Activity

In many ways, this paradigm both reflects and goes well beyond the prognosis of Frankfurt Institute theorists like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1997). Writing in the lead-up to and the wake of the Second World War, these authors noted the way rationality, calculation, science and reason had b…

Drawing on Foucault’s notion of the biopolitics of neoliberalism, Maurizzio Lazzarato (2012, 89–114) has sought to define finance less as a breed of economic action and more as a weapon of power which, through the production of debt, exhorts economic actors (both individuals and whole nation-states…

Aside from postmodern malaise, what might such an approach offer to our considerations of precariousness and financialization? Its most important lesson is that precariousness is the norm, not the exception. Our current precarious moment, one dominated by market and financial forces and manifesting…

A similar argument is made by Giorgio Agamben (1998) in his consideration of what he calls “bare life.” For Agamben, modern political systems and imaginaries are underscored by the capacity to strip individuals and groups of all social belonging and value and reduce them to a purely biological exis…

Though at opposite ends of a spectrum, both the Wall Street financier and the sub-prime borrower are subjects and objects of an economic idiom at once beyond their control and driven by their actions. Both are trapped, though one in a more gilded cage. In short, both have seen their own social repr…