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This course engages with the question of speculation in ways that encompass the artistic, the economic and the philosophical, with excursions into the literary and the scientific. Speculation will be approached as a powerful logic of contemporary life whose key instantiations are art and finance. Both are premised on the power of contingency, temporality, and experiment in the creation (and capitalisation) of possible worlds. Once social reality becomes speculative and opaque in its own right, risky and algorithmic, overhauled by networked markets in everything, what becomes of the distinction between not just art and finance, but art and life? From being at least hypothetically separate from the economy, the artist becomes a creative tasked with diligently optimising their quantified self, and the two senses of speculation converge. At the same time, however, we need to fight for another sense of speculation which retains the commitment to experiment and non-utility, for social as well as aesthetic – and cognitive - reasons. As Henk Slager notes, ‘From an artistic perspective, it seems essential to start investigating the following methodological question: how could we engage in that assignment of reconsidering and revealing speculation in order to arrive at novel panoramas and “not-yet-known-knowledge?’
Some of the departure points for the notion of speculation relevant here will be: speculation in making, speculation in gambling, speculation in thinking, and speculation in action. The artist is a good example of a speculative subject, trying and failing, investing in sheer supposition and experiment, working towards a de-functionalisation of materials, social contexts, and ultimately her own position – a source of propositions, advancing possible worlds on the uncertain credit of today. But more broadly than this, there is the by now well-observed link between artmaking and the modality of ‘speculative fiction’ which has been often articulated in a number of publishing and curatorial projects in the past decade, increasingly taking on the discourses of ecology, new materialities and posthumanism. The ‘becoming-speculative’ of the world cannot be contained between the poles of art and finance but must instead be situated in a much more extensive, and much more strange, topology of practices. This also means reckoning with the future-forming and future-destroying powers of the financialization and digitalization of the planet. But it also means surveying material and social inventiveness from the ground up: speculating with constructs of the family, speculating with technologies, speculating with identity, speculating with systems of logistics and co-ordination. |
