M Savransky
Biographic Data
| ID | 42914 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Savransky |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Savransky |
| SIGNATURE | SAVRANSKY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0807-8350 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 191 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Collapse as a Way of Life
Engaging debates in social theory on the transformations of the future today, this article argues that planetary upheavals suffuse the present with a sense of malaise, wherein we seem simultaneously unable to envisage liveable futures and unable to envisage life outside ‘the future’ as such. Paradoxically, nowhere is this more evident than in those strands of climate thinking that prescribe ‘deep adaptation’ to inevitable societal collapse. Where…
Irreverent Pessimism (A Planetary Life Without Appeal)
Perhaps the most disorienting feature of the long socioecological disaster that makes ever-sprawling environmental disasters amplify the effects of ongoing and uneven conditions of poverty, violence, and dispossession, is not its urgency, but its permanence: that there is no foreseeable future in which redemption would prevail. What might it take to refuse the cruel hope for a redemptive future without seeking consolation in the despair that such…
The Apocalypse We Become
Review of Stephanie Wakefield, Miami in the Anthropocene: Rising Seas and Urban Resilience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025)
Regimes of futurity
Interstitial Politics
Recent editorials in Science, Technology & Human Values have invited us to expand alternative ways of doing Science and Technology Studies (STS) that respond to the here-and-now of planetary life. This paper relays these calls for these catastrophic times by considering the manner in which philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has approached this problem. Proffering an extended reading of the mutations of Stengers's thought in the last decade,…
Glosario tecno-climático para orientarse en una época incierta
El "Glosario tecno-climático" es una obra colaborativa que recopila entradas abordando conceptos fundamentales para explorar la intersección entre tecnología y crisis climática. Cada entrada se presenta de manera concisa, estableciendo puntos clave sobre los siguientes términos: "Activismo Digital", "Alteración Climática", "Antropoceno", "Atmósfera", "Dinámicas de inflexión social", "Gaia", "Geosimbiosis", "Progreso", "Sostenibilidad", "Tecnologí…
In the fourth person singular
Nothing has done more to cement William James’s reputation than his unrepentant individualism. In a present marked by the challenge of imagining modes of transformative action worthy of our planetary travails, James’s individualism appears dated, unworthy of the present. Yet such judgement neglects its pragmatic dimension, as well as its political connections to James’s anarchistic pluralism. Situating anarchism at the centre of James’s vision, t…
Ecological Reparation
How do we engage with the threat of social and environmental degradation while creating and maintaining liveable and just worlds? Researchers from diverse backgrounds unpack this question through a series of original and committed contributions to this wide-ranging volume.
Passages to the outside
What might it take to re-imagine the futures of geographical thought on an Earth whose geological disjunctures and catastrophic dynamics have radically upended the progressive temporality that once made of ‘the future’ a modern article of faith and a matter of concern? What, in other words, is the future to those practices animated by the metamorphic forces of the Earth? Seeking to inhabit the problem-space these questions generate, this commenta…
The Will to Believe in this World
The patterns of ecological devastation that mark the present unexpectedly enable an ancient and many‐storied question to resurface with renewed force: the question of the arts of living — that is, of learning how to live and die well with others on a precarious Earth. Modernity has all but forgotten this question, which has long been buried under the dreams of progress and infinite growth, colonial projects, and the enthroning of technoscience. B…
Ecological uncivilisation
Responding to the proposition that learning to live in the Anthropocene involves learning how to die, this article problematises the modes of world-making upheld in some of the contemporary proposals for the global reorganisation of societies towards just, socio-ecological transitions beyond the techno-fixes of geoengineering, green growth, and their attendant ideals of progress. Specifically, it critically examines one such proposal that, inspir…
After progress
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 Euro…
Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
In Around the Day in Eighty Worlds Martin Savransky calls for a radical politics of the pluriverse amid the ongoing devastation of the present. Responding to an epoch marked by the history of colonialism and ecological devastation, Savransky draws on the pragmatic pluralism of William James to develop what he calls a “pluralistic realism”—an understanding of the world as simultaneously one and many, ongoing and unfinished, underway and yet to be …
Counter-apocalyptic beginnings
Departing from Aimé Césaire’s striking proposition that The End of the World is the only thing in this world that is worth beginning, this article sets out to explore some of its implications as a counter-apocalyptic gesture that renders apocalypse an immanent event: the end of some world in this world. Probing the speculative force of Césaire's counter-apocalyptic proposition, the article suggests that it can trouble one of the more insidious po…
