Speculative blurring may enable disorienting culture wars or interrupt them.

Evidence

A blurring of the line between image and reality has been seen as one of the most nefarious consequences of our time’s speculative politics: from the growing spread of “misinformation” and populist indictments of “fake news” to the pernicious conspiracies that are increasingly swirled against scientific evidence of all kinds. But what if this very blurring also opens up new paths for interrupting the disastrous cycle of culture wars produced by speculative politics? Contemplating different collective ways of imagining the future, Karl Mannheim (1966) suggested that utopia must be considered distinct from ideology because, while the former “breaks the bonds of the existing social order, the latter aims to preserve it” (Bottici 2014, 161). Is fighting capital with distracting videos and stranded proprietary algorithms offering an alternative to the menacing unreality of culture wars? And are these struggles a spur to a political community endeavoring to be a more autonomous guardian of the unknown? — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 307

Categorization

• QUESTION: The chapter ends open: are these struggles a real alternative to culture wars? The reader should track whether the next chapter resolves this or leaves it as a provocation—this is where left-reclamation vs. concession gets settled.
• XREF: Mannheim’s utopia-vs-ideology distinction (‘breaks the bonds’ vs ‘preserves’) is a classical anchor that frames the left-reclamation vs. concession debate the reader is assessing.