Speculative Essay Research Articles

Possibilities in Three Parts for Collaborative Futures in Autoethnography

This speculative essay, divided into three sections, raises questions about the collaborative future of autoethnography while asserting the author’s continued commitment to the method. It starts by identifying collaborative practices in the author’s past, then moves to a series of possibilities for future practice, and ends by identifying autoethnographic orientations that the author endorses. Each section carries a note of skepticism about autoethnography’s efficacy.

Love and Learning in the Age of Algorithms: How Intimate Relationships with Artificial Intelligence May Shape Epistemology, Sociality, and Linguistic Justice

AbstractGenerative artificial intelligence (GAI) programs such as ChatGPT and other large language models are designed to engage in complex, responsive dialogues that feel like human interactions. The dialogic and responsive nature of GAI signals the potential for users to form relationships with GAI platforms or digital personalities created on these platforms. Given the degree to which language use and broader conceptual understandings are deeply embedded in social relationships, the relational nature of GAI has powerful implications for the future of literacy and learning. This speculative essay draws upon sociocultural, affective, and posthuman perspectives on literacy to explore key concerns regarding the nature of intimate relationships with GAI. The author highlights three central concerns for literacy researchers and educators: epistemological issues stemming from intimate relationships with GAI, the potential for students to (re)conceptualize human relationships through GAI, and the role of relational GAI in linguistic justice.

Trans-forming Narratology

ABSTRACT: From the vantagepoint of a feminist/queer/cisgender narratologist, “Trans-forming Narratology” asks which aspects of narrative practice might be particularly salient to developing a fruitful trans narratology while also calling our attention to elements of narrative that conventional (cis)narratology has undervalued or ignored. Keeping in mind matters that might be particularly relevant to trans narratives, this speculative essay explores aspects of voice, embodiment, character space, plotting, and closure in a set of recent American and British novels. It considers ways in which trans narratives can exploit the gender freedom of the first-person English pronoun or, conversely, signal temporally dual identities through heterodiegetic naming practices. It addresses tensions between a character’s proclaimed gender and their assigned sex and the differing implications of texts with narratees who are also textual actors and those whose narratees serve as external confidantes. Through brief forays into multiple aspects of narrative form, this essay argues for a narratology that can show the rich and varied capacities of trans writings past and present, with the hope that attention to trans narratives will both deepen our understanding of trans literature and advance the larger project of a comprehensive, situated narratology.

Renunciation

In their ruminations on Mark Rothko’s Chapel paintings, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit posit a mode of aesthetic consciousness produced by acts of renunciation. Rothko deliberately relinquishes his paintings’ visibility and thus, like Beckett and Resnais, impoverishes a primary feature of his artistic medium. Bersani and Dutoit’s concept of renunciation undermines modernist medium specificity and points to a form of pseudomorphosis that reveals the fundamental homo-ness between the arts. This speculative essay builds on their argument that such renunciative gestures produce aesthetic models of nondual consciousness and brings Bersani’s later writings into conversation with musical experience. In Bersani’s encounter with Proust and music, musical experience proffers a powerful ego solvent in favor of ontological interpenetration. An attention to music—here, that of Morton Feldman and Joan La Barbara—avers the power of modernism to shatter the modern ego.

Human among the more-than-human. Retrofitting Kohut for the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT In this speculative essay, I try to take seriously and psychoanalytically what many have diagnosed as a key dynamic in our age of the Anthropocene, namely narcissism. Because of the powerful paradigm shift and transformations his thinking inaugurated around narcissism, I turn to Heinz Kohut and those intersubjective Self psychologists who developed his theories. By expanding Kohut’s theories of selfobject ties to include a tie to the more-than-human, I attempt to describe a state that too many of us inhabit too much of the time. An archaic self craves safety in response to precarity, while a more stable self is aware of the possibility of a liveable permeability. I suggest that such self states need to be thought together with internal and external more-than-human surrounds. My hope is that these explorations may contribute to our ability to understand, explain and ultimately act on the disproportionate suffering some endure and some inflict on each other and the planet in the Anthropocene.

Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective

Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective

How to See Global Religion: Comparativism, Connectivity, and the Undisciplining of Victorian Literary Studies

AbstractRecent developments in the field of Victorian studies include its increasingly “global” or “transnational” scope as well as its “religious turn,” with a proliferation of scholarship on religion from Christian sects to new religious movements such as Theosophy. However, the highly relevant concept of global or globalized religion is not yet a part of Victorian literary scholarship. This speculative essay explores why this topic has been relatively invisible in Victorian literary studies and how the field might better encounter globalized religion and literature. The essay suggests that global religion remains absent from the field in consequence of how certain nineteenth-century ideas structure Victorian studies: for example, the treatment of religion as a fairly stable category that indexes an author’s or a text’s nationality and even aesthetic value. To move these ideas farther from structure to subject of studies in the field, this essay turns to religious studies and recent projects informed by work in Black studies that engages in “undisciplining” scholarly fields. Such work suggests how Victorian literary studies functions within a comparativist logic that treats religion as a universal cultural phenomenon that corresponds to national and aesthetic characteristics. A promising alternative is a “connective” rather than a comparativist approach, which entails emphasizing the historical formation of religious practices in cultural exchange. This more connective approach seeks to attune Victorian studies to aesthetic projects it has previously overlooked as outside its disciplinary borders. To illustrate this claim, this essay discusses the literary-spiritual project of Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship, which flourished in twentieth-century America in literary and spiritual commentary on texts, including texts themselves more and less usually understood as Victorian, such as Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 translation of the Rubaiyat.

The Time of Diagrams

Diagrams are visual structures that, while immediately spatial in appearance, invite us to confront time in its simultaneous multiplicity, outside the bounds of linear progression and development. Diagrams collapse the past into the present and afford the opportunity to imagine divergent futures. While the diagram has been adopted as a theoretical model by historians of art, music and performance in terms of its administration of materials and gestures in space, we still lack a thorough articulation and elaboration of the diagram’s peculiar relationship to time. This speculative essay expands on arguments initiated in Harren’s book, Fluxus Forms: Scores, multiples, and the eternal network (University of Chicago, 2020), regarding the fundamentally diagrammatic nature of Fluxus event scores in order to consider all experimental scores as a genre of diagram that bears a philosophically complex relationship to temporality. Moving beyond the case of Fluxus, Harren gestures to a broader range of artistic diagrams and experimental performance scores (e.g. from Dada, Yvonne Rainer, Lawrence and Anna Halprin, among others), as she considers the diagram on more theoretical grounds, moving between the diagrammatologies of Frederik Stjernfelt and Gilles Deleuze (who receives special emphasis) in order to account for diagrams’ multifaceted temporal address. Ultimately, Harren argues, the ‘real’ time of the diagram faces the past in relation to the form it describes, whereas the ‘virtual’ time of the diagram is the infinite future space to which it may connect through (actualizations of) formal correspondences. For the present, the score-as-diagram is thus both a wedge between and a bridge connecting the past and the future. Notation emerges as an applied model of becoming.

Physiological and cognitive discontinuities: From mythical mediation to implicit discretization of architectural design tools

In architectural design, representation tools are often compared according to their alleged effects on the creativity of designers. Moreover, their mediating capacities are often mythicized, to such an extent that one might surmise the direct transmission of the mental images from the designer's consciousness to an external representation. In this speculative essay, we demonstrate that the process of representation at work in architectural design originates from the designer's consciousness natural cognitive ability, rather than from the use of a specific mediation tool between the designer and his environment, between the mentally constructed architectural project and its representation. The effects of any tool of representation—analog or digital—on our perceptual apparatus depend primarily on the cognitive mechanisms affecting the discontinuous flow of internal representations formed by our consciousness. In other words, we propose to shed a new light on these limitations through the heuristic modeling of an architectural project designer confronted with his own cognitive biases, and the limits of the representation processes. In the present essay, the discontinuities and uncertainties inherent to the processes of representation are reintegrate in the models.

Founding Fathers (in a Tailings Pond)

This speculative essay uses an imaginary (and non-existent) comic to call a tar-sands industry founder who may have thought of himself as a goose back to Fort McMurray to see how waterfowl fare in tailings ponds. It treats S.C. Ells (1878-1971), an early-20th-century Canadian Department of Mines engineer who was also an amateur writer and illustrator, as a colonial founder not only of the tar-sands industry but also of literary and visual representations of the industry and the Athabasca region. Drawing inspiration from artist and former tar-sands worker Kate Beaton’s “Founding Fathers” comics, it compares the linkages between humans and waterfowl in Ells’s works and in Beaton’s 2014 webcomic “Ducks.” By doing so, it takes Ells on a time-travelling adventure and homecoming tour in the petromodern dystopia that has become his legacy.

