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THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS AND THE CULTURE OF CONTINUAL GROWTH

The proximate causes of the global financial crisis (GFC) have been widely attributed to ‘financialisation’. However, we argue that the global financial crisis had cultural conditions of possibility that were imbricated with economic factors in complex ways. The idea that the crisis was the function of independent financial forces that spread through society fails to consider cultural rationalities that constituted the citizen as someone enjoined to improve their lives through consumption and speculative personal investment. The message that continual economic growth was both possible and the grounds for personal growth was normalised in the public sphere, reinforced by political spruiking and pervasive lifestyle media. But do we have the disciplinary resources to take cultural factors in the crisis seriously? A greater attention to culture and materiality, including the cultures of finance and markets, does not mean simply regarding ‘culture’ as the context in which markets take place: it involves examining the fashioning of financial identities and everyday consumption practices in arenas that are cultural as much as they are economic. This also includes addressing the complexities of financial subjects for whom the pursuit of life security and private wealth accumulation (through home ownership, property investment and equity withdrawal, for example) is increasingly dependent on debt and underpinned by greater levels of risk and insecurity.