An upcoming opportunity to think together again:
“ANTICIPATION”:
This workshop is an interdisciplinary investigation of the politics of “anticipation” among scholars working at junctures of life, technoscience, affect, and temporality. We sense that anticipation has become a dominant orientation of value, affect, and truth production in the contemporary. This project puts into conversation scholarship concerned with affect, questions of speculative epistemologies, and temporal politics. We seek to investigate, on the one hand, assumptions that speculation about the future is necessary even while the future must remain ultimately uncertain and, on the other hand, injunctions that we can and should be prepared for and affectively orient towards those futures as if they were already real. Therefore, as a hegemonic orientation, “anticipation” calls for intensive critical investigation.
Recent work on “the affective turn” across the humanities and social sciences is, of course, especially pertinent to this project. By conjoining questions of affect from feminist, queer and other scholarship together with discussions of speculative epistemologies within technoscience and political economy, we hope to provoke new ways of theorizing together affect, knowledge, and time. We see anticipation as culturally and biopolitically transnational, however unevenly engageable and intensely realized. This makes the need for collaborative deliberation even more important.
As an orientation, anticipation cuts across substantive topics and we have selected participants whose individual projects range widely. Our planning involves a two-day workshop with short precirculated papers at a retreat venue in the San Francisco Bay area slotted for March 28 and 29, 2011. We also plan an online publication of our collective project, which allows us to include multi-media material and to rapidly disseminate our deliberations in “anticipation” of the need for timely critical conversation.
