Speculative intimacies are anxious wagers offering scant hope against uncertainty

Evidence

My argument is this: contemporary intimate relations, like the social fabric that binds them, are laced with unstable, disorienting (and often disconcerting) images circulated by digital media. Permeated by finance’s imagination, speculative intimacies are formed through our anxious and doggedly recurrent wagers on intimate bonds, which offer scant hope of withstanding uncertainty. Yet speculative intimacies are not simply the fixed expressions of a new emotional or rational order bestowed on us by an immutable neoliberalism. Like other endeavors of homo speculans, they reflect tentative yearnings for connection and for navigating the uncharted waters of an unknowable future in new ways. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 217

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Core definition of ‘speculative intimacies’ — parallels dating with homo speculans’s wager-orientation.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that these are neither imposed by immutable neoliberalism nor purely liberatory, but tentative yearnings, is a genuinely surprising and dense middle position.

Related

• Speculative intimacies are anxious repeated wagers on intimate bonds amid uncertainty. (similarity 0.98)
• Speculative imagination, not neoliberal rationality, drives contemporary intimacies (similarity 0.90)
• Intimacy became a temporary experience molded by speculative technologies (similarity 0.86)
• Romantic love’s redemptive promise now conflicts with our embrace of uncertainty (similarity 0.84)
• Romantic bonds are now formed as transactable speculative positions (similarity 0.82)
• Digital-financial convergence reorients intimacy toward open-ended uncertainty navigation rather than destroying sociality (similarity 0.82)
• Impatience with capitalism’s promises drives us to speculate in every domain of choice (similarity 0.82)
• Speculative communities form through fleeting digital rituals, not shared narratives. (similarity 0.82)
• Homo speculans pursues connectivity and secular mythologies, not gratification (similarity 0.82)
• Money and intimacy cannot be disentangled from each other. (similarity 0.81)
• Neoliberal critique alone cannot explain speculation in modern dating (similarity 0.80)
• Popular digital media constitute technologies of speculation binding economic and intimate life (similarity 0.80)
• Speculative imagination is social yearning, not just individual credit-maximizing. (similarity 0.80)
• Dating-app desires exceed rational risk calculation and uncertainty control (similarity 0.79)
• Speculation is an imaginative act confronting uncertainty, not mere risk-taking (similarity 0.79)