John Key the biofinancial entrepreneur

ABSTRACT

Alongside the better known repudiations of truth that have risen to prominence since the 1970s—known variously in terms of postmodernism, identity politics, democratic materialism or simply university discourse—this article seeks to estimate the significance of the reactions against truth that are characteristic of finance. Finance is a collective subject or social movement in its own right, composed of a set of actors, devices, technologies and platforms which together constitute an apparatus that reacts against truths whenever and wherever they arise. This operates most clearly in the logic of risk management, a generalised technology that accompanies the financialisation of economy, politics and culture. The process of financialisation or rather what will be called here the ‘biofinancialisation’ that seeks to code life in the terms of finance, bears austere lessons about truth and resistance and these, in conjunction with new resistances from below, provide new prospects for radical politics and progressive social change today. These lessons we will learn from, among others, the 38th Prime Minister of New Zealand.

KEYWORDS:

• Biofinance
• biofinancialisation
• John Key
• politics
• resistance
• resistance from above
• social movements
• truths

Introduction

One of the first lessons about resistance is that it does not rise up from below against an otherwise victorious power. To think of resistance as occasional, or moreover as something that is only ever a response to already established power, cedes the initiative in advance. On the one hand this is a mistake of knowing, one that registers only one side of ongoing struggles and movement. On the other hand it is a political mistake, one that gives too much credence to the claims of those momentarily in power that this will last forever and that the downtrodden are not only powerless but are incapable of genuine transformation.

This is not the lesson that power is everywhere, that there is no outside of power, or that: ‘Where there is power, there is resistance’ (Foucault 1978, p. 95). It is rather the lesson of the fragility of power, its incompleteness and anxieties. This is also always the lesson taught by resistance to power—that of the powers of those that were hitherto considered powerless. Resistance, then, comes as much from above as from below, reflecting the attempt at ever new and ever deeper subjections as much as it does new emancipatory subjectivations.

Central among these contemporary strategies of the extensification and intensification of subjection have been the strategies of finance. Finance is then not only a technique or apparatus, but is moreover a social movement in its own right. This is not to say that finance is a progressive social movement—quite the contrary. If we are concerned to understand the overlapping set of social movements that since the 1970s have sought to restructure relations of subjection in favour of elite privilege, it will be necessary to think the place within this of finance. Finance has shown that it is not content to govern investment portfolios, but has liberated itself in an effort to extend to the entirety of life. Hence the need to speak of ‘biofinancialisation’—a process of the efforts to transform the entirety of life into the terms of finance.

The argument here follows the important work of numerous scholars and activists involved in intellectual and practical interventions in relation to finance. I draw in particular on the framing of finance and resistance presented in the important work of Max Haiven (2012, 2014), who articulates precisely the operation of finance as resistance. Finance in this sense is a capture of initiatives that are constantly bubbling up from below. I also draw on Shanti Daellenbach’s (2015) valuable framing of finance as ‘resistance from above’. In this strand of thought the important thing is that finance does not come first as a massive and overwhelming power, but is something that comes after, comes after us all.

If there is something that this present article adds to this strand of thought then it is to give further specificity about exactly what it is that finance resists. This will involve something of an account of the logics of finance, and, in doing so, to clarify what it is that finance, in its constant reworking of worlds, finds so desperately troubling about the world as it is. While it is no doubt true, as has been argued, that the thing that finance resists is ultimately us (Jones 2016), this ‘us’ is itself multiple and composed of many things. My goal here is to specify more clearly what it is about human sociality that finance finds so repugnant and so in need of refusal.

The theoretical stakes of what is proposed here are considerable. In terms of debates regarding resistance, I am contesting models of power drawn in one way or another from Foucault, developing and elaborating ideas arising from workerism and autonomism regarding the priority of initiative from below, and also extending the lessons of progressive revolutionary struggle that have asserted the powers of those taken to be powerless. In terms of finance there are equally significant theoretical stakes, regarding positioning finance within the transformations of capital accumulation, the cultural and symbolic politics of community, and the intermeshing of the technical and ideological that accompanies finance. It is vital to not shy away from any of these important theoretical questions regarding resistance and finance.

