Speculation, Now

Speculation, Now

Author: Vyjayanthi Rao

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2015-03-23

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0822375907

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Interdisciplinary in design and concept, Speculation, Now illuminates unexpected convergences between images, concepts, and language. Artwork is interspersed among essays that approach speculation and progressive change from surprising perspectives. A radical cartographer asks whether "the speculative" can be represented on a map. An ethnographer investigates religious possession in Islam to contemplate states between the divine and the seemingly human. A financial technologist queries understandings of speculation in financial markets. A multimedia artist and activist considers the relation between social change and assumptions about the conditions to be changed, and an architect posits purposeful neglect as political strategy. The book includes an extensive glossary with more than twenty short entries in which scholars contemplate such speculation-related notions as insurance, hallucination, prophecy, the paradox of beginnings, and states of half-knowledge. The book's artful, nonlinear design mirrors and reinforces the notion of contingency that animates it. By embracing speculation substantively, stylistically, seriously, and playfully, Speculation, Now reveals its subversive and critical potential. Artists and essayists include William Darity Jr., Filip De Boeck, Boris Groys, Hans Haacke, Darrick Hamilton, Laura Kurgan, Lin + Lam, Gary Lincoff, Lize Mogel, Christina Moon, Stefania Pandolfo, Satya Pemmaraju, Mary Poovey, Walid Raad, Sherene Schostak, Robert Sember, and Srdjan Jovanović Weiss. Published by Duke University Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School


Speculation

Speculation

Author: Gayle Rogers

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 0231553498

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the modern world, why do we still resort to speculation? Advances in scientific and statistical reasoning are supposed to have provided greater certainty in making claims about the future. Yet we constantly spin out scenarios about tomorrow, for ourselves or for entire societies, with flimsy or no evidence. Insubstantial speculations—from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles—often provoke fierce backlash, even when they prove prophetic for the world we come to inhabit. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy? In this cultural, literary, and intellectual history, Gayle Rogers traces debates over speculation from antiquity to the present. Celebrated by Boethius as the height of humanity’s mental powers but denigrated as sinful by John Calvin, speculation eventually became central to the scientific revolution’s new methods of seeing the natural world. In the nineteenth century, writers such as Jane Austen used the concept to diagnose the marriage market, redefining speculation for the purpose of social critique. Speculation fueled the development of modern capitalism, spurring booms, busts, and bubbles, and recently artificial intelligence has automated the speculation previously done by humans, with uncertain and troubling consequences. Unraveling these histories and many other disputes, Rogers argues that what has always been at stake in arguments over speculation, and why it so often appears so threatening, is the authority to produce and control knowledge about the future. Recasting centuries of contests over the power to anticipate tomorrow, this book reveals the crucial role speculation has played in how we create—and potentially destroy—the future.


Hegel, Logic and Speculation

Hegel, Logic and Speculation

Author: Paolo Diego Bubbio

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-08-22

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1350056359

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book offers new critical perspectives on the relationship between the notions of speculation, logic and reality in Hegel's thought as basis for his philosophical account of nature, history, spirit and human experience. The systematic functions of logic and pure thought are explored in their concrete forms and processual progression from subjective spirit to philosophy of right, society, the notion of habit, the idea of work, art, religion and science. Engaging the relation between the Logic and its realisations, this book shows the internal tension that inhabits Hegel's philosophy at the intersection of logical (conceptual) speculation and concrete (interpretative) analysis. The investigation of this tension allows for a hermeneutical approach that demystifies the common view of Hegel's idealism as a form of abstract thought, while allowing for a new assessment of the importance of speculation for a concrete understanding of the world.


Speculate This!

Speculate This!

Author: Uncertain Commons uncertain commons

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2013-06-25

Total Pages: 126

ISBN-13: 0822376938

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Speculate This! is a concise, provocative manifesto advocating practices of "affirmative speculation" over and against contemporary forms of speculation that quantify and contain risk to generate financial profit for a privileged few. This latter mode of speculation is predatory and familiar, its fallout evident in ongoing environmental degradation, in restrictive legal claims on natural resources in distant lands, and in the foreclosures, evictions, and unemployment resulting from the financial collapse of 2007–08. While such exploitive speculation seeks to reduce uncertainty and pin down the future, the affirmative practices championed by the authors of Speculate This! engage uncertainty, contingency, and difference, and they multiply, rather than reduce, possible futures. In these affirmative practices, social relations and the creation of goods and knowledge are not driven by the desire for financial gain or professional status. Whether manifest in open-source software, eco-communes, global activist movements, community credit networks, or experimental art, speculative living affirms our commonality. As a collaborative work coauthored by a group of anonymous scholars, Speculate This! argues for and embodies affirmative speculation.


