“On January 24, 2025, just four days after Trump’s official takeover began to wage catastrophe on American society and the world, Notnef Greco played a short live set at a garage space in downtown LA at the invitation of the California Institute of the Arts and in the context of an event titled Experiments in Listening.”
Notnef Greco has now released Live @ CalArts.
This review was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier.
G for Glossary: Some Thoughts on Finance Aesthetics as Cultural Logic
Arne De Boever
A Missing Term
In what follows I propose to reflect on a term that I consider to be missing from Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary, a book that one of the editors of this dossier, Mikkel Krause Frantzen, co-edited, and to which I contributed a term.
That missing term is the term “glossary” itself.
Indeed, I would like to posit that a critical glossary of the kind that Frantzen and his co-editors have generated—a critical glossary of finance aesthetics–is symptomatic of the financial era itself, part and parcel of the financial mindset. I posit this based on the number of books published in the field of critical finance studies that come with a glossary. I haven’t encountered this phenomenon in any of the other fields I’ve worked in, each of which are quite technical (as any academic field is perhaps bound to be). But finance really takes the cake: it seems that it is so abstract and complex in its language that almost every book that is published about it requires a glossary. Even if you’re unfamiliar with the field, you may have come across the phenomenon in popular culture about finance: Adam McKay’s film The Big Short, for example, compiles something like a glossary over the course of its narrative, splicing in segments in which certain financial terms are explained:
This glossary phenomenon also exceeds the realm of finance. In recent years, a remarkable lot of glossaries or glossary-like books have been published, making me wonder whether it’s not just finance but the world at large that has become so abstract and complex that more and more glossaries are needed. The glossary has become something like a cultural form, perhaps reflecting or producing something like a glossary brain as the symptom (if you want to talk not just critically but also clinically) of what’s been called “the information era” and “the network society”: our contemporary, highly digitized times dominated by a form of both input and organization that doesn’t narrate but merely counts, as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has it in his book The Disappearance of Rituals (2020). Going against the invitation of such a form, then, I propose to ask: what story does the glossary allow us to tell? What does it allow us to think?[1]
Glossary as Cultural Form
Readers of the Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson will recognize that kind of approach. First in an article published in New Left Review in 1984, and then later in a book published in 1991 with Duke University Press, Jameson presented “postmodernism” as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” (Jameson). A big, ambitious book that ranged across “culture”, “ideology”, “video”, “architecture”, “sentences”, “space”, “theory”, “economics”, and “film”, Postmodernism fit right in with some of the novels—say Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow or Roberto Bolaño’s 2666—that are considered textbook examples of the cultural logic that Jameson considers. If I bring up Jameson’s book, it’s not to engage the text in any detail but because the question it raises—what is the cultural logic that attends any given economic formation?—is important for thinking through our contemporary moment and the glossary’s role within it.
In the Introduction to his book Glossary of Cognitive Activism (For A Not So Distant Future)—another recent example of the glossary form–the artist and theorist Warren Neidich suggests that we are now living in late cognitive capitalism (he writes specifically of a “late stage cognitive capitalism”). That era, which brings “another transformation and crisis of labor and the laborer”, is one
in which the subject will become “unsituated” and agentless. No longer posed between sensation and perception, information arising, for instance, from the Internet and virtual displays, will directly engage with the brain’s higher cortical centers, like the frontal and parietal cortices. As such it will bypass the bidirectional sensory-motor-affective schemas, embedded in its thalamocortical networks, which had facilitated its relations to the material world in the past. As a result a non-thinking zombie controlled by streams of analyzed and activated data without free choice will emerge. This constitutes the endpoint of an ontogenesis of tool use that begins in aiding the laborer to accomplish their job faster and more efficiently to one that makes them obsolete [sic]. This is especially true for the cognitive laborer or cognitariat. (Neidich xi)
Let us accept this as a more or less adequate clinical description (from a neuro-aesthetic point of view) of our current economic formation. After Jameson—an “after” that Neidich’s own Marxist orientation in this passage and his Introduction at large invites–, one would then be inclined to ask what might be the “cultural logic” that attends that formation. What is the cultural logic of the late cognitive capitalism that Neidich diagnoses?
This is where the glossary comes in. Defined as “an alphabetical list of terms or words found in or relating to a specific subject, text, or dialect, with explanations”, a glossary is effectively “a brief dictionary”, and in that sense it has some connection to the encyclopedic form that is related to the maximalist novels of postmodernism that I mentioned before. (Lists, by the way, are a typical feature of such novels—consider, for instance, Bolaño.) Etymologically, “glossary” goes back to the word “gloss”, defined as “luster or shine on a smooth surface”; “a superficially attractive appearance or impression”. The verb “gloss over” for example—“to conceal or disguise something unfavorable by treating it briefly or representing it misleadingly”—is related to “gloss” and ultimately to “glossary”, a form of writing that thus, by its very name and in its very form, treats terms briefly, perhaps even in a superficially attractive way that looks smooth and shiny, but may in fact be hiding something else.
Those descriptions could also be applied to some of Neidich’s recent artistic work: say, The Statisticon Neon (2016-2020), a sculpture that in its various iterations includes many of the terms included in Neidich’s later glossary.[2]
In the sculpture, however, those terms are diagrammed on a wall, as the glossy realization of an artwork that looks shiny and lustrous, smooth even, but is in fact showing us through the diagram it provides the dark underside of our contemporary economic, political, and aesthetic era. It’s Jeremy Bentham’s troubling panopticon—in Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault’s diagram for disciplinary power (1978)–rethought for our age, and rendered in neon. There is a lot to unpack here, and a serious consideration of the glossary-form can guide us in that direction.
I mention all of this not to criticize Neidich’s artwork and book, but to draw out a dimension of those works that we would (after Jameson) do well to consider if we are interested in the cultural logic of late cognitive capitalism. Indeed, I want to propose that the glossary, and more broadly speaking the list, is a key component in that cultural logic, to the extent that the list-like form of Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary can be said to call up a veritable listomania that is the pathological condition of late cognitive capitalist societies—from the list of unanswered emails and text messages that awaits us when we turn on our phones in the morning (this is assuming—optimistically–that you had turned it off at night), to the X feeds we generate and follow, to Amazon’s suggestions for what we may want to buy next, to Spotify’s music streaming recommendations, to the episodes of television series waiting to be binge-watched (let’s just get it over with…), to—yes—books that read like lists.
It would be wrong, of course, to limit the form of the list to the era of what Neidich calls “late cognitive capitalism”. I already pointed out that as a phenomenon of late cognitive capitalism, the list can be traced back to postmodernism and the era of late capitalism that Neidich’s phrase references, and that was Jameson’s era of focus. But any consideration of for example literary lists, which are an ancient writerly device going back in the Western literary tradition to Homeric and even Biblical times (think of the ship catalogues in Book 2 of Homer’s war epic The Iliad or the genealogical list in Genesis 10 and 11), will immediately reveal the fallacy of uniquely associating the list to the era of late capitalism, and thus marking it as postmodern, as well. Indeed, and staying with the literary for now, lists also feature in realist novels, whose aesthetic is often placed in tension with postmodernism. Clearly, it simply will not do to locate the list in any particular literary period, or associate it with any particular literary aesthetic—late capitalist, late cognitive capitalist, or whatever.
And yet, there are ways in which the list, and specifically the glossary, stand out as a typical form of our time, to the extent that the form of our lives under late cognitive capitalism at times appears to be list-like, or glossary-like: doesn’t your life sometimes begin to feel like a list of brief impressions or superficial appearances that project the shine or luster of the smooth but in fact disguise something more troubling? Think of your Instagram account, for example; what it shows, but especially what it doesn’t. Much is glossed over in such a form of life. There is no overarching narrative—just a couple of keywords with explanations–, no diagram to bring it all together, but a mere list of terms or words found in, or relating to, a specific subject—and that subject is you. The only order available, in the glossary, is that of the alphabet.
And one could even go further than that. The listomania of the present may be transforming our very brains into organs that list rather than narrate, that gloss over rather than think through, that are associated with brief impressions and superficial attractions rather than in-depth engagements. Post-critical organs, if you will, rather than critical ones (and post-criticalism may be a good name for the cultural logic of our time[3]). It’s in this overall context, within these overall transformations, that our glossary needs to be situated. Glossary, then, ought to be read as a further realization of a cultural logic that is already clinically and critically present in a work like Neidich’s Statisticon Neon. But whereas the diagram in Statisticon Neon still provides some narrative of how the terms featured in it cohere—a narrative that Neidich also performs, as a key supplement to the work–, the book form of the glossary moves further in the direction of the mere list, a formal shift that solicits our careful attention.
In the field of what’s called “theory”, Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary is hardly the only recent publication to take the form of a list. I’ve already mentioned (and commented on) Neidich’s book. Emily Apter’s Unexceptional Politics also reads in this way, as a collection of loosely connected short entries that bring a change to the traditional format of the academic book (Apter 2018). It’s a form that goes back to Apter’s Against World Literature (2013), a book whose entire second part is constituted by entries that present themselves as “Keywords” (this recalls, of course, Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society). That book came out around the time that Apter’s translation and reworking of Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables was published (Cassin 2004), and it seems that the dictionary format somehow worked its way into Apter’s writing. Consider also Karen Pinkus’ Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary; or the edited collection Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking.
“Lists” are also a central stylistic trait of one current of contemporary theory, object-oriented ontology, where, according to Ian Bogost for example, they perform serious philosophical work. In his book Alien Phenomenology, Bogost discusses what he calls “ontography” “as a name of a general inscriptive strategy, one that uncovers the repleteness of units and their interobjectivity … Like a medieval bestiary, ontography can take the form of a compendium, a record of things, juxtaposed to demonstrate their overlap and imply interaction through collocation” (Bogost 38). “The simplest approach to such recording,” Bogost observes towards the end of his paragraph, “is the list, a group of items loosely joined together not by logic or power or use but by the gentle knot of the comma” (Bogost 38). He suggests in his chapter that the exploded-view drawing, invented in the Renaissance, is a kind of visualization of an OOO list in which “everything sits suspended” (Bogost 50).
This isn’t exactly the same as the glossary—but it is formally similar, there is an isomorphy here that deserves to be considered. And of course the question that I am asking is to what extent the list, as a philosophically serious and thus critical (or perhaps better, post-critical?) tool in OOO, is also a clinical symptom of the information era.[4]
While those examples of theorists working with lists or glossaries are chosen almost at random, the format seems widespread enough—and the attention that the list has received is large enough—to warrant my claim about the glossary as a cultural logic. One can think, for example, of Eva von Contzen’s “listology” project, which is supported by a grant from the European Research Council of 1.38 million euros over a period of five years.[5] It’s enough to make one wonder not so much whether academics can’t write books anymore (though this may be part of the condition we are diagnosing) but whether, in this new form of the glossary and the list that they have chosen, something like a cultural logic might be at work—the cultural logic of the very economic era that, in our glossary, the form of the list seeks to capture.
The spin on the glossary and the list that I’ve given so far (with the goal of provoking you a little bit, of course) is the pathological one—the glossary or list as the pathological form of the era of late cognitive capitalism. But although pathology is part of the glossary-form and the list-form, it cannot tell the whole story. For when we’re putting together or contributing to a book like Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary, we obviously do not only think of the glossary as a pathological form but also as a kind of tool or even weapon that enables activists to find a new poetry, a new common language to talk about our contemporary situation (or un-situation, as Neidich puts it). It’s also the first step towards a narrative moment that we hope will follow.
Towards a Glossopharmacology
By thinking of the glossary as a kind of “arsenal of concepts” (as Bernard Stiegler might allow us to call it; when he uses this phrase in his work, he has in mind concepts for artists in particular, artists who are working “neganthropically” [Stiegler’s coinage] against what he calls the entropic dissipation or fall of spirit in the digital era), I am now trying to draw out the other side of the glossary-form’s politics. I do so in light of the recent revival of a “political formalism”, a thinking about the politics of forms—rather than about the politics of formlessness that is characteristic of much “theory”.[6] (Stiegler’s neganthropy is precisely about that: about thinking form against entropic formlessness.) That means to think across aesthetics and politics to assess the positive/ affirmative politics of forms—in this case, the politics of the glossary-form and, by extension, of the glossary brain. I mention Stiegler because the glossary-form is important for thinking what I would characterize as the pharmacology of the late phase of Stiegler’s work. I am trying to think a pharmacology of the glossary, a glossopharmacology, which is operative in Stiegler’s own work.
Consider, for example, how in Stiegler’s book The Neganthropocene there are many indications that the author was perpetually running out of time. “Had there been time” (Stiegler 2018, 102), “but, unfortunately, I’m out of time” (Stiegler 128), “If we had more time” (Stiegler 2018, 129), and again “If we had more time” (Stiegler 2018, 131): these are just some of the phrases that punctuate the talks that are collected in this book. Reading the talks that Daniel Ross edited, translated, and introduced for this collection, one gets the impression that one of the reasons Stiegler was running out of time was the burden, if I can put it that way, of his thought itself and especially of the elaborate terminology in which and through which it developed. The term “neganthropocene” is part of that terminology; but any page in the book by that title will reveal many more such terms, with sentences at times appearing to have been put together with jargon alone:
The epiphylogenetic supplement thus inscribes a bifurcation in vital différance, where it makes an exosomatic différance, which in the Upper Palaeolithic becomes that which makes a noetic différance—by passing through hypomnesic tertiary retention. (Stiegler 2018, 221)
Always the poetic inventor of philosophical concepts, Stiegler had by the time of the Neganthropocene lectures arrived at a stage where his reliance on what preceded, the fact that when he was speaking he was developing further a thought that had already started, actually risked to prevent him from getting something new across, especially to those not familiar with his work. A lot of his time was taken up by explaining what he had already accomplished (often with reference to other lectures given elsewhere, and sometimes with reference to unpublished work), and introducing his audience to the vocabulary of his thought. The beginnings of his lectures often involve a summary of what’s preceded (in no less than “12 points” [Stiegler 2018, 93], for example); for the non-initiated, they can come across as a language lesson. To think with Stiegler one has to learn Stieglerese. Anyone who has tried to write about or teach the late Stiegler—consider unpacking the passage I quoted about with a group of students–will know what I mean.