Nevertheless, I propose here to approach these questions of resistance and finance in a way that might appear at first not at all theoretical, taking up what might seem to be merely a local case study of finance as resistance. Although no example ever approximates the whole as such, I propose to share a local example that is rich in resonance and might shed some light on the broader situation of contemporary resistance to social change.

The next section of the article will introduce the central character in this case study and provide some context to the approach taken here to finance, resistance and politics. The section that follows, which forms the main body of the article, turns to an analysis of the concrete dynamics of what finance resists in the case of Key, identifying risk management as the central tactic in his resistance to truths in science, art, politics and love. The third and final section draws out some of the broader consequences of this analysis for progressive thought and politics, in terms of the place of finance in contemporary politics, and what lies beyond and exceeds the resistance of finance to truths.

Biofinancial entrepreneurship

I will take one particular example of a biofinancial entrepreneur, in the form of the 38th Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key. Key’s personality has gained considerable attention in terms of what is often seen as his unique biography (see Roughan 2014; see also New Zealand Herald 2015). It is not this particular individual that is important, though, but rather the tendency that analysis of this individual makes it possible to identify. The goal will be not merely to know John Key but to ascertain the truth of John Key, in terms of what Key brings to light about finance, resistance and politics.

Those interested in biography can learn from Key what is widely presented as a rags to riches story. Born in 1961 and raised most of his early life in a state house after his father died at the age of seven, he then completed a degree in accounting before marrying at 23 to Bronagh, who had attended the same high school. He worked as a foreign exchange trader in Wellington from 1984, and then Auckland from 1988, before moving to Singapore as head of foreign exchange for Merrill Lynch in 1995, and then in the same year to become global head of foreign exchange in London. Key became a Member of Parliament in 2002, finance spokesperson in 2004, leader of the National Party in 2006 and Prime Minister in 2008. His party subsequently claimed victory in the 2011 and 2014 elections and at the time of writing he is Minister of Tourism and Prime Minister.

Exceeding this particular individual character is a very specific and, I will argue, important tendency in contemporary politics. Our concern therefore should not be so much with John Key the person but with the significance of Key as a placeholder for understanding contemporary politics in its financialised form. In this I am following Alain Badiou’s (2008, 2012a) books on French President Nicholas Sarkozy and Richard Seymour’s (2010) book on British Prime Minister David Cameron. These both take up the question of the ‘meaning’ of these political characters in order to articulate that of which these characters are symptoms. Such a ‘symptomnal’ or ‘symptomatic’ analysis is demanded even more so in the case of Key for the reason of the characteristic absence or emptiness which is frequently noted about his character. In the analysis to follow I will seek to show that this emptiness is exactly one of the keys to the financialised politics that he represents.

I have also found it valuable to draw on the work of other commentators who have offered important analyses of the ‘the meaning of John Key’ (Devadas & Nichols 2012; Political Organisation Aotearoa 2013; Tie in press). In their poignant analysis Devadas and Nichols identify Key as a representative of not merely superficial branding, but rather emphasise him as the manifestation of, variously: ‘neoliberal capitalism’ (p. 18); ‘post-Fordist capitalism’ (p. 19); and the ‘brutal hegemony of capitalism’ (p. 30). They further identify, importantly I will argue, the way in which Key ‘is ensconced in the neoliberal world of financial markets’ (p. 28) and that ‘every decision that the government has made … is driven by the logic of money’ (p. 25).

I propose to give further clarity and specificity to the meaning of John Key by focusing on the place of finance in his particular form of politics. It is in finance, I will argue, rather than a simple ‘logic of money’ or a nebulous ‘neoliberalism’, that the meaning of Key lies. In part this might not be surprising, given the background in finance that marks his biography, but again, biography is not nearly as important as a global transformation in the nature of economy, culture and politics in recent years that provides the conditions of possibility for a financialised politics. Furthermore, the history of parliamentary democracy is full of examples of financiers, bankers and speculators who have become politicians. But it is only recently that such figures have been able to move so seamlessly between finance and politics (and often back again) and, more importantly, that they are able to bring the logics of the world of finance with them not only unhindered but as presumed and often unconscious ground of their politics.

