Horizons of care: from future imaginaries to responsible research and innovation

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© Christopher Groves 2013

DRAFT VERSION – DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHORIAL PERMISSION

Horizons of care: from future imaginaries to

responsible research and innovation

Christopher GROVESa,1

a

ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen), Cardiff

University, 10 Museum Place, Cardiff, United Kingdom CF10 3BG

Abstract. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has emerged as a response to the problem of the unintended consequences of new technologies, one with an agenda shaped by concerns about the

impact of technological innovation on issues of procedural and substantive justice. The role of future

imaginaries, manifest in texts and images, in shaping innovation and framing what counts as legitimate topics for social debate on technologies has been documented by science and technology studies (STS)

scholars, but has not yet been discussed widely in the literature on RRI. In this paper, I argue that the

critique of future imaginaries is important for the procedural and substantive justice concerns of RRI, but that missing from the STS literature on imaginaries is an adequate treatment of their non-

representational dimensions, including practice and desire, and the role these play in constructing

particular ‘future horizons’, styles of living the future in the present that are constitutive of subjectivity. I suggest that, without an adequate treatment of these aspects, RRI perspectives will face difficulties in

understanding the nature and role of ‘organized irresponsibility’ within innovation, before proposing

that a ‘political imaginary of care’ offers a possible route to take in thinking about the ethical and political aspects of innovation that permits these aspects to be adequately addressed.

Keywords. Care, futures, future imaginaries, responsible research and innovation, uncertainty.

1. Introduction

Responsible innovation or responsible research and innovation (RRI) (Owen

et al., 2012) is a concept that has emerged in response to a slow-burning crisis of

legitimacy, in which emerging technologies (such as biotechnologies,

nanotechnologies and neurotechnologies, for example) are often represented as major

drivers. Critical commentators have found in such technologies the threat of

disruptive innovation, framing this threat in ethical terms as heralding the erosion of

culturally constitutive ‘values’ (de St. Cameron, 2006) or in political terms as creating

the real prospect of an irreversible and anti-democratic redistribution of power

(Sparrow, 2008).

RRI aims to symbolically and practically re-integrate innovation within

political and civil society, by opening it up to democratic questioning and oversight,

and by introducing values other than profit and efficiency into decisions about what

pathways innovation should follow. At the level of codified norms, RRI may mean

adopting codes of conduct or adjusting regulatory statutes to render them adaptive and

anticipatory in the face of uncertainty. It also may require the creation and

promulgation of new practices that recognize the potential of technological novelty

for producing unintended consequences, including the intensification of social

problems like alienation or inequality as well as more traditional concerns, such as

environmental or health risks. Instead of being characterized by ‘organized

irresponsibility’ (Beck, 1995), innovation under RRI is to be pressed into a virtuous

mold, and made to produce the ‘right impacts’ (Von Schomberg, 2011). RRI thus

rests on two basic ideas: that innovation can help make a better world by contributing

to substantive ethico-political goals like social justice or the common good, and also

1

Corresponding Author.

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that innovation processes have a procedural justice dimension, insofar as they may

trigger processes of social change over which ‘stakeholders’ (including the public)

should have some form of oversight and influence.

An important, though often overlooked (there are exceptions, such as Grin and

Grunwald (2000)) aspect of innovation in relation to procedural justice is the role

played by imaginaries in shaping technological evolution, from basic research to

commercialization. Texts and imagery associated with innovation are often

interwoven with the imaginative construction of alternative futures. In public rhetoric

around innovation, evocations of the future are frequently used in ways that mirror

genre conventions of science fiction, as Jose Lopez has noted in relation to

nanoscience and nanotechnology. Lopez points out there is a key difference here,

however: in science fiction ‘the extrapolated future is a stepping-stone for critical

reflection’, whereas in rhetoric around innovation, it ‘is the endpoint of the reflection’

(Lopez, 2004). The power of such future-oriented imagery and narrative is

considerable, as has been documented by the ‘sociology of expectations’. It can create

‘future imaginaries’ (Fujimura, 2003) that influence the course of innovation by

facilitating the formation of networks, transfer of resources, and dissemination of

knowledge (Brown and Michael, 2003), and more broadly, by shaping collective

understandings of what kinds of futures are possible, and thus of what kinds of agency

are feasible in the present. Their significance for the theme of RRI is therefore

considerable (Simakova and Coenen, 2013).

For example, the influence of imaginaries of technological determinism has

been traced in examples of path dependency in technological development (Mody,

2006; Sparrow, 2007). Promissory rhetoric has also been interpreted as either

misdirecting ethical discussions towards highly speculative debates about potential

futures that may never happen (Nordmann, 2007), or as encouraging the

postponement of ethical debates (Hanson, 2011). As a consequence, technological

future imaginaries may help to prevent scrutiny of assumptions about innovation

pathways and to exclude alternative visions of the future form discussion, thus

making progress on the procedural elements of RRI more difficult.

The kinds of critique undertaken by Lopez and others might, therefore, be

thought to be an essential contribution to RRI. However, imaginaries in the sense

examined by the sociology of expectations are typically interpreted as what Emilio

Mordini calls a 'symbolic template' 'that generates a sense of identity and

inclusiveness' (Mordini, 2007, p. 30). Imaginaries in this sense are seen as forms of

representation that encourage individuals and groups to identify symbolically and

imaginatively with them. Critiques of imaginaries generally point to contradictions

and inconsistencies within them (e.g. Lopez, 2004). However, such an approach fails

to touch on the ways in which identification with particular visions is produced

through other, non-representational practices that underlie and influence sense-

making through image or text – such as those involved in the production and

reproduction of economic relationships, in the formation of desire, and in shaping

other elements that, in turn, produce and sustain specific forms of life and their

characteristic matters of concern.

