Technoscientific Imaginaries and Futures

JPM999

Is the future already gone once the world itself is pronounced? When is the future? These questions puzzled philosophers as well as physicists for millennia. This course will, however, advance slightly different, more modest, approach toward the notion of the future – especially in relationship to technoscience. How humans conceive future is central to the understanding of present social life. But how specifically do people make sense of the unknown – and unknowable – future? In this course we will discuss several directions that might help us to tackle – not resolve or offer solutions – and “accept” such vital questions. At the same time, imagining a better future has been constant collective feature (perhaps) of the entire social history, that reached its climax over the course of modernity. Visions of future(s), expectations, anticipations, the role strange of economists in co-shaping collective futures, utopian, anti-utopian, dystopian and catastrophic projections of future are integral components – barely thematised – in private and public discourse. The course will explore how social collectives craft, negotiate, contest and realize such projections. In the course we will be oscillating between technoscientific imaginaries that are inclining to utopian and dystopian science fiction, “profitable futuristic hubris” (e.g. Kurzweil & Harari), modes of anticipation and systematic techniques of expectations, and futures that are profiling themselves as promising in security-related, socio-economic, environmental and psychological sense. Is another technoscientific world possible? – one is tempted to ask nowadays. It remains extremely difficult to come up with definitive answer, but it is surely worth asking this question.

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