In this direction important lessons can also be drawn from Lazzarato’s (2007) analysis of Silvio Berlusconi, who he dubs a ‘political entrepreneur’. What is important is the way that Lazzarato draws attention to the dynamics by which the contemporary economy is characterised by the control of flows. As he puts it, perhaps a little hyperbolically, the contemporary economy is characterised by ‘flows of labor, flows of consumption, flows of communication, flows of desires’ (2007, p. 88). Here, by placing Key within what flows above all as finance capital, something which itself bleeds out of the economy into the political and the cultural, it will become possible to comprehend the very specific dynamics of financialised politics. It will then become possible to further elaborate a more detailed analysis of what Devadas and Nichols importantly note regarding the meaning of Key as a ‘nonentity’ (p. 20; see also Seymour 2010, p. 1). As a nonentity, this is a figure who ‘refuses to concede that there could be a disjunction between brand image and the actual world’ (Devadas & Nichols 2012, p. 27), and who ‘disavows politics, and closes down an actual politics in terms of politics’ (p. 29).

Positioning finance as pivotal in the symptomatology of Key is therefore motivated not by the otherwise rather insignificant figure of Key but rather by concerns over a more general process of the financialisation of politics. There is now considerable evidence and a significant body of scholarly work that critically scrutinises the processes by which there has been a dissemination of the techniques and concepts of finance, up to and including efforts towards the ‘financialization of everything’ (Harvey 2005, p. 33; Brown 2015, p. 70). Critical analyses of finance and financialisation have exposed the breadth and depth of the reach of finance, demonstrating the historical implication of finance in, for instance, the dynamics of the slave trade (Baucom 2005) and the rise of fiction and, in particular, the novel (Sherman 1996). The foundational work of Randy Martin demonstrates the concrete tactics that seek to effect the ‘financialisation of daily life’ (Martin 2002) and the place of logics of risk management in, for example, the specific practices of contemporary war (Martin 2007). These, and numerous other works, have shown the way in which political economy and cultural economy are, as Martin puts it, the ‘twin towers of financialization’ (2009, p. 108).

Insofar as financialisation seeks not simply a transformation of market and economy and a radical shift not so much in employment practices as in the dynamics of the extraction of wealth (Krippner 2011), the expansive relation of finance to the rest of life seeks to encode the entirety of life in terms of finance. It is in light of this incorporation of bios into finance that it is possible to extend the analyses of biopolitics offered by Foucault, Agamben, and so many others, to seek to account for a process of biofinancialisation (French & Kneale 2012; Lilley & Papadopoulis 2014). Key is at least a national treasure for the clarity with which he expresses a tendency by which finance increasingly seeks to move into each and every level of life.

What finance resists

The example of Key is, I will argue, illustrative for the clear relief into which it places that which finance repudiates. It is, perhaps, the simple and innocent naivety with which Key speaks, as an almost completely financialised subject himself, that will help to resolve the question as to what it is that finance resists. The clue that will be followed in the analysis here is the status of truths in relation to finance. In doing so I draw on the framing provided by Alain Badiou of the four conditions from which truths can arise, to spell out in concrete detail the relation of Key, the biofinancial entrepreneur, to truth. Badiou identifies the way that truths can arise in the realms of science, art, politics and love, stressing further that, in relation to truths, a subject can be faithful or seek to react to or to obscure truths. Badiou quips that today we only know four types of truth: ‘For our part, we will say that there are perhaps an infinity of types of truths but we humans only know four’ (Badiou 2009, p. 71).

My analysis seeks to focus attention on the response to truths that Key represents in the spheres of science, art, politics and love. What we see in each of these domains is a strategy that draws on various techniques of risk management, of securitising or ‘hedging’ a speculative investment, in a process that involves ‘risk shifting’ (Hacker 2008; Bryan & Rafferty 2012). Later I will turn to analysis of the consequences of the rise of risk management as a strategy for hedging against truths, but in this section I will first briefly document the relation that Key has to truth in the realms of science, art, politics and love.

Science

At first glance Key and his government seem to be proud defenders of science. It was his government that, in 2009, established the Office of the Chief Science Advisor, and with this a Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister, and in May 2013 launched a major publicly funded initiative under the rubric of the National Science Challenges and in July 2014 the Science in Society project. Something called ‘science’ is clearly important for such a government, although the issue here with science is how the science that Key promotes relates to opinion, established knowledge and interests.

