Michel Feher’s new book “Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age” offers both critical evaluations and political discussions of the existing socio-economic theories about the dynamics of capitalism in the past half-century and the possible alternative directions current capitalism could take. Feher argues that whether we are a company in search of funding from shareholders, an indebted public authority seeking bondholders, or an instrumentally precarious individual in need of social benefits, we would all be subject to the issue of accreditation and indebtedness, in which being an investee is more appreciated in an age in which investors have become all-powerful.
Keyword: speculation
Money as Medium, Speculation and Scrypt
Although they intervened on a culture of financialization in two very different ways, both Speculation and scrypt explore the intersection of money with the history of media, imperialism, colonialism, and computation. If capitalism is a kind of computer, a difference engine propagating vectors of exchange, these projects attempted to reprogram its operations. Apart from exploring the homology between money, language, computation, and philosophies of abstraction, Speculation and scrypt engage in collaborative practices that interrupt forms of classroom pedagogy based around the concept of the neoliberal individual (and neoliberal university). When money is pursued not for profit, but play, and when money is transformed from a medium of exchange to a medium for artistic practice, these two moneygames make invisible hands visible.