Speculative DeliberationNathaniel A. Rivers @sophist_monster Saint Louis University

In his productively weird essay, “The Authenticity of What’s Next,” Timothy Richardson writes of the future as that which we like to “imagine and perform.” He sites the inventor Charles F. Kettering, who, in what Richardson

calls the “perhaps the greatest display of deliberative rhetoric ever,” argued, “We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.” Working through science fiction and the practice of

hacking, Richardson digs into how we make plausible and productive our speculations. Richardson connects speculation with deliberation through the practice of hacking: the working with what is already present to imagine what might

yet be(come).

“The simplest piece of powerful deliberative rhetoric I have ever encountered was on the Long Now Foundation website almost two decades ago,” Richardson writes. The Long Now Foundation was established to creatively

“foster long-term thinking in the framework of the next 10,000 years.” Richardson continues:

And it was that the year was written as 01996. It seems to me that that “0” registers as potential in all the right ways. It’s completely forward-looking. No one would write the date of a thousand years prior as 0996. Actually, that “0”

would be pretty horrifying, since that “0” is us. Insofar as that 0 indicates promise or potential, an incipient futurity that can be recognized now, perhaps one option is to live in the gap between what we know and what we have, to

embrace the hack ontologically as well as rhetorically. (Emphasis added)

Richardson’s conceptual juggling of science fiction, rhetoric, and deliberation is the perfect catalyst for my own speculative foray into deliberation as rhetorical activity. What I am after, in brief, is a hack of deliberation itself

by science fiction wherein both are transformed: neither reading science fiction as deliberative rhetoric nor writing deliberative rhetoric as science fiction, but hacking deliberative mechanisms within the attitude of science fiction: it’s

incipient futurity deliberative. In what follows I will explain what I mean by the habits of reading and writing science fiction, before departing from those two options to develop a third: what I am calling speculative deliberation.

"An astrobiologist asks a sci-fi novelist how to survive the anthropocene."

David Grinspoon Interviews Kim Stanley Robinson

The instinct to turn toward science fiction in moments of deliberation is surely nothing new. Reading it as equipment for living isn’t earth shattering, but why turn to science fiction in moments of existential threat? When we

deliberate upon the future we must choose between competing hypotheticals. Simply put, science fictions, which are far from homogenous in their scope, aim, and politics, can fill in the shadowy areas of these hypotheticals: they add

reality to the fuzzy choices we have to make.

In his interview with the astrobiologist David Grinspoon, Kim Stanley Robison is described as “the most important science fiction and political novelists alive today.” Of course, the merit of this claim is not the issue, but

rather that both monikers are ascribed to him. Here, thinking in terms of science fiction is linked to thinking politically, which here generally means deliberatively. The opening (and crucial) question asked of the sci-fi novelist by the

astrobiologist is, “Do you think our intelligence just isn’t adaptive enough to learn how to live sustainably?” The question goes to the heart of the matter: our survival and ability to effectively imagine it.

Robinson’s answer is rooted in the Anthropocene and his imaginative understanding of our embeddedness: “I have this intuition that because we evolved on Earth, and are, as individuals, part of a complex network of living

and natural forces, that we are biomes in effect. The result is that we will never be able to stay healthy if away from Earth for long. We carry the Earth within us, and by the same measure, I think we’ll always need the Earth around us to

replenish ourselves.” Part of Robinson’s deliberative strategy, then, is that remembering, “that our system is constructed for a purpose, and so in need of constant fixing and new tries.” This response resonates with Richardson’s

preference for hacking—working with what is available—and the speculative attitude I am eager to cultivate.

Sitting upon possible worlds, which is why I love this image, in conversation among and about them. It is the sprit of this exchange that I want to capture rather than the distinct positions they inhabit as reader and writer.

“Science Fiction and the Post-Ferguson World Mary Hansen Interviews Walidah Imarisha

More intensely in the vein of thinking politically through science fiction is the work of the Octavia’s Brood blog and now edited collection, which are committed to envisioning “alternatives to unjust and oppressive systems.”

As co-editor Adrienne Maree Brown argues in a video promoting the book, “all community organizers are involved in science and speculative fiction.” Deliberative rhetoric is here explicitly linked with science fiction. The work of social

justice hinges around always asking How else might this be? When asked by journalist Mary Hansen about the connection between science fiction and issues of social justice, Brown’s co-editor, Walidah Imarisha answers “I think that

science fiction and visionary fiction […] are a perfect testing ground to explore the countless alternatives that could exist to policing and institutions like prisons” (emphasis added). The realm of science fiction is a realm of social

experimentation wherein other worlds can be written and made realer.

The title of the project, Octavia’s Brood, does much compelling work in gesturing toward speculative deliberation. In addition to placing their work as part of the legacy of Octavia Butler and nodding to one of her more

famous works, brood suggests an attitude of thought: to brood is to think deeply about something which troubles you. It is an attitude of speculation.

Neither writing nor reading science fiction.

Speculative Deliberation

Across both of these sci-fi projects and concomitant interviews, there is an alignment of science fiction with attitude, in the way that Kenneth Burke, who following I.A. Richards, defined attitude as, in part, incipient action.

Persuasion to attitude, which is how Burke largely saw literature, prepares us to act rather than giving us explicit commands. Burke writes, “If there is to be a storm, poetry (pure literature) and propaganda (applied literature) will both

deal with it. … The poet will prepare us … by saying, ‘beware, a storm approacheth,’ while the pamphleteer will handle the matter by saying ‘Go thou, and buy rubbers.”

