Dear List Members
The event was previously advertised for 4 pm. I will now start an hour later, at 5 pm.
You are warmly invited to
Speculative Communities and Contemporary Politics
Dr Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, UCL
Wednesday
20th November
2019
5 - 6:30 pm
Room
DLG19
Rhind Building
City, University of London
Abstract
Capitalist societies have always relied on their capacity to anticipate, imagine and speculate on the future in order to navigate its uncertainty. But what happens to our power of imagination in the epoch of Trump and Brexit, when
uncertainty becomes radicalised, and the traffic between reality and fiction accelerates? Our current moment is marked by speculation: growing impatience with promises of all sorts, cynical rejection of evidence, and immersive surrender to the chaos of the
present. This talk discusses how finance today nurtures a speculative engagement with uncertainty across social, political and even intimate life. We ‘connect’ with others on the basis of a shared precarity, to endorse rather than try to control uncertainty,
and to wager on it. The talk offers a conceptual framework that departs from reductive views of finance as a source of individuation, social segmentation, and a cause of populist backlash, which have dominated critical scholarship of capitalist societies in
the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. It argues instead for the need to study financialisation as a profound generative force in the constitution of today's ‘Imagined Communities’, shaping their social bonds and political aspirations, their desires
and myths. The talk discusses the implications of the proposed theory for the study of contemporary forms of financialised populism, and for political sociology more broadly
The Jeremy Tunstall Global Media Research Centre
Department of Sociology
City, University of London