I remember this very issue—Stiegler’s terminology, the increasingly intricate language of his quickly developing thought (he wrote and published at a rate that made some of his fellow philosophers suspicious about the quality of his work)—being a topic of after-hour garden conversations at Cerisy-la-salle, when both Stiegler and I were guests there for the “Décade” on the work of Gilbert Simondon. This was around the time that Stiegler’s book Pharmacologie du Front National had been published (Stiegler 2013). It came, tellingly, with a “Vocabulaire d’Ars Industrialis” (written by Victor Petit), a glossary of the key terms not just of the political organization he co-founded but also—by extension—of his thought. This was also around the time when he was starting his philosophy school in Épineuil-le-fleuriel, and both the book on France’s National Front (now National Rally) party and the plans for the school revealed a concerted effort to translate his thought to readers not necessarily specialized in academic philosophy.
The addition of a glossary indicated, however, some sense of concern about accessibility: developing a new thought always requires developing a new language, but Stiegler seems to have realized that his work, as a poetic intervention, had begun to spiral terminologically to such an extent that it may have reached a high step-in threshold that prevented him precisely from getting the general reader on board. One could consider this an example of how the tertiary retention of poetic philosophical writing operates pharmacologically to produce the very opposite of the noesis to which it aspires. And if you didn’t quite get that: that’s precisely my point. We’re arriving at a phase of thought in which the terminology becomes a burden, and a glossary is needed. It’s the thin line between a conceptual arsenal and the potentially pathological aspects of a list of concepts—and this is where I would situate the financial glossary.
So, as a kind of provisional conclusion, I would say that broadly speaking, and by way of the glossopharmacology that I’ve developed after Stiegler, an analysis of today’s listomania—of the ways in which our lives, and possibly our very brains, are starting to operate in the glossary-form—would need to include two components, one clinical, the other critical.
This is not the life of the book—of the narrative or the thought that demands a longer attention-span. We are in the realm of tweet-fiction, of the short story at best, of the novel reconceived as a collection of loosely connected tales that are written with an eye on their future adaptation into a television series. No need to set aside a few hours to dedicate to reading. The time between two zoom meetings or subway stops or art openings will do. It’s the glossy life, made up of keywords that are good conversational value at the next vernissage or finissage.
Not all of this is bad. Laments about the effect on our attention-spans of significant transformations in the media are legion; there were the same warnings when the novel itself was becoming established as a genre (see, for example, Carr). In some ways this is just the progress of time, the transformation of the contemporary media-scape, and its concomitant effects on our lives and brains. In some ways it is about the always-in-progress generation of our future brains, which will inevitably be different from our past brains (how could it be otherwise?). Not all of this is uniquely tied to the era of late cognitive capitalism—the short story, for example, obviously exceeds that time period. In many ways, then, all of this is normal, and nothing to worry about; criticisms of the glossy life may just be conservative and cantankerous responses to the inevitable progress of time. Consider me guilty.
To sum up: in glossaries, editors and authors lay out our time’s terms of analysis, and hint at how they are connected (how they are to be diagrammed, or put together as part of a narration). Part symptom, but also pitched as part of the solution, glossaries seek to provide, then, something like a new, and unknown language, a kind of glossolalia, that would open up an understanding of our contemporary list-like, glossary-like, times, and enable a resistance to them. Glossaries realize such a project both through their content and their form. Importantly, the resistance they propose does not strike from the outside but from within. Rooted in a deep understanding of what it counters, a critical glossary would not be a knee-jerk response that simply rejects what it resists. Rather, it promises to take on that very thing in order to assume agency over it, and make it ours.
Arne De Boever teaches contemporary comparative fiction, literary theory, and aesthetic and political philosophy in the School of Critical Studies and the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at the California Institute of the Arts. His most recent book is Post-Exceptionalism: Art After Political Theology (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). De Boever is part of the boundary 2 editorial collective and co-edits boundary 2 online.
References
Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. New York: Verso, 2013.
—. Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic. New York: Verso, 2018.
Boever, Arne De. “Giorgio Agamben’s Political Formalism”. Distinktion 23: 2-3 (2022): 259-273.
Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. New York: Norton, 2011.
Cassin, Barbara. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Ed. and Trans. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, Michael Wood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome and Lowell Duckert, eds. Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1978.
Han, Byung-Chul. Saving Beauty. Trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity, 2018.
—. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity, 2020.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Kornbluh, Anna. Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. New York: Verso, 2023.
Liming, Sheila. “Fighting Words”. Los Angeles Review of Books, 12/14/2020, accessible: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/fighting-words/.
Neidich, Warren. Glossary of Cognitive Activism (For a Not So Distant Future). Berlin: Archive Books, 2019.
Pinkus, Karen. Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Stiegler, Bernard. Pharmacologie du Front National. Paris: Flammarion, 2013.
—. The Neganthropocene. Ed. and Trans. Daniel Ross. London: Open Humanities Press, 2018.
Tucker-Abramson, Myka. “Make Literary Criticism Great Again”. boundary 2 online, 09/26/2018, accessible: https://www.boundary2.org/2018/09/myka-tucker-abramson-make-literary-criticism-great-again-review-of-david-alworths-site-reading-fiction-art-social-form/.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
[1] Here it is worth noting the importance of the list, a term that will appear in my argument momentarily, in Anna Kornbluh’s work on immediacy as the “style of too late capitalism” (Kornbluh 175ff). Indeed, I have no hesitation in positing the glossary as one indication of immediacy as the style of our time.
[2] The sculpture has various iterations. For the work from 2016, see: https://www.warrenWarren.com/01-Warren-statisticon-neon-2016/. For the work from 2020, see: https://vimeo.com/496263760.
[3] I am evoking the rise of post-critique in academic discourse. For two critical takes, see: Tucker-Abramson, 2018; Liming, 2020.
[4] We shouldn’t forget Bogost’s ties to video-game culture and the centrality of the Cold War as a reference point in his thought–especially in Alien Phenomenology, which begins with a Cold War story from Bogost’s childhood. It would be interesting to place next to each other Neidich’s Statisticon Neon, Bogost’s exploded-view drawing (with its Cold War resonances), and a work by Jackson Pollock, and note the CIA’s interest in Pollock’s so-called automatic painting–because of the patterning that it produced. So there are connections here between Pollock, the Cold War moment, and algorithmic governance in the information era that interests Neidich.
[5] See: https://www.listlit.uni-freiburg.de/.
[6] On this, see Boever 2022.
This Intervention is published as part of the b2o Review’s “Stop the Right” dossier.
Modernity, Lebensreform, and MAGA’s Grassroots: On Some Economic Contradictions of Trumpism
Matti Leprêtre
The MAGA movement presents a paradox: it rails against globalization and modernity, yet it is led by billionaire capitalists who thrive on both. This contradiction echoes the coalition that brought Hitler to power—a mix of industrial elites and working- to middle-class Germans drawn to the reactionary, anti-modern rhetoric of the Lebensreform. The same fractures that ultimately weakened that coalition could be exploited today to challenge MAGA’s hold on power. But if left unchecked, its path is just as clear: when economic promises fail, all that remains is the persecution of minorities.
*
Trump, Hitler, and Weimar: Rethinking the German-American Parallel
There is something deeply amiss in the way the memory of Nazi Germany is invoked in contemporary debates about American politics. Trump’s bid for a second term has inspired countless comparisons between him and Hitler—comparisons that, aside from their historical dubiousness, merely stimulate MAGA supporters’ libidinous drive to trigger woke liberals. Instead, there is value in fixating not on the Nazi era from 1933 onward, but on the more fluid, transformative period of 1920s Germany.
In that turbulent decade, a wounded cultural pride lingered after the 1918 defeat, and deep anxieties about losing world-power status permeated society. Gender-based challenges to the patriarchal order, the growing assertion of gay rights, and other emancipation movements met with fierce resistance from traditional authorities and conservative reactionaries. Most importantly, the profound crisis of modernity caused widespread anti-modern sentiments—all of which eventually coalesced into the conditions that allowed the Nazi Party to seize power.
There is little doubt that dealing with the first element—hurt cultural pride—is the chasse gardée of the Republican Party, while the struggle for emancipation remains the preserve of the Democrats. As an outsider, I have long been struck by how readily the U.S. left has allowed anti-modern sentiments to be co-opted by Republicans, with figures like Steve Bannon at the helm.
The caution is understandable. Anti-modern sentiments have long been associated with the rise of fascism in Europe and Nazism in particular. Yet before these ideas became the exclusive domain of the Nazis, they circulated freely across the political spectrum for more than half a century. They not only fueled nationalist and anti-Semitic currents but also underpinned a proto-environmentalist critique of modernity as part of a popular movement that came to be known as the Lebensreform.
Antimodernity before Fascism: The Ambivalent Heritage of the Lebensreform
Emerging in the latter half of the 19th century in a rapidly industrializing Germany, the Lebensreform (or reform of life) movement chiefly championed the “return to nature,” in a country where factories mushroomed across the landscape. For some, this “return” meant rejecting modern medicine in favor of natural remedies; for others, it meant embracing long hikes in the mountains; and for still others, it meant seeking an alternative to a worldview that treated nature and humanity as mere cogs in the economic machine.
Though largely driven by the bourgeoisie, the movement mounted a sharp critique of globalization, the dehumanization of factory labor, and the environmental devastation wrought by capitalist accumulation—even giving birth to Germany’s first utopian communities. For all these reasons, the Lebensreform has been described as the matrix not only for Nazism but also for future environmentalist and anti-globalization movements.
As a historian of Germany, I have always been struck by the parallels between the Lebensreform critique of globalization and the rhetoric of the grassroots of the MAGA movement. The far-right’s critique of “globalists” finds a clear parallel in the Lebensreform’s disdain for the emerging globalized world; and Bannon’s scathing attacks on technological progress, Elon Musk, and the “broligarchs” are reminiscent of earlier Lebensreform-ist critiques of technological advancement. Likewise, the widespread rejection of academic medicine and science—exemplified by the nomination of Robert Kennedy Jr. as Health Secretary—bears an uncanny resemblance to the alternative medical views championed in Germany a century ago. Yet, because of their common historical root in the Lebensreform, these elements also appear in leftist anti-globalization movements.[1]
Beyond Cultural War: Reclaiming the Critique of Globalization
I am not equating anti-globalization leftist movements with MAGA, nor suggesting that an alliance between the two is possible or desirable at this point. MAGA’s anti-modernity departs sharply from the traditional leftist critique—with its crude racism, nationalism, Christian fundamentalism, and mysticism. Yet these tensions were already present in 1920s Germany, and largely because the German left failed to harness these popular energies, a significant portion of the movement fell into Nazi hands. This historical precedent suggests that if a new left is to succeed where the old faltered against the far right, it should develop a critique of globalized capitalism able to prevent the growing number of those left behind by globalization from joining MAGA, or even capture the grassroots energies now under the MAGA banner.
For that, the left has a rich political repertory to draw upon. The critique of globalization and capitalist modernity has never been primarily a far-right one. From the first utopian communities to the “small is beautiful” movement of the 1970s, from Ivan Illich’s critique of biomedicine to the Our Bodies, Ourselves of the Boston Women’s Health Group Collective, from the anti-G8 protests of the 2000s to post- and decolonial propositions for finding an alternative to—or even an exit from—modernity, a range of options exists, more or less appealing, more or less viable today, but all worth considering for the emergence of a New Left. What is certain is that discarding the slightest critique of academic medicine as a conspiracy theory, scorning even the smallest enthusiasm for a life lived closer to nature as reactionary, and claiming to be “progressive” at all costs in a world so deeply embedded in a crisis of modernity will only seem repulsive to the growing number of people who see techno-industrial progress and globalized capitalism as the main cause of their torment.
It is only a question of time before MAGA’s disparate coalition begins to disappoint its working- and middle-class members. A coalition built around an omnipotent, transhumanist tech billionaire and a cadre of like-minded oligarchs will most likely do very little to address the real impacts of globalization and technological change on millions of American workers. Trump’s wavering stance on tariffs reflects this very contradiction: every time he tries to deliver on the aspirations of his working-class base, he is reined in by the cast of oligarchs he ultimately serves. To conceal this, the oligarchs have to double down on the one fight in which they can seem to stand with “the people” against “the regime”—cultural war. In effect, the only arena in which the Trump administration can thrive is in the persecution of minorities.
This, too, was the case in 1920s Germany. The coalition that eventually propelled Hitler to power brought together Lebensreform-inspired anti-modern peasants, factory workers, and middle-class employees, alongside wealthy industrialists terrified of the rising tide of communism and emancipatory movements.[2] This uneasy alliance forced the Nazis to adopt a vehement anti-modern rhetoric to placate their grassroots supporters, while simultaneously embracing cutting-edge techno-industrial policies and deepening the logics of global capitalism. Even the Nazis’ de-globalizing measures emerged only when war loomed and autarky became a national security imperative. Their only ideological common ground was the cultural war they waged against emancipatory movements and, most notoriously, against ethnic and religious minorities—a war that would ultimately pave the way for the Shoah.
