Dimensions of the asset economy

The papers collected in this Special Issue are part of an ongoing series of conversations and workshops that take as their starting point the observation that the current conjuncture has been, and continues to be, deeply shaped by the logic of assets (some of these conversations were held, in person, at the University of Sydney, but they have continued in various online fora throughout the pandemic).

From a certain angle, the claim that asset logics are a prominent aspect of our time could be seen as almost banal. These days it’s almost impossible to open a newspaper or social media account without being exposed to a list of news items about various new asset economies – bitcoin, NFTs, and a range of other financial inventions. All these are products of complex, somewhat unfamiliar technological design strategies, and they sit in an economic grey zone: nobody seems to be able to say exactly how they should be classified according to traditional economic categories. They are not simple commodities (in Marxist terms, they don’t seem to have any discernible use-value separate from their exchange-value), nor are they money in any straightforward sense (with some exceptions, you can’t use them as general means of payment). This means that they have, almost by default, been classified as assets. But this re-classification doesn’t really resolve the mystery surrounding these new economies. After all, we normally think of assets as property titles or investments that are held because they are anticipated to generate returns in the future. With many of these tokens or symbolic chains, it is not at all clear why we should expect them to generate returns in the future. If they are assets, they are very unfamiliar kinds of assets.

The conceptual puzzle that these strange assets pose is symptomatic of wider social changes. Their advent has entirely upended the notion, intuitively appealing to so many of us and the cornerstone of orthodox economic theory, that money is a simple measure. We are used to thinking (and orthodox economic theory is premised on the formal elaboration of this intuition) that there exists a world of objects, and that money is a more or less arbitrary, neutral convention that allows us to commensurate these heterogeneous objects. The new asset forms that are receiving so much attention these days undermine this distinction: they make it essentially impossible to separate object and measure, commodity and money. If it was at one point in time possible to imagine that we had an economic world that consisted of stable economic objects on the one hand and stable measures on the other, the rise of assetization has eroded this relative stability from both ends.

The way in which the lines between traditional economic categories are being blurred should represent big news. And yet, all this attention lavished on the asset form has got stuck at a somewhat superficial level. This is the case in a very obvious way for discussions on social media platforms, where billionaire fantasies, technological solutionism and conspiracy theories are locked in a battle for the spotlight. But even in the more serious fora of the public sphere, where one might expect to find more sustained reflection on the meaning of these trends, the level of commentary on the phenomenon of assetization has difficulty rising above a certain level. This is especially striking in the current moment, when, in the aftermath of the relative generosity of Covid-driven payments and bailouts, social forces are positioning themselves to build on such developments or to effect a return to austerity on the model of the post-GFC era. Often, the very same commentators that tell us we may be witnessing epochal transformations in the nature of money are happy to keep doling out the most banal economic truisms anchored in the unreconstructed fantasies of orthodox economic theory (about living beyond our means, wage-price spirals and the importance of anchoring and stabilizing expectations). As is so often the case, the exaggerated fascination with novelty is perfectly complemented by the conviction that the basic structures of our economic world are set in stone.

This collection treats the current excitement about crypto and similar phenomena as only the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, it will have relatively little to say about blockchain or crypto. Instead, it takes the confused excitement that swirls around these new economic forms as an invitation to reflect more broadly on the asset form itself and to bring into sharper focus what its role in contemporary capitalism is. Critically, we aim to trace how asset logics are associated not simply with changing dynamics of valuation but also how they drive transformations in the very standards that we use to assess the everyday conduct and governance of economic life. This fluidity is what justifies speaking of ‘assetization’ as a process, rather than the simple spread of asset principles as if this involved the quantitative spread of a mostly static, unchanging principle. In other words, we are not just witnessing dynamics that take place within an existing grid of measures and standards that itself remains unchanged. Rather, by blurring the boundaries of existing economic categories and by confounding our go-to perspectives on commensuration (what counts as what?), assetization is transforming our very sense of what money is and how measures work (Adkins 2018; Konings 2018).

