Towards a Benjaminist Political Economy

Abstract

In Political Economy, Benjamin is frequently referred to typically in the form of catchy quotations. Indeed, in Western intelligentsia, a ‘Benjamin cult’ has emerged (Buck-Morss, 1989, p.ix). Benjaminist Political Economy is nevertheless unheard of.¹ This chapter outlines such an approach. Through a critique of Benjamin’s understanding of dialectics and intended to develop context-sensitive concepts for thinking about the processes by which the aesthetically embedded economy undergoes change, it develops Benjaminist dialectics. Drawing on fragments of Benjamin’s fragmented thought and interpretations of his work, I construct a dialectical concept of ‘economic aesthetics’ to sketch the contradictions emerging with the economic transformations that we have come to know as the ‘financialization of everyday life’, or the privatization of financial risk (e.g. Martin, 2002). Post-war Keynesian Fordism enabled the construction of a Sorelian ‘myth of consumption’. Financialization can be understood as a very powerful set of processes by which the ‘myth of consumption’ itself is commodified through the mass-formation of investor subjects, which at the same leads to its possible demise. Economic aesthetics sensitizes us to the fact that financialization constitutes a profound challenge to capitalist modernity on the level of subject-formation.