Why Speculation?

We are bringing this collection together at a time in which speculative ways of thinking appear to be undergoing a reprise across the social sciences and humanities. Whether through engagements with speculative cosmology (Stengers, 2006), speculative empiricism (Debaise, 2017), speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2011), speculative research (Wilkie et al., 2017), or speculative realism (Bryant et al., 2011), what is striking about this moment is that ‘speculation’ is approached as a diverse set of conceptual and empirical endeavours that construct plural rather than singular narratives, recuperate multiple rather than complete forms of knowledge, value holding open what is at stake and can be brought into purview and, in doing so, intensify alternative possibilities. Central to these endeavours, as Alfred North Whitehead suggests, is the sense that speculation presents a certain form of reason whose “business is to make thought creative of the future” (1929: 82). Thinking with this notion of speculative reason, our motivation for assembling this collection is to assay what this speculative intervention might mean for geography, and how speculation might itself be conceived as geographical. In approaching the relationship between speculation and geography, this collection of essays manifests a collective desire to complicate the modes of thought used to evaluate experience by crafting alternatives, pluralising perspectives, and thereby problematising the immediately given.

If speculation has until recently occupied a somewhat marginal position in academia, this might be because it is often considered a form of futile guesswork that, as Alex Wilkie (2018: 347) observes, would seemingly be “the very antithesis of sober empirical research”. More troubling, perhaps, is the sense that speculation implies a zealous celebration of the immaterial and an avoidance of this world’s material politics (Hallward, 2006). With its connotations of abstract thinking, discourses of first principles, and transcendental reasonings, speculation seemingly inherits a sense of detachment from the empirical particularities and differences of this world. Working against these tendencies, in this book we consider speculation as something other than futile guesswork, vague suppositions, or immaterial escape. On the contrary, we insist that speculations expand, complicate, and invent abstractions that modify the possibilities of what thought might become. To ask what thought might become is to cultivate a mode of speculative thinking that is at odds with prophetic positions that are themselves only capable of answering questions posed from within the bounds of the contemporary regimes of knowledge production. Developing this line of thought, the chapters in this book differently, and in their own way, foreground speculation as a style of thinking that prioritises an openness to what thought might become, and which therefore reconfigures the empirical beyond what seems given in an immediate experience. A key motivation of the book is thus to develop speculation as a practice that, in asking what thought might become, reformulates the problems that can be staged as part of empirical enquiry.

Speculation, we contend, is uniquely placed to problematise the kinds of questions we are capable of asking out of the conditions of thought in the present. As with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1994) ‘geophilosophy’, speculation is a term that engenders a mode of attention to the ways problems are always staged and valued from the bounds of dominant abstractions and territories of thought—and it is through a spirit to cultivate thought in its capacity to think difference that this mode of attention maintains a generosity to the way thinking could be otherwise. Here we take our cue from Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers (2017) in arguing that speculation is concerned with the formulation of problems of a new kind. Debaise and Stengers call for a ‘speculative’ mode of thought capable of responding to a crisis of “lazy thinking”, “false problems” (p. 14) and a rising “inability to think that what we care about might have a future” (p. 18). Speculative thinking, here, is concerned with sensing the virtual possibilities—interpretations, ideas, connections—that saturate any situation. It is a call to develop a sense of openness in the most expanded terms possible to “what, in this situation, might be of importance” (Debaise & Stengers, 2017: 18–19). It is owing to this sense of openness to what thought might become that speculation can be said to complicate certain majoritarian knowledge claims expressed, as they often are, according to normative politics, calculative logics, and risk-management strategies (Savransky et al., 2017). Our contention is that speculation must itself be understood as something that instructs majoritarian political formations concerning how life could, or should, be organised. Put differently, we are less concerned with what speculation imagines for the future than with how, in doing so, it complicates what is deemed important through current epistemic habits.

In problematising epistemic habits, speculation presents a renewed understanding of what counts as the empirical that resists reducing and channelling experience according to immediate facts, off-the-shelf abstractions, or clichéd diagnoses. The diverse approaches to speculation developed in this book evince a unique mode of empiricism that is variously concerned with amplifying experience in its pluralism (Debaise, 2017). In seeking to articulate a pluralism of experience, speculation would be something capable of signalling (im)possibilities outside of recognisable ontological frameworks (Brown, 2021: 6), and which diffracts in order “to make visible all those things that have been lost in an object; not in order to make the other meanings disappear, but rather to make it impossible for the bottom line to be one single statement” (Haraway, 2000: 105). The empirical emerges here not as something that simply appears to us through perception, but as an experiential event that necessarily exceeds and modifies the frameworks in which it gets placed. Each of these thinkers can thus be said to be elaborating a mode of speculation that, as Martin Savransky writes (2018: 6), dramatises philosophy with the ‘earthly’ such that speculation becomes “an immanent and situated act of creation concerned with whens and wheres and hows, with abstractions and their consequences, with practices and their dreams, with events and the possibles they create”. It is owing to such investments in the relations between thought and the earthly that we are interested here in elaborating how speculation is geographical.

Indeed, whilst acknowledging that geographical research has in certain ways always been speculative (see Doel and Clarke, Chap. 4), this is not to say speculation has always been geographical. How might imbuing speculation with a geographic awareness solicit abstractions of thought as they come to force and fruition in relation to diverse ‘earthly’ processes and virtual potentialities? What becomes of the practice of earth writing when it is directed towards a reappraisal of the abstractions it uses to think the experiential? What does it take to leave behind conventional abstractions of thought and instead engage in what Whitehead (1929: 65) terms “the flight after the unattainable”? And how might this pursuit of the unattainable, as it intersects with the mundane, in turn help revaluate those “daily affirmations, which have become too comfortable and prejudice us to a future that has yet to be determined” (Sharpe et al., 2014: 124)?