In this essay, I argue that the procedural dimension of RRI will have to deal,

not only with imaginaries and the symbolic dimensions of innovation more widely,

but also with these non-representational conditions of their production and

reproduction. These constitute key yet overlooked material conditions that shape the

values with which innovators and consumers of innovation identify. In the next

section, I explore the concept of RRI itself, and relate its emergence to contradictions

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within the ‘imaginaries’ of modernist ethical and social thought, generated by the

relationship between these modernist patterns of thought and natural science.

Following this, I examine some of the material conditions under which this

contradiction is produced and reproduced against the background of what I term the

‘future horizon’ of practice and representation. I then explore the antagonistic

structure of these conditions, before concluding with a brief sketch of a different

‘future horizon’, through which a different relationship with technology and

innovation may be imagined, one in which these antagonisms are acknowledged and

overcome.

2. Responsible research and innovation and the contradictions of

consequentialism

RRI has taken on currency in discussions around technology policy for a

variety of reasons (Owen et al., 2012). Originating within discussions of themes such

as that of the knowledge society and the changing nature of the ‘contract’ between

scientific research and wider society (Guston 2006), the concept has since been much

discussed in relation to emerging technologies such as nanotechnology and synthetic

biology. Debates over the necessity of precaution as a regulatory approach (Mayer

and Stirling 2002) for new technologies have emerged over the last three decades in

response to specific governance dilemmas that derive from the scarcity of information

regarding the potential safety or environmental hazards of emerging technologies

(Collingridge 1980). At the same time, participants in these debates have also

interpreted precaution as providing opportunities to ask questions about the social

impact of technologies that extend more widely than questions of risks versus benefits

(Wynne 1996). In particular, precaution has been seen as a theme under which

debates over the social and democratic control of technology may be re-activated

(Tallacchini 2004). RRI views this opportunity as one for enhancing the social value

of new technologies through deliberative public scrutiny of innovation processes,

which operates ‘upstream’ in innovation processes (Wilsdon and Willis 2004), and

aims to ensure that innovation produces the ‘right impacts’ (Von Schomberg, 2011).

Beyond this, however, RRI has specified one of its substantive and procedural

goals as responsiveness (Macnaghten and Owen, 2011; Von Schomberg, 2011).

Wider and earlier engagement is intended to scrutinize the priorities and values that

explicitly or implicitly guide innovation activities, and which their ‘enactors’ (Garud

and Ahlstrom, 1997) may take as given and as more or less universally shared. It is

hoped that, through engagement, such implicit priorities and values may be made

more explicit and opened up to questioning. It is further hoped that enactors

(individuals and institutions) will therefore become actively responsive to the other

voices admitted into the ‘arenas of expectations’ in which selection pressures are

exerted on new technologies (Bakker et al., 2011). It is intended that one of the

central outcomes of responsiveness should be a procedural democratization of

innovation, as well as a new substantive focus for innovation on achieving societally-

valued ‘right impacts’.

However, the demand for these changes – which implicitly recognizes that

social attitudes toward innovation itself are (as they have perhaps always been)

ambivalent – may appear to have something of the quality Hegel attributed to the

demands of morality in general, which held to possess a reality that ‘only ought to be’,

and which stubbornly ‘is not’ (Hegel, 1993: 133-36). If innovation is, as Beck (1995)

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puts it, ‘organised irresponsibility’, receiving all its vigor from dynamics of profit-led

creative destruction and the externalization or socialization of risks, then one might

entertain a suspicion that RRI may represent a merely verbal solution to a real and

persistent contradiction or antagonism. Whereas once the social ‘ought’ was the

recognition of legal or social rights, in what Beck has called ‘risk societies’ this ought

may have been replaced, in the face of reflexive uncertainties created by innovation,

by that of ‘being responsible’. If RRI is to mean something beyond a ‘mere ought’, an

impotent verbal solution, then it is necessary to understand the contradictions and

antagonisms to which it is a response, which is our task in this chapter.2

Innovation – in the sense of creating technological artefacts and associated

capabilities with the primary goal of solving instrumental (‘how to’) tasks – brings the

idea of responsibility to the foreground of ethical debates in a way that was not the

case in pre-modern societies (Mitcham, 1994: 107). This is because it is inherently a

future-creating activity: by bringing something new into the world, it can change the

world itself. Yet the habits of mind that tend to govern how we think about the ethical

significance of innovation are largely focused on the past, present and near future and

on situations where relationships between proximate individuals are involved rather

than relationships between people distant from us in space and/or time (Jonas 1984).

Despite this, the increasing economic and cultural importance of technological

innovation during the early modern period was itself accompanied by changes in

ideas regarding moral conduct, which gave new weight to the future in moral

discourse. Modernity, as many sociologists from Weber and Durkheim through to

Zygmunt Bauman have argued, involves both social differentiation and reintegration:

new divisions of labour and the multiplication of social roles, but also attempts to

formulate new overarching moral principles. The purpose of these principles was to

fill the gap left by the vanishing moral certainties of medieval Europe, a worldview

called by J. B. Schneewind (1984) the ‘divine corporation’ – with God at the head as

its CEO, and others occupying fixed ‘offices’ within this edifice. In the medieval

moral frame, what it meant to act responsibly was therefore fixed with regard to the

immemorial past, and specifically, to rules that carried the deontological authority of

religious revelation. A fixed set of virtues, enshrined in religious traditions and in the

ethics of figures like Aquinas, were seen as necessary to fit any individual to the

station they were born to occupy in life.

But the changes which ‘early’ modernity brought with it in the 16th

and 17th

centuries began to loosen these traditional certainties and the bonds they cemented.

