Today, financial exchanges represent a massive proportion of the globe’s economic activity, especially in highly “developed” nations, where financial services has emerged as among the most “productive” sectors of the economy. Yet the primary product and medium of this “industry” is immaterial, speculative and promissory: the manipulation of risk, probability, market differentials, insurance and, essentially, belief. While defenders of the sector might claim that all these digital financial ephemera are merely the good-faith representations of real-world wealth, the truth is that financial assets are, in large part, imaginary. But imaginary, in my reading, does not mean unreal.

This is not a book about the workings of the financial sector as such, in terms of the operations of derivatives markets, the antics of investment bankers or the economic terrorism of deregulated global financial flows. This book is about the way the financial sector influences and transforms culture and social life beyond its formal borders, and, more unnervingly, the way it (and the broader capitalist order of which it is a part) depends on that very transformation.

I am of the belief that any attempt to answer the challenges of financialization, both structurally and ethically, must be grounded in the necessity of the abolition of capitalism.

But, while authors like Chris Hedges (2009) may associate these facts with the emergence of an “empire of illusion,” I believe there is more to be gained by taking ideas like “imaginary wealth” and “fictitious capital” seriously. So, too, do I believe that, in contrast to insightful authors like Matt Taibbi (2010), Gerald Epstein (2006) and Joseph Stiglitz (2010), financialization is something more than the excesses of a deregulated cleptocracy; like Costas Lapavistas (1999; 2013), Ben Fine (2010; 2012), John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff (2009) and Greg Albo, Sam Ginden and Leo Panitch (2010), I see financialization and its current crises as symptomatic of and integral to the capitalist system of which it is a part.

Scholars including Brooke Harrington (2008), Randy Martin (2003), Paul Langley (2008), Rob Aitken (2007), Julia Ott (2011) and Louis Hyman (2011) have done the invaluable work of showing how investing, financial risk management and financial literacy have been sold to publics well beyond the financial sector, to such an extent that today, in an age of the neoliberal retreat of the welfare state and other modalities of collective insurance and wealth, we are all increasingly expected to understand ourselves as savvy financial actors, judiciously managing our material and immaterial assets in a world without guarantees.

This book, by contrast, follows scholars like Martin (2003; 2007), Fredric Jameson (1997; 1998), Morgan Adamson (2012), Annie McClanahan (2012; 2013), Arjun Appadurai (2011; 2012a; 2012b), Joyce Goggin (2008; 2012) and others in seeking out the traces and resonances of financialization beyond the realm of banking, personal finance, economic discourse and other zones where we might expect to find it. I am interested in the rhizomatic and diffuse appearance of financial metaphors, practices, narratives, ideals, measurements, ideologies and identities throughout the social fabric and, conversely, the way financialization represents a new set of techniques and dispositifs (Foucault 1980, 194–228; see also Agamben 2009, 1–24) by which various elements of the social fabric are conscripted into an increasingly sophisticated order of capitalist accumulation.

It may be true that the idea, propagated widely throughout the media landscape, that we are all “financiers” and “risk managers” obfuscates key class antagonisms and economic realities (notably, that the vast majority of us have no real assets to speak of, and the financial economy is being run by what can, without too much exaggeration, be characterized as a cabal of lawless oligarchs).

Perhaps the most terrifying feature of financialization is that there is no one steering the ship; there is no grand conspiracy, though its operations do depend on lesser conspiracies. Rather, I want to understand financialization as a means by which social agency (at both the highest echelons of the financial world and the lowest depths of the sub-prime) is transformed and reoriented towards the reproduction of a pathological and cancerous system.

In the first chapter, I note that it is all too easy to slip into one of two undialectical approaches to finance and financialization. One position, often, but not exclusively, associated with a neoclassical approach, would insist that financial wealth is just as real as any other form of value, determined as it is by the eternal and infallible laws of supply and demand. If there is a real demand for credit default swaps, then their value is as real as the value of rice, oil or pickled herring. Such positions tend to reinforce the idea that the financial sector is merely the logical evolution of money: a neutral expedient to facilitate the primordial act of exchange. Typically (though not exclusively), those who hold this opinion blame the financial sector's failures not on the pathology of markets, but on bungled government regulations, subsidies and interventions that skew the market's inherent ability to properly value real and financial assets alike.

The premise of this book is that neither position is particularly helpful in terms of either understanding or overcoming financialization. Rather, the first chapter suggests we take up Marx's (1981, 594–652) notion of fictitious capital in a way he probably did not fully intend it: capital's reproduction depends on and transforms the social fictions that animate society. Financial wealth may be largely "fictitious," but that does not make it any less "real": as Thomas King (2003), among many others, teaches us, fictions can be among the most powerful forces in human societies. Indeed, it is through shared fictions that we reproduce social and subjective life itself.

Hence, I draw here upon a concept of reproduction to explain the power and influence of finance on culture (a term I use advisedly, given that I aim to transgress its usual borders), and the way culture is at work at the core of financialization. This concept of reproduction combines three components. First, I draw on Marxist theories of the reproduction of capital accumulation through the displacement of its systemic crises (through war, imperialism and, importantly, speculation). Second, I mobilize cultural studies approaches that query how capitalist social relations, hegemony and ideology are reproduced through cultural texts and everyday life. Third, I lean on feminist conceptualizations of reproduction, which refocus our attention on capitalism’s reliance on the subordination of reproductive labour (traditionally, though not exclusively, associated with “women’s work”) and broaden our conception of reproduction so that we might ask deeper, harder questions about the nature of capitalist exploitation and its reliance on other systems of domination such as patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and ablism.

In Chapter 2, I take up the theme of precariousness, a term that has emerged among scholars and activists over the last 20 years to describe the new timbre of work and life in a highly financialized age when life’s risks have been dramatically privatized and downloaded from governments and corporations onto individuals and everyday life. I argue that precariousness is not incidental to financialization; they are deeply and structurally linked, and, indeed, financialization helps create a stark and troubling bifurcation and hierarchy of precarity. At its top, I explore the example of the quintessential icon of the Wall Street financier, the lauded “risk-taker,” whose personal and professional embrace of precariousness as an inherent good makes him or her an extremely effective agent of the broader process of financialization. At the bottom, I explore the plight of the abject “at risk” victim (or, for some, villain) of the recent economic meltdown: the (racialized) sub-prime borrower, whose “toxic” debts poisoned the financial system in 2007.

I conclude this chapter by suggesting that finance might well be understood as an elaborate way in which capitalism can obscure the raw and primal reality of what Judith Butler (2006) calls “precarious life.”

In spite of its austere retail ecologies and gimmicky brand image, Walmart, I argue, addresses and shapes its shoppers and its workers as savvy risk-takers, mature neoliberal subjects and sophisticated financial actors, all the while applying the methods and practices of financial risk management to its own operations.

In this chapter, I suggest that Walmart can also be fruitfully interpreted through the lens of securitization, a term that neatly connects the financial imperative to manage risk, on the one hand, and the concomitant trend towards increased security, surveillance and militarized pre-emptive action, on the other. … This double meaning of securitization, I argue, helps us understand the ways in which financialization is rooted in the spaces and processes of everyday life and popular culture.

I conclude Chapter 5 with a discussion of how creativity's particular wooliness and euphemistic quality is, in fact, its greatest strength: in an age when seemingly all aspects of life are measured, quanti- fied and speculated upon, creativity's peculiar nebulousness actuality makes it a highly useful discursive formation for financialization. Yet it is also in creativity's vague and imprecise character that we can find a kernel of utopian negation that might allow us to see beyond our present moment. Creativity, for all its inadequacies, "works" precisely because it bears the haunting trace of the promise of unalienated labour, and so carries encrypted within it, in fragmented form, the seeds of a very different society.

I argue that it is well worth entertaining a thought experiment that would imagine the recent waves of financialization as rooted in resistance. Here I suggest that the spike in financialized borrowing (both among nations in the Third World and among individuals in the First) might be read not merely as the punitive and predatory machinations of capital, but also as (Pyrrhic) working-class or subaltern attempts to reclaim stolen value. In an age of neoliberal and neocolonial retrenchment, there may be merit in imagining debt as a means to claim wealth otherwise clawed back by capital.

Financialization both foments and relies upon discursive and material formations such as precariousness, security, play, creativity and resistance. These are important fictions that are at once reproduced by and help reproduce finance capitalism. I conclude by suggesting that these fictions can be leveraged into opportunities to reimagine social reproduction and renarrate social fictions in ways that open onto different, common horizons, horizons far more fertile than those opened through a simplistic condemnation of financialization as merely unregulated top-down greed.

In making this argument, I am not seeking to contradict but, rather, to complicate analyzes of financialization that see it as a weapon marshalled by the capitalist ruling class (or a faction thereof) against workers of the world. I understand finance as a disciplinary mechanism of capitalist power, one whose primary purpose is to mobilize debt (of individuals, of firms, of governments) as a means to better extort and exploit labour, generate and circulate surplus value, and shape the reproduction of social and economic life.

Financialization does, indeed, serve an ideological function, in the expanded sense of the term mapped by Terry Eagleton (2007). Louis Althusser (2014) spoke of ideology as an imaginary relationship to the realities in which we live, a false cohesive worldview that covers over the inherently partial, fractured and contradictory nature of our consciousness. In this sense, ideology is not some passively received, generic, prepackaged simulacrum dispensed from on high and swiftly internalized. Rather, as Eagleton explains, ideology is an active creation whereby individuals and groups are constantly in the process of making sense of their world with the intellectual and cultural resources that they find at hand.

Hence, ideology is not simply "false consciousness," nor is it merely a "top-down" imposition. Rather, it is a field of contestations and activities, an evolving and emerging set of meanings and explanations created by people as they make sense of their world. But, importantly, it is not a totally free or unmediated process: to build ideology, we draw on those cultural and social resources at our disposal (from fiction to films, from metaphors to measurements) that are, themselves, ideological.

But, further (and this is crucial), financialization also means a moment when the financial system, and the capitalist economy of which it is a part, is dependent on and invested in the ideologies, practices and fictions of daily life as never before. In a moment characterized by ubiquitous debt, escalating consumerism and political quietism (or, worse, reactionism), and by a highly volatile financialized economy, the realms of culture and ideology can no longer be said to be merely the superstructure of a "real" economic base.

I have sought, throughout, to beg, borrow and steal terms and ideas from finance and find the utopian moment within them that is at once the heart of their power and the kernel of their negation.

It is no exaggeration to say that, since the 2008 crisis, there has been an explosion of academic interest in the financial sector, its periodic crises, and the impacts and implications of both for society at large. I started my own research into finance capital in 2005, and it was my great misfortune to be trying to complete a PhD thesis on the topic as a monumental and historical financial crisis unfolded, in a time when, every week, new analyzes of the very sector I was looking at were emerging from nearly all political and disciplinary quarters. The only option, really, was to continue with the lines of inquiry with which I had begun: how do we account for not only the tremendous power of financial wealth in a moment of neoliberal globalization (see Bryan and Rafferty 2006; Lapavitsas 2013; LiPuma and Lee 2004), but also the fact that what is perhaps the most powerful and pervasive economic force in human history is made up of what are, at first glance, imaginary assets? After all, the fabled credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations at the core of the 2007/2008 meltdown were, essentially, made up. Sure, they referred back to “real” assets in terms of the homes owned by subprime borrowers, but, as financiers and the rest of us were to learn as the crisis unfolded, the value ascribed to these assets was dramatically less than the price at which these financial instruments circulated. In other words, there is something profoundly and tantalizingly cultural about contemporary finance capital, about the way confidence, belief, identity and rhetoric are rolled into an evolving economic landscape dominated by themes of speculation, immateriality and communication.

Derrida’s intervention was to suggest that the line between metaphor and other elements of speech is “always already” blurred. This is in contrast to analytic theories that see metaphor as merely a second-order element of speech, an artificial creative substitution of meaning used for stylistic purposes. Derrida argues that a large number of the words we use every day were once metaphors, and that metaphor is a process at the very core of language. Take, for instance, the word investment. It stems from the Latin vestire, from which we also derive the word vest: it means to dress or to cloak oneself. Early-modern Italian merchants used this as a metaphor for the different profitable purposes to which money could be put – they were dressing their money up when they lent it to trading or manufacturing ventures that would bring a favourable return. This metaphor resonated, and the word invest became independent of its original meanings, folding into living language. It began to become what linguists call a dead metaphor, a metaphor whose metaphoric quality has disappeared or goes unremarked or unobserved. Lo and behold, by the late 20th century investment not only named the most profitable activity in a hyper-financialized global capitalist economy, but was increasingly borrowed as a metaphor to explain all manner of activities in our social lives.

Education, for instance, is increasingly talked about as an individualized “investment in the future,” rather than a shared social good (Williams 2006; 2008), and, likewise, we are constantly being told that the fostering of children by parents and society at large is an investment. Books are being published that advise people to learn to invest time and affect in their relationships for later payback (see Martin 2003, 91–107). All these new meanings of investment are now being folded into common parlance: they elicit almost no response any more. And this is where metaphor gets dangerous: as George Lakoff (2003) and others have noted, metaphors function to hide social violence – they often work to disguise or normalize unstated or unacknowledged ideological assumptions.

But it is also a key means by which that saturation is advanced, the way financial modes of thinking and understanding are stitched into and throughout the social fabric. This cultural and linguistic shift both reveals and advances a broader socio-economic reality of financialization.

Financialization in this sense refers to the increased mobility of transnational capital flows, as well as to the way those flows are accelerating and becoming more and more chaotic thanks to increasingly sophisticated forms of securitization and automated high-frequency trading, a system in which computers are, by some accounts, executing the majority of exchanges (Tiessen 2012). It also refers to the way financial markets are increasingly shaped by almost sublime formulae and technologies for managing risk, for creating new, overlapping, interconnected derivative products whose scale and complexity defy the human imagination (Holmes 2010; Stark 2009).

Even the poor are not immune. In North America, of course, we have seen the rise of sub-prime lending, but this is only one aspect of a larger financial poverty industry made up of extremely profitable pay-day loans operations, pawn shops and discount financial services aimed at short-term profiteering from social immiseration (Aitken 2006; Rivlin 2010; Wyly et al.

It means deep penetration of financial ideas, tropes, logics and processes into the fabric of everyday life (see Martin 2007). We can return to the example of education. Not only has it come to be understood as a highly individualized commodity in which students are told they should invest in order to get the payoff of a stable, middle-class life. It has become a key means by which individuals are integrated into the global financial economy (Blacker 2012; Caffentzis 2010; Williams 2006).

In the United States, student loan debt has topped $1 trillion, and, as with the sub-prime mortgage market, these loans are broken apart, rebundled and securitized, their spectral presence haunting the global financial architecture, casting its shadow over perhaps the majority of investment portfolios.

Likewise, in the last decade world political and economic leaders have been seduced by the lure of micro-finance schemes where small loans are extended to the world’s poorest populations (notably to women) in order to share with them the magic of free-market capitalism and the uplifting responsibility of debt (Bateman 2010; Roy 2012; Young 2010).

Because metaphor is always retreating into language, all language is tainted and influenced by metaphor (2007). Language is a set of mutually suspending claims to meaning, as each word relies upon its connection to others. It is a fabric woven through endless “play” (1967), a polyseme that indicates (among other things) the constant creative (semi-competitive) repurposing of language and meaning, and also the inherent malleability or plasticity of language. In other words, your ability to understand my metaphoric use of “disappear” relies upon a whole variety of linguistic metaphoric relationships – we can never trace language back to its “real” root. If all language is metaphoric, our ability to use and understand language is not simply our comprehension of the meaning of each word and their syntax; it is our involvement or participation in living language, our constant use of and innovation within language. This demands that we constantly reinvent metaphor. We are constantly delving into the trove of language to invent new meanings and repurpose old words like “delve” and “trove” or “invest.”

My argument is that the price of a financial asset, like the meaning of a word, is suspended between multiple competing claims to meaning, amidst an ecology of play.

