Speculative Globalities

Bishnupriya Ghosh
English
UC Santa Barbara

Participants

This Residential Research Group sought to develop more fully the logic of the premise that uncertainty is the only certitude of being in contemporary globalities. A statistical logic having to do with unknown or unstable states, lack of information, and the tasks of apprehension and prediction, uncertainty refers to a situation where the number and nature of all possible states are unknown. Hence it can be a particularly useful critical logic for what remains invisible, unknown, and unthought in our present confrontations with global phenomena.New global phenomena (e.g. yoga, bird flu, cellular robotics) in constant flux direct a rethinking of existing categories, established genealogies, fixed epistemological pathways, and available vocabularies. To follow the entangled circuitry of present global forms requires a radical openness to intervention from other epistemologies and, ideally, collaborative interdisciplinary investigation.

The group proposed radical openness as a critical habit—informed by uncertainty—as reasoned but imaginative speculation. The focus of the research group was to analyze multi-leveled global phenomena through the lenses of risk and uncertainty. What kinds of globalities are conjured in examining each phenomenon? What remains invisible, recessed? The corollary task is to rethink ways in which we can know, even recognize, such phenomena. Uncertainty approaches technological diffusions, pandemics, or drug use as global flows whose fluctuating states demand constant revision of existing intellectual paradigms; the wiring of genealogies in new combinations; historically and regionally comparative perspectives; and committed interdisciplinarity—if not a new vocabulary.