The rise of the scientific method shaped an increasingly future-oriented world, one

that could be improved, and that was structured by an emerging qualitative change in

the relationship to historical time itself, a relationship only fully realized after 1870 in

the idea of modernity as neue Zeit, a period ‘better than what has gone before’

(Koselleck, 1985: 295) and distinguished from ‘old time’ (Rabinow, 2009: 61). It is in

the second half of the 17th

century that the concepts of antiquity, middle ages and

modernity (where one must aim to live) ‘became established for the entirety of

historical time” (Koselleck, 1985: 17). Such a condition, Peter Osborne suggests, is

characterized both by an ‘openness to an indeterminate future’ and a diminution of the

present to the status of a vanishing point, a gap between past and future which

constitutes time itself (Osborne, 1992: 31). The deontological morality of the divine

corporation is overwritten by emergent consequentialist habits of mind, tied to what

Max Weber described as Zweckrationalität enshrined as an administrative form of

2 The rest of this section summarizes an argument first made in Grinbaum and Groves (2013)

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reason.

The mathematics and natural science of the 17th

century contributed to this

development by helping to redefine the very concept of futurity, constituting it as ‘a

domain of finite possibilities, arranged according to their greater or lesser probability’,

a territory of greater or lesser foreseeable evils rather than the prospect of a single,

final division made by deontological religious ethics ‘between Good and Evil through

the establishment of a single principle of behavior’, confirmed by the Bible and the

promise of the Last Judgement (Koselleck, 1985, p. 18). The work of Jacob Bernouilli

was a major step forward here in determining how to decide whether a given set of

observational data could be a representative basis for estimating probabilities

(Bernstein, 1996: 117-19).

These shifts in culturally-prevalent understandings of time and futurity were

accompanied by the emergence of a new, more minimal concept of virtue. As Henry

S. Richardson has pointed out (Richardson, 1999), the ideal moral agent of this

emerging consequentialist age was Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian subject as well as

Weber’s diligent Protestant, a subject who strives to assess, with precision, the

contribution each act she performs makes to the aggregate happiness of society.

Foresight – clear vision directed into the geometric space of the probable future

(Romanyshyn, 1989) – became the badge of the responsible agent. Scientific

precision is offered as the benchmark of good foresight, which in turn is the condition

of progress, providing both a tool for realizing it and a warrant for pursuing it.

Foresight based on predictive techniques is thus the primary tool and virtue of

the consequentialist subject. Yet no matter how much past data is available to build

risk predictions upon, the perspective of a perfect utilitarian agent is ultimately

impossible to adopt. To entirely overcome uncertainty would require foresight

capable of covering the entire span of the consequences of any act. The utilitarian

philosopher J. J. C. Smart proposed that, in most circumstances, the utilitarian can

assume that the ‘remote effects of his actions tend rapidly to zero, like the ripples on a

pond after a stone has been thrown into it’ (Smart and Williams, 1973: 64).

Sometimes this will not be so, however. The consequentialist moral agent thus has

both first and second order responsibilities. Responsible for assessing the

consequences of an action, the agent is also responsible for deciding when s/he has

finished performing due diligence, and can make up his/her mind to act. Sometimes,

as Smart notes, in situations that are relatively routine, this second order responsibility

is undemanding. With respect to other activities, however, the opposite is true – and

technological innovation, due to the unwanted surprises that may accompany it, is one

such.

Data, by itself, is not enough to determine when one has performed one’s

second-order responsibility adequately. Certain evaluative commitments are needed to

interpret the data, and therefore cannot themselves be drawn from data. These are

required in order to determine which potential consequences of an action should be

treated as salient or not, how far into the future one’s foresight should be extended,

and how any expected consequences should be weighted depending on their distance

from the present. As well as a consequentialist decision framework, then, ‘decision

horizons’ (Hansson, 1996) need to be settled on, along with a positive or negative rate

of discounting future outcomes (Feldstein, 1964). But in addition, the agent needs to

know ‘what are reasonable standards of prediction?’ (MacIntyre, 1983). The

‘reasonable standard’ for such knowledge in modernity is generally provided by

scientific knowledge. This intimate connection between science and ethics has,

however, proven problematic.

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As Ian Hacking (1986) has pointed out, the potential of advanced technologies

for creating unforeseen 'interference effects' is written into the way they are embedded

within contemporary societies. Their pervasiveness and proximity to each other, along

with the intimacy with which they interact with natural processes (Latour, 2008),

creates the likelihood of nasty surprises. Yet, as Luigi Pellizzoni (2004) has observed,

according to the legal principle of reasonable foreseeability, an agent can be absolved

of liability even if later found to be causally responsible for creating harm, so long as

the agent was inescapably ignorant of the potential consequences of his or her actions

at the time of acting. If the 'state of the art' in science could not have predicted certain

consequences at the time of acting, then how can someone be judged responsible for

producing them? Yet at the same time, this condition of ignorance is, on Hacking's

account, still a form of culpable ignorance: we are no longer ignorant that, thanks to

living in technological societies where phenomena like PCB pollution, asbestos-

related illnesses and BSE are widespread, we can expect the unexpected. Nonetheless,

how can we take responsibility for avoiding specific consequences that, even if we

suspect they may be in wait, we cannot foresee?

The 'state of the art' of scientific knowledge is rooted in the past - it is, if you

like, a picture of the world as it has existed up until the point where it makes new

innovations possible. From this picture, we can extrapolate what the world may be

like in the future. But once scientific knowledge has been translated into technology

and innovation – actual transformative interventions in the world – the world as it has

hitherto been framed within the lens of science may no longer exist. New

technologies can help to change nature and society so radically that the world for

which established regulations (and even moral codes) were created may no longer

exist. Our reliance on science prompts us to imagine the future as 'stationary' (Orléan,

2010). We could say that, in the wake of innovation, the future facing us is no longer

what it used to be.

