1 The Speculative State, Education and the Commons Magnus Dahlstedt & Mekonnen Tesfahuney Linköping University, University of Karlstad Every Thought emits a Roll of the Dice. Mallarmé A Throw of the Dice We are living in a speculative age. It is not simply politics, economics and culture, but also life itself, which is subject to the logic of speculation. In this speculative social and political climate, it is the entrepreneurial self that has come to symbolize the ideal (citizen) subject at once flexible and docile yet risk-taking. The logic of speculative competition and accumula- tion has become an integral part of technologies of disciplination, control and surveillance over the past decades – in times of crisis as well as growth. Daily shows and television series, such as “celebrity poker”, “poker stars” and “poker tours”, foster a culture of gambling and speculation. That poker magazines are one of the fastest growing and best selling publications in Sweden indexes the inroads of speculative culture in everyday life. The media are just one aspect of the wider repertoire of speculative technologies of disciplination that have emerged since the 1970s. The state has been a key agent abetting a speculative ethos and culture, not only by availing public sector moneys for speculative ends, but even more significantly by mobilizing one of, if not, the most significant disciplinary space in modernity, i.e., education, to foster and impart a speculative ethos and culture. In the speculative era the nation-state is transformed into an organ that stakes identity, history, economy, culture and citizens in the global casino. We see it in speculation in pension funds, state guarantees and/or subsidies to risky projects, in short, a gambling state. These developments reflect the hegemonic role of financial capitalism since the mid 1970-s and the ensuing “financiarization of everything”. 1 In this paper we focus on the consequences of economies and cultures of speculation in the field of education. Education is one of the arenas where the logics of speculation are being played out. It is argued that the major sifts in educational policy over the past decades in Sweden derive from what Baucom aptly called “speculative epistemologies”. 2 The field of education is contemporaneous with the wider recasting of society, economy, politics and cul- ture that is premised on the neo-liberal calculus of accumulation and value maximization. Disciplinary technologies in education are molded by what we call speculative pedagogies. Entrepreneurship, employability and lifelong learning form key aspects of speculative peda- gogies. As disciplinary technologies in education, the task of speculative pedagogies is to (re)mould individuals into calculating, risk-taking and maximizing subjects – gamblers – or docile and risk-taking subjects that live and act in accordance to the rules of the game. In what follows, we rely on recent developments in Swedish educational policy, to discuss the rise of speculative regimes in education. A major task of speculative pedagogies is to foster specula- tive subjects attuned to the demands of accumulation by speculation on a global scale. Chan- ges in educational policy over the last two decades in Sweden have transformed education into an arena where politics and pedagogies of speculation come into play whose primary ob- jective is to promote ways of being and thinking, foster values and ideals based on the specu- lative logics of financial capitalism. However, these pedagogic interventions have been contested and have been facing a num- ber of challenges. One of these challenges in this regard, discussed particularly lively in re- 1 Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 2 Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.