118. Speculation in our eyes: fictions for thinking about STS
Juan Felipe Guevara-Aristizabal, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa, México; Agustín Mercado, Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades, UNAM
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
Among the many ways of understanding science fiction, there is one that emphasizes the speculative aspect of it. This emphasis presents us with a view of unique worlds informed by some radically different way of being in them or thinking about them. A speculative approach to science fiction allows us to depart from a view of science and technology as the elements that make or break a future. A particular gadget or theory doesn’t immediately change the future, but necessarily falls into a complex network of values, expectations and relations, which modulate and modify it, as it is valued in a social, political or ecological way. It is impossible to pinpoint a single fact that makes up for the difference between fiction and reality. The fiction will seem removed from us, not because it’s inconsistent with our own reality, but because it’s entirely consistent within an alternate system.
Speculative fiction, as Isabelle Stengers has suggested, is an invaluable vantage point for generative questioning of reality, akin to the thought experiments performed in various scientific disciplines. Through its lens, we can ask what happens if scientific knowledge, scientific practices and technological elements weave into different systems of suppositions – including seemingly impossible ones.
This proposed session is an invitation to think about speculative fiction, both in its theoretical import to understand the functioning of science and technology in a reality that comprises many worlds, and as an exercise in narration, to explore our own fictions and partake in this wondering.