This is not just a problem of knowledge. Its root is buried within what Hannah

Arendt has identified as an inescapable feature of human finitude. Finitude, the

foundation of Schneewind's divine corporation, is re-encountered by modernity just at

the moment when its achievements encourage us to entertain the prospect of infinite

progress. In fact, it is precisely the transformative power of technology and scientific

knowledge that, for Arendt, underlines this rediscovery of our finitude. She pointed

out that the human condition of finitude is not the same as a fixed, immutable human

nature. Rather, it is an inherent aspect of human beings’ power to remake their world

and themselves: what human beings create through subjective effort takes on an

objective form that then, in turn, conditions both their existence and their subsequent

creative activity (Arendt, 1998: 9-10), leading to unanticipated consequences.

So we have now exposed the tension within modern ethical culture to which

RRI desires to respond. The social use of science promises the transformation of the

future, but in transforming it, depends on foresight that itself relies on hindsight,

hindsight that can quickly become out of date thanks to the novelty introduced into

the world through the appliance of science. RRI counterposes to the modernist

reliance on scientific foresight and ‘clear vision’ a multiperspectival culture of caution

and transparency. It also recognizes, however, that the imperative to innovate is

driven by structural, political economic features of contemporary society. The need to

extract profit from investment in new technologies is seen as the key driver behind the

selection of particular technological options. RRI aims to introduce alongside this

driver countervailing social values elicited through deliberative engagement in an

expanded public sphere, so that innovation is not only procedurally restrained from

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proceeding along unacceptable pathways, but directed towards priorities that are

subject to a wider consensus – implying that the uncertainties that will still surround

innovation may be more acceptable if goals are chosen on a more transparent, more

consensual basis. Creating around technology a more discursively-open public sphere

is seen as the cure for the ethical tensions of modernity. In the next section, I examine

some aspects of a deeper antagonism at the heart of innovation, one that helps to

creates the ethical contradiction I have explored above. I then show that an

understanding of this antagonism can help expose some current limitations of the RRI

agenda. In the Conclusion, I explore some openings through which these limitations

may be overcome.

3. Living the empty future

In this section, we explore how the future is constructed, not just with texts and

images, but also through practices and patterns of desire. Together, representations,

practices and patterns of desire constitute assemblages that concretize styles of living

the future, ‘future horizons’ within which forms of subjectivity are constituted. It is

against these horizons that social antagonisms are produced and reproduced, as a

function of tensions within practices and representations. The future-oriented

phenomenon of technological innovation can then be contextualized within a broader

analysis of how contemporary technological societies relate to the future.

The need to understand how futures are constructed using the concept of

future horizons is set out in Adam and Groves (2007). That the construction of futures

is more than a representational process or activity has been recognized by some

researchers within the sociology of expectations, who have examined the role of

affect in shaping how expectations are produced (e.g. Brown, 2005). Nonetheless,

critical treatments of the ways imaginaries exert selection pressures upon technologies

remain largely concerned with their representational content and inner logics (e.g.

Lopez, 2004). It is questionable, I want to suggest, whether a critical stance that

remains at the level of how futures are represented goes far enough to expose deeper

tensions with within how the future is socially constructed. My point here is similar to

Langdon Winner’s criticism of social constructivism as a way of understanding

technology that usually finds ‘it sufficient to gather evidence of social activities most

clearly connected to technological change’ while ignoring the possible existence of

‘deeper cultural, intellectual, or economic origins of social choices about technology

or deeper issues surrounding these choices’ (Winner, 1993: 371).

Something that is missing from critiques of how imaginaries represent the

future is why the idea of foresight itself and the imagery that accompanies it are so

seductive. Future narratives are always constructed around promises connected to

particular technological capabilities, but what they share is the gesture of looking

ahead itself, which relies on what Robert Romanyshyn (1989) has called the

archetypal, fundamental modern metaphor of Cartesian perspective, from which the

modern subject (in art, science and ethics) views the world as a geometrically

extended both in the three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension of time.

From Bentham to contemporary champion of strategic nanoscience Mihail Roco, faith

in foresight is reaffirmed: ‘progress is faster with clearer vision’ (Roco, 2007). As we

have seen, there are contradictions at the heart of this allegedly rational faith, yet still

it endures. What habits of mind and what practices sustained this faith in the face of

these contradictions?

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In the previous section, we explored certain central aspects of the revolution in

ethical life brought by modernity. What changed here, to use Foucauldian language,

was the ethical problematization of the world, where by problematization is meant

‘the ensemble of discursive and non-discursive practices that make something enter

into the play of true and false and constitute it as an object of thought’’ (Foucault,

1966, p. 670, quoted in Rabinow, 2003: 18). The problematization of the future was a

key element of the cultural, epistemic, ethical and political shifts initiated within the

early modern period. In this period, the future became an object for a variety of

regimes of scientific and moral truth, as we saw in the previous section.

A future of finite possibilities became, for instance, conceptualizable in terms

of counterfactual worlds (Giddens, 1991), a prerequisite for the kinds of imaginaries

analyzed by Lopez, or indeed, for any critique of them. Lucian Hölscher has

documented how the re-organization of the temporal character of experience in this

period, made representations of disjunctive possible future worlds possible in the first

place. In medieval European culture, he argues, the future was thought of mostly in

terms of the future states or condition of an individual person or thing (Hölscher, 1999,

pp. 19-20). From the 16th and 17th centuries onwards, however, European culture

manifests the idea of the future as such: a unified realm of potential, interconnected

events, of finite possibilities.

