Counter-speculations refuse to substitute one broken promise for another

Evidence

What makes our time’s counter-speculations distinct from the broader speculative politics currently on the march is their unwillingness to simply replace one external broken promise with another. As Ann Mische (2014) has astutely argued, imagining the future has always vexed sociologists because imaginings ultimately exist “in our heads.” In her own work, Mische has looked for “proxies” to trace more radical re-imaginings in contemporary social movements, different “externalizations in text, talk, and material objects, which make them accessible to empirical study” (438). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 349

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens the boundary between ‘counter-speculations’ and the broader speculative politics the book critiques — key to the reader’s assessment.