The risky nature of science broke out in a telling and widely discussed manner in an interview of Key by Stephen Sackur on 9 May 2011 for the BBC programme HARDtalk. In a detailed and wide-ranging interview, one of the themes that was raised was the environmental situation in New Zealand. This is a country with an extensive and highly industrialised intensive farming sector that has demonstrably created significant and widespread environmental damage. Sackur sought to confront Key with this truth and the way that this was in conflict with advertising campaigns touting New Zealand as 100% pure, posing to Key that: ‘Dr Mike Joy, of Massey University, a leading environmental scientist in your country said, just the other day, he said, “We are delusional about how clean and green we are”’ (HARDtalk 2011, citing Joy 2011).

Key’s response is telling, in that he denies this truth no less than three times. The strategy is one of reduction of science variously to opinion and then to ‘what is known’. Thus Key’s response: ‘Well that might be Mike Joy’s view, but I don’t share that view’ (HARDtalk 2011). In response to pressure from Sackur that Joy was expressing something other than a purely subjective position, Key again reduces science to opinion: ‘Well, I’d hate to get into a flaming row with one of our academics, but he is offering his view’ (HARDtalk 2011). When Sackur responded that Joy is a scientist making claims based on research and not ‘an opinion he’s plucked from the air’, Key’s response directly reduces truth to opinion: ‘He’s one academic, and like lawyers, I could provide you with another one who would give you a counter-view’ (HARDtalk 2011).

This exchange captures a tactic that Key repeats time after time, and is characterised by Devadas and Nichols as Key’s ‘I don’t share that view’ strategy (2012, p. 27). Using this tactic he will therefore frequently make assertions that are clearly in contradiction with science, but are dressed up as personal opinion. It is from such a position that he says, skirting around the requirement for evidence: ‘In my view New Zealand was one of the very few countries in the world that were settled peacefully’ (Stuff 2014, para. 7, line 1). What should be stressed here is that this is not just orthodox relativism or sophistry, no matter how much such a position does share with traditional relativism. Here, as elsewhere, we find in Key a sense of the apparently democratic nature of the repudiation of scientific authority, which is accompanied by an appeal to the naive sense experience of anyone who visits New Zealand to ‘just know’ that it is clean and green. It is in this oscillation between pure opinion and common sense that Key repudiates truth.

What should be emphasised is that this approach to science is not an outright refusal of science but rather the emptying from science of risk. Traditionally in science truth is conceived as some version of the idea that a truth crosses the situation reconfiguring the elements of which the situation was formerly considered to compose, thus creating the possibility of something new that was previously considered impossible. In such a sense a truth always presents a risk and breaks not only with opinion but with what was previously known. But this is what must be absolutely prevented by the biofinancial entrepreneur, who is an entrepreneur in the unusual sense that he constantly works to prevent the arising of the new. According to the biofinancial entrepreneur, everyone can have opinion and knowledge, but not a truth that expands the prospect of the possible. For this reason it should therefore not be surprising that the Terms of Reference of the Chief Science Advisor include the agreement stated twice in bold font of a ‘no surprises convention’ (Office of the Prime Minister’s Science Advisory Committee 2013). For the biofinancial entrepreneur there may well be science, indeed mountains and mountains of science, but this will be science without truth, science in which risks and surprises will be carefully put in their place.

Art

A similar relation to truth in science can be found in the relation of the biofinancial entrepreneur to art. Clearly, if science can be reduced to knowledge, technique or even opinion, in the same way art can be reduced to culture and entertainment. To this end it is not coincidental that Key, former financier, did not take up the finance portfolio but instead took the position as Minister of Tourism. In this role he would therefore engage in public presentations of self in the promotion of the country as a tourist destination and, for example, in frequent appearances supporting the local All Blacks in international rugby matches.

It is around the status and function of art and artists involved in cultural and intellectual production that a furore arose in the public media in early 2015. In January 2015 Eleanor Catton, a New Zealand writer whose book The Luminaries (Catton 2013) had been a commercial success and achieved critical acclaim, including winning the 2013 Booker prize, spoke publicly about the challenges of doing intellectual and artistic work in New Zealand. In an interview at the Jaipur Literature Festival she explained that: ‘Actually, my country is not doing as much as it could, especially for the intellectual world in general but for the literary arts or for the arts in general’ (Catton 2015).

