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Technologies of Anticipation in Contemporary Societies

Technologies of Anticipation in Contemporary Societies

Contemporary societies are confronted with novel constellations of political, economic, and ecological challenges ranging from global warming, pandemic outbreaks to refugee crises and financial meltdowns. When anticipating contingent futures, societies tend to rely increasingly on ‘technological fixes’, investing them with the capacity of averting or solving future problems. Taking up insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), the research training group (RTG) sets out to empirically examine how ‘fixing futures’ works in technologies of anticipation. It proposes to investigate two different dimensions of ‘fixing’: ‘stabilisation’ and ‘repair’, focusing on economic practices, modes of government, and processes of life as the main research areas.

About

The RTG considers the interplay of practices of ‘stabilisation’ and ‘repair’ as indicators of ‘technologies of anticipation’ – that is, socio-material orderings and temporal orientations that have the capacity to define entire domains of knowledge, forms of social organisation, or even societies as a whole. Tied to a politics of temporality and affect, technologies of anticipation not only aim to identify and imagine future trajectories but also to arrange or accommodate what is yet to come.

Research Programme

Anticipation conceives of the future as both fundamentally open and inevitable and demands actions in the here and now to change the course of events. Until now, “anticipation” has been addressed in two different ways. Some authors describe the general future-orientedness of contemporary societies (Adams et al. 2009; Mackenzie 2013; see also Dolez et al. 2019) and highlight distinctive “logics of anticipation”: e.g. precaution, preemption, and preparedness (Anderson 2010). Conversely, other scholars have introduced anticipation as a specific mode of futurity which particularly hinges on contingency and complexity and ultimately on the impossibility of controlling future developments (Alvial-Palavicino 2015).

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News + Events

Fixing as Repair

‘We are doomed to repair.’ With these words the journal for architecture and urbanism ARCH+ introduces the project “The Great Repair” in its 250th issue. In two ARCH+ issues, an exhibition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and a connected education program, The Great Repair invites us to think about the importance of repair practices in light of escalating socio-ecological crises on a planetary scale as a counternarrative to growth-driven ideas about a green capitalist transformation. In a similar vein, literature in the social sciences, humanities, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) increasingly engages with the concept of repair as a vital and potentially transformative practice for fixing futures, shifting the focus from one-size-fits all solutions to the socio-material embeddedness of transformation processes in the everyday practices of repair and maintenance.

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