Saturday August 15th 2020

Reading Speculative Research (Alex Wilkie, Martin Savransky, Marsha Rosengarten, eds.)

We began reading Unthought by Katherine N Hayles, but decided that we needed to look at some texts that engaged more with the idea of “speculative” consciousness and cognition. Katherine N Hayles makes a distinction between, in a way, the living and the non-living or the cognitive and the non-cognitive. While we are keen to read more about her ideas of what constitutes cognition and consciousness (a point of difference here is probably that we consider geological entities to have consciousness and the capacity to make choices), we ultimately found that the introduction to speculation in “Speculative Research” enlivened us and gave us more entry points to our project, specifically in terms of ideas about time (resisting the modern arrow of time); the way that many applications of speculation (financial, for example) to linearly instantiate the prolongation of the present; and the co-relation of speculation to governance, control, security and capital. Our interest lies in how to shift speculation into the realm of the impossible, and the unknown.

We decided that we should perhaps begin by licking a rock!