Market rationality is actually imagination dominating at every level

Evidence

Imagination thus undergirds capitalist economy in both market and bureaucratic forms of rationality. It plays both a “negative” and a “positive” role in “articulating” the many fragments of its “bureaucratic universe.” In his own critique of capitalism, Castoriadis submits that the “modern pseudo-rationality” of markets “exhibits most strikingly the domination of the imaginary at every level,” which tosses modern societies “in the throes of a systematic delirium” (1975, 156). The task of critique, however, should not be to merely suggest an “alternative rationality” that would shake homo speculans out of its delirium. Nor, contrarily, should it center on the system’s endemic irrationalities as a launchpad for attacking “pure reason.” — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 156

Categorization

• DEFINE: Castoriadis’s claim that markets exhibit ‘domination of the imaginary’ — key for arguing speculation is not irrational but a mode of imagining.
• QUESTION: Watch how the author resolves this: does critiquing finance via imagination (rather than alternative rationality) end up conceding too much? This is exactly the reader’s assessment question.
• XREF: connects to: Market highs arise from millions’ indifferent thinking, not expert consensus — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 99; Neoliberalism is a governing rationality that frames all life in market terms — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 357