So far, Democrats have largely fallen into the trap of fighting Republicans on the terrain of cultural war, the only domain in which MAGA’s coalition remains united. While there is indeed an urgency in responding to the Trump administration’s “flood the zone” strategy and its constant targeting of minority rights, history suggests that a more promising strategy would be to stop fighting solely on the terrain of values and start exposing the internal fractures within MAGA’s vision—particularly its conflicting ideas about globalization, technology, and the meaning of life and work. At the same time, they must put forward viable alternatives; ones that embrace more localized, low-tech ways of living.
An Uncomfortable Dialogue: Lessons from the Yellow Vests
Engaging in a dialogue with people currently attracted by MAGA’s anti-modern rhetoric might feel uncomfortable at first. In France, the left faced a similar unease in 2018 when the Yellow Vest movement erupted. Initially a reaction against an oil tax, the movement soon broadened to encompass grievances common to MAGA’s grassroots—demands for a decent life in one’s village, resistance to the concentration of services in big cities, a rejection of unrestrained globalization, and a critique of the ultra-connected, ultra-mobile elite’s way of life. In retrospect, it became clear that the movement had emerged from those left behind by globalization.[3] The French left, initially repulsed by the protests—deeming them the product of politically illiterate people with no clear views on immigration, gender politics, and ecology—gradually joined the movement, imposing leftist slogans and even sidelining its more overtly far-right, violent elements.
The convergence was by no means easy. A sensible component of the Yellow Vests eventually turned back to the far right as the movement faded—partly due to quasi-military repression and partly because some of its most basic revendications were fulfilled. Yet this turn toward Marine Le Pen also occurred because the institutional left was unable to articulate a critique of modernity compelling enough to keep the Yellow Vests from falling into the open hands of France’s MAGA equivalent. As uncomfortable as this dialogue might feel, it is a necessary one.
Coda: What’s Left of the Left?
Debates after the election have focused on whether the Democrats should have leaned further to the left or more toward the center to win the votes they needed to secure victory. This assumes that political positions can be summed up along a single line from far right to far left. Yet, depending on the issues considered, there is sometimes less distance between an anti-globalization leftist activist and a MAGA grassroots supporter than between that same activist and a centrist Democrat. MAGA supporters may soon come to see that the strongest “regime” of all is the one that binds together the guardians of globalized capitalism—a regime spanning large swathes of both the Democratic and Republican parties, with Trump and Musk as its most zealous artisans.
One can only hope that the American left will have made its aggiornamento by the time this day comes, to welcome the disillusioned adherents of Trumpism. The Democratic Party’s current stance—as the last firewall between Trump’s erratic populism and Wall Street, and as the staunch defender of free trade and the post-1945 global economic order—raises serious doubts about the American left’s ability—or willingness—to reclaim a critique of globalization that should always have remained central to any party still dreaming of itself as the voice of the working class[4].
Matti Leprêtre is a Teaching and Research Fellow at Sciences Po Paris and a PhD candidate at the EHESS. His dissertation examines the history of medicinal plants in the German Empire from the 1880s to 1945. He trained in postcolonial studies as an undergraduate and earned a dual degree from Sciences Po and Columbia University in 2017. He has been invited to present his research at a wide host of institutions across France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, including Oxford and Harvard. His work has appeared in several edited volumes and journals such as the Journal of the History of Ideas. He is currently co-editing an edited volume and a journal special issue on the relationship between health, nature, and the pharmaceutical industry.
Works Cited
Chapoutot, Johann. Les irresponsables. Qui a porté Hitler au pouvoir ? Paris: Gallimard, 2025.
Gourgouris, Stathis. Nothing Sacred. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.
Porcher, Thomas. Les délaissés: Comment transformer un bloc divisé en force majoritaire. Paris: Fayard, 2020.
Siegfried, Detlef, and David Templin, eds. Lebensreform Um 1900 Und Alternativmilieu Um 1980: Kontinuitäten Und Brüche in Milieus Der Gesellschaftlichen Selbstreflexion Im Frühen Und Späten 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019.
[1] Siegfried, Detlef and David Templin, eds. Lebensreform Um 1900 Und Alternativmilieu Um 1980: Kontinuitäten Und Brüche in Milieus Der Gesellschaftlichen Selbstreflexion Im Frühen Und Späten 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019.
[2] Chapoutot, Johann. Les irresponsables. Qui a porté Hitler au pouvoir ? Paris: Gallimard, 2025.
[3] Porcher, Thomas. Les délaissés : Comment transformer un bloc divisé en force majoritaire. Paris: Fayard, 2020.
[4] For a recent example of what a leftist criticism of globalization could be, see Gourgouris, Stathis. Nothing Sacred. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.
This post is Part Three of “The Bangladesh Chapter” of the b2o review’s “The University in Turmoil: Global Perspectives” dossier.
How to Capture a University: Lessons from Dhaka
Shrobona Shafique Dipti, Naveeda Khan and Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury
Figure 1: Dhaka University.
The Cast of Characters
Sheikh Mujib, Founding father of Bangladesh
Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Sheikh Mujib, head of AL, and till recently Prime Minister of Bangladesh
AL, Awami League, the ruling party
BCL, Bangladesh Chhatra League, AL student wing, also referred as Chhatra Leaguers
BNP, Bangladesh Nationalist Party, opposition party
JI, Jamaat-e-Islami, religious party
Shibir, JI student wing
Hefazat-e-Islam, coalition of religious parties and groups
DU, Dhaka University
BUET, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
Universities in Comparative Perspective: Two Types of Capture
2024 will surely go down in history as the year that students in U.S-based universities revolted against their government’s stance on Gaza. Expressions of gratitude emblazoned on the tent roofs of displaced Gazans gave voice to an almost global appreciation of the students in the face of threats by university administrators. While for a bit it seemed that university campuses were the last bastion of free speech in the U.S., the subsequent attacks by police on students at the behest of administrators made clear that universities in the Global North were already captured spaces and had been for a long time. Between zealously grown and protected endowments, entrenched boards of trustees, and administrative bloat, faculty, students, research and teaching had long been mere excuses for the existence of corporatized universities.
In other parts of the world this pernicious combination of liberalism and capitalism has not quite set in the same way, although there are some indications that it may yet do so, judging by the growing numbers of private, for-profit universities in places where capital is rapidly accumulating, such as China and India. Consider, for instance, the case of Bangladesh. Here public universities, such as Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) and Dhaka University (DU) – both British, colonial-era institutions – are still hallowed places of education and training, where teachers are respected, and young Bangladeshis strive to get admission to better their life chances. This has remained the case even as the Bangladesh economy has turned rapaciously capitalist, private universities steal away teaching talent, and university coffers are depleted, with a baleful impact on infrastructure and services.
But it is not the case that universities of Bangladesh are free of capture. The capture is just of a different kind than that by capital. Historically, university students, most notably at Dhaka University, have been associated with anti-colonial and nationalist politics. Since Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971, political parties have evolved student wings that carry out a version of national politics on campus. Depending on which party is in power, their equivalent wings dominate in universities, extending into higher education the politics of patronage and insinuating themselves into the lives of students.
Given this scenario, it was quite shocking to most that the 2024 Student Anti-Quota Movement, very clearly critical of the government headed by the Awami League (AL), started from Dhaka University, which was at that point very much under the thumb of the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL), the student arm of the ruling party. Given this unlikely development, it is incumbent upon us to inquire how a space as state dominated as Dhaka University could also be the site of an anti-state revolt. It requires us to inquire how the BCL’s vice grip upon the campus may have created the conditions of possibilities for its downfall. The battle within the university grounds on July 15th, 2024, when the Awami League let loose BCL students upon peers involved in the Anti-Quota Movement, an encounter which ended in considerable bloodshed, death, and the chilling images of Chhatra League men in helmets with hockey sticks bearing down on unprotected bodies – often with the support of law enforcement authorities –will probably serve for all time as the moment when Bangladesh civil society realized that the Prime Minister and her party had gone mad.
In Part Three of “The Bangladesh Chapter” of the b2o review’s “The University in Turmoil: Global Perspectives” dossier, we explore the spatial experience of the university as a captured space, that is, how the AL-led government and its student wing came to take over the space of the university, before turning in our next contribution to how this space was reinhabited to launch a movement against the state. We hope that getting a sense of the lay of the land may provide a glimpse into how small incursions into space becomes a full-throated capture of every domains of existence, including the imagination, and what living under active oppression feels like while one is trying to simply go about the business of getting educated.
Mapping Dhaka University
Dhaka University occupies a central location in the capital, on the way from the older residential neighborhoods of west Dhaka to the business district in the east, but which, crossroads though it may be, still feels like a haven, thanks to its wide roads, tree-lined avenues and historic buildings set back from the roads. In this section, we provide in three maps an overview of the location and layout of the university before homing in on the monuments that dot its landscape and that provide an important vantage on how students have been central to politics in Bangladesh, for better or for worse.
Map 1.
The first map shows the form of the university area and its placement within the heart of downtown Dhaka. We see that it is relatively green, indicating trees and parks in its vicinity, such as the Ramna Park, a site of romantic liaisons, sports, and other leisure activities. Otherwise, very densely occupied neighborhoods and areas throng the campus.
Map 2.
The second is a road map of the University. When we zoom into it, we see that the campus is overlaid by four roads, although university buildings spread out beyond these thoroughfares: the New Elephant Road to its north, Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue/Abdul Gani Road somewhat to its east, Nilkhet Road to its south and Azimpur Road to its west. All four of these roads are busy commercial thoroughfares and sites of important student mobilization.
Map 3.
The third map is a creation of the graphic art group Dhakayeah, known for producing images of urban and semi-urban areas of Bangladesh – visual pastiches, suffused with elements of the past, espousing a certain romantic view of Bangladesh as both familiar and lost. The pale green color palette reinscribes this view. The image of a woman in a white overcoat and that of a woman in a sari perusing a book alongside the image of a man sitting on the grass looking at something or the man playing football puts forward the university as a co-educational space. While we are alerted to the distribution of educational buildings through icons indicating laboratories, libraries, science, art, etc., and we are also given the names and images of several historical buildings and cultural sites, such as Curzon Hall, Shahidullah Hall, Bangla Academy, National Museum. Among the residential buildings, the one for non-Muslims, primarily Hindus, Jaganath Hall, is indicated by the icon of the Hindu Goddess Saraswati, associated with wisdom, with her sitar and white goose.
On the Dhakayeah map we are pointed to the presence of notable monuments, such as the Central Shahid Minar (Martyrs Monument), the 1963 national monument to the martyrs of the 1952 Language Movement composed of five forms of white pillars and arches. There is the 1979 sculpture of three freedom fighters holding guns, including a woman, titled Aparajeyo Bangla (Unvanquished Bengal) to commemorate the 1971 liberation struggle. The Anti-Terrorism Raju Memorial, composed of men and women looking outwards while forming a circle with interlocked arms and hands, was created in the late 1990s to commemorate the student Moin Hossain Raju, killed while protesting terrorism within the university campus.
Figure 2, ©jagonews24.
The map represents several others, but inevitably omits many, as the campus is awash in monuments. One significant to the story of how the campus has come to be the resting place of the memories of violence faced by the country’s young is called the Road Accident Memorial, unveiled in 2014 and representing the car crash that killed the Bangladesh filmmaker Tareque Masud and his companions in 2011. These memorials, like others, indict the country’s two major political parties, the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), for their reigns of violence and neglect of student safety. These monuments were once counterpoised by large murals of Sheikh Mujib, the founder of Bangladesh, and Sheikh Hasina, his daughter and Prime Minister of Bangladesh until 2024, on the pillars of the Metrorail. The murals were defaced during the Anti-Quota Movement (figure 2), but are worth keep in mind, as we note how monumental sculptures and images indicate the diverse political strivings of the university students.
A Recent History of the University, 1990s-2020s
To understand our story of the capture of the university by the ruling party, and the seeds of unrest that this planted, it would help to trace the recent history of Dhaka University from 1990 to the present. In the early part of the period, we see students becoming involved in national movements to depose a dictator, but also teachers and administrators getting politicized. In the later part of this period, we see the student wing of the ruling party consolidating its hold on the university with the aid of senior administrators. We also see the university expelling all other student parties across the political spectrum.
1990 stands out as the year in which a broad swathe of civil society organized to lead a movement against the standing military leader turned dictator, General Ershad. Students at Dhaka University were part of this movement. What is particularly noteworthy in the decade following Ershad’s being forced out of power was the entrenchment of teachers within national politics by means of the university. Until the 1990s, it was students who had played a conspicuous role in national politics through the student wings of various parties, but the 1990s brought party-linked teachers’ organization to the fore: the BNP-backed teachers of Shada Dol (White Party), for instance, or Awami League-backed teachers of Nil Dol (Blue Party). The students remained markedly more influential than their teachers within this changing dispensation; it was students, for instance, who secured positions for teachers, such as those of the vice chancellor, proctor and hall provosts. The teachers expressed their gratitude through shielding and protecting students from criticism and the repercussions of their violent acts.
The next two decades, the period from 2000 to 2019, saw the steady encroachment of the state into the university, leading to growing political influence over university governance, including the dispensing of justice. One event that especially colored this period was the 2010 murder of Abu Bakar, widely regarded as a student of great promise, who was killed during clashes between two Chhatra League factions fighting for control over access to a room in a residential hall referred to as a “hall seat.” Despite overwhelming evidence, the students accused of his murder were acquitted, and the victim’s family was not even informed of the verdict. Even the President of the country ignored the family’s appeals for justice. Such incidents were in step with the state growing in power in the country more widely, and starting to perpetrate violence against its own citizens, in the form of enforced disappearances and illegal detentions.
Figure 4, ©Maciej Dokowicz.
Figure 5, ©JagoNews24. Scenes from Shapla.
Figure 6, ©Syed Zakir Hossain.
