Living otherwise in uncertain and speculative times

Abstract

Speculation has come to define the current conjuncture in myriad ways, from the structural hegemony of finance capital to the ways that people and communities are always thinking about and remaking their futures. In this brief commentary, I draw out five ways in which the articles in this special issue advance our understanding of speculation in the contemporary moment: speculative urbanism's temporalities, geographies, undersides, more-than-human materialities, and articulations. I also pose questions of where the concept of speculation might lead, hoping to further enflesh this analytic from the perspectives of different socio-spatial positionalities across the globe. I ultimately consider how storytelling and future envisionings are already leading people to live life otherwise in uncertain and speculative times.

Our world isn’t ending. It already ended…Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever. (Rice, 2018, pp. 149–150)

Recently I have been asking my students to engage with speculative fiction by Anishinaabe authors to learn more about the land upon which Queen’s University resides. For the past 2 years, I have tasked my Urban Natures class with reading and writing about a novel called Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice. The book is speculative fiction, positing a future scenario in which a small Anishinaabe community in Northern Ontario is suddenly cut off from the rest of the world – the electricity and phones go out, and no one is quite sure what is happening. But this community has to go on living, banding together and making life through Anishinabek practices. At one point in the story the protagonist, Evan, visits a respected elder and knowledge keeper, Aileen, to ensure she has enough supplies. During their conversation, Aileen explains to Evan that apocalypses have been ongoing against Indigenous communities since settlers first arrived, and that Indigenous peoples have always had to draw on their cultural and cosmological practices to go on living. This short fictional novel, while speculative and imaginative, is also deeply material, providing lessons for how Anishinaabeg can continue to resist settler colonialism and other forms of exploitative practices – like extractive forms of speculative urbanism – on their land.

Speculation, as the contributors to this special issue argue, encompasses future-oriented actions and imaginaries that engage ‘affective, discursive, and physical labour’ (Bear, 2020, pp. 47–48) to accumulate value, but which also allow people, their families, and their kin to stay alive. Such forms of speculation are at once material and imaginative; they are acts of envisioning that create alternative pathways to capital and to life. This special issue animates and spatializes this concept of speculation. The articles together offer a nuanced conjunctural analytic of the multiscalar workings of speculative urbanism, from the perspectives of larger structural regimes of capital, racial capitalism and (neo)colonialism, to national and local state land regimes, to the everyday lives of people who are displaced by or forced to grapple with this speculation. In this brief commentary, I draw out five ways in which the articles in this issue advance our understanding of speculation in the contemporary moment: speculative urbanism's temporalities, geographies, undersides, more-than-human materialities, and articulations. I also pose questions of where the concept of speculation might lead, hoping to further enflesh this analytic from the perspectives of different socio-spatial positionalities and storytellers across the globe.

Temporality of the speculative urban conjuncture

Speculation is not new, but there is a novelty to today's speculation. Authors in this special issue help historically contextualize speculative urbanism, tracing the current conjuncture back to modes of colonial speculation that financed the Indian railway and Wall Street's financial control of banking in the Caribbean (Goldman, 2021; Gidwani and Upadhya, this issue). This collection of articles, however, points to the specificity of the contemporary conjuncture. Michael Goldman in particular details how the sheer amount of speculation, the liquidity of capital, and the speed with which it moves and re-makes environments is unprecedented. In historical materialist terms, then, there is a particularity to this conjuncture: it is a moment in the historical trajectory of capitalist ‘development,’ and has become the contemporary terrain upon which social forces are organized and articulated (Gidwani and Upadhya, this issue).

But there is also a temporality inherent to the act of speculating itself. Indeed, anthropologists and geographers define the term in part through its temporal direction – the unprecedented speculation of the current conjuncture constitutes ‘new urban subjectivities’ (Goldman, 2021, p. 8) embodying future-oriented actions and imaginaries (Bear, 2020). Leitner et al. (2022) elaborate on this governmentality approach to speculation. Their research explores how capital speculation cultivates a whole host of new anticipatory behaviours, and how the speed and uncertainty of (dis)investment forces residents of kampung neighbourhoods to speculate on whether to stay or leave, where to build new houses, and at what moment it is lucrative to buy and sell. Crucially, though, they argue that speculation is not just about accumulating economic capital, but also ‘maintaining and recreating cherished cultural values’ (Leitner et al., 2022, p. 10) such as commoning practices and ‘connections with the land and the rural landscape’ (Leitner et al., 2022, p. 15).

