Marina Vishmidt: Speculation as a Mode of Production – Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital

Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, Brill, 2018, hb, 268pp, ?120, 978 9004291379.

The financial crisis of 2007 marks a watershed in theories of capitalism. While the return to Marx, precipitated by the subprime disaster and attempts to explain it, has been profound, it has not overturned the earlier abandonment of the alleged productivism of Marxism signalled by Jean Baudrillard's 'break with Marx' after 1968 and epitomised by Andre Gorz's Farewell to the Working Class. If Marx's analysis of capitalism already appeared to be obsolete for the theorists of consumerism, information technology, the post-industrial society, post-Fordism and the service industries, the outmodedness of production for capitalism seemed to be confirmed by the credit crunch. Financialisation, it was argued, supersedes industrial capitalism by supplanting profit with rent, wages with debt, capitalists with shareholders, commodities with money and so on.

Marina Vishmidt's contribution to a conceptual mapping of financialisation as it intersects with politics and art represents a turning point in the debate. Here, for the first time, the full weight of critical theory - with its characteristic ambition of intellectual scope and relentless exposure of the damage done by calculation, equivalence and abstraction - is brought to bear on art and politics in the age of financialisation.

While taking her bearings from Randy Martin's theory of the financialisation of everyday life, Andrea Phillips and Suhail Malik on the financialisation of art, and Christian Marazzi on the financialisation of capitalism, Vishmidt surpasses them all. Eschewing the empirical survey of the interactions of art and finance through case studies, as Max Haiven does so brilliantly, and turning away from the economic analysis of what constitutes financialisation, as Costas Lapavitsas and others have done, Vishmidt constructs a new theoretical terrain on which these investigations take place.

Her argument recasts the relationship between art and capitalism. In one sense, she updates the Frankfurt School's analysis by shifting the emphasis away from processes of commodification and the culture industry, or what Fredric Jameson called 'the penetration of commodity fetishism into those realms of the imagination and the psyche which had ... always been taken as the last impregnable stronghold against the instrumental logic of capital'.

Art does...