Speculative communities unify members through shared future-openness rather than traditional power ties.

Evidence

Neopopulism’s emerging speculative communities work like Anderson’s imagined communities, though perhaps less obviously. As I have argued throughout this book, speculative communities congeal around a continual integration of the future’s openness into an uncertain present, thus generating a renewed sense of synchronicity and narrative. In preceding chapters, I have contended that this operation relies on the creation of a spectacle, and that one of the key consequences is the obfuscation of power conflicts simmering beneath. Such obfuscation lends further legitimacy to nationalist narratives. As in all spectacles, horizontality, in the sense of synchronicity and narrative, pulls speculators together across traditional power constellations. It is in this process that we must locate the ascendancy of homo speculans as a neopopulist political subject, avoiding the pitfalls of a universalist ontology of cosmopolitanism or of the determinist dismissals of “atavistic” populist crowds. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 292

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the speculative community’s mechanism: integrating future openness into an uncertain present produces synchronicity and narrative.
• XREF: Builds directly on Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities concept, which the reader’s stated goal explicitly engages. — connects to: Communities endure financialized life’s chaos by building shared fictions — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 563; Shared uncertain futures are central to how imagined communities bind people together — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 158; Representation itself is a speculative act that binds speculative communities together. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 280 (+3 more)