Catton set this position regarding the priorities of intellectual and artistic work within a context of a generalised anti-intellectualism in New Zealand, a longstanding local lament among artists and intellectuals: ‘New Zealand has the misfortune in not having a lot of confidence in the brains of its citizens. There is a lot of embarrassment, a lot of discrediting that goes on in terms of local writers’ (Kuruvilla 2015, para. 11, lines 1–4). But her comments were also placed within the context of a very specific set of political decisions about funding of the arts and intellectual production, which were expressed in the following terms:

At the moment, New Zealand, like Australia and Canada, are dominated by these neo-liberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry politicians who do not care about culture. They care about short-term gains. They would destroy the planet in order to be able to have the life they want. I feel very angry with my government. (Kuruvilla 2015, para. 15, lines 1–6)

In doing so Catton expressed in an interview situation a hasty improvised response that nonetheless channelled the well established critique of the redirection of public purpose in terms of neoliberalism (recently, see Mirowski 2013; Brown 2015). This critique is well established across scholarly debate in economics and the social sciences in New Zealand (see, for example, Kelsey 1995, 2015; Hazeldine 1998; Rashbrooke 2013; Dalziel & Saunders 2014; Dean 2015; Eaqub & Eaqub 2015). Such criticisms of the Key government in these terms are also not restricted to a small mountain of academic books and articles, but have been seen recurrently in recent years in waves of protests around asset sales, mining, deep sea oil drilling, student fees, privacy, trade deals, water rights and others; and in public media with leading academics identifying Key’s government with the end of democracy (Salmond 2013).

Key ignored such context in his rebuff to the comments from Catton regarding himself and his government. Key responded on 27 January with a display of ‘disappointment’ that Catton did not share the same equal respect for the work of his government as the ‘tremendous respect’ that he had for her literary work (TVNZ One News Now 2015a). This respect was clarified a few days later in an interview on breakfast television on 2 February 2015 in which Key again praised her work as a writer but restricted the scope of any insights she might have to fiction: ‘She has no particular great insights into politics; she is a fiction writer. I have great respect for her as a fictional writer’ (TVNZ One News Now 2015b).

Although, as Key admitted, this respect for Catton did not extend to actually reading her work; again, what is most important is that content is totally irrelevant to the biofinancial entrepreneur. Thus he reduces the substance of what is said to a mere opinion, which is then further reduced to silence by explaining views in relation to the relative authority of speakers. Thus the ‘views’ on politics of arguably the most important young novelist of a generation are, the biofinancial entrepreneur would assert, of no more significance than those of the captain of the All Blacks, although he would also claim that the views of both hold considerably less weight than the editor of the television programme on which he was appearing. As there is no truth in science, there is no truth in art: ‘Her views on politics are no more authoritative than anybody else’s’ (TVNZ One News Now 2015b).

Politics

Comments such as this should not be read as simply indicating an astonishing lack of awareness of the purpose and social function of literature in an educated and thoughtful democracy. They are one aspect of a shared syndrome regarding the status of truths as such, whether they arise in science, art, politics or love. We might now turn to politics where again truths are reduced by the biofinancial entrepreneur to opinion and authority, to be treated by risk management. Key’s arguments from authority are clearly arbitrary, claiming truth from authority when convenient (against the novelist Catton) and rejecting any idea of scientific authority when convenient (against the scientist Joy). This is not authoritarianism pure and simple, but more an effort at containment or better hedging, in the sense of keeping truth where it belongs; that is to say, out of the way of the biofinancial entrepreneur. In this world, the truths of science and art might well have an existence, but they can have no substantial content that might be risky or general in the sense that they might serve as a point of interruption.

The absence of content, manifest as a refusal to even consider the substantial content of science or art, is crucial to understand the specific politics of the biofinancial entrepreneur. Now, much has been said about the emptying out of substantial content from parliamentary politics in recent years (see, for example, Mair 2013; Ali 2015; Brown 2015). The party of which Key became leader in 2006 was identified by Nicky Hager in that year as, following the poem by TS Elliot, the party of ‘the hollow men’ (Hager 2006). But this point about hollowness goes well beyond particular characters and exceeds the often remarked point about the centrality of branding in contemporary politics. The crucial point here is that emptiness is at the very heart of the logic of finance, premised as it is not on the production of substantial content but on the trade on present and future pricing differentials between things (Jones 2016).

