So that is an important new development arising out of neoliberal thinking - the financialisation of national balance sheets.
But it seems way distance from any biopolitics or bodily precariousness. You haven't actually drawn a connection I can see.
...I agree that neoliberalism is about turning everything that composes life into a tradable commodity. — apokrisis
Fostering a sense of crisis to be able to push through a political agenda is quite the opposite of creating the false market optimism on which speculative bubbles depend. — apokrisis
Hence the widespread 'need' to enact legislation - all around the Western world - that violates fundamental rights in order to protect us from Godknowswhat impending, immanent, but incalculable risk of.... ???. A kind of permanent state of emergency, licenced by temporal collapse. The ubiquitous threat of 'terrorism', unsurprisingly finds a perfectly receptive audience in neoliberal societies. — StreetlightX
Anyway, as usual you're singularly incapable of holding a discussion without turning it into some sort of dick measuring competition — StreetlightX
So at no point did you suggest anything about the fostering of a sense of crisis? Hmm. — apokrisis
Perhaps if you posted a coherent argument it would go better for you. Have a go at writing out your OP in plain language without all the fancy words. And with proper examples to support your point at each turn. See how much sense you think it makes then. — apokrisis
the categories that once used to exempt the body from it's circuits now begin to capture it: beyond the much mentioned 'commodification' of the body (in terms of say, stem cells, DNA sequences, and other, now 'patentable' biological 'innovations'), you also get - as again charted by Cooper - the militarization of biology, where the body itself becomes a site of security concern -
Beyond commodification and warfare, one can imagine other places in which categories once applicable to non-humans gradually shade into human considerations - I have in mind Agamben's other studies on the growing indistinction between animal and human, law and life, the sacred and the profane, etc.
So again, while it's true that this represents a culmination of long-term trends, what's changed is the specificity of that movement which has now increasingly encircled even the body, which at least at one point could be left out of it. In Marxist parlance, capital has set it's sights not only on the means of production, but on the means of (biological) reproduction as well. This change needs also to be tracked in tandem with the temporal shift in which capital, generalizing the debt form, now beings to place more and more importance on not just the mode of production, but on the speculative mode of prediction which underlies it's upheaval of temporal categories as well (cf. the work of Ivan Ascher on the 'portfolio society' which we now inhabit). But this last is a larger point that needs elaboration.
I agree that neoliberalism is about turning everything that composes life into a tradable commodity. That sounds a good idea, but then always results in an opaque and weakly regulated system that is easy to game. So that is a huge source of psychic instability. It erodes personal or community level control. The economy becomes as impersonal and capricious as the weather. We become helpless in its tides. — apokrisis
Exept the GFC was caused precisely by investment into assests that were not revenue generating (housing), and speculative finance - derivitive trading on futures and so on - is almost entirely unproductive. And given that private debt stands currently at 156% of US GDP - 17% less than it's hight during the GFC and growing - you'd have to be completely blind to economic reality to think the 'stabilizers' you speak of are in anyway working. — StreetlightX
You are simply highlighting how your abstracted jargon conceals... — apokrisis
When Mr. Apo - "symmetry" "constraint" "triadic" - Krisis accuses you of jargon mongering. You couldn't make this up if you tried. — StreetlightX
But the argument is not so much that life itself becomes a commodity but that it has been co-opted into circuits of speculative finance. — StreetlightX
The key distinction is that of temporal orientation: — StreetlightX
The crux of it is that this is exactly the same commodity form as debt. — StreetlightX
In other words this cooption of life into the circuits of speculative finance converges with debt as the high-point of capitalist accumulation — StreetlightX
But even this is not what I'm super concerned with. My real interest lies in the collapse of temporal categories occasioned by such developments: by tethering calculations of risk in the present to the quite literally incalculable speculative promises/fears of the future, almost every and any 'preventative' action is licenced. — StreetlightX
Essentially what is at stake is a temporal 'state of exception' in which the boundaries between the calculable and the incalculable are effaced such that there is cartre blanche to do anything whatsoever in the name of the incalculable. — StreetlightX
these myths don't just spring up out of nowhere - the point is the chart the mechanisms that have brought it into being, and have allowed it to catch on. — StreetlightX
Yes, but one of the foundations upon which the USA is a vigilant and informed public. That the Republicans keep the population vigilant with invisible enemies from within and outside the borders, then that's a political issue, not an economic one. — Posty McPostface
(Well China not so much as its main existential concern is forever going to be preventing the peasants revolting against the centre. It doesn't aspire to a new colonialism, just security and stability within the traditional boundaries of its Imperial Empire.) — apokrisis
The invisible hand might not be infallible (climate change and tragedy of the commons) — Posty McPostface
In principle, a free market takes into account all information or self-interest. And most folk are at least modestly concerned at least a generation or two into the future. — apokrisis
That also depends on how informed the rational agent is. I fear, and see, that the population of the US is hopelessly misinformed about current affairs. — Posty McPostface
But speaking realistically, there are always going to be artificial constraints - state intervention - in any market system. States can't in practice stand back and let themselves collapse as good market practice demands. — apokrisis
What's more is that credit seems to have saturated the economy. You can get credit for anything nowadays. — Posty McPostface
This is an essentially historical question, but I would like to say that a reasonable amount of the blame can be stuck on health insurance. — fdrake
You see my problem: — apokrisis
In the end, I have to question whether a strictly economic analysis is appropriate here. I understand that this is all very political, of course, but so much of it is enabled/dictated by technological change that I don't think we can analyze it like Marxist historians looking for contradictions in the system or some such. You need to bring in a wider conceptual context to get out of your "mapping" phase, methinks. — Pneumenon
But the temporal shift I'm interested in consists of two things: (1) a focus on incalculable risk in the future - what might be called catastrophe risk — StreetlightX
So, why didn't QE lead to much higher inflation rates? Or more simply, why is inflation so low in the US? — Posty McPostface
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