Performing capital: toward a cultural economy of popular and global finance

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

“…Through discourses of 'personal responsibility' and 'self-sufficiency' produced by state-sponsored financial literacy programmes, individuals are normalised as being responsible for their own financial wellbeing (Martin, 2002). By focusing on risk-taking and self-management, scholars identify the formation of the 'financial subject' or 'investor subject' (Aitken, 2007;Langley, 2006;Langley and Leyshon, 2012) who insures himself/herself against the risks of the life course through self-disciplined financial practices. Rather than being ''passive dupes who act at the behest of new financial imperative'' (Langley, 2007: 86), everyday investors are conceived as engaging in calculated risks and portfolios of financial assets in order to derive satisfaction from expected future returns, thereby utilising investment as a technology of the self under neoliberal governmentality.…”

“…Individual consumers are financial subjects who not only fulfil neoliberalised scripts of self-reliant, disciplined and responsible subjects able to take care of their own financial futures, they are also mobilised as citizen subjects who would contribute to a stronger and more competitive national economy through their changing financial practices, even as they benefit from greater access to financial products and services. This relationship between popular finance and the forging of a 'national economy' has been examined by Aitken (2007), who demonstrates how specific financial instruments (e.g. US Savings Bonds, New York Stock Exchange mass-investment programme) have been used in the inter-war and post-war periods for patriotic purposes.…”

“…While geographers have been particularly active in researching the uneven constitution and impacts of financialisation of everyday life (Hall, 2012), we argue for a renewed emphasis and fresh perspective on the state as a vital and strategic actor in the formation of financial subjects and the enactment of financialisation. Much of the current studies on financialisation have tended to foreground market imperative as a key explanatory factor in the increasing importance of financial logics, and financial markets and institutions, in ever more aspects of social, cultural and political life, while treating the state as a distant or reactionary agent who provides the background of deregulation for greater market efficiency This is not to say that state-subject relations have been completely neglected in research on financial subjectivities (see, for example, Langley, 2008Langley, , 2014, or that changing financial practices and subject formation have been not been situated in the context of national economic strategies (see Aitken, 2007). Our intention is to build on certain threads of the existing literature to highlight the strategic ways in which the state actively mobilises institutions, firms and households to adopt and enact financialisation scripts for political-economic purposes, which takes the form of a reinvigorated focus on state-subject relations in the mobilisation of financialisation processes and financial subject formation.…”

Feeding finance: a critical account of the shifting relationships between finance, food and farming

“…This is a perspective which has clearly benefitted from the lessons of the sub-prime crisis, among them the uncertainty and unevenness of financialization, a testament to the limits, fragilities and failures of finance itself (Ertürk et al, 2008;Froud et al, 2006;Langley, 2008bLangley, , 2010Lee et al, 2009) and the distinctly spatial politics of financialization (French & Leyshon, 2012). The framework of economic geography, combined with Foucauldian notions of subjectification, responsibilization and self-governance, has also helped to draw attention to the expansion of finance into everyday contexts of saving and investment producing responsibilized investor-subjects eager to insert themselves into the markets and manage their own financial futures (Aitken, 2007;Langley, 2008a;Martin, 2002).…”

Anglobal governance?

“…What the South American debt crisis of the 1980s, the Asian financial crisis of 1997 -1998 and the current global crisis share is a tendency of US Treasury officials to turn into powerful International Monetary Fund (IMF) 'consultants' or G20 summit 'facilitators'. Discursively, the structural power of capital lies in a globalization of liberal discourses that emphasize individual ownership and independence and, in turn, compel ordinary people to 'perform capital' in everyday life-an engagement with finance without significant awareness, capacity or gain (Aitken 2007). The discursive power of liberalism also becomes evident once we reframe governance as 'governmentality'-a Foucauldian concept that refers to the processes in modern history through which society has become both an object and a subject of government.…”