Refusal to engage with content and constant recourse to an elsewhere for validation are in this way central to biofinancialised politics. There is nothing in what is, there is no prospect of an event as such or a substance that has meaning or significance in and for itself. What exists for the biofinancial entrepreneur is speculative calculation of future returns and minimisation or displacement of risk. This reduction of any particular content from anything that threatens to arise as a truth is then turned into opportunity and hedging. This specific form of post-political or anti-political politics that is found in Key can be seen across a range of occasions in which the risk of a political event in which might be contained a truth about social collectives threatens to rise up.

The biofinancial entrepreneur warned early on that the greatest risk faced by New Zealand is protectionism: ‘Our risks are not on global interest rates on the fiscal side, our risks are on protectionism where America or Europe put up the trade barriers and we, as a small open economy that trades with a lot of people, become badly affected by that’ (Magazines Today 2010, para. 18, lines 1–4). Again unaffected by concerns for consistency or by any sense of the factual evidence regarding the extent to which New Zealand’s trade is international, this will not stop him from later saying that the greatest risks are from a fall in commodity prices or a slowdown of the Australian or Chinese economies (Harjani 2015). As in finance, risks are manifold and constantly mutating. For the purposes of our analysis, the point is that the logic of risk management goes well beyond wellknown positions for and against international trade. It affects the very nature of the politics of the biofinancial entrepreneur.

Facing spiralling prices in the housing market in Auckland, this is not a question about human or social consequences; rather, the biofinancial entrepreneur will conclude that the housing market poses no risk (Rutherford 2015). The justification for going to war against ISIS in 2015 was explained in terms of the need to ‘syndicate risk’ (TVNZ One News 2015). And when the Greek people voted in a national referendum against austerity on 5 July 2015—the first time in living memory that a nation state refused outright the dictates of the present politics of austerity—again the biofinancial entrepreneur found nothing of significance in this. Rather, he concluded that there is very little risk to the New Zealand economy, and that the Greek vote ‘shouldn’t affect New Zealand’ (Otago Daily Times 2015).

Love

Compared to science, art and politics, it might at first seem strange that Badiou insists there can be truth in love. If truth is taken purely as a matter of knowledge, then the excesses of love could surely not count as truth. But it is precisely the excessive nature of truth, the ways in which truth exceeds opinion and knowledge, that render the possibility of truth in love. Of course love has always been under threat from the prospects of reducing love to the safety of knowing what is good for us mortals, and this is the danger of love, and is always a threat for risk management (cf. Badiou 2012b). Love is about consistency and fidelity, but love also arises from an event and always involves something surprising. This truth is surprising not just in its origin but in the opening that it makes to the fact that there is something universal that exceeds the finite, mortal, limited individual.

The biofinancial entrepreneur can be read in two ways in relation to love, depending on which concept of love is at play. On the one hand there is the almost measured constancy of the happy family, the 23-year-old who married his sweetheart from Burnside High School who, like her husband, completed a commerce degree. They have two children and a presentation of a calm family life in which it is said that, in their marriage, ‘Bronagh’s the boss’ (Australian Women’s Weekly 2011, n.p.). In this there is almost nothing of significance to say about Key and love, playing as it does to the televisual script of heterosexual normality.

This was interrupted in April 2015 with the news that Key had for many months been routinely pulling the hair of a waitress who worked in a café he frequently visited near their family home. The fact of this hair-pulling, which was accompanied by Key saying ‘that’s a very tantalising ponytail’ as he approached her from behind, was revealed by the waitress anonymously on a public blog on 22 April 2015 (Bradbury 2015). This swept the global media (see, for example, Manhire 2015) and was lampooned by comedians such as John Oliver (2015). Key subsequently apologised to the waitress, sending her two bottles of wine, and publicly confessing to the act. Subsequently a media storm surrounded the exposure of the waitress who had anonymously written the blog, along with media entrapment and deception by journalists at the New Zealand Herald.

