Ali Rıza Taşkale is organizing a workshop on finance and fiction in Denmark next year.

While social thinkers have begun to explore the role of speculative fiction in understanding financial abstractions and employing it as a tool for social diagnosis, its potential applications within social and cultural theory—particularly in examining the role of speculative finance in contemporary society—remain curiously under-explored. Highlighting this gap is essential, given the widespread presence of speculative finance in the realms of economics, urbanism, culture, climate, and society. However, the inherently abstract nature of speculative finance poses a significant challenge for effective representation. In response, speculative fiction emerges as a distinct and powerful critical lens through which to examine our contemporary financialized existence.

 

 

This two-day workshop seeks to investigate the dialectical relationship between speculative fiction and speculative finance, positioning speculative fiction as a critical framework for analyzing the latter. While most discussions of capitalist temporality emphasize the commodity as the paradigmatic social form, this workshop explores why such frameworks are increasingly inadequate for understanding the dynamics of contemporary capitalism. These dynamics are now dominated by the logic of speculation—a social form that is principally unthinkable without reference to the current temporality. The workshop will explore how the logic of financialization relies on fictions that materialize the worlds it envisions, and how speculative fiction subverts what I call ‘the perceived rationalization of finance,’ revealing the predatory abstraction and structural violence embedded within financial systems. It will thus foster a deeper understanding of how speculative finance seeks to narrow and constrain future possibilities, and how speculative fiction challenges its ongoing attempts to shape all aspects of political and social life in economic terms.