imagination

“Art, debt, capitalism and revenge” lecture at Slade

A video of an illustrated lecture I gave (virtually) at The Slade School at UCL in May.  It offers something of an overview of my work to date, encompassing, in a short 50 minutes my books The Radical Imagination, Cultures of Financialization, Art after Money, Money after Art and Revenge Capitalism.

“No artist left alive” in Arts of the Working Class

My short, provocative essay “No Artist Left Alive” has appeared in the 11th issue of the Berlin-based broadsheet Arts of the Working Class. It argues that, as we emegre from that pandemic, artists and their supporters should consider anti-capitalist strategies not based on making life and economic conditions better for artists, but for all poor and working people, (the vast majority of) artists included.

Text below, but also check out the whole very interesting issue online, or, better yet, buy a copy in Berlin, London, Los Angeles and beyond.

Read more“No artist left alive” in Arts of the Working Class

“The Crypt of Art, the Decryption of Money, the Encrypted Common and the Problem of Cryptocurrencies” (2018)

Citation Haiven, Max. 2018. “The Crypt of Art, the Decryption of Money, the Encrypted Common and the Problem of Cryptocurrencies.” In Moneylab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype, edited by Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink, and Patricia De Vries, 121–37. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Abstract Money is a medium of the imagination. While it is often …

Read more“The Crypt of Art, the Decryption of Money, the Encrypted Common and the Problem of Cryptocurrencies” (2018)

Beyond the Violence of Colonial Civility: The Art of Raven Davis (2017)

Citation Haiven, Max. 2017. “Beyond the Violence of Colonial Civility: The Art of Raven Davis.” In The Art of Civil Action, edited by Pascal Gielen and Philip Dietachmair, 115–36. Amsterdam: Valiz. Abstract “At issue here is the way the legacies of genocidal settler-colonialism leads to a cultural politics in which ‘civility’, ‘civilization’, and ‘civil society’ …

Read moreBeyond the Violence of Colonial Civility: The Art of Raven Davis (2017)

The Creative and the Derivative: Historicizing Creativity under Post-Bretton Woods Financialization (2014)

Citation Haiven, Max. 2014. “The Creative and the Derivative: Historicizing Creativity under Post-Bretton Woods Financialization.” Radical History Review 118: 113–138. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2349142 Abstract This essay seeks to draw connections between, on the one hand, the financialization of the global economy and everyday life in the post – Bretton Woods era (post-1973) and, on the other, the …

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“Can Pikachu Save Fannie Mae? Value, Finance and Imagination in the New Pokeconomy” (2012)

Citation Haiven, Max. 2012. “Can Pikachu Save Fannie Mae? Value, Finance and Imagination in the New Pokeconomy.” Cultural Studies 26 (4): 516–541. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.630480 Abstract I argue that Pokémon offers a demonstrative and constitutive moment of the financializaion of contemporary cultural life in ways that signal an intensification of finance, risk, debt and cognitive labour as …

Read more“Can Pikachu Save Fannie Mae? Value, Finance and Imagination in the New Pokeconomy” (2012)

Finance as Capital’s Imagination?: Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis (2011)

Citation Haiven, Max. 2011. “Finance as Capital’s Imagination?: Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis.” Social Text 108: 93–124. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-1299983 Abstract This essay seeks to contribute to the theoretical groundwork for a cultural studies of finance by recasting a Marxist theory of value toward an analysis of the politics of …

Read moreFinance as Capital’s Imagination?: Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis (2011)

What is the Radical Imagination? (2011)

In 2011 Alex Khasnabish and I edited a special issue of Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action (volume 4, issue 2) on the topic “What is the Radical Imagination?” What is the radical imagination? A Special Issue Max Haiven, Alex Khasnabish Interventions: Struggles Precariousness, Catastrophe and Challenging the Blackmail of the Imagination …

Read moreWhat is the Radical Imagination? (2011)

“The Financial Crisis as a Crisis of Imagination” (2010)

Citation Haiven, Max. 2010. “The Financial Crisis as a Crisis of Imagination.” Cultural Logic 30 (online). https://doi.org/10.14288/clogic.v17i0.191526 Abstract Finance is a means by which capital develops an imagination of the future. As a volatile churning mass of speculative investments, finance aggregates and interlaces millions upon millions of individual acts of prescience into something almost akin to …

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