In Speculation as a Mode of Production: 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.
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“[Speculation as a Mode of Production] is a real contribution to a deepened understanding of how financialised capitalism has fundamental and worrying consequences for the ways in which art and subjectivity are reproduced today.”
—Josefine Wikström, Radical Philosophy
“An astonishingly lucid account of the way in which neoliberalism operates, inscribing the logic of a barely mediated labour-capital relationship into the intimate recesses of subject formation.”
—Jaleh Mansoor, University of British Columbia
“Breaking with the boosterism and banality that so often accompany discussions of art and capital, Marina Vishmidt brings an impressive command over contemporary debates and a truly dialectical sensitivity to bear on the transformations that artistic practice has undergone in our speculative times.”
—Alberto Toscano, co-author of Cartographies of the Absolute
“Speculation as a Mode of Production is an exceptional work whose full import, both political and philosophical, will be reckoned [with] for years to come.”
—Ray Brassier, Radical Philosophy