Financialization is capitalism’s most advanced mode of harnessing consumer agency and imagination

Evidence

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. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 362

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bridges to deWaard’s cultural argument about finance colonizing everyday life and imagination — this is the mechanistic core of how financialization captures subjectivity. — connects to: Imagined Communities analysis can be deployed to study financialized capitalism through speculation. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 127; Finance capitalism now shapes collective imagination the way print capitalism built nations — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 271; Households are pushed into financial markets that promise lifestyle advancement. — Neil Fligstein & Adam Goldstein, The Emergence of a Finance Culture in…, 34 (+5 more)
• SEED: Angle: capitalism no longer needs to manufacture consent against resistance when it can productively harness ‘resistance’ itself — financialized selfhood as the apotheosis of this capture.

Broader Connections

• Financialization colonizes culture by fusing economic price with social value #expands (0.85) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 561
• Finance shapes modern societies’ collective myths and imagined communities, not just economies #expands (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 19