Anticipatory knowledge and techniques
Predicting and organizing the future in 18th- and 19th-century Europe
The focus of this project is on the anticipatory knowledge and techniques which emerged in 18th- and 19th-century Europe. It focuses specifically on the new attempts to forecast and to govern the future using techniques and forms of knowledge which were concerned both with saying what the future will be and also with making it happen.
On the one hand the future was widely understood as a natural, more-or-less determined phenomenon: unavoidable and unchangeable, to be forecast only in order that human behaviour adapt itself accordingly. On the other hand the future could be understood as something to be built, organized, or at least influenced by way of specific methods. These twin practices of forecasting and of organization were, therefore, integral to the forms of anticipatory knowledge and techniques to emerge in the 18th and 19th centuries. These practices, which have become ubiquitous in twentieth- and twenty-first-century societies, were tested and developed during the two previous centuries, in the realms of science and engineering, medicine, administration, insurance, and business more generally. Although they have received some attention in various historiographical traditions and in relation to specific objects, anticipatory knowledge and techniques have not previously been studied, per se, as modes of forecasting and organizing the future. The novelty of this project is to approach these anticipatory forms of knowledge and techniques by analyzing, within a single framework, a range of different topics which have not previously been brought together: projecting (understood as a formal and institutional process), insurance, stock-markets, climate change (in the 18th and 19th centuries), and life-span (a concept applied in various contexts, not only to humans, but also to things).
This project aspires to show how these different objects were related to one another, and how they shared a certain will to predict and organize the future through specific forms of anticipation. The project also aims to identify both the specificity and the circulation of these anticipations between different professional contexts, and different European countries during the period. The project will create opportunities to consider the importance of anticipation for shaping notions such as responsibility, precaution, depreciation or amortization; notions which have had important social and political implications, and been essential to projecting, insurance, stock-markets, climate change and the consideration of life-spans. In the end, anticipatory forms of knowledge and techniques have functioned as tools of trust and control in preventing fraud, disaster or arbitrariness.
The activities of the project proceed along two separate lines: i) a collective and transverse research programme on anticipatory forms of knowledge and techniques in general, and ii) a series of monographs dealing specifically with, 18th- and 19th-century projects (the formalization of projects in Public Works, technical subscriptions, technical safety standards); insurance (provision, insurance of steam-engines, risk); stock-markets (anticipation of financial crises, socio-technical communication through markets); climate change; and finally, the differing conceptualization of life-span (mortality, wear, obsolescence, depreciation, fatigue, etc.)