But the reality is more complex. As we will see in a moment, while the real world of value exists, financial instruments are never perfect or unproblematic representations of that value. The prices at which financial assets are exchanged are not direct representations of the underlying value of the “real stuff” to which they allegedly refer. For instance, in 2007 the price of a sub-prime mortgage had almost nothing to do with the value of the house in question, nor was it an accurate reflection of the mortgagee’s ability to repay the loan (see McNally 2011, 97–112; Wyly 2012). Rather, the price of a sub-prime mortgage was a function of its circulation in a broader speculative financial economy (see Chapter 2). Its price represented its relationality to a vast array of interconnected speculative gambits.

Whether it is Callon’s investigations of financiers’ use of modelling technology or MacKenzie’s analysis of the production of financial instruments, these scholars are interested in what we might call the sociology of financial meaning-making. MacKenzie, for instance, has been at the forefront of identifying financial instruments as “performative”: according to MacKenzie, formulae like the famous Black–Scholes mechanism for derivative pricing do not simply reveal underlying market realities. Because they influence and shape subsequent financial decisions and the financial milieu more broadly, these formulae actively shape and build market realities. They are, in MacKenzie’s words, “an engine, not a camera”: they do not simply measure market realities; they help bring them into being.

It is also for this reason that recent anthropological accounts of the financial sector likewise tend to avoid Marx, though they are more attentive to the broader sociological patterns that influence financial speculation and are reproduced by it. For instance, Caitlin Zaloom’s (2006) studies of financier culture have revealed the way financiers internalize a culture of risk management and are guided by an imagined relation to a highly circumscribed future. She also illustrates the way that norms and patterns of belief and behaviour are created and sustained within the largely (though not exclusively) homosocial world of financiers, and the importance of these norms to what we might call the reproduction of the financial industry (see also Czarniawska 2005; La Berge 2010; Prügl 2012). Similarly, Karen Ho (2009) has illustrated the way that financier culture is driven by a cult of “smartness” and chronic overwork and a form of hyperindividualized competition and inhumane flexibility. Ho illustrates how, in the name of “shareholder value,” the financial sector has imposed these norms on the rest of society through its influence over corporations and governments.

For Lazarrato, finance represents a historic bloc of capitalist forces. The wealth of the financial sector exists because of the debts of actors as small as individuals and as large as nation-states, and this wealth and this debt are used to discipline these actors into compliance with an emerging global capitalist paradigm which is based not as much on the extraction of surplus value but more on the production of financialized, debt-driven subjectivities.

Finance's goal, according to Lazzarato, is to compel us all to imagine ourselves as "financiers of the self," and embrace precariousness, risk, and economic and existential insecurity. For Lazarrato, debt and finance operate biopolitically: they are techniques of power whereby both bodies and whole populations can be enlisted into the reproduction of capitalist power relations. Finance's ultimate objective, then, is not simply profit but the creation and reproduction of compliant subjectivities, workers germane to a decentralized and disorganized form of global capitalism.

His 2003 book Financialization of Daily Life illustrated the way financial ideas, understandings, metaphors and modes were creeping their way into the cultural climate of North America in spheres as diverse as "financial literacy" education, self-help books and, of course, the realms of investments, pensions, credit and debt.

This work joined the scholarship of Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty (2006) in identifying financialization as a key moment of neoliberal transformation by which capitalism shrugged off the necessity of the welfare state and its promise of collective security, replacing it with increasingly individualized and speculative forms of insurance under the rubric of "risk management."

Jameson argued that the increasingly abstract nature of the financial economy was finding its articulation in popular culture, from the frenetic pastiche of postmodern film and art to the money-centric architecture and design of an increasingly homogenized archipelago of global cities on whose speculative real-estate empires the financial sector depended (1997). For Jameson, the rise of finance capital is inseparable from the postmodern turn, and its disjunctive and hybridizing cultural practices and texts cannot be understood except within the context of a post-gold-standard world, where money has no fixed meaning and where debt and credit rule.

We can increasingly see popular cultural texts and everyday life practices as, on the one hand, symptomatic of a seismic transformation in political economy towards financialization and, on the other, critical and essential elements of that transformation.

Ideology is, in Louis Althusser’s (2014) definition, an imagined relationship to real economic conditions. Today’s brand of capitalism demands subjects who identify themselves as miniature financiers, or, as Robin Blackburn (2006) puts it, “two-legged cost-and profit centres.” The study of financialization, then, is not merely the study of how capitalist culture beguiles and charms, nor merely of how it threatens and cajoles. It is the study of how, on the one hand, the economic depends on the cultural and how, on the other, the cultural depends on the economic.

The reason Marx never developed a full analysis of finance is not because, in his day, it was a less important force than in our own. Indeed, Marx's career was witness to many bank failures and financial crises, as well as to the tremendous power of the financial sub-class over state policy. His reluctance to address the financial sector in detail stemmed, instead, from his insistence that any understanding of it would need to be grounded in the analysis of capitalist exploitation more elementally: the extraction of surplus value from workers (the subject of volume I) and the processes by which capital reproduced itself in circulation (volume II).

For Marx, of course, all value came from labour, and from the manufacture of goods for exchange. Finance is a means by which the elemental contradictions of this exploitation are managed (see Chapter 6).

For Harvey, fictitious capital represents not a claim on actually existing value but a share of future surplus value yet to be extracted (2006, 265–268). But, for Harvey, finance does not exist purely as the realm of elite skulduggery, it is a crucial set of economic institutions by which capital “fixes” its inherent tendency towards overproduction and, as such is an essential, if crisis-prone, component of capitalist accumulation. In order for capital to expand, it requires mechanisms by which multiple otherwise competitive capitalists can pool their resources to undertake ventures that are too risky or too large for any single capitalist to undertake alone (270–273).

I am inclined to side with Michael Perelman (1987, 110–127): the transformation problem is not a problem at all – it is a dialectical heuristic. It is not a flaw in Marx’s logic that leads to the irreconcilability of real value and price – it is that these two are never reconciled under capitalism. The gap between the two is a productive lacuna in Marx’s work which allows us to pinpoint a key element of capitalist crisis, and also, importantly, to locate finance as a key element of a much broader system of exploitation, not just a particularly ugly form of economic power in its own right.

At no moment has capitalism been free from the influence of finance, and at no moment has finance failed to produce fictitious capital – that is, freely circulating claims to future surplus value that act as money and so distort the ideal capitalist economy. The result is that, for this and other reasons, there is always more capital than value to which it has a claim, and this excess fictitious capital, while to a certain extent necessary to overcome certain crises in capitalist economics, fundamentally and essentially skews capital’s reckoning of value.

Indeed, it is here that the alpha and the omega of capitalism meet: primitive accumulation (de Angelis 2007, 97–101; Federici 2005; Midnight Notes 1990) or “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2003, ch.4) is relied upon in times of crisis to fill the vacuum left by the evaporation of fictitious capital as social programs and public assets are liquidated and privatized.

Poovey draws upon a long history in literary studies of seeing fiction as working at the intersection of the real and the imaginary. From this approach, fictions do not represent as much as they act. As with MacKenzie’s (2005) performative account of financial instruments, fictions are not an entirely accurate depiction of the world, but neither are they simply false. As literary criticism has insisted for decades, fiction is best imagined as a strategic narrative or imaginative intervention that does not merely seek to amuse or please but to change reality by transforming the reader and causing them to act differently (see Jameson 1981). In this sense, fictions, like metaphors, are inherently social and intertextual: they depend on the reader understanding a broader cultural context and, in turn, contribute to that broader context. Indeed, we live by and through our fictions.

I am not simply arguing that financial wealth is a mere fiction, and for this reason we must distinguish fictitious capital as something significant and unique. All wealth, all value is a fiction, whether it exists under capitalism or any other economic system (see Graeber 2001). Certainly, material culture is valuable, and much of it appears to be intrinsically valuable (things like food and shelter). But the value we ascribe to things is a matter of cultural intercourse. A thing is just a thing until it is backed by a story … Unlike the other social fictions woven by the rich and powerful, these advance through subtle and nuanced harnessing of agency, creativity and the imagination.

I am not simply arguing that financial wealth is a mere fiction, and for this reason we must distinguish fictitious capital as something significant and unique. All wealth, all value is a fiction, whether it exists under capitalism or any other economic system (see Graeber 2001). Certainly, material culture is valuable, and much of it appears to be intrinsically valuable (things like food and shelter). But the value we ascribe to things is a matter of cultural intercourse. A thing is just a thing until it is backed by a story, and this is as true of the value of a loaf of bread as it is of the value of an Andy Warhol print, an hour of a massage therapist’s time, or a futures contract. While there is political and rhetorical utility in contrasting the hyperbolic wealth of the financial sector with the emaciated “real economy,” the reality is that all value is a fiction, a story about what is valuable used to shape social cooperation. The reason why the idea of fictitious capital is useful is because it draws our attention to the way that finance foments and depends on the production of social fictions. It is fictitious not simply because it is a fiction, but because it helps transform the social fictions that order social cooperation. It is productive of fictions and reproduced by fictions.

Nor do I believe that a post-capitalist future of abundance and peace can be won merely on the cultural front. But I do believe that this expanded idea of fictitious capital can help us begin to come to grips with the creative power that, on the one hand, is harnessed to drive the reproduction of the capitalist system and the subjects germane to it and, on the other, is the wellspring of resistance and refusal.

By culture here I do not simply mean the realm of formal and intentional representations, ideas, aesthetic practices and objects, and interventions. Nor do I mean culture in the purely anthropological sense of the deeply seated codes, norms, performances of self and social institutions germane to the reproduction of social life that are often obscured to those who practise and live by them. I mean both these ideas of culture wrapped up within one another. Culture here refers both to the way we live our lives and reproduce our social surroundings, and to the way we do this through the arts, literature, play, teaching and learning, and an infinite variety of other practices. I understand culture as intimately connected to the way societies and individuals reproduce themselves, though in this approach reproduction does not imply mindless replication. Instead, it implies a complex, conflicted, contestatory, creative and reflexive process.

The first is the notion of the reproduction of capital, developed from Marx’s writing by Rosa Luxembourg and others. Luxemburg (2003), like Lenin (1948) and other early 20th-century Marxist thinkers, was attempting to understand the tense and conflicted class composition of her day, notably the struggle against nationalism within socalist and labour movements and the rise of an increasingly monopolistic corporate imperialism predicated on colonialism and imperialist warfare. Drawing on Marx’s crisis theory, which (basically) holds that capitalism is based on fundamental contradictions which can never be resolved, only elevated to a higher level of abstraction and violence, Luxemburg sought to show how the inherent limits of capital manifest themselves in destructive wars (notably the First World War), colonial relations of seemingly non-capitalist exploitation (slavery, unfree labour, etc.) and inter-capitalist rivalry.

A second approach to reproduction emerges from another moment of Marxist crisis. The dawn of the field of cultural studies was necessitated by the decline and fall of the Communist dream (Hall 1996a; 1996b). Thanks to the betrayals of the Soviet regime (especially the invasion of Hungary in 1956) and the increasingly doctrinaire and conservative (and, indeed, reformistic) tendencies of European Communist and socialist political parties, a new generation of scholars sought to understand the way in which capitalism was reproduced, on the level not merely of global economics, but of everyday life.

By the 1970s, Marxist feminists were seeking to displace the primacy of the idea(l) of production by positing the centrality of reproduction to capitalist social and economic relations. For Maria Mies (1986), Selma James (2012), Silvia Federici (2012) and others (many of whom were active in the influential Wages for Housework campaign; see Weeks 2011), a focus on reproduction could help Marxist organizers break free of what had, up to that time, been its singular focus on the industrial (male) working class. A focus on reproduction had the potential to reveal the reliance of capital on patriarchy, sexism and misogyny that created a situation in which women supplied the system (and men) with the free reproductive labour necessary for its reproduction. Such a perspective also had the potential to shift the terrain of struggle from the factory to all those sites (including the factory) where capitalist social and economic relations were being reproduced, and where the reproduction of life itself was interdicted by capitalism: the classroom, the nursery, the grocery store, the fast-food joint, and so on.

This trifold theory of reproduction allows us to locate culture at the heart of economics. If we understand societies as composed, fundamentally, of patterns of reproduction, then patterns are always under negotiation, always changing, and are made up of uncountable individual actions that either reinforce or challenge (in subtle and blatant ways) that reproduction of the status quo. Reproduction in this sense does not refer to an automatic, unthinking, agentless process by which humans, drone-like, rehearse their social life in their habituated fashion. Reproduction at all three levels is a field of contestation, refusal, negotiation, compromise and experimentation.

The social fabric of reproduction is, for lack of a better term, sublime: its scope, complexity, interconnectivity and – in Jameson’s (1981) terms – totality cannot be comprehended by the imagination. As such, in order to reflect, understand and intervene in reproduction, we rely on imaginative or ideological constructs, or social fictions. These are the narratives and metaphors we use to make sense of our place (as individuals, as collectives, as societies), within which we are made to reproduce our lives. These imaginative fictions are central to our ability to cooperate and to act.

To clarify, such an approach by no means assumes that capitalism is merely a cultural set of relationships; it is a material system, based on the exploitation of labour, the materialization of that labour in commodities, and the circulation of those commodities through their abstraction into price. But it is to say that, in addition to the analysis of this process, we must also see the production, distribution and use of commodities as a set of relationships always in the process of reproduction, and backed by relations of reproduction, and that these, in turn, flow through and change the fabric of meaning, identity, power relations, institutions and ideas.

I want to suggest that financialization is symptomatic and constitutive of a historically specific capitalist mediation of the flows of social reproduction. It is a force not simply driven by some autonomous logic or shadowy oligarchy, but reproduced, at least in part, on the level of everyday life. And, in turn, it provides resources for a very particular, delimited and, I would suggest, ultimately disastrous form of personal and social reproduction through debt, speculation and securitization. In other words, financialization (re)produces those technologies of the self, those social practices, those relationships, those forms of ‘freedom’ and ‘creativity’ and those idioms of value that, in turn, are reproductive of financialization and the forms of capitalist power it serves.

So, we can understand financialization as a terrain of struggle and friction between different spheres and cycles of reproduction: the reproduction of capital writ large, the reproduction of a financial sub-class, the reproduction of daily life in all its many contradictory forms, and the reproduction of various forms of exploitation. In other words, by examining financialization through the lens of an expanded notion of reproduction, we glimpse it as more than a brutal ideological imposition; it is a scene of crisis and contradiction, of contestation and ingenuity.

First, financialization fundamentally relies on the conscription of culture and dramatically influences the sorts of social fictions that circulate and have meaning and value today. In this sense, financialization can be understood as the spread of financial narratives, metaphors, ideas, tropes, clichés, characters, plots and vernaculars throughout the social fabric. In other words, fictitious capital becomes a key resource by which social life is reproduced on the level of everyday decisions, institutional cultures, ideological predispositions and cultural narratives.

As Martin (2007), LiPuma and Lee (2004) and Bryan and Rafferty (2006) note, the emblematic construct of this new system is the “derivative,” a financial asset which is essentially a tradable agreement between two parties to make a specified exchange at some future point. Such an instrument was initially intended to help manage risk by allowing purchasers of a certain security or asset to lock in prices today, so as not to be caught off gaurd by future price fluctuations. Yet, in a moment when finance is driven by intense competition between markets, derivatives have become the idiomatic asset of a financialized economy, providing opportunities for speculators to gamble on future turns in the price of nearly any underlying economic reality (say, the market in sub-prime mortgages, the price of oil, or the potentiality of devastating weather systems). Meanwhile, finance today is characterized by the securitization of many such gambles into portfolios and new, synthetic derivative products made up of potentially tens of thousands of fragments of other assets or their derivatives, circulating at a sickening velocity between major investment banks and throughout digitized world markets.

On this level, the “narrative” qualities of finance as a means to understand and comprehend the world take on a disjointed, abstract and postmodern character that, at least at first blush, never resolves itself into some stable overarching pattern or plot (see Nilges 2014) (for a fascinating attempt to use literary and postmodern theory to analyze markets, see Ayache 2010). So, while finance might be a modality of social fiction which functions by telling a performative story about the world, it is a story that is, essentially, almost nonsense: a frenetic jumble of metaphors built on metaphors that never resolve into a coherent or linear narrative. Wealth is generated not by seeing the greater narrative in the market, but by spinning out new metaphors and abandoning them once they have done their work. The system is held together not by internal coherence, but by sheer momentum. … But, of course, for all that, the financial system continues to be among the most powerful institutions in the world.