In posing these questions it is worth adding a note of clarification: this is a book about speculation in a capacity that is resolutely not a transcendent mode of thought that is detached from the world or from contextual placings (whether historical, theoretical, cultural, political, geographical). Nor do we suggest speculation is something without certain limits. For us this mode of speculation, which is attentive to the conditions that produce thought, gains particular resonance in the Leibnizian refrain favoured by Stengers (2005, 2008b) dic cur hic [say why here]: a call for precise occasions of decision making such that we attend to the singularity of each occasion in which our thinking takes flight. In other words, dic cur hic states that generalisable justifications provide a shaky cause for our evaluative thinking. In this always situated mode, speculation is thus not simply about hesitant guesswork: our aim in this book goes beyond a celebration of a general sense of uncertainty as part of contemporary scholarly claims, since to argue speculation concerns an openness to what thought might become is not to say it resists scepticism and precise forms of evaluation (Williams, 2022: 10). Instead, we argue that speculation is a method of evidencing precise, albeit diverging, lines of enquiry that need not mean that “every issue is readily decided by recourse to facts currently available” (Connolly, 2019: 10), and thus are no less rigorous than formal calculative or statistical evidence. Far from abstract thinking, then, this is a book about speculation dedicated to the task of thinking abstractions and the forms of value, intellectual horizons, and the modes of existence they give rise to.

The remainder of this introduction has three sections: the next section develops the question of ‘who speculates?’ by tracing certain genealogies of speculative thinking; the chapter then develops what it means to think abstractions; finally, we provide an overview of how the three themes of the book—ethics, technologies, aesthetics—speak to the chapters in this edited collection.

Who Speculates?

Speculation abounds, whether in the social sciences and humanities, architecture and design, the creative industries, financial markets and urban investments, or philosophy and social theory wherein speculation becomes oriented around a politics seeking to negotiate complex social, environmental, or epistemological change, albeit in very different ways. Speculations are also present, of course, in less formal modes such as those moments when a mind wanders and contemplates something unforeseen: What does the future hold? What is the weather going to be like? Is the universe infinite or finite? What is consciousness? How to distinguish the living from the non-living? To what extent might one think different imperceptible relations of sense? (Do you believe in life after love?). Speculations, in this reflective and fleeting mode, do not necessarily concern fantastical visions of the future, nor privileged moments of discovery, since they “occur all the time” (Parisi, 2012: 237) involving a mediation on abstractions that, in their realisation, pose alternative problems and thus change what appears thinkable and possible.

And yet, writing in an era of anti-establishment populisms marked by a cynicism towards expertise, it might be argued that what is required today is more conviction in the value of rigorously evidenced logics. Amidst continued hesitancy by various governments in the face of innumerable ecological and mass extinction crises, what would seemingly be required are deliberative actions that themselves anticipate practical solutions. Speculation, in this context, might appear at once untimely and dangerously impractical. In our reading, if speculation is untimely then it is so only in the sense that Nietzsche argues that philosophy of the future must be untimely if it is to resist the power of facts, the tyranny of the real, or the ‘inadequacy of false problems’ (Gerlach, Chap. 5). And if speculation is considered impractical, this might be because it is often evaluated through a lens of applicability and its value decided against certain calculated measures derived from extant regimes of knowledge mired by reactionary thinking (see Gerlach & Jellis, 2015; Burdon, Chap. 13). In recognising a certain value in the untimeliness and impracticality of speculative thinking, we are not suggesting speculation is a remedy to all twenty-first-century problems; this collection is not intended as a guide to living on in the Anthropocene not least because speculation here is opposed to that timely ethos of solution-oriented thinking, and resits ‘practico-theoretical’ applications (de La Herrán Iriarte, Chap. 6). However, what we are interested in is how and why the speculative has a certain appeal in the context of contemporary political, social, or ecological problems precisely as a means of pluralising the onto-epistemologies used to formulate problems in catastrophic times (Stengers, 2015; see also Brown, Chap. 2; Fearns, Chap. 9; Kraftl, Chap. 12).

Posing the question ‘who speculates?’, therefore, is also to ask ‘who and what gets to speculate?’, or as Aimee Bahng (2018: 5) puts it, who ‘narrates’ such speculations? Moreover, it at once asks ‘which speculations will be heard?’ since the task of surveying proponents of speculative thinking itself risks omitting certain othered voices of speculative thought who are less likely to be cited in academic publications (Oswin, 2020; Müller, 2021). Whilst we commenced with a moment of speculation that has a genealogy in Western philosophy as well as with a distinct disciplinary attachment, we want to be explicit that this collection is indebted to a plurality of forms of speculative thinking. Glancing through the contents page of this book reveals that this is not just a book by or for geographers: it is a collection indebted to different commitments across the social sciences and humanities, including within theories of decolonialisation and post-colonialism, feminist and queer theories, and theories of race and alterity that seek to unsettle universal categories and, in doing so, decentre the legacies of European imperialism and problematise capitalist destruction by listening to a plurality of earthbound onto-epistemologies already in existence today (Brown, 2021; Jackson, 2021; Savransky, 2021; Tsing, 2015). Crucially, for us part of this plurality means recognising that speculations are more often than not irreducible to individuated forms of intentionality and decision. Partly, speculations exceed individuated forms because they are often enacted by collections of different bodies and materials (Fannin, Chap. 8; Patchett, Chap. 15; Rousell et al., Chap. 16; Wakefield-Rann and Lee, Chap. 17). To develop this reading of speculation, in what follows we tentatively survey a number of conversations engaging speculative thinking which inform the spirit of this collection.

