Speculation in a Sense: Aesthetics and Real Abstraction

In an era dominated by technologies of automation and virtualization, this essay will examine the financial logic of abstract risk as a key dynamic in the valorization of capital. Further, I will consider how abstract risk also emerges through in art as one node of valorization on this digitalized plane. Both instances subsume labor to value, and result in confusion between being a commodity and having a commodity. The question then could be: what antagonisms recur in such a valorization schema—which Marx discussed in the ironic terms of the “automatic subject” of value—and how may they be extended?