This period also saw the rise of sizeable movements in which university students, including seminarians, played a leading role. Two, the Shahbag Protests of 2013 and the Shapla Square Protests of the same year, were defining moments in the country’s recent history, driving home the cultural divides that marked the Hasina era. Locating themselves at one of the main entry points of Dhaka University, tens of thousands of people participated in the Shahbagh Movement, which were led by pro-liberation activists, aligned with Bangladesh’s bid for self-determination from Pakistan in 1971, and strongly supported by left-leaning Dhaka University students. These activists expressed their desire for the state to impose stiff sentences, including death, on those they considered war criminals for having sided with the Pakistan army in 1971, for having, that is, assisted in the violence that the army inflicted against East Pakistanis at that time. When the war criminal Abdul Quader Molla was handed a life sentence by the tribunal overseeing his trial, the movement demanded that he be sentenced to death instead. The movement thus served the state’s interests by pushing for the rigorous punishment of those seen as traitors to the nation – Molla’s sentence was transmuted, and he was promptly hung; it was also used by the state to suppress the political activities of the student wing of the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami’s student wing, and other groups within the university campus.[1]
This movement was followed by the Shapla Square Protests, led by Hefazat-e-Islam, an advocacy group consisting of religious leaders and students within the Qawmi Madrasa system, a privately run religious educational system parallel to the state-run one. They called for the adoption of a blasphemy law, citing perceived offences to religious sentiment caused by Shahbag protesters. This movement ended in a violent crackdown, with security forces brutally dispersing protesters. Even though Hefazat as a group backed the war crimes trials, which was used to persecute leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) Bangladesh, JI and its student wing Shibir, contributed heavily to the group, seeking common ground against the Awami League and a shared goal of integrating Islam into Bangladesh’s governance and laws.
The two movements, Shahbagh and Shapla, symbolized a deep political and cultural divide: Shahbagh was framed as upholding the spirit of 1971 (muktijuddher chetona), while Shapla was portrayed as anti-liberation (bipokkho shokti). This binary allowed the government to homogenize and demonize madrasa students and anyone visibly religious, such as those with beards and skullcaps, as enemies of the state. By constructing this division, the ruling party justified widespread repression under the guise of protecting the nation’s independence, a strategy that they continued for the next decade.[2]
While the Shahbagh and Shapla movements have provided the frame for political narratives since 2013, Dhaka University students also led the first version of the anti-quota reform movement that same year. Though overshadowed by the massive Shahbagh movement, anti-quota activism would return in 2018 and again in 2024 to challenge the established polarities of the nation’s politics, its divvying of the field between progressives and reactionaries, that framed the Awami League’s encroachment upon and the Chhatra League’s dominance on the DU campus and elsewhere.
The Micro-capture of University Space
Amid this growing capture and repression of the university by the state by means of its student wing, the entire social, cultural, and educational landscape of the university underwent a transformation. Chhatra League’s dominance extended beyond student politics, infiltrating academic and professional spheres. Academic opportunities, teaching positions, and even government jobs increasingly required loyalty to them. Many joined not out of ideological conviction, but as a means of survival: to secure protection from violence, gain access to institutional privileges, or ensure career advancement. But once they joined, they soon learned of the BCL’s mode of operation: the loyalty that it expected of its members and the incessant jockeying for power within the organization.
The president and general secretary of the Dhaka University branch of BCL were considered the most powerful positions within the branch, as these served as steppingstones to central leadership within the all-Bangladesh student party. So important were these two posts that both the national media and the wider student body watched to see who secured them. Those who aspired to political careers on the national scene often prolonged their studies artificially, declining to complete their degrees to hang onto positions of influence. Departments were organized to allow students to stay enrolled despite failing their exams multiple times. In fact, the longer one stayed at the university, the greater were one’s chances of rising to the top.
Students within the Chhatra League competed for these positions. Having control over hall committees, enjoying a monopoly over rackets enabling rent seeking and patronage, known locally as “cartels,” and cultivating close ties with the university administration all contributed to one’s prospects of rising through the ranks. And the path to leadership began within the residential halls. Political leaders often referred to their time in the halls as laying the foundation for their careers.
At Dhaka University, the number of students admitted often exceeded the available accommodations, leading to overcrowding. As a result, the university authorities had long ago stopped offering housing to first-year students, leading to tremendous insecurity for those coming from outside Dhaka or from poorer backgrounds, given the exorbitant rental costs in the capital. Hall leaders, backed by their loyal followers, consolidated power by securing the support of hall provosts and house tutors. Through such political maneuvering, BCL activists gained control over specific rooms, with Chhatra League leaders and their followers receiving rooms more easily.
The leaders typically had separate rooms with amenities, while students, depending on their patronage of BCL activists, were assigned spaces within rooms, called Gonorooms (mass dormitories), which housed 20-30 students, far exceeding their normal capacity. They were overcrowded, unsanitary environments, severely affecting students’ health and well-being. Nonetheless, the premium on space meant that they were sought after and served as spaces of control and political tutelage. For instance, students new to Chhatra League were required to attend Guest Room sessions, where they were instructed on so-called political courtesy, including how to show deference to student leaders. These sessions often lasted several days; refusal to participate often resulted in bullying and even physical abuse. Fear was pervasive, as the Chhatra League’s power was absolute as they had both impunity and deep resources to draw on to impose their will.
The 2016 death of Hafizur Molla, a student from the Marketing Department of Dhaka University, highlighted the harsh living conditions and political control exercised by the Chhatra League over students at the university. Molla moved into Salimullah Muslim Hall in January under the good graces of a Chhtra League activist, but was forced to sleep in the veranda, which some halls also use as makeshift living spaces. Less than a month after his admission, he contracted pneumonia and typhoid and died. His family and classmates claimed that his illness worsened due to the exposure to cold living in the veranda and being forced to attend Chhatra League nightly programs, including AL-led political processions.
This power over students and their residential lives extended to the food canteens in the halls. Canteen owners were required to provide food and stay open late to serve the leaders or else face beatings and assaults. According to an example provided by the newspaper Daily Jugantor, leaders ate food worth 18 lakhs of takas ($18,000) from the canteens between 2019 and 2024 without paying for it. In turn, the canteen owners passed on their losses to the students, who had to pay inflated prices for their food, while the canteen ownership saw a fast turnover.
Despite widespread awareness of the ongoing situation at Dhaka University and other campuses, one incident deeply shook the public. This incident occurred not at Dhaka University but at the neighboring Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), a campus traditionally known for its apolitical stance. On the night of October 6, 2019, Abrar Fahad, a second-year BUET student, was tortured to death by Chhatra League activists inside Sher-e-Bangla Hall. The attack was likely brought on by his Facebook post, which was critical of India. Accused of being affiliated with Shibir, the religious student wing – a common justification for violent hazing – he was severely beaten. CCTV footage later showed his lifeless body being dragged down the stairs, an image that quickly spread across the country through national media. In response to Abrar Fahad’s murder, BUET students launched a massive protest demanding justice and the banning of political activities on campus. This movement led to the BUET administration officially prohibiting student politics, marking an unprecedented step by an avowedly apolitical but also relatively passive administration, which now committed to quashing student influence within public universities.
Figures 7 and 8, Modhur Canteen, 1904 and Present.
The BCL’s mode of extending its influence over the campus was to capture sites that had historically been associated with the fight for freedom (of various kinds) and that retained symbolic importance within the history of the university. One such site, Modhur Canteen, was long associated with student social gatherings and political activism. Originally a dance hall in the garden house of a zamindar from Srinagar, on whose property Dhaka University was later built (figures 7 and 8), it would host the planning of significant student-led anti-government movements in 1948 and 1952. During 1971, Madhusudhan Dey otherwise known as Modhu Da, the man who served in the canteen, was shot dead by Pakistani forces. After independence, the canteen came to bear his name in recognition of his sacrifice. Its symbolic importance for student politics is indicated by the fact that it became the site of press conferences by various student wings.
Figure 9, ©Jannatul Mawa.
Figure 10, ©amarbarta.
Figure 11, ©Mehedi Haque.
Under the BCL the canteen became a site for the performance of power by their leaders. After gaining control of the space, its leaders arrived every day on motorcycles, revving their engines to produce an awful din. Their helmet-covered heads and shielded eyes gave them an ominous look. This look even acquired a certain iconic character (figures 9, 11 and 13). Modhur Canteen also served pragmatically as the site of BCL meetings. Factional infighting took place here in full view of passersby and those living close by (figure 10).
Another example of a space captured, and its original symbolism overturned was the Teachers-Students Center (TSC). The capture of TSC allowed Chhatra League to expand its scope from being a political force to asserting cultural hegemony, becoming the “Cultural Chhatra League.” TSC housed a cafeteria, beside which stood the Anti-Terrorism Raju Memorial Sculpture, a significant piece expressing the students’ struggle for spaces to learn without the threat of political violence (see section “Mapping Dhaka University”). TSC’s auditorium and rooms were allocated for various long-standing and popular students – film, IT, debate, etc. In time these clubs too fell under the control of Chhatra League. Club leaders had to be affiliated with BCL. This included the presidents of the film and debate clubs, which had once been the most independent-minded of the student clubs, generating high levels of cultural and political excitement, but which now operated under Chhatra League’s command.
TSC was once a stronghold of leftist political organizations. Even as the clubs fell under BCL control, they maintained some independence by putting on concerts, film screenings, and other cultural events. However, the rigged Dhaka University Central Students Union (DUCSU) election of 2019 (discussed below) brought about a drastic change, tilting the Center entirely into BCL’s camp. All funds allocated for cultural activities were appropriated by the BCL, which started organizing large concerts with massive banners and extravagant expenses amounting to lakhs of takas ($100,000s), both as a racket and to draw attention to their presence and power. Without any school funding, the leftist groups were forced to rely on crowdfunding. While the much-weakened leftist groups were allowed to stay on campus the student organizations affiliated with the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) were expelled from campus in 2010. The party was then allowed to participate in the 2019 DUCSU elections – and thus allowed back on campus in some limited way – because elections, even rigged ones, require opposition groups and BNP was deemed the most acceptable of the lot. Students affiliated with Jamaat-e-Islami and other religious parties were forced to hide their political identities or else were banned from campus. In fact, dissimulating one’s political identity became the norm.
Women in the BCL
Although there were women in the Chhatra League, they were often excluded from the image of Chhatra League politics, where leadership was typically associated with men – the kind of men who led motorcycle processions, exerted control through violence, carried out extortion, and exuded dominance by wearing biker helmets as though they were armor. Women’s spaces were also a site of BCL power politics, though of a muted kind. And while not free of the BCL’s clientism, they still provided the space for some iota of resistance.
As a resident of Ruqayyah Hall, one of us, Shrobona, witnessed firsthand how power operated in women’s halls. While the violent capture of student halls by Chhatra League members was rampant in men’s dormitories, women’s halls experienced a more subtle form of control. Rooms in each hall were designated for Chhatra League leaders—at least two to four per building spread across different floors. These rooms belonged to senior apus (sisters), each of whom had her own group of followers. Some of these followers joined the BCL willingly, hoping to advance in politics, while others were recruited for reasons of geography or because they were squatting and were vulnerable to intimidation. Women who were conventionally attractive and deemed obedient were often targeted for recruitment.
Every week or month, these women were required to meet with BCL leaders, who then selected a few to be introduced to party officials at the AL headquarters. Despite never holding major leadership positions, these women were often deployed to suppress protests. I remember one such incident when we marched to the Vice-Chancellor’s office to protest sexual harassment. There were around 200 students, yet Chhatra League mobilized nearly 2000 men and women to attack us – under the pretext of protecting the university administrator.
While residents were only allowed to stay out until 10 PM, female Chhatra League leaders could enter halls at any hour of the night. There were extravagant birthday celebrations of apu leaders. One such event went viral during the 2024 protests that led to Hasina’s downfall. In the footage, Atika, a BCL leader from Ruqayyah Hall, was seen celebrating her birthday in grand style, with the TV room lavishly decorated with flowers and followers chanting slogans, a festivity that seemed ill-judged at a time of national crisis.
Unlike men’s halls, where religious segregation was enforced (e.g., male students of minority religions had to stay in Jagannath Hall and were not welcome in the other halls), women’s halls accommodated students of all religious backgrounds. This encouraged a degree of pluralism. While BCL monopolized university-wide cultural activities – determining, for instance, who could or could not participate in sports, debates or music – Hindu festivals, such as the Saraswati Puja, were celebrated within the women’s halls, providing some spaces for socializing outside of BCL control.
Women’s halls were also frequently sites of protest, as students came to challenge the treatment of rooms as property and the partisan exploitation – indeed, extortion – of hall resources. During the fasting month of Ramadan, female students protested the unfair distribution of food, although dissent was soon suppressed by hall authorities threatening to revoke residence permits. One striking example of resistance to the consolidation of power within the hall emerged following the 2019 DUCSU election. Professor Zeenat Huda, the provost of Ruqayyah Hall, was accused of colluding with Chhatra League leaders in demanding Tk 21 lakhs in bribes for university jobs in the Class IV category, that is, lower administrative jobs. Two students posted on social media an audio recording of a conversation in which the demand was made. In retaliation, the provost canceled their legally allocated residential seats.
The 2019 DUCSU Elections: A Turning Point?
Figure 12, ©Maloy Kumar Dutta.
