Imagination precedes reason and affect, uniting farmers, workers, and traders

Evidence

Through accepting the radical thesis according to which imagination precedes both reason and affect, we can better understand the historical enmities and alliances among speculating camps in and around financial markets. Finance is not merely a conduit for traversing between the worlds of the real and the fictitious nor between the rational and the irrational. It is a space where these worlds no longer remain insulated from each other. Doomed to permanently inhabit the precipice of the unknown, farmers, workers, populists, and derivatives traders have no choice but to turn to their speculative imaginations—to speculate in order to survive. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 159

Categorization

• DEFINE: The radical claim that imagination precedes reason AND affect is the definitional core underpinning the reader’s ‘homo speculans’ explanation.
• XREF: The claim that populists and derivatives traders share a speculative imagination seeds the reader’s financialized-populism argument about voting as speculative betting.