In the same way as the financial sector sees the devolution of value into fragmentary metaphorics, so, too, does the social and cultural realm witness increased fragmentation, meaninglessness and chaos. Corporate strategy, disciplined by stock markets and financial institutions, is increasingly guided by frantic short-term efforts to secure higher financial returns, rather than by any long-term concept of fiscal sustainability, let alone any commitment to workers or consumers. Government policy, guided by the influence of bond markets, eschews any pretence to long-term planning and seeks largely to manage potential risks to the future profitability of transnational capital. Even individuals, driven increasingly by the dictates of debt or lonely financial acumen in a “liquid” world without guarantees, have difficulty envisioning the future as anything more than the endless continuation of the present (see Žižek 2010).

In this chapter, I argue that the rise of precarious (part-time, casualized, temporary) labour in the era of globalization (roughly 1990– present) cannot be separated from the financialization of economic, political, social and cultural life. … Both illustrate the deep relationship between financialization and the liquidation of social bonds. Yet I also argue that precariousness may be a common ground for solidarity and possibility beyond the horizon of financialization.

For queer folk, life, love and physical and mental health were extremely precarious, under threat at all times from a conservative culture that based its stability (non-precariousness) on repression and oppression … Likewise, women paid the price for post-war non-precariousness, compelled to provide free reproductive labour in the home, which was the sine qua non and ultimate cultural referent for stability, and denied access to The Financial Liquidation of Social Life 45 most occupations and ways of being (Federici 2012).

Is it any wonder, then, that the post-war "compromise" gave rise to the civil rights and Black power struggles, to the feminist and queer movements, and to a movement for economic, political and cultural transformation among white, middle-class students, the supposedly privileged children of that very system of non-precarious bliss (Epstein 1991; Katsiaficas 1987; Ross 2002)?

As financial power has grown, it has managed, nearly everywhere, to fundamentally undermine (or at least widen loopholes in) those Bretton Woods regulatory systems that had once sought to keep it in check (Stiglitz 2010, 1–26). Banking, investment and insurance firm mergers have, as early as the 1990s, facilitated the emergence of colossal economic powerhouses headquartered almost exclusively in North America and Europe, which both finance and benefit from the International Monetary Fundand World Bank-brokered politics of third-world debt and structural adjustment (Bello 2013).

Meanwhile, the dream of middle-class inclusion has seen workers and other citizens borrow from the market to buy homes (mortgages), education (student loans) and consumer goods (credit cards) in the hopes of achieving class mobility or maintaining middle-class status (Bryan and Rafferty 2009). And, as multiple levels of government have sought to compete with other locales by cutting taxes, they have covered the shortfall (when not slashing spending) by borrowing, injecting trillions of dollars into financial markets (McNally 2011, 106).

The ephemeral ectoplasm holding the whole system together are derivatives: complex techniques for borrowing or speculating on future rises and drops in asset prices, including practices of "hedging" or betting against the increased value of an asset (as in betting against the value of the Argentinian Peso or the Thai Baht).

These have included the "economic hit men" who seduced, bribed and cajoled political elites in the first and third worlds to enter into a devil's bargain with financial markets (Perkins 2004), and the legions of small-time fly-by-night predatory mortgage salesmen who preyed largely on the racialized urban poor of America (and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere), hawking sub-prime mortgages (McNally 2011, 102–108; Taibbi 2010, 78–123).

For their part, the mortgage salespeople passed on the mortgages to larger banks, who, in turn, bundled hundreds or thousands of mortgages (the good with the bad) and sold them in tailored "tranches" on to other investors as Structured Investment Vehicles, Collateralized Debt Obligations and Asset-backed Securities.

Feasting on the forms of precariousness and social dislocation it had itself helped to create (and which had fed its growth), the financial market sank its fangs into a mortgage market where, thanks to deregulation, so-called "NINJAs" (urban poor with No Income, No Job, or Assets) were offered loans to purchase or renovate houses. … These loans, whose conditions were rarely disclosed by the unscrupulous salesmen (who worked on commission), offered low interest rates initially, or until debtors missed a payment, when they would skyrocket. … Sub-prime borrowers found themselves owing double, sometimes triple the value of their homes, taking out yet more sub-prime loans to cover their mounting debts (McNally 2011, 102–108; Wyly 2012).

Citing only the voracious demands of the market as the highest government obligation, a grim unanimity emerged among world leaders that put the famous “Washington Consensus” to shame: social spending would be dramatically slashed in order to provide bailouts to banks and other financial corporations and to pay for highly targeted and temporary economic “stimulus” measures that largely amounted to handouts and tax cuts for corporate interests. The triumphalism that had announced the ascendency of markets in the early 1990s, emblematized by Francis Fukayama’s (1993) celebratory pronouncement of the End of History, was over. Instead of a rhetoric of a “rising tide lifting all boats,” austerity is marked by a post-ideological candour, emerging from politicians both left and right: expect only precariousness, now and forever.

As the state has retreated from public life under neoliberal barrage, individuals from all tax brackets have been compelled to participate in finance as never before. Mortgages are a key and widespread example, but so too are student loans, car loans, medical debt (in the United States) and even the predations of market-integrated pay-day loans and pawnshops … Over the past 50 years, debt has been culturally transformed from an emasculating dependency to be avoided into the marker of full adult subjectivity, evidence of prudent economic maturity and "financial literacy" (see Arthur 2014; Hyman 2011).

From sub-prime loans to the fertile fields of third-world microcredit, even the poorest of the poor are ensnared by a system that offers finance (debt and investment) as not merely an economic but a moral good (Bateman 2010; Roy 2012a).

Schematically speaking, financial liquidity accumulates to the extent it imposes liquidity upon society, to the extent that precariousness is the norm. When social relations are liquid and precarious, it speaks to a fundamental lack of non-market institutions (whether social or political) that would otherwise protect people from the economy (Bourdieu 1998).

The institutional culture of “The Street” is one that not only prides itself on generating liquidity, in the sense that it strives to generate funds and assets that quickly and easily trade (purportedly to provide capital to needy firms and initiatives while earning profit for investors), but also depends and thrives on the “liquid lives” of investment bank workers themselves (4–13).

While it might be tempting to imagine that these immaterial workers transcend the body itself, such an approach would be misleading: not only do the pace and form of work take their toll on the body, but those whose bodies are marked by gender, race or ability find it challenging to persist and succeed in an informal macho corporate culture based in many ways on whom you know and what you do in your precious “down time” (Czarniawska 2005; Ho 2009, 116–120; La Berge 2010; Zaloom 2006, 111–125).

As Ho notes, the price for this culture of liquidity is not merely limited to the woeful fate of individual bankers. An overarching value paradigm is imposed by Wall Street on the rest of the economy, as firms (and also, we might add, governments) are compelled to constantly downsize and do more with less. Ho illustrates that, while financiers lionize their austerity agenda in the name of “shareholder value” and the clients whom they ostensibly represent, it has high long-term costs for both individual firms (and their share prices) and society at large (2009, 122–168). Further, the “strategy of no strategy” and the culture of acceleration and short-term profiteering foment the conditions of over-speculation and mis-evaluation that cause market crashes, although Wall Street long ago learned to profit from these economic disasters (2009, 295–324).

In the financier, we find the paragon of leveraged precariousness, the ideal to which all workers, no matter how humble, are instructed to aspire. They lead a form of life that strives towards maximum liquidity: one that has few durable bonds and is highly adaptable to profitable circumstances, able to respond with almost inhuman alacrity to the needs of the market. Ho’s research subjects report that it is rare to find finance workers over the age of 40, the vast majority either having been downsized or having succumbed to the personal costs of the frenetic lifestyle and work rhythm in terms of mental or physical health (2009, 97–107). Many take the “work ethic,” ethos and connections they cultivated in the financial realm into private and public management of non-financial firms and government bureaucracies, imposing their austere expectations on other workplaces and sectors.

The designation of “sub-prime” had a lot to do with the Byzantine structure of credit ratings agencies, which at times appeared arbitrary and at other times seemed to follow a purely punitive logic, combining statistical models based on general data with information about individuals’ past borrowing history as well as socio-demographic data and with the more subjective impressions of remote functionaries crunching numbers and assessing risk in offices half a continent away.

At the other end of the spectrum from our high-flying financier, we find another icon of financialized precariousness: the sub-prime borrower. As discussed above, while decried as so-called “NINJAs” (No income, No Job or Assets), the sub-prime category was amorphous and stretched far beyond the stereotypical image that became associated with it: that of a poor, black urban welfare recipient who greedily took advantage of easy money to make frivolous purchases (McNally 2011, 119–126; Wyly 2010). … The result was that sub-prime borrowers ranged from the truly destitute, through the working poor, into the middle class (McNally 2011, 97–107; Taibbi 2010, 78–123). These borrowers took out loans not only to buy homes but to repair houses, to pay for education, to make renovations, to pay medical bills and, importantly, to pay off prior debt, much of it incurred simply by the costs of trying to live in precarious times on a meagre and unstable income. At their height, many sub-prime “securities” were made up of loans that had been refi- nanced two or more times, each with its own exploitative conditions (Wyly 2010).

But her ability to go further and further into debt is based on the presumption of brighter days around the corner and the success of her schemes and ambitions. In both cases, the characters are motivated by the hope that, eventually, they will find the means of overcoming their debts or settling their accounts. Of course, we need not look to century-old literature for such instruction: in this day and age of “casino capitalism,” a great many of us have carried a credit-card balance or owed student loans or otherwise been in a debt we did not know how to pay, but which we had to believe would, in the future, somehow be alleviated.

It is important to locate the genealogies of sub-prime lending. First, some aspects of the sub-prime business have been in operation for centuries. Pawnshops and loan sharks have been the subjects of myths, legends, fables and cautionary tales since before the rise of capitalism and have been a key feature of the life of the poor throughout that system's development. These industries thrived not only on poverty, and usually urbanized poverty, but also, perversely, on hope. Their extortionate fees and rates of interest could be justified not only by necessity, but also be the fact that people tend to need to assume things will get better in the future in order to keep going.

A few factors have certainly changed in the recent past. For one, the moral concern that surrounded debt, even into the second half of the 20th century, has evaporated. While Madame Bovary and Bleak House vividly illustrated the deep moral, personal and social costs of debt and the system of corrosive obligations it put in place, today debt is almost compulsory, and certainly expected. Many an individual's first adult economic experience is taking out a loan to secure an education, or a car (necessary to drive to work), or, less often now, a home loan.

Libertarian and neoclassical ideological approaches suggested that, rather than the state taking responsibility for poverty and lack of social housing and education, these “investments in human capital” should be made by individuals. Liberalizing banking and borrowing laws, rules and regulations would allow the poor (many of whom were structurally disadvantaged, as in the case of most US Blacks in the wake of slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow and segregationist laws and practices) to accumulate and then leverage “capital” in the form of homes and education (Wyly 2010). Rather than “perpetuating” “reliance” on the paternalistic state, a more wholesome American free-market solution could be achieved by encouraging personal responsibility, prudent risk-taking and competitive ambition.

Interestingly, these forces were often joined by more neoliberal community and advocacy organizations. Noting the way ghettoization and exploitative slum landlords thrived in areas where (racialized) poor populations had little to no access to banking services and credit, they lobbied and partnered with financial institutional to make sub-prime credit available in the hopes of seeing money spent on housing come back to home-owners, rather than being simply transferred from tenants to (typically absentee) landlords and thus leaving the community. As numerous studies attest, the saga and imagery of the sub-prime meltdown are highly racialized The Financial Liquidation of Social Life 63 (Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva 2012; Dymski, Hernandez and Mohanty 2011; McNally 2011, 119-123; "Race and Recession" 2009; Wyly 2009).

Ho (2009, 4–13) makes the compelling argument that Wall Street investment bankers are both the subjects and the authors of a hyper-precarious form of “liquid” neoliberal social and economic relationality. Financiers are both exemplars and enforcers of precarious life and work in the global economy. In the context of the sub-prime sector and industry, we might make a similar argument: sub-prime borrowers represent both a paradigm of the precarious economy and the precariousness of the economy itself.

Though at opposite ends of a spectrum, both the Wall Street financier and the sub-prime borrower are subjects and objects of an economic idiom at once beyond their control and driven by their actions. Both are trapped, though one in a more gilded cage. In short, both have seen their own social reproduction become dependent on the capacity to which they, in their unique and specific ways, reproduce financialized capitalism. While corporatized media outlets have been quick to castigate sub-prime borrowers for “living beyond their means” and for taking advantage of the system, they hold very little power.

Perhaps we can imagine precariousness, instead, as something that is produced and reproduced on an everyday basis by economic and social actors, large and small. Within late neoliberal capitalism, we have seen how it is produced not only through the actions of large corporations, financiers, (de)regulators, politicians and intellectuals, but also by individuals who are compelled to embrace debt and a financialized disposition in order to get by.

The complicated and fraught process that Levinas identifies with “the face,” one which destabilizes self and other and reorders the moral universe, was covered over by a veneer of racist, nationalist and jingoistic assumptions which, in the end, protected the extant systems of power, rather than the precarious lives those systems promise to protect.

If we are all dependent on one another, and must act in the world as individuals yet always know that we are ontologically reliant on one another, and that our subjectivity and individuality are always precarious, at stake, it is our social forms (including those expressed as “economic realities”) that help us cope and manage.

A similar argument is made by Giorgio Agamben (1998) in his consideration of what he calls “bare life.” For Agamben, modern political systems and imaginaries are underscored by the capacity to strip individuals and groups of all social belonging and value and reduce them to a purely biological existence. Not only is this spectre of raw humanity a threat (“do what we say or else you too will be denuded”), it is also an image and a reality that reaffirm our (those of us fortunate enough not to be reduced to bare life) sense of worth and belonging to our imagined political community.

To the extent that we succeed in leveraging ourselves out of total liquidation, building up a life of prosperity and (the illusion of) security, we are compelled to close ourselves off to the face of the other, to the image of existential suffering. In fact, we come to loathe it, loathe the way it calls us back into a fellow precarious human body from the privilege of forgetting our precariousness.

Ironically, it is not easily displaced onto the architects and beneficiaries of financialized capitalism, but instead gravitates towards the more precarious, the more abject: they who call us back into the shared precarious "species being" we have bought into the system to avoid. While this may or may not manifest itself in the form of new nationalisms, it will manifest itself in the form of hatred towards the homeless, towards refugees, towards welfare recipients and towards others.

The speculative ethos that animates financialization is one intimately and irreducibly acquainted with the ontological realities of precariousness. “Risk” and “risk management” are, underneath all their trappings of quantitative and scientistic rigour, mythological constructs for engaging with, navigating through and manipulating the cultural fabric of precariousness. Investments are, at a certain abstract level, attempts to leverage precarious life into more advantageous outcomes. Finance, as a broad sphere of activities, is a mechanism by which individuals and society at large seek to gain agency over the precariousness and contingency of the future. It is a particularly perverse mechanism, and one whose logic and mechanisms are either occluded from sight, or so complex, rapid or vast to be fully grasped even by its primary engineers and agents. Yet it reproduces itself by cultivating and mobilizing the energies, creativity and hope of almost everyone in their attempts to thwart or diminish precarity, and aggregates all these individual and institutional actions into a system which, tragically, only drives greater and greater precariousness.

The silver lining is perhaps this: what financialization reveals is the inherent futurity of precariousness. The word itself derives from the Latin prex or prayer, with strong connotations of begging or soliciting: yearning for future outcomes, throwing oneself on the mercy of fate or divine provenance.

What our financialized moment might reveal is that our shared precariousness, which is the condition both of disastrous authoritarianism (including the disorganized and diffuse totalitarianism of finance capital) and of solidarity, does not only emerge from our shared material and ontological conditions; it is also a horizon of shared futurity (see Berardi 2009). That is, precariousness carries encrypted within it a shared relationship with the future.

