Speculative finance fragments persons into rateable dividuals, making whole-individual resistance obsolete

Evidence

Instead of a singular identity that is articulated through the process of “individuation,” Deleuze saw a separation of the underlying individual and its various attributes analogous to a financial derivative. Dividuation, therefore, is a predatory process by which speculative finance partitions, quantifies, rates, and profiles individual subjects’ behaviors and then rebundles them in order to exploit new risks and profit opportunities. Such partitions have become so entrenched that they have rendered irrelevant the idea of the classical “whole” individual. As a consequence, Appadurai argues, any attempt to restore the ideal of the individual as a bedrock of resistance to financial indebtment is doomed to fail, as long as it primarily relies on categories and “stable associations” such as class, race, ethnicities, identities, and parties. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 312

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Deleuze’s ‘dividual’ concept via Appadurai and explains its operative mechanism (partition, quantify, rebundle) as the core technical meaning the reader needs to explain homo speculans.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how uncertainty-training produces speculative voting subjects — the dividual is the unit financialized subjectivity operates on, analogous to how polarization metrics disaggregate the electorate. — connects to: Financialised valuations override prior forms of valuation and reshape how people act and identify — Ève Chiapello, Financialisation of Valuation, 16; Neoliberal capital profits by commodifying resistance itself — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 531; Commodified resistance reinforces the individualization that finance depends on — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 532 (+4 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is ‘dividual’ also the right unit for understanding how an individual voter embodies multiple, sometimes contradictory speculative bets at once?