The first of these engagements is the penchant within human geography for assaying and amplifying the plurality of events and experiences as they are constituted through particular spacetimes. The question of spacetimes has long held a prominent place as a geographical concept for approaching certain forms of complexity (Massey, 1999). Recently, for instance, spacetimes have operated as a device for rendering future contingency open to certain logics of preemptive governance (Anderson, 2010), are used to articulate rhythms of exhaustion in practices of work (Straughan et al., 2020), and are developed to reconceptualise relations between technology, media objects, and affect (Ash, 2017), to name but a few lines of enquiry. Whilst ‘speculation’ is not always explicit in the lexicon of these works, this conversation speaks to the notion of speculative thinking at work in this collection since it concerns precisely how articulating abstractions of spacetime itself helps think different metaphysical relations between time, space, and matter. By engaging questions of metaphysics, albeit often indirectly, spacetimes have given rise to a concomitant imperative to rethink the boundaries of fieldwork within the discipline (Katz, 1994), such that fieldwork is thought less as bounded space and “more as a series of graspings” (Gerlach & Jellis, 2015: 136–7).

Second includes the way speculative thinking is discernible in nonrepresentational theories (Simpson, 2020), including cognate research into notions of the elemental (Engelmann, 2020; Jackson & Fannin, 2011), the atmospheric (McCormack, 2017), the inorganic (Roberts & Dewsbury, 2021; Grosz, 2011), the unsayable (Harrison, 2007), the inhuman (Clark & Yusoff, 2017), the spectral (Wylie, 2007; Enigbokan & Patchett, 2012), the pre-individual (Lapworth, 2020; Keating, 2019), and the aleatory and contingent (Doel, 2004). Throughout, we are drawn to these attempts to admit articulations of experience that may be tensed with affective orientations yet lack any pre-given necessity and meaning: How to write about an impasse of thinking and doing without reducing such moments to universal judgement and justification? And how to speculate elementally, without assuming a fully formed subject or object who carries out such speculations and is able to appraise them as such? By approaching these questions, these engagements with spacetime and nonrepresentational registers seek other ways of thinking experience spatio-temporally, or what Keith Woodward (2016: 350) refers to in his speculative geography of Orson Welles as those “spaces that are thinkable, but not tangible, visible, or manifest”. Imbuing geography with a certain speculative impulse, then, as Barry et al. (2021: 126) do through the notion of planetary speculative listening, might open geography up to different expressions of experience and thought that “nurtures, cultivates and affirms the potentialities of possible futures”. Thought as forms of speculative thinking, these geographies put forward diverse attempts to think—through the invention of abstractions—something of the invisible, imperceptible, affective, and infra-sensible processes that elide the human sensorium.

Third, this commitment within geographical scholarship to render something of those imperceptible and infra-sensible expressions of experience can itself be recognised in line with a set of theoretical speculations that have advanced different kinds of processual and relational thinking. Without wanting to blur the distinction between a diverse set of works, we are thinking here of theorisations of matter (Bennett, 2010), ecologies of experience (Manning & Massumi, 2014), assemblage theory (DeLanda, 2006), post-humanism (Braidotti, 2013), plant thinking (Marder, 2013), hyperobjects (Morton, 2013), and perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro, 2014), which engage differing modes of speculation via their attention to dimensions of the world that exceed human recognition. Such theoretical orientations have themselves led to a proliferation of techniques and technologies taken up within research concerned with citizen sensing (Gabrys, 2019, Pritchard & Gabrys, 2016) and the politics and poetics of listening and attuning to nonhuman ecologies (Kanngieser & Todd, 2020; Gallagher et al., 2017; Brigstocke & Noorani, 2016). Across these diverse conversations, there is a speculative impulse that considers alternative forms of experience through the problematisation of anthropocentrism, by attending to the agency of nonhuman processes and technologies, and in grasping subjectivity as embedded in the materiality of the world.

The fourth key area of speculative thought informing this collection concerns the way speculative fictions across literature, music, and the arts have been engaged as sites of critical thinking across the humanities and social sciences (Dawson, Chap. 14). From Donna Haraway’s (2013) reading of Ursula Le Guin; Aimee Bahng’s (2017, 2018) work on Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany; Jayna Brown’s (2021) theorisation of Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra; to Kodwo Eshun’s (2018) exploration of Afrofuturist sonic fiction, a central tenet of each of these works is to take speculative fictions themselves as modes of creative and critical enquiry. For example, Elizabeth de Freitas and Sarah Truman (2021: 4) explore “how examples of [speculative fiction] pursue an ecological cosmic sympathy with the non-human, and how close readings of these texts allow scholars to think creatively about new kinds of inquiry in the Anthropocene”. Here, a politics of thinking futurity is palpable that does not cease when one leaves the otherworldly visions presented within speculative fictions. Moreover, it is a politics much more radical than one of being hopeful, since the ways we story the future determines how we invest in the present (Bahng, 2018: 3). Advancing this politics through what she terms Black utopias, Jayna Brown liberates the term ‘utopia’ from its connotations of a universal hopefulness; she attests:

I am not arguing for life according to a model in which we have been restored to some original state, or for life in which we have been granted rights according to some social contract. I don’t hope for that. In fact, I don’t think utopia needs hope at all. Hope yearns for a future. Instead, we dream in place, in situ, in medias res, in layers in dimensional frequencies. The quality of being I find in the speculations considered here is about existence beyond life or death, about the ways in which we reach into the unknowable, outside the bounds of past, present, and future, of selfhood and other. This is what I call utopia: the moments when those of us untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress here on earth celebrate ourselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium. (Brown, 2021: 1–2)

The fifth engagement includes speculative and critical design practices that produce novel ways of thinking the future as a way of responding to specific ethico-political problems (see Cutting, Chap. 7; Fearns, Chap. 9). As with speculative fictions, such speculations are committed to a politics of this world in their inclination to problematise the kinds of questions that are possible to be posed within the conditions of the present (Malpass, 2013). We see such political propositions in the work that appears on the cover of this book; The Other Place by Olivier Cotsaftis: an urban architectural design that aims to open up different ways of speculating with the future of urban life besides the logics of limitless consumption and, we might add, beyond more troubling capitalistic ‘speculative urbanisms’ (see Woodworth, 2020; Leszczynski, 2016). As Cotsaftis argues (Chap. 3), speculative design pushes beyond the problem-solving practices within which design is often confined. Presenting instead a form of speculation that is not directed with utopian ideals, Cotsaftis’ images grasp at ‘alternative nows’ as ideas about social organisation and living that change what appears possible in the present. Far from the production of new possibilities ex nihilo, to focus on alternative nows means thinking speculations that arise instead, as Vyjayanthi Rao (2014: 19) argues, out of an already existing “murky, indeterminate terrain of potential”.

