Governing Homo Subprimicus: Beyond Financial Citizenship, Exclusion, and Rights

Abstract

The paper presents an alternative to scholarship on the distributional politics of finance that emphasizes citizenship-based claims to new financial rights. To compensate for the dominance of exclusion-based etiologies of financial marginality in financial geography, I reframe financial exclusion as a problem of financial government-that is, as a problem of conducting the conduct of risky populations without threatening the security and autonomy of financial markets. Drawing on Foucault's distinction between technologies of discipline and security, I describe how barriers to the extension of financial government create tiered processes of financial subject formation. The inchoate "subprime" financial subject produced is the correlate of a specialized financial governmentality-a homo subprimicus eminently governable by financial means. I close by calling for greater attention to questions regarding the relationship between technologies for valorizing bare life, new systems of financially mediated value extraction, and emerging capitalist class processes.

“Neighbours First, Bankers Second”: Mobilising financial citizenship in Singapore

“…Events of the 2008 financial crisis have provided additional insights to such inclusion/exclusion politics, with subprime households being 'included' in global financial circuits as a short-sighted strategy for generating profits rather than a genuine, sustainable vision for financial inclusion (see French et al, 2009). Kear (2013), for instance, argue for moving beyond financial citizenship's current focus on politics of accessibility to examine how financial subjects are 'safely' mobilised by states to participate in contemporary financial capitalism without incurring the same subprimal fallout as seen in 2008.…”

Financialization and Economic Development: A Debate on the Social Efficiency of Modern Finance

“…More generally, individual citizens everywhere are invited to ‘live by finance’, in the evocative words of Martin (: 17): that is, to organize their daily lives around ‘investor logic’, active individual risk management, and involvement in global financial markets. Citizenship and rights are being reconceptualized in terms of universal access to ‘safe’ and affordable financial products (Kear, ) — redefining Descartes’ philosophical proof of existence as: ‘I am indebted, therefore I am’ (Graeber, ). Financial markets are opening ‘new enclosures’, deeply penetrating social space — as in the case of so‐called ‘viaticals’, the third‐party purchase of the rights to future payoffs of life insurance contracts from the terminally ill (Quinn, ; van der Zwan, ); or of ‘healthcare bonds’ issued by insurance companies to fund healthcare interventions, in which the payoff to private investors depends on the cost savings arising from the healthcare intervention for the insurers.…”

‘Mortgaged lives’: the biopolitics of debt and housing financialisation

“…As noted in the introduction, focusing on the embodied practices of housing financialisation, this paper also offers new conceptual and empirical insight to the emerging literature on financialisation and subjectification. This body of work unpacks how the liberalisation of the economy encourages citizens to change their subject positions and/or become strategic investors in order to meet the basic needs of everyday life – such as access to housing, healthcare, pensions – under a neoliberal economy (French and Kneale ; Hall ; Kaika and Ruggiero ; Kear ; Langley ; Lazzarato ; Martin ). Langley's work ( ) is particularly pertinent to our analysis, as he documents the production of everyday investor identities (Langley ) in the context of Anglo‐American mortgage finance.…”

“…Second, the paper offers new conceptual insight and empirical nuance to the emerging body of work on financialisation and subjectification (French and Kneale ; Hall ; Kear ; Langley ; Lazzarato ; Martin ) or financialisation as a ‘lived process’ (Kaika and Ruggiero ). In the pages that follow, mortgage contracts as tools for forging embodied practices of financialisation and for subjecting life to debt servicing practices are exemplified through the narratives of people who were ‘sold’ the idea of becoming leveraged real‐estate investors (Langley ), but were subsequently unable to service their mortgage debt.…”