Individual resistance is reabsorbed into speculation through personal debts and savings
Evidence
Two things, however, are qualitatively new at this point, having come to fruition over the last 30 years. First, as we have seen, finance has reached incredibly deeply into everyday life in new ways, making our daily choices and forms of resistance legible to and part of the global market (Langley 2008, 88–111; Martin 2007, 1–9). Today, our own resistance to the capitalist social order is borne out in our creditcard debt, our student loans, our mortgages and our savings (if we are lucky enough to have any of those), which have themselves become the source of financial speculation and derivative dealing. Second, the financial market today is more integrated, faster, more complex and more uncontrollable than ever before. Indeed, the vast majority of exchanges are conducted by automated computers, decomposing, rebundling and flipping securities in ways that exceed the pace and capacity of human cognition (see Lewis 2014). — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 544
Categorization
- XREF: Directly extends the ‘finance colonizes everyday life’ theme — this is the mechanism bridging to deWaard’s cultural argument about financialization entering imagination and daily living. — connects to: Financial speculation externalizes its risks and costs onto the powerless — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 332; Commodified resistance reinforces the individualization that finance depends on — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 532; Financialized capitalism absorbs resistance by pricing it in advance as risk. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 540 (+9 more)
- SEED: Essay angle: resistance itself becomes raw material for speculative profit — how protest and dissent get priced, securitized, and traded via the very instruments individuals hold against their own future.
Broader Connections
- Speculative finance fragments persons into rateable dividuals, making whole-individual resistance obsolete
#expands(0.82) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 312 - Financialization captures and encloses human creative capacity through debt
#expands(0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 390 - Capital precedes and shapes resistance rather than resistance driving capital
#corroborates(0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 923 - Fighting financialization requires wielding speculation on shifting ground
#complicates(0.75) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 43 - Counter-speculation turns financial uncertainty against oppressive structures
#complicates(0.72) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 69 - Speculative wagers can be deployed as counter-power against dominant financial structures
#complicates(0.72) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 31