Friday, March 14, 2014
Committee (Omni Shoreham)
How does a particular articulation of the future come to play a prominent role in shaping modes of reckoning about the future in general, and what are the consequences when this happens? Since the onset of the current debt crisis, the future of Greece and in Greece has persistently been thought of and discussed in terms of the future of the national economy. This economic future, an object brought into being by a range of practices centered around the production and circulation of forecasts, brings domains of expert knowledge into direct interrelation with domains of everyday anxiety. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research in Athens, this paper examines what is involved in rendering future states of a national economy, how work with the future contributes to establishing economics as a form of expertise with social legitimacy (if not acceptance), and how constructions of the future serve as a key resource for contemporary nation-building. The paper attends in particular to a specific future as something made, intervened in, and circulated in distinctive ways and, moreover, to how this future gets embraced, contested, and refused. In doing so, it examines the work of the future not only as a source of uncertainty, but more primarily as a site for both establishing and contesting key claims to knowledge and authority in the present.