How Have the U.S. Coasts Changed (and How Are They Going to Change) as Cultural and Policy Spaces? An Example from California

Over the centuries, the coastal zones of the world have attracted agents of political expansion and instrumental maritime (e.g., fishing, shipping, boat building) industries seeking profit, and also great numbers of the general public seeking a place for residence, relaxation, outdoor recreation, tourism and other forms of play. The impressive amenities of the coastal zone are the economic value of natural resources and the social value of a sublime biophysical and human ecology. In the United States, the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 created a mandate for special area management plans to balance protection of the coasts with provisions that allow residence, visitation, and industry. This mandate is also found in the California Coastal Act of 1974 which created the California Coastal Commission. In the time since the passage of these acts, the cultural and policy spaces of California’s coast have changed dramatically. It is, however, an open question as to whether the Coastal Commission—and the many governmental entities with which it interacts—have succeeded or failed in their mandates. Whatever the conclusion drawn, this speculative essay suggests that climate change-induced future sea level rise will render the historic coastal management institutions and approaches obsolete. The future will be very different—ecologically, culturally, economically and politically. Coastal zone practitioners will be forced to reconfigure and expand their mandates and toolkit. We encourage a recognition that the challenge before them will be a new and very different one. It will call for an adaptation of the coastal management profession and the reorientation of the training and education of the next generation of coastal leaders in the public, private and civil society sectors. This should entail an expansion of disciplinary expertise to address human dimensions topics that include planned retreat, population and infrastructure relocation, social equity and environmental justice and be intimately informed by science and stakeholder engagement.

Toward a reflexive anthropology

AbstractThis partly personal, partly polemical, and partly speculative essay is my thinking‐out‐loud about how anthropologists might decentre existing ways of producing, teaching, and sharing ethnographic knowledge and strive toward a more accountable, more responsible, and more ethical way of working in the discipline. Imagining a genuinely ethical and intellectually critical anthropology, I reflect on my experiences as a racialised woman trained in the “Western” academy in the subject of anthropology. I think about at what—and whose—cost anthropology stagnates in its whiteness, and how this stagnation affects the emergence of new forms of anthropological knowledge and work as well as how neoliberalisation of academia further encourages and perpetuates whiteness as the norm. Then, I ruminate on what anthropology could look like if anthropologists made serious efforts to dismantle white academic privilege, if we let go of our obsession with Theory, if we took ethics seriously: what I imagine to be a critical epistemic multiplicity in a reflexive anthropology.

Object-oriented photography: A speculative essay on the photography of essence

In this article, we discuss the insights object-oriented ontology (OOO) offers in understanding the photographic process. Following Kant’s distinction between noumena and phenomena and Heidegger’s Geviert, Harman’s OOO focuses on the real versus sensory aspects of all objects of experience. In our analysis, we explore its implications for intentionality, signification and revelation in photography. OOO locates being within all objects and stands in opposition to the post-Cartesian correlationism influential in the continental tradition. In Heidegger’s terms, the still camera exhibits both presence and readiness at hand. However, this readiness at hand is so ubiquitous that it is easy to overlook what makes it unique amongst the tools at our disposal. We argue that in the field of visual experience, the camera does what Kant believed impossible. It has the potential to reduce epistemic loss and transform the phenomenology of conscious experience into the noumenology of non-conscious awareness of the real object.

Traumatic Knowing/Unknowing and the Return of the Disavowed in The Tale

ABSTRACT This speculative essay focuses on the defensive disavowal of childhood sexual abuse that is effected through the recursive intrapsychic and interpersonal operations of identification with and introjection of the aggressor that act in tandem to prohibit traumatic knowing. In the film The Tale, these operate cinematically at diegetic and metadiegetic levels, and are present in both symbolized and enacted forms. The deconstruction and reconstruction of traumatic reality is examined through the film’s oneiric interpolations of past and present time, reality and fantasy, and use of semiologic elements. The traumatic injury is remembered, repeated, and worked through, undergirded by the operations of nachträglichkeit and repetition compulsion.

Are quasicrystals really so rare in the Universe?

Abstract Until 2009, the only known quasicrystals were synthetic, formed in the laboratory under highly controlled conditions. Conceivably, the only quasicrystals in the Milky Way, perhaps even in the Universe, were the ones fabricated by humans, or so it seemed. Then came the report that a quasicrystal with icosahedral symmetry had been discovered inside a rock recovered from a remote stream in far eastern Russia, and later that the rock proved to be an extraterrestrial, a piece of a rare CV3 carbonaceous chondrite meteorite (known as Khatyrka) that formed 4.5 billion years ago in the pre-solar nebula. At present, the only known examples of natural quasicrystals are from the Khatyrka meteorite. Does that mean that quasicrystals must be extremely rare in the Universe? In this speculative essay, we present several reasons why the answer might be no. In fact, quasicrystals may prove to be among the most ubiquitous minerals found in the Universe.

