Toxicity and technology in the Soviet and Post-Soviet anthropocene

Egle Rindzeviciute: ‘Scientific prediction and governing complexity: epistemologies of the Soviet Anthropocene’

In this talk I will draw on my recent book The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future through Science (Cornell University Press, 2023) to discuss the making of future scenarios of military and environmental destruction in the late Soviet Union. The postwar idea of channelling the boundless growth of science and technology to boost the military-industrial complex was questioned in the 1960s and particularly in the 1970s-1980s, when an influential epistemic community of Soviet scientists began to critique the Cold War regime that was unravelling the very living milieu of humankind. This talk will explore several lines of this debate which developed liberal governmentality approaches, particularly the idea of governing from the limits, and called for the institutional and epistemological reform of the authoritarian regime.