Speculation as a Mode of Production

Historical Materialism #176

by Marina Vishmidt

In Speculation as a Mode of Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital , Marina Vishmidt offers a new perspective on one of the main categories of capitalist life in the historical present. Writing not under the shadow but in the spirit of Adorno's negative dialectic, her work pursues speculation through its contested terrains of philosophy, finance, and art, to arrive at the most detailed analysis that we now possess of the role of speculation in the shaping of subjectivity by value relations. Featuring detailed critical discussions of recent tendencies in the artistic representation of labour, and a brilliant reconstruction of the philosophical concept of the speculative from its origins in German Romanticism, Speculation as a Mode of Production is an essential, widescreen theorisation of capital's drive to self-expansion, and an urgent corrective to the narrow and one-sided periodisations to which it is most commonly subjected.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Nonfiction

268 pages, ebook

Published October 25, 2018

Reviews

[Dante]

my confusion and terror of experiencing Tino Sehgal's 'This Is So Contemporary' as a seven year old rendered into living, negative dialectic. Immensely rewarding, challenging in all the right ways.

Speculative in its own form, pushing up and against the paradigms of its influences and thinking at a limit of periodisation. I'd clumsily dipped in and out of this for a while but the summer COVID wave gave me the time (and occasional lucidity) to get through it proper; this is how to engage concepts, routing through and beyond them, spiraling between the abstract and the concrete.

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

We lost a real one. I am never able to make head nor tail of art and art theory in general, so I approached this one quite nervously. What I found was an intensive interrogation of speculation, its relationship to labour-power and tendencies of financialisation, and finally speculation's relation with the subject. Whilst interrogated most of all through the prism of art, this should be taken up more broadly in a society filled to the brim with ideas of 'human capital', 'risk societies' and more.