In a new review in Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Wei-Ping Chen discusses Michel Feher’s Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“Michel Feher’s new book Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age offers both critical evaluations and political discussions of the existing socio-economic theories about the dynamics of capitalism in the past half-century and the possible alternative directions current capitalism could take. His original and timely contribution lies in the argument that we can move beyond neoliberalism once we know how to use it as the source of resistance.

Feher’s analysis centers on the transformation of global economic organizations and actors towards a form of capitalism structured by the dynamics between ‘investors’ and ‘investees.’ Consequently, companies, states, and individuals are all preoccupied with hyperfinancialization in the context of the neoliberal project where the accumulation of reputation under the guise of self-responsibility, renders them attractive to investors. They hope not so much to increase profits from the gap between sales revenues and production costs over the long term, but rather to maximize credit from projects continuously submitted for evaluation that enable them to continue conducting economic activities within a short period. Such a transformation of the form of capitalism thus shifts the social struggles from a fairer distribution of profits between capital owners and workers to the condition upon which investors agree to allocate their credit to those investees deemed credit-worthy.”