Finance as Capital's Imagination

Abstract

<P> This dissertation argues that the imagination takes on a new importance in the current moment of "financialization": the expansion of financial power both broadly around the world and deeply into everyday life. I suggest that a dialectic theory of imagination and value is necessary to understand this shift. Following an introduction laying out this problematic, chapter two looks at the career of the Western notions of the imagination up to and including the 191h century, positing that it has been an important aspect of the rise of modernity, capitalism and colonialism, but one whose political salience diminished with the rise of discourses of value. In chapter three I turn to theories of imagination in the twentieth century. But I suggest that none of these theories sufficiently accounts for the economic. In order to do so, I turn in chapter four to the notion of value, arguing that we are better equipped to understand economic value under capitalism when we see its relationship to other social values (ethical, aesthetic, political, etc.). To do so, I revisit Marx's "Labour Theory of Value" and, after narrating the rise and fall of this influential idea, I discuss the work of current social theorists seeking to revivify this concept for new times. In the fifth chapter I delineate how capitalism as a system subordinates social values to economic value and how finance is both the highest articulation and a key moment of this process. I conclude by mapping this theoretical approach through a reading of children's play with Pokemon cards, arguing that financialization demands we revisit questions of structure and agency in cultural studies. </p>