Debt and finance work biopolitically to produce compliant self-financing subjectivities

Evidence

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. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 90

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and explains Lazzarato’s concept of ‘financier of the self’ as a debt-driven subjectivity.
• XREF: Directly bridges to deWaard’s cultural argument about financialization’s colonization of everyday inner life and identity. — connects to: Deregulation let non-finance firms pursue financial activities, fueling debt expansion — Ken-Hou Lin & Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Financialization and U.S. Income…, 40; Finance operates as a disciplinary mechanism that mobilizes debt to exploit labor. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 58; Microfinance extended debt to the poorest as a moralizing free-market project — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 73 (+12 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how exactly does debt ‘discipline’ — what are the concrete micro-mechanisms beyond subscription?

Broader Connections

• Finance wields power by forcing agency to express itself as debt #corroborates (0.90) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 264
• Financial sector wealth derives from debts that discipline debtors into compliance #expands (0.85) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 90
• Finance is socially and politically generative, not merely economically exploitative #expands (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 22
• Financial practice expresses class and acts as a control mechanism #corroborates (0.75) — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 20