Review of “Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World”

Abstract

Based on the title, I hoped that by reading this book, I might learn something about how speculators in financial markets dealt with uncertainty, or perhaps how people in a financialized society managed their everyday lives. But in fact, I did not learn very much about these things. Instead, I learned a lot concerning how the author speculates about these and many other topics. I learned that the author is erudite, fond of word play and rhetorical flourishes, writes aphoristically, and likes to pull together authors as wide ranging as Theodore Adorno, Virginia Woolf, Pascal, Cornelius Castoriadis, Nancy Fraser, and Arlie Hochschild. Fans of modern social theory will enjoy the kind of playful intellectual bricolage Komporozos-Athanasiou performs. I was pleased to see Guy Debord, a figure from my undergraduate years, brought back into the discussion (and how could he not, having written the Society of the Spectacle). I valued the author’s engagement with Benedict Anderson. I learned that the world is filled with paradoxes and contradictions, puzzles and ironies, all linked together via hidden and visible connections, and that the author is busy trying to connect all the dots. I appreciated that the author has read a fair amount about financialization but not as much as he should (the financial history presented in Chapter 2 is often simplistic and sometimes wrong). He has a great interest in digital social media platforms, and phenomena like “fake news,” and so discusses Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, and Tinder at length. The latter is the centerpiece of such baffling questions as: “What are the implications of this immersive surrender to the uncertain space of Tinder’s infinite swipe?” (p. 87). Of course, put that question in its context and the reader gets some help about what it means. But not a lot. And if one doubts he is au courant with the latest in popular culture, the discussion of Love Island and use of the term “weaponize” will allay any suspicions.