The past years have seen a significant growth in scholarship on the logics of assets, and the papers in this issue will draw on and progress those contributions. But we do so with a specific purpose in mind. Much of the interest in assetization has drawn inspiration from methodologies associated with actor-network theory and social studies of science (Langley 2020; Birch and Muniesa 2020). These approaches aim to understand how ‘things’ are transformed into ‘assets’ by studying the practical financial technologies and institutional devices that are deployed to effect this transformation. The contributors to this issue largely follow this set of concerns, investigating in various ways how assets are produced by making projected futures actionable in the present. However, our concerns are shaped less specifically by a set of methodological concerns and are more oriented to re-joining some wider debates in political economy, economic sociology and social theory. Whereas the assetization literature has generally kept its distance from ‘classic’ questions in political economy and social theory, several contributions to this issue purposely return to such questions. If assets are not ‘things’ but complex property titles that embody elaborate social infrastructures of valuation, this implies the operation of system-wide forces of transformation that have remade the kind of society we live in.

One way of making this point more concrete is to contrast the ‘asset’ form with the ‘commodity’ form. ‘Commodification’ is a frequently (and often productively) employed lens through which contemporary transformations are presented in a critical framing (see e.g. Fraser and Jaeggi 2018; Hermann 2021). It broadly refers to the idea that more and more social spheres and activities are becoming subject to the imperatives of buying and selling. The concept of assetization is often presented as merely an updated version of the concept of commodification, seen as being more in touch with today’s financialized world. But such an approach, we argue, understates some of the qualitative differences between commodification and assetization.

The article by Adkins, Cooper and Konings (‘The asset economy: conceptualizing new logics of inequality’) investigates some of the qualitatively specific dimensions of the asset form. Central here is its distinctive temporal logic. The established critical (Marxist, Weberian or Polanyian) understanding of the commodity form has always remained to some degree marked by the fantasies of mainstream economics, which depict a world where time is mainly a source of inconvenience that we can hope to neutralize with the right institutional design (i.e. by instituting money as a universal commensurator). Even those who are critical of the substantive conclusions of orthodox economics nonetheless often bracket this temporal dimension through the continued conceptual reliance on the commodity as the key social form of contemporary capitalism (that is to say, the critique often focuses on the social consequences of marketization, less on how the market is conceptualized in the first place). The limits of this approach, we argue, become more fully visible when we think through the logic of assets: any attempt to neutralize or bracket the force of time leads us into a situation where we are no longer able to conceptualize the essential characteristics of assets. While commodities can still be understood through the lens of consumption (what is bought is used up instantly and, in that sense, does not have a ‘life’), the interest that economic actors have in assets is only comprehensible if we factor in the temporal dimension, i.e. the possibility or promise of future returns. Adkins, Cooper and Konings show that this distinction allows us to understand how the coordinates of economic action and of everyday life have been transformed by the logics of asset appreciation and depreciation.

The dynamics of asset appreciation and depreciation are especially marked in Anglo-capitalist societies (on which most of the papers in this Special Issue focus), but increasingly we are seeing them in action across the Western world and beyond. In a context of stagnant wages, holding assets that are likely to appreciate in value has become central to economic survival and prosperity. We suggest that, to a large extent, these dynamics mark the specificity of what is often referred to as the ‘neoliberal’ economy: they have engendered a speculative rationality that is oriented to the future and intuitively grasps that its investments exist in an ecology of interactions with the speculative investments made by others (Feher 2018).

For many political economists writing in a Marxist or post-Keynesian vein, this speculative economy is unsustainable, built on nothing but quicksand (Keen 2011; Lapavitsas 2014). They view rising asset values as representing primarily ‘bubbles’ that are detached from the ‘real’ economy – that is, from the foundational structures of value grounded in the world of work and wages. That does not necessarily mean that they view the dynamics of the asset economy as epiphenomenal or of only secondary significance; but it involves the claim that only work and wages are capable of generating the liquidity that is ultimately required to service mortgage debt and pay rent and so to sustain asset values (see e.g. Wigger 2020). Such approaches are too reductionist, unable to recognize the many ways in which dynamics of asset inflation and deflation have become institutionally anchored and embedded in social life. As a consequence, they have had persistent difficulty accounting for the relative durability of the asset economy. For instance, the asset price boom following the 2007/2008 global financial crisis (see e.g. Gane 2015) is not easily comprehensible from this point of view.

