Living temporality: Speculative engagements with elderly people on bioscience and the body

Abstract

This article reports on speculative engagements in group conversations with elderly citizens on the biomedical possibilities of modifying aging in the future. The participants oriented themselves towards the future of aging through memories and present embodied perceptions. To constrict the analysis, we draw on Isabelle Stengers’ speculative thinking and, to conceptualize the multiplicity of temporalities in our data, we build on Henri Bergson's theorization on time. The analysis of the conversations on technoscientific change illustrate how experiences of aging and the life-span are constituted in and through relations with human and more-than-human others. We theorized these connections of the personal and the collective as living temporality with two temporal logics: Intergenerational time involving other humans in the past, present and future, and evolutionary time that connects the aging body to other living beings and the planet. Within these articulations of the experience of time various alternative perspectives into what is considered as ‘normal’ aging emerged as counternarratives to biomedical models of temporal change. Methodologically, we show that as speculative thinking foregrounds experiential knowledge, it provides a vessel for unruliness and freedom that allows other types of aging futures to emerge alongside bioscientific ones.