Lauren Tooker: Going to uncomfortable places: Redemptive critique and ordinary agency

Warwick Critical Finance

Lauren Tooker began by addressing the problematic of developing a reflexive critique of finance. While we might want to move beyond a form of critique that assigns the academic a seemingly objective view on finance from above, it is often hard to take on a more reflexive position, because it forces us to engage with the uncomfortable contradictions and ambiguities in the field. Financial resistance movements can be confronted by problems of gender and race; neoliberal imaginaries sometimes yield surprising democratic politics. To develop a sensitivity to such counter intuitive findings, Tooker suggests moving away from a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ towards more reflexive forms of ‘redemptive critique’. The challenge to build such a situated approach relates to a second challenge highlighted by Tooker - to conceive of ordinary agency. Despite the recent (re-)turn to the everyday in IPE, ordinary agency is often not taken seriously. The challenge is an approach that allows us to think with and alongside people, rather than for them. Finally, Tooker suggested a need to move from the apparent divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ finance to focus on the porous interface between public and private, so as to ask critical political questions of finance.