Millenarian Metropoles: Science, Empire, and the Production of Novelty in Contemporary Liberalism

• In Event: Travelling Knowledge (I): Concepts, Practices and Institutions

Abstract

In the classical conception of empire, a basic spatial distinction maintains the global imbalance of power: the metropole, referring to administrative and commercial urban centers, and the periphery- spaces of dependence characterized by their subordination to the core. Scholarship across many disciplines has complicated this narrative, noting the ways in which these two spaces co-construct, subvert, and blur one another through the global flow of commodities and knowledge. In particular, there now exists a rich body of literature exploring the production of scientific knowledge throughout the Global South- former peripheries turned sites of modernity and progress. In this paper, I call attention back to the metropoles, now home to research institutions of unparalleled global prestige that serve not only to produce knowledge, but novelty. I argue that these sites- Silicon Valley, London, Paris, and Boston, among others- act as top-down nodes in the global scientific network, conceiving massive "disruptive" technological undertakings that promise to solve humanity's most urgent problems. These enterprises, which include automation, precision medicine, artificial intelligence, and renewable energy, set the global agenda for science as a righteous, millenarian, and salvational force in the world. I argue that the evermore promissory and ambitious nature of the projects that flow outward from the world's scientific metropoles serve to rehabilitate imperial power and protect the authority of liberal scientism.

Author

• Aaron Neiman, Stanford University