Representation itself is a speculative act shaping shared futures

Evidence

The act of representation is key to understanding this tension between visibility and invisibility at the heart of our own glass house: the ways we become visible (or invisible) to both ourselves and others, and the images we rely on to endow our speculative communities with meaning. Such images are inherently uncertain—fragments of a fragile and impermanent social reality. Yet, as they course ceaselessly through our smartphone screens, they also shape our visions of the future. Representation itself is a speculative act and therefore crucial in the fulfillment or betrayal of promises made in markets and societies alike—a prerequisite for imagining speculative communities. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 179

The act of representation is key to understanding this tension between visibility and invisibility at the heart of our own glass house: the ways we become visible (or invisible) to both ourselves and others, and the images we rely on to endow our speculative communities with meaning. Such images are inherently uncertain—fragments of a fragile and impermanent social reality. Yet, as they course ceaselessly through our smartphone screens, they also shape our visions of the future. Representation itself is a speculative act and therefore crucial in the fulfillment or betrayal of promises made in markets and societies alike—a prerequisite for imagining speculative communities. In that sense, even chaos and darkness have an image—be it the line chart patterns of the VIX (the “fear index”) representing stock price movements or TikTok’s narcoleptic lip-synching videos. Yet the images disseminated by speculative technologies can be at once highly legible and misleading—a “splendid trompe l’oeil” (Anderson 1991, 184) of deceptive optical illusions, binding speculative communities together despite their respective differences and underlying cleavages of power. The glass house’s technological obscurity often masks new forms of inequality and exploitation, predicated on people’s differential powers of seeing: while some are able to navigate darkness effortlessly without a flashlight, others are paralyzed and forced to stand still. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 179

Categorization

• DEFINE: Extends the book’s core ‘speculative’ concept to cover representation itself — the act of imaging is being reframed as part of the speculative apparatus.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in techno-financial liquidity debates and to the ‘glass house’ metaphor thread running through this book. — connects to: Speculation re-enchants collectivities by projecting broken promises onto shared futures — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 96; Representation itself is a speculative act that binds speculative communities together. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 280
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 179