Framing asset inflation pejoratively, i.e. depicting it as a product of out-of-control markets, makes it easy to miss the ways in which is embedded in and sustained by a complex configuration of fiscal and monetary policies. This Special Issue places greater emphasis on the institutional pathways that organize and regulate the logics of asset appreciation and depreciation, including the political projects that have sought to promote asset-based capital gains, the active recalibration by policymakers of life chances around asset ownership, and the way in which these have over time produced a mutual imbrication of rising asset prices and stagnating wages. We certainly do not mean to imply here the asset economy is without contradictions. Instead, we argue that those contradictions of the asset economy only become visible if we view them as arising endogenously, i.e. if we understand the distinctive temporality of the asset not as a dysfunctional divergence from a more basic commodity economy but as building a particular economy of its own.

Powered by credit, investments in assets are typically made possible by a series of scheduled payment obligations over time. This means that asset owners face the problem of securing and managing a flow of liquidity to meet their payment obligations. Crucially, access to liquidity and payment capacity are not simply derivative of a more foundational structure. This is visible in everyday life, and in particular, in the area of home ownership, which has for several decades served as the pivot of the neoliberal asset economy. Building on the widespread homeownership achieved during the Keynesian era, successive governments pursued policies (the democratization of credit, low interest rates, and organized reductions in stocks of social housing) that resulted in an expansion of credit-driven home ownership (Andrews and Sanchez A 2011) and drove steady increases in property prices (Ryan-Collins 2021). However, even those who could comfortably participate in this dynamic were never able to transcend the problem of liquidity. Homeowners are a ‘too big to fail’ constituency (Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2020), and this is reflected in the active concern of policymakers to ensure that homeowners can continue paying their mortgages. But this arrangement does not always work in straightforward ways: for example, the need to keep interest rates low to keep mortgage payments manageable can conflict with other objectives of macro-economic policy. The household can therefore never take its liquidity for granted.

The temporality of the asset form is, in other words, non-linear: there are significant temporal delays and interruptions at work in the process of asset acquisition, debt service, and asset appreciation. These delays can be highly consequential: even a temporary shortage of liquidity in the present, for example, can have far-reaching effects. The temporality of household asset investment strategies entails risk exposures that can be life-making or life-breaking. In this sense liquidity should be understood as the lifeblood of the asset society (Konings and Adkins 2022), allowing households to access the time needed to make their investments in residential property work out.

Payment streams and temporality are also central to Tellman’s contribution (‘The politics of assetization: from devices of calculation to devices of obligation’). Drawing on the distinction between commodities and assets as economic forms, Tellman suggests that the significance of the conceptual shift to assets can be magnified by an accompanying focus on ‘devices of obligation’. Engaging with the conceptualization of assets found in the social studies of finance literature and in particular its focus on the role that devices of calculation play in the constitution of assets, Tellman argues that, somewhat paradoxically, such understandings are still too presentist. Specifically, they are unable to grasp how assets – and especially the payment obligations they require – necessitate the binding of time (that is, the creation of duration) and that this has material and political consequences.

To understand this binding Tellman turns to classical sociological theory, that is, the very body of theory that the pragmatic and technicist social studies of finance has often rallied against. Specifically, she draws on Mauss’ work to analyze how security in the form of collateral as a legal technique functions to format future obligations. That focus can help us understand how chains of obligations allowed the largest housing securities market in Europe to emerge, fuelling major housing development – and how, after the global financial crisis, unsold, unoccupied, and foreclosed dwellings were purchased en masse from insolvent developers by private equity firms who transformed them into rental securities, enabling the transformation of toxic assets back into collateral assets.

