Post-2008 radical uncertainty cleared the way for speculative communities to coalesce

Evidence

Today, capitalism’s new media commodities have undoubtedly renewed its vernacularizing thrust, but the breakdown of pre-2008 certainties has been no less spectacular. As I write these lines at the end of 2020, the optimism of the 1990s and 2000s could not feel more distant. A sense of generalized anxiety is becoming a condition that makes societies no longer able to “look the future in the eye” (Berardi 2017). What I described earlier as a radicalization of pervasive uncertainty in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 has cleared the way for the circulation of new “standardizing” vernaculars, around which speculative communities now coalesce. Luc Boltanski (2009, 2011) argued some time ago that such radical uncertainty, deeply embedded in modern capitalism, can be thought of as the very distance between the “world” (monde) and “reality” (réalité). Blokker (2012) emphasizes the implications of this proposition: “The world is normally in the background but comes to the fore in instances of ‘radical uncertainty’—that is, when our existing modes of giving meaning to the world seem inadequate. ‘Reality’ is then exactly that which is ‘orientated towards permanence’ or the ‘preservation of order,’ providing a closed set of meanings of the world, in an attempt to eradicate radical uncertainty” (25). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 96

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Boltanski’s world/reality distinction — radical uncertainty surfacing the world as inadequate-to-meaning, reality as the order-preserving closure attempting to eradicate it — is a dense, generative frame likely to reshape how the reader thinks about speculative politics.
• XREF: This radical-uncertainty mechanism is the load-bearing causal link to the reader’s financialized populism thesis: voters not voting against interests but betting under trained uncertainty. — connects to: Speculative communities arise from the collapse of the TINA doctrine. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 526