The sixth and final engagement directly concerns the advancement of speculation and speculative thinking in philosophy. Whilst several philosophers undergo careful attention in this collection as speculative thinkers—including Irigaray (Fannin), Guattari (Burdon; Dawson), Haraway (Kraftl; Patchett), Derrida (Doel and Clarke), Borges (Doel and Clarke), and Spinoza (Gerlach)—most notable for us is to recognise a specific genealogy of speculative thinking linking Whitehead, William James, Stengers, Debaise, and Deleuze. Contrary to the tradition of speculative thinking in philosophy posited as a task of thinking outside of experience and thus beyond the empirical (Kant, 1998), this genealogy develops speculation as a precise task of producing abstractions that ‘thicken’ the category of experience (Debaise & Keating, 2021). If Kantian transcendental deduction insists on a split between noumena and phenomena—of the thing as it is and the thing as it is perceived—speculative reason would be something necessarily opposed to the practical and active. Pursuing something different, the genealogy we are turning to recuperates speculation by insisting that one of the most important problems today is to develop forms of speculative thinking so as to exclude nothing from experience. Whether through speculative reason (Whitehead, 1929), radical empiricism (James, 1996), in characterising immanence as “Spinoza’s speculative proposition” (Deleuze, 1980), or in the insistence of the possible (Debaise & Stengers, 2017), speculation emerges not as something that is ultimately superfluous or marginal to practical action but itself as a process that is precisely capable of problematising the conditions of the present and altering the limits of the calculative logics that characterise it (Wilkie et al., 2017). Here it is worth elaborating two of the ways this reading of speculation is detectable in philosophy and social theory today, and particularly how this mode of speculation comes to rethink what gets counted as the ‘empirical’ besides transcendental limits.

On the one hand, this genealogy is crystalised in the Speculative Turn (Bryant et al., 2011): a book developing the value of speculation across object-oriented, correlationist, and panpsychist modes of thought, amongst others. Whilst recognising the diverging approaches to speculative thinking housed within this turn (see Harman, 2011; Shaviro, 2014), at least part of the enthusiasm surrounding this speculative and object-oriented turn, as Povinelli (2016: 84) notes, hinges on the sense that these conversations rethink the relationship between aesthetics and aesthesis to “provide us with a sense-perception of objects independent of our cognitive capture”. In doing so, this recent engagement with speculative thinking might be read as an attempt to stretch the categories of objects and matter beyond the logics of simple localisation that deem them inert, inoperative, and outside of the ontological.

On the other hand, this philosophical genealogy also gains expression today through the work of the Groupe d’études constructivistes founded by Stengers and Debaise. Different to the speculative turn, the work on speculation developed out of this group informs a commitment to questions of experience and the production of abstractions that speaks to a number of the ideas expressed by this collection. This community of speculative thought does not advance a new ontology of objects, but directly seeks to reappraise experience as central to a pluralistic universe that is already primed with alternative modes of living and thinking. At the forefront of this work is Stengers’ (2005, 2006) revisitation of Whitehead and development of speculative thinking as it intersects diverse ecologies of practice (see also Landau, 2021; Puig de La Bellacasa, 2017; Savransky, 2021). Refusing to limit thought to toxic modern categories that poison our thinking, and paraphrasing her own appeal to Whitehead’s philosophy, we too are drawn to Stengers’ inventive style that dares “to propose that we [are] not prisoners of those categories” (Stengers, 2008a: 50–1).

One notable theoretical contribution here is the way Debaise develops this speculative genealogy through what he terms a ‘speculative empiricism’. Responding to a radical empiricist imperative to excluding nothing from experience, and drawing especially on Whitehead’s (1957) speculative philosophy, Debaise (2017: 164) introduces speculative empiricism as a technical philosophy for contemplating experience besides all a priori limits and dualisms (perception vs the imperceptible, conscious vs unconscious thinking, intentional vs non-intentional, etc.). For Debaise, a speculative empiricism alters the kinds of questions philosophy is able to ask since “the speculative problem is constituted not by an analysis of perceptual experience, nor by a philosophical anthropology, nor by a relation to given experience, but rather by an approach to existence as such” (2017: 116). In rethinking the metaphysical terms articulating existence, speculative empiricism responds to a tendency within Western philosophy to assume that the abstractions created to understand empirical things adequately qualify their ontological qualities and possibilities for experience. As Russell Duvernoy (2019: 477) explains, the problem with abstractions in the context of a speculative empiricism is: “What gets left out is the way that vaguely felt or sensed intensities, not subsumable under a category of identity, drive our experience at a subrepresentative level”. Hence, the primary question of a speculative empiricism is to ask: “[t]o what extent do unexamined assumptions about conceptual abstraction hinder, block, or prefigure experiential attention?” (Duvernoy, 2019: 460–461). Questioning the assumptions of abstraction, speculative empiricism insists on the risky imperative of constructing different lines of thought that attend to those elements of experience that are disqualified and deemed not worth paying attention to.

How To Think Abstractions?

At the beginning of this introduction, we suggested that speculation is geographical. This claim goes beyond disciplinary implications—we are arguing that speculating is geographical because it demands considered investments in the relations between thinking and the earthly. Speculating is to think-practice the force of abstractions as they register, differently, across various terrains and have the power to transform those settings. Here we delve into this practice of thinking abstractions as a speculative and pragmatic affair concerned with the consequences of abstractions—how they configure the frameworks for evaluating experience and offer opportunities for what Savransky (2021: 25) refers to as a “situated art of noticing”. Speculation, in this manner, is thus pertinent for intensifying aspects of events that dominant abstractions demand we overlook: it “stipulates that we must reject the right to disqualify” (Debaise & Stengers, 2017: 15).