With this problematization came new styles of living the future, new

assemblages of practices and patterns of desire, along with new representational and

symbolic regimes. As a result, Peter Osborne’s remark, quoted earlier, that modernity

is characterized by ‘openness to an indeterminate future’ is arguably not precise

enough. The future is, to a certain extent, always indeterminate for human beings. Yet

at particular times and in specific places, humans are cultured by determinate

assemblages of techniques, practices, modes of representation, imagination and

thought that constitute styles of living the future in the present, ways of ‘cutting out’ a

more or less domesticated future for themselves from purely determinable uncertainty.

From within such a style, the future becomes the object of regimes of truth – an object

of knowledge, of action, and a source of ethical demands.

This concept of a constitutive style of living the future is foreshadowed in

Reinhardt Koselleck's notion of a 'horizon of expectations' [Erwartungshorizont]

(Koselleck, 2002) characteristic of individual texts and particular historical periods,

and Lucian Hölscher's notion of a 'future horizon' [Zukunftshorizont] (Hölscher,

1999). Their respective employments of the word ‘horizon’ resonate with the

concepts of horizon found in Heidegger and Gadamer, who deploy it in describing a

feature of subjectivity not present to the subject itself but nonetheless constitutive of

its perspective on the world. As Niklas Luhmann writes, ‘the essential characteristic

of a horizon is that we can never touch it, never get at it, never surpass it, but that in

spite of that, it contributes to the definition of the situation’ (Luhmann, 1976: 140).

Barbara Adam and I (2007) have suggested that with modernity evolved a

number of distinctive, divergent styles of living the future, a variety of assemblages of

practices, patterns of desire and forms of representation. These emerged gradually

(rather than signaling a punctual break with the past) from within the fissures that

social change opened up within medieval habits of mind. It is these new horizons

within which future imaginaries begin to populate the future with counterfactual

possibilities. We taxonomized these horizons as a set of ideal types: for example, an

abstract future emerging in the 17th

century, where the future was interpreted as the

deterministic product of Newtonian physical laws, an open future, in which the future

was the horizon of collective political action, and as the 18th

century passed into the

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19th

, an empty future horizon.

It is this empty future horizon, I want to suggest, which ultimately makes the

promises of foresight so seductive and readily reproducible – even in the face of

contradiction – as the basis of making sense of the future. Hölscher (1999) documents

how such a future horizon emerges within Europe and the United States towards the

end of the 19th

century, and then begins to coalesce in new imaginaries, patterns of

representation and imagery. He names this new ethos the ‘mechanization of the future’

[Technisierung der Zukunft], with the growth of railways being a major influence.

New practices of travel and the distribution of goods reshaped conceptions of

progress, enabling them to be thought and imagined, for the first time, in terms of

quantitative measure: faster speeds, greater numbers of passengers carried, whole

nations crossed in a single day. The Enlightenment had dreamed of the moral

perfection of humanity and the realization of its inner nature. By contrast, the late 19th

century dreamed of abundance, realized through myriad avenues of technological

ingenuity, having become habituated to the technologically-assisted crossing of

frontiers.

Hölscher identifies the development of certain technologies as a driving force

behind the mechanization of the future. But contributing to their development, and

rippling out beyond it to affect a wide range of institutions was a wider confluence of

knowledge practices, modes of action and ethical life, within which new forms of

expert knowledge had significant influence. The future increasingly became

constructed to fit within the grids made available by the systematic and mathematized

forms of knowledge that had begun their growth in the 17th

century – physics

(especially thermodynamics), engineering, and economics. The future was

increasingly projected through these practices as an empty field, empty of actuality –

the geometric, Cartesian temporal space we encountered above, which is empty yet

full of infinite counterfactual possibilities from which specific finite possibilities can

be selected and realized at will.

Emerging in the middle of the century, cost-benefit analysis (CBA)

exemplified such counterfactual, future-oriented expert knowledge. Quantifying

potential outcomes, in order to render them commensurable with each other, became

an increasingly influential way for State actors to justify policy choices and build

consensus for political decisions, as Theodor Porter (1995) has argued. Pioneered by

figures such as Jules Dupuit, the epistemological and ethical goal for such thinkers

was to dissolve the conflicts of politics into bureaucratized routines of administrative

decision-making.

‘Custom treats [politics] as a moral science: time, we are convinced, will make it

an exact one, borrowing its methods of reasoning from analysis and geometry, to give

its demonstrations a precision they now lack.’ (Jules Dupuit, Titres scientifiques de M.

J. Dupuit (1857), p. 31, cited in Porter, 1995)

CBA shaped new practices for the governance of public works, such as the

actuarial practices of risk accounting that became part of the emergent ‘social state’

(Donzelot, 1988), and which, in Nikolas Rose's words, 'brought the future into the

present and made it calculable' (Rose, 1999, p. 247). Such practices also accelerated

the evolution of new economic institutions and practices built around the trading of

futures options. Later, in the 20th

century, the dominance of such practices extended to

shaping how wars were fought (Edwards, 1996). Similar, quasi-scientific approaches

to assessing ‘indicators’ of progress (such as formalized, consensus-based foresight

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and horizon scanning exercises, innovation scoreboards and integrated assessment

models) were developed in the second half of the century as ways of laying down a

road into the future along which innovation could proceed.

The accretion of capabilities for using new knowledge practices to exercise

foresight and plan ahead of the present, and new ways of organizing action to

maximize options and adaptive flexibility meant that those social actors, including

states, that possessed such capabilities were able to increase their political legitimacy.

Further, they gained the advantage of being able to decisively and speedily shape the

future territory on which less agile and capable others would later have to make

decisions and deal with consequences. In the age of the empty future, all were equally

able to imagine new possible futures, but in the end, some of these futures were

created more equal than others.

