An Empire of Indifference

The Creative and the Derivative

“…For instance, Martin illustrates the way this approach has influenced and been influenced by US military strategy, where preemptive "investments" of high-tech "shock and awe" warfare in key "hotspots" are intended to leverage massive "regime change," aimed at mitigating "global risks" and installing governments that will make the world safer for transnational capital flows. 86 He also shows how this logic plays out in new forms of neoliberal governance, which no longer see vulnerable citizens as a responsibility but see them as "at risk" populations in need of preemptive 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"). 87 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.…”

The bodies in the bubble: David Foster Wallace'sThe Pale King

“…25 The issue is not simply that tax is owed retrospectively; additionally, the monies with which persons, whether individual or corporate, paid at the close of the twentieth century and beyond were in large part 'fictitious'. We borrow Marx's term: money made from rents on money, or 'money that expands its own value independently of production', insofar as it proves to be 'pregnant' only with itself, amounts to 'fictitious capital'.…”

“…[become] concrete', as 'the world of bonds and promissory notes between firms, that Marx had described as "fictitious capital", was becoming a master tale of economic life'. 15 Wendy Brown adds that neoliberalism, the political face of the Richard Godden and Michael Szalay The bodies in the bubble financial turn, should be understood as 'a constructivist project', insofar as 'it does not presume the ontological givenness of a thoroughgoing economic rationality for domains of society, but rather takes as its task the development, dissemination and institutionalization of such a rationality'. 16 We would add that since an economy -for all its apparent abstraction -may best be understood as a mask worn by social relations, where said economy takes finance as its model (rather than merely as its means), the social relations of finance (to lever, to short, to securitise) become the basis of social practice and thus of personhood.…”

Finance as Capital's Imagination?: Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis

“…It functions as capital's imagination. 5. The current rise of neoliberal financialization both relies on and produces the expansion of a financialized imagination on the levels of everyday life This essay, then, is a way of "reading" finance and financial crises that does not dispute more political-economic or concrete analyses but seeks to offer another angle that highlights intersections of the cultural and systemic elements of financialization.…”

“…4 It also both depends on and extends a culture of financialized individualism in which full economic subjectivity means a "care of the self" based on economic "risk management" and the transformation of personal horizons into economic investments. 5 Financialization implies the spread of economic discipline, both extensively around the world and intensively into local social processes, and the coordination of this discipline by abstract global financial markets. 6 How do we account for finance's influence not only on global prices but on social, cultural, and ethical values more broadly?…”