금융의 세계화와 아파트 공화국: 금융의 수행성과 시장장치 : performativity of finance and its market devices

Lee, Ban (2024) 금융의 세계화와 아파트 공화국: 금융의 수행성과 시장장치 : performativity of finance and its market devices. 인문사회과학연구, 25 (1). pp. 75-105. ISSN 2093-8780

Abstract

The study traces the rise of apartments as a dominant form of housing since the 2000s, analysing how the logic of finance has been enacted by its calculative devices. Discussions on financialisation have primarily emerged within the realm of political economy centered on capital and production. In the Marxist tradition, financialisation is defined as a shift in the regime of accumulation, highlighting the discrepancy between booming finance and under-performing production. However, such discussions may mislead into defining financialisation as an abstract force detached from specific social contexts, thereby reducing individual actors to passive subjects influenced by the operation of finance. This study theorises the financialisation through the perspective of market studies inflected from actor-network theory (ANT). The dominant ideology of finance extends through the financialisation of daily life, deeply infiltrating personal and cultural realms. Financial devices reconstruct socio-material agencements of calculation and accumulation, building and redefining market practices according to the logic of finance. The financialisation of apartments is the result of neoliberal globalisation and the efficient market model being ‘performed’ in the Korean context. This paper investigates how market devices of housing financialisation, including price provision platforms, are constituted and how they are inscribed in financial theories. Then, it examines the apartment as a financialised asset performed by these market devices and discusses the emergence of the ‘homo investus’. These discussions suggest that financialisation is fundamentally a political process of socio-materials.