Adkins, Cooper and Konings too bring the question of assets into conversation with broader themes in sociological theory, in particular theories of class. They argue that asset inflation has produced a new and distinctive logic of inequality, one in which our relationship to assets increasingly trumps work and employment as determinants of life chances and class position. They contrast their approach with the prominent tendency to focus discussions of resurgent inequality on the super and ultra-rich (see e.g. Piketty 2014; Collins, Ocampo, and Paslaski 2020). While the rise of the 1% is entirely real, a focus on the wealthiest alone ignores broadscale participation in the dynamics of the asset economy, and in particular how the dream of home ownership continues to be the driver of a broad-based middle-class politics. Political parties know all too well that this constituency wields significant electoral influence, and that they are likely to support parties that commit to continuing with pro-home ownership, pro-residential property investment and pro-capital gains policies.

At the current moment, the empirical development of this asset-driven class structure is increasingly shaped by the difficulty of entering the property market. In previous decades, property inflation might have been seen primarily to benefit the wealth portfolios of middle-class households, which often compensated for stagnant wages (Pfeffer and Waitkus 2021). But as house prices have continued to rise, significant segments of populations across Anglo-capitalist societies have found themselves locked out of home ownership. The price of entry has become so high that saving up for a down payment on the basis of an average income has become impossible. Those whose incomes would have allowed entry to the housing market one or two generations ago now cannot use savings from wages alone (Köppe 2018). This development has translated into increases in the proportion of households privately renting and steady declines in rates of homeownership (Ronald and Lennartz 2020).

In this context, support from parents is increasingly how first home buyers are gaining entry to the housing market and accessing the potential asset appreciation and leveraging opportunities that it provides. Homeowners who have benefitted from the capital gains their residential properties have generated, now often transfer part of that housing wealth to their adult children to assist with first home purchases. Of course, substantial asset transfers between generations have always occurred and have been a central mechanism of transferring private wealth across the generations. The difference is that these transfers are becoming a key determinant of stratification not only for the top few percent but well beyond the very top of the wealth distribution.

These developments are driving a re-privatization of the intergenerational social contract. Those whose incomes would previously have allowed access to the housing market and put them in higher categories in most categorizations of class, now have their access to many opportunities shaped by their parent’s housing wealth status. While family wealth transfer is by no means a new feature of the economic system, in the post-World War II period, relatively high inflation, asset depreciation and inheritance taxes partly arrested wealth transfer as a means of reproduction (Cooper 2017). This was also a period when highly influential ideas about the role of education in social reproduction and mobility were developed. Economic transfers now play a greater role again, but they do so in new conditions, reshaping the way other resources like cultural capital and social networks can be deployed. Parents are increasingly the guarantors of loans, not just for housing but for education, for business ventures and supporting other life course transitions (Bessant, Farthing, and Watts 2017).

Woodman’s article (‘Generational chance and intergenerational relationships in the context of the asset economy’) engages with debates about class and social change in the study of youth and transitions to adulthood. He uses the asset economy as a concept to highlight the limitations of existing perspectives on class inequality in the context of generational change. The rise of the asset economy and the growing importance of inter-vivo intergenerational transfers to the lives of young adults has yet to be properly recognized in the sociological study of youth, which remains focused on employment status and its intergenerational correlation. That has led in two contrasting directions: on the one hand an exaggeration of the continuity of the processes underpinning class differences, and on the other an exaggeration of the extent to which young people, as a whole, can be categorized as precarious relative to previous cohorts. Certainly, many baby boomers across many countries benefitted from market investments (including retirement schemes), property market growth and the timing of their employment transitions in a way that can be legitimately understood as on average more beneficial than that facing current generations. However, this has had the effect of strengthening solidarities across generations within families and increasing the importance of family transfers in shaping life opportunities for the next generation.