Figure 13, ©Reesham Shahab Tirtho
The Dhaka University Central Students’ Union had long been a crucial means of political engagement in Bangladesh for students. Sultan Mohammad Mansur Ahmed, elected as DUCSU Vice President (VP) in 1980 during the Ershad era, underscored the enduring importance of the union in shaping the political trajectory of Bangladesh. He remarked in 2019 that, “If we consider DUCSU only as the Dhaka University Central Students’ Union, its significance will not be fully understood. DUCSU has served as the birthplace of Bangladesh’s liberation struggle and all democratic movements. From the Language Movement to the fight for self-determination and independence, DUCSU has led every major political movement.” After Bangladesh’s independence, DUCSU continued to serve as a platform for political dissent, notably in the 1990s, when it spearheaded the student uprising that ultimately led to the fall of Hussain Muhammad Ershad’s military dictatorship, mentioned above.
There is a stark irony in the fact that DUCSU elections were regularly held during both the Pakistan era and General Ershad’s rule. However, after the 1990 uprising that toppled Ershad, the tenure of those who had been elected in 1990 was allowed to lapse without another election for 28 years. Between 2016 and 2018, left-wing and non-partisan student activists campaigned for elections to be reinstated, seeing these as a solution to the deteriorating conditions on campus. Through the DUCSU Chayi (We want DUCSU) movement, they organized protests, gatherings, and graffiti.
Surprisingly, after decades of inaction, the Awami League government agreed to hold Student Union elections in 2019, just months after the notoriously rigged national elections of December 2018. This was thought to be a concession, as demands for change had been gaining momentum on campus. The 2018 Anti-Quota Movement, led by Nurul Haq Nur, had launched a popular panel, Bangladesh Sadharon Chhatra Odhikar Songrokkhon Parishad (Bangladesh General Students’ Rights Protection Council). Meanwhile, a new student group, Shotontro Jot (Independent Alliance), emerged, consisting mostly of non-resident students from the science departments who claimed to be apolitical and sought a campus free of partisan influence. Leftist student groups also organized campaigns, addressing critical issues such as the entrenched system of loyalty-based politics (lejurbrittik rajniti), the overcrowded and exploitative conditions in Gonorooms (mass dormitories), and the poor quality of food in campus canteens. Their manifestos called for greater rights for students and a better quality of campus life.
Any hope for change was badly shaken when the Student Union began to resemble the discredited national election. The AL-government’s apparent concession to student demands appeared to be mere window dressing. For instance, on the night before voting, ballot papers were discovered hidden in a canteen storeroom. Students and candidates stood guard to prevent further interference, but BCL activists forcibly entered, clashing with hall tutors and teachers as voting descended into chaos. When students discovered rigged ballots in another residential hall, they demanded the provost’s resignation on the day of voting. Despite widespread protests, threats of boycott, and calls to halt the election, officials rushed through with the process and counted the votes.
To appease the students at large, the BCL strategically conceded the VP position to Nurul Haq Nur, the leader of the 2018 Anti-Quota Movement and a general position to a member of his party, while securing control over the remaining 23 positions. Upon his election, Nur visited the parliament in session and controversially praised Sheikh Hasina as the “mother of education.” His statement shocked many students who had hoped for continued resistance, reinforcing skepticism about whether any real change was possible within the existing political structure. But what became clear from the 2019 DUCSU elections was that student participation and protests directly challenged the dominance of the Chhatra League.
In Conclusion
Even in a space as thoroughly captured as Dhaka University, resistance fomented. As the gains from the previous 2018 Quota Movement were eroded back to nothing, above all through the 2024 High Court ruling that reestablished the hated quotas for the family members of freedom fighters, students in various universities took to protests. What such spontaneous protests showed more than anything else was that students maintained a belief in the power of collective action above all else. The monuments we spoke of earlier that dotted the campus of Dhaka University embodied this belief. And as we saw in the sketch of student politics over the past few decades, despite all efforts at repression by BCL, the space of Dhaka University was riven by unrest always just below its surface, materializing in intermittent protests. In effect, the July Movement of 2024 that toppled the Awami League government and its mode of student politics could be taken to be just one more protest along a long trajectory of such protests. We next move to the scene of the movement to explore how it became the means of undoing an authoritarian regime and the possible undoing of the state capture of the university campus.
Naveeda Khan is professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She has worked on religious violence and everyday life in urban Pakistan. Her more recent work is on riverine lives in Bangladesh and UN-led global climate negotiations. Her field dispatches from Dhaka in the middle of the July Uprising may be found here.
Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury is a campaigner working for the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association on climate, policy, renewable energy and human rights.
Shrobona Shafique Dipti, a graduate of the University of Dhaka, is an urban anthropologist and lecturer at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh with an interest in environmental humanities and multi-species entanglements.
[1] Through these trials much of the leadership of Jamaat-e-Islami was also executed. There were also torture and repression of students at this and other universities, such as Rajshahi University under the presumption that they were supporters of JI or Shibir.
[2] At the same time as the religious right was being suppressed, there was considerable concession to their demands. The 2018 Digital Security Act allowed in through the side door the surveillance and punishment of utterances deemed blasphemous by criminalizing any insult to Sheikh Mujib, the founding father of Bangladesh, and the Prophet Muhammad.
This text is published as part of a special b2o issue titled “Critique as Care”, edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, and published in honor of our b2o and b2 colleague and friend, the late David Golumbia.
Toll Roads and Gated Communities:
How Private Commerce Took Over the Public Internet
Adam Dean
“The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation” (Katz 2012).
When the Internet went private with the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, it was the metaphorical Wild West—the land-grab decade, where unknown companies popped up to claim untapped real estate in the form of domain names, and prospecting users invented pathways to share unlimited unlegislated copyrighted material. It was in this period that long-established telecommunications companies grew their existing infrastructure to deliver faster Internet to our homes, and a new generation of hosting companies were born. Those companies that got in early parceled out the Internet into what it is today—high-speed toll roads leading to gated communities. Decades later, when the problems with this model became noticeable to the everyday user, the FCC began to assert itself as regulator by establishing Net Neutrality, which limited the Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) legal right to control the direction and speed of Internet traffic for the everyday user. President Barack Obama called it, “…a victory for the millions of Americans who made their voices heard in support of a free and fair Internet” (2016).
That victory was short-lived. When those regulations were rolled back by the FCC in 2017, it was done under the banner of freedom as well. The title of the press release that introduced the rollbacks read: “CHAIRMAN PAI CIRCULATES DRAFT ORDER TO RESTORE INTERNET FREEDOM AND ELIMINATE HEAVY-HANDED INTERNET REGULATIONS” (Pelkey 2017). Then, in 2022, the FCC announced plans to support legislation to make Net Neutrality regulations law. Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said, “…everyone should be able to go where they want and do what they want online without their broadband provider making choices for them. I support Net Neutrality because it fosters this openness and accountability” (Perez 2022). That legislation, introduced that year in the House (H.R. 8573) and Senate (S.4676), which “expressly classifies broadband internet as a telecommunications service rather than an information service for purposes of regulation by the Federal Communications Commission,” never advanced in either chamber (Markey and Matsui 2021). As a result of this stall, the FCC under Rosenworcel’s Chairship voted to regulate the ISPs in three specific ways: 1) By prohibiting ISPs from blocking, throttling, or engaging in paid prioritization of lawful content, 2) By empowering the FCC with the discretion and ability to revoke the authorizations of foreign-owned broadband operators, and 3) By empowering the FCC to monitor and intervene in service outages (FCC 2024). Of course, the battle for a free internet didn’t end there. In January, 2025, the FCC’s jurisdiction of oversight was struck down in federal court (Bowman 2025).
Through all of this, the battle over Net Neutrality has been defended and opposed under the banner of freedom—on one side the freedom banner protects the everyday consumer/end user so that they can visit any law-abiding website without restrictions or throttling, and on the other the freedom banner protects the ISP’s interests to compete in an open marketplace, where, as traffic controller, the ISP can direct end users and restrict or promote sites and content in their business interest. But the Net Neutrality battle isn’t actually limited to these two sides—the FCC v. the ISPs—and at risk of defending those should-be telecommunications companies that deliver the Internet to our homes, this simplified two-sided battle distracts from another group of traffic controllers who have been given a pass. In caring for our public Internet, the deeper critique in this essay is of the true winners of the Internet land grab. Content curators like Google (Alphabet) and Facebook (Meta) are not, by the strict definition, ISPs, nor are they telecommunications companies, and so they would not have answered to the FCC even if the 2024 order had been upheld by the federal court. Instead, these commerce companies abide by the regulations set by the FTC despite their role as the replacement for traditional radio and television broadcast stations, charged with the responsibility to curate the daily news and entertainment options for 5.5 billion users each day while restricting access to those that do not pay with their personal data (Statista 2022).
In caring for the public Internet, this essay critiques precisely how the Internet was built with tax dollars and then given away to private content curators from whom the public now must rent. References made to the Internet throughout this essay are not meant to indicate published content in/on/across the Internet, but there should be some understanding that freedom of access to the Internet and freedom to access the information therein are coupled. While it is intuitive to assume access applies to both the same, there are different public and private partnerships with stakes in one or the other, and sometimes both, so their access challenges often differ. For example, Google does not have the ability to restrict access to a URL on the World Wide Web. A user can navigate directly to a website; however, most users search, even using the address bar to do so, and are subject to omissions made by the search engine in the result. On the other hand, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the international governing body of the domain names and has the technical power to revoke a website name from public access through its Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy. However, its regulatory power is restricted to enforcing the basic rules of the registry, such as cybersquatting and trademark violations (ICANN 2016). As an international governing body, ICANN is one example of the existing structure already in place to enforce Internet regulation, but apart from the FCC’s push for Net Neutrality, there is no U.S. regulation for how companies, such as Alphabet or the ISP, direct, divert, dissuade and restrict users as they navigate.
The Public’s Internet
“The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. … Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them” (Hertzfield 2019).
Much has been published on the Internet’s roots, through amusing intra-government memos on over-the-network etiquette, its truncated first transmission message “LO”[i], and its ties to the U.S. Military’s first air defense system S.A.G.E. Despite its establishment by the U.S. Department of Defense, the original Internet known as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was a means to tie together the nation’s most powerful computers at various research institutions. In short, in its origin, the Internet had no commercial appeal:
It is considered illegal to use the ARPANet for anything which is not in direct support of Government business … Sending electronic mail over the ARPANet for commercial profit or political purposes is both anti-social and illegal. By sending such messages, you can offend many people, and it is possible to get MIT in serious trouble with the Government agencies which manage the ARPANet (Stacy 1982).
While ARPA held oversight over its own network, it did not deter private companies from copying the technology, and copy they did:
A number of U.S. companies have also procured or are procuring private corporate networks utilizing many of the techniques developed for ARPANET. For instance, it was recently announced that Citibank of New York City has constructed (by contract to BBN) a private network very similar to the ARPANET. …A number of companies have taken advantage of the fact that the ARPANET technology is in the public domain to obtain the listings of the ARPANET software. (Bolt, Beranek and Newman Inc. 1981).
By 1980 taxpayers had invested billions of dollars in the Internet’s infrastructure, through research grants to public universities and the RAND Corporation from ARPA, the National Science Foundation and other government entities, but the handoff to private corporations was not formalized for another decade. In 1991 the High Performance Computing Act appropriated more than $1.5 billion from the National Science Foundation to “serve as the primary source of information on access to and use of the Network” (Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and Gore 1991). With the research directive still prevalent, computer science programs at UCLA, MIT, Stanford, Wisconsin and others received substantial funding toward the collective goal to provide high speed internet to the public. ISPs emerged and remained attached to the regulatory structure that came with the funding. But there were pockets of research that fell beyond the scope of ARPA—namely the organization and curation of the content published on the Internet and the potential profits in collecting and selling user data that were still untapped. While private ISPs worked closely with government partners to make the internet accessible to the everyday user, another group developed websites to host the traffic that was coming.
Google: Popularity is not Accuracy
Google began its success nearly two decades ago with this now infamous public promise to itself: “Don’t be Evil”—a mantra that helped the company become the most trusted search engine in the world. But what on earth did it mean? The phrase floated around Google in its early days, where buzzwords like accuracy, transparency and democracy were thrown around in every meeting. The phrase gained enough traction to be included in the young company’s code of conduct until 2015 when it restructured under Alphabet, Inc. Eric Schmidt attributes the phrase as “invented by Larry and Sergey” and talks about it often, including in his book, How Google Works, co-authored with Jonathan Rosenberg. Schmidt makes a strong case that it was perhaps a legitimate foundation for a code of conduct still in place at Google, or maybe not. As a guest on NPR’s quiz show “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me!” in 2013, Schmidt remembers a conversation with an engineer, as an example of this sincerity:
Well, it was invented by Larry and Sergey. And the idea was that we don’t quite know what evil is, but if we have a rule that says don’t be evil, then employees can say, I think that’s evil. Now, when I showed up, I thought this was the stupidest rule ever, because there’s no book about evil except maybe, you know, the Bible or something. So what happens is, I’m sitting in this meeting, and we’re having this debate about an advertising product. And one of the engineers pounds his fists on the table and says, that’s evil. And then the whole conversation stops, everyone goes into conniptions, and eventually we stopped the project. So it did work (NPR.org 2013).
So it did work, says Schmidt. And perhaps it did in some way create a subtle check at the brainstorming sessions, or perhaps it could have even been internalized by programmers and designers, who may have resisted subtle changes pressed by their sales wing. Perhaps. We can only know anecdotally what Google chose not to do, yet we can take a careful look at what it has done. In an interview for Logic magazine, Fred Turner, a prolific critic of cyberlibertarianism and tech utopianism, said:
About ten years back, I spent a lot of time inside Google. What I saw there was an interesting loop. It started with, “Don’t be evil.” So then the question became, “Okay, what’s good?” Well, information is good. Information empowers people. So providing information is good. Okay, great. Who provides information? Oh, right: Google provides information. So you end up in this loop where what’s good for people is what’s good for Google, and vice versa (Turner and Weigel 2017).
