Excessive Financialisation: Insuring Lifestyles, Enlivening Subjects, and Everyday Spaces of Biosocial Excess

Abstract

The last two decades have witnessed, as part of a wider financialisation of British economy and society, a creeping privatisation of social welfare provision. Political justification for the expansion of privatised social insurance markets has frequently been couched in the language of responsibility. However, as the ‘credit crunch’ spectacularly attests and as studies of the dynamics of financialisation have succeeded in showing, financialised capitalism turns on excess. In this paper we explore some of the ways in which the reworking of long-term insurance or life assurance has contributed to the financialisation of everyday life. More particularly, we trace the emergence of what we call ‘lifestyle insurance’. Our purpose here is not only to begin to map the terrain and consider the consequences of this nascent modality of insurance in the UK, but in so doing to contribute to wider debates about the processes of subjectification that underwrite financialisation. In addition to pressing for a greater attention to be given to life assurance the paper suggests, by mobilising the figure of excess, three more areas to which studies of the financialisation of the everyday might productively attend: first, the financialisation of life itself; second, the ways in which financialisation is affectively charged; third, the spatial politics of financialisation.

Speculating on Careless Lives

“…Actuarialism, as discipline and practice, has successfully constituted itself as the primary insurantial agency, able to exercise the authority to value life through its appeal to scientific status and the invention and mobilisation of such technologies as the mortality table. An agency that in turn relies on an ability to enrol other calculatory tools and technologies, and in the case of lifestyle assurance the ability in particular to enrol and meld medicine and biomedical apparatus in the service of actuarialism; in the pacification of bodies, and the stabilisation of the connections between lifestyle, morbidity and mortality (French & Kneale 2009). …”

“…In an endeavour to try and address such problems, eight of the leading providers of enhanced annuities Á including Partnership, the descendant of PAFS Á have established a common quotation form for applications for enhanced pension annuities. The construction of standardised forms for the collection of information from applicants and/or from mediators (Ç alışkan & Callon 2010) such as GPs and independent financial advisers (IFAs) has long been a key socio-technical strategy for the assembly of insurantial encounters, and the pacification and valuation of insured bodies in the form of premiums, sums assured, policy excess and payout (French & Kneale 2009). The form itself is a substantial document, some 22 pages in length.…”

“…In seeking to address this lacuna, the paper focuses on the recent transformation of the UK after-retirement market and, in particular, the invention of enhanced and impaired pension annuities. The enhancing of annuities, we argue, provides a striking example of biofinancialisation, one that is expressed in the present assembly of a new modality of 'lifestyle' insurance (French & Kneale 2009).…”

Financial Business Education

“…In order to develop understandings of the role of education credentials in reproducing gendered discourses of financial services work, we develop cultural economy research that examines the role of different kinds of financial knowledge such as technologies of risk management, insurance and affective governance in processes of financial subjectification (Marron 2007;French & Kneale 2009;Langley 2010). In particular, we focus on work that takes as its starting point Foucault's (1979) understanding of governmentality in order to examine the embodied and performative work involved in the (re)production of financial subjects.…”

How European pension promises changed in austere times: 2002–15

“…Citizens have to accept that their income in retirement will be less predictable and that they are more directly affected by the volatility of their investments' value. The change has turned them into "investor subjects" (Langley 2006;French and Kneale 2009;Lapavitsas 2009). This is regarded as problematic because individuals need stable incomes in retirement, yet evidence suggests that, if left to their own devices, even under favourable conditions the average citizen will not save enough for their long term future.…”