I am interested in this persuasion to attitude beyond the confines of reading and writing science fiction. I want to import and plug in the attitude of speculation into deliberative rhetorics and the composition thereof. What I

aiming for, then, is a speculative deliberation we can hack into rhetoric and composition methodologically and pedagogically. Something other than a literature course or a creative writing workshop: something uniquely rhet/comp. I am

after the What else can we do with rhetoric?

So what more can we hope for? Can we venture our own pedagogical “what’s next?” in thinking through speculative deliberation in the composition classroom? For the present, for me, the speculation of science fiction

merges with various speculative realisms, design aesthetics, and multimodal approaches to composition that push us to images what else composition itself might be, toward each of which I now turn.

Ontological Theater “What the world will do.”

Helping me to hack the speculative enterprise, noted science and technology studies scholar Andrew Pickering has developed what he calls the ontological theatre, which seeks ways of “finding out what the world will

do” [198]. This language of “will do” I find suggestive for speculative deliberation. An ontological theatre is any thing or operation that stages “for us a vision of the world” “as a place of inexhaustible novelty and becoming” (199). For

instance, how algorithms have been used to generate music outside the direct, instrumental control of human hands. Such algorithms generate music but they also clue us in to what else music might be.

Furthermore, Pickering argues, “Unintended consequences are what we should expect—that’s the way [the] world is—not something to be marginalized from our consciousness and blamed on the scientists and engineers

and politicians for their lack of omniscient foresight” [206]. Pickering’s ontological theatre is strange, but the goal is down to earth and practical: how might we do things differently? Such deliberation requires riffing on the possible

unintended consequences of things—speculating through what can be done differently. Speculative deliberation operates in and as ontological theatre.

Speculative Everything Design as Social Dreaming

We can watch such ontological theatre in the social dreaming of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby in their book Speculative Everything. Social dreaming is a design aesthetic in the gap between critical engagement with

science fiction and the writing of it. Social dreaming is a politically-oriented speculative process: deliberation, in other words. They write,

We believe that by speculating more, at all levels of society, and exploring alternative scenarios, reality will become more malleable and, although the future cannot be predicted, we can help set in place today factors

that will increase the probability of more desirable futures happening. (6, emphasis added)

There is something attitudinal here in the Burkean sense: speculation as preparation for action—incipient acts. Elsewhere they write, “The project could be described as a form of ‘speculative ethics’—a tool for exploring notions of

future good and future bad” (64).

Privileging design as that which sets in place a desire to improve the future, Dunne and Raby write, “rather than trying to convince the viewer that their ideas are ‘real,’ learn to enjoy the unreality of speculation and the

aesthetic opportunities it creates” (134). Resonating with Pickering’s “ontological theatre,” Dunne and Raby write, “Design speculations can give form to the multiverse of worlds our world could be” (160, emphasis). As an ontological

theatre, social dreaming enacts designs as speculative medium for deliberation. “The medium,” they write, “through which we can make otherwise awkward connections and comparisons. The language for tricky conversations and

translations” (188). A speculative language for the tricky reminds me of Nietzsche’s description of the aesthetic relationship between different spheres: “I mean a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely

foreign tongue” (1176).

Speculative Composition Composing Speculative Deliberations

So how could this speculative attitude inhabit and what might in require of the composition classroom? Neither reading nor writing science fiction, how else might we compose unique deliberative arguments, explicit

attempts at persuasion in the future tense—that deal with the “what’s next” of Richardson. I conclude with a modified example from a piece Jim Brown and I wrote titled “Composing the Carpenter’s Workshop.”

It is November 2016, and you are visiting what you thought was a college composition classroom. However, something seems to be amiss. In one corner, a group of students huddles around a 3D printer as a strange looking

blue plastic object emerges (it looks like a helmet). […] Your unease is increased when you learn that this composition classroom is actually focused on public rhetoric, specifically, environmental rhetoric. As you move through the room,

you hear students discussing the features of the objects they are working with: the group in the corner probes the grooves inside of the “helmet.” You soon learn that these objects each have a specific purpose. The objects are all

interactive arguments built to engage audiences in environmental deliberation: objects designed to confront audiences (who are now also users) with pressing ecological and political concerns.

For example, the blue object is not, in fact, a helmet, but a puzzle. The grooves on the inside of the sphere allow users to place and re-place dividers to create a series of self-contained compartments on the inside of the

sphere. Users are first asked to pour a certain amount of water into the sphere (proportionally representing the amount of fresh water in the world). The challenge is to evenly apportion the water in all of the compartments by sliding

open and close the dividers inside the sphere. The object of the object is to foreground water itself as a political actor. Aside from the human intention to fairly distribute fresh water (which might or might not be present), the puzzle

presents water as on object with its own purposes and features, both of which make it difficult to control. Through this speculative deliberation, environmental rhetoric becomes something other than the task of shaping human hearts

and minds to “save the world,” and instead becomes something more akin to the recognition that the “world itself” is likewise populated by a plethora of nonhuman political actors. Working speculatively, this deliberative composition

is infused with the attitude of science fiction.

Speculative DeliberationNathaniel A. Rivers @sophist_monster Saint Louis University

Speculative deliberation is a rhetorical mechanism harnessing the attitudes of science fiction to compose plausible and persuasive futures. While akin to the reading and writing of science fiction, speculative deliberation is a practice of

possibly multimodal composition that yet seeks to engage audiences beyond the traditional bounds of fiction. It is a hack of science fiction that deliberately proposes what’s next.