Cultures of Finance

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INTRODUCTION: CULTURES OF FINANCEWHEN THE CRISIS, WHICH WAS A CERTAINTY,BECOMES A CONTINGENCY

Kay Bal and Mar Wdtu

Since Karl Polyani published The Great Transformation in 1944,cultural theorists have become less teleological and more chastenedin their hope that the crises, which reveal the contradictions inherentin capitalism, will inevitably bring about its disintegration.1 At thestart of the new millennium, this attitude may be attributed in part tothe intensification of debt, speculation, and risk on global, national,corporate, and individual levels that has attended changing patternsof accumulation in the post-World War II era.

Greta R. Krippner understands financialization as "a pattern ofaccumulation in which profit-making occurs increasingly throughfinancial channels rather than through trade and commodity produc-tion."2 Her initial analysis gauging relative industry shares of corpo-rate profits between 1952 and 2001 in the United States demonstratesa dramatic decline of manufacturing in contrast to the finance, insur-ance, and real estate industries.3 These industries have not only be-come the dominant sector of the economy but also grow increasinglyvolatile the more they disengage from production.

This state of affairs provides part of our impetus as guest editorsof this special issue to reevaluate Marx's arguments about the com-petition between finance and industrial capital and to consider therole of fictitious capital vis-A-vis public perceptions of debt and risk.

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comprise "activities relating to the provision (or transfer) of liquidcapital in expectation of future interest, dividends, or capital gains."'In his attention to the hegemonic emergence of a "mass investmentculture,"6Adam Harmes notes that "new trends, associated with therise of the mutual-fund industry and an emerging 'investment cul-ture' may be creating the perception of a growing link between theinterests of workers and finance capital," which has transformed"tens of millions from passive savers into 'active' investors." Harmesargues that this transformation disciplines voting constituencies intofavoring neoliberal, macroeconomic polices and structures that areopposed to their interests as workers.7

A few events have recently heightened scholarly and media atten-tion to the potentially catastrophic consequences of shareholder valueas a fulcrum of corporate governance as well as speculative tradingassociated with the proliferation of new financial instruments. In thehysterical wake of the punctured dotcom bubble, Enron's bankruptcyin 2001 was among the first of many scandals to traumatize marketfaith by devastating U.S. stockholder savings and pensions. Enron'semployees shared their fate with those at Nortel Networks Corpora-tion, Lucent Technologies, and Global Crossing, who were also over-invested in company stock when it dove and dissolved their savings.In the same year, Argentina declared its inability to make paymentson its external debt, thereby precipitating the largest sovereign defaultin history. Notably, finance has also become an important term in the"war against terrorism" as the United States and other G7 countrieshave sought to control the flow of funds to particular groups. Whileofficial responses to these events have varied nationally, most aremediated by "common-sense" assumptions about market rationalityand a fetishistic faith in the magical potency of financial liberaliza-tion. This faith has made workers susceptible to a disciplinary rhetoricthat currently promotes the privatization of investment risk in retire-ment planning.


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Marxist theories.8 These methodological and theoretical shortfalls havenarrowed the range of inquiry about financialization and its implica-tions for subject formation. To open up this line of inquiry, the editorsof this special issue have invited scholars from the social sciences andthe humanities to consider the value of cultural theory for criticalapproaches to financialization.

Karyn Ball's "Death-Driven Futures, or You Can't Spell Deconstruc-tion without Enron" turns to Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, andDavid Harvey to examine how Enron inadvertently "deconstructed"a fetishistic faith in market rationality through its calculated gamingwith the imaginary proleptic potential of value determinations in itstrading, financing, and accounting strategies. Her argument is that suchstrategies "hyperrealized" projected revenues and derealized debt inorder to inflate Enron's stock values from the letter rather than the sub-stance of speculative gains. The essay also considers debates aboutthe 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which responded to the implosions ofEnron and Worldcom by legislating for the reform of corporate gov-ernance structures and enjoining greater transparency in financialrepresentations. Ball's consideration of diff6rance as the horizon ofpostmetaphysical theories of designation and production links heranalysis with A. Kiarina Kordela's "Marx's Update of Cultural The-ory." Kordela sees the differentiation and deferral of surplus value asthe "transcendental" principle of capital accumulation as a wholeand thus calls on us to rethink the presumed historical break betweenproductive and virtual capital. A reading of Spinoza serves as a de-parture point for her critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri'sfailure in Empire to acknowledge the interrelationship between "tran-scendent" and "immanent" authority. Just as the normal functioningof capital is revealed in fictitious capital, Kordela argues, the normalfunctioning of power is revealed in disciplinary power.

