Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality

One defining quality of our current moment is its characteristic state of anticipation, of thinking and living toward the future. Anticipation has epistemic value, a virtue emerging through actuarial saturation as sciences of the actual are displaced by speculative forecast. It is a politics of temporality and affect. Key dimensions are: injunction as the moral imperative to characterize and inhabit states of uncertainty; abduction as requisite tacking back and forth between futures, pasts and presents, framing templates for producing the future; optimization as the moral responsibility of citizens to secure their 'best possible futures'; preparedness as living in 'preparation for' potential trauma; and possibility as 'ratcheting up' hopefulness, especially through technoscience. Anticipation is the palpable sense that things could be (all) right if we leverage new spaces of opportunity, reconfiguring 'the possible.' We illustrate exemplary sites of anticipatory practice, especially biomedical, highlighting how such sites are gendered, increasingly implicating young girls.