Financialization captures and encloses human creative capacity through debt

Evidence

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)? — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 390

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Virno’s ‘virtuosity’ and deploys it as the key mechanism linking financialization to human creativity — a core theoretical tool.
• XREF: The debt-as-disciplining-virtuosity thesis connects to deWaard’s cultural argument and to the reader’s broader finance-colonizes-culture project. — connects to: Finance operates as a disciplinary mechanism that mobilizes debt to exploit labor. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 58; Financial fictions uniquely harness human imagination and creativity compared to other social fictions — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 111; Financialization lets capital extract value from social life without destroying its creative source ecosystems — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 572 (+13 more)
• QUESTION: The excerpt is cut mid-thought ending ‘creating a situation’ — the full mechanism of how debt disciplines virtuosity isn’t completed here; worth chasing the continuation.

Broader Connections

• Speculative finance dominates by co-opting the generative worker imagination. #corroborates (0.85) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 142
• Financialization lets capital extract value from social life without destroying its creative source ecosystems #corroborates (0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 572
• Financialization colonizes culture by fusing economic price with social value #expands (0.72) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 561