As Richard Dienst (2011), David Graeber (2011) and affirm, the politics of debt, if they are to be a radical challenge to the financialized empire, cannot simply be a demand for some libertarian fantasy of complete individual freedom. Rather, it must embrace a broader, more capacious concept of the ontological wealth of social bonds that make life possible, that render all of us precariously reliant on one another. In this sense, they, each in their own way, encourage a envisioning of an expanded notion of debt as a grounds for crafting and building common futures.

Consider the following example from my people, the Dene Nations of what is now the Northwest Territories, Canada. In the Yellowknives Dene (or Weledeh) dialect of Dogrib, land (or dè) is translated in relational terms as that which encompasses not only the land (understood here as material), but also people and animals, rocks and trees, lakes and rivers, and so on. Seen in this light, we are as much a part of the land as any other element. Furthermore, within this system of relations human beings are not the only constituent believed to embody spirit or agency. Ethically, this meant that humans held certain obligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes in much the same way that we hold obligations to other people. And if these obligations were met, then the land, animals, plants and lakes would reciprocate and meet their obligations to humans, thus ensuring the survival and well being of all over time.

Coulthard's articulation of a broader field of grounded land-based obligation, reciprocity and care demonstrates the radical potentialities that might emerge from a reconsideration of the bonds of debt and the conditions of shared precarity, were we open to reenvision their meanings beyond the hollow promises of security proffered by capital and the state.

The previous chapter's discussion of the financialized character of contemporary precariousness and the processes of social liquidation and securitization may be illuminated and deepened by an examination of a social institution that, in the United States at least, has become synonymous with economic self-management, austerity economics and the relentless cultural power of financialized capitalism. Walmart, the world's largest employer and retailer (with over 2.2 million workers and global sales of $473.1 billion US – Annual Report 2014), in many ways defines the everyday life of American capitalism. Homogeneous and ubiquitous, its supercenters have come to dominate the landscape of many small and medium-sized American towns and cities and to preoccupy work, consumption and public space for hundreds of millions of people in the United States and beyond (the firm boasts no less than 6,100 retail units operating across 26 countries – Annual Report 2014). This influence, combined with the way Walmart, as a corporate entity, constantly revolutionizes itself to navigate (and, indeed, help shape) the rapidly changing global economy, makes it a particularly telling site to study the cultural politics of the dawning age of austerity.

On the other, it refers to the way that individuals and institutions are increasingly encouraged to reduce the possibility of potential disruptions, errors and catastrophes by policing, guarding, anticipating and interdicting possible threats through surveillance, militarization, profiling and the analysis of data. In both cases, securitization relies upon an underlying logic of risk management, which holds that the future can be subjected to sophisticated logistical and mathematical models that seek to subordinate the qualitative category of uncertainty to a quantitative measure of risk and to commodify that risk in ways that allow it to be integrated into an increasingly global capitalist market. Walmart, I argue, is a unique and masterful exemplar of the way these two forms of securitization come together in a corporate entity. Not only is Walmart a paragon of securitization, it is also, by virtue of both its economic clout and its special reach, a key means by which the broader paradigm of securitization is spread through the cultural–political fabric of everyday life.

But we must also account for the firm’s popularity and success as an exercise of cultural politics that goes beyond the “heavy artillery of cheap prices” and dogmatic propaganda. Walmart is an articulation of capitalist exploitation that both contributes to and preys upon a culture of insecurity, precariousness and fear, while at the same time promising to ameliorate these ills.

I argue that Walmart succeeds, in part, to the extent that it cultivates a cultural politics of securitization and offers to its consumer-subjects the spectacle of security and peace in a world of economic, political and social chaos. In this sense, Walmart is not only an instance of a cultural moment of “securitization”; it also actively conscripts subjects and produces understandings and meanings germane to that idiom.

The general tendency within this paradigm is towards securitization, the process by which basic investments, assets and revenue streams can be cut apart and recombined to build new synthetic investment instruments which allow an almost surgical manipulation of risk (Martin 2007, 17–42). The key feature of securitization as a paradigm is that it moves speculation and risk management from a marginal, supportive role in global economic affairs to the forefront of profitability. In general, securitization refers to the way multiple forms of investment, or derivatives thereof, might be packaged together, woven into an inter-reliant vehicle for speculation. … Securitization effectively packages future probabilities as present-day commodities through the highly sophisticated manipulation of risk.

Securitization, in this sense, has little to do with any notion of economic or financial security: it names a technique or technology for achieving moment-to-moment advantage by counterbalancing risks, and also the impulse to customize, collateralize and synthesize multiple (often conflicting and contradictory) forms of volatility and chance. … Financialized subjects are to relinquish any hope of actual security and, instead, become savvy virtuosi, counter-levering life's uncertainty into opportunities for self-maximization.

The other side of securitization is the increasing concern over securing space in societies where notions of the public sphere and civic participation have collapsed into isolated consumer individualism and a culture of fear (Giroux 2006, 1–18; see also Puar 2007). Securitization here refers to the imperative to pre-empt and avoid threats to perceived normality, and to ensure that people can go about their business and conduct their commerce without interruption. Securitization, then, takes the form of increased policing, surveillance and (racialized) suspicion. Securitization both intimates and thrives on a sort of generalized, depoliticized paranoia driven by media representations of crime and chaos that distort audiences' sense of the world beyond their immediate circumstances and prey upon a generalized state of increasing material insecurity wrought by neoliberalism (Bauman 2006) – identified in Chapter 2 as the liquidation of society into speculative wealth.

But the paradigm of securitization goes beyond this. It increasingly takes the form of a culture of suspicion that is part of a broader neoliberal transformation. Employees, institutions and other actors, from teachers to charities to government departments, are increasingly subjected to financialized measure through punitive audits and surveillance to ensure they are operating at maximum efficiency and to ensure employers, shareholders and the public that the risk of abuse is being mitigated (Shore 2008).

Neoliberalism, in this sense, has less to do with older forms of economic liberalism which sought to mobilize the free market as a force for freedom, individualism and peace and more to do with the governmentality of the market over social life, the ways that those biopolitical tasks once monopolized by the state might be contrived, mobilized and executed by the forces of capital and in their interests (2008, 130–131). Elsewhere, Scott Stoneman and I (2009) have suggested that Walmart should be understood as a "panopticon of time," a corporate manifestation that brings Foucault's famous emblematic prison thoroughly into the neoliberal moment, evolving a diverse, flexible, networked institution that both fundamentally delimits social time and helps produce a range of subjectivities germane to and productive of neoliberal social and economic norms.

Drawing on Foucault's notion of the biopolitics of neoliberalism, Maurizzio Lazzarato (2012, 89–114) has sought to define finance less as a breed of economic action and more as a weapon of power which, through the production of debt, exhorts economic actors (both individuals and whole nation-states) into a form of subjectivation aimed at market integration, towards what Foucault dubbed an entrepreneurialism of the self (2008, 226). From this perspective, the biopolitics of financialization is not merely repressive and oppressive; it creates a situation in which all forms of agency are encouraged to articulate themselves in financialized form, and where financial "freedom" and power are held to be the fullest expression of liberty and acumen (see also Mitropoulos 2012). Indeed, for Lazzarato, debt and finance are two sides of the same coin, one whose inscription might read "securitize or else": embrace your inner financier, distil the ethereal future into a saleable present-day commodity, or suffer the consequences.

As Martin notes, and as we saw in Chapter 2, today's securitized logic of governmentality sees state power increasingly separate society into, on the one hand, lauded "risk-takers," modelled on high-rolling Wall Street Übermenschen, and, on the other, the abject "at risk" ("welfare queens," poor youth, the racialized and ghettoized) in need of intervention lest they threaten the risk management of everyone else in what used to be known as society (Martin 2007, 37).

In an age of precarious labour, when full-time, permanent employment has been replaced with episodic, contract-based, part-time and temporary jobs, workers are expected to understand themselves as individuated risk managers in an unforgiving, dog-eat-dog world … Pensions, healthcare, education and transportation cease to be common concerns and modes of collective insurance and become sites of personal risk management and individualized investment (Martin, 2002).

Financialization forces this insight to a new level. The financial system represents a phenomenal crucible of human rationality, creativity, imagination and collaboration … But, as with the systems and institutions that developed nuclear weapons, or the Nazis’ "final solution," these are derivatives of Enlightenment cognition and epistemology that have been turned against human interests and have been used to entrench and exacerbate systemic inequality and a deeply profound insecurity.

For Martin (2007, 65–96), the paradigm of securitization has both guided and benefited from the War on Terror. He charts the way it has migrated into the character of imperialist warfare, guiding the "revolution in military affairs" that stood behind the Bush regime's foreign and domestic policy. Within this paradigm, the world was read as a vector of omnipresent and unending terrorist risk (or, more accurately, risk to American military and economic supremacy and/or the unhindered global flow of capital), in need, in all places, of securitization. Far from a Cold War logic of security, containment or détente, based on a logic of preparedness and the accumulation of robust defences, the terror war sees the enemy as a vast, illogical and ubiquitous threat to be scientifically pre-empted, predicted and intervened in with decisive, (allegedly) exact and extreme force. Martin identifies the "Rumsfeld Doctrine" of shock and awe, of a constantly revolutionizing, streamlined, high-tech and precise military apparatus, as one geared to what he calls "derivative wars": the casting of a global net of advanced surveillance and predictive calculation punctuated by brief, sharp and devastating "surgical" interventions in global "hotspots." These actions, which make use of lightning-fast, disposable technology (predator drones, smart bombs, special ops), are aimed not at traditional imperial or colonial domination, but at shifting and shaping the flows of global risk. While this attempt at risk management has actually produced greater global volatility, this insecurity has also been "externalized," unleashing new forms of terror on abject populations.

Walmart’s integration into the world of finance is deeper than share prices; it represents a ubiquitous vector by which financialization, securitization and risk management are introduced and stitched into everyday life.

[Walmart] uses derivative financial instruments for hedging and non-trading purposes to manage its exposure to changes in interest and currency exchange rates, as well as to maintain an appropriate mix of fixedand floating-rate debt. Use of derivative financial instruments in hedging programs subjects the Company to certain risks, such as market and credit risks. … Credit risk related to derivatives represents the possibility that the counterparty will not fulfill the terms of the contract.

As Li Puma and Lee (2004, 161–189) illustrate, the signature cultural achievement of the derivative is to render the endemic economic violence of global financialization invisible by articulating volatility as the purely disinterested calculation of risk. So, while Walmart's derivatives may take the form of currency swaps (allowing them to mitigate the risk of, say, a sudden spike in the value of the Bangladeshi Taka, which would represent an unforeseen increase in the cost of materials produced there), these securities enfold and encrypt the endemic social, political and economic insecurities that are the result of financialization. This is emblematic of the Pyrrhic character of securitization: the hyper-individuated impulse to manage risk tragically produces only greater risk, although that risk may be transferred or, externalized onto others.

Walmart has been prevented from establishing an actual bank by an unprecedented alliance of established financial institutions, concerned that the firm would drive down fees by leveraging its massive economic power and geographic reach (Gogoi 2007c). Yet Walmart recently established its own line of branded credit cards, proprietary prepaid debit cards, wire transfers, chequecashing services, and other low-fee financial services to ensure that consumers are unencumbered in purchasing all their lives' needs at Walmart's massive superstores, which today can include supermarkets, health clinics, pharmacies, hairdressers, restaurants and optometrists, as well as the entire range of commodities from hardware to furniture to clothing (Gogoi 2007b; Zellner 2005).

Walmart might be understood as having more in common with a financial firm specializing in arbitrage (lightning-fast trading that profits from the momentary differentials between prices in different markets) than with retail in any conventional sense of the term.

Rankand-file employees are informed that they are not dependent workers but independent "associates" of the firm with a vested interest in its success (and, conversely, to whom Walmart owes no obligation) (Rosenbloom 2009). These themes are reinforced by compulsory daily rituals and campy group chants. As Moreton (2007) points out, this corporate ideology is "the soul of neoliberalism," not merely crass propaganda but a means for people in the folds of the massive organization to gain some sense of belonging, purpose and satisfaction from what might otherwise be considered highly alienating work. Within Walmart's theocratic worldview the "protestant work ethic" is updated: the "investment" of one's time as a Walmart employee is also spiritual investment in one's own self.

The contradictions are, as Jean and John Comaroff (2000) point out, mutually reinforcing: the neoliberal assault on economic and social security (of which Walmart is a key agent) breeds new forms of social conservatism and reactionary politics as well as new forms of religiosity and fatalism. While “servant leadership” may seem like just one more example of Walmart’s idiosyncratic and disingenuous corporate culture, it is an intimate counterpoint to a managerial strategy that effectively transforms local store managers, as well as more senior company officials, into specialized “risk managers” – not merely suited bureaucratic automatons but finely honed, “naturally” selected (via the “market”) creative subjects who are able to “plug in” to Walmart’s logistical mainframe and work everywhere throughout the corporation to cut costs and maximize efficiency (Atkinson 2003; Wallgum 2007). As Rosen (2006) documents, managers at Walmart are themselves governed by stress, forced to meet ever-leaner criteria, constantly under both digital and cultural surveillance to ensure they never cease to cut waste, improve inefficiency and respond to local markets. Managers who cannot improve same-store sales year-overyear are fired, demoted or publicly shamed.

Managers who cannot improve same-store sales year-overyear are fired, demoted or publicly shamed. The majority of Walmart's many labour violations in its retail stores stem from local managers cutting corners in the hopes of meeting the ever-rising demands of Bentonville (Gogoi 2007a; Greenhouse 2004; Greenhouse and Barbaro 2005; Greenhouse and Barbaro 2006, 26–28), which usually allows Walmart to externalize blame and punishment.

Of course, Walmart’s low prices are borne on the backs of its rankand-file workers, the majority of whom are part-time, temporary and precarious and whose poor working conditions, minimal income and boredom are the stuff of legend and popular humour (Discounting rights 2007; Gogoi 2007a; Lichtenstein 2010; Zimmerman and Hudson 2006). As in the broader American and global economy, the distribution and intensity of new forms of precarity are more heavily borne by women, migrants, racialized and otherwise marginalized workers (Discounting rights 2007; Featherstone 2004; Rosen 2006). These conditions persist in no small part because of Walmart’s extreme forms of labour surveillance and discipline, including an unprecedented several decades-long war against the risk of trade unions organizing their “associates” (Adams 2006). Techniques include constant CCTV observation of workers, several specialized teams of union-busting managers deployed from corporate headquarters in Bentonville at a moment’s notice (Clark 2007), and the perennial insistence (reinforced through compulsory daily pep-talks and chants) that Walmart is an egalitarian team doing good in the world by lowering the prices on consumer “necessities” (Rosenbloom 2009). Walmart is not averse to shutting whole stores that are at risk of unionization (Lichtenstein 2010, 165–196). Indeed, unions, like other social justice groups, rank as key targets of what Walmart calls its “threat research” division, made up in large part of former military and police personnel, who keep files on union organizers and activists, set up front groups to defend the corporation, infiltrate and spy on threatening organizations, and comb through Walmart’s massive databanks for labour or consumer misbehaviour (Zimmerman and McWilliams 2007). Here Walmart imports, refines and exports the militarized logic of risk management in order to control its population of over 140 million shoppers per week (Annual Report 2014, 6).

Nowhere is this more evident than in the very architectures of its ubiquitous and homogeneous stores, which now number over 6,100 worldwide (Annual Report 2014, 63), and which were at one time opening at a rate of 1.45 per day (Bianco 2006, 3).

Walmart has also offered its space and parking lots for fundraisers and community events in support of the military (Podsada 2008). It is also the top firearms retailer in the United States (Barrett 2008), including the assault rifles used in many of America’s most notorious recent massacres (Zornick 2013).

But all of these techniques are pivotal to a broader cultural politics whereby Walmart has become the crucible for themes of nationalism, militarism, Christian fundamentalism, consumerism, and a politics of fear and security germane to the War on Terror and the way it reorganizes the spaces of daily life under the paradigm of neoliberal risk management.

