Communities Are the Site Where Imagination Happens

Discussion

* Q: Chiara Di Leone: "I wanted to ask you to be a bit more precise about what constitutes communities and what is the theory of action there between imagining and doing?"

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou: "There is an important point to make here. I don’t view the imagination as a force that is necessarily or inherently positive; and I do not consider all imagined social, political and economic futures to be ‘progressive’. In the book, I argue that imagination is generative, that it doesn’t mirror reality – it produces it. But some produced realities can be extremely depressing. There’s perhaps something counterintuitive here. When I tell people that I am interested in the way finance (re)imagines the world and our futures, there’s something jarring, I suppose, because our intuitive understanding of finance is that of a force that extracts and limits rather than produces. But my framing of the imagination argues that even the most destructive operations of finance are in a sense generative: because they involve fashioning new forms of society, new relations, new narratives, and new futures. And to go back to your question, there is a big caveat here: power is still operative in this process. As you said, not everyone’s imagination carries the same weight or has the same power to influence the reality that they help shape. The speculative communities that I described in the book are not equal communities, they are marred by profound inequalities.

Let me take a step back here and say a few words on my use of the term ‘community’. Anderson describes the proto-national community that is forged through the reading of newspapers and novels (made possible by the invention of the print press). The speculative communities of our own time are instead imagined through new collective rituals in virtual media – not ‘in the turn of the newspaper page’ but through what we could call the infinite scroll and the infinite swipe. There is, in these digital rituals, a different kind of imagination that allows us to cope with uncertainty, a sense of belonging into something that exceeds the merely narcissistic self, something that is more communal even if disorienting and ephemeral. However, this isn’t necessarily a beautiful utopian community. Speculative communities are cleaved by unequal structures of power, which are undergirded by an unequal distribution of resources and a scarcity of technologies that can be mobilised. Our capacity to imagine is contingent on having access to such vital material resources, without which our collective wagers on the future cannot successfully hedge uncertainty. But part of my point in the book is that the very field of ‘the struggle’, so to speak, the form of contemporary conflicts of power is today shifting towards the realm of the speculative imagination."

(https://weirdeconomies.com/contributions/speculative-communities)