Problems All the Way Down
Besieged by ongoing economic crises, global health emergencies, geopolitical instabilities, ecological devastation, and growing political resentments, the intractable nature of the problems that configure the present has never loomed larger or more darkly. But what, indeed, is a problem? Problematising the modern image that treats problems as obstacles to be overcome by the progress of technoscientific knowledge and policy, this introductory arti…
The Pluralistic Problematic
In his lectures on pragmatism, William James famously proposed that the question of 'the one and the many' constitutes the most central of all philosophic problems, and that it is 'central because so pregnant'. Prompted by James' proposition, this article explores the intimately political connection in James' thought between his pluralistic metaphysics and the nature of the problematic as a generative force that impregnates worlds and thoughts wi…
Pragmáticas do pluriverso
The Bat Revolt in Values
Written in the wake of the strike action that has seen academics and students across more than sixty UK universities create new interstices and alliances against the marketization of higher education and its generalized forms of impoverishment, this parabolic article experiments with the possibility of developing a radically immanent approach to the creation and destruction of value and explores its implications for the concept and politics of ev…
When bodies think
Cultivating a speculative orientation to the medical humanities, the aim of this essay is to explore some dimensions of the recent calls for more participatory forms of medicine and healthcare under the sign of what, after Michel Foucault, I call the 'biopolitical problematic'. That is, the divergent encounter between techniques of biopower that seek to take hold of life and the body, and a plurality of living bodies that persistently respond, ch…
A careful biomedicine? Generalization and abstraction in RCTs
This article takes up biomedical and public health concerns about the difficulty of generalizing or extrapolating measurements of efficacy produced by the method of the randomized control trial (RCT) to wider populations. While explanations for the difficulty may be deduced from social studies of science that reveal the contingent and situated nature of trial findings, new conceptual tools are required to allow for the practical value associated …
Introduction
IntroductionIsabelle Stengers and the Dramatization of Philosophy Martin Savransky (bio) “Dic cur hic” In what may seem like an uncharacteristic passage by someone who otherwise described himself as the typical example of the Victorian Englishman, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that “[t]he notion of pure thought in abstraction from all expression is a figment of the learned world. A thought is a tremendous form of excitement” (Modes 36). It is…
Relearning the Art of Paying Attention
Relearning the Art of Paying Attention: A Conversation Martin Savransky (bio) and Isabelle Stengers (bio) I. Philosophy as a Provocation of Thought Martin Savransky (MS): The first question I wanted to ask you has to do with the manner in which you do philosophy, in the sense that the concepts that you create, develop and experiment with, always resist the temptation to tell others what to do. In fact, at the very beginning of your “The Cosmopoli…
The Humor of the Problematic
The Humor of the Problematic: Thinking with Stengers Martin Savransky (bio) Thinking with Stengers In the chapter of Gilles Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque where Whitehead makes a surprising and crucial appearance, Deleuze chooses to introduce the English mathematician and philosopher as the successor, or "diadoche," of what he describes as a somewhat secret school. The reason for the secrecy of this school is itself something of a my…
How It Feels to Think
This article explores some aspects of what happens, and what can happen, in the complex practice we commonly refer to as "thinking." Of all the practices involved in the messy processes we call research, "thinking" is perhaps the most pervasive and widespread. Yet, it also remains the most opaque. Thinking happens, but it is seldom spoken about. The theories we normally engage with never say how they come about. Surely, philosophers of various tr…
A Decolonial Imagination
While the recent proliferation of sociological engagements with postcolonial thought is important and welcome, central to most critiques of Eurocentrism is a concern with the realm of epistemology, with how sociology comes to know its objects of study. Such a concern, however, risks perpetuating another form of Eurocentrism, one that is responsible for instituting the very distinction between epistemology and ontology, knowledge and reality. By d…
A Decolonial Imagination
While the recent proliferation of sociological engagements with postcolonial thought is important and welcome, central to most critiques of Eurocentrism is a concern with the realm of epistemology, with how sociology comes to know its objects of study. Such a concern, however, risks perpetuating another form of Eurocentrism, one that is responsible for instituting the very distinction between epistemology and ontology, knowledge and reality. By d…
The Adventure of Relevance
At a time where the relevance of the social sciences is under threat, this innovative book offers a speculative experimentation on the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences to rethink what
Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
In Around the Day in Eighty Worlds Martin Savransky calls for a radical politics of the pluriverse amid the ongoing devastation of the present. Responding to an epoch marked by the history of colonialism and ecological devastation, Savransky draws on the pragmatic pluralism of William James to develop what he calls a “pluralistic realism”—an understanding of the world as simultaneously one and many, ongoing and unfinished, underway and yet to be …
Problems All the Way Down
Besieged by ongoing economic crises, global health emergencies, geopolitical instabilities, ecological devastation, and growing political resentments, the intractable nature of the problems that configure the present has never loomed larger or more darkly. But what, indeed, is a problem? Problematising the modern image that treats problems as obstacles to be overcome by the progress of technoscientific knowledge and policy, this introductory arti…
The Pluralistic Problematic
In his lectures on pragmatism, William James famously proposed that the question of 'the one and the many' constitutes the most central of all philosophic problems, and that it is 'central because so pregnant'. Prompted by James' proposition, this article explores the intimately political connection in James' thought between his pluralistic metaphysics and the nature of the problematic as a generative force that impregnates worlds and thoughts wi…
Relearning the Art of Paying Attention
Relearning the Art of Paying Attention: A Conversation Martin Savransky (bio) and Isabelle Stengers (bio) I. Philosophy as a Provocation of Thought Martin Savransky (MS): The first question I wanted to ask you has to do with the manner in which you do philosophy, in the sense that the concepts that you create, develop and experiment with, always resist the temptation to tell others what to do. In fact, at the very beginning of your “The Cosmopoli…
Worlds in the making
In December 1982, Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the now classic Cien Anos de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), among many other novels and short stories, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.1 In the award ceremony, Professor Lars Gyllensten, who presented the laureate and his work, emphasized the quality of the work as an exemplary case within the so-called magical-realist tradition: 'In his novels and short stor…
After progress
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 Euro…
Ecological uncivilisation
Responding to the proposition that learning to live in the Anthropocene involves learning how to die, this article problematises the modes of world-making upheld in some of the contemporary proposals for the global reorganisation of societies towards just, socio-ecological transitions beyond the techno-fixes of geoengineering, green growth, and their attendant ideals of progress. Specifically, it critically examines one such proposal that, inspir…
Passages to the outside
What might it take to re-imagine the futures of geographical thought on an Earth whose geological disjunctures and catastrophic dynamics have radically upended the progressive temporality that once made of ‘the future’ a modern article of faith and a matter of concern? What, in other words, is the future to those practices animated by the metamorphic forces of the Earth? Seeking to inhabit the problem-space these questions generate, this commenta…
What is nature capable of? Evidence, ontology and speculative medical humanities
Expanding on the recent call for a 'critical medical humanities' to intervene in questions of the ontology of health, this article develops a what we call a 'speculative' orientation to such interventions in relation to some of the ontological commitments on which contemporary biomedical cultures rest. We argue that crucial to this task is an approach to ontology that treats it not as a question of first principles, but as a matter of the consequ…
The Humor of the Problematic
The Humor of the Problematic: Thinking with Stengers Martin Savransky (bio) Thinking with Stengers In the chapter of Gilles Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque where Whitehead makes a surprising and crucial appearance, Deleuze chooses to introduce the English mathematician and philosopher as the successor, or "diadoche," of what he describes as a somewhat secret school. The reason for the secrecy of this school is itself something of a my…
Introduction
IntroductionIsabelle Stengers and the Dramatization of Philosophy Martin Savransky (bio) “Dic cur hic” In what may seem like an uncharacteristic passage by someone who otherwise described himself as the typical example of the Victorian Englishman, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that “[t]he notion of pure thought in abstraction from all expression is a figment of the learned world. A thought is a tremendous form of excitement” (Modes 36). It is…
How It Feels to Think
This article explores some aspects of what happens, and what can happen, in the complex practice we commonly refer to as "thinking." Of all the practices involved in the messy processes we call research, "thinking" is perhaps the most pervasive and widespread. Yet, it also remains the most opaque. Thinking happens, but it is seldom spoken about. The theories we normally engage with never say how they come about. Surely, philosophers of various tr…
Counter-apocalyptic beginnings
Departing from Aimé Césaire’s striking proposition that The End of the World is the only thing in this world that is worth beginning, this article sets out to explore some of its implications as a counter-apocalyptic gesture that renders apocalypse an immanent event: the end of some world in this world. Probing the speculative force of Césaire's counter-apocalyptic proposition, the article suggests that it can trouble one of the more insidious po…
When bodies think
