When speculation becomes politics

While the "power of scientific evidence" creates the impression that the situation is under control, the questions of when, for example, contact restrictions can be lifted, or what a future world living with coronavirus might look like, remain speculative. How will the Covid 19 virus mutate and which vaccines will still be effective then? How long will people continue to adhere to the restrictions, and how will the incidence of infection develop with lock-down measures?
What measures can be safely relaxed, and what effect will the reopening of schools have? Speculation plays a central role in all of this.

Speculation creates deficit of trust

"Even the evidence-based assessment of risk comes down to speculation - and such risk assessments currently determine the actions of our politicians," says Prof. Dr. Jeanne Cortiel in an interview with "UBTaktuell". Cortiel Professor for North American Studies at UBT, and edited the interdisciplinary anthology on "Practices of Speculation" with colleagues from both UBT and UC Davis. "Take face masks," Cortiel says in conversation with UBTaktuell: "First they were said to be useless, now they are compulsory wearing in many places - initially because their effectiveness seemed too low, but now it is plausible that even less than 100% effectiveness is enough. Both decisions were therefore understandable, it is only that, now, we have different, better-founded information than before." Yet Cortiel also warns: "This creates a problem of trust, as we often forget that science is a process that will never be completed once and for all." Prof. Dr. Christine Hanke (Chair for Digital & Audiovisual Media, UBT) adds: "At the same time, we see that in the course of the measures taken to contain the pandemic, existing power relations and social inequalities have been reconstituted and consolidated. It is therefore the task of the humanities and cultural studies to critically reflect on such social processes and political decisions."

Speculation makes passible radically new ways of thinking

In this respect, the volume addresses THE issue of the moment. “This is a moment of crisis on a grand scale, and the heightened uncertainties are forcing us to abandon any illusions of autonomy in order to fully confront our own vulnerabilities and those of our life-support systems. The future has opened up in radically new ways, and the speculative practices that give this volume its title are clearly becoming more relevant," the editors write in the preface. Speculation is not only the dominant principle in current politics - it plays an important role in numerous thematic fields of our culture, and imbues our thinking with a future of radical changeability. And so the volume explains practices of speculation in history and literature, in comics and computer games, in research on mould, and in performative research approaches in empirical social research, exploring both the closing, firmative, and the opening, affirmative dimensions of the speculative.

Some of the contents:

Prof. Dr. Susanne Lachenicht, Chair of Early Modern History, has written a paper on "Cultures of Speculation-Histories of Speculation". She sheds light on the history of speculative practices in the early modern period, and how they developed in the Renaissance and the so-called voyages of discovery of the colonial era, in terms of calculation of probability and risk, and of travel narratives and utopias. These developments allow a new look at how contemporary speculation breaks up or consolidates constellations of power.

Dr. Felix Raczkowski, research associate at UBT‘s Digital & Audiovisual Media research group writes about: "The Rule of Productivity and the Fear of Transgression - Speculative Uncertainty in Digital Games". He asks how digital games stage indeterminacies and what forms of speculation are used here. Uncertainties in digital games are examined with regard to two dimensions: On the one hand, they are a necessary condition for the game (otherwise we would already know how it ends), but they also contain concrete risks, such as acts of sabotage by individual players - which in turn should be prevented by sanctions.

In his article on "Spores of Speculation - Negotiating Mold as Contamination", Christoph Schemann, research assistant at the UBT’s Cultural Geography research group, deals with the production of knowledge about mould as a socio-material form of speculation that exemplifies how anticipated threats to human health are limited by preventive tactics. Schemann contrasts this example of firmative practices keeping futures at bay with urban practices such as "dumpster diving" that use dimensions of "contamination" for a multi-voiced and nuanced engagement with contingency.

In their interdisciplinary contribution to "Enacting Speculation - The Paradoxical Epistemology of Performance as Research", Prof. Dr. Wolf-Dieter Ernst, Professor for Theatre Studies at UBT, and Dr. Jan Simon Hutta (Research Assistant at the UBT’s Cultural Geography research group) show the ways in which the production of knowledge, especially in the scientific cultures of the Global North, depends on bodily and performative practices. Based on research on "performance as research" and an interdisciplinary seminar at the University of Bayreuth, they explore the potential of these practices not only for new scientific knowledge, but also for entirely new forms of knowledge.

Prof. Dr. Matthew Hannah, Chair of Cultural Geography, and Prof. Dr. Sylvia Mayer, Chair of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, jointly investigate "Scale and Speculative Futures in Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker and Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312". In their contribution, they analyse two science fiction novels that deal with current key technologies: nuclear power, artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and geoengineering. This interdisciplinary analysis focuses on the spatial dimension of the future in fictional worlds - as well as on the social constitution of space and time in the context of the risks of technological modernisation.

Prof. Dr. Jeanne Cortiel, Professor for North American Studies, and Prof. Dr. Christine Hanke, Chair of Digital & Audiovisual Media, undertake a dialogue between image studies and narrative text analysis in their text "Uncertainty between Image and Text in Ben Templesmith's Singularity 7 - Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative and Performance". They examine how comics use the relationship between image and text to create speculative narratives and imaginative spaces, and discuss the extent to which speculation is constitutive of the medium of comics. The authors show that this quality of the medium counteracts the stabilising effects of story and image - and thus makes comics speculative in their own way.