Thus, while the temporalities of speculation are often delimited and theorized as future-oriented, these ‘new’ subjectivities are also informed by the past, drawing on ancestral practices, connections to the land, and kinship affects. As Leitner et al. hint, many people speculating in this conjuncture do so not solely with future anticipation, but also in connection with their ancestors, their land, and their kin. Just as with Waub Rice's Evan and Aileen, speculation is not simply future-oriented but is lived by some in what Whyte (2018) of the Potawatomi Nation calls spiralling time: drawing together the past, present, and future – and especially the knowledge of ancestral generations – in order to make life under sometimes apocalyptic conditions. One of the strengths of these essays, then, is not only how they point to capitalist speculation as being future-oriented (anticipating the future, disciplining people to anticipate this future). But they also, as Leitner et al.’s (2022) work begins to reveal, provide an opening for understanding how speculative subjectivities incorporate the past, in ways that don’t reproduce the linear temporal logic of future-oriented speculation. This begs us to consider: How might living in spiralling time be a kind of resistance to the future-anticipatory disciplining of speculative capital?

Location of the conjuncture

The conjunctural approach of this collection helps elucidate how speculation – a global project and process – takes particular configurations as articulating elements in Jakarta and Bengaluru. In other words, the authors are provincializing the supposed universality of capitalist speculation through attention to the conjunctural terrain of their cases. For instance, Anguelov (this issue, p. 13) looks at what he calls the ‘historical, path-dependent evolution of [Jakarta's] speculative state spaces.’ He shows how neoliberal infrastructure financing models such as public–private partnerships and state-led State-Owned Enterprise models ‘articulate with local political-economies’ which is ‘critical for explaining the changing spatialities of state power and capital accumulation strategies’ (Anguelov, this issue, p. 3), thus shaping the particularities of new state spaces in cities in the Global South, in his case Jakarta. The past also haunts the present in Carol Upadhya and Deeksha Rao's (2022) piece. These authors point to the specificity of colonial/post-colonial forms of land possession in Bengaluru, India (as distinct from settler colonial forms), where non-privatized land tenures are being enclosed and converted to private property through slum redevelopment schemes, thus effecting dispossession without physical displacement. Similarly, Gidwani and Upadhya (this issue, p. 11) show how ‘land's potential for value generation pivots on a combination’ of inter-scalar, but place specific, elements, including ‘personal charisma, place-specific knowledge…localized instruments of power…regional political networks…as well as inter-scalar circuits of capital.’

This analytic of conjunctural articulation – thinking of how global and local capital articulate/are conjoined with regional networks and localized technologies of power – provides a methodological framework that allows us to consider how speculative urbanism operates elsewhere. And thinking through speculative urbanism elsewhere can help us reflect back on this concept and perhaps refine it, as Robinson (2016) might urge of us. In what follows, then, I bring speculative urbanism to the site of much of my own work, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to consider the ‘underside’ of speculation.

Securitization as the underside of speculation?

In helping to define the speed and globalizing tendencies of speculative urbanism, Goldman offers the example of Spain's banks investing in infrastructural debt in Brazil. Some of my own research has traced the everyday impacts of these investments in mega event infrastructure in Rio de Janeiro. To residents of the complex of favelas where I have done most of my work – Complexo do Alemão – it is impossible to understand the kinds of global speculative activities that took infrastructure as their object, without also understanding how the state was trying to mitigate against unforeseen outcomes and to promote and protect this investment. At the time of the mega events, the state government rolled out a heavily militarized police pacification project that saw the military police permanently occupying low-income favelas near the mega event infrastructure. This project drew on long histories of military police violence against favelas and low-income afro-Brazilians, a history which became articulated violently to speculative investment in both World Cup infrastructure and slum upgrading schemes (Prouse, 2018). In other words, the articulating elements of speculative urbanism in Brazil – which include global forms of speculation – are often tied to violent forms of global and national security apparatuses. Speculation is by definition risky, and this risk begets attempts to securitize speculation for those most exposed powerful agents, from banks securitizing subprime mortgages to states unleashing violent policing initiatives.

