A Hauntological Turn for STS

• In Event: Ghosts of Modern Futures Past – I

Abstract

How futures are made and take hold of the present—in the form of expectations, promises, visions, or imaginaries—is a major concern of STS research. But what happens when futures are abandoned? In a world saturated with talk of innovation, transformation, and change, the corollary to the new is the rejected, obsolete, declining, and decaying. And yet, do the dreamscapes of the past ever disappear completely? Do they not continue to haunt even the flashiest proclamations of the new? One approach to studying the origins and solidification of the futures that societies aspire to is the conceptual framework of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff 2015). Drawing on Derrida’s (1993) concept of hauntology and related works in media studies, music, literature, political theory and architecture (Fisher 2014; Davis 2005), we extend this line of inquiry to ask what happens when societies desert the futures that once gave form and meaning to collective life.

Davis, C. 2005. “Hauntology, spectres and phantoms”, in French Studies 59(3), pp. 437-379.
Derrida, J. 1993 [2006]. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York: Routledge.
Fisher, M. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. London: Zero Books.
Jasanoff, S. and S.-H. Kim (eds.) 2015. Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Authors

• Kasper Hedegaard Schiølin, Harvard STS Program, Harvard Kennedy School

• Stefan Schäfer, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies