Shifting Tenses: Reconnecting Regimes of Truth and Hope

Drawing on insights from the "sociology of expectations," this paper comments on the public consumption of science and technology with reference to the changing connections and links between the tenses of the present and those of the promissory future. In a wide range of contexts, present-day evidences, proofs, facts, or truths are giving way to future-oriented abstractions premised on desire, imagination, and the will to the yet "not present." To this extent, the paper speaks to long-standing debates on the relationships between given facts and future values,¹ or the movement from present "authority to authenticity" noted by myself and Mike Michael.² It is in these terms that Tiago Moreira and Paolo Palladino write of "regimes of hope,"³ and Bruno Latour writes of shifts from present "matters of fact" to future-oriented "matters of concern."⁴ My paper links these shifting tenses to the promissory features of economy and markets, and at a number of levels, including products, services, and bodies. I also challenge or soften claims to the dominance of the present and the now—the "momentocentrism"—of much recent writing on temporality.

Three interrelated stories serve as a basis for discussing the politics of temporal regime change at the junctures of the present and the future, of truth and hope, in the contemporary consumption of bioscience—each being presented here merely as a site for thinking through these relationships between presents and futures, truths and hopes. First, I comment on a series of events in the biotechnology debate at the close of the twentieth century where it has been possible to see a key strategic shift away from a debate premised on an authoritative, factual, and evidential discourse, toward the language and authentic symbolism of hopeful, future-oriented values.

Second, the imagination has been central to brokering new and highly privatized consumption markets in the biosciences—most saliently in global efforts to store the present for the future through biobanking. This has been particularly striking in those situations where new parents have elected to pay for the storage of their newborn's cord blood.⁵ The case illustrates the corporeality of hope in terms of the deposition of matters that should accrue value over time, but it also signifies acute tensions at the boundaries of regimes of hope and truth as debate rages over the miss-selling ("truthlessness" or "hype") of the stem cell promise.

Finally, building on these themes of embodied hope and economy, I want to explore an area in which regimes of hope have become the calculable objects of truth regimes. The emergence of "hope scales"—a literature and apparatus widely used in oncology treatment to assess whether or not patients are appropriately positive about their potential recovery—represents the calculative naturalization and objectification of hope in the form of personal will and volition to overcome pathology. In what Mary Delvecchio-Good describes as the political "economy of hope" in oncology culture, there are conflicting pressures to both speak the truth of clinical disclosure (prognosis), and yet to avoid damaging the patient's volition to mindfully confront their pathology with hope.⁶

In these uneven though related stories are intertwined the changing balances between "regimes of truth" and "regimes of hope" in the present-day politics of the biosciences. Such stories prompt far-reaching questions about the temporalities of expectations, and changes in the character of the future; about the place of bioscience in future-oriented subjecthood and embodiment; and important reflexive questions about the role of social science analysis in reshaping or intervening in the worlds of hope and expectation. I will also explore the links and connections between these sites and economies of capitalization, where regimes of hope serve as the basis for new markets and new ways of mobilizing biologies and selves.⁷

By way of background, this paper draws on a number of recent strands in sociological literature on expectations, time, and futurity in making sense of these kinds of temporal linkages. Moreira and Palladino have written about the tensions and relationships between the paired "regimes" of hope and...