Finance capitalism’s power struggles are fundamentally contests over speculative imagination

Evidence

However, as my foregoing history of speculation has revealed, finance capitalism’s power struggles were played out within an altogether different arena. They were not merely conflicts between passions and interests, between rationality and irrationality, or between reality and fiction; they were struggles for speculative imagination. It is therefore time to take a further step. Redressing the hierarchical divisions between reason and imagination requires that we move beyond both the structural determinism of economic rationality and the Kantian essentialism of an emancipatory political rationality (which, as we saw in the previous chapter, also begets the current idée fixe of neoliberal reason). We must tackle the role of imagination head-on. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 148

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that power struggles are ‘struggles for speculative imagination’ sets up the reader’s thesis about financialized populism as speculative betting — people trained to embrace uncertainty. — connects to: Contemporary political struggle is now fought on finance’s own terrain — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 486; Finance’s dominance rests on speculative imagination, not just market rationality. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 550; Financialized power conflicts are won by deploying imaginative resources rather than capital (+9 more)
• DEFINE: The author stakes his distinctive contribution: moving beyond both economic-rationality determinism and Kantian emancipatory rationality.