Homo Speculans

Discussion

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou:

"There has been a persistent view in contemporary critical theories that tend to still focus on homo economicus as the dominant hegemonic subject of contemporary capitalism, often setting it up against an idealised Homo politicus. In response, discussion tends to centre on a search for ‘alternative narratives’ that strive to ‘rescue’ more radical political subjectivities from the imagined figure of homo economicus, which is seen as utility-maximising and strangling our political agency, stifling our political imagination, if you like.

That’s a very well versed narrative that I didn’t quite feel happy with. And so the figure of homo speculans, whose outlines I draw in the book, in some ways seeks to shake up the debate around what the hegemonic subject of contemporary financialized capitalism looks like - and in doing so to move us away from a binary view economic and political agency as either rational or irrational. There is something quite fundamental about our notions of economic subjectivity that need to be opened up, in order to include the profoundly relevant role of imagination in shaping economic agents’ choices and relations.

To do this I turned to some thinkers that have not traditionally been brought into the conversation so far, when it comes to questions of economic imaginings: Cornelius Castoriadis and Benedict Anderson. Both thinkers have written extensively about the generative, constructive, productive role of the human imagination in moulding human subjectivity, but also our collective bonds, communities, and of course markets: all spaces, in other words, where human relations unfold. With homo speculans, I sought to rehabilitate this role of the imagination in economic as well as social life, which precedes both rationality and what can be designated as the realm of emotions, what Keynes famously called ‘animal spirits’. And a key implication of this was to challenge the reductive view of individual economic agents that are seen as irrational masses and crowds in the aggregate level, and to foreground instead questions of community, relationality and connectivity: the ways in which our economic imaginations produce a kind of collective sense of self."

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