Taking speculative urbanism to Brazil, then, demonstrates how securitization and security are intimately related to these risky practices. But how can we think of these relations? Are these dialectical tendencies and, if so, how can or should they be accounted for in speculative urbanism's conceptual and methodological framework? For instance, how have the police or military been involved in removing people from the land for real estate development in Jakarta and Bengaluru? What is the state's role in speculative urbanism, not only through liberalizing financial regulations and privatizing assets, as Goldman points out, but also through mobilizing a racialized security and policing apparatus? Of course, people who are uprooted, dispossessed, or exploited through speculative practices also form their own networks to manage risk, as Nowak argues. How, then, might organizing against policing and security apparatuses – or more generalized risk – also be central to speculative urbanism?

Speculative urbanism beyond real estate, infrastructure, and land

In his discussion of organizing efforts to manage speculative urbanism's risks, Nowak shows how speculation operates beyond the trifecta of physical infrastructure, real estate, and land – objects that, for good reason, have long held the attention of scholarship on financialized speculation. His focus, instead, is on how speculation operates in and through ‘digital sequences of 1 and 0s’ (Nowak, 2021, p. 3), where ‘venture capital speculation on platform firms and the data they collect has become increasingly influential for urban transformations across the globe’ (Nowak, 2021, p. 2). Not only does speculative activity occur through the digital, but so too do organizing other economic ventures, social reproduction, and care in the face of risk: Nowak documents how ride-hailing drivers use sociotechnical networks and apps, like WhatsApp, to organize insurance and emergency response. Speculative urbanism, here, manifests beyond physical infrastructure and land with the urban constituted through sociotechnical and digital networks.

Emma Colven's work likewise calls upon readers to think of speculation beyond land and infrastructure grabs, to consider speculative urbanism as a ‘socio-ecological process’ (Colven, this issue, p. 4), one that floods, gushes, gurgles, and precipitates. While speculative urbanism in Jakarta is of course invested in real estate, its imaginative and material dimensions are unequivocally bound with the ecologies of the city: speculative real estate development exacerbates land subsidence while simultaneously relying on land reclamation projects. The imaginaries, too, of the sinking city have underwritten investment in mega infrastructural projects – such as seawalls – while also projecting future urban developments and new capital cities elsewhere. The material and imaginative, the digital and physical, the human and non-human are all intertwined in contemporary forms of speculative urbanism.

These pieces open new possible horizons for thinking of the human and more-than-human forms of speculation that are central to making life and value in the contemporary conjuncture. While not a focus of this collection, these latter works inspire me to think of the very embodied forms of speculation associated with present-day financialized innovation economies. Life science industries, for instance, are often urban-based, relying on real estate development and speculative investment in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals for value accrual. But they also require clinical subjects: people whose labour involves participation in drug development trials (Cooper and Waldby, 2014). Anthropologist Kaushik Sunder Rajan (2017) argues that in India, those involved in clinical trials are generally folks who have already been victims of dispossession, de-proletarianization, and expropriation through the speculative kinds of investments this collection details. Some of the dispossessed engage in a highly speculative, embodied, socioecological, and clinical form of labour, in which their very cells, microbiologies, and bodily capacities are being speculated on by life science firms for drug development. These clinical labourers are, too, forced to speculate – on their life, in order to make a living. This, I argue, is also an important dimension of speculative urbanism, one that takes shape in a deeply embodied way.

