Beyond the Financialised Imagination

Dr Max Haiven (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design)

Financialisation is commonly understood to refer to an economic process, implying the growing power of financial firms and financial pressures on the global capitalist economy. But we must equally understand it as a political, sociological and cultural process through which the ideas, metaphors, measurements, aesthetics and value systems of the financial world come to shape and saturate society at large and our subjectivities. The consequences of financialisation, then, are not merely the forms of austerity, neoliberalism and imperialism with which we have become all too familiar; they also include the conscription of the imagination. Here the imagination is more than an individual possession, it is a collective process that is key to coordinating social cooperation and shaping potential futures. In a moment of financialisation, what are the prospects for cultivating the radical imagination? The need to do so has never been greater.