Cultivating a speculative orientation to the medical humanities, the aim of this essay is to explore some dimensions of the recent calls for more participatory forms of medicine and healthcare under the sign of what, after Michel Foucault, I call the 'biopolitical problematic'. That is, the divergent encounter between techniques of biopower that seek to take hold of life and the body, and a plurality of living bodies that persistently respond, ch…
Worlds in the making
In December 1982, Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the now classic Cien Anos de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), among many other novels and short stories, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.1 In the award ceremony, Professor Lars Gyllensten, who presented the laureate and his work, emphasized the quality of the work as an exemplary case within the so-called magical-realist tradition: 'In his novels and short stor…
Of Recalcitrant Subjects
This paper problematises some of the assumptions underlying efforts in Governmentality Studies (GS) to theorise the production of subjectivity. By focusing on the GS literature about the role of the ‘psy-disciplines’ in the contemporary production of subjects, and by engaging in discussion with a heterogeneous series of authors such as Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres, it is argued that there are methodological, e…
On the Problem of Attachment
A global economic crisis and the imminent prospects of a time of environmental catastrophes may have been the price we had to pay for our modern habits of bifurcating the world into clear-cut, dist
The Risks of Invention
Adventures of relevance are inventive undertakings in knowledge-making. But in what sense are such inquiries inventive? In ‘The Risks of Invention’, Savransky argues that an account of ‘invention’ attuned to the question of relevance involves the risk of conjoining ‘fabrication’ and ‘discovery’, and of devising a new concept of ‘objectivity’. Taking this risk seriously requires the construction of a space that can resist a long-standing but false…
Afterword
By undertaking a speculative exercise in reconstruction, in this book I have sought to produce a series of intellectual instruments that might make possible a different care of knowledge in the contemporary social sciences. The speculative task of making possibles has here forced me to reconsider the place that the concept of relevance has, and may have, in relation to the articulation of a different mode of social inquiry. One that rather than u…
For Speculative Experimentation
Savransky discusses the possible role of theory within the empiricist framework that adventures adopt, and he calls for a new mode of theorising that he associates with the idea of ‘speculative experimentation’. After discussing recent debates around the death of theory in the social sciences and humanities as well as some of the new empiricisms that have emerged in response to it, Savransky articulates a speculative, empiricist, and future-orien…
Thinking With Encounters
Adventures of relevance are inventive undertakings in knowledge-making. But in what sense are such inquiries inventive? In ‘The Risks of Invention’, Savransky argues that an account of ‘invention’ attuned to the question of relevance involves the risk of conjoining ‘fabrication’ and ‘discovery’, and of devising a new concept of ‘objectivity’. Taking this risk seriously requires the construction of a space that can resist a longstanding but false …
An Ethics of Adventure
Savransky takes up the challenge of providing a characterisation of an ethics of adventure. To do this, the chapter elucidates the nature of ‘relevance’ as an event and investigates the complex temporal and ethical requirements that events pose on practices of social inquiry. While many traditions of social inquiry consist in reducing the becoming of events to pre-existing historical and social conditions, Savransky argues that an ethics of adven…
The Question of Relevance
Savransky tackles the ‘crisis’ of the contemporary social sciences by attending to the ways in which ‘relevance’ is conceived. Focusing on various demands for relevance, including debates on ‘public sociology’, he argues that the way in which the concept is understood reduces it to a subjective judgement of worth and to a problem of communication. Engaging with the philosophies of A.N. Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers, and others, Savransky elaborate…
Introduction
In this historical conjuncture where the relevance of the social sciences is under threat, Savransky argues that we need to cultivate new habits of thinking, knowing, and feeling in social inquiry. That is, a new set of ethical sensibilities, or what he calls a ‘care of knowledge’. Drawing on a range of philosophers, including John Dewey, Michel Foucault, and A. N. Whitehead, the introduction provides an integral definition ethics as an entire ma…
Modes of Connection
Demands for relevance often become manifest as suspicions about the impact of social scientific inventions beyond the academy. In Chap. 5 , Savransky addresses the question of how to think about the effects that knowledge makes to the worlds with which it connects. While those traditions that have embraced a logic of ‘performativity’ may seem well equipped to give an account of this process, Savransky shows that this logic tends to exaggerate cla…
What is nature capable of? Evidence, ontology and speculative medical humanities
Expanding on the recent call for a 'critical medical humanities' to intervene in questions of the ontology of health, this article develops a what we call a 'speculative' orientation to such interventions in relation to some of the ontological commitments on which contemporary biomedical cultures rest. We argue that crucial to this task is an approach to ontology that treats it not as a question of first principles, but as a matter of the consequ…
