Technoscientific Imaginaries & Futures

Sylabus

TECHNOSCIENTIFIC IMAGINARIES & FUTURES 

When: Fridays, 14.00-15.20

THIS COURSE WILL BE HELD ONLINE ONLY ON GOOGLE MEET meet.google.com/mdw-pquc-eog  

Lecturer: Filip Vostal, PhD (University of Bristol), [e-mail]

Office hours: by appointment (email me)  

Course description  

Is the future already gone once the world itself is pronounced? When is the future? These questions puzzled philosophers as well as physicists for millennia. This course will, however, advance slightly different, more modest, approach toward the notion of the future – especially in relationship to technoscience. How humans conceive future is central to the understanding of present social life. But how specifically do people make sense of the unknown – and unknowable – future? In this course we will discuss several directions that might help us to tackle – not resolve or offer solutions – and “accept” such vital questions.  At the same time, imagining a better future has been constant collective feature (perhaps) of the entire social history, that reached its climax over the course of modernity. Visions of future(s), expectations, anticipations, the role strange of economists in co-shaping collective futures, utopian, anti-utopian, dystopian and catastrophic projections of future are integral components – barely thematised – in private and public discourse. The course will explore how social collectives craft, negotiate, contest and realize such projections. In the course we will be oscillating between technoscientific imaginaries that are inclining to utopian and dystopian science fiction, “profitable futuristic hubris” (e.g. Kurzweil & Harari), modes of anticipation and systematic techniques of expectations, and futures that are profiling themselves as promising in security-related, socio-economic, environmental and psychological sense. Is another technoscientific world possible? – one is tempted to ask nowadays. It remains extremely difficult to come up with definitive answer, but it is surely worth asking this question.  

Aims of the Course  

-        gaining basic knowledge about social scientific streams exploring and problematizing how future(s) is/are dealt with, theorized and analysed

-        opening up the question of imaginaries and utopia as relevant concept (and perhaps “activities”) in the world where liberal democracy apparently reached “end of history”, there are many obvious evidences that it has not. The question is an old one, but still pressing if slightly modified: “Is another (technoscientific) world possible”?

-        almost every imaginary and future projects involves some sociotechnical artefact, solution, infrastructure etc, thus in the course we will be focusing on such entities and in the second part of the course relate them to questions around security and related technologies (e.g. pandemics, money, AI, nuclear bomb)    

The Structure of the Course   1)     Intro: Modernity’s Unknowables (23/2)

Is another technoscientific world possible? Donald Rumsfeld’s unexpected philosophical moment – I guess even, perhaps mostly, for him: Known-knows; known-unknowns, unknown unknowns; unknown knowns.    2)     What is the Future? When is the Future? (1/3)

Looking at the future vs looking into the future.   

Readings:

Urry J (2015) What Is The Future? Cambridge: Polity, pp. 1-86  

O’Shea L (2019) Future Histories: What Ada Lovelance, Tom Paine and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology. New York: Verso, pp. 1-12 & 65-94.   3)     Imagining Imaginaries (8/3)

Language of and rhetoric of techno-scientific futures. What is an imaginary?  

Readings: 

Jessop B (2013) Recovered imaginaries, imagined recoveries: A cultural political economy of crisis construals and crisis management in the North Atlantic financial crisis. In Before and Beyond the Global Economic Crisis, edited by M. Benner. Cheltenham: Edward Edgar, pp. 234-254.  

Strauss C (2006) The Imaginary. <

Anotace

Is the future already gone once the world itself is pronounced? When is the future? These questions puzzled philosophers as well as physicists for millennia. This course will, however, advance slightly different, more modest, approach toward the notion of the future – especially in relationship to technoscience.

How humans conceive future is central to the understanding of present social life. But how specifically do people make sense of the unknown – and unknowable – future? In this course we will discuss several directions that might help us to tackle – not resolve or offer solutions – and “accept” such vital questions. At the same time, imagining a better future has been constant collective feature (perhaps) of the entire social history, that reached its climax over the course of modernity.

Visions of future(s), expectations, anticipations, the role strange of economists in co-shaping collective futures, utopian, anti-utopian, dystopian and catastrophic projections of future are integral components – barely thematised – in private and public discourse. The course will explore how social collectives craft, negotiate, contest and realize such projections.

In the course we will be oscillating between technoscientific imaginaries that are inclining to utopian and dystopian science fiction, “profitable futuristic hubris” (e.g. Kurzweil & Harari), modes of anticipation and systematic techniques of expectations, and futures that are profiling themselves as promising in security-related, socio-economic, environmental and psychological sense.

Is another technoscientific world possible? – one is tempted to ask nowadays. It remains extremely difficult to come up with definitive answer, but it is surely worth asking this question.