The Ascendancy of a Political Technology

| 28.10.2024, 6:15 pm, PEG 1.G150 | Prof. Dr. Liliana Doganova (PSL University Paris) | 

The forest fires and extreme episodes of drought and flood that have afflicted Europe in the last few years incarnated not only the effects of climate change but also the aporias of climate action. Struggling with the urgency of saving the present and the preparedness for a warming future, how can we envision the possibility to act on the future? In this lecture, Liliana Doganova proposes to address this issue through the devices that compose our relationship with the future. She focuses on a device that recently came under the spotlights in debates on climate change but has been entrenched in economic and policy practices for decades. This device is discounting: a technique that values all things through the flows of costs and benefits/revenues that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present.

Building on herrecently published book „Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Zone Books, 2024)“, she outlines three troubles with discounting. First, is the future worth less than the present, and should it be counted or discounted? Second, does value stem from the future, and should looking to the future guide acting in the present? Third, is discounting a general form of action, which encompasses all kinds of entities and issues? She discusses these three troubles through past and present examples relating to the use of discounting in governments’ and investors’ attempts at valuing forests and mineral resources.

Analysing discounting as a political technology leads her to exploring the links between temporality and valuation. She concludes that shifting focus from the problem of (not) knowing the future to the problem of (de)valuing the future enables us to examine afresh what acting on the future means and entails.

Liliana Doganova is Associate Professor at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, Mines Paris, PSL University. She is the author of “Valoriser la Science“ and co-author of “Capitalization. A Cultural Guide”.