By cutting out the recording industry, Walmart can afford to sell these records at rock-bottom prices and even offer recording artists much more rewarding royalties and advances than those to which they are accustomed. But the scope of cultural possibility narrows to a selection of guaranteed hits that tend to conform to a conservative aesthetic, political and moral template.

In order to pre-empt the risk of censorship, recording studios have been forced to create special Walmart editions of records and films (Ahearn 2009). Similarly, Walmart’s huge control of access to cultural commodities has seen almost all small and independent publications, films, music and periodicals frozen out of the markets that might sustain them (Maneker 2009; Rich 2009). Still unsatisfied with the risks of trusting to the anonymous engines of cultural production, Walmart has begun to work directly with publishers, artists, studios and the like to produce its own proprietary products (Fox 2005). Many popular recording artists have released albums exclusively through Walmart, scrubbed clean of any offensive lyrics or themes (Pareles 2009).

Walmart’s cultural politics here are revealing. It profits by offering (ostensibly for “free”) a set of services emulating or simulating the forms of community, family and morality, which, while they may never have existed (at least in such an idealized form), relied on a post-war socio-economic order that Walmart, in various ways, helped eradicate.

Walmart promises a sort of protection from the forms of neoliberal precarious life it actually helps create. As investors are discovering, not even the state is as secure, as reliable and as benevolent as Walmart, with its sanitized ecologies and iconic smiley-faced brand icon. The cultural and spatial politics of the firm orbit around the mobilization of risk management to promise a shelter from the terror of financialized everyday life. The fact that, at present, a greater proportion of the American adult population shops at Walmart than votes (Sasseen 2008) illustrates the tendency towards a new cultural, economic and political dynamic in an age of securitization.

Were Walmart a state-run monopoly, rather than a staggeringly successful capitalist enterprise, its actions would likely be seen, in sum, as totalitarian. It blends crass populism with incredible material power, a culture of highly torqued securitization with a quasi-theocratic ethos. The fact that Walmart elicits so little resistance cannot simply be reduced to false consciousness, cognitive dissonance or lack of education. Rather, Walmart helps produce the subjects germane to its rule, securitizing souls who find in Walmart a temporary ally in a world of systemic and perpetual insecuritization.

As much as Walmart might render its supply chain more efficient, shipping thousands of tons of excessive plastic paraphernalia and food half way around the world is, in and of itself, a massive ecological catastrophe (Rosenthal 2008), and its ultimate costs will be borne by the anonymous "at risk" of the world, who suffer the most acute effects of erratic climate change, endemic ecological toxicity and resource depletion.

Walmart offers itself as an ally of the sorts of consuming/investing securitized subjects it helps create. This is why efforts that limit themselves to revealing Walmart's (many) evils will have only limited success. In order to confront and overcome securitizing capitalism, cultural critics and their allies will need to offer a vision of a plausible future that provides those things that securitization falsely promises.

True enough, but it is my conjecture that we may discover the elemental traces of financialization even in children’s culture, and in those traces find, in a uniquely telling form, some of the most important and elemental aspects of the processes of financialization and its complex and unique reliance on and transformation of agency.

Susan Strange (1997), the late but legendary figure in the development of international political economy, coined the term "casino capitalism" in 1987 to describe the then-new changes in government and supra-national policy that would, in time, come to be known as neoliberal deregulation. For Strange, the coordinated and sustained ideological and political attack on Keynesian financial regulation threatened to unleash a Pandora's box of speculative gambling, fraud and malfeasance, hot money and, as a result, political and economic instability. … Strange's neologism sought to dramatize the impact of these changes by collapsing what Marieke de Goede (2005) has shown to be a central tension in the development of finance since the Early Modern period: the distinction between investment and gambling. … De Goede has demonstrated that central to the legitimacy of stock markets, investment banks, and other financial firms and practices has been a discourse that makes a (largely artificial but highly functional) separation between games of chance, which see the virtueless gambler subordinate himself to fortune's whims, and the quasi-science of finance, wherein the prudent and discerning investor applies reason and skill to taming and dominating fortune (see also Aitken 2014).

Indeed, the central conceit of what is still the most popular and influential financier autobiography/testimonial, Michael Lewis's (2001) Liar's Poker, takes the popular card game and its culture of high-stakes, hyper-masculine competition and duplicity as a metaphor for the culture of Wall Street in the 1980s (see also Bjerg 2011; on the genre of financier confessional, see Hayward 2014). As outlined in Chapter 2, little has changed culturally since that time, though the advances of financial technology have accelerated, exacerbated and broadened the volatility such a culture creates. Indeed, as Ho (2009), Zaloom (2006), Preda (2009) and other anthropologists illustrate, the level of technological and mathematical detachment that characterizes today's financial sector allows traders and other financial actors an even greater level of detachment and renders finance even more game-like. Michel Callon (2007), Donald MacKenzie (2005), Karin Knorr Cetina (2005) and others have likewise illustrated the ways that, in an age of incredible computing power, when the sublime movements of the "market" must be represented through computer models and when some of the most important work in finance is done by digital engineers, the game-like qualities of finance become even more acute (see also Hutton 2014).

More concerning still is the way that this system as a whole can be understood as a massive mechanism by which the actual costs and risks of speculative accumulation can be "externalized" onto those with little or no power to influence financial markets (LiPuma and Lee 2004, 69). For instance, the game-like trade in government bonds, or in commodities futures (corn, soybeans, wheat, oil), or in currencies, or in blue-chip corporate stocks can have horrific and devastating effects on whole populations who encounter massive economic volatility, debilitating price inflation (or deflation) and the loss of jobs. So, too, can we note the way that an increasingly detached and game-like culture of financial speculation drives an ever leaner and more austere brand of capitalism in which the financial sector accumulates massive disciplinary power over governments, corporations and smaller financial players, which is used to leverage competition, speculation, neoliberal austerity and ruthless profiteering into nearly every corner of the global capitalist economy. And we have seen the way in which all these human and economic costs are, ultimately, borne by those outside the financial services industry, including (dramatically) not only the way the public sector was compelled to bail out the financial sector in the wake of its spectacular collapse, but the way that it was prevented from imposing any meaningful or effective regulation on that sector in the aftermath, which has led to record-setting levels of profits for investment banks and other financial firms, as well as scandalous levels of executive compensation for their managers.

It is no exaggeration that, whatever we might say about the nature of its influence over our lives, the global economy is by far the most universal, powerful and interwoven system of power on the planet. People everywhere live and die by their pocketbooks. Local modes of oppression and exploitation, from racism to sexism to ablism to homophobia, tend to express themselves most universally in the form of economic privilege or privation and the division of labour.

And, while a great deal of attention has been paid to the scourge of neoliberalism, one worries that this term tends to appear (like globalization, and perhaps financialization) as a short-hand for whatever seems worst at the moment. Little importance tends to be placed on a more elaborate consideration of the machinations of the global capitalist economy, of which neoliberalism is an important phase, but by no means the first or the worst.

After the failure of world “leaders” at Copenhagen, Cancun and other climate conferences (with millions consigned to starvation and displacement due to climate change so as to spare the global economy any pain) and the massive transfer of wealth and power leveraged by capital in the wake of the recent financial crisis we can hardly avoid the conclusion that we are amidst a moment of terrifying corporate power and in the grips of a fundamentally perverse paradigm of value.

But what I fear these perspectives often lose sight of is the way the economic, or the capitalist economic system as a whole, is not merely the product of human activity: it also helps shape human activity, and, as its power grows in an era of neoliberal, corporate-led, financialized globalization, it starts to run societies around the world in ways that are outside the control of any human agency, at least as we imagine that agency today.

As Graeber (2001, 64–65) illustrates, the world of social values – of which we are a part, a process and a producer – is fundamentally beyond our conscious comprehension. … As a result, we must rely on our imaginations to give us the sort of comprehensive understanding of values that makes social action possible. Not only do we imagine what social values look like now, but we imagine how our actions might be received in the future and what the potential outcomes of our activities might be.

For De Angelis (2007, 37–42), the disciplining of social values under economic value is capitalism’s fundamental logic, but one that takes particular historical forms.

So, increasingly, under financialized capitalism, which has seen the bleed of financial logics into the fabric of daily life, we are guided to act in the world on the basis of economic imperatives. Our social cooperation with other people is based increasingly on the mediation of money, in the sense that more and more aspects of our lives become “services” and more and more of our material culture becomes commodities (De Angelis 2007, 172–174). For instance, many university students, brought up in this cultural climate, have little interest in learning for its own sake or even for even for the role of higher education in society, but, rather, see its value as a commodity they are investing in for their own personal enrichment (Giroux 2004, 81–104). That said, as De Angelis (2007, 34–35) takes pains to make clear, the vast majority of relationships and activities that matter to most people are, by and large, based on non-economic values like friendship, family, solidarity, cooperation and equality. In this sense, all points of life are a struggle between, on the one hand, the relentless threat of commodification and, on the other, the semi-autonomous negotiation of values based on the necessities and contingencies of social reproduction. This is not to suggest that there is a set of universally “good” values, which we need only discover and live by, and they are eternally counterposed against “bad” capitalist values. It is to say that capital represents a unilateral value logic that seeks to confine and redirect the negotiation of social values more broadly towards its own ends. Put otherwise, capitalism can and should also be seen as a system that functions to reorient the reproduction of social life towards its own reproduction by coopting, conscripting and reshaping the way values are imagined and practiced, under the banner of commodification, monetization, quantitative measurement and exploitative discipline.

This is not merely an academic point, and the complaint that the world has become too possessed by economic and materialistic values is not only the property of left-wing malcontents. The neoliberal collapse of all social values into economic value can be heard in churches, mosques and temples around the world, and it is a key plank of new forms of ethnic nationalism and right-wing populism, all of which argue that we need to “return” to a fabled time when (family, religious, national, etc.) values were better aligned. All too often in these cases the decay of social values is blamed on convenient minorities, rather than the broader economic system that is the real cause (see Haiven 2014, 31–35).

In the waning days of the 20th century the world was taken by storm by the phenomenon of Pokémon, a multi-platform cultural commodity aimed at children between the ages of 4 and 14 (a previously almost unprecedented age range for a toy or amusement). … As Anne Allison (2004, 47) notes, even the most fearsome Pokémon obey an aesthetic imperative of "cuteness" (or kawaisa in Japanese), which, as she puts it, is Japan's "millennial product," a means of reconciling and negotiating the ambivalences of (disappearing) nature, (troubled) gender, (post-innocent) childhood and (cultural) capitalism in a moment of neoliberal insecurity and cultural drift.

It tends to be the case that the capitalism we imagine in this debate is one from a 1970s or 1980s that never actually was: one where capitalism handed down cultural commodities in their refined and finished form, one in which the relationship between cultural producers and consumers was largely one-way, and where "resistance" meant posing creativity, autonomy, individuality, networks and new forms of affinity against a capitalism imagined to be largely monolithic, didactic, compulsory, hierarchical and banal.

Today, capitalism as a cultural force is far more versatile, variegated and pluralistic – it offers an extremely wide variety of cultural commodities and is developing new modes to harness and capture consumers' horizontal affiliations, creativity, individualism and "resistance." … Nowhere, perhaps, is this more the case than in those spheres of financialization that actively court and harness people's imaginations, agencies and connective capacities to create a global matrix of financialized relationships, as we have seen in the previous chapters.

As Allison (2004, 41) notes, the game's primary designer was motivated by a melancholic and nostalgic naturalism that harkened back to a childhood of collecting and battling insects in a world lost to today's children growing up in the cities and apartment buildings of postmodern Japan. The seminal Pokémon video game mobilized new advances in Nintendo's Game Boy portable platform that allowed players to battle and swap their Pokémon if both owned the device and the game, creating portable public spheres of shared knowledge, discourse and imagination (Allison 2004, 42; Kollar 2009). In general, Pokémon was designed less as a personal possession than as a social medium: it did not seek merely to replace children's shared imagination, creativity and agency with privatized commodities, but to suggest itself as an expedient, a tool or a vector by which these could be expressed (Buckingham and Sefton-Green 2004, 21–23).

Pokémon, we might say, is an example of what Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (2009), writing about video games, call a “game of empire”: a technologically augmented form of social interaction, learning and social practice that stresses agency and creativity but within a very particular, capitalist-driven context. Like the large, multiplayer online worlds that have shocked economists and sociologists by creating gigantic digital societies and economies, Pokémon emerged in a very particular moment of capitalist accumulation. It is a moment when capital is no longer solely interested in command over workers' bodies but is increasingly invested in their minds and social relations. In this age of so-called cognitive capitalism we see the emergence of “playbour,” the blurring of work and play in the sense that, where capitalism is increasingly predicated on crafting subjectivities, the clean divide between labour and leisure begins to erode (Kücklich 2005).

Marx illustrated that the commodification of a thing does not exhaust its use-values (Cleaver 2000), and likewise this harnessing of social agency by this more nuanced and intelligent capitalist structure cancel the very real and important social and subjective work children do when they play with Pokémon. It does, however, intimate that we need to reconsider the dialectic of structure and agency in a new light.

We must not simply assume that children are mindless or uncritical and uncreative drones, being played by Nintendo and its Pokémon franchise. Rather, we should see Pokémon as a means by which children "do" or make meaning within and as a part of a culture and economy over which, by virtue of their age, they have little ability to change.

For Goggin (2008), the immersive, seemingly "addictive" character of games today is less evidence of individual pathology or diabolical corporate engineering, and more a reflection of and response to a world made up, on the one hand, of serialized activity, routines and codes and, on the other, one increasingly dependent on the way each of us must manage chance, risk and uncertainty in the course of our daily affairs. Further, she suggests that immersive and obsessive games also work by allowing their players to experience a cohesive sense of self and subjectivity – of control, understanding and agency – in a postmodern moment of disconnection, helplessness, confusion, flux and drift.

But Pokémon cards are also highly engineered commodities, tailored precisely to render themselves resources for children’s negotiation of value, esteem, affinity and agency (Brougère 2004, 192–193). The cards offer themselves not as an entirely prescriptive and rigid plaything but as an extremely versatile and mutable social medium, one whose cunning simplicity and relative abundance makes them almost ubiquitous within many children’s social circles. As Brougère (2004, 188) notes, neither Nintendo nor children have absolute authority over the cards’ value or the brand’s meanings – it is a market-mediated negotiation between meaning and creative play.

Key to the success of Pokémon cards as a site of the semiautonomous play of value is the underlying, more rigid and rulebound order of value that stems from the game for which the cards were originally designed. While not all children play the game (or play it by the given rules), and while most children value cards in social economies that are not based on their value within the game, the ability to reference a card’s game value (or sometimes “objective” monetary value) is a critical touchstone for the negotiation of value (Brougère 2004, 198–199). In other words, the determination of value is not merely an act of social imagination and creativity in groups of children – it is one that is in dialectic tension with an imposed logic of value. The intimate negotiation of value and imagination occurs in the shadow of an ostensibly real, foreign, alien economy.

The value of Pokémon cards is clearly imaginary. Even in their initial, commodified form, a slip of mass-produced, coloured cardboard is by no stretch of the imagination "worth" the money children wish to pay for them. Within most economistic analyzes, and many Marxist ones, it would simply be assumed that the "use-value" of the cards is worth the extra price, and that this "use" is basically enjoyment or distraction (whether interpreted positively or negatively). But the "use-value" of the cards is really the way they serve as a medium for the negotiation of value, which is highly imaginative, remarkably collaborative (if sometimes coercive) and largely autonomous.

While it is possible that children might make radically different use of Pokémon cards than the basic theme of collection/battle/nurture/train/accumulate, these tendencies repeat in children's play with Pokémon cards through a combination of the cards' own material logic (they are highly collectable and suggest themselves for these purposes) and intertextual reinforcement, not only from other Pokémon media (films, comic books, etc.) but from a whole society in which values of acquisition, competitiveness, accumulation and hierarchy are privileged in uncountable subtle ways. So, while children may exercise their agency and imagination in their play with Pokémon cards, and while they may use them to negotiate their own social values and reproduce (and transform) their social circles, they do so in conditions not of their own choosing.