Such foresight practices helped the consequentialist ethical imperatives of

modernity to be more widely manifest in public policy and to accrue legitimacy as

ways of ordering policy priorities. Utilitarianism informed the basis of neo-classical

microeconomics, before being translated, as the 19th century passed into the 20th,

into the new sub-discipline of welfare economics. Maximizing material well-being

through an increased satisfaction of individual preferences, became the measure of all

social progress, with utility curves and cost-benefit profiles shaping the social

imaginaries of progress.

As we noted in the previous section, consequentialist morality manifests

contradictions in the face of innovation. For their part, the empty future’s

consequentialist tools have faced widespread criticisms of the presuppositions on

which their extensive policy use rests, along with demonstrations of their systematic

failure in practice (Mitchell, 2002; Flyvbjerg et al., 2003). Yet despite this, they retain

legitimacy, a fact that has led to a kind of religious character being attributed to the

ethos of the empty future. CBA has been called a ‘secular sacrament’ (Hammond,

1966: 196), a form of ritual observance undertaken through practices of precise

quantification. Walter Benjamin notes how utilitarianism, as the centre of the ethical

life of industrial capitalist societies, takes on a ‘religious coloring’ that is cultic in

nature – concerned with external affirmations of belief and associated practices rather

than with theology or scripture – becoming a form of observance for which there is

‘no day that would not be a holiday in the awful sense of exhibiting all sacred pomp –

the extreme exertion of worship’ (Benjamin, 1996: 288). The ubiquity of

quantification is attested to by Georg Simmel, writing in 1903 of the centrality of

‘[p]unctuality, calculability and exactness’ (Simmel, 2002: 14) to the normative and

moral texture of even everyday life in the capitalist metropolis. The use of tools like

CBA does not, therefore, purify politics of the symbolic reasoning and argumentation

that is characteristic of morality and politics, and, as Dupuit desired, transform it into

an exact science. Instead, the rituals of CBA and welfare economics retain a

supplementary symbolic and even aesthetic significance in the face of even complex

and reflexive uncertainty, enabling demarcations to be made between the pure and

impure, the risky yet calculable and the merely dangerous and unpredictable

(Crawford, 2004).

This combination of the scientific, symbolic and aesthetic within the empty

future requires further analysis. We have not yet discussed the patterns of desire that

characterize it, and which, in the face of antagonism and contradiction, ensure its

reproduction as a style of living the future.

Hölscher shows that what he calls the mechanization of the future shapes

specific varieties of future imaginary that become prevalent around the turn of the 20th

11



century, ones in which novel techniques and technologies are depicted that bring ease,

comfort, speed and abundance. Yet the forms of desire that typify the empty future

are not simply fixated on the accumulation of quantities of luxuries and the

diminution of annoyances. I noted above that the chief advantage conferred by the

knowledge practices that map the vacant terrain of the empty future is flexibility – an

increase in the autonomy of people and/or organizations, a decrease in their reliance

on the explicit consent of others in carrying out their policies, and an ability to secure

their own future by displacing uncertainty and insecurity onto others (Vail, 1999: 14).

Such an increase in autonomy promises to make the future more secure and

controllable. Yet at the same time, the mapping of the future, precisely because it

increases autonomy and flexibility, can also increase uncertainty. For example, basing

decisions about innovation pathways and products at each stage on the basis of

information about narrowly-define potential benefits and costs can produce

unforeseeable consequences, exactly because of the conviction that the benefits are so

certain or so great the product in question must be deployed as widely as possible.

As we saw in Section Two, the lack of fit between territory and map –

between the future that is created and the predictions that justified the acts that led to

it being created – points up an ethical contradiction. At the same time, however, this

contradiction can be traced back to an underlying tension within the empty future

between what, in psychoanalytical terminology, can be distinguished as desires and

drives. On the one hand, the desire to see ahead, to exercise foresight and have one’s

autonomy affirmed is fulfilled in the production of the map and the fantasy of a future

unified under the rule of the imperium of technical control. The precision of utility-

functions, cost-benefit analyses and trend forecasts reassure us that a boundary exists

between ways of acting that are risk aware and rational, and others which are unruly,

risk-blind, and dangerous. However, the desire for uncertainty to be at least

symbolically tamed goes along with a conflicting impulse, one which enjoins us to

transgress the boundary between risk and danger in order to open up new territories of

possibility. The existence of prediction becomes at the same time a license to seek out

uncertainty, to create new futures on the basis of ‘rules of thumb’, in ways similar to

how participants in extreme sports conduct themselves (O'Malley, 2008). This

impulse can be related to the Freudian/Lacanian concept of death drive, in the sense

of ‘a compulsion so powerful that it makes one indifferent to death’ (Fisher, 2011),

which Marshall Berman (1983) identifies at the heart of modernity in his reading of

Goethe's Faust:

In the world’s more advanced industrial countries, development has followed

more authentically Faustian forms. Here the tragic dilemmas that Goethe defined

have remained urgently in force. It has turned out – and Goethe could have predicted

it – that under the pressures of the modern world economy the process of development

must itself go through perpetual development. (p. 78)

The empty future is sustained by a modern frontier spirit: the positing of new

certainties in order to transgress them. Ian Welsh (2000) has noted the affective

charge associated with the colonisation of the future, which drives innovation beyond

the limits of socially ratified rationality, beyond the strictures of cost-benefit analysis,

and which saturates even the most measured language of advocates of, for example,

nuclear power. Welsh (p. 13) quotes the head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Sir

John Hill, speaking in 1971:

12



I hope we will not lose all sense of striving for the future or of interest in the

undiscovered, nor refuse to make any journey unless every step can be counted and

measured in advance. The road to successful and economic power stations is

uncharted. I hope we can maintain our resolve to continue the exploration.

