Abstract
Savransky discusses the possible role of theory within the empiricist framework that adventures adopt, and he calls for a new mode of theorising that he associates with the idea of ‘speculative experimentation’. After discussing recent debates around the death of theory in the social sciences and humanities as well as some of the new empiricisms that have emerged in response to it, Savransky articulates a speculative, empiricist, and future-oriented mode of theorising. By engaging with the work of A. N. Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers, John Dewey, and others, the chapter specifies what speculative experimentation is, what its relation to experience is, what its requirements are, and what it might be capable of offering to future social theory.
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- 1.
Or perhaps it is just like Rodin’s Thinker, given that he wrote that ‘[w]hat makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils, and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes’ (cited in Caso and Sanders 1977: 133). I am thankful to Kane Race for bringing this illuminating passage to my attention.
- 2.
There are numerous versions of this argument and even some empirical studies on what sort of practice thinking might be (for a historico-philosophical study of ancient philosophy as a spiritual exercise see Hadot 1995, on intellectual invention in science and culture see Schlanger 1983, for a discussion of ‘conceptual practices’ in science and mathematics see for instance Pickering 1995, for a recent attempt at empirically studying social theory as a practice see Heilbron 2011).
- 3.
Hunter (2006: 98) relates this emergence to a post-phenomenological renewal of seventeenth century European university metaphysics, which ‘can be characterised as an academic discipline (or culture) whose thematics concern the relation between an infinite, atemporal, self-active, world-creating intellect and a finite, “duplex” (intellectual-corporeal) worldly being. Since the seventeenth century one of this discipline’s central tasks has been to forestall the autonomy of positive knowledges by tethering them to philosophical reflection on this relation of finite to infinite being.’
- 4.
This can be said to be the case at least to the extent that one retains ‘theory’ as a somewhat abstract characterisation of a mode of self-interrogation that might allow as to articulate a different ethics of thought. Like any abstraction from concrete fact, however, Hunter’s characterisation omits part of the truth. So does mine, insofar as it takes his as a point of departure. Indeed, when one approaches the individual works of some of the authors loosely associated with the moment of Theory on the question of experience, as intellectual historian Martin Jay (2005) has done with Barthes, Foucault, and also Bataille, for instance, it becomes clear that these theorists’ relation to experience was less straightforward and more ambivalent than here suggested. I will come back to this, concerning Foucault, below and in the Afterword.
- 5.
For a critical overview in social theory see Savage (2009).
- 6.
From the point of view of a characterisation of ‘Theory’ as a technique of self-problematisation, critiques of ‘critique’ or of ‘Theory’ appear as treating both terms interchangeably.
- 7.
The mode of speculation that I am seeking to articulate here differs in various ways from what in recent years has acquired the name of ‘Speculative Realism’ (SR) and ‘Object-oriented ontology’ (OOO) (e.g., Bryant 2011; Harman 2010; Meillassoux 2008). One of SR’s central claims is the rejection of the Kantian and Husserlian gesture that Meillassoux (2008: 5) termed ‘correlationism’. Namely, ‘the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’. As Graham Harman (2013: 23) argues, correlationism is thus the adoption of an intermediate position between idealism and realism, suggesting that ‘we cannot say that the world either exists or fails to exist outside human thought’. This is another way of approaching the same sceptical position we have explored above. To that extent, the anti-correlationism of SR and the form of speculation I am attempting to outline share a common point of departure. The speculative realist project that ensues from this, however, constitutes an attempt to both affirm the possibility and explore the implications of a thought of reality that is independent from human knowledge, it is an attempt to think the ‘in-itself’ of things. For speculative empiricsm, on the other hand, human and other-than-human thinking is not a mere correlation to the facts but ‘a factor in the fact of experience’ (Whitehead 1958: 80). Thus, it is a practical tool for the experimental actualisation of possible futures (for different speculative projects see Bryant et al. 2011).
- 8.
- 9.
We should not be confused by Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term ‘belief’ in this passage. Indeed, to the extent that they are developing a philosophy of becoming thoroughly committed to an immanent world that is not just immanent to God, or any other transcendental value, but only immanent to itself, the term ‘belief‘ here should not be interpreted in the Christian mode that we discussed in Chap. 5. It is not a belief in God, that might concern the transcendental existence of the latter, but one that concerns ‘the infinite immanent possibilities brought by the one who believes that God exists’ (1994: 75). It this commitment to the radical immanence of the world—a plane of existence that William James (2003) would call ‘pure experience’—that gives meaning to the notion of an ‘empiricist conversion’. The shift is spiritual, for sure, as the term ‘conversion’ provocatively suggests. But it involves not the claim that there is a God beyond our immanent world, but the wager of a world that matters, and which includes the possibilities of those who believe in the existence of God as their inhabitants. Perhaps this is what Whitehead (1926: 49)—who, admittedly, was more of a theist than either Deleuze or myself—meant when he proposed that ‘[r]eligion is world-loyalty’.
- 10.
I am here drawing on the distinction made by Atwood (2011: 6) between science fiction and speculative fiction. What she means by ‘science fiction’ is ‘those books that descend from H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled, blood-sucking Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters–things that could not possibly happen. ‘Speculative fiction’ by contrast, ‘means plots that descend from Jules Verne’s books about submarines and balloon travel and such—things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books.’
- 11.
To be sure, it may be that what comes after it involves a different form of inheriting the past. In this sense, to say that speculation is future-oriented is not to say that it is unconcerned with the past. As I have argued, that it takes the existence of the past as a stubborn fact that demands to be inherited does not mean that this fact determines ‘how’ it is to be inherited, or what the ‘right’ account of the past is. Thus, the future with which speculation is concerned might indeed involve the future of the past.
- 12.
This is not to say that speculative propositions are not to be judged as to their truth or falsehood. What this means is that their possible truth is not primary nor inherent in them, but is an event that can happen to them. As James (2011: 141, emphasis in original) was at pains to argue, ‘truth happens to an idea, it becomes true, it is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, the process namely of verifying itself, its verification.’
- 13.
A lesson she herself learned from Marilyn Strathern (1992: 10).
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Savransky, M. (2016). For Speculative Experimentation. In: The Adventure of Relevance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57146-5_7
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