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Martin Savransky

 

Casting Off From Modernity: Speculative Thinking and Potential Spaces

A long critical and heterogeneous tradition in the humanities and the social sciences, one which could be traced all the way back to Kant, has problematised the universalist aspirations of modern thinking and knowing by arguing that the place of such practices cannot be ascribed to a ‘view from nowhere’ but is always owing to, and shaped by, the cultural, historical and political configurations that constitute its own conditions of possibility (for example see Foucault, 1966/2001). Thinking, it is argued, is always already inscribed in place, indeed, it cannot help but reenact the conditions that make such thinking possible. Such a critique is certainly important and valuable insofar as it makes present the need to make a certain ecology of situated thinking perceptible (Haraway, 1991; Stengers, 2010), as well as to limit the ambitions of a modern, Western universalism that would claim to speak for the world as a preexisting whole. While retaining a commitment to the situated nature of thought and knowledge, in this paper, however, I will argue that such a mode of problematisation needs to be complemented with an attention to the inventive and adventurous capacities of thinking. Namely, the extent to which thinking might not only be emplaced but might become a force for allowing us to cast off from our modern territories, and contribute to the invention of potential –that is, unrealised– spaces and places of problematic togetherness where previously incompatible experiences might be brought into (co)existence. As Michel Serres (1990/1995: 188) has argued: “Casting off throws us elsewhere, or toward and into another world so that this relation causes a new ‘object’ to appear in the literal sense, a thing cast before us”. By drawing on philosophers Alfred North Whitehead, Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze and Isabelle Stengers, I will reclaim speculative thinking as a mode of thought that is primarily concerned with the invention of propositions that may act as ‘lures for feeling’ (Whitehead, 1929/1985), that is, a casting off into potentiality, an adventurous invitation to the experience of unrealised possibilities and against the logic of probability and plausibility that characterises the modern territory. Speculative thinking, I will contend, might not only be a force for allowing us to cast off into potential spaces and places, but, in so doing, it might constitute a powerful practice for the metamorphosis of modernity as a place of thought.

 

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