The Making of Postwar Japan: A Speculative Essay

The Making of Postwar Japan: A Speculative Essay

From the human to the planetary

This is largely a theoretical, speculative essay that takes on the question of what ‘care’ looks like at a moment when climate change is increasingly taking center stage in public and political discussions. Starting with two new practices, namely, humanitarian care for nonhumans and One Health collaborations, I seek to determine what forms of political care can incorporate the well-being of future generations and future iterations of the earth. After an exploration of One Health as an approach to planetary care, I ask what its parts enable us to think, despite its limitations; I focus on the new human-nonhuman assemblages connected through different biosocial models, such as neuroscience or immunology, to see how these scientific theories might enable new possibilities. I argue that a focus on biological ecologies at different scales – as opposed to ethicomoral categories like humanity – can open the way to a larger imaginary of human and nonhuman flourishing and a space for nonmoralistic politics.

Heidegger’s Socrates: “Pure Thinking” on Method, Truth, and Learning

This speculative essay develops a unique understanding of Socrates by reading Heidegger in relation to contemporary Platonic scholarship arising from the Continental tradition, which embraces Plato’s Socrates as a non-doctrinal philosopher. The portrait of Heidegger’s Socrates that emerges is related to contemporary education and its drive toward emphasizing an academic focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) at the exclusion of the Liberal Arts, with the goal of showing that other forms of “knowledge,” such as the philosophical “truth” emerging from the relationship between the human and the unfolding of Being, while stifled or neglected in STEM curricula, are also crucial to our continued development as human beings. Ultimately, the essay seeks to draw out an authentic vision of paideia by turning to the valuable, albeit limited, writings of Heidegger focused specifically on the historical philosopher Socrates, as opposed to Plato.

Against the Evidence: ‘Persuasion’ and the Facts of Experience in Shelley’s ‘A Future State’

ABSTRACTShelley’s speculative essay, ‘A Future State’, has been unduly neglected. Its ostensibly circumscribed argument and strictly empiricist, Humean logic appear to set it apart from more intimate reflections on similar topics such as ‘On Love’ and ‘On Life’, which are regularly anthologised. Redating of the composition to the winter of 1818–19 when Shelley was at Rome or Naples alters the significance of the piece, indicating that it is an intermediary work that scrupulously re-proposes earlier sceptical and materialist formulations as a means of putting belief in an afterlife to the test. The dialectical strategy of the text places the inescapable and lamentable fact of mortality – a pressing and ongoing concern as reflected in the narrative, ‘The Coliseum’, and ‘A Vision of the Sea’ – in opposition to the extraordinary persistence and prevalence of ‘persuasion’. This approach is neither rigidly materialist nor idealist. The fascination of ‘A Future State’ lies in the fact that, as one who wholly excludes recourse to religious testimony or faith, since there is no factual evidence to support it, Shelley continued to advocate extreme doubt (in the manner of Hume) whilst admitting to an irrepressible human desire for everlasting life, founded on an innate resistance to change.

Geontologia e as artes neoliberais de governo: educar os corpos para além do imaginário do carbono

Resumo Inspirado na obra Geontologies: a requiem to late liberalism, de Elizabeth Povinelli, este texto problematiza as atuais condições do governamento neoliberal expandindo o conceito foucaultiano de biopolítica. Procura mais amplamente repensar os processos educativos nas margens da biontologia desdobrada pela entrada no Antropoceno, a fim de desabilitar o chamado “imaginário do carbono”. Trata-se de ensaio especulativo organizado em dois eixos que articulam noções foucaultianas, tematizando as condições pelas quais certas populações e certos corpos sofrem pela exposição diferencial a injustiças, violência e morte. Em seguida, discute-se a possibilidade de ativar outros modos de vida capazes de resistir no contexto das economias do abandono e das políticas queer de migração. Ao final, busca-se evidenciar algumas razões pelas quais o campo pedagógico inflacionou a questão da educação como empreendimento-de-si e deflacionou a preocupação com o cuidado-de-si e dos outros, defendendo uma abertura para outras figuras e sujeitos da educação como parte de uma crítica potente aos excessos provocados pelo imaginário do carbono em nossos sistemas de pensamento.