What is probably most important for the purposes of the analysis here is the way that the biofinancial entrepreneur responds to this situation. Again, the content of his repeated acts disappeared, as he continued instead to seek to justify his behaviour, claiming that he was ‘just horsing around’ (Davison 2015, para. 1, line 2). Then the national media arrived on the scene, with incredibly careful and subtle analyses expressing astonishment at the fact that this could have happened, or alternatively stressing the insignificance or indeed the justified nature of this serial assault. In The Press of Christchurch Martin van Beynon would write:

We also need to keep a sense of perspective. There are worse things than being embarrassed by your prime minister. At least he isn’t organising the killing of his opposition or closing down the free press. He’s not giving his family or his cronies gilt-edged government contracts. He doesn’t have mistresses living in mansions paid for by the taxpayer. There’s something reassuring about living in a country where one of the worst things you can say of your prime minister is that he is inclined to pull your hair if you have a ponytail. (van Beynon 2015, paras 25–26)

Meanwhile in the New Zealand Herald the property speculator and part-time extreme right political commentator Bob Jones wrote: ‘Ponytails, which I’m a fan of, have been tugged by males since they were invented by the third century BC Macedonian poet Samus, who wrote lyrically and at length on the desirability of pulling them’ (Jones 2015, para. 4, lines 1–7). To note that such claims, made by a financial speculator who advocates history as the appropriate course of advanced study for the leaders of tomorrow, contain not an ounce of truth, again invite charges of falsity and avoidance of truth. But the problem with such an objection is that a cynical distance from the claims being made is already part of the content of the claims. More importantly, content again has little significance, being above all a ruse to defuse the idea that any act, no matter how repugnant or sublime, might contain any trace of significance, fidelity to which might lead to the uprising of a truth.

Finance, truth, resistance

Much more can and will be said about John Key and the consequences of his politics for New Zealand and beyond. The analysis here has sought to establish some of the lessons that can be drawn from what might seem an idiosyncratic individual figure, taking that singular example not for its own sake but in order to demonstrate something much more general about the nature of politics today in the context of a broader process of biofinancialisation. This joins in and extends other efforts that have sought to demonstrate the profound restructuring of the New Zealand economy in terms of finance (see Kelsey 2015), to show how this is a much deeper process of establishing the profound place of finance and strategies such as risk management in a way that is economic but equally cuts to the core of the political and cultural.

If we ask what is the meaning of Key, or of what is he the symptom, then we find some polemical points of orientation by the idea that the meaning of Key is the ‘brutal hegemony of capitalism’ (Devadas & Nichols 2012, p. 30) or, as with David Cameron, that ultimately ‘He means war’ (Seymour 2010, p. 88). Of course, the meaning of John Key is class war, but the question is the specific nature of that class war, the means through which it is waged, the precise earlier victories on the other side that it resists, and how it does so. Without a very concrete and specific knowledge of the political economy of finance and with this the realities of risk, ownership and rent, and also without a careful alertness to the cultural landscape in which finance is not only an economic reality but a way of seeing reality as such, the true terror is that this is a war without hope and without end.

The warning that is raised here about Key the biofinancial entrepreneur is that opposition to him has rarely been able to effectively confront him on his own ground. There is a profound truth, far beyond what is read into this, in the charge that Key can make against the leader of the opposition, of how ‘ignorant’ he is ‘when it comes to banking’ (Leslie 2016, para. 7, lines 4–5). Any opposition, from within parliament or from outside that is unable to match Key toe to toe on matters of economics and above all finance will be ineffective and will be met with jeers and mockery. Any effort, whether parliamentary or extraparliamentary initiatives such as social movements and other efforts towards resistance and social change, need to be attuned to the realities and sophistication of biofinancialised politics, both in New Zealand but also in the other contexts globally in which this form of politics is taking hold.

In the present situation finance, which has always accompanied and indeed predates capitalism, has come to centre stage. That the power of finance is known demands, however, that it also be thought, and this involves much more than specification of the reach and power of finance. I have sought here to show the intimacy of finance with contemporary politics to contribute to thinking finance, stressing that finance is not a separate domain that might be practised or criticised, but is rather vitally coextensive with politics and with progressive struggle today.