The rapid growth of such property-based divisions has led some to claim that capitalism is turning in on itself and transforming into a form of feudalism or, as Dean (2020) has described it, ‘neofeudalism’. Here the offspring of the super-rich are the inheritors of property and wealth, while a growing majority live in global cities or their hinterlands as a propertyless mass, at best scratching together a living from directly or indirectly servicing the rich (Neel 2018). While this apocalyptic vision may have some political value, its analytical powers are more questionable. In particular, it understates how familial wealth transfers are increasingly prevalent among and within the ‘middle’ (see e.g. Emmons, Kent, and Ricketts 2018) – however squeezed that middle might be – and, critically, how such transfers have a pronounced speculative dimension. Increasingly, intergenerational wealth transfers serve as an entry point into a world of asset-based capital gains and can be leveraged to access credit-fuelled asset ownership. The asset society is therefore not well-described in terms of a propertied overlord minority extracting rent and surplus from a dispossessed and propertyless majority. Instead, it is a far more complex imbrication of asset logics with lives and lifetimes. Far from returning us to feudalism, asset society instigates a more broadscale speculative life.

Similarly, for some commentators, the price-out of homeownership represents a nascent political tipping point of sorts, whereby just on numbers alone the electoral power of non-homeowners will eventually come to trump that of the propertied, precipitating a necessary disruption to pro-asset ownership policies (e.g. Ansell and Cansunar 2021). But this position understates just how ideologically successful asset politics has been and how asset logics have become embedded in social, political and economic life. Furthermore, while sizeable segments of the population may now be locked out from the possibility of saving for a deposit on a residential property from income from wages alone, alternative strategies for entry into property ownership have emerged. These include adult children living with their parents while saving for a deposit for a residential property or purchasing an investment property; rent-vesting, that is, renting and living in a preferred area while owning and renting out an investment property elsewhere; drawing down on other assets (such as superannuation) to fuel property ownership, and joint mortgaging to pool enough funds to access mortgage financing. Along with familial wealth transmission, these modes are critical to understanding emergent and future fault lines of the asset society, and especially the generation, accumulation and transmission of wealth.

The neoliberal era began with a host of fantasies about the many ways in which the benefits of asset ownership and capital gains could be democratized. The nostalgia that the decade of the 1990s nowadays evokes should be seen in this light: it represented the high point of an asset-focused middle-class politics, when rising home and stock prices delivered benefits widely enough to give credence to the promise of inclusive wealth, and meaningful returns on education gave the human capital dream sufficient traction to divert attention from general wage stagnation. As stock ownership and human capital lost some of their appeal, homeownership became the central pillar of middle-class asset politics. As that dream is now losing some plausibility, we are seeing a shift back to other asset-focused strategies. In other words, while we may well have reached an important turning or tipping point in the trajectory of asset-driven politics, we should not be too quick to align ourselves with the ‘end of neoliberalism’ narratives that left-wing commentators often turn to with exaggerated excitement. In many cases the response seems to be a doubling down rather than a retreat, a further investment in other dimensions of the asset economy.

While property ownership through savings from wages remains out of reach for many young people, retail trading through online platforms is more easily accessible (Hendry, Hanckel, and Zhong 2021). Indeed, the success of the platform economy can to a large extent be attributed to its ‘promise of access’ (Greene 2021). Financial Technologies or ‘FinTech’ is one of the biggest platform types on the internet and provides services such as online and mobile monetary payments, cryptocurrency exchanges, banking apps, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending and retail trading (Langley and Leyshon 2021). Retail trading platforms have been successful in breaking down the institutional barriers of stock market trading and they have facilitated an influx of new investors into the market, particularly millennial and gen z investors (Hendry, Hanckel, and Zhong 2021). This trend has also been accelerated by the growth of digital finance cultures that open up access to financial advice and information through social media platforms, podcasts and forums. Young people’s tactics for participation in the asset economy may then be shifting from housing-based strategies to attempts to build a portfolio of non-housing based financial assets.

