Lisa Adkins

The Time of Money

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The Time of Money investigates how the expansion of finance has led to a distinctive social world that demands a speculative stance towards life as a whole.

Produktdetails

• Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times
• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 25. September 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 228mm x 151mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 376g
• ISBN-13: 9781503607101
• ISBN-10: 1503607100
• Artikelnr.: 50912157

Autorenporträt

Lisa Adkins is Head of the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney and the author of The Post-Fordist Sexual Contract (2016).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
This chapter sets out how, rather than being simply associated with finance
and financial trading, a logic of speculation is at the heart of
contemporary capitalist accumulation strategies and guides and directs the
dynamics of social formation. It suggests that a logic of speculation has
replaced a logic of extraction and operates as a rationality that defines
the telos of action. It is argued that what unites speculation as a mode of
accumulation and a mode of social organization, that is, what precisely
constitutes the logic of speculation as a rationality, is time.
1Money on the Move
chapter abstract
This chapter investigates the logic of speculation operative in
postBretton Woods agreement finance markets. It addresses the claim that
at the heart of the 2007-8 financial crisis lay unregulated and excessive
speculation on the part of finance traders, especially to the claim that at
the heart of this activity was a trading of the future at the expense of
the present. Through a focus not on the actions of traders but on movements
and flows of money in financial markets, this chapter lays out how in
regard to finance markets the issue is not a trade on the future but a
shifting relationship between time and money. It argues that speculation
concerns a particular form of time.
2Austere Times
chapter abstract
This chapter engages with the contemporary politics of austerity. It
outlines how austerity must be understood not as a fiscal response to the
global financial crisis but as a political strategy through which the
economy of debt is being extended. It shows how this extension enrolls the
productivity of populations into the generation of surplus via the
movements and flows of everyday money. This chapter also discusses how
transformations to everyday money, especially transformations to what money
can do, must be center stage if we are to understand this enrollment. These
transformations turn on the emergence of money as a value.
3The Speculative Time of Debt
chapter abstract
This chapter is concerned with mass debt and indebtedness. Against the view
that debt is destructive of time, it outlines how securitized household and
personal debt involves a specific time universe and the binding of
populations to this time, a binding to a nonchronological time, or
speculative time. It lays out how central to this time and to this binding
is the operation of the calculus of securitized debt, a calculus concerned
not with working lives of repayment but with lifetimes of payment. This
chapter elaborates how this calculus opens up specific modes of practice
that expand the productive potential of populations in regard to the
generation of surplus from everyday payments from households.
4Wages and the Problem of Value
chapter abstract
This chapter is concerned with wages in the era of financial expansion.
Existing accounts of wages in this era point to endemic wage stagnation and
outline strategies to reconnect labor with value as a remedy to this
problem. This chapter outlines how such accounts bracket a broad-scale
restructuring of wages. It points to and maps a reworking of the
relationship between labor and money. This reworking concerns the emergence
of wages that are not a measure of external things but an in-motion
surface. It also concerns the replacement of the free laborer, who must
exchange her or his labor for a wage, by the speculative subject, who must
speculate on their (stagnant) wages and their whole lives and lifetimes to
ensure survival.
5Out of Work
chapter abstract
This chapter explores how a restructuring of labor in the era of financial
expansion has taken place on the ground of unemployment through a set of
coordinated policies and programs. It shows how this restructuring has
eroded the distinction between unemployment and employment by positioning
both the in-work and out-of-work as in need of adapting to events that have
not yet and might never happen. It outlines how the in-work and out-of-work
must constantly adapt to the indeterminate movements of time. It argues
that the policy regimes governing unemployed populations should be designed
as analogues to the creation of surplus via the indeterminate movements and
flows of money.
Conclusion
chapter abstract
This chapter outlines how understanding the finance-society relationship
requires a focus on the productivity of money, finance, and debt in regard
to the social. It sets out how such a focus challenges prevailing
understandings of the finance-society relation, including those that locate
money, debt, and finance as immaterial and/or superstructural phenomena. It
also reflects on the relationship between the expansion of finance and the
political project of neoliberalism. It suggests that the policies of the
postnational neoliberal state work to maximize the productive capacities of
populations in regard to the generation of surplus from money.