But, crucially, what Pokémon cards offer that other collectables do not is not merely a diversified commodity onto which children can project their own values freely, but one that subtly includes its own value system. Pokémon cards work, I would hazard, precisely because the cards always already refer to nebulous "objective" values (rarity, price on the market, the power of the card or Pokémon in the game) against, beyond and within which children negotiate their own subjective and collective values. That is, the Pokémon brand offers its own official set of values, not to enforce those values on young collectors but as a sort of touchstone or reference point to orient the working-out of value by child agents, even though these official values are often virtually meaningless within children's social worlds. It is because children can refer to these "objective" values that they are able to sustain the illusion of value they create through shared narratives and conviviality.

No longer is it sufficient to read onto popular culture the ideological tendencies and tropes of capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity and other systems of power (though this work remains critically important). Nor is it sufficient to feign surprise when the researcher "finds" agency, creativity and "resistance" where, allegedly, none was expected. Rather, we must look to the extremely complicated ways popular culture shapes the dialogic relationship between structure and agency, between value and imagination, towards the perpetuation of durable systems of exploitation and inequality in financialized times.

Viviana A. Zelizer (1997), Bruce Carruthers (2010), Peter North (2007) and other sociologists and anthropologists of money have, over the past 30 years, sought to show that currencies are not simply unmediated expressions of the broader economic totality they represent and facilitate. Rather, a careful examination of money’s uses and meanings in the field of daily life reveals that they become carriers, transmitters and palimpsestual zones of mediation for multiple frames of value. Money is not only the disciplinary force of capital, materialized (though this it certainly is – see Caffentzis 2013; Cleaver 2000; Lapavitsas 1999); it can also function as a gift, as a means to negotiate social worth and as a medium of social intercourse.

So understanding Pokémon cards as a financialized practice, one in which children internalize, play with and rearticulate the ambient codes and cultural thematics of the financialized societies in which they live, should not lead us to the conclusion that they are purely hegemonic in a reductionist sense of that term (a one-way, rulingclass effort to re-educate subalterns and, thus, reproduce dominant social relations). Yet it is equally important to note that, like money, Pokémon cards do not exist in a vacuum where their value is purely a matter of interpersonal negotiation and convivial play. More accurately, Pokémon is a site where we can see multiple frames of value at work. Like an ocean gyre, it is a meeting-point of multiple, con- flicting and complex currents, within which material debris ebbs and flows. In children’s Pokémon card play we can find a key example of the way financialization is articulated in daily life, but also the way that articulation enjoys and, indeed, depends on an interval of play, autonomy and creativity that cannot simply be reduced to superstructural ephemera.

Virtuosity in this sense is not merely reducible to skill or proficiency. It speaks more broadly to a socially situated form of imagination, creativity and capacity for action, a potential. Yet, importantly, this virtuosity is rooted in (and contributes to) a broader field of performative and communicative acts. It is not insignificant that the root of "virtuosity" is "virtue," a term closely related to (and, in Italian, directly linked to) value: virtuosity, for Virno, is our capacity to create value, and, in an age of cognitive capitalism, it is that capacity that is ever more at stake. Financialization, I suggest, is a key means of capturing, shaping and enclosing virtuosity. What is Wall Street except a massive "machine" (in the Deleuzian sense of the term) for harnessing and putting to work the incredible creative and cognitive energies of a massive pool of financial workers? And what is debt (finance's key product) except a complicated means of disciplining virtuosity, of creating a situation in which one must apply one's creativity, ingenuity and social and cultural capacities towards capitalist ends (Lazzarato 2012)?

Allison (2003) astutely points out, Pokémon succeeds because it provides children with portable personal and social props for a commodified, neoliberal life where the line between innocent play and capitalistic behaviour is blurred. I am suggesting that the tendency that Pokémon represents responds to and profits from not only a culture of neoliberalism, but also a cultural politics of financialization.

So, Pokémon is a multimedia practice for developing a sense of agency in financialized times. It is a form of what I call, borrowing from the work of Henry Giroux (2004, 105–124), a “public pedagogy” of financialization: it creates a learning environment for the cultivation of a certain repertoire of skills and competencies and, more importantly, an ethos.

Pokémon, I am suggesting, provides a commodified space where children can develop this ethos, and the critical and reflexive skills for navigating a financialized world in which subjectivity, community, creativity and the speculative negotiation of value are put to work in new ways. Pokémon is a site where children “learn to learn” (Buckingham and Sefton-Green 2004, 30) to develop financialized subjecthood and a sense of agency germane to a world without guarantees where social values are bartered, where the individual is an isolated economic agent and where society is merely the sum of its people’s economic decisions. This learning is clearly not the intention of the Nintendo Corporation, but the brand works and takes such a hold of children’s imagination because they, on a deep existential level, recognize what Pokémon can offer them: it affirms a world they see all around them, from observing their parents’ increasingly episodic careers and financial woes to the sorts of narratives they witness on television and the media. Pokémon’s success stems from its resonance within and reproduction of the ethos of financialization.

In an age of financialization, when all of this commodification and agency occurs under the aegis of a system dominated by financial flows and speculations, the everyday production of value becomes more important than ever. In a world where our lives are increasingly determined by immaterial statistics in remote bank databases, where money – which has always been a mutually agreed upon illusion – has ceased to be tangible and entered the digital stratosphere, where the contradictions of the global system are readily apparent (countries like Greece, Iceland or Ireland can go from financial utopia to financial ruin in the blink of an eye with absolutely no “real” change to their underlying economy), the global economy is predicated on the shared belief of value as never before.

Consider, for instance, the culture of mutually reinforcing belief and credulity (explored in earlier chapters) that is reproduced in the financial sector’s various interlinked institutional environments, from hedge funds and investment banks to government regulatory offices and the financial press. Consider the “performative” dimensions of finance capital, from the preemptory role of financial instruments in shaping (not just reading) financial markets to the speech acts of CEOs and central bank chiefs. Consider the ways in which financial value of relies not only on the culture of particular organizations, but also on the broader field of sociocultural understandings, and how “metaphoric wealth” helps shape and transform the understandings and the negotiations of value in society at large (see Chapter 1).

Still, for all that intelligence and innovation, the sector mostly produces immaterial financial assets or metaphoric wealth – in other words, practically nothing of tangible or lasting value. From one angle, in fact, it destroys value: liquidating public assets by privatizing services, foreclosing on homes and businesses, and imposing austerity measures that funnel social wealth upwards to an apparently lawless global oligarchy. Financial forces also superintend a global economic system that is characterized by a massively unfair global division of creative labour, where creative opportunities are reserved for a fraction of the world’s population (mostly in Northern cities). The remainder spend longer days and shorter lives in fields, factories and kitchens, with little opportunity to practise creativity and even less to have it recognized or valued. Most of the wealth “created” by the financial sector is, in a sense, derivative – it derives its value as a reflection or means of representing real-world labour and wealth. Finance, at least at first blush, appears to be a glitzy simulacrum of value that nonetheless disciplines and (dis)orients the economic and social world. In this sense, finance is, a form of class war, which synthesizes, aggregates and puts to work the creativity of the financial “industry” in the interests of perpetuating and, indeed, more deeply entrenching reigning inequalities and forms of exploitation.

Here, the challenges of "development" (whether of nations, communities or individuals) are imagined largely as the inaccessibility or prejudice of markets; venture philanthropy initiatives aim to precisely mobilize targeted funds to leverage open market opportunities for those who would otherwise be too poor or too benighted to benefit from them.

The Gates Foundation forms a key part of a broader shift in philanthropy towards a financialized model. Charities, NGOs and "social capital" or "social innovation" firms are now expected to manage themselves as corporations by developing rigorous metrics for measuring "impact" and "success" and by trimming budget lines, relying on temporary or intern labour that makes work ever more precarious (see Guthman 2008). Sometimes going by the name of "venture philanthropy," this approach often focuses on short-term, measurable results, much as in the corporate world, where ever-increasing quarterly profits help inflate stock prices while potentially (usually) damaging or completely curtailing long-term strategy. Moreover, many of the charities, NGOs and initiatives funded by such venture philanthropy foundations aim to leverage social and subjective change out of relatively small investments. In keeping with a broader neoliberal hostility towards relationships of long-term dependency, preference goes to schemes that supply small injections of funding to help individuals, groups or neighbourhoods "enter the market" and succeed (or fail) on their own accord (Ball and Olmedo 2011; Bateman 2010; Roy 2012b).

For them, the free market is a natural and historically unique force for creativity, and any motives beyond the constant quest for profit are antithetical to this force, imposing the subjective will and preferences of soft-hearted corporate executives over the inherently superior and objective (if ruthless) intelligence of the market. Gates and his allies responded that these motives were not antithetical, and that venture philanthropy could also be profitable, when imagined as enlightened self-interest. Curing key third-world diseases or social problems, improving education and alleviating poverty, on the whole, open up new markets, build trust in corporations and eliminated systemic risks in the global economy. "Creativity" is required to see beyond competition and short-term profiteering and recognize the need for the enlightened non-government intervention in markets.

This romantic narrative of what finance accomplishes emerges as perhaps the single most powerful rationale for the financial sector both within and beyond its quarters. Ho (2009, 67–72) reports that, when investment bankers are not simply justifying their actions as the natural expression of biological human competitive individualism, they measure the social good of their work in its capacity to foster creativity, innovation and dynamism within the economy at large. Even when financiers are engaged in what would appear to be entirely destructive and predatory pursuits (like private equity firms that strip bankrupt companies of assets and worker protections, then “flip” them on the market; currency speculators who play havoc with national economies; or sub-prime securities traders who benefit from endemic poverty), they make recourse to this narrative that justifies financial accumulation in the name of a broader economic creativity.

“Creative destruction” has become, in fact, an important phrase for the financial sector and the advocates of its further deregulation. The idea emerges in its fullest form from Joseph Schumpeter’s reading of Marx, the latter having drawn on Adam Smith to observe the ways in which capitalism is constantly revolutionizing itself. Yet this leads to massive waste when old machinery and whole populations are idled and reduced to worthlessness as capitalists compete to lower the costs of production. Importantly, for Marx, this “creative destruction” is the cause of the endemic crisis both of the falling rate of profit (capitalists strive so hard to lower production costs that they drive themselves out of business and drive workers into potentially revolutionary poverty) and of the financial system (Harvey 2006, 176–197; Perelman 1987).

The discourse of creative destruction today is, of course, very different from Marx’s analysis, very different even from Schumpeter’s (2008) wry observations, which were not intended as an unqualified celebration of capitalism’s “creative” powers, but, rather, as a warning about their potential to severely fray the social fabric.

For instance, both The Economist and The New York Times featured the term only a handful of times up until 1996, though thereafter its appearance increased exponentially, first in reference to Schumpeter’s concept, but then, by 2002, as its own self-referential truism.

The mythological figure of the artist was held up as the mirror image of the economic entrepreneur: both individuals imposed their masculine will on the world and begat productive order out of meaningless or wasteful nature (see Wolff 1984).

Creativity’s ability to elicit universal good feeling is relatively recent. In the Middle Ages, the term hardly existed in the English lexicon. Words stemming from its Latin root – creatus – typically were employed to refer to God the creator or to his “creations” (Williams 1985, 82–84). It was not until the “birth of the author” in the 18th century that the term was widely applied to a particular human quality or skill. As the bourgeoisie rose to prominence in Europe and demanded cultural artefacts through which they could reckon and display their “distinction” from the proto-proletariat, the work of art gained its stamp of authenticity and transcendental value from the figure of what would, in the 19th century, come to be known as the “creative genius,” the unique and refined imagination of the singular individual (Nelson 2010; Rose 1993; Woodmansee and Jaszi 1994). The mythological figure of the artist was held up as the mirror image of the economic entrepreneur: both individuals imposed their masculine will on the world and begat productive order out of meaningless or wasteful nature (see Wolff 1984).

Yet creativity remained largely associated with the work of artists and authors, as the European “high arts” gained their creative esteem largely by contrasting themselves with more pedestrian forms of culture. Whether working in factories, on plantations or in various administrative positions, the vast majority of humanity who were enrolled in European-led capitalism were systematically denied any real opportunity for creative expression, and what little was afforded them was belittled and mocked by elites as uncreative: peasant dances, indigenous musics and workers’ popular culture were all seen as hopelessly derivative (see Haiven 2014, 190–216).

Promising material stability and affluence in return for productivity, a clear division of labour defined the Keynesian moment of capitalism and the New Deal, which left very little opportunity for creative expression for most people. But, when the first generation of post-war youth and many workers of the late 1960s revolted against oppressive and exploitative working conditions, they also revolted against a stifling and conservative cultural idiom (Katsiaficas 1987; Vaneigem 2012). Not just about “good jobs” or the nature of state power, these movements demanded the liberation of creativity and the right to define life, subjectivity, culture and human potential.

As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, 167–225; Rolnik 2011) point out, over the 1970s and 1980s these ironically became the watchwords for the reorganization of capitalism itself, as it incorporated both its “social” and “artistic” critique in order to shrug off the imposition of Keynesian regulations (themselves the residual compromise of pre-war anti-capitalist struggles). … Under the banner of liberating individuals from the shackles of “big government” and paternalistic corporations, a new paradigm of neoliberal privatization was implemented. … In this period, as Angela McRobbie (2001; 2011) notes, the artist was held up as the “pioneer of the new economy,” their contract-based employment and seamless integration of work life with social life with home life with a passionate dream life having been positioned as a beacon to those “uncreative” souls struggling to make ends meet through the drudgery of multiple part-time, temporary jobs. … To be clear, we need to make a distinction between the actual sociological trends towards “creative” work and the function of the celebratory rhetoric as a means to discipline and shape the subjectivities of workers more broadly.

But something has shifted in the ways in which work is imagined and legitimated, and the sorts of promises that capitalism makes, a shift of which financialization and the ascendent discourse of creativity are both parts.

Portfolio theory moves us out of a linear logic of investment, which implies the steady securing of profit from long-term investment in certain concerns, towards a more chaotic and scattered pattern, which sees profit generated by overlapping, inter-referential, and even contradictory short-term investments as part of an overall portfolio and an overall strategy guided by the principle of securitization (see Chapter 3).

Not only are we encouraged to imagine our subjectivities as “portfolios” of traits, skills, experiences and competencies that we might rent out, we are also expected to see this as the expression inherent creativity. Here, the model portfolio is not only that of the financier but also that of the artist. … The portfolio offers an understanding of the “investments” the artist has made into her or his skills, education, experience and connections, as well as a window into the soul, implying access to the time and labour of its submitter and to the raw core of “human capital” itself: the ineffable, immeasurable substance of creativity.

Creativity is, then, more than merely romantic rhetoric; it speaks, imprecisely, to the fundamental stakes of class struggle. For Marx, living labour is the substance that capital, through the wage relationship, transforms into abstract labour power, which it puts to work producing commodities, which then it sells so that the surplus value may be reinvested in the process of exploitation (see Read 2003).

The portfolio in a financialized technology for measuring and disciplining living labour. In isolating and pitching their creative accomplishments, workers are made to render visible precisely those aspects of themselves that are irreplaceable, as well as to isolate only those risks they have taken that have been recognized and rewarded. The portfolio is, after all, a collection of things others have found valuable. If, to some degree, all creativity is about taking risks, the portfolio externalizes that risk onto the individual even as it submits risk’s benefits to investment.

Drawing on the example of the dot.com bubble of the early 2000s, he argues that finance offers liquid capital to a whole variety of attempts to marketize and commodify the creative energies of workers and consumers. While perhaps only 1% of firms succeed (paying for the other 99% that end in failure), finance effectively widens and pluralizes capitalism's social factory.

With the advent of post-Fordist production, globalization and new forms of consumerism and service-sector work, however, these authors argue that we have entered a phase of "real subsumption," in which work occurs throughout the "social factory" such that capitalist measure and discipline are applied across the social fabric and, moreover, social life itself becomes an object of capitalist speculation and commodification (Gill and Pratt 2008; Hardt and Negri 2000, 255–272).