The tech industry has also been successful in transforming personal property into assets, either through allowing people to rent out these items (CarNextDoor or Airbnb) or to use them to perform labour (Uber, Deliveroo etc). Additionally, many platforms exist that specialize in selling labour through physical (Fivver, TaskRabbit) and immaterial (Upwork, Amazon Mechanical Turk) labour. Platforms promote themselves as simple and flexible tools for households to valorize their ‘spare capacity’. Phrased less euphemistically, in practice this often means access to income for individuals and households who have not been able to find secure employment or are underemployed in their current labour contracts (Prassl 2018; Ravenelle 2019). In her contribution to this special issue (‘Radical flexibility: driving for Lyft and the future of work in the platform economy’), Chihara suggests that gig platforms are successfully tapping into anxieties associated with household liquidity constraints. Critical commentators often depict gig-economy workers as falling for the ‘myth of flexibility’. But, as Chihara’s article makes clear, the benefits here are real. Drawing on interviews with rideshare drivers, she shows how flexibility is a key motivation for joining and remaining on the platform. This flexibility doesn’t just come in the form of choosing working hours but also in the access to expedited pay days and liberation from having to interact with a boss or manager.

Yet it is not only through the transformation of personal property into assets that platforms are part of the infrastructure of the asset economy. Under the guise of trust-building, platforms enable users to rate and review each other, and in this way they have transformed reputational capital from subjective word-of-mouth recommendations to a measurable and appreciable asset. These reputational metrics are now deeply embedded with the process of consumer choice: people use ratings, rankings and reviews on Google, TripAdvisor, eBay and Airbnb to determine which products and services to purchase. These ratings and reviews are the new frontier of human capital: they transform short-term service interactions into a crowdsourced, quantifiable metric able to signify quality and trustworthiness. The importance of good reputational capital often results in users providing labour for little or no renumeration in return for good ratings/reviews (Prassl 2018). In this way, the temporality governing reputational assets is not unlike that of property: workers invest in a future of capital gains, in this case in the appreciation of their value within the platform ecosystem.

It is along these lines that McKenzie’s paper (‘Micro-asset and portfolio management in the new platform economy’) explores the recent evolution of human capital and in particular the mechanisms for its devalorization. As we have suggested, the 1990s represented the high point of the human capital dream: the idea that workers were not really workers but were simply offering a different kind of capital that would be just as likely to attract capital gains as capital itself. Of course, this transcendence of the wage labour condition has remained elusive, particularly as the declining returns on higher education have combined with general wage stagnation to leave many workers trapped in a never-ending cycle of skills upgrading to merely maintain their existing income level and to service their student debt. But the effects of the human capital paradigm have been profound in that it has facilitated a thoroughgoing transition from ‘disciplined’ to ‘controlled’ labour: whereas the Fordist paradigm of work was based on the direct supervision of labour, work in the control society is driven by workers’ continuous self-monitoring of their performance against an ever-proliferating series of metrics that serve to maintain the fantasy of self-appreciation (Feher 2009).

Redden’s article (‘Human capital at work: performance measurement, prospective valuation and labour inequality’) traces the general development of this metricization of labour, suggesting that we are at a signal moment in the history of quantification, similar in impact to the institutionalization of the statistical study of populations in the nineteenth century. These metrics embody a calculative rationality that directs all employees to assess and manage their own capacity to create value amid expectations for continuous improvement in an environment of competition with others. Instituting new performance management techniques of quantitative differentiation has been central to new ways of extracting greater value from some for less reward, while the increasingly bonus-driven equity-owning manager class pulls away from the pack. Performance measurement as a method of control and activation of employees to create economic value and to differentiate reward is an example of a wider tendency to mark out social orders of unequal values through data.

Redden is focused primarily on how metrics have organized the depreciation of labour within the corporate economy. While this process continues undiminished, McKenzie’s article suggests that the platform economy represents the further escalation of this structural depreciation of human capital. In a somewhat paradoxical way, the credentials that workers earn on platforms are less transferable than the credentials workers build up in the corporate economy – they are like special-purpose monies, enjoying currency only in the framework of that specific platform. Micro-assets are both created and controlled by the platform and therefore are significantly less transferable than traditional assets. McKenzie argues that it is by tying these assets to the platform that the enterprise can lock successful workers in by preventing them from taking their trustworthiness to another platform. In this way, human capital has been transformed from transferable, broad assets such as university degrees, work experience and qualitative personal references into corporate owned, fragmented and quantifiable metrics that remained locked into the platform in which they were created.

