A Speculative Worldview to Make Sense of Complexity

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Speculative Space: A Conversational Laboratory to Explore Speculative Education and Research in the Professions

Abstract

A Speculative Worldview to Make Sense of Complexity

How do we understand and make sense of our world? We observe and describe. And yet, there are times when literal, prose descriptions are insufficient to convey meaning. We are entangled in systems that perpetuate a permanent state of sociopolitical-ecological crisis and are in urgent need of wayfinding. A speculative worldview offers an imaginative exploration of complexity to navigate and make sense of our present. The speculative turn in many disciplines has no single, unifying definition, however, there are distinguishing qualities. In this summary, I will first sketch speculative as a worldview and then describe some non-exhaustive qualities of a speculative approach, namely dark, aesthetic and transtemporal.

A worldview is a basic set of beliefs that guide action. A postpositivist worldview asserts a single, objective reality observable through science, while a constructionist worldview asserts a reality constructed by individuals through experience. A speculative worldview, by contrast, believes in alternative ontologies that embrace complexity and resists reducing reality into a sum of its parts or effects. This worldview attempts to sidestep repetitive circularities, like correlationism and dialectical logic, subject/object hierarchies, and open new possibilities for sensemaking. For example, within the speculative realism philosophical movement, Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) offers a flat ontology free of subjects --everything is an object-- and all objects are in part withdrawn from direct access including from themselves (i.e. the elusive unconscious in psychology).

The dark, unknown, or uncertain is of central concern to a speculative approach. Literal, categorical descriptions are insufficient to explore this mysterious aspect of reality. Therefore, the use of metaphor, story, and other aesthetic practices are needed to go beyond the literal and offer a more sensuous analogy to convey meaning and evoke imagination. The use of metaphor creates an aesthetic effect that removes the distance between conceptual understanding and embodied knowing. The writer NK Jemisin describes speculative fiction as the use of metaphor to reflect on present concerns. She says her Broken Earth trilogy was engaging Ferguson and anti-Blackness, and that although “intellectually, [she] understood. . . feeling it was something different.” A speculative approach is not chiefly concerned with prediction or revisions, but with felt observation and reflection through metaphor to make sense of the present.

Concerns of the present are rooted in the past and often stretch into the future. Therefore, a speculative approach which reflects on the present is transtemporal. It can time travel to the past and fill historical gaps, as in critical fabulation, or it can leap forward and offer visions of the future that convey authentic hope, or warning. Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, is eerily prophetic in its descriptions of a 2024 Los Angeles in flames, destabilizing wealth inequality and a politician who wants to “make America great again.” And yet, Butler was observing the present and asking what happens if this goes on, and how do we survive it. Likewise, speculative approaches in education, social science, and design use aesthetics as a prism to make present complexity visible and meaningful.

Author

• Tiffany Chambers, University of California - San Francisco