Abstractions extract and generalise certain peculiarities or resonances in the world out of broader processes, and therefore enable a consistency of perception in grouping together the disparate in the form of the individual or the similar. As such, we cannot think without abstractions. And yet, abstractions also limit thought when such suppositions are deemed to have a self-evidence that gets mistaken for the reality that they represent (see Jeyasingh, Chap. 10)—what Whitehead (1948) describes as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is why Whitehead insists on greater vigilance over abstractions arguing that “a civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility” (1948: 59), or “produces minds in a groove” (p. 196). Thus the task of Whitehead’s philosophy, as Tom Roberts argues, “is to create concepts that go beyond the specialised ‘grooves’ of professionalised knowledge practices” (2014: 973).

Whilst Whitehead (1948: 59) maintains that it is philosophy that is the critic of abstractions, the call to be vigilant over abstractions is one that Derek McCormack (2012: 716) has extended in order “to affirm the value of a differentiated sense of abstraction for geographical thinking and research in a world where what counts as lived space is arguably becoming increasingly complex”. Such vigilance is critical if we are to better come to terms with the present in which it has become increasingly apparent that our abstractions, as Debaise and Keating (2021) discuss, have “become machines that have run empty”. The very stakes of this problematic, and precisely why abstractions come to matter in determining not just theoretical choices but what forms of experience are made possible, are explicated by Susanne Langer when writing that:

The formulation of experience which is contained within the intellectual horizon of an age and a society is determined, I believe, not so much by events and desires, as by the basic concepts at people’s disposal for analyzing and describing their adventures to their own understanding. (Langer, 1978: 6)

Abstractions in Langer’s account are the conceptual possibilities of an intellectual horizon that condition experience: abstractions matter for determining what, in an era, it is possible to think. The inverse of this is that abstractions equally determine what is made impossible and what is disqualified. To ‘think’ abstractions, then, to take care of what they do and what they restrict—it is to encounter the force of concepts as they effectuate different resonances and different ways of thinking and living. Indeed, as Debaise (2017: 23) argues, “it would be no exaggeration to see Whitehead’s philosophy as one of the boldest attempts to give abstractions a fundamental role in experience. Abstractions are neither representations nor generalizations of empirical state of affairs but constructions”. Thinking abstractions, therefore, is a far cry from a mode of ‘lofty thinking’ divorced from a material politics of this world. Equally, thinking abstractions is not merely concerned with circulating new neologisms. To flesh out this position, in what follows we propose that thinking abstractions must instead dismantle the opposition between subjective knowledge and objective fact; fold together theory and practice; and, consequently, reconfigure modes of evaluation.

Principally for Whitehead, speculation is a task of developing abstractions that are distinct from the closed perspectives of either primary brute facts or, on the other hand, secondary values. One way to understand this task is the way Whitehead identifies the bifurcation of nature into two distinct realities as a disastrous abstraction for thought. “Another way of phrasing this theory which I am arguing against”, Whitehead writes, “is to bifurcate nature into two divisions, namely into the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness” (1964: 30). Modern thought, for Whitehead, has been determined according to a bifurcation of nature that results in a tendency to explain away that which does not coincide with scientific materialism as simply subjective, secondary qualities. As Stengers argues (2006: 1), this Modern abstraction of nature is reducible to either the values we assign to it through perception (such as, for Whitehead, the red glow of a sunset) or the “dull affair” of material obeying laws of nature (such as the molecules and electric waves through which scientists explain a sunset). Reacting against the bifurcation of nature, Whitehead dismantles this opposition between subjective knowledges and objective facts. As Whitehead continues:

The nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature. The meeting point of these two natures is the mind, the causal nature being influent and the apparent nature being effluent. (Whitehead, 1964: 31)

In this proposition Whitehead signals a particularly exciting possibility for thought where, and speaking now in our reflections as cultural geography researchers, we frequently run up against empirical occasions that expose “the sheer ugliness of the opposition between valid, rational knowledge and mere subjective opinion” (Stengers, 2018: 414). For instance, J.D. Dewsbury (2000) responds precisely to this problem when staging the intuitive utterances of the ‘performative’—whether in the theatre or scenes of social action—“where the unfounded and unmediated status of becoming is valorised such that society (the objective) and the individual (subjective) are simultaneously enacting a conjunct substantiality” (p. 488). Following Whitehead, we might also refuse in pedagogical spaces to capitulate to the terms of the supposedly more valid objective knowledge of scientific materialism. Crucially, as Stengers (2018: 409) attests, “this is not a formula for a conquering enlightenment but for a cautious, relational exploration, and a situated one, as the effects are never ‘objectively’ good or bad, but are not ‘only subjective’ either”. Whitehead’s philosophy offers a radical refusal of this distinction between the false alternative of subjective and objective that is neither concerned with fading into a universal totality nor clinging to the relativistic knowledge of subjectivity.

In refusing this false alternative of the subjective and objective, the call to think abstractions must apprehend thought within the fields in which they gain resonance, to fold together theory and practice. This does not privilege epistemology at the expense of ontology, as with Cartesian, Kantian or phenomenological traditions that tend to be concerned with what we can know at the expense of questions about what there is. Instead, as Steven Shaviro shows, Whitehead adopts a radically speculative position: “I do not come to know a world of things outside myself. Rather, I discover—which is to say, I feel—that I myself, together with things that go beyond my knowledge of them, are all alike inhabitants of a ‘common world’” (Shaviro, 2014: 3). Here, ideas and abstractions come about through engagements with the world, a folding together of theory and practice, such that any speculative adventure, as David Rousell (2021: 1) suggests, must refuse “to cleave the activities of thought from the activities of sensing, feeling, moving, and living”. Philosophy after Whitehead is thus a matter of feeling as knowing. In exposing the limits of disqualifying, empty categories, thinking abstractions involves an intensification of experience vis-à-vis the potential manners through which we apprehend it, which become indistinguishable from each other. As Andrew Lapworth (2015: 5) argues, “Whitehead’s philosophy thus implicates the becoming of thought and bodies within the world’s material process, re-directing our attention towards ecologies of nascent abstractions that present opportunities for creative experiment with different immanent forces and potentials”. Thinking abstractions, here, arises as a method of experimenting with ideas in their emergence by way of practices, to sense difference within repetition as Merle Patchett (2016) writes.