The upshot of the transformations described in this introduction is the existence of a double movement of sorts – asset appreciation alongside asset depreciation – that has reshaped the core structures of Western society in far-going ways. The last three contributions to this Special Issue engage some of the cultural and philosophical elements of this transformation, reflecting in particular on how it shapes our experience of time. These contributions are all, to one extent or another and in various ways, formulated with reference to what has been a dominant perspective in critical theory and cultural studies on the temporality of late capitalism – that is, the idea that the future is cancelled, compromised or otherwise foreclosed and that we are instead stuck in an enduring and extended present from which there is no reprieve (e.g. Berardi 2011; Fisher 2014).

This idea is often closely associated with a focus on debt: it is the mass indebtedness imposed by finance capital that colonizes or steals the future (Lazzarato 2011). However, we are living not exactly in a ‘debt economy’ but in an ‘asset economy’, which implies a more complex and less one-dimensional temporal structure. Payments on debts associated with assets are, in other words, never mere transfers against liabilities since they always have a speculative, future-oriented dimension bound up with the possibility of capital gains. Everyday scuffles for liquidity are precisely struggles concerning the future, since staying liquid in the present can open out pathways to capital gains, that is, to asset-based futures. Before we can think more clearly about how exactly our asset-driven futures are compromised, we need to shift towards a perspective that can consider this problem from a more open-ended perspective. After all, the idea of a blocked future is a prominent cultural sentiment that exists in tension with the equally prominent sense that all of life is speculative, that nothing is outside of time and that there is no way out of having to engage the future.

Coleman’s article (‘The presents of the present: mindfulness, time and structure of feeling’) opens up the question of time in contemporary capitalism, examining it from such a more open-ended perspective. Prior to putting forward strong hypotheses about how time works in the asset economy, it seems that the first task is to note that contemporary economic objects are so profoundly temporal in nature. Things have become filled with time. Somewhat schematically, we might think that at some point time was a linear grid, a framework within events took place that were not in themselves temporal in nature. But this world where objects and time were external to each other is long gone, and time has become folded into the production and operation of the object itself. This resonates with the distinction between the commodity and the asset that we introduced earlier: it is perfectly possible to conceive of a commodity as an object that exists ‘in’ time but is not itself at its core temporal. An asset, by contrast, is incomprehensible if we don’t view it as being temporalized at its core. This is what we are often still struggling to comprehend: the ways in which temporal logics – and in particular dynamics of appreciation and depreciation – increasingly are not secondary attributes of economic objects but their defining features.

Coleman’s article examines the growing preoccupation with the temporal nature of things in contemporary capitalism through the lens of the growing interest with mindfulness. She reads this phenomenologically, neither reducing it to an ideological diversion nor assuming that mindfulness effectively solves the problems it aims to come to grips with, but approaching it as an expression of a particular affective state brought into being by and in response to the distinctive dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Mindfulness can produce a critical distance, but it can equally produce hypnotic capture (and the latter can masquerade as the former). If the constant engagement with the endogenous temporality of the economic object is often experienced as oppressive or problematic, the difficulty is that there is no obvious way out, no sure-fire way to achieve distance, no neutral point that allows us to survey the terrain and take a breath before re-engaging. Coleman approaches the interest in mindfulness from this angle, recognizing it as a potential way of finding a different relationship to the object’s temporality while also underscoring how precarious and uncertain this option is.

Like Coleman, Elliott’s article (‘Punitive futurity and speculative time’) places time at the heart of the experience of the asset economy but pursues this in a different, more explicitly political direction that engages classic debates about power and control. Whereas Coleman places considerable emphasis on the way temporality is folded into the processual logic of the object, Elliott seems more concerned to keep her distance from strong claims regarding the immanence of temporality in the object, highlighting instead how the asset economy forces subjects to constantly and actively select from a menu of choices not of their own making. Elliott too pushes back against formulations about a blocked future or empty time. She notes that the idea of ‘static time’ is a recurrent one: ever since the 1960s counterculture, this idea has been deployed to account for the apparent inability of the dissatisfaction with capitalism to result in anything other than a further deepening and extension of capitalist logics. But the recurrent character of this response suggests that it is best seen not as a positive explanation of our relationship to time but rather as a cultural manifestation that needs decoding.

