Excerpted from Max Haiven’s 2014 book, Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life.
Read a longer excerpt on Public Seminar.
“In fact, the economic and social precariousness that neoliberal financialization causes, and on which it relies, may be a perverse and skewed reflection of a much deeper, ontological field of possibility. As Randy Martin explains, finance is, elementally, the monetized quantification of future uncertainty, measured through the evaluation of risks and the translation of those risks into discrete and highly fungible financial objects. I argue that these objects both measure and transform social life, rendering social reality and labour power highly “liquid,” calibrated to the whims of a form of capitalism that thrives on volatility. I want to frame finance, in part, as one particularly ugly means of contending with the onto-sociological fact of shared precariousness. We all share some degree of existential precariousness at our core, and various systems of power and government are sustained to the extent that they reassure us otherwise. In a more Marxian phrasing, we might say that humans, as an inherently cooperative species, are ontologically dependent on one another, precarious in that we rely on social bonds (between humans and with other more-than-humans actors — eg. other animals, natural systems, the land) to ensure our reproduction: this is our “species being.”