What, in other words, thinking abstractions necessitates, is an enquiry into modes of evaluation How do we register the force of events according to that which is possible to articulate within certain framings? Which concepts become inscribed and reinscribed as part of the apprehension of experience—and, accordingly, at what point do those concepts run empty? What becomes unknowable or unsayable due to the absences within epistemic habits? Perhaps too, how do we negotiate (and value) the multiplicity of possibilities and alternatives that speculative reason calls to attention? Exposing the limits of critique, whilst also necessarily pursuing its own mode of evaluation, speculation demands that we rethink versions of events that had appeared fixed or singular according to ready-made values and abstractions. At the same time, as a new mode of evaluation—now more situated and immanent—speculation might register the alternatives of such events. Evaluation itself, as Williams (2022: 11) suggests, must speculate with its own pluralism, thus “holding open the possibility that something different might arise out of this world or this event”.

The Collection

The collection is grouped into themes which situate this speculative imperative to think abstractions across three domains: ethics, technologies, aesthetics. In what follows, we tease out each of these themes both as possible trajectories for extending the ethos of the book, and to introduce how the chapters in the collection amplify these problematics as components of speculative geographies. The allocation of chapters across these themes is not meant to be exhaustive, and we encourage readers to engage each of these works with a spirit of speculation attuned to what other framings, interpretations, and connections are possible.

Ethics

This first theme of the book is concerned with an impulse to take care of the alternative as a way of pluralising experience. Such a focus demands a speculative ethics engaged with the ways “categorical abstractions are something we may fabricate in order for them to fabricate us” (Stengers, 2008a: 51). Taking care of the alternative is a practice of holding open the possibility that we might be able to think the world differently; the point being that the bounds of our ways of thinking are not set in stone. A speculative ethics, in this way, is also a question of analysis and evaluation: it is about how we register the force of the possible as constitutive to what appears materially concrete in the environments we inhabit (Williams & Collet, 2021; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). In holding open the possibility of the alternative, Whitehead is resolute in his claim that speculation has been the salvation of the world, for speculation “made systems and then transcended them” (Whitehead, 1929: 76). What is striking about this sentiment is that it demonstrates a mode of speculation capable of transcending already existing evaluative frames and abstractions, but without itself ever become transcendent.

To consider this claim further we turn to the notion of speculative ethics advanced by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa as “everyday ecological doings” (2017: 22), which she contrasts with the transcendent “moralism of anthropocentric ethics” (p. 13). For Puig de la Bellacasa, it is through speculation that we might cultivate forms of ethics beyond the myth of transcendent truths and universalising moralism, which has been catastrophic in its location of ethics in terms of human life rather than across ecological systems, and is moreover deadly in its privileging of particular human lives over others. Speculative ethics, rather than moralistic judgements, as Joe Gerlach suggests, can be “considered an ongoing and experimental speculation in how to generate—and attend to—different forms, atmospheres, spaces, affects, bodies, and materialities of existence” (2020: 200).

Let us be clear that this is as much about conceptual possibilities as it is about cultivating practical possibilities in the form of new behaviours and activities. We would go so far as to say that the two are inseparable for, as Whitehead argues, “[a]s we think, we live” (1968: 63). As Melanie Sehgal suggests (2014), we might see Whitehead as cultivating a renewed form of ethics that is concerned with being lured into non-conformity with environments that shape us according to modern habits of thought. Speculative ethics, therefore, is a mode of thought capable of getting us outside of the toxicity of dominant abstractions in order to construct different ways of knowing and living.

Situated as part of this question of ethics, in Chap. 2 Jayna Brown develops an ethics of terraformation capable of troubling assumptions about humans and their relationship with broader ecologies. Turning to the speculative visions of Black and Indigenous women directors, Brown suggests that—at a time of planetary crises—possibilities for renewal must involve reconceiving the very criteria through which the human is defined. Brown traces a connection between the racial, gendered, and ableist category of the human within European thought, and the expression terra nullius, in order to problematise the role of this violent abstraction in colonial devastation.

In Chap. 3, Olivier Cotsaftis presents The Other Place: a speculative ‘urban heterotopia’ that problematises resource-intensive and human-centred forms of urban design and living. Commencing with a discussion of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, Cotsaftis examines the innovations staged through a series of experimental cities and the possibilities for urban life they give rise to. Recognising a certain failure of these examples, however, Cotsaftis emphasises the potential for biophilic design principles as well a ‘pluriversal’ politics. A central proposition of the chapter, and one which we might consider a form of speculative ethics, is to insist on the importance of a practice of thinking the alternative as part of speculative architectural and urban design.

In Chap. 4, Marcus Doel and David Clarke question the pursuit of speculative geographies through the writing of Jacques Derrida and Jorge Luis Borges, amongst others. In doing so they evocatively address how Zeno’s paradoxes provide ways of thinking relations of space and time that are no longer defined in terms of their real or speculative qualities. The authors foreground an impossible space and time that endures in spite of both British idealist attempts to position movement and space in terms of its ‘unreality’, and in recent attempts to think space and time as relational and speculative; neither satisfy Zeno’s paradoxes, leaving behind only a certain unthinkability of space and time.

In Chap. 5, Joe Gerlach proffers a gentle insistence on Spinoza’s passion as capable of intensifying the ethical import of the speculative. Putting forth the unique coupling of Whitehead’s process philosophy and Spinoza’s substantialist monism, Gerlach suggests that both thinkers practice an attentive ethics: “to dismiss nothing from their enquiries, but to instead afford the same philosophical dignity and gentleness to all modes, material and immaterial”. Speculative ethics, here, is indebted to a commitment to passion and passionate forms of reason—a technique for confronting false problems, which emphasises that how one conceives of, and negotiates, the problem of the false problem matters.