The need for a rationalized measure of progress, embodied in the search for

more efficient techniques of manipulating nature, is inseparable from an impulse to

use the map as a launching platform for an erratic quest for novelty for its own sake,

even if it is costly and a step into 'uncharted territory'. This two-sided dynamic can be

seen, once again, at work in relation to radical nanotechnology visions, in which nano

is conceived of as the 'new new thing', in Richard Jones' words (Jones 2007), carrying

both the promise of ultimate certainty (in the shape of the capability to engineer out of

human life natural uncertain, fragility and vulnerability) and the promise of infinitely

disruptive potential for transforming the world. This twin dynamic finds expression,

for example, in the future imaginaries of radical visions of nanotechnology, such as

molecular engineering (Amato, 1999) and technological convergence (Roco and

Bainbridge, 2003). The empty future tries to bring manifest unity and order to the

future in the form of ordered assessments of risk, yet simultaneously seeks to recreate

the empty field of possibilities it has just caught within the nets of reason.

4. Conclusion: Horizons of Care

In Section Two, we saw how a central contradiction within the ethical life of

modernity results from its reliance on scientifically-guided foresight to assess the

potential consequences of innovation. This contradiction began to emerge alongside a

style of living the future that develops around industrial technological innovation as

an engine of modernization and rationalization, and which reshapes a variety of

practices across a wide variety of aspects of social life. Within this style of living the

future, this future horizon, there is a deep antagonism that creates the conditions for

the contradiction analyzed in Section Two. The modern emphasis on foresight, I have

suggested, clouds the reality of how uncertainty is experienced but also of how it is, at

the same time, a seductive source of value in industrial and post-industrial societies.

As we saw in Section Two, technological societies – characterized by the

pervasiveness of advanced technologies – confirm the reality of human finitude. In

Section Three, we have seem how this confirmation of finitude is a dialectical result

of the lure of infinity – of living an empty future, of continually recreating the future

as a vacant space of pure potential. The uncertainty caused by the quest for certainty

is, though troubling, an excess produced from within the patterns of practice we have

examined above that have come, across history, to characterize modernization.

Despite destabilising its results, this excess nonetheless also sustains its forward

momentum.

It may not be enough, then, to simply point out contradictions, expose the

determinist logics of technological imaginaries, or even admit a multiplicity of voices

into arenas of expectations in order to ensure that innovation drives at the ‘right

impacts’. If the empty future is a seductive and compulsive way of living the

counterfactual futures that Giddens and Hölscher see as characterizing modernity,

then replacing irresponsibility with responsibility cannot simply a matter of

employing precaution, or of re-organising institutions to be more responsive. The

material basis of this style of living the future, rooted in practice and desire and how

13



social patterns are reproduced across time, needs also to be the subject of analysis for

RRI.

As we saw towards the beginning of this essay, responsible innovation

contains a constitutive tension. The empty future, the source of this tension, is an

ethos, a style of living, with, in turn, its own characteristic style of aesthetics, of

epistemology, politics and ethics. Responsible innovation, if properly conscious of

the tension to which it is a response, must consciously aim to culture an alternative

ethos, a style of living the future that is more appropriate to our rediscovered finitude

– one that counterposes its own aesthetics to the aesthetics of the empty future, a

remodeled epistemology to its epistemology, a different politics to its politics and a

recalibrated ethics to its ethics.

The use of the concept of 'responsiveness' (von Schomberg 2011), as we saw

above in Section Two, has been a way of articulating RRI as rooted in a kind of ethics

of mutual recognition and an epistemology of multiple perspectives on uncertainty.

Both these dimensions are represented as intrinsically important parts of the central

thread of RRI, to direct innovation towards the ‘right impacts’, defined through

extensive and inclusive deliberation and debate. Part of the goal of employing such an

approach is to interrogate the imaginaries invoked by enactors of new technologies in

order to expose the assumptions about social priorities and ideological tropes that

underlie and reinforce them – and which reproduce within them particular styles of

living the future.

Yet RRI has not, to date, addressed the need for a new ethos for living with

technology more fully than this. The call for responsiveness expresses what its

advocates see as a radical demand for innovation to be opened up to the influence of

‘stakeholders’, including publics, beyond the charmed circle of the ‘usual suspects’.

Yet this call, by focusing on reciprocity, fails to recognize central aspects of our

relationship to the future generations who will inhabit the world shaped by innovation.

This relationship is characterized by non-reciprocity (Groves 2009), by the inequality

of power between living and potential people. It has been recognized by some

advocates of RRI that a kind of implicitly non-reciprocal ‘care for the future’ must be

an ingredient within RRI (Owen, Macnaghten, and Stilgoe 2012). But the question

that remains is how the different elements of RRI might hang together, in the context

of how futures are lived in practice, and how RRI can be ‘cultured’ as part of a

different future horizon. If the phenomenon of organized irresponsibility emerges

from out of the empty future, is there a corresponding ethos or style of living the

future in which RRI could be anchored, one that brings together practice, desire,

aesthetics, knowledge, ethics and politics?

I have argued elsewhere (Groves 2011) that such an ethos might be sketched

out as a ‘political imaginary’ of care, drawing on phenomenological traditions of

thought as well as feminist ethics. This would develop an account of care as a relation

to the future with particular aesthetic, ethical and epistemological orientations, and as

associated with modes of subjectivity that contrast strongly with those shaped by the

empty future. Rather than basing a concept of RRI on a ‘thin’ account of procedural

or substantive justice (based on, say, concepts of rights) that aims to rein in organized

irresponsibility, what this position would require is a commitment to and justification

of a ‘thick’ account of human flourishing that places the concept of a ‘good life’ at the

heart of its ethical (and aesthetic, and political) elements. In addition, what would be

unique about this approach (making it distinct from, for example, a capabilities-based

approach) is how it makes the subjective experience of meaning and agency – of

‘what matters’ to individuals and the groups of which they are part (Sayer 2011) –

14



into necessary ingredients of its characteristic concepts of flourishing and harm, and

also how it recognizes that such experiences are dependent upon intersubjective and

psychosocial conditions.

