the internecine and corrupt entanglements of major investment banks, hedge funds and shadowy para-financial firms,

[...] Not only does finance measure and profit by speculation on the fundamentals of economic life; it also helps shape and discipline the reality of production and circulation. [...] financialization essentially represents an unaccountable form of global economic planning, yet one with no broad goal, save for the endless competitive maximization of profit. The result is a world cut to fit the financial imagination, whose benefits accrue largely to the wealthiest percentiles, and whose dramatic costs are endured by the majority of humanity. [...]

Perhaps the most terrifying feature of financialization is that there is no one steering the ship; there is no grand conspiracy, though its operations do depend on lesser conspiracies. Rather, I want to understand financialization as a means by which social agency (at both the highest echelons of the financial world and the lowest depths of the sub-prime) is transformed and reoriented towards the reproduction of a pathological and cancerous system.

[...] we take up Marx’s (1981, 594–652) notion of fictitious capital in a way he probably did not fully intend it: capital’s reproduction depends on and transforms the social fictions that animate society. Financial wealth may be largely “fictitious,” but that does not make it any less “real”: as Thomas King (2003), among many others, teaches us, fictions can be among the most powerful forces in human societies. Indeed, it is through shared fictions that we reproduce social and subjective life itself.

Financialization both foments and relies upon discursive and material formations such as precariousness, security, play, creativity and resistance.

[...] Louis Althusser (2014) spoke of ideology as an imaginary relationship to the realities in which we live, a false cohesive worldview that covers over the inherently partial, fractured and contradictory nature of our consciousness. In this sense, ideology is not some passively received, generic, prepackaged simulacrum dispensed from on high and swiftly internalized. Rather, as Eagleton explains, ideology is an active creation whereby individuals and groups are constantly in the process of making sense of their world with the intellectual and cultural resources that they find at hand. Likewise, Fredric Jameson (1981; 1984) has approached ideology as a false or fragmentary synthesis based on real experience, or an inherently limited attempt to grasp the unfathomable complexity of capitalist totality. Hence, ideology is not simply “false consciousness,” nor is it merely a “top-down” imposition. Rather, it is a field of contestations and activities, an evolving and emerging set of meanings and explanations created by people as they make sense of their world. But, importantly, it is not a totally free or unmediated process: to build ideology, we draw on those cultural and social resources at our disposal (from fiction to films, from metaphors to measurements) that are, themselves, ideological. We are unduly influenced by those forces of cultural production and social institutions that monopolize meaning and broadcast knowledge: the media, religion, schools, fiction and so forth.

So, perhaps, we can understand financialization as an ideological process, if we apply this expanded definition: it is a process whereby a set of narrative, metaphoric and procedural resources imported from the financial world come to help explain and reproduce everyday life and the capitalist totality of which we are a part. But, in so doing, they also transform that reality more broadly. To the extent that we see ourselves as miniature financiers, investing in and renting out our human capital, we act, behave, cooperate and reproduce social life differently. To the extent that we see health, education, government programming, relationships, games, shopping and work as investments and see our lives as fields of paranoid securitization, we build up an ideological armature which occludes certain aspects of social reality and precludes certain futures. But, further (and this is crucial), financialization also means a moment when the financial system, and the capitalist economy of which it is a part, is dependent on and invested in the ideologies, practices and fictions of daily life as never before. In a moment characterized by ubiquitous debt, escalating consumerism and political quietism (or, worse, reactionism), and by a highly volatile financialized economy, the realms of culture and ideology can no longer be said to be merely the superstructure of a “real” economic base. [...]