Florida argues that, in the post-industrial global landscape, cities that attract and retain creative individuals enjoy significant economic and social benefits (see Tochterman 2012). If urban policy and funding were directed towards projects that made neighbourhoods attractive to an ever more mobile and cosmopolitan “creative class” of knowledge workers, economic prosperity and corporate investment would follow them, at the same time improving the social and economic climate of the city, promoting citizen engagement and social cohesion. Florida (2012) has noted that efforts to improve creativity must dovetail with liberalist efforts to reduce inequality and regulate corporate powers. Yet Florida’s ideas have generally been taken up in a neoliberal register, helping to reconfigure capitalist labour discipline in ways meant to capture and exploit (indeed, to shape and mould) the creative energies and passions of workers in a digitized age (see Banks 2013; Brouillette 2009).

In the United Kingdom, for instance, the enthusiasm for creativity merged with New Labour’s efforts to advance a kinder, gentler post-industrial neoliberalism through the promotion of the cultural industries (Hesmondhalgh 2008; McGuigan 2009). Rather than seeking to reverse the decline of the manufacturing sector and undo the cuts to and privatization of government services, the Blair government envisioned the nation’s prosperity as rooted in the production of “intangibles.” While, on the whole, cultural institutions enjoyed little additional funding, new monies were made available for limited individual projects that promised economic and social spin-offs. So, rather than fully fund public education and supplementary programs for youth (school lunch programs, recreation, special needs, remedial education), these new initiatives would bring artists into schools and community centres to offer “at risk” youth a chance to “express themselves.” In many cases, funding for such projects was dependent on finding “third party” and “stakeholder” support, which often meant corporate sponsorship.

As numerous authors have noted since the 1980s, this championing of artists and creative types also sees them deployed as the “shock troops of gentrification” (Bowler and McBurney 1993; Harris 2013; Makagon 2010). Attracted to neighbourhoods that offer low rent, little surveillance, and large spaces for studios, visual artists, designers, actors, dancers and others have often unwittingly participated in colonizing poor, often racialized zones. As “creatives” move in, they, along with the services they attract (coffee shops, art galleries), make these neighbourhoods more appealing to affluent individuals and property speculators, thereby attracting the attention of the police and other authorities who were, hitherto, largely satisfied to ignore these areas.

According to David Harvey (2012, 89–113), the city is a zone in which capitalism negotiates the problem of cultural autonomy. Capital is driven, in part, by competition for monopoly rents and the ability to profit by delimited access to scarce or unique “resources.” While this is perhaps clearest in the case of canals, railways, land, natural resources and large-scale or irreproducible infrastructure, Harvey’s concern is for the ineffable substance of “local” culture and the way a whole variety of industries, notably tourism and real estate, attempt to capitalize on the unique character of global spaces and cities. For Harvey, capital’s engagement with these zones is complex. On the one hand, there is a recognition that this uniqueness, however saleable and valuable it may be, is the product of a certain degree of cultural and economic autonomy and is the outgrowth of largely non-market relationships and forms of cooperation. At the same time, capital necessarily seeks to capture and to exploit that uniqueness, typically replacing it with corporate monocultures, as part of its drive towards globalization. As local property speculators, regional chains and global firms discover unique cultural zones and flock to them, they either bring with them the homogenizing effects of global capital, or they drive up local rents and prices, pushing out their original creative residents.

Rather, the financial sector functions as a realm to explore and to experiment with means for capturing creative energies more broadly. If we understand the sought-after and distinctive dimensions of creative neighbourhoods – their networks of cooperating individuals and institutions – as a kind of commons, real-estate speculation both enables and profits from a nuanced form of enclosure. Finance permits the commodification of these creative commons indirectly, selling individuals and firms access to unique and attractive neighbourhoods along with the promise of higher future returns as property prices increase.

But the derivative has a felicitous second meaning. Within financial parlance, a derivative is a secondary investment vehicle, an asset whose value depends on or refers to that of another. Derivatives are typically contracts between two financial actors that give one or the other the option or obligation to buy or sell another asset at a specified future time. These include “futures” contracts (agreements to purchase a certain quantity of a certain asset at a future date), “options” (like futures, but one party may opt out of the deal when the date arrives) and “swaps” (including the infamous “credit default” variety, which gives a party the option of exchanging one asset for another – often currency – if certain conditions are met). Derivatives also enable buyers to purchase only certain dimensions of an underlying security, as when banks securitized sub-prime mortgages, then sold different “tranches” of those mortgage packages to different investors interested in different levels of risk exposure. Effectively, derivatives allow investors an extremely precise tool for tailoring exposure to risk, allowing a much more meticulous and sophisticated construction of interdependent portfolios (LiPuma and Lee 2004, 33–34; Martin 2007, 31–32). Further, derivatives contracts have become tradable commodities in and of themselves, allowing financial actors to develop a speculative trade in derivatives – that is, to create further derivative products out of multiple derivative contracts. Since the 1970s, the volume of derivative contracts and exchanges has skyrocketed, such that, by 2006, the notional value of over-the-counter derivatives was worth over 600% of the global GDP (Foster and Magdoff 2009, 28). This fictitious capital tremendously influences economies and markets large and small, as it rushes in and out of national currencies and government bonds, and global agricultural and energy products, not to mention mortgages, real estate and corporate shares.

The derivative represents a new contagious logic or pattern of social and institutional cognition and organization, one that spreads through and influences various social, economic and governmental spheres. For instance, he illustrates the way this approach has infiltrated US military strategy, whereby pre-emptive “investments” of hightech “shock and awe” warfare in key “hotspots” are intended to produce massive “regime change,” aimed at “securitizing” global risks and installing governments that will make the world safer for transnational capital flows. He also shows how this logic plays out in new forms of neoliberal governance, which no longer see vulnerable citizens as a responsibility, but as “at risk” populations in need of pre-emptive intervention to help them better manage risk (“financial literacy” campaigns, deregulation to allow predatory lending, “investments” in silver-bullet-type programs aimed at giving youth “a hand up”) (Martin 2007, 21–42). For Martin, this spread of the logic of the derivative is not simply finance overstepping its proper bounds, nor is it merely symptomatic of a global social and economic scene dominated by financial pressures. It represents a fundamental shift in the nature of wealth and capital itself, one germane to a rapidly globalizing world where the connections between and dynamics of economic processes are more chaotic than ever. Financial derivatives are an example of an emergent technology for measuring and controlling the flux of human labour and social cooperation as it becomes unfathomably more interconnective.

Martin finds in the derivative both a leitmotif of post-Bretton Woods global capitalism and a theoretical and historical heuristic device. By attending to the “logic” of the derivative, we can begin to develop an awareness of the way apparently independent or incongruous processes within global capitalism fit together within an overarching paradigm, the way different, seemingly disconnected processes “derive” value, structure and meaning from one another.

For all the chaos it causes and all the massive abnormalities and volatilities it induces in the global economy, finance is an essential ingredient of capitalist accumulation. But it is only one ingredient.

Such financial mechanisms enable a few possibilities. First, they allow many capitalists to pool vast quantities of resources for risky or long-term ventures that no single capitalist would or could take on alone. For instance, the first corporations were formed to exploit maritime colonialism, sharing the risk of dangerous exploratory sea voyages, slave-taking and settlement among hundreds or sometimes thousands of individual investors (see Baucom 2005). Another example might be the construction of railways, canals, telecommunications lines or other huge acts of “civil” infrastructure essential to the expansion of capitalist interests, or, similarly, the establishment of banks and insurance houses, which require a great deal of capital.

Second, finance allows long-term profiteering by offering capitalists credit, to pursue projects that may take years to come to profitable fruition. For instance, while ultimately extremely profitable, the construction of a mine, or the development of new communication or industrial technologies, takes time and does not afford returns quickly enough to entice most capitalist investors. Finance allows the capitalist class as a whole to advance money to individual capitalists whose ventures will, eventually, benefit the system as a whole and commodify another aspect of the world or of social relations (in terms of new resource "inputs" derived from the mine, or new technologies of exploitation). Through the magic of interest, lending institutions and individual investors can afford to provide many more capitalists with funds than will ever succeed: the interest (at least theoretically) covers the costs of the failure of some enterprises and provides an incentive for investment. Hence, finance allows a much more dynamic capitalist economy and encourages the expansion of capitalist accumulation into new spheres of social life as "entrepreneurs" seek to commodify ever-more dimensions of human existence. For instance, the frantic (and ultimately successful) rush to commodify the internet was facilitated by the rise of the so-called dot.com bubble, which saw financial markets make speculative investments in a multitude of tiny, fly-by-night firms with "good ideas" (Marazzi 2010). While most of these ideas would never actually generate meaningful revenue, the sphere of finance afforded the possibility for capital to attempt tens of thousands of strategies of commodification, knowing full well that only a handful (Amazon, Yahoo, etc.) would succeed, but that this success would make up for the capital invested in the legions of failures.

Finance also permits capital an incredibly powerful lever of power over indebted states, which depend on the sale of government bonds for economic vitality and which, today, are at the mercy of transnational currency markets and stock indexes as never before (ironically, the same markets that states had to “bail out” after the 2008 crisis) (Albo, Ginden and Panitch 2010, 60–74; Bello 2013).

Financial wealth is always a claim on future productivity, but when the credibility of that claim comes into question the financial sector grinds to a halt and securities shed value, causing panic (Akerlof and Shiller 2010; Marazzi 2010, 129–138). Investors stop buying, or, en masse, seek to trade their speculative certificates for more seemingly “real” stores of value (e.g. gold, agricultural commodities, cash). The markets come to a sickening halt, and many are ruined as they realize the fictitious qualities of their capital.

But we should not deceive ourselves; the inevitable (cyclical) financial crisis is no accident. It has happened time and again, with much the same outcome: it allows a partial restructuring of capitalist social relations. It has the potential to recalibrate the contradictions accumulated since the previous crisis and allows capital to, for instance, demand massive changes to state economic policy and both break up large integrated firms and allow smaller firms to be gobbled up by larger ones (Harvey 2006, 324–329). And, as we have seen in the current crisis, it allows capital to reclaim wealth fought for and won by the working class: the foreclosure of homes, the pulverization of the welfare state, the attack on wages, the assault on workers’ rights (Lapavitsas 2013; McNally 2011). This sort of “corrective” restructuring has been the aftermath of financial crises time and again (see, for instance, Polanyi 2001). Because capitalism is fundamentally based on contradictions, financial crises, in a way, regulate the inherent systemic crisis by limiting its effects to the particular sphere of finance. In the aftermath of such crises, capital has the opportunity redraw or renegotiate the lines of regulation.

Yet such talk of sovereignty should not tempt us to imagine that finance is exclusively or simply a top down imposition of oligarchical power. This cycle of financial accumulation depends, fundamentally, on resistance.

First, finance exists in response to resistance. The financial sphere emerges as capitalists seek to collectively share risk and collaborate as a class, and they do so because they feel under threat.

First, finance exists in response to resistance. The financial sphere emerges as capitalists seek to collectively share risk and collaborate as a class, and they do so because they feel under threat. The most recent cycle of financialization, which dates roughly to the 1970s, was a direct capitalist response to the gains of labour in the global North in the post-war period (Bello 2013). Finance facilitated the globalization of manufacturing, foreign direct investment, and the building of industrial and intensive agricultural infrastructure in the Third World and the transportation of secondary and tertiary production to "off-shore" factories and sweatshops in order to undermine the collective power of Northern workers and avoid state regulation. Concomitantly, this expansion of finance was a response to anti-colonial struggles that had largely destroyed the older, more formal colonial relations in the wake of the Second World War. Neocolonialism was, of course, leveraged largely through the politics of debt, with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (IMF/WB) as key brokers, and "globalization" emerged as a capitalist response to the Keynesian mediation of Northern workers' struggles. So finance is, in effect, a means by which capital responds to people's resistance by rendering capital more fluid and mobile, thus Finance, Regulation and Cultural Politics 161 circumventing local forms of solidarity and struggle, or transforming these into rivalry and competition with other communities, societies and nations (Harvey 2006, 413-445; LiPuma and Lee 2004, 161-189).

And, fundamentally (libertarian fantasies aside), finance utterly depends on governments to regulate financial behaviour: that is, finance cannot operate reliably (at least not on any scale) except where a state provides securities commissions, legal mechanisms to make sure counterparties pay their debts, and forms of government intervention that mitigate utter monopolies, insider trading, cartelization and financial bubbles (Henwood 1998, 90–99). So finance relies fundamentally on state-mediated forms of resistance to its own power.

Financial capital would simply render everything speculative, propounding the already salient contradiction in capitalism between actual value and market price. Finance would value (and, hence, organize) social production and social goods based on their speculative returns, rather than social need. This is happening, to a certain extent, in today's global food markets, where the vast majority of basic cereals are bought and sold before the seeds are in the ground, thanks to the trade in commodities futures and derivatives (Bello 2009; Russi 2013). The result has been a massive spike in global food prices as financial capital flees more abstract securities (speculative information technology, credit default swaps, etc.) and seeks to shore up portfolios in more "material" investments (food, gold, energy, etc.).

It should be remembered that Keynesianism was, for all intents and purposes, a means by which the state translated the class antagonisms of resistance to finance capital of the 1920s and 1930s into the stability of the post-war "compromise" of the 1950s and 1960s (Cleaver 2005).

Similarly, the best that can be said about the measures being formulated today to regulate finance by the G20 countries is that they represent efforts to resist finance for its own good. Tepid and meagre regulatory strategies such as the nominal Tobin Tax on transnational financial transactions or new controls on derivatives (shot through with loopholes) will do relatively little to alter the global capitalist dynamic of exploitation, of which finance is an important component and manifestation.

My suggestion here is that we entertain a thought experiment that would see us imagine the most recent round of financialization as based, in part, in the resistance of working people to capital. It is not a very promising form of resistance, at least in terms of contributing to a brighter future. Since the Second World War, people and constituencies have embraced finance in multiple ways as a means to gain a tragic and ironic agency over the material conditions of their lives, as imposed by capital. … As Brett Benjamin (2007, 55–88) illustrates, revolutionary figures of the third world resistance engaged with transnational finance as a form of resistance to formal colonialism, as a strategy towards autonomous national agency (see also Haiven 2013a; Khagram 2004). While this might have been a tragic and ironic miscalculation, we should not discount this defining moment of post-war global political economy: finance here appeared as a means to break free of colonial relations, or at least renegotiate them on different terms – at least, in the absence of duly deserved reparations from colonizing countries, and in the absence of indigenous forms of modernized manufacturing, scientific and technological infrastructure and expertise.

Similarly, in the global North, we might imagine that, since the early 1980s, the working class embraced everyday financialization as a form of resistance to neoliberalism and capitalist culture. In the post-war period, home ownership became the key means to social mobility in “the good society.” The embrace of mortgages in North America and Western Europe was a significant departure from a pre-war wariness of debt and credit (Hyman 2011; Langley 2008, 43–63). … Importantly, the owned patriarchal home was held up as a shared signpost, a “dream image” or myth within Western national imaginaries (Buck-Morss 2000, 190–207). A bank mortgage and other forms of “good debt” became seen less as a form of emasculating dependency and more as the marker of full adult, masculinized agency and subjectivity (Hyman 2011).

This was, of course, part and parcel of the destruction of spatial forms of working-class solidarity based in dense urban communities or the shared experience of tenancy. Home ownership became one of the key means of encouraging workers to tether their hopes and dreams to the capitalist marketplace and to define economic and social gender norms in the post-war period. Robin Blackburn (2006) has illustrated the way retirement investments likewise tether working-class prosperity to ruling class interests.

While capital may have been able to buy off a section of the working class (particularly those whom it valued in white-collar, managerial and professional positions) (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 2013), there was (and is) no way to extend this prosperity to even a fraction of the world’s population, though this promise was (and is) among the key legitimations of global capitalism (Benjamin 2007, 99–110). As critics clamour for a return to this “Golden Age,” let us recall that it did not provide enough of a sense of social security, equality or sustainability to entice even the first generation of middle-class youth. It was this generation, born to relative prosperity, who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, developed whole new repertoires of resistance to demand a world beyond the turgid and unjust global condition of their purportedly gilded epoch (see Katsiaficas 1987).

