Financialized commodity culture depends on the autonomy and creativity it purports to swallow.

Evidence

Hence my desire to find the traces of such a process where we are least likely to expect it, such as the fertile, imaginative and complicated world of children’s play. I argued in Chapter 4 that we can examine young people’s engagement with Pokémon trading cards as an example of a financialized social practice wherein kids “learn to learn” the dispositions, subjectivities and practices germane to a financialized society. … It is not so much that Pokémon cards fail as a financialized commodity because they leave too much space open for children’s autonomy. They rely on this space of autonomy, play, agency and creativity to succeed where other, more didactic or directive products fail. My argument is that this tells us a great deal about the complexities and nuances of cultural politics under financialization. While neoliberal financialization may, ultimately, be characterized by the pathological and limitless collapsing of all social values into and under the ruthless quantitative measure of economic value, it is also, contradictorily, dependent on the forms of innovation, social reproduction and subjectivity generated in the intervals. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 567

Categorization

• XREF: The paradox of capitalism depending on the autonomy it colonizes connects to Boltanski and Chiapello’s ‘new spirit of capitalism’ and to deWaard’s cultural argument that finance captures everyday imagination. — connects to: Financialization colonizes culture by mobilizing everyday fictions like play, creativity, and resistance. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 54; Financialized practice depends on genuine play and autonomy, not just hegemony — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 389; Art’s autonomy paradoxically depends on the very commodity economy it negates — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 118 (+5 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies how ‘financialized social practice’ means kids internalizing dispositions germane to a financialized society via play.

Broader Connections

• Art’s autonomy paradoxically depends on the very commodity economy it negates #corroborates (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 118
• Financialization captures and encloses human creative capacity through debt #expands (0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 390
• Creativity’s vagueness makes it effective for financialization while hiding utopian potential #expands (0.78) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 51
• Culture’s distance from the economy makes it prone to idealization #complicates (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 18
• Culture now shapes the financial economy as much as the economy shapes culture #expands (0.72) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 61