Speculative Communities

Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

240 pages, parution le 16/01/2022

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Résumé

Speculative Communities investigates the financial world's influence on the social imagination, unraveling its radical effects on our personal and political lives.

In Speculative Communities, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou examines the ways that speculation has moved beyond financial markets to shape fundamental aspects of our social and political lives. As ordinary people make exceptional decisions, such as the American election of a populist demagogue or the British vote to leave the European Union, they are moving from time-honored and -tested practices of governance, toward the speculative promise of a new, more uncertain future. This book shows how even our methods of building community have shifted to the speculative realm as social media platforms enable and amplify our volatile wagers.

For Komporozos-Athanasiou, "to speculate" means increasingly "to connect," to endorse the unknown pre-emptively, and often daringly, as a means of social survival. Grappling with the question of how more uncertainty can lead to its full-throated embrace rather than dissent, Speculative Communities shows how finance has become the model for society writ large. As Komporozos-Athanasiou argues, virtual marketplaces, new social media, and dating apps bring finance's opaque infrastructures into the most intimate realms of our lives, leading to a new type of speculative imagination across economy, culture, and society.

Key Terms
Introduction

Part 1: Speculation: Finance and Capitalism
1. The Rise of Speculative Communities
2. A Genealogy of Speculative Imagination: Old Spirits of Capitalism

Part 2: Spectacle: Finance and Society
3. Speculative Technologies and the New Homo speculans
4. Speculative Intimacies

Part 3: Specter: Finance and Polity
5. Financialized Populism and New Nationalisms
6. Counter-speculations

Conclusions
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

L'auteur - Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou is associate professor of sociology at University College London.

Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	The University of Chicago Press
Auteur(s)	Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou
Parution	16/01/2022
Nb. de pages	240
Couverture	Broché
EAN13	9780226816029