Speculative Communities

* Book: Speculative Communities. Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World. By Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. University of Chicago Press, 2022

URL = https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo125281793.html

Description

"Speculative Communities investigates the financial world’s influence on the social imagination, unraveling its radical effects on our personal and political lives.

In Speculative Communities, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou examines the ways that speculation has moved beyond financial markets to shape fundamental aspects of our social and political lives. As ordinary people make exceptional decisions, such as the American election of a populist demagogue or the British vote to leave the European Union, they are moving from time-honored and -tested practices of governance, toward the speculative promise of a new, more uncertain future. This book shows how even our methods of building community have shifted to the speculative realm as social media platforms enable and amplify our volatile wagers.

For Komporozos-Athanasiou, “to speculate” means increasingly “to connect,” to endorse the unknown pre-emptively, and often daringly, as a means of social survival. Grappling with the question of how more uncertainty can lead to its full-throated embrace rather than dissent, Speculative Communities shows how finance has become the model for society writ large. As Komporozos-Athanasiou argues, virtual marketplaces, new social media, and dating apps bring finance’s opaque infrastructures into the most intimate realms of our lives, leading to a new type of speculative imagination across economy, culture, and society."

Contents

Part 1: Speculation: Finance and Capitalism

1. The Rise of Speculative Communities

2. A Genealogy of Speculative Imagination: Old Spirits of Capitalism

Part 2: Spectacle: Finance and Society

3. Speculative Technologies and the New Homo Speculans

4. Speculative Intimacies

Part 3: Specter: Finance and Polity

5. Financialized Populism and New Nationalisms

6. Counter-speculations

Interview

The author is interviewed by Chiara Di Leone.

What made you write Speculative Communities?

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou: Having studied Economics as an undergraduate student, I have always been fascinated by financial markets and interested in understanding their impact on everyday life. I was of course disappointed by the profound inadequacies of my formal training in the discipline – by the lack of historical and social grounding in the curriculum, by the short-sightedness and quixotic forecasting claims of economic models. But, at the same time, I was also inexplicably drawn to the mystified world of economic future-making that was simmering beneath these abstractions. Speculative Communities, in some ways, is an attempt to go back to this complex, obfuscated and bewildering world of financial markets as a sociologist, with the intent of doing something more than merely ‘deconstructing’ that world. The book also comes out of a frustration with the often naive and universalizing ways in which contemporary markets tend to be treated in social and political theory, which often cast them as an ‘over-rationalising’ force sequestering our political agency and imagination – or as a fanciful world that is completely ‘disembedded’ from society and politics. Though many of these arguments point to real problems with our financialised world, they tend to engage only superficially with the rich and generative complexity of finance, which therefore remains a ‘black box’.

The core question in the book speaks to a key feature of our contemporary moment which has been precipitated by finance, what we could call a radicalization of uncertainty: the way in which our contemporary sense of reality is perceived increasingly as profoundly unstable and volatile, as traditional structures and narratives are failing to provide satisfactory answers about what is going on. I wanted to delve, specifically, into a perplexing ‘paradox’: we no longer seem capable of or even interested in controlling such uncertainty. Many of our behaviours, across different realms of our lives, are geared increasingly towards more upfront engagements with the unknown, which seem to be accepting and endorsing uncertainty rather than trying to limit it or to mitigate it.

The book traces the recent history of this phenomenon, focusing on the historical period following up from the 2008 financial crisis. I look at some of the ‘unexpected’ political events of the tumultuous 2010s, like the election of Donald Trump, Brexit in the UK, and the growth of the global national-populist current with Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil and so on. I discuss the rise of a particular brand of rather chaotic and strange mix of ideologies coagulating into the right wing populism that has become so prevalent, often befuddling political commentators and theorists alike. My argument is that these kinds of unexpected (political) events represent a shift in the ways voters imagine their futures, how they relate to political narratives and promises. Such imagined futures are no longer geared towards stability and the promise of greater security. Emerging political narratives fueling the global rise of the populist right are disjointed, chaotic and uncertain – and yet somehow they ‘make sense’. Some of the prevalent academic explanations of this issue have been overly focused on people who ‘vote against their interests’, casting them as ‘irrational crowds’ and delusional masses.

In Speculative Communities, I wanted to examine this paradox from a different perspective, through the lens of finance: I wanted to understand how finance has been nurturing a certain way of imagining, what I call a speculative imagination, in society at large - an imagination that has cultivated these disorienting narratives and attendant political behaviours. Our seemingly ‘irrational’ responses to uncertainty make sense, then, much in the same way as finance’s own speculative endorsement of uncertainty is perfectly rational when it seeks to capitalise from it. Swathes of society have been immersing themselves in a seemingly chaotic and confusing moment with the hope of benefiting from radical uncertainty (rather than trying to avert it). So that’s a core argument that threads through the book, and which I discuss on different levels including economic, social and even intimate life."

You propose this figure of Homo Speculans ?

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)

Communities Are the Site Where Imagination Happens

* 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)