Problematising the idea that speculation is reducible to ‘practico-theoretical tools’, in Chap. 6, Carlota de La Herrán Iriarte insists that speculation must become an experimental, micro-subjective venture if it is to amplify the pre-cursive, and not pre-meditative, registers of the world. The chapter draws primarily on the notion of faith within the radical empiricism of William James, and skirts around the speculative question of what it might mean to take a leap of faith—as one such experimental venture. Constructing some precise opportunities for such an approach, de La Herrán Iriarte theorises three speculative dispositions which engender a particular openness towards novel and unforeseen connections.

Technologies

The second theme aims to grasp the force of speculation as it arises through particular technologies and techniques, wherein speculation is understood to be modified, at least in part, by the operations and mediations of technical things capable of enacting certain kinds of spatio-temporal exteriorisation. The motivation here is to explore what kinds of techniques and technologies might complicate dominant abstractions that risk disqualifying and deadening experience. This attention to the technological is critical because, if speculative thinking comes to refer just to the speculations of a particular subject, we might ask: what privileges are enforced when researchers appeal to the importance of their singular views? Our aim to understand speculation besides the interiority of the subject is thus because the alternative approach tends to locate speculative thinking within human experience—experience that, more often than not, is itself primarily derived from exteriorisations of technical processes of perception (Stiegler, 2010).

In arguing that speculation is not limited to the perceptive registers of human subjects, we are thus interested in exploring the interconnections between speculative thinking, technological systems, and experimental techniques. There are a number of ways in which we can gauge the significance of this focus. For example, when in Cosmopolitics I Stengers (2010) develops the idea that the ‘neutrino’ particle has a paradoxical mode of existence, in doing so she is not just merely drawing attention to the non-objectivity of scientific knowledge practices but is instead developing the case for thinking the neutrino as a technological speculative entity par excellence. As Stengers observes, the neutrino—this “genuinely phantom particle, which ignores walls and barriers”—is of interest, at least in part, because it is “an object that is difficult to observe” (2010: 21). On one level, the neutrino is difficult to observe because it exists in an empirical reality in the sense that it is something made evidencable through certain technologies of observation: the neutrino requires “an enormous number of instruments, interpretations, and references to other particles” (Stengers, 2010: 21) that makes it possible for this theoretical particle’s existence (its mass) to be classified as part of the empirical real. And yet, on another level, the neutrino exists in a speculative reality that is something open to certain kinds of theoretical thinking prior to its discovery as a thing with an observable mass: the neutrino “had been postulated, for theoretical-aesthetic reasons of symmetry and conservation, long before the means for ‘detecting’ it were created” (Stengers, 2010: 21–22). Insofar as it had been postulated, theorised, and used operationally in technical thinking prior to its actual discovery as an observable entity, the neutrino is a unique way of thinking about how technologies offer opportunities to mediate abstractions that engage in different modes of thinking the experiential. As one instance of thinking the interconnections between speculation, technologies, and techniques, then, the process of thinking the unobserved neutrino in a speculative reality is possible precisely because it involves the technological production, movement, and circulation of certain abstractions.

In Chap. 7, Kieran Cutting presents how a workshop card game acts as a set of deterritorialising forces and techniques that modifies a subject’s sense of the future. The chapter theorises the notion of ‘speculative praxis’ by turning to Deleuzian engagements with speculation in the context of youth workshops organised in collaboration with UK charities. Uniquely, by considering some of the productive tensions between capitalist realism (‘there are no alternatives’) and speculative praxis (‘other futures are possible’), the chapter gathers impressions of other material futures: futures that, whilst being enacted through the semiotics and affects of the card game, remain stubbornly irreducible to pre-conceived calculative logics.

In Chap. 8, Maria Fannin questions how traditional notions of time become modified by technologies of gamete freezing that are able “to arrest, reset, and restart the time of fertility”. Advancing this as a practice of speculative reproduction, the chapter advances the concept of ‘speculative time’ as a way to understand precisely how speculative reproduction involves certain leveraging of human biological risk. Problematising the idea that speculative time would merely reinforce neoliberal logics, Fannin argues that a more affirmative reading is possible through the emerging possibilities speculative reproduction offers for “non-normative reproductive arrangements”.

In Chap. 9, Vera Fearns examines the potential of speculative design in education, and specifically for the task of thinking about planetary futures. The chapter presents a set of immersive and experiential activities that took place as part of the NeoRural Futures summer school in Rome in 2019—including examining resources for ‘signals’ as matters on the margins of dominant modes of thought, and constructing figurative ‘amulets’ as speculative technologies for future scenarios. The chapter thus seeks to reinvigorate traditions of both speculation and educational work via a commitment to aesthetic and embodied practices, which are capable of making the abstract seem more immediate.

In Chap. 10, Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh brings Deleuze’s concept of fabulation together with Berberian Sound Studio by Peter Strickland, a film notable for its playful illumination of Foley work—the post-production tactic whereby a film’s sound effects are re-created through various materials for the purpose of enhancing audio quality. Challenging the idea that Foley work is valuable simply as a means of creating more accurate encounters with the sounds of cinema, Jeyasingh demonstrates how the audio-image of Berberian Sound Studio mediates between reality and unreality and, in so doing, poses speculative questions about the generative potential of cinematic encounters in producing a people to come.

In Chap. 11, Thomas Keating asks, ‘what remains of nuclear remains when the human no longer remains?’. In doing so, the chapter considers how the concept of remains opens thought up to the speculative qualities and materialities of nuclear waste. Arguing for a speculative empirical approach to thinking nuclear waste futures, the chapter focuses on the way nuclear semiotics—specifically, the Spike Field nuclear marker concept by Safdar Abidi and Michael Brill—highlights the value of pre-individual expressions of sense, which may prove important for transferring memory of nuclear permanent geological repositories for nuclear waste 100,000 years into the future.