The Adventure of Relevance
At a time where the relevance of the social sciences is under threat, this innovative book offers a speculative experimentation on the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences to rethink what
A Decolonial Imagination
While the recent proliferation of sociological engagements with postcolonial thought is important and welcome, central to most critiques of Eurocentrism is a concern with the realm of epistemology, with how sociology comes to know its objects of study. Such a concern, however, risks perpetuating another form of Eurocentrism, one that is responsible for instituting the very distinction between epistemology and ontology, knowledge and reality. By d…
A careful biomedicine? Generalization and abstraction in RCTs
This article takes up biomedical and public health concerns about the difficulty of generalizing or extrapolating measurements of efficacy produced by the method of the randomized control trial (RCT) to wider populations. While explanations for the difficulty may be deduced from social studies of science that reveal the contingent and situated nature of trial findings, new conceptual tools are required to allow for the practical value associated …
Introduction
IntroductionIsabelle Stengers and the Dramatization of Philosophy Martin Savransky (bio) “Dic cur hic” In what may seem like an uncharacteristic passage by someone who otherwise described himself as the typical example of the Victorian Englishman, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that “[t]he notion of pure thought in abstraction from all expression is a figment of the learned world. A thought is a tremendous form of excitement” (Modes 36). It is…
Relearning the Art of Paying Attention
Relearning the Art of Paying Attention: A Conversation Martin Savransky (bio) and Isabelle Stengers (bio) I. Philosophy as a Provocation of Thought Martin Savransky (MS): The first question I wanted to ask you has to do with the manner in which you do philosophy, in the sense that the concepts that you create, develop and experiment with, always resist the temptation to tell others what to do. In fact, at the very beginning of your “The Cosmopoli…
The Humor of the Problematic
The Humor of the Problematic: Thinking with Stengers Martin Savransky (bio) Thinking with Stengers In the chapter of Gilles Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque where Whitehead makes a surprising and crucial appearance, Deleuze chooses to introduce the English mathematician and philosopher as the successor, or "diadoche," of what he describes as a somewhat secret school. The reason for the secrecy of this school is itself something of a my…
How It Feels to Think
This article explores some aspects of what happens, and what can happen, in the complex practice we commonly refer to as "thinking." Of all the practices involved in the messy processes we call research, "thinking" is perhaps the most pervasive and widespread. Yet, it also remains the most opaque. Thinking happens, but it is seldom spoken about. The theories we normally engage with never say how they come about. Surely, philosophers of various tr…
The Bat Revolt in Values
Written in the wake of the strike action that has seen academics and students across more than sixty UK universities create new interstices and alliances against the marketization of higher education and its generalized forms of impoverishment, this parabolic article experiments with the possibility of developing a radically immanent approach to the creation and destruction of value and explores its implications for the concept and politics of ev…
When bodies think
Cultivating a speculative orientation to the medical humanities, the aim of this essay is to explore some dimensions of the recent calls for more participatory forms of medicine and healthcare under the sign of what, after Michel Foucault, I call the 'biopolitical problematic'. That is, the divergent encounter between techniques of biopower that seek to take hold of life and the body, and a plurality of living bodies that persistently respond, ch…
Pragmáticas do pluriverso
Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
In Around the Day in Eighty Worlds Martin Savransky calls for a radical politics of the pluriverse amid the ongoing devastation of the present. Responding to an epoch marked by the history of colonialism and ecological devastation, Savransky draws on the pragmatic pluralism of William James to develop what he calls a “pluralistic realism”—an understanding of the world as simultaneously one and many, ongoing and unfinished, underway and yet to be …
Counter-apocalyptic beginnings
Departing from Aimé Césaire’s striking proposition that The End of the World is the only thing in this world that is worth beginning, this article sets out to explore some of its implications as a counter-apocalyptic gesture that renders apocalypse an immanent event: the end of some world in this world. Probing the speculative force of Césaire's counter-apocalyptic proposition, the article suggests that it can trouble one of the more insidious po…
Problems All the Way Down
Besieged by ongoing economic crises, global health emergencies, geopolitical instabilities, ecological devastation, and growing political resentments, the intractable nature of the problems that configure the present has never loomed larger or more darkly. But what, indeed, is a problem? Problematising the modern image that treats problems as obstacles to be overcome by the progress of technoscientific knowledge and policy, this introductory arti…
Philosophy (31 works) · Epistemology (29 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Political science (21 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Environmental ethics (10 works)