Speculative Time examines how a climate of financial and economic speculation and disaster shaped the literary culture of the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century. It argues that speculation's risk-laden and crisis-prone temporalities had major impacts on writing in the period, and on important aspects of visual representation.

A wide-ranging investigation of what speculation is, and what is at stake for artistic, curatorial, critical, and institutional practices in relating to their own speculative character. Engaging with the question of speculation in ways that encompass the artistic, the economic, and the philosophical, with excursions into the literary and the scientific, this collection approaches the theme as a powerful logic of contemporary life whose key instantiations are art and finance. Both are premised on the power of contingency, temporality, and experimentation in the creation (and capitalization) of possible worlds. Artistic autonomy, and the self-legislation of the space of art, have often been seen as the freedom to speculate wildly on material and social possibilities. In this context, the artist is seen as a speculative subject and a paragon of creativity—the diametrical opposite of the bean-counter obsessed with balance sheets and value added. However, once social reality becomes speculative and opaque in its own right—risky, algorithmic, and overhauled by networked markets—what becomes of the distinction between not just art and finance but art and life? This anthology surveys material and social inventiveness from the ground up, speculating with technologies, gender, constructs of the family, and systems of logistics and coordination. An ecology of speculation is traced—one that is as broken, specific, and enthralling as the world. Artists Surveyed include Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Ludwiński, Cameron Rowland, Salvage Art Institute, Andy Warhol, Mi You, PiraMMMida, Sam Lewitt Writers Include Lisa Adkins, Ramon Amaro, Brenna Bhandar, Octavia Butler, Cédric Durand, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Sophie Lewis, Dougal Dixon, Stanisław Lem, Isabelle Stengers and Phillip Pignarre, Steven Shaviro, Can Xue, Daniel Spaulding

The main objective of this 2002 book is to show that behind the bewildering diversity of historical speculative episodes it is possible to find hidden regularities, thus preparing the way for a unified theory of market speculation. Speculative bubbles require the study of various episodes in order for a comparative perspective to be obtained and the analysis developed in this book follows a few simple but unconventional ideas. Investors are assumed to exhibit the same basic behavior during speculative episodes whether they trade stocks, real estate, or postage stamps. The author demonstrates how some of the basic concepts of dynamical system theory, such as the notions of impulse response, reaction times and frequency analysis, play an instrumental role in describing and predicting speculative behavior. This book will serve as a useful introduction for students of econophysics, and readers with a general interest in economics as seen from the perspective of physics.

Every age has characteristic inventions that change the world. In the 19th century it was the steam engine and the train. For the 20th, electric and gasoline power, aircraft, nuclear weapons, even ventures into space. Today, the planet is awash with electronic business, chatter and virtual-reality entertainment so brilliant that the division between real and simulated is hard to discern. But one new idea from the 19th century has failed, so far, to enter reality—time travel, using machines to turn the time dimension into a two-way highway. Will it come true, as foreseen in science fiction? Might we expect visits to and from the future, sooner than from space? That is the Time Machine Hypothesis, examined here by futurist Damien Broderick, an award-winning writer and theorist of the genre of the future. Broderick homes in on the topic through the lens of science as well as fiction, exploring some fifty different time-travel scenarios and conundrums found in the science fiction literature and film.

This book is devoted to a systems-theoretical presentation of the main results of applying the systemic yoyo model and relevant analytical tools to the topics of money and financial institutions. The author presents the main concepts and results of the subject matter in the language of systems science, which has in the past century prompted revolutionary applicati ons of systems research in various subfields of traditional disciplines. This volume applies a brand new logic of reasoning to some of the unsett led problems in the area of money and banking. Due to the particular systemic approach employed, the reader will be able to see how different economic activities are implicitly related to each other and how financial decisions are holistically made in reference to seemingly unrelated events. That is, the learning of this particular subject matter takes place at a different, more elevated level, from which, among others, economies are respectively seen as both closed and open systems; their interactions emulate those of rotational pools of fluids. This book can be used as a textbook for researchers and graduate students in economics, finance, systems science, and mathematical / systems modeling. It will also be useful as a reference book for applied economists and various policy makers.