Speculative imagination is a generative social force integrated into everyday capitalist life

Evidence

In common language, speculation is associated with the fancies of global stock markets and the whims of Wall Street’s bulls and bears. But what exactly is the role of speculation in modern capitalist life? Why, after decades of rampant financialization throughout the world, do markets and publics remain today so closely aligned? And how do we account for the paradox of a political economy where debilitating uncertainty about the future brings growing yields for financiers and politicians alike? This first part of the book disentangles these paradoxes by proposing a theory of speculative communities. I argue that, ever since the transition from industrial to finance capitalism, a sweeping speculative imagination has been integrated into everyday life: a profoundly generative social force, whose important role has remained neglected to this day, despite its great influence in shaping capitalist societies and their uneven abilities to cope with the future’s radical uncertainties. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 74

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Pollock and the Frankfurt School’s account of the transition from liberal to organized/finance capitalism. — connects to: Artistic categories for Bloch become modes of Utopian realization at the ontological level — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 290; Anderson’s imagined-communities framework applies to speculative finance and collective imaginings. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 55; Imagined Communities analysis can be deployed to study financialized capitalism through speculation. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 127 (+9 more)
• SEED: The insight that speculation was ‘democratized’ into everyday life opens an essay angle on how ordinary saving, insurance and retail investing encode a speculative stance toward the future.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 74