The Aesthetics of the Financial Crisis: Work, Culture, and Politics

The ways that financialization has contributed to the technocratic and antipolitical management of economies have become ever more evident in the wake of the financial crisis that commenced in the autumn of 2007. This bracketing and suspension of politics occurs in various ways but significantly, it does so through the obscuring of work as a moment of economic life. If economics has been complicit in this antipolitics, can an aesthetic approach to financialization shed light on how work is rendered invisible? This article analyzes four short film clips all distributed through YouTube to show not only how their visual and narrative elements organize subjectivities for an antipolitics of finance but also to find in the popular aesthetic a different "distribution of the sensible" that permits moments of suspension or rupture that can politicize financialized subjectivity and begin to recover a politics of work.