After progress: Experiments in the revaluation of values

Abstract

What might it take to learn to think and live after progress? The notion of ‘progress’ is arguably the defining idea of modernity: a civilisational imagery of a boundless, linear and upwards trajectory towards a future that, guided by reason and technology, will be ‘better’ than the present. It was this notion that placed techno-science at the heart of the modern political culture, and it was the global unevenness of ‘progress’ that imagined European imperialism as a civilising mission inflicted upon ‘backward’ others for their own sake. Whilst during the postcolonial era the modern idea of progress and its deleterious consequences on a global scale have deservingly been the object of fierce criticism, ‘progress’, its promises and its discontents still command global political imaginations, values and policies to this day. In the wake of its devastating social, political and ecological effects, this article argues that the imperative of progress is now one we cannot live with but do not know how to live without. Thinking of progress not as one modern value among others but as the very mode of evaluation from which modern values are derived, this article provides an introductory exploration of the question of what thinking and living after progress might mean. It also provides an overview of the many contributions that compose this monograph, as divergent experiments in the radical revaluation of our values.

From copper mining to data extractivism? Data worth making at Chile’s Data Observatory Foundation

“…There is no question that imagining futures from the potentialities of astronomy and projecting a more diversified economy is a desirable goal. The point that we have tried to make is that the contexts from which those futures are imagined remain limited to a modern-colonial rationality in which the figure of linear progress seems to be guided or driven by cutting-edge technologies (Savransky and Lundy, 2022), in this case, Big Data and AI. This form of data-centric coloniality of power assumes the exploitation of data as a civilizing step toward technological progress, even when the modes of justifying these actions’ worth tends to reinscribe narratives of asymmetrical power relations and camouflage geopolitical dependencies.…”

From organizations as systems of ocean destruction to organizations as systems of ocean thriving

“…In that perspective, efforts to developing ocean‐centric MOS requires to shift to a paradigm that views relationship between human beings, organizations, and the ocean as a different ‘ecological agencement’ where participants are made available and visible to each other (Savransky, 2020). This paper views organizations as a hyphen between humans and the ocean, potentially enabling both to remain healthy and harmonious.…”

Passages to the outside: A prelude to a geophilosophy of the future

“…We woke up yearning for its arrival, and at night the future was our consolation, our lullaby. Such, after all, has been the affective disposition and experience of time proper to the imperial philosophy of history that those who called themselves (or aspired to become) 'modern' called progress (Savransky and Lundy, 2022). Indeed, if Christian imperialism brought about what Vítor Westhelle (2012: 10) calls 'the triumph of time over space', rendering eschatology fundamentally a question of world-historyand leading Columbus to conceive of his imperial conquest as accelerating the advent of the promised End of the Worldthe historicity of modern progress simultaneously intensified the Christian penchant for a time while abandoning the eschatology which set limits to human ambitions and hopes.…”