Finance, by contrast with vague terms of left criticism such as ‘neoliberalism’, brings some specificity to our analysis in seeing how something like, for instance, risk management can become central to the politics of one or another biofinancial entrepreneur. Finance is not simply a particular way of making money or a new mode of capital accumulation. It is that. But beyond this what I have sought establish here is the way that finance brings with it an entire logic, a set of social relations between people and, moreover, relations to the world and dispositions of character. This is a cultural condition, involving a radical recoding of categories of experience and of the person. But it is equally a logic and one that is crucial to understand in order to intervene in the political.

There is nothing new in the movement of ideas and practices from business into politics. The thing that characterises a financialised politics is the specific nature of these ideas and practices, in this case their origin in the world of finance. To be specific, it is one thing to criticise the present government of this country for engaging in ‘dirty politics’ (Hager 2014). It is another to be clear that the particular practices of the biofinancial entrepreneur and his coterie are not only unexceptional but are the very normal routine practice of good business management. Those familiar with this world will therefore shrug their shoulders at such revelations, aware that in the brutally rapacious business world through which they have smiled their way, this has come to be the normal reality to which one and all must adjust themselves.

In the formal theory of the subject outlined in Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou identifies three different possible relations to truth. Alongside the prospect of fidelity to truths, the strategy on which he pins his hopes, Badiou is clear about the fact that there are reactive and obscure relations to truths. These both refuse truth and its consequences, but in different ways. The obscure subject occludes the possibility of truth by maintaining the figure of a ‘full body’, a seamless whole imagined to exist in an imagined and yearned for past. The reactive subject, by contrast, defends the present not because it is good but because it is ‘a little less worse’ than the past, or indeed any other actually existing or future social formation (Badiou 2009, p. 55).

John Key is not an obscure subject. He is not a traditionalist, a fanatic or an obscurantist. What he reflects, rather, is a particular form of the reactive subject, based in a thoroughly financialised delimitation of the consequences of truth. In his particular form of the reactive subject there is not so much denial as management of truth. There may well be truths, the biofinancial entrepreneur admits, it is just that these must never present any definite risk to the programme. This financialised politics is reactive to truths but is not ‘reactionary’ in the sense of preserving an imagined past. This reactive politics will happily strive for replacing traditional symbols such as national flags, but will seek to replace the old with the most obvious cliches of the present.

To reiterate: the reactive subject John Key does not so much deny truth as deny the consequences of truth. Truth is perfectly well allowed and even encouraged, as long as it stays in the safe comfort of the laboratory or the seminar room. Everything is put in its proper place, and the place for truth, then, is the university—where it should remain. Moreover, for the reactive subject, this will be the most democratic solution. Everyone will be allowed their opinion, in an elaborate democracy of opinion in which the risks of truth to established powers have been carefully managed. Which is well and good, but in science, art, politics and love, one does not vote on truth and truths are always surprising. This risky and dangerous nature of truth is precisely why the biofinancial entrepreneur is so actively committed to resisting truths whenever and wherever they arise.

When it is recognised that finance is resistance, it becomes apparent that finance enacts a particularly ‘derivative’ form of politics, working off and in relation to ‘underlying’ conditions, but with little regard to those conditions and instead multiplying new prospects and possibilities. In this sense finance is resistance, although resistance is not just about the new but can either expand or diminish prospects depending on which bodies are counted as included. As an apparatus of resistance or as a ‘social movement’, finance has been remarkably effective in the extension of privilege for elites and for those whose politics is a politics of separation, in which particular individuals can only ever hope for inclusion in privilege.

It is because capitalist elites have always sought to resist existing social relations that Marx and Engels stressed the fact that, ‘The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part’ (Marx & Engels 2010, p. 70). In this sense the place of finance in the creation of new and previously unimaginable relations should be clear. I have been trying to stress here that in this constant multiplication of the new there is a constant practice of risk management, which sets its sights on reducing the prospect of touching on something that would be radically new, a new and more inclusive truth. The lesson on this regarding inventiveness lies not in a return to the politics of the past but in inventing new and more expansive forms of politics. Such politics in turn arise from the new and more expansive social forms and bonds that are already present in our midst and that finance constantly seeks, in efforts that are forever failing, to manage the risks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.