In Chap. 12, Peter Kraftl thinks speculatively about geographies of childhoods, plastics and other ‘stuff’. Drawing on Haraway’s (2011) speculative fabulation, the chapter evokes two events: on the one hand, an event of sculpture making from scavenged plastic and, on the other hand, a gathering and analysing of microplastics through nanoscience biosampling. Across these events what emerges is a way of making palpable, at different registers of experience, the multiple entanglements of a child’s life with plastics. Significantly, the chapter attends to plastics as technologies for constructing different stories that, through their performative manifestation, produce alternative dispositions for thinking human and nonhuman life differently.

Aesthetics

The final theme explores the styles of thought within artistic and creative practices that, like any proposition in Whitehead’s terms, serve to lure feeling. In following Whitehead, as Lapworth suggests, “we might reframe the transformative potential of art in terms of its capacity to disrupt habitual modes of experience, acting to “lure” thinking and feeling beyond the representational territories of the already familiar” (2015: 4). To be clear, ‘feelings’ for Whitehead are not limited to conscious states: “they strive towards the feeler, towards the subject, and yet they do so only insofar as the latter is presented as a virtual form of existence” (Debaise, 2017: 70). In this section, we consider aesthetics as a domain that is uniquely capable of intensifying or animating such virtual forms of subjectivity.

We want to insist on a certain coupling between such manners of intensification and the abstractions available across histories of practices. Tarrying with the task of thinking abstractions, speculative aesthetics is concerned with the particular problems that are being animated by the arts, such as the universes of reference (values, norms, institutional codes, etc.) that characterise a given era or milieu. To give an example: in the context of the genre of ‘abstract art’ of the twentieth century the predominant problem will likely be that representational painting does not get at the experiential—indeed, we might argue that it is owing to a refusal to represent ‘reality’ in any concrete way that abstract art transforms virtual subjectivities. The activity of looking at a painting and being modestly transformed, then, is always scaffolded according to a whole other set of abstractions that permeate an artwork in ways that are not necessarily visible or recognisable. Such scaffolds might be an encounter with impressionism, the beauty ascribed to geometry in Greek philosophy, or the unacknowledged influence of non-European art.

Lures for feeling within aesthetic practice are situated then—they inherit a history and a socio-cultural context—and, thus, it is imperative to acknowledge how aesthetic transformations are conditioned according to the abstractions of a particular milieu, and also to examine the particular problems that animate those aesthetic practices. And yet, such practices are also irreducible to their singular situation. Returning to the proposition of feeling with which we started this theme, they are irreducible to a particular situation because they animate virtual subjectivities and sensibilities. A vital proposition as part of speculative aesthetics then, as Stengers suggests, is to “say why you choose to tell, or to do, this, on this precise occasion … do not shield yourself behind general justifications that block pragmatic imagination, the envisagement of the kinds of difference this choice is liable to make here and now” (Stengers, 2008b: 29).

In Chap. 13, George Burdon insists on the importance of Felix Guattari’s philosophy for speculative thought insofar as it challenges us to think outside of the comfortable and predictable style of thinking that he terms ‘common sense’. Common sense, for Burdon, is at the core of a contemporary spirit of cynicism by which thought recuperates the similar over the greater challenge of harbouring the different and the unforeseen. Introducing us to the sonic experiments of Irish composer Jennifer Walshe, Burdon alerts us to the generative potentials of novel incorporeal universes—what we might conceive as lures of feeling—emergent through aesthetic practices.

Also turning to Guattari, in Chap. 14 Oliver Dawson theorises the notion of ecosophic acts of feeling as speculative and aesthetic intensifications of experience. Dawson presents an encounter with artist and poet Sophie Herxheimer, whose poems, collages, and cuttings, Dawson suggests, pivot more on a certain transformation rather than any imitation of a world ‘out there’ and, as such, expand what counts as experience. Deftly weaving together vignettes of Herxheimer’s work with the ecosophy of Guattari, as well as theorisations of Amerindian animist subjectivities, Dawson makes explicit a speculative propensity of aesthetics to produce intensities with which to feel the future into the present.

In Chap. 15, Merle Patchett advances speculative taxidermy as a pedagogical tool for thinking in risky and creative ways about histories and futures beyond the human. Patchett takes us through a speculative workshop of artefacts of the plumage trade, including pages from fashion or anthropological magazines, a piece of Paradisaea apparel, and natural history illustrations—all of which themselves played a key part in the formation of the particularly peculiar abstraction of the Apoda myth: a legless, perpetually in-flight, bird-of-paradise. Working through these materials, the chapter problematises the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and names in scientific nomenclature, and offers alternate ways of re-writing and re-enchanting human-avian histories.

In Chap. 16, David Rousell, Michael Gallagher, and Mark Peter Wright present the Listening Body: a series of experimental sound walks organised with children attending a community arts programme in Manchester, UK. In retelling this series of events, the authors demonstrate how learning can take place speculatively through shifting affective atmospheres that are irreducible to singular enclosure since they envelop bodies, environments, histories, discourses, feelings, sensations, and ideas. There is, moreover, a micropolitical intervention highlighted here, where—in discussing some acts of humorous rebellion by the participants—the authors recognise how sonic experiments might disrupt spaces of pedagogical authority and social stratification.

In Chap. 17, Rachael Wakefield-Rann and Thomas Lee survey the dominant abstractions used to define dust and soil since the nineteenth century. Whether understood as amorphous containers of other (unhygienic) things, and despite research into the composition of these substances during the technoscientific orientation at the molecular scale in the twentieth century, the authors maintain that dust and soil are not readily sensed or specified. In response, they turn to citizen-sensing projects that make the microbial dynamics of these substances more legible. Introducing ‘exposme’ and ‘senstance’—concepts that might lure different ways of feeling—Wakefield-Rann and Lee speculatively transform how we think about soil and dust.