Ambivalent retreat and uncoordinated refusal form a generative counter-speculative politics

Evidence

In our recent studies of the so-called anxiety epidemic in UK and North American university campuses, for instance, we found hints of more generative politics that may appear unfamiliar (taking the form of retreat, ambivalence, disengagement, and practices of uncoordinated refusal) but contain a counter-speculative potential. Students today are just as capable of knowingly undermining their universities’ technocratic management systems (for instance, by tactically using “extenuating-circumstances” forms to disrupt the bureaucratic administration of “student support services”), as they are of more overt political organizing such as protests and sit-ins. Simply put, speculative communities can be sites of anxious solidarities, formed around unseen and often “unseeable” struggles that cannot be answered under the guise of individual psychology. They often unfold in the darker corners of speculative technologies—in Instagram posts and Facebook comment threads, where students’ anxiety reverberates but at the same time also blends with irony, playfulness, and routine expressions of mutual aid, care, and fellowship. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 346

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates what ‘anxious solidarities’ means through concrete student tactics like ‘extenuating-circumstances’ forms; directly feeds the reader’s need to assess the counter-speculations chapter.
• XREF: Echoes the Frankfurt School’s suppressed ‘practices of refusal’ and the reader’s prior notes on uncoordinated non-participation as resistance. — connects to: Nomadism’s anticonformism does not automatically make it subversive — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 115; Post-Fordist resistance must escape the motivation and demotivation binary — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 68
• QUESTION: Is retreat/disengagement truly counter-speculative, or does it mirror speculation’s own withdrawal from solid ground? The reader should interrogate whether this concedes ground.