Financialized capitalism requires subjects who see themselves as miniature financiers.

Evidence

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. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 95

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the study of financialization as the mutual constitution of economic and cultural, against reductionist false-consciousness readings.
• XREF: Althusser’s ideology definition links to the reader’s cultural-studies frame and deWaard’s argument about finance’s cultural colonization. — connects to: Financialization establishes ideological dominance of individual profit over collective interests — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 109; Debt and finance work biopolitically to produce compliant self-financing subjectivities — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 90; The financier embodies an ideal of leveraged precariousness imposed on all workers — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 187
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how the ‘imagined relationship’ (Althusser) becomes literal when subjects really do hold financial instruments — does ideology collapse into material practice?

Broader Connections

• Debt and finance work biopolitically to produce compliant self-financing subjectivities #expands (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 90
• Financialization establishes ideological dominance of individual profit over collective interests #expands (0.78) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 109