Imagining Finance and Crisis
Alberto Toscano
In The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills advocates the development of an ‘insurgent’ intellectual practice that would exercise both a scholarly and a public (or political) service by articulating social ‘problems’ and translating individual ‘troubles’ into public ‘issues’. Can this vision of sociology’s public task help us to think through the theoretical and political challenges posed by the short-circuit between personal predicaments and collective transformations at stake in the current financial crisis? Can sociology counter the ‘misery of vague uneasiness’ that comes from being unable to draw intelligible and actionable connections between economic realities and political actions? In this talk I will try to explore these questions in terms of some recent attempts in the visual arts to ‘imagine’ finance and crisis, and by bringing Mills’s conception of the sociological imagination into contact with Fredric Jameson’s theses about the aesthetics of ‘cognitive mapping’.