ABSTRACT

Stengers has argued, 'a speculative possibility does not simply fall from the sky of ideas. Speculation originates in unique situations, which exhibit the possibility of an approach by the very fact they have already undertaken it'. The proposition of speculative lures comes with a pluralist politics. More specifically, as Stengers terms it 'a politics of ontology': 'a world where many worlds fit'. For the social scientist or any inquirer interested in the adventure that comes with exposure to other worlds, this politics has perhaps one key guide rail: to avoid judgements by one world of another and, instead, construct what Stengers proposes should become ecology of practices'. To accept the world on such terms – the terms of given 'problems' – is to ignore the creativity and hence novelty that comes of the 'weaving of co-evolutions'. Co-evolutions are the making of connections between 'beings' whose interests, whose ways of having their world matter, diverge.