Financial times: Competing temporalities in the age of finance capitalism

Abstract

This special issue explores how finance deploys time, structures the future, and interacts with actors and institutions that sometimes function according to very different temporal regimes. Finance capitalism’s logic of recurrence, repetitive cycles, and successive ruptures has long been with us, but the essays in this special issue are particularly interested in how recent decades of intensified financialization have restructured temporal experience. They interrogate the production and dissemination of agency in an age of acceleration, risk, and uncertainty, asking how the temporality inscribed in financial transactions emerges from and simultaneously shapes individual and social practice. Topics covered range from the logic of finance and foundational concepts of financial theory to the intersection between objective structures and social practice, the role of literature, and finally questions of social insecurity, political action, and the possibility of resistance within a context of competing temporalities. In this introduction, the editors delineate some fundamental concepts and questions for our financial times.

The time that money requires: Use of the future and critique of the present in financial valuation

“…And it can in addition be considered as a kind of horizon, something not possible to apprehend, but which can be imagined, narrated, and contemplated. A sociological analysis of the use of the future in finance can very well serve the examination of the undeniable presence and significance of these various themes (Kloeckner and Mueller, 2018). Nevertheless, the argument we are forming here does not intend to contribute so much to a sociology of how the future is viewed from a financial perspective as to an anthropology of how finance can produce an idea of the future that captures sociological imagination.…”

“…These contradictory answers to the question of the orientation of financial temporalities are all the more puzzling as they are generally accompanied by the important proposition that financial temporalities translate into individual and social temporalities (Kloeckner and Mueller, 2018). Jameson (2003) identifies the expressions of the reduction to the present in philosophical, ideological, and cultural symptoms.…”

The temporalities of financialization

“…This body of work describes new financial technologies and instruments that help global capital to secure profitable outlets and also function to assess or minimize risk (Bitterer and Heeg 2012;David and Halbert 2014); it demonstrates how financialization has shifted power relations in urban and national governance (Weber 2010;Ashton, Doussard, andWeber [2014] 2016); documents the emergence of a 'shareholder-value maximization' credo (Froud et al 2000;Pike 2006) that seeks to maximize the exchange-value of underlying assets as opposed to their use-value (Clark, Larsen, and Hansen 2015); and captures the impacts of financialization on everyday life (Martin 2002;French and Kneale 2009), for instance in housing struggles (Bojadžijev 2015;García-Lamarca and Kaika 2016;Kaika and Ruggiero 2016) or the effects of financialized water provisioning (Allen and Pryke 2013). While some of this literature touches upon the role of time (notably, Martin 2002;Graham and Thrift 2007;Weber 2010), current analyses are limited in that they do not explicitly reflect the temporal dimension of financialization (but see Kloeckner and Mueller 2018). Yet, as this paper shows, financialization not only impacts upon the characteristics of time, but finance's temporal effects have further repercussions in urban space.…”