Courses

Speculation is an extremely ambivalent concept. A term that derives from the Latin word speculum (mirror), speculation means both to reflect an empirical fact and to conjecture about a reality hidden behind experience without any evidence. For instance, speculative fiction engages in the literary invention of a world beyond our everyday experience in an alternate future. In Latin America, speculative fiction appears to be an umbrella term that commits to the creation of fictions that imagine alternate realities, blurring the distance between fictionalization and philosophical speculation in hybrid genres such as fantastic literature, climate-fiction, cyberpunk, horror, steampunk, and science fiction.  The literature we will read in this course dwells extensively on emotions such as creeping dread and inevitable doom provoked by the intrusion of outside forces.

Incidentally, financial speculation is an activity associated with a process of valorization and crediting of commodities that is simultaneously a politics, that is, a way of governing by debt, to borrow Lazaratto's expression. Marx uses the term "fictitious capital" to describe forms of abstract value such as credit, shares, debts, and even currency, that are separate from material use-value. Financial speculation is the dominant form of contemporary capitalist deterritorialization, the M-C-M' process (money-commodity-money) where the money is invested in commodities in the hope of gain but with the risk of loss. In sum, fiction is crucial not only for the political reproduction of capitalist ideology but, more importantly, to produce surplus-value itself. Across the spectrum of the opposite sides of contemporary critique such as the world-ecology  (Jason Moore, Christian Parentti) and accelerationism (Nick Land, Nick Srnicek, and Alex Williams), financial speculation appears to be conceptualized as a process of abstraction that drives technology understood as the metabolic exchange between human and non-human actants.

There are both points of convergence and points of divergence between speculative fiction and financial speculation. Both speculative fiction and speculative finance converge on the reliance of images and abstractions separated from material realities. While speculative fiction attempts to dismantle the dualisms of nature and culture (which, according to the proponents of the world-ecology project are the cause of capitalism and the ecological crisis), it also serves as allegories of a vampiric capital: the Thing that seeks to colonize all forms of life, until there is nothing left. This course will explore an immanent critique of the impasses between abstract, speculative finance, and its material (extractive) conditions of possibilities. We will examine the dialectical tension between financial and fictional modes of speculation by exploring how finance, as a way of organizing nature, depends on disproportionally larger acts of appropriation that enclose cheap labor and nature. Latin American speculative fiction's commitment to complex alternate worlds inhabited by characters with multiple and even antagonistic perspectives serves as a privileged platform for interrogating the gender/racial and class differences that are instrumental to extractivism and therefore inseparable from a global capitalist ecology.