Of course, we should never tire of pointing out that, even in the supposed “Golden Age,” the middle class was largely aspirational and a completely rigged game. Individualized consumer lifestyles depended on the neocolonial exploitation of the Third World, huge racialized underclasses (with virtually no access to debt or credit) (Winant 2001) and the systematic exploitation of women’s reproductive labour in the home and the market (Federici 2012). It also depended on a deep cultural conservatism enforced by homophobic terrorism (Kinsman and Gentile 2009) and what we now understand to be completely unsustainable ecological practices, including the mass exploitation of fossil fuels, the proliferation of toxic chemicals and plastics, and the mass production of commodities and their subsequent waste (Foster, Clark and York 2010).

We are beholden to recognize the savvy motivations that animated people's engagement with sub-prime finance and not fall prey to the right-wing castigation of our "financial illiteracy" or the canard that people "used their houses as ATMs" for the purchase of "big-screen TVs" and the like.

For our purposes, it should be noted that the entire sub-prime market was based on offering NINJA borrowers a chance for privatized upward class mobility through the lure of home ownership. One way of reading this situation is to suggest that low-income workers accepted the loans as a form of resistance to their material conditions. Indeed, many did so because, even if their homes were foreclosed, things could not get much worse: they already, after all, had virtually no assets to lose. Sub-prime loans depended to a large extent on the myth of the universality of the middle class and the idea of financialized independence; sub-prime mortgages offered borrowers what seemed to be a key to economic security, health, education and a fair share of social wealth (Aronowitz 2003; Haiven and Khasnabish 2014, 112-117). This, especially for the largely racialized urban populations that were the prime target of this form of extortion, might be read as a form of resistance to a neoliberal culture of utter abandonment and the vaporization of social security and public space (see Giroux 2012).

Obviously, the strategies of financialized "resistance" through finance outlined here, and to which we can today add micro-finance schemes as well, were and are Pyrrhic, if not utterly disastrous. And they stretch the definition of "resistance" almost to the breaking point, given that IMF/WB loans, sub-prime mortgages, consumer credit and the like were actively advertised and encouraged by the powers-that-be. But, as Aihwa Ong (2006) and others have recently pointed out, we do a disservice to people's agency and intelligence when we imagine neoliberalism is merely imposed from above. It is, in fact, activated from below, enacted and performed by social actors as they contend with and respond to material conditions.

Neoliberalism, as a cultural and economic force, has created conditions that embrace and incorporate resistance as never before (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). No longer finding a unified and singular mass culture profitable, capital today offers numerous fragmented cultural commodities that promise resistance and agency. From the hyper-masculinized bad-boy ethos of Ultimate Fighting Championship to the edgy vampiric conformity of Twilight, to the defanged rebelliousness of corporatized hip-hop, to the commodity feminism of Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, today's cultural landscape is rife with forms of commodified resistance. Every car advertisement suggests that driving a new vehicle will set you apart from the crowd and allow you to express your (presumably suppressed) individuality. Images and aesthetics of protest are now common fare. As Slavoj Žižek (2010) has illustrated, resistance is the cultural idiom of neoliberal financialization.

This is not merely because resistance is sexy and sells cars. It is part and parcel of the neoliberal individualization of social life, the systematic destruction of any liberatory or hopeful notion of collectivity, commons or public participation. But this, in turn, is intimately tied to the forms of agency both that financialization creates, and on which it depends.

Similarly, as we enter a new phase of militarized austerity, corporate and state power have spared no time or expense in developing new technologies of repression and surveillance that make any substantial revolutionary effort much more difficult. In this situation resistance is far from a threat to the system. In fact, resistance may quickly become the keyword of a new, even more dystopian form of what Herbert Marcuse (1969, 36–48) called “repressive desublimation,” where we are all encouraged to resist precisely because it poses no real threat to the system as a whole. While capitalism is based on the cooptation of people's individual and collective subjectivities, bodies and agencies, the forms of resistance through acts of desire, communities of difference and unmappable identities are not sufficient, in and of themselves, to save us. Nor, we might add, are forms of resistance based purely in attempting to secure for workers (or some fraction of workers) a slightly better deal.

One of the key strengths of the present order of neoliberal financialization is that it anticipates and incorporates resistance. Resistance is ultimately factored into financial flows in advance as risk: the present calculus of future probabilities.

But it is also important to note that capital also usually reads the signs incorrectly, or individual investors, driven less by cool-headed rationale and more by a frantic, short-sighted desire to beat the market, may misread or wilfully ignore these signals (Marazzi 2008, 129–131). Indeed, partly because of the elemental and continuing fact that capital is built on inter-capitalist competition, it is far from a perfect machine.

Two things, however, are qualitatively new at this point, having come to fruition over the last 30 years. First, as we have seen, finance has reached incredibly deeply into everyday life in new ways, making our daily choices and forms of resistance legible to and part of the global market (Langley 2008, 88–111; Martin 2007, 1–9). Today, our own resistance to the capitalist social order is borne out in our creditcard debt, our student loans, our mortgages and our savings (if we are lucky enough to have any of those), which have themselves become the source of financial speculation and derivative dealing. Second, the financial market today is more integrated, faster, more complex and more uncontrollable than ever before. Indeed, the vast majority of exchanges are conducted by automated computers, decomposing, rebundling and flipping securities in ways that exceed the pace and capacity of human cognition (see Lewis 2014).

The bailouts that followed the crisis did not occur merely because a shadowy group of bankers colluded with the state. They happened because no one can admit the truth: that they cannot turn the machine off or realistically slow it down without crashing the global economy and imperilling the capitalist system as a whole.

Beyond this more abstract transformation, finance disciplines social and economic actors more directly. For instance, should a government choose to buck the neoliberal trend and consider instituting greater protection for workers, communities and environments, or should it dare breathe a hint about nationalization, financial markets interpret this possibility and respond by devaluing currency and downgrading bond ratings, or divesting themselves of shares in risky local ventures (LiPuma and Lee 2004, 151–156). This resistance need not even come to pass for markets to pre-emptively respond with financial discipline; the mere rumour is often enough.

Student loans are a good example: Graduating with debt-loads in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, students rely on a university education less to broaden their minds and more to provide them with workplace-ready skills to pay back their loans (although recent student-led movements such as those in Québec and Chile are very promising). Indebted, at risk subjects are less willing or inclined to risk rebellion or refusal, and the university becomes a commodified space where authentic intellectual risks are discouraged and punished.

Of course, I could well be accused of making too fine a point. The examples of resistance outlined here can, of course, be contrasted with more effective and hopeful forms of resistance, notably the (quasi-)socialist developments of state and civil society power in Latin America under the banner of the Bolivarian Revolution over the last decade, or the growth of populist far-left parties in Europe, or the rise of the Occupy Movement and the Movement of the Squares. I am not among those who delight in the perpetual discovery of how all that we believe is resistance is actually merely a function of the system. My hope here, however, is to caution against a simplistic understanding of financialization as something that can be resisted easily or in isolation. Today’s financial sector is an elemental and inseparable part of a highly complex and contradictory capitalist system. If we are to conceive of and practise a form of resistance adequate to the challenges we now face, it cannot be based on the celebration of resistance for its own sake, a tendency common to both cultural criticism and protest culture.

As we have seen, finance is, elementally, the monetized quantification of future uncertainty, measured through the evaluation of risks and the translation of those risks into discrete and highly fungible financial objects. I argued (in chapters 1 and 6) that these objects both measure and transform social life, rendering social reality and labour power highly "liquid." In this reading, finance is merely one particularly ugly means of contending with the ontological fact of shared precariousness. We are all share some degree of existential precariousness at our core, and various systems of power and government are sustained to the extent that they reassure us otherwise. In a more Marxian idiom, we might say that humans, as an inherently cooperative species, are ontologically dependent on one another, precarious in that we rely on social bonds to ensure our reproduction: this is our "species being" (see Dyer-Witheford 2006).

Walmart is not merely a corporation or a brand, it is an assemblage of capitalist power that reproduces this power in the field of everyday life and is also reproduced by quotidian participation. I argued that Walmart’s cultural and material politics rely on a logic of securitization, a term that binds together, on the one hand, the way in which all aspects of life can increasingly be understood as financial assets and risks to be managed and, on the other, the increased militarization, surveillance, and policing germane to a high-risk financialized society. Walmart succeeds not only because it ruthlessly mobilizes speculative and security logics to perfect its global operations, but because it offers to its customers and workers the illusion of security in a precarious world.

The security it offers effectively secures the volatile and violent reproduction of capital, not the reproduction of autonomy. Yet, conversely, in the material bounty that is Walmart, perhaps we can also catch a glimpse of the fecund cooperative potential of our species being: to what ends could this power be put were it not harnessed to an empire of debt and securitization, an empire for which Walmart is the flagship?

In this chapter, I drew on the work of Massimo de Angelis and David Graeber, who have sought to understand capitalism as a system based on the subordination of social values to economic value. Social life, for these authors, is driven by human cooperation (species being) that is coordinated through a dialectic of value: on the one hand, values shape the social actions of individuals and groups which reproduce society and its individuals; on the other, the actions of individuals and groups help reproduce values, reinforcing or undermining established notions of worth, propriety, rank, station or decorum. … As John McMurtry (1999; 2002) argues, capitalism represents a rogue value paradigm, one which shapes our individual and shared sense of what and who is valuable in such a way as to orient social activity towards the endless reproduction of the system of accumulation, even when that accumulation jeopardizes our own social and biological reproduction. … McMurtry (1999) defines our moment as the “cancer stage” of capitalism, when deregulation, globalization, ecological pollution and the voracious consumption of natural resources threaten to overwhelm society’s and the planet’s capacity to survive this pathological value system.

Financialization, then, refers not only to an economic process, but to a cultural one as well. Or, more properly, it emblematizes what Fredric Jameson (1998, 60) has called the “becoming cultural of the economic and the becoming economic of the cultural.” As such, in Chapter 4 I turned to a fraught term wedged unhappily between these two nebulous fields: value. The term’s potential and peril lies in its capacity to articulate both the idea of social values (those codes, ideas, hierarchies, beliefs and senses of worth that ground subjects and societies) and the notion of economic price.

Importantly, for none of these authors is capitalism merely reducible to the sum of individual actions: a ruling class continues to exist, and they still represent the prime beneficiaries and agents of the system. However, these authors’ approaches help us highlight and contextualize the way financialized capitalism is also rooted in the cultural processes of daily life as never before. If capitalism is elementally a viral or cancerous logic that measures and subjugates the play of social values to the austere logic of economic value, then culture (being the name we give to the endless and limitless negotiation of social values and meanings) is not merely the superstructural ephemera of a “real” economic base. Yet such a perspective does not lose sight of the realities of economic exploitation, nor does it allow us to imagine that the negotiation of values is somehow an autonomous field of activity driven by some mythological concept of “agency” or “resistance.”

Financialization, then, can name the overarching process by which the massive neoliberal wave of value enclosure is facilitated, comprehended and measured. I have borrowed the notion of “liquidity” to speak to the way the financial sector both advances and measures the liquidation of society into marketable commodities (tangible and intangible), or, in other terms, the depth and extent to which all social institutions, forms, spaces and processes – spheres of social value – are re-encoded, disciplined and measured by economic value. The contemporary financial realm is both a reflection and a motor of the seepage of neoliberal capitalism into almost all spheres of social life.

I argued that, while Pokémon cards are highly engineered commodities, whose meanings and value are reinforced by an intertextual set of commercialized referents (TV shows, comic books, video games, etc.), young Pokémon players retain a degree of freedom, creativity, autonomy and agency.

Hence my desire to find the traces of such a process where we are least likely to expect it, such as the fertile, imaginative and complicated world of children’s play. I argued in Chapter 4 that we can examine young people’s engagement with Pokémon trading cards as an example of a financialized social practice wherein kids “learn to learn” the dispositions, subjectivities and practices germane to a financialized society. … It is not so much that Pokémon cards fail as a financialized commodity because they leave too much space open for children’s autonomy. They rely on this space of autonomy, play, agency and creativity to succeed where other, more didactic or directive products fail. My argument is that this tells us a great deal about the complexities and nuances of cultural politics under financialization. While neoliberal financialization may, ultimately, be characterized by the pathological and limitless collapsing of all social values into and under the ruthless quantitative measure of economic value, it is also, contradictorily, dependent on the forms of innovation, social reproduction and subjectivity generated in the intervals.

I concluded that chapter by suggesting that, though a fraught, tired cliché, the idea of creativity functions so effectively precisely because it is made to hold the place for all those capacities and powers that are otherwise denied, constrained, enclosed or exploited under neoliberal financialized capitalism: autonomy, agency, freedom, meaningful individuality, imagination and cooperation. As with a politics to counter financialization, a politics of creativity cannot solely be based on critique and deconstruction but must, instead or in addition, seek to show that the real, serious needs and desires encrypted within words like "creativity" cannot be met within the current economic and political structures. Rather, they can only be realized in a very different society and by very different subjects.

In keeping with questions of value, autonomy, agency and imagination raised in Chapter 4, I also suggested that financialization represents a key means by which capital can expand its discipline and measure into various realms of social life and extract value (ideally) without damaging or corrupting the creative, semiautonomous ecosystems that generate value in the first place. With reference to the relationship of speculative real estate and the gentrification and enclosure of "creative" urban neighbourhoods, I suggested that financialization represents a high level of refinement, decentralization and sophistication in the methods by which capital captures, harnesses, reorients and shapes the creation of value and values in social life, transforming social reproduction in ways that ultimately reinforce and reproduce capital and social liquidation.

I posited (following arguments in previous chapters) that there may be much to be gained by imagining working-class and subaltern engagements with finance (and debt) as forms of resistance. Borrowing becomes a Pyrrhic and flawed means to reclaim a share of social wealth otherwise enclosed by capital, whether in the form of government or individual debts. While this form of "resistance" is by no means advisable or laudable, such a counterintuitive approach helps reveal the way that finance shapes and harnesses agency, resistance and hope. As such, I argued that resistance, at least as a normative good in and of itself, is largely futile. If finance depends on resistance and is, in some way, articulated as a form of resistance, we need to look beyond the term and the idea(l) for real answers to the crisis of financialized capitalism. Resistance, in this formulation, is an undialectic, idealistic term which simply obscures capitalism's contradictions in a feel-good phrase with no capacity to illuminate, let alone motivate, the forms of agency and action we would actually need to move beyond the foreclosed future of finance's endless reproduction.

Much of the scholarship in the social study of finance has done the invaluable work of illuminating the nuances and complexities of how the financial services industry works, revealing that, at the heart of a sector that prides itself on the surgical and scientific management of risk and the dispassionate, distanced and objective manipulation of abstract economic objects, the unruly mess of culture is at work.

One is to suggest that the problems of the otherwise functional and legitimate financial sector stem from being either too cultural (in the sense that financiers, at some level, make decisions based not on “objective” data but on subjective impressions) or not cultural enough (in the sense that financial actors ought to forgo the pretence of scientism and admit that they are guided, primarily, by convention and intuition). The actionable conclusions that stem from this approach usually boil down to the (palpable) need for better financial regulation and oversight to protect society from the sector’s excesses. … The second approach is much like the first: it suggests, with various degrees of outrage, that finance’s “cultural” dimensions render it unfit to wield the power and influence it today enjoys, and that, what is worse, the financial apparatus can essentially be reduced to an oligarchy of unfathomably wealthy individuals and institutions (served by functionaries), who adopt the accoutrements of economic rigour to cloak and justify the reproduction of their own power.

Perhaps we can see financialization as something very different from a regrettable perversion of or departure from some sort of normative Keynesianism (an approach common to liberal critics and to Marxists, the latter all too often pining for an age when class struggle seemed more straightforward and tangible).

Such a proposition might begin by asking the question: What is it that fictitious capital ceaselessly promises, but endlessly defers? As we have seen, in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, financialization promises that, if one prudently invests one’s human capital and embraces the right risks in the right ways, one will be rewarded with economic security, the absence of precariousness. … These desires are not in and of themselves unworthy, but financialization cannot fulfil them, at least not for very many of us.