At the heart of the mantra is not whether Google is good or evil in abstraction, but that they curate what is good and evil for their users. Looking back at the company’s foundation, Brin and Page wrote in their famous paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, that PageRank would improve search quality, which is described really as keyword accuracy:
“Junk results” often wash out any results that a user is interested in. In fact, as of November 1997, only one of the top four commercial search engines finds itself (returns its own search page in response to its name in the top ten results). … Indeed, we want our notion of “relevant” to only include the very best documents since there may be tens of thousands of slightly relevant documents. This very high precision is important even at the expense of recall (the total number of relevant documents the system is able to return) (Brin and Page 2012).
The notion of “quality” is the first hint in the original writings that PageRank could quickly get caught between two competing goals: most accurate and most popular. The word “accurate” appears only twice in the document (and accuracy does not appear). First in reference to anchor text as providing more accurate descriptions than the pages themselves, and second to criticize a web user’s lack of specificity in keyword searches (“some argue that on the web, users should specify more accurately what they want and add more words to their query”) (Brin and Page 2012). Neither of these address the question, is quality accuracy, and is accuracy quality? But Brin and Page did not seek to answer this question in the original document, perhaps relying on a public trust—whatever their answer, it won’t be evil.
At the heart of Brin and Page’s famous paper is the argument that PageRank will bring order to the Web, and certainly it has done that if the public consensus is the indicator. Google’s search engine is the most popular in the world, with 80% of the desktop market share (Statistica Research Department 2022). Credit is due to the Internet pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee and John Postel, who organized the underlying system upon which Brin and Page could organize, and credit is due to Brin and Page for discovering that hyperlinks are the lexicon of the web and can be used not just as a map of the entire globe, but to create a hierarchy for all pages. What PageRank did that had not been accomplished previously, was determining the value of pages on the web by how they relate to one another. In essence, this is the voting system that determines which webpages are “the best”. As Brin and Page explain it in their paper,
These maps allow rapid calculation of a web page’s “PageRank”, an objective measure of its citation importance that corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance. Because of this correspondence, PageRank is an excellent way to prioritize the results of web keyword searches. For most popular subjects, a simple text matching search that is restricted to web page titles performs admirably when PageRank prioritizes the results (demo available at google.stanford.edu). For the type of full text searches in the main Google system, PageRank also helps a great deal (Brin and Page 2012).
They go on to explain the algorithm, which weighs and thus ranks pages according to not only the amount of links to the page but again the quality. This is the root of the democracy, as each page is a voter and is also in the pool to be voted for, and this is objective somehow. An earlier paper Brin and Page wrote with their advisor at Stanford, Terry Winograd, places this idea of PageRank’s inherent objectivity in the abstract, placing all subjective interpretation on users alone. It reads:
The importance of a Web page is an inherently subjective matter, which depends on the reader’s interests, knowledge and attitudes. But there is still much that can be said objectively about the relative importance of Web pages. This paper describes PageRank, a method for rating Web pages objectively and mechanically, effectively measuring the human interest and attention devoted to them (Brin et al. 1998).
Their very idea of a popularity ranking metric, which is measured in a way that “corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance” really means that each page has been cited by another page in the form of a hyperlink. And if we take a step back and consider that a person created the hyperlink, we are now in the loop that Fred Turner described. Who made the link? Someone that knows how to make links. Who decided how important that link was? Google. But the question this essay seeks to answer is not whether Google’s own judgment of evil is a proper measure, or even whether there is a notion of good and bad on which we’d settle. Making an argument for Google as good or evil would have to include their lesser-known contributions, like DeepMind, or the mobile Wi-Fi surveillance probe built into the Google Maps car, or lawsuits that charge the company with giving “unfair preference” to their own services and subsidiaries over those of their rivals. And we would have to talk about censorship and surveillance, both at the company’s own discretion and in cooperation with its regulators and partnership. All that, including the ethics of simultaneously controlling the information hierarchy and the ad revenue—AdWords and AdSense, which work hand-in-hand with PageRank—would be a long discussion of what is good, and what is evil, indeed. There is already a great deal of opinion on “Don’t be Evil” in popular media as well, so it’s safe to say that testing the morality of the mantra has been covered. What has hardly been touched, though, is the public trust in which Google is deeply embedded. Despite the widespread exposure of “Don’t be Evil”, there is some agreement, as indicated in number of users, that Google is trustworthy. It may be trust in accuracy, speed, convenience, or something else, but trust is the right word. The democracy that it is founded on, according to the original workings of PageRank, might even be a symbol of U.S. citizen trust in democracy itself. Many users may not know or consider the implications of the PageRank’s dependence, but there is significant implicit trust in its democracy, if the market share is the indicator.
But it’s important to note here that at best it’s a misunderstanding that Google is democratic, and it is not entirely clear that this was ever its purpose. It was certainly its key to the success of PageRank, but it was only the foundation. In addition to targeted search results weighing heavily on top of PageRank, the myth of the “objective” voting system has been trusted for two decades. Only in the wake of the 2016 election did the public really begin to take seriously the question: is the democracy rigged? Carole Cadwalladr reports on an ad hoc test in The Guardian, allowing Google’s autocomplete function to guide her in toward the most popular/accurate/quality results. She started with a simple keyword and allowed autocomplete to choose for her, and the results are shocking. She writes:
Google is knowledge. It’s where you go to find things out. And evil Jews are just the start of it. There are also evil women. I didn’t go looking for them either. This is what I type: “a-r-e w-o-m-e-n”. And Google offers me just two choices, the first of which is: “Are women evil?” I press return. Yes, they are. Every one of the 10 results “confirms” that they are, including the top one, from a site called sheddingoftheego.com, which is boxed out and highlighted: “Every woman has some degree of prostitute in her. Every woman has a little evil in her… Women don’t love men, they love what they can do for them. It is within reason to say women feel attraction but they cannot love men” (Cadwalladr 2016).
Cadwalladr hoped these were not the most popular/accurate/quality results, so she contacted Google and received the following response.
Our search results are a reflection of the content across the web. This means that sometimes unpleasant portrayals of sensitive subject matter online can affect what search results appear for a given query. These results don’t reflect Google’s own opinions or beliefs – as a company, we strongly value a diversity of perspectives, ideas and cultures (Cadwalladr 2016).
Jonathan Albright, Director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, studied this too. He created a list of 306 widely circulated fake news sites and followed the lexica, just as PageRank was designed to do (Albright et al. 2017). Essentially Albright revealed through the hyperlinks that there had been a vast movement to manipulate PageRank’s popularity-based results to favor this subset of pages. Understanding how this is done is the key to breaking any illusion that the PageRank democracy is representative of popular opinion. Pages vote for one another by the amount and quality of hyperlinks, which means, in oversimplified terms, the creator of the link submits the vote. Albright’s experiment shows clearly that democracy can be rigged, or even automated. This subset contained 23,000 pages and 1.3 million hyperlinks. It is very unlikely these represent the popular vote of people making the pages, and even more unlikely that it resembles the popular opinion of the searching public. Add to this the more recent and increasing deployment of Artificial Intelligence to aid in content curation and the immediate creation of webpages that are included in search results, and it is clear that Brin’s and Page’s original ideas about organizing the Internet by either popularity or democracy are dead.
Facebook: Move Fast and Break Things
Hierarchies of information are big business, as Google has proven. Like traveling, the business of digital information is not in the destination. It’s the journey. Page visits are the blue ribbon for the web. The almighty click has stripped away any attention to content itself. Facebook has a famous sign that hangs in its office. It is big red lettering that says, “Move Fast and Break Things.” Indeed, the symbol of the company’s take on “Don’t be Evil.” Facebook was, for at least the four years following its launch, a community closed to advertisers. This meant that content circulated within the community by account holders, posting on their own behalf more or less. Sharing information this way, whether it was news articles, cat pictures, or political opinions, could be traced back to a user. When Facebook launched its Initial Public Stock Offering on May 18, 2012, the community-curated content dynamic broke. Facebook transformed its entire platform and mission from giving “people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” into an advertising company “making the world more open and connected.” Under Meta, Facebook logs more than 2 billion daily active users (Dixon 2022). Facebook is popular for reasons that should be obvious by now; a cult of personality that so effectively brings like minds together with individualized pseudo-authority to “friend”, “like”, “unfollow”, “block.” This may be the source of the widespread success of content curation that has seated Meta among the top 10 most valuable companies in the world, but the content is no longer managed by the community of active users any more than the search results over at Google. The newsfeed now contains ads from outside the friend circle, and the ever-changing “Trending” section consists of popular news, selected by a concoction of user likes and shares, and Meta’s magic dust. What was once an exclusive friends network, with the “.edu” email address as its user criterion origin story, is now an advertiser-consumer matchmaking app. It is spelled out plainly in Meta’s Transparency Center:
Facebook’s goal is to make sure you see posts from the people, interests, and ideas that you find valuable, whether that content comes from people you’re already connected to or from those you may not yet know. When you open Facebook and see Feed in your Home tab, you experience a mix of “connected content” (e.g., content from the people you’re friends with or are following, Groups you’ve joined, and Pages you’ve liked) as well as “recommended content” (e.g., content we think you’ll be interested in from those you may want to know). We also show you ads that are tailored to you (Meta Platforms 2024).
As an aside, when auto-generating a citation for this webpage, the result is on point: “‘Log in or Sign up to View.’ n.d. Transparency.meta.com.” In short, the introduction of advertisers into the closed community of Facebook has sparked the downward spiral that we are struggling to reverse. Advertisers inside the social circle means an exchange of data, but it is not a free exchange. The data flows overwhelmingly in one direction. As we converse, like and share, the advertiser listens.
The Gated Community
As the leading two aggregators of unprecedented amounts of market research, these two companies effectively direct and manage what is accessible on the World Wide Web without having to take part in the ongoing battle for a neutral net. And, while the two companies gained credibility and user loyalty through long held outspoken advocacy of free and accessible information, their business models are now based almost exclusively on restriction. Users are contractually restricted to access only curated monetized content through their services, in exchange for opting in to a vast digital infrastructure of behavioral analytics. Most of the world accesses the Internet through Alphabet and Meta, having opted-in to participate as subjects of for-profit behavioral analytics, and we have been lured through their gateways on foundational promises of democracy and free information.
Despite these false promises, younger generations on social media may have never experienced a free Internet, where their clicks were not tracked, and we see the window for such a freedom actually shrinking further. ISPs have always been privy to our data, but have not been allowed to monetize it as the curators have. With the rollbacks on Net Neutrality protections, the ISPs could join the data free-for-all, but their entry is late in the game. Alphabet and Meta continue to expand the transactional design of their Internet, tightening the terms under which we all surf, and locking off the information they curate behind a login screen—the gated community.
Putting this together, everyday users must pay an ISP to access the Internet, then exchange personal data to search it, then log in to view and interact with one another on the most popular social media websites. There are still niche social and search companies that allow users to interact without the paywall, but the majority of users choose to pay the toll road to enter the gated community. Users still can choose to rent or purchase a domain in order to share their own intellectual property without having to grant permissions for the hosting party to monetize it, but so many users instead choose to post original content through their social media accounts, where the owners of those servers are within their users agreements to harvest and sell it.
The question of free space is just part of it. There is also the question of free information, which has been the main subject of this essay. When posting on social media, for example, we are led to believe that what we write is sent out to our friends, but we know that the property owner will decide that for us. Having a personal account on a social site is comparable to renting a house because it lets you be with your friends, but the landlord prohibits curtains, enters without asking, and sometimes takes your stuff. The restriction of information is at the discretion of the landlord, and there is no obligation, implied or written, that we have a role in this decision process. All information has restriction inherently, too. We know that if we click on a news essay, for instance, that publisher is under similar constraints. They must pay to let you enter their gate, come in their home and eat their food. A paywall is often how they do that, or agreeing to the cookies statement that pops up, or whitelisting to allow ads on your screen. The question emerges, if the information wasn’t free in newspapers, why do we expect it to become free on the Internet? In some ways, that’s a fair question, but what is unfair is the introduction of new gates to the community, each with their own tolls and taxes. It is not only the access point at which we arrive at the information. It is the service-oriented process of finding it. At one of the gates to the Internet community, you are asked, “what are you looking for?” The answer we give is the search query. You are not only given directions to the content (that would be the URL). We are given the door itself…the link directly to the information. The search engines do not promise to help us find the information. They promise that they have already found it for us. This has the makings of a utopia indeed, the world at our fingertips! But the search transaction is the exact opposite really. The queries deliver us to the information, not the information to us. The choice is narrowed down, organically we are told, so that we can choose from the very best sources related to our search. This is the trust we have in search. It is not that we used their service to find what we’re looking for within a myriad of information, it is that we were delivered to their preferred information based on the words we typed. That’s what targeting is.
It is safe to say that these companies have made the rules that suit their needs, and our choice is between their way or the highway. Opt-in culture is comparable to an entry fee at a movie theater, but you have to keep paying while you’re watching the movie. Given the backward progress of Net Neutrality, which may be an idea of the past, it is difficult to see a path that puts the freedoms of the everyday user over those of the ISPs and content curators. Though a solution that protects the everyday user’s freedom to use their public Internet feels quite out of reach at this time, it is at least worth declaring that there is one, and it is attainable, if only on the technical side. The solution to the problem is two-fold: First, the FCC can restore and extend privacy protections that were approved by the FCC in October 2016 but repealed under then chairman, Ajit Pai, in March 2017, however the cycle could continue if future chairpersons choose to roll them back again. Instead of limiting oversight power to the FCC, Congress can revisit The Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act of 2022, and this has the potential to solidify Net Neutrality into law. Second, Net Neutrality should go beyond the ISP, into the domains, where the content curators monetize the clicks. ICANN already acts as a licenser in assigning domains, and so it can enforce as licenser in accordance with Net Neutrality law, which should include a standard for “basic service” for companies in the business of mass information dissemination.