Kordela reaffirms Marx's relevance in light of Spinoza, Derrida,Kojin Karatani, and Lacan. Their writings inform her theorization of a


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on governmentality and subjectification to bear on personal invest-ment and consumption as disciplinary modes of "securing, advanc-ing, and expressing individual freedom in neoliberal society." Theessay thus repoliticizes discourses of financial literacy that configureinvestment and pension planning as technologies of the self. SusanneSoederberg also considers the neoliberal disciplining of investor sub-jects in "Freedom, Ownership, and the Privatization of Social (In-)Security in the United States." The essay historicizes the Social Secu-rity system in the United States from the advent of pension plansafter the Civil War to the present in order to situate George W . Bush'sOwnership Society rhetoric as a strategic adaptation to crises ofoveraccumulation.

Maureen Sioh's and Marieke de Goede's contributions illuminatethe global power of financial regulation to unravel state autonomy. In"Pricing Race, Circulating Anxieties, and the Fate of Malaya's Cur-rency Reserves at Independence," Sioh offers a case study of theMalayan government's decision to peg its currency to sterling ratherthan U.S. dollars after the break from British imperial rule. Heranalysis problematizes the assumption that independent postcolonialstates make completely autonomous financial decisions by highlight-ing the extent to which the combined force of colonial structures andracial stereotypes institute social hierarchies that overdetermine eco-nomic practice. De Goede's "Underground Money" also probes theideological coding of financial hierarchies. Like Kordela, de Goede iscritical of Hardt and Negri's conceptualization of Empire, but sheselectively draws on it to expose a discourse that projects "a clearlybounded and rationally organized space for global finance on the onehand and a clearly bounded and centrally organized space for under-ground money on the other." De Goede's analysis of the detection andprevention strategies employed in the post-9/11 war on terrorist fund-ing isolates the terrorist underground as a discursive construct thatconsolidates the apparent "legitimacy" of global finance.


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apathy, yet they engage in concerted protest against state practices.The ambivalence that surrounds them as fringe figures is sympto-matic of a climate that refracts the fallout from Japan's "orgy of finan-cial speculation in the 1980s" by disciplining workers and leftists intoaccepting financialization as part of a neoliberalized social contract.

In "Escape Artists: Germany, Fortress Europe, and the Situation-ist Rescripting of Travel," Ole Gram interprets the avant-garde prac-tices of the Munich-based artist collective Bundesverband Schleppen& Schleusen, an ostensible "PR firm and lobbying organization" that"hijacks" corporate discourse and iconography. Their situationist styleof intervention ironically enunciates how the term mobility gains aprivileged place in a universalistic discourse about "globalization" aslong as it pertains to finance, technology, and commodities but not to"human capital." Gram revisits Peter Bilrger's Theory of the Avant-Gardeand Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle to foreground the per-formativity of Schleppen & Schleusen's advocacy on behalf of humanmobility and global capital flow over and against EU policies thatcriminalize migrant workers while occulting the exploitation of theirlabor. We conclude the volume with Driscoll's and Gram's contribu-tions because they move beyond an earnest literalization of Marxistuniversals while responding to Taylor and Morton's 2006 call to main-tain the visibility of labor in cultural theories of finance.

Notes1. Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation:The Politicaland Economic Originsof

Our Time, introduced by R. M. MacIver (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).2. Greta R. Krippner, "The Financialization of the American Economy," Socio-

economic Review 3 (2005): 173-208 at 181. She adopts this definition from GiovanniArrighi's The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power,and the Origins of Our Times(London: Verso, 1994).

3. Krippner, "The Financialization of the American Economy," 179-80.4. David Harvey, The


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TITLE: Introduction: Cultures of Finance: When the Crisis,

Which Was a Certainty, Becomes a Contingency

SOURCE: Cult Crit 65 Wint 2007

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Cultures of Finance

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