while attempting to cross the Rio Grande to claim asylum in the United States. The martínez family—óscar, his wife tania vanessa Ávalos, and their daughter valeria—had arrived at the border city of Matamoros, Mexico, after a months-long trek from their hometown in San Martín, El Salvador. They planned to apply for asylum in Brownsville, Texas, but when they reached the border, the international bridge was closed for the weekend. Like other asylum-seekers faced with torturously long waits, they decided to risk forging the river instead.1 Unlike countless migrant deaths that pass unnoticed by the general public, Óscar and Valeria's drowning became highly visible because it was photographed. Julia Le Duc, a photojournalist for La Jornada in Matamoros, arrived on the scene after receiving an emergency call. Her perturbing photograph captures father and daughter floating face down in the Rio Grande, their bodies tightly pressed together. Their corpses diagonally occupy the shot, framed by a riverbank littered with cans of Bud Light. Valeria is tucked under her father's shirt, her arm embracing his [End Page 379] neck. It is a shocking image of the deadly toll of U.S. migration policy: a death sentence carried out by a weaponized river. The graphic image of Óscar and Valeria quickly became omnipresent, distributed by the Associated Press to countless news sources and shared by many on social media. While several newspapers acknowledged the discomfort of disseminating such an explicit photograph, it was justified as a way to bear witness to the ongoing statistical surge in migrant drownings.2 Members of Congress circulated it as proof of the human cost of inhumane migration policies and as impetus to pass a $4.5 billion emergency humanitarian aid bill. Many hoped that the brutal sight of Óscar and his young daughter's corpses would spur collective action and generate empathy for migrants. Just as swiftly as the photograph went viral, others rightly questioned the ethics of its transmission. Photography critic Teju Cole succinctly summarized their concerns: "do we need the spectacle of corpses to make the story real?"3 The representation of the dead is racialized, Cole furthered. The media most readily circulates images of injured Brown and Black bodies, inuring the public to their pain, and normalizing its consumption. Many outlets did not mention Óscar and Valeria's names, referring to them in headlines simply as "drowned migrants." This presented them as anonymous victims, detached from their interiority and their loved ones' pain. The advocacy group RAICES encouraged its followers on social media to instead share pictures of Óscar and Valeria taken before their death, to prevent their commodification as "just another tragedy" or symptom of policy failure.4 In the debate surrounding Le Duc's photograph lies a central question about whether the familiar forms of documentary realism are capable of reckoning with the contemporary crises of migration. Realism has long been the dominant aesthetic mode for representing state violence. Yet the underlying premise that realist documentation spurs action is not necessarily the case. The aspiration for objectivity is similarly complicated. Attempts to provide unmediated portraits of vulnerable subjects cannot actually escape mediation, Pooja Rangan contends. Documentary ends up "regulating what does and does not count as human"; it requires that the Other be legible.5 It generates empathy through portraits of vulnerable Others that mirror the viewer's own experiences or expectations or, worse, fetishizes their suffering as spectacle. The question then becomes what [End Page 380] art can do beyond simply raising awareness or rendering visible the racialized violence and injustice of weaponized borders. How can art intervene in ways that begin the work not only of critique and mourning but of mapping alternative forms of relating to the borderlands and border-crossers? This imperative to respond to the world as it is and imagine it as it could be impels a shift from realist to speculative modes. In a project titled The Underworld curated for X-TRA Contemporary...

What if we think of the classroom as a work of art? Performance, collaboration, and social engagement considered as pedagogic practices

This article brings into relation critical perspectives and practical tactics from a range of different fields—performance studies, visual art practice, pedagogy and educational theory, and activism and community organising—in order to create some space for re-imagining what might be possible within the dynamics of the Higher Education classroom. It proceeds through a series of speculative modes: ‘what if we think of the classroom as a market?’, which for many is the currently dominant metaphor under neoliberalist economies; ‘what if we think of the work of art as a classroom?’, which traces the recent ‘pedagogical’ or ‘educational’ turn in visual art practice; and finally, ‘what if we think of the classroom as a work of art?’, in which the creative impulses and tactics drawn from performance practices, activism and community organising, and socially engaged art are speculatively applied to the arts and humanities classroom.

NK cell markers predict the efficacy of IV immunoglobulins in CIDP.

ObjectiveTo assess whether IV immunoglobulins (IVIgs) as a first-line treatment for chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) have a regulative effect on natural killer (NK) cells that is related to clinical responsiveness to IVIg.MethodsIn a prospective longitudinal study, we collected blood samples of 29 patients with CIDP before and after initiation of IVIg treatment for up to 6 months. We used semiquantitative PCR and flow cytometry in the peripheral blood to analyze the effects of IVIg on the NK cells. The results were correlated with clinical aspects encompassing responsiveness.ResultsWe found a reduction in the expression of several typical NK cell genes 1 day after IVIg administration. Flow cytometry furthermore revealed a reduced cytotoxic CD56dim NK cell population, whereas regulatory CD56bright NK cells remained mostly unaffected or were even increased after IVIg treatment. Surprisingly, the observed effects on NK cells almost exclusively occurred in IVIg-responsive patients with CIDP.ConclusionsThe correlation between the altered NK cell population and treatment efficiency suggests a crucial role for NK cells in the still speculative mode of action of IVIg treatment. Analyzing NK cell subsets after 24 hours of treatment initiation appeared as a predictive marker for IVIg responsiveness. Further studies are warranted investigating the potential of NK cell status as a routine parameter in patients with CIDP before IVIg therapy.Classification of evidenceThis study provides Class I evidence that NK cell markers predict clinical response to IVIg in patients with CIDP.

Material Politics Facing Post‐Truth: Speculation, Infrastructure, and Ecology in Turkey

AbstractDespite their imposing material presence, the values and harms stemming from the construction of infrastructural megaprojects remain speculative affairs in Istanbul, Turkey. This article distinguishes two modes of speculation pertaining to megaprojects that present different ethical and political possibilities, namely de‐materialising and re‐materialising speculation. Contributing to debates about material politics informed by Noortje Marres (Material Participation; Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and William Connolly (The Fragility of Things; Duke University Press, 2013), our framework of de‐ and re‐materialising speculation avoids isolating material and planetary agency to instead consider how their uncertainties and potentials play a role at the intersection with politico‐economic life. Accordingly, we analyse the coalescence of ecological and democratic crises. In Turkey, populism’s anthropocentric construction of “the will of the people” exacerbates ecological collapse. But also, ecological collapse inspires a search for a politics and ethics that acknowledge human–nonhuman ecological entanglements. The contestation between de‐and re‐materialising speculation underscores possibilities and limitations of ecological politics in contexts of populism and post‐truth.

Historicizing the money of account: a critique of the nominalist ontology of money

The article puts forward a case against the nominalist ontology of money, that is, the heterodox notion that moneyness – the quality of being money – is conferred by the money of account. From the nominalist perspective, money is essentially a balance-sheet phenomenon: a credit-debit bookkeeping entity whose origins can be traced back to ancient Near Eastern practices of accounting. This ontological position, which is often erroneously traced back to Keynes’ Treatise, mystifies and obscures the actual history of the money of account as a regime of monetary governance and a mode of speculation that only made sense in the European late medieval context of bimetallism. The article thus provides a critique of monetary nominalism based on Keynes’ reflection on the value of money in the Treatise and the General Theory. In turn, it proceeds to historicize the phenomenon of the money of account, building on the seminal contributions of Marc Bloch and Luigi Einaudi.