For the first solution, it’s important to make a distinction between the end-user license agreements (EULA) and privacy policies. EULA are not mandatory by law, and terms of service are fairly broad and unregulated. The most common types are explicit (clickwrap) and implicit (browser wrap). EULAs are common on the web and ubiquitous in OS software and mobile apps. While equally hostile and unreadable to the end-user, it is more pressing that a solution be found within the privacy policy documents, as they must by law directly address data collection and use. Privacy laws are already subject to federal regulations, however there is almost no regulation in effect at this time. Further, a user has no option to opt-out. That option would mean that you choose not to use the service in any capacity. Considering the requirements from employers for e-mail, as the most obvious example, the forceful nature of opting-in to keep your job or do your homework reveals the high costs of the information access hierarchy. As mentioned, a gradual step toward protecting individual privacy was made by the FCC in 2016, and should be expanded. The Broadband Consumer Privacy Rules, (approved October 2016 then repealed 2017) separated the standard all-or-nothing Opt-in agreement into the following:
Obviously, these rules aren’t broad enough to shake us free from Alphabet’s and Meta’s information headlock, but it is the place to start. The ability to select from tiers of service might sound problematic, since it is actually adding another hierarchy on top of the hyperlink hierarchy Google has put in place for us. However, the tiers of service has an immediate and measurable improvement to all-or-nothing opt-in privacy agreements because, like initialing each page of a legal document to indicate it has been read, incremental agreement options mean more opportunities to stop and think. Alphabet and Meta have made improvements to their privacy policies, at least in transparency, but both companies retain full power to restrict content from those that will not allow their personal data to be sold. It is still, in essence, a strong-arm agreement. Regulation could ensure that access to any site is independent of that site’s own policy document. In other words, a universal agreement that grants access to all sites on the World Wide Web.
For the second solution we must create and enforce a standard for “basic service” for companies in the business of mass information dissemination. Given that the underlying infrastructure of the World Wide Web has always depended on public funding, it would be consistent with the investment to regulate mass information disseminators that utilize the infrastructure for private profits. There is precedent for this. Newton Minow proposed that networks have an obligation to serve the public interest in his famous “Vast Wasteland” speech to the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961. Specifically, a universal set of “basic services” must be publicly accessible with a default “opt-out” privacy agreement. For example, a person not logged in to any account could utilize Google’s search engine with the inherent agreement that their search habits may not be shared or sold. Some may argue further, that under a default opt-out agreement the data should not even be logged.
The enforcement model, too, is in place. Indirectly, the FCC must establish “basic services” for mass information disseminators and work directly with ICANN to enforce it. In simplest terms, the information contained behind the gates of these companies must be accessible without entering. Facebook’s login page is the most striking example. It is a moat around a castle, and the only drawbridge is your login. ICANN, which has the authority to restrict domains for registration violations, can be expanded beyond trademark and general uniformity of the domain names. The organization’s internal governance structure needs modification if it is to become an enforcing body. It currently consists of “governments and international treaty organizations, root server operators, groups concerned with the Internet’s security and the ‘at large’ community, meaning average Internet users” (ICANN 2014). When it was established in partnership with the U.S. government, it included a mandate that it must operate in a bottom-up and democratic manner. However, ICANN has stated repeatedly in public meetings that input from a global community is not amenable to the Board. In addition, ICANN has not conducted its “Conflicts of Interest and Ethics Practices Review” since 2012, and gives no indication that it intends to schedule another review (ICANN 2023).
Due to its impartial governance structure, under the proposed solution ICANN should remain limited to the management of the domain register, but could be directed by the FCC to restrict domains when for-profit mass information disseminators would violate a “basic services” mandate. It should be said, at this time, that this proposal does not take lightly the role of FCC oversight historically and looking to the future. It is crucial that the FCC return to its charge of regulating the venues of public information, far from which it has strayed.
Dr. Adam Dean is the Program Director for Communication and Media at LMU. He holds a BA in Media Studies from Penn State University, an MA in Radio, Television and Film from the University of North Texas, and a PhD in Media, Art and Text from Virginia Commonwealth University. Before joining the faculty at LMU Dr. Dean taught Digital Media Arts at Barry University in Miami while working professionally as an Adobe Certified Expert for CBS and Univision. His research and professional work focus on digital democracy and include creative projects that bring students and community partners together to produce documentaries, podcasts and other educational media.
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[i] On October 29, 1969, Leonard Kleinrock successfully transmitted the first message over the ARPANET from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute. The message was “LO” while the intended message was “LOGIN”, interrupted by a computer crash.
This text is published as part of a special b2o issue titled “Critique as Care”, edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, and published in honor of our b2o and b2 colleague and friend, the late David Golumbia.
Videogames are bad objects.[1] They proliferate hidden structures of control, concentrated power, and inequity (Golumbia 2009b, 154). They are vehicles for the ideology of neoliberal capitalism (Jagoda 2020, 44). They are the “paradigmatic media of empire,” and they operate as the “ideological avatar of play,” insisting on a correct way to play that isn’t even really play at all (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009; Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 281). They promulgate rhetorics of destruction, conquest, exploitation, colonization, and violence (Mukherjee 2018; Harrer 2018; Dooghan 2019). They are a medium steeped in misogyny and the objectification and aestheticization of women (Gray, Voorhees, and Vossen 2018; D. J. Leonard and Kishonna L. Gray 2018; DeWinter and Kocurek 2017). They minstrelize people of color when not erasing them entirely (Everett and Watkins 2008; D. J. Leonard and Kishonna L. Gray 2018; D. Leonard 2003). And they are inextricably embedded in the American military-industrial complex (Ivory 2015).
Videogame culture is bad; it is “dark” and always has been (Paul 2018, 2). Popular videogame culture proselytizes the most toxic logic of the videogame in all its noxious glory. From booth babes to in-game harassment to eSports to GamerGate to the racist frenzy that forced a Japanese politician to declare official neutrality towards a Canadian-produced Samurai game in the Summer of 2024, videogame culture is toxic to everyone who sets foot outside of its punitive magic circle (Cryer 2024). The culture is the circle, and the circle is toxic. The magic circle of popular videogame culture is the proverbial embodiment of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s poisonous swamp, and like “hardcore” logic of Miyazaki’s Souls-like games, it reproduces the hidden hierarchy created through pseudo-meritocracy that ensures those who begin on top remain on top (Paul 2018, 13).
The videogame industry is very, very bad. Born in the laboratories of Brookhaven and MIT, it reached maturity amid the capitalist parable of Atari that began with dorm room piracy, snowballed into the Magnavox vs. Atari lawsuit, and ended under concrete in the New Mexico desert. From Atari to Nintendo to Blizzard, the development of videogames has been inseparable from the exploitation, harassment, and abuse of workers: fan laborers, outsourced grunt coders, and white-collar American women in Irvine, California, alike (Bulut 2020). The videogame industry is both an arm of the American military entertainment complex and an agent of warfare in its own right (Milburn 2018, 173; Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009, 98–105).
Even videogame scholarship has its problems. The gendered undertones of the Narratology vs. Ludology debates, a tendency to smooth over unseemly edges, a longstanding aversion to politics, ludo-orientalist and techno-orientalist tendencies, the murky conflation of game development and critical game studies, even a cursory survey of the field indicates that it is far from tidy. Despite this mire, the field is also always attempting perpetual normalizations in the form of theories, methods, actions, and, indeed, canons. And yet, lest negativity be misconstrued as hatred, as I write this critique, like so many others, I am simultaneously producing works arguing for the liberatory, radical, anamorphic, ameliorative, or at the very least, harmless potential in videogames. I argue, however, that if videogames offer us any chance or experience of liberation from the oppressive weight of late capitalism, it is as a glitch, a bug, a tactical action informed either by hybridity, a reparative reading, or an oppositional gaze. Left to their own devices, videogames will not bring about a revolution; they will dehumanize global workforces through a simulation fever of ludic optimization.
By nature, videogames are part and parcel of computation. Videogames are, after all, just software. If, as Tara Fickle poses in the Race Card, Eurocentrist and white supremacist cultural frameworks position Eastern cultures as ludic mirrors of Western culture, then videogames are the ludic mirror of functionalist software (Fickle 2019, 113–37). They are one and the same, operating under different mythologies. Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux suggest that if one gets close enough to the game, it ceases to be one (Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 287). Up close, all is reduced to computation.
David Golumbia wrote that “computation is not a neutral technology; it is a means for expanding top-down, hierarchical power, for concentrating rather than distributing” (Golumbia 2009b, 151). It is perhaps easy to imagine macro-level computational infrastructures striating and concentrating power through systemic mechanisms of economic, political, and social control. However, it’s harder to imagine the logic of computationalism at play in our everyday micro-encounters with computer technology, especially the kind disguised as play. If I was once told that Golumbia was not really a videogames scholar, it is because he was a scholar of computation and software, the latter of which videogames are but one variety, like word processors, web browsers, and media players.
As software, videogames operate as mechanisms for organizing power (and often towards the end of producing labor).[2] On games, Golumbia wrote that “within a wide variety of computer games, one can see a process exactly isomorphic to such software applications, in which quantified resources are maximized so that the player can win the game.” These games, he contended, “reveal exactly the oligarchical-monopolist, Statist, even fascist politics at issue throughout the computerized world” (Golumbia 2009b, 135). Videogames both materially concentrate their operational powers at the hidden level of the code and offer a simulation of power concentration to players through an interface essentialism that obscures everything that the player does not control. Like computers, videogames are inherently ideological objects. They are immersive, interactive, fictional worlds that invite simulational, speculative, and parasocial thinking on the part of players and, at the same time, mask the mechanics of their own functionality and material composition, projecting outward to the surface only that which is desirable, accessible, pleasurable, fun, interesting, exciting, or entertaining when what lies beneath is always, and only, binary code.
If videogames are indeed bad, can they be fixed and made better? Can the videogame be redeemed? Can it be reborn anew, as it should have been, as factions of the independent and avant-garde games movements strive towards? No, nor should they be. Every attempt to reform the videogame reproduces in some other iteration what was problematic to begin with, simply shuffling its contents around and forcing the form’s most toxic ooze out of a different orifice. All we can do as game scholars and game players is confront them as they are and accept them for it. This is, of course, a monumental undertaking. Within the scope of this work, however, is one argument that I hope will serve as a small but necessary cog in the greater mechanism of critical videogame studies.
If we are to acknowledge videogames as bad objects, we must stop trying to salvage our favorites among them, imbuing them with the nullifying powers of aestheticization in the market economy of cultural capital. We must cease construction on and dismantle the foundations that have already been laid for the “canon” of videogames that implicitly shapes videogame studies. Multiple scholars warn of the increasing stagnation, narrowness, and coalescence of game studies (Gekker 2021; Deterding 2017; Murray 2018; Phillips 2020; Paul 2018). They are correct. To begin to remedy this pressing threat, we must surrender our attempts at mimicking the cohesion of other fields of textual study in desperate attempts at legitimization or separatism. Despite the best efforts of videogame studies’ most prominent scholars to prevent the field’s “colonization” by literature, film, or visual studies, it has ultimately colonized itself anyway (E. Aarseth 2001).
Almost twenty-five years after the discipline’s formal opening ceremony, videogame studies has colonized itself by promoting the hierarchical, bourgeois, and ultimately counterproductive economic logic of cultural capital. By arguing fervently for the legitimization of the videogame as an artistic, aesthetic object imbued with cultural capital, the videogame has been not only divorced from its origin as software but from the problematics of computationalism writ large. The result is the implementation of a logic of canonicity within videogame studies, culminating in the uneven allocation of cultural capital and the imposition of yet another layer of hierarchy upon objects that are always already incarnations of concentrated, hierarchical power.
I contend that this hyperconcentration of hierarchy has created an intellectual choke point. Only the deconstruction, dismantling, and destruction of the extant canon of videogames can correct already-established trajectories of concern within videogame studies and cultivate a freer, more diverse, and more productive future for the study of videogames. A game studies discourse grounded in the deeply flawed nature of all videogames, can more easily describe their reparative potential than one couched in terms of “good” games, “bad” games, “real” games, and “junk” games.
Culture, industry, and scholarly toxicity aside, videogames are still tricky, “grotesque” objects. They are profoundly unstable commodities and objects. Like all new media, particularly those associated with analog gaming (and thus also with gambling), the videogame was born into a marginalized and subordinate status within the popular media landscape (Kocurek 2016). Outside of their hegemonic origins in the political and technological realms, videogames have an infamously low standing in the social and cultural hierarchy. Even if, as so many critics have argued, the videogame has or will soon achieve cultural and artistic legitimacy, this legitimacy is still largely meaningless outside of academic, industry, and entertainment gaming cultures. It should, moreover, already be clear that we cannot expect videogame culture to improve the medium’s standing in general culture.