The connection of care with forms of life rather than principles divorced from

such forms has been made by a range of feminist ethicists, notably Sara Ruddick

(1980) and Joan Tronto (1993). They have both argued that ethics viewed through a

lens of care is less a question of finding different foundations for morality, and more a

matter of changing the relationship between moral theory and practice. Ethics for such

theorists – and politics, for that matter – becomes less about how and why to apply

moral principles and more about cultivating attitudes and dispositions that are suited

to protecting and sustaining valuable human relationships in the face of uncertainty

and insecurity. A future horizon of care is a different way of bringing the future into

the present than that which characterizes the quantifying and instrumentalizing

projections of the empty future. It domesticates uncertainty by beginning from within

relationality and connection rather than by beginning from an assumed position of

autonomy.

In beginning with relationality, care begins with the experience of attachment

and how it contributes to flourishing (Groves 2011). The developmental contribution

of good attachment is the building of reliable relationships through which the

uncertain future that arises from human vulnerability and finitude can be tamed in

ways that acknowledge the emotional, as well as practical, dependence of people on

each other. Human needs – which include the need for meaning and influence over

one’s fate and over the fates of those one cares about – are the primary source of

human vulnerability and thus the primary object of care, but the circles of attachment

spread more widely than just one’s human ‘significant others’. Places, objects, non-

humans, institutions and ideals can all be objects of attachment – and thus become

constitutive values that also have needs (even ideals can flourish or decay) and which

contribute to the meaningfulness of individual lives and collective histories.

To be able to deal with one’s attachments as an active subject of care requires

the cultivation of certain capabilities, among which feminist theorists such as Sara

Ruddick (1980) highlight the role of listening, intuition, attentiveness to what others

need in order to flourish, and tending to these needs. In this sense, a political

imaginary of care can be linked to the ‘capabilities approach’ to an ethics of

flourishing championed, in different forms, by Martha Nussbaum (2003) and Amartya

Sen (1993). A key difference between the two approaches is, however, that for the

former active care on the part of those in need must be a constitutive part of how all

human needs/capabilities are provided for, except perhaps in cases of emergency or

genuine helplessness. Needs may be fulfilled generically and instrumentally as a

precondition of survival (think of refugees being provided with a certain number of

calories a day in staple foods by an aid agency at a feeding station) or they can be

fulfilled in ways that are constitutively valuable over time as an ingredient in human

flourishing (think of an extended family celebrating Eid-ul-Fitr, Pesach or Christmas

with an appropriate meal). In this way, it can be seen that care, when directed at other

subjects, is always ultimately care for their capacity to care both for themselves and

others, to form attachments, to make sense of their world based on these relationships

and the biographical or historical narratives to which these relations contribute, and to

act within these narratives to shape and influence their futures.

To care is not simply an interpersonal endeavor. Enabling others for whom we

care to flourish also requires the construction of broader socio-political and economic

structures that embody solidarity and mutual risk-sharing across space time, as Joan

15



Tronto (1993) and other theorists who have written on the political significance of

care, such as Eva Kittay (2001), Fiona Robinson (1999) and Daniel Engster (2007)

have argued. It also requires human-nature relations that honor the dependency of

human flourishing on the non-human world (Groves 2009). The political imaginary of

care connects the experience of attachment to the social (and natural) conditions

necessary to support and sustain flourishing across time. In doing so, it points to an

ethos in and for which the future is constructed as the totality of the singular futures

of others we care about, together with the conditions of their flourishing – very

different to an untenanted future of pure possibility to be seized and colonized at will.

While there is no space here to fully develop the political imaginary of care as

the basis for a new ethos of technological innovation (or to properly anticipate the

criticisms that such a thick account of flourishing will attract), some possible linkages

can be indicated. In relation to technology, the idea of care offers a starting point for

thinking about responsibility that connects with the analysis of technological artefacts

offered by, for example, Peter-Paul Verbeek (2011). Verbeek, echoing Arendt's

account of finitude, sees technology as morally significant because of the ways in

which it conditions human agency. Design, for Verbeek, is therefore an inherently

moral activity as it aims to embed within technological artefacts qualities that are

actively designed to positively enhance specific forms of human life, including the

capacity of technological objects to create and sustain forms of attachment across

time, creating a relationship between humans and technologies which circles around

care (in the sense outlined above) rather than latching onto the compulsion to seek

novelty. Verbeek presents his ethics as a kind of 'good life' ethics of technology, a

technologically-mediated vision of eudaimonia, that awakens a different aesthetic and

ethical relationship to the future.

Viewed as part of a political imaginary of care, the ‘right impacts’ of

innovation would not just be impacts that address material needs, but ones that

enhance human capacities to flourish in the face of uncertainties and surprises, by

contributing to the social relationships that are necessary to support these capacities.

In place of the coupled impulses of future-mapping and the desire for the ‘new new

thing’, we might find a desire for the qualitative enhancement of values that stand for

the resilience and flourishing of richer forms of life. Examining a technology within

the context of a 'good life' ethics of care suited to human finitude would base itself on

the recognition technology is not, in and of itself, essentially alienating, destructive or

dehumanising. Equally, it would be wary of the will to transgression embodied by the

empty future. It would respond to the new problematic of the future awakened by the

experience of reflexive uncertainty by asking not only what a given technology might

contribute to the fulfillment of human needs, but how it will affect the agency and

identity of its users. The point here would perhaps be not to view technological

artefacts as tools for satisfying abstract needs, but as participating with human users

in reshaping our sense of who we are and what we can do.

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Horizons of care: from future imaginaries to responsible research and innovation

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