Suchergebnisse

This paper explores the ways in which financial speculation and disruption have become common traits defining our artistic and political imagination. In this discussion a variety of notions emerge – namely, the move from value to price, from labor to debt, from revolution to disruption, and from avant garde to speculation. Finance is speculation on debt. Speculation is commonly used in recent years in philosophy, literature, politics, the arts and the sciences. As varied as the usages of the term may be, the current emergence of speculation in these different fields stems from the world of finance capital and its premise of managing risk. Speculation proves to be a form of pragmatism that generates more and more extreme models within the current system of control and accumulation by dispossession. Whatever the extreme scenarios it generates might be, they always depend on a stable variant – the continuation of finance capital. This paper wishes to offer in addition, the notion of counter-speculation by using the work of contemporary thinkers and artists. Counter-speculation invites potentials for actualization. While exploring new forms for being in uncertainties against financialization, counter-speculation assigns scenarios and narration that actualize onto the present its own potentials. By that it opens a new horizon for our political imagination beyond finance.

From the beginning of the twentieth century, new urban housing forms, including social housing, land pooling, and building syndicates, began to emerge as products of housing rights and labor movements. Yet this emergence cannot simply be accounted for by a history of workers' rights and housing movements but must also take into consideration the political economy of land and housing created by new forms of real estate speculation. This article situates the history of urban speculation and the new fiduciary innovations pertaining to urban land and housing markets within the scholarship on the development of architectural and town-planning theories during the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on Calcutta and Bombay—two central cities of the British Empire—as case studies, I will trace the history of how the housing market became a tradeable object of speculation through colonial policies that disentangled housing from its singular history and abstracted it out of its nonmonetizable attachments. Indeed, it is by understanding how the land and housing market became a site for future investments and ultimately was structured through new social relations and values following World War I that we might get a fuller understanding of how we arrived at our contemporary "residential capitalism" and landscapes of accumulation and homelessness.

Speculation structures the unprecedented breadth and depth of contemporary global capitalism. We define it as an engagement with uncertainty that aims to materialize potential futures. Studies of economization and financialization have highlighted the production of value through transparent practices of calculation and have focused on the Global North. As an alternative, we use ethnographic and historical genealogical methods to explore predictive practices that are motivated by contingency and aim to make uncertainty productive. India, a celebrated emerging market and dense arena of capitalist promise and failure, provides the foundations for our approach. The speculative practices we focus on challenge the distinction between formal and informal, the licit and illicit, because they fuel rationalized market regimes, as well as worlds of precarity. Our approach reveals the governmentalities, public cultures, and market actions that are characteristic of the present pursuit of value for profit and survival.

From the Editorial Introduction: "Since I am convinced that nobody reads editorials I will keep my remarks brief. Putting together the inaugural issue of Speculations has been an unusual experience. It has depended on the collusion of fellow speculative types, the help of many anonymous reviewers, the endless patience of designer Thomas Gokey, and more hours than someone in the final year of their PhD should ever spend on a project. Looking over the final product I think it has all been worth it. This is the first journal dedicated to speculative realism and despite the obscurity of that term I think we all understand it as a handy label under which weird realists, continental metaphysicians, object oriented ontologists, transcendental realists, vitalists, and Lovecraftians can unite. This is also, perhaps, the first time a journal can boast that each contributor is also a blogger. This is the reason why Speculations could only ever be an online, open-access journal. …"

This book contains the proceedings from Weaponising Speculation, a two-day conference and exhibition that took place in Dublin in March 2013. Weaponising Speculation was organised by D.U.S.T. (Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought) and aimed to be an exploration of the various expressions of DIY theory operative in the elsewheres, the shafts and tunnels of the para-academy. The topics covered all come under the welcoming embrace of speculation, spanning a broad range: from art, philosophy, nature, fiction, and computation to spiders, culinary cosmology, and Oscar the Grouch. The book itself aims to be more than just a collection of essays and catalogue of artworks, but also a documentation of the event as a whole. An object that both those present at the event and those who missed it would want to own — bringing something new to both sets of readers

"In this sixth issue of Speculations, a serial imprint created to explore post-continental philosophy and speculative realism, a wide range of contemporary philosophical issues pertaining to the contemporary philosophical scene is touched upon, from the continental realism of Tristan Garcia, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux to the 'new realism' of Maurizio Ferraris, from Lacanian and Laurellian speculations to the synthetic philosophy of Fernando Zalamea's mathematics"--

In this sixth issue of Speculations, a serial imprint created to explore post-continental philosophy and speculative realism, a wide range of contemporary philosophical issues pertaining to the contemporary philosophical scene is touched upon, from the continental realism of Tristan Garcia, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux to the 'new realism' of Maurizio Ferraris, from Lacanian and Laurellian speculations to the synthetic philosophy of Fernando Zalamea's mathematics.

In the second wave of feminism it was enough to say that Antonia Dickson co-wrote History of The Kinetograph, the Kinetoscope and the Kineto-Phonograph (1895) with her inventor brother William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. But in a new moment, I utilize Catherine Gallagher's concept of "counterfactual speculation" as a "thought experiment," offering a fuller examination of the time between 1893 and 1896 when Antonia was involved in the experiments around the "projecting" Kinetoscope. "What if Antonia Dickson Had Invented the Kinetoscope?" raises the question of historical outcome, empirical evidence, and causality, offering a way around uncritical reliance on the traditions of historical narrative and testing a new methodology for feminism and film.

In this third volume of Speculations, a serial imprint created to explore post-continental philosophy and speculative realism, a wide range of topics are covered, from the philosophy of religion to psychoanalysis to the philosophy of science to gender studies, and in a wide variety of formats (articles, interviews, position pieces, translations, and review essays).

From the Editorial Introduction: "If the first volume of Speculations was enough of an explicit wager, a willing blind leap in the terra incognita of the publishing world, then this volume forces us to stop and evaluate the reasons for the journal's protracted existence. This is all the more important when we consider how the range of meanings of the term 'speculative realism' seems to be growing--with increasing numbers of thinkers situating themselves in its trail, or holding a somewhat cautious interest in it--while its e ective reference seems nowhere to be found. ..."