Risk Management, Speculation, and Derivative Securities

Risk Management, Speculation, and Derivative Securities

Author: Geoffrey Poitras

Publisher: Academic Press

Published: 2002-06-10

Total Pages: 628

ISBN-13: 9780125588225

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Presenting an integrated explanation of speculative trading and risk management from the practitioner's point of view, "Risk Management, Speculation, and Derivative Securities" is a standard text on financial risk management that departs from the perspective of an agent whose main concerns are pricing and hedging derivatives.


Weaponising Speculation

Weaponising Speculation

Author: Caoimhe Doyle

Publisher: punctum books

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 0615956661

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book contains the proceedings from Weaponising Speculation, a two-day conference and exhibition that took place in Dublin in March 2013. Weaponising Speculation was organised by D.U.S.T. (Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought) and aimed to be an exploration of the various expressions of DIY theory operative in the elsewheres, the shafts and tunnels of the para-academy. The topics covered all come under the welcoming embrace of speculation, spanning a broad range: from art, philosophy, nature, fiction, and computation to spiders, culinary cosmology, and Oscar the Grouch. The book itself aims to be more than just a collection of essays and catalogue of artworks, but also a documentation of the event as a whole. An object that both those present at the event and those who missed it would want to own - bringing something new to both sets of readers


Nature, Speculation and the Return to Schelling

Nature, Speculation and the Return to Schelling

Author: Tyler Tritten

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 1351379410

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Two decades ago, Schelling first resurfaced in Žižek’s Indivisible Remainder, and the same argumentative move of redeploying Schellingian themes for contemporary ends has continued to play a significant role in critical theory since (Markus Gabriel, Iain Hamilton Grant, Jean-Luc Nancy). All the articles in this volume attempt to take seriously the idea of Schelling as a contemporary philosopher: Schelling is read in dialogue with key figures in the canon of European philosophy and critical theory (Alain Badiou, Émilie du Châtelet, Gilles Deleuze, Paul de Man, Quentin Meillassoux, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilbert Simondon, Slavoj Žižek), as well as in light of recent trends in analytic philosophy (Brandomian pragmatism, powers-based metaphysics and semantic naturalism) – and such readings are not meant merely to highlight Schellingian influences or resonances in contemporary thinking but rather to challenge and interrogate current orthodoxies by insisting upon the contemporaneity of Schellingian speculation. That is, the aim is both to evaluate and constructively build upon this repeated return to Schelling: to probe, to diagnose and to experiment on the latent Schellingianisms of the present and the future. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.


Speculation

Speculation

Author: Marina Vishmidt

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-06-06

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0262373890

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A wide-ranging investigation of what speculation is, and what is at stake for artistic, curatorial, critical, and institutional practices in relating to their own speculative character. Engaging with the question of speculation in ways that encompass the artistic, the economic, and the philosophical, with excursions into the literary and the scientific, this collection approaches the theme as a powerful logic of contemporary life whose key instantiations are art and finance. Both are premised on the power of contingency, temporality, and experimentation in the creation (and capitalization) of possible worlds. Artistic autonomy, and the self-legislation of the space of art, have often been seen as the freedom to speculate wildly on material and social possibilities. In this context, the artist is seen as a speculative subject and a paragon of creativity—the diametrical opposite of the bean-counter obsessed with balance sheets and value added. However, once social reality becomes speculative and opaque in its own right—risky, algorithmic, and overhauled by networked markets—what becomes of the distinction between not just art and finance but art and life? This anthology surveys material and social inventiveness from the ground up, speculating with technologies, gender, constructs of the family, and systems of logistics and coordination. An ecology of speculation is traced—one that is as broken, specific, and enthralling as the world. Artists Surveyed include Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Ludwiński, Cameron Rowland, Salvage Art Institute, Andy Warhol, Mi You, PiraMMMida, Sam Lewitt Writers Include Lisa Adkins, Ramon Amaro, Brenna Bhandar, Octavia Butler, Cédric Durand, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Sophie Lewis, Dougal Dixon, Stanisław Lem, Isabelle Stengers and Phillip Pignarre, Steven Shaviro, Can Xue, Daniel Spaulding