It is not that the subject without liquidity is literally deprived of agency or futurity, but rather that it is forced to ‘suffer agency’, a paradoxical formulation that highlights how agency is experienced not as a power to constructively shape the future but as a modality of self-chosen self-harm. We may have to actively participate in the devaluation of our reputational capital in order to prevent an even worse fate. The subject may be faced with a menu of options that are all bad, but it must choose nonetheless. Precisely because there are no positive, desirable options on the table but there may be one that promises survival, the stakes of the forced choice are raised exponentially. The logic of suffering agency that Elliott describes has an affinity with particular genres of horror, and it is far more evental than the somewhat dismal and boring image of the end of time.

Elliott’s summary of her perspective on what she terms the ‘microeconomic mode’ is worth quoting in full:

Whereas in static time our inability to take significant action robs us of positive futurity, in the microeconomic mode suffering agency links our capacity to create chosen effects over time to an experience of domination – to the permeation and seeming inescapability of individual choice. And, rather than the capacity to create chosen futures indicating a political or experiential good, the individual negotiation of choice, action, cause and effect becomes itself a mode of imprisonment, a site of incipient negative consequences one must choose between and actively endorse. Rather than resulting in static time, this experience of closure generates a form of temporality that we might describe as punitive futurity. Instead of preventing subjects from creating chosen effect over time, punitive futurity turns the act of preserving and shaping one’s future into a form of self-chosen torment. (Elliott, this issue, 156).

Elliott concludes on a pessimistic note: her analysis pushes back against the totalizing thrust of static time, but the room for agency permitted by punitive futurity is folded into a new, more terrifying totalizing process, one that perversely thrives on rather than pre-empts choice. Elliott thus presents a startlingly novel account of a commonly observed feature of neoliberal life, i.e. the uncanny way in which it seems to be able to absorb any and all impulses for self-preservation. Exploring similar conceptual terrain as Elliott’s article, Samman’s article (‘Eternal return on capital: nihilistic repetition in the asset economy’) more explicitly raises the question of what we might do with this sense that there is no way out. He considers the temporality of the asset economy by examining it through the lens of the idea of the ‘eternal return’. Nietzsche’s enigmatic idea is notoriously ambivalent, and Samman argues that this can be usefully mapped on to two distinctively different aspects of the temporality of the asset economy. In Samman’s words, ‘the centrality of the asset form to everyday life has produced two seemingly distinct outlooks on the prospect of eternal return – one based on the thrill of endless turnover and return on capital, the other on the drudgery of recurring payment schedules and debt rollovers.’ (Samman, this issue 166).

In this way, Samman usefully highlights the temporality of the asset economy as a kind of difference-in-unity. Although actors relate to the asset economy in very different ways, there is nonetheless a binding force at work that gives this formation some temporal consistency and duration at a society-wide level. One might potentially also have framed this in terms of neurotic attachment or the death drive. But to think about this in terms of ‘the eternal return’ allows one to underscore the element of expectation and anticipation that so persistently attend our engagement with the asset economy. The prospect of the eternal return can be terrifying or exhilarating, and many of us spend our lives being thrown back and forth between these emotions in ways that elaborate rather than attenuate our attachment to the temporal logics of contemporary capital. In this way, Samman’s article returns to some version of the idea of blocked futurity but does so in a way that transforms it from an ontological condition into an outlook that we constantly reproduce. Struggling to stand still and the thrill of speculative appreciation are the flipsides of the asset society’s same coin.

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Notes on contributors

Martijn Konings

Martijn Konings is a Professor of Political Economy and Social Theory in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney.

Lisa Adkins

Lisa Adkins is a Professor of Sociology and Head of the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney.

Monique de Jong McKenzie

Monique de Jong McKenzie is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney.

Dan Woodman

Dan Woodman is TR Ashworth Professor of Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.