Unpacking financial subjectivities: Intimacies, governance and socioeconomic practices in financialisation

Abstract

Existing studies on financialisation have used Foucauldian governmentality to examine how everyday consumers, shaped by state initiatives and proliferation of financial products, are transforming into self-reliant subjects capable of seeking out financial knowledge and products for future security. By bringing the idea of agencement into critical dialogue with governmentality, this paper incorporates lived and emotive elements of quotidian financial practices with political economic and organisational dimensions of market behaviour to uncover a broad bandwidth of financial subjectivities. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with investors and participant observation at financial literacy events to explore financial knowledge and practices of everyday investors in Singapore. Findings reveal how intimacies, moralities and technologies are mobilised and entangled such that logics of financial governmentality could operate through multiple registers, harnessed for different means and with varied outcomes.