Thinking of speculative urbanism as socioecology, digital platform, and embodied clinical labour unsettles traditional analyses of what constitutes the ‘urban,’ and, in so doing, brings to the fore resistances and alternatives to speculative capital. For instance, how is connecting to ancestors, future kin, and land – that is, living in a speculative spiraling time ––also a socioecological practice that remakes the urban? How do these practices involve fully embodied, microbiological, and affective selves, and increasingly play out through digital landscapes and peripheral forms of autoconstruction? Prising apart ‘the urban’ allows these authors to see some of the critical and vastly divergent ways of living in, under, and outside dominant speculative urbanism's violences.

Speculation as articulation

Speculation is a practice of visioning and articulating a future reality towards multiple ends: real estate and platform value accrual, debt repayment, land expropriation, livelihood generation, land reclamation, and connections with land and kin. The collection of papers shows how this articulation of a future reality draws together actors as they seek a return on their speculative investments and actions, with often dire consequences. Gidwani and Upadhya in particular emphasize speculation as an articulating practice by drawing on Stuart Hall's dual sense of the latter term. Following Hall, conjunctural alliances/articulations are made as different actors come together to articulate – enunciate – a hegemony of how things ought to be, a common sense of the social formation (Hall and Massey, 2010; see also Hart, 2003). Gidwani and Upadhya argue that, in Bengaluru, different social actors become aligned/conjoined at the contemporary speculative conjuncture as they together articulate a common sense future of (possibly) lucrative real estate development. These articulations can be, Hall and Massey (2010, p. 61) write, ideologically ‘disabling,’ especially when they make ‘the financial system [appear] beyond any possibility of intervention.’

But, as I have written elsewhere, these discursive articulations of a future reality can also challenge taken-for-granted hegemonies or even become the basis for liberatory practices (Prouse, 2021). Indeed, Hall and Massey (2010) explain that upsetting common sense articulations and crafting alternate visions are key to a radical politics. The political imperative with respect to dominant forms of speculative urbanism, then, is to materially and ideologically upend the taken-for-granted common sense that the speculative market is truth. To Goldman (2021, p. 17), this radical politics involves ‘excavat[ing] the workings behind this truth-making and truth-telling’ in order to ‘develop strategies to radically rethink its authority and power.’

This envisioning and radical rethinking is happening all around us – materially, discursively, and ideologically. I chose to open this short commentary with an excerpt from Anishinaabe speculative fiction because this futuristic envisioning provides one such way to live and be otherwise. It is a scenario where those who have faced (neo)colonial genocide not only survive but thrive through Indigenous cosmologies and ways of being in resistance to, but also outside of, mainstream speculative urbanism. Black creative and aesthetic work, too, articulates a way of being apart from racism and ongoing forms of colonialism. Katherine McKittrick (2022), for instance, identifies storytelling as teachings for navigating harm, and a mode to express and enact liberation (see also Hartman, 2008).

I want to end, then, by turning to another piece of speculative fiction that articulates a future visioning bound to the past, one that intervenes in common sense articulations of racial capitalism, climate change, and unhindered speculation. In other words, one for our moment. The book Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler was heralded during Trump's reign and the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as remarkably prescient. The story traces the journey of Lauren Olamina, whose not-so-distant future in California is defined by climate and economic crisis, whose walled neighbourhood is constantly under threat by people themselves who have been dispossessed. Eventually, Olamina is forced to make a difficult choice: between migrating to the newly privatized city, Olivar, to work a low-wage job with little freedom in exchange for security, or to start journeying North in hopes that she can find a better life. Choosing the latter, Olamina takes to the highway. As she walks, she encounters and forms community with a variety of people who must band together to make life under these catastrophic circumstances. This community's relational ethic of care, Afrocentric spirituality, and speculation about the ‘North’ have become an important touchstone for many at the current conjuncture, offering a way to imagine and live otherwise in uncertain and speculative times.

We are Earthseed. We are flesh—self aware, questing, problem-solving flesh. We are that aspect of Earthlife best able to shape God knowingly. We are Earthlife maturing. Earthlife preparing to fall away from the parent world. We are Earthlife preparing to take root in new ground, Earthlife fulfilling its purpose, its promise, its Destiny. (Butler, 2016, p. 157)