My graduate study occurred in and around the various “wars”and “turns” of the early 1990s: theory, cultural, science, and so on. Prevalent among these, as some will recall, was anti-foundationalism, exemplified in different ways by Richard Rorty, Terry Eagleton, Stanley Fish, and so on. I recall encountering Patricia Bizzell as a rhetoric and composition scholar taking up anti-foundationalism (mostly the Fish variety if memory serves). While her work was always in some tension to Fish’s, she reframed her theoretical context as one that was more explicitly justice-oriented.

In Fish’s anti-foundationalist theory hope, even though there was no Truth or ground for meaning, meaning could be usefully sustained through discourse and community. The hope was believing that discourse communities would be sufficient, but that hope was insufficient for many, including Bizzell. I don’t think I have that kind of hope in me: the hope that leads to a conviction in my own sense of “what must be done” that is so strong I seek to gather others around it. That said, I’m not seeking to harsh your vibe or criticize those who do have such conviction.

A similar dynamic swirls about posthuman theory, some of which is forthrightly engaged in justice-oriented, political work and others which are not. I don’t want to talk about that inside disciplinary politics either, but the dynamics are not dissimilar to those 30-40 years ago: plus ça change.

But I’ve been thinking about this dynamic and the concepts of anti-anti-utopianism, hope punk and speculative posthuman collective experimentation. Part of this issue is agency. How do we understand agency as an emergent, relational unfolding that develops an autopoietic operation (as assemblage) with a history and tendencies and capacities within environments, including cognitive capacities? How do we get to justice from here? Or do we just whistle past it as we try to get by day to day?

If you read hopepunk then the answer often is that getting by includes getting to justice or trying to head in that direction. However as justice is contingent, especially in the big, sci-fi universes of hopepunk, it’s mostly about the friends you make along the way. There is something of the gold and platinum rules and working from a recognition of inter-dependency. Put simply, there is no self without the other. As we become increasingly interdependent on a material level, recalibrating our actions in response becomes a challenge. Hopepunk narratives are often about working through that, but not on a grand scale. They probably don’t add up to the grander narratives of theory hope. And they retain enough critical utopianism to resist those moves.

Without getting into the scholarly politics of it, there is an understandable interest in moving from the existential dread of posthuman theory (from a particular perspective) to something that is life-affirming, that offers a way to make things better. Because, otherwise, what is it for? Maybe it doesn’t have to be for anything, but that’s a different day. Is “hopepunk” enough of something that posthuman theory might be for? That is, speculative posthumanism (as I generally take it up, which is just one way of course) is about collective experimentation (as Latour frames it). We are trying to make things better? What’s better? Well, that’s part of the problem. We have epistemic humility here. We aren’t trying to be the grand narrative problem solvers like scientists and engineers portrayed in the Golden Age of sci fi. We’re hope punks, pesky kids, rude mechanicals, and mystery gangs. When the world is running down, you make the best of what’s still around. But don’t get into the story that far.