Collapse Fictions

Abstract

The most consequential financial instruments of the present may be narratives. This presentation argues that a technocapitalist exit imaginary - the TESCREAL complex, Network State ideology, neoreactionary sovereign individualism - operates as an operative fiction: a speculative construct embedded into reality through circulation, investment, and operationalization until it acquires the force of infrastructure. What makes this fiction distinctive is its double movement. It presents escape from capital as technologically achievable for a select few while ensuring that escape as such remains structurally foreclosed for everyone else. Reading the exit imaginary through Mark Fisher's capitalist realism and the theory of exocapitalism, the presentation contends that the exit fantasy does not challenge the impossibility of escaping capital but constitutes its most elaborated form: foreclosure sublimated into a heroic narrative of escape through capital, available only to those whose asset positions already guarantee survival. Drawing on Greenspan's account of capital as a producer of time, it reframes collapse not as a coming event but as a permanent horizon doing operative work in the present - the ruins prepared for the many becoming the raw material from which exits are built for the few. Whether escape from capital is genuinely foreclosed remains open; the fiction's operative value to the elect does not depend on the answer.

Title of Event

Finance & Ruination

Organisers/Management