Dismissal, denigration, and disinterest in videogames as a medium still pervades Western cultural sentiment. In 2023, 13-year-old Willis Gibson became the first human recorded to “beat” Tetris, a typically unending and thus unbeatable game (Mohtasham 2024). This accomplishment is remarkable in terms of gaming as a hobby, sport, practice, and field of study and made more so by the roughly forty years between the game’s creation and the event. One would be hard-pressed to think of many other games, particularly as ubiquitous as Tetris, that required forty years of global effort to beat. And yet, Gibson’s accomplishment was overshadowed in the news cycle by a single snide remark from a Sky News anchor three weeks later (Rogers 2024).[3] John Walker’s Kotaku article from October of 2024 also iterates this point: Walker asks one simple and critical question about the failure of a 400-million-dollar game, “Sony’s Concord might be the biggest entertainment failure of all time, so why wasn’t it news?” (Walker 2024). Indeed, outside of Kotaku and other popular gaming presses, it wasn’t. However, the news cycle at that same moment in time did focus on a 200-million-dollar box office flop. [4]
A lack of cultural capital is not the only way videogames have a unique relationship to the dominant culture. Like film, the history of videogames is filled with legends of lost, damaged, or unfinished games. Lost media is a feature rather than a bug in the production and circulation of the videogame, which is native to digitized late capitalism. From development to production, games have a “limited lifespan” enforced by interindustry apathy towards data preservation, techno-industrial practices of planned obsolescence, and the generational cycle of console development (Newman 2012). This ephemerality is reinforced by economic systems of release, trade-in and used sales, intellectual property laws, region-locking, digitally native releases and updates, the politics of backward compatibility, and finally (outside even of the control of publishers, manufacturers, or capitalism itself) bit rot. While bit rot and data discarding may be the only empirically objective factors currently contributing to the lifespan of the videogame, their effect is exacerbated by the industry. Videogames are a mortal medium.
I am not arguing that this dismissal, disinterest, or resignation to decay is correct, good, or culturally beneficial. I am in firm agreement with Shira Chess and Mia Consalvo’s sentiment that “the future of media studies is game studies,” not because of some unique, essential power of the videogame to eclipse and supplant all other media, but because “as convergence culture becomes less of a special case and more of an everyday reality, the medium itself matters less” (Chess and Consalvo 2022, 160). Rather, I argue that the marginalization of video games as a form has not ended in mainstream culture, at least not yet. No matter how many canons have been constructed by games scholars, journalists, developers, or archivists, and how many treatises on games-as-art those same demographics publish, the game has not been elevated to an equal cultural evaluation as other, older mediums, including those that historically faced the same hurdles such as the novel, the film, or the television series. As such, these processes have accomplished little and have only limited knowledge production within game studies.
I can’t deny that, in my day-to-day life, a videogame canon is appealing. Subjectively, perhaps the driving impetus of this article stems from my own disagreement with those games that have been deemed canonical within videogame studies. However, it is by being earnest about such sentiments that the more significant issue becomes visible. As John Vanderhoef argues, following Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital, videogame canons are the product of “taste cultures,” in which the taste of dominant groups shapes the perceived importance, legitimacy, and material value of individual cultural artifacts characterized as videogames (Vanderhoef 2012). Moreover, as Glas and Von Vught demonstrate through practical experience, these dominant groups are almost always white, male, cis-gendered, and heterosexual (Glas and van Vught 2019, 9). While I do not meet all of these criteria, I meet most of them. Thus, I must also recognize that the imposition of my own fantasy canon on the field at large would be nothing more than the slightest alteration of who exactly the dominant party is. Instead of canon reformation, I argue for self-awareness. I argue for the acknowledgment that it is not the current canon that is bad or even current games that are bad, but that these problematics or “badness” are inherent attributes of the videogame. We must instead work with them rather than fruitlessly attempt to breed out these sine qua non traits.
In short, this negativity is not an argument for the obliteration of the videogame in some formalist eugenics any more than it is a call for the obliteration of any and all media that bear some problematic origin (as so many do). Rather, it is a reminder that the videogame was born in a network of power, politics, economics, and Empire, and acts of reclamation, redemption, subversion, or even radical liberation attempted with or through the videogame must neither set aside nor willfully ignore that origin. If we are to continue to study videogames, and if they are to be recovered, redeemed, or even simply neutralized, we must acknowledge their faults.
The current videogame studies canon is a fluid collection of works imbued with exceptional levels of cultural capital, and, like all canons, it does not really exist. There is no stone tablet engraved with the words World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, EverQuest, Tetris, or the Sims preserved in the basement of the Strong Museum of Play, nor even the Library of Congress. The videogame canon is, as John Guillory wrote of the literary canon, “an imaginary totality of works” (Guillory 1993, 30). And yet, “what does have a concrete location as a list…is not the canon, but the syllabus,” and “every construction of a syllabus institutes once again the process of canon formation” (Guillory 1993, 30–31). Like literary syllabi, game studies syllabi certainly exist, and the games on them are, more often than not, canonical games by virtue of their citational, instructional, and analytic repetition. Game studies, like film and literature, shapes its canon through material acts of scholarship, research, theorization, and dissemination. Jonathan Frome and Paul Martin consider the five games listed above canonical through a disproportionately high citation frequency in the two most prominent game studies journals (Frome and Martin 2019, 6). Published in 2019, Frome and Martin’s study is profoundly limited in that it only surveys two journals, disregarding published monographs, edited volumes, and not exclusively game-focused journals. However, even in this microcosmic analysis, evidence of disproportionate citation and, thus, canonization is immediately evident. In 2017, two years before Frome and Martin put the word “canon” to print, Coavoux, Boutet, and Zabban gestured towards the presence of a canon in videogame studies. Yet, they argued against it without ever actually using the word, instead decrying the harmful limitations of “selective focus on a few particular games” (Coavoux, Boutet, and Zabban 2017, 573). While I agree with Coavoux et al. in positionality, I insist on calling a canon a canon, because only by doing so can we access the depths of its potential harm.
If videogames are inherently problematic, so are cultural canons. Canons are hegemonies that confer cultural dominance upon a particular collection of artifacts. Hegemonies, however, are not static. Canons are lived hegemonies, and “a lived hegemony is always a process…it is a realized complex of experiences, relationships, and activities with specific changing pressures and limits” (Williams 2009, 112). They necessitate relationships of domination and subordination, and the dominant, in this case, is manifest in what is culturally accorded the status of art or literature, creating the familiar dichotomy of high and low culture or the distinction between art and culture (Williams 2009, 110). As Williams suggests and Liam Dee expands on in Against Art and Culture, “art and culture are thus clearly the concepts of human expression, transcending rational or natural dictates, but they have an important distinction. One makes this expression extraordinary [art]. The other makes it ordinary [culture]” (Williams 2009, 145; Dee 2018, 15). That is, art and culture are the same thing inside different rhetorical frames, and thus why Dee refuses the separation between them and instead writes against “art/culture” as a dyad “to make explicit the shared qualities of ‘high art’ and ‘popular culture’…and make clear that I am not referring to ‘skill’…nor an amorphous ‘way of life’” (Dee 2018, 17).
One of the cultural frames that enforces this false dichotomy and hegemonic relationship is that of the canon. For John Guillory, “the problem of what is called canon formation is best understood as a problem in the constitution and distribution of cultural capital, or more specifically, a problem of access to the means of literary production and consumption” (Guillory 1993, ix). This is simply another means of describing Williams’ hegemony in which certain objects are attributed higher values of cultural capital than others and accordingly venerated, elevated, and distributed in controlled or institutional contexts. Ultimately, canonicity is intrinsically a problem of inclusivity and diversity, for “canonization of a work is nothing but the affirmation of the social values expressed in the work” even when that affirmation is hidden beneath a veneer of artistic aestheticization. As such, the social values expressed in canonical videogames (and indeed all videogames as pieces of software) are hierarchy, exclusion, and dominance (Guillory 1993, 270).
While Guillory is not explicit in attributing the intentionality of canon formation to any individual or system, I would like to posit here that the process of canonization that has been churning in game studies for the last twenty years has been enacted through what Simone Winko theorizes as an “invisible hand.” Hans-Joachim Backe translates and synthesizes Winko’s theory as “a process in which countless individual (micro-level) actions—which may have altogether different goals—will result, in conjunction, in the (macro-level) phenomenon of canon formation” (Backe 2015, 11). In this light, canon formation is not enacted singularly or with necessary intentionality. Certainly, scholars’ selection and valuation of texts are intentional, but their usage in the canonization process is not. Canons are constructed through evaluation, and for literature, “evaluations can influence the act of writing either beforehand…or during the writing process” and are made by “literary mediators…television and radio producers…literary critics, scholars, and teachers” with the latter operating in the mode described above by the decision “to give the text more or less space” or “other works whose values have already been defined are used as points of comparison” (von Heydebrand and Winko 2010, 225). In what follows, I would like to briefly survey three significant moments of interaction between this invisible hand and the game studies canon that served to establish, legitimize, and reformat it over the nearly four decades since the field’s foundation. These moments are, chronologically, the beginning of videogame studies, the height of the videogame legitimation debate, and the recent (ironic) dominance of “independently developed” games.
In the primordial moment, 1985 and 1986, respectively, Mary Ann Buckles and Brenda Laurel separately and coincidentally completed the first videogame studies dissertations long before videogame studies existed. When Buckles and Laurel were researching and writing about interactive narratives within videogames, they were doing so within the German Literature and Theatre departments, respectively. Working without precedent, they established the first approaches to videogame analysis, and, with them, which videogames provided the most productive analytical fodder. Thus, they also established which games would become early canonical texts.
Buckles’ dissertation is a close reading of the storied text-based role-playing game Adventure. In her introduction, Buckles delineates her area of study, distinguishing Adventure from contemporary arcade games: “Let me first emphasize what Adventure and other works of interactive fiction are not: they are not video arcade games. They do not resemble games like Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, or Pac-Man, which require good hand-eye co-ordination and quick physical reactions” (Buckles 1985, 6). Notably, Buckles does not disvalue “video arcade games” or place them in a value hierarchy with “interactive fiction” but rather creates a taxonomy based on the skills and actions required to play.
Laurel creates a different taxonomy that, while divided along similar lines as Buckles’, introduces an element of hierarchy in its teleological orientation. Laurel’s primary area of study is what she calls “interactive fantasy systems,” which produce “interactive dramas,” a “first-person experience within a fantasy world, in which the user may create, enact, and observe a character whose choices and actions affect the course of events just as they might in a play” (Laurel 1986, 10–11). Her two primary examples are Zork! and Star Raiders, which both allow “the user to participate in the fantasy world as an active character” (Laurel 1986, 86). Arcade games are characterized as “antecedents to interactive fantasy” or “poetic interactive works” that generate affective experiences for the player but do not integrate the player into the world (Laurel 1986, 19–20). While Laurel does not position this class of “poetic interactive works” as oppositional to or less than “interactive dramas,” the connotation of antecedent implicitly argues for an evolutionary view of games in which the latter represent the more evolved, more complex and more capable (and thus more valuable) form of the former, creating a hierarchy between them.
The establishment of both systems of taxonomy fragmented the vast body of media called video or computer games. From the starting point of Buckles’ analysis, Adventure has become a canonical text, representative of the literary qualities of the videogame.[5] As videogame studies, videogame history, videogame culture, and videogame development influence one another in a digital feedback loop, Adventure has remained relevant and briefly achieved prominence once again with the release and subsequent studies of the serially released 2012-2020 and acclaimed game Kentucky Route Zero which directly references and indirectly alludes to Adventure.[6] Conversely, while Buckles and Laurel may have purposefully omitted (and articulated their reasons for doing so) Space Invaders from their studies, it has hardly been omitted from the subsequent forty years of game studies. Returning to Frome and Martin’s survey, Space Invaders was cited 34 times, ranking 20th out of 38 in 2019 (Frome and Martin 2019, 6). In this, the game has come to stand as synonymous with both the arcade genre and a particular moment in video game history.[7] Moreover, the ludic turn in videogame studies in the early 2000s emphasized exactly the kind of highly structured, ludus games that Space Invaders represent as if in direct response to Buckles and Laurel’s emphasis on gamic fiction.[8] A direct correlation between Adventure and contemporary videogame studies is as clearly recognizable as its inverse: the omission of arcade games from these original studies, and the ludic fixation in early organized game studies.
What I hope to bring attention to here in this first moment is the process through which games assume and maintain prolonged and disproportionate relevance within game studies over the course of decades, rather than Mary Ann Buckles and Brenda Laurel’s personal responsibility for the field’s subsequent trajectory. It matters that these games still receive citations in game studies survey texts when innumerable other early, influential, or impactful games do not.[9] However, no two games are alike, and this delicate negotiation of relevance shapes the ways we play, think about, study, analyze, and promulgate videogames and their study. There is a parallel universe in which the team at Cardboard Computer who developed Kentucky Route Zero made a game that takes place not around the Mammoth Cave National Park on which the world of Adventure was based, but in and around the highly fantastic Great Underground Empire of Zork! This is the power of the invisible hand that shapes canonization through individual evaluations.
A second crucial moment in the formulation of a videogame studies canon comes in the late 2000s and early 2010s in the form of popular and scholarly legitimation discourse. In Felan Parker’s 2017 article for Games and Culture, “Canonizing Bioshock,” Parker untangles the structural and rhetorical actions that made 2K’s 2007 first-person shooter Bioshock the quintessential entry in the game studies canon. Parker argues that Bioshock’s rapid incorporation into the canon of videogame studies coincided with a different moment in videogame culture: the apex of the legitimization discourse, a discourse that has plagued videogame studies to various degrees since Laurel and Buckles’ time as doctoral students (Parker 2018, 83).[10] This discourse has always been predicated on the artificial dichotomy between “art” and “culture.” Were videogames doomed to be forever considered popular or “low” culture? Could they be art? Should they be art? Which games are art? And which games definitely are not art? These questions were voiced loudly by oft-cited works like Aaron Smuts’ “Are Videogames Art?” and Grant Tavinor’s The Art of Videogames. In both scholarly and popular culture, this phenomenon was most evident in what Parker called “Ebert versus Games,” in which, between 2005 and 2010, film critic Roger Ebert became the representative of “the prejudice against digital games as art,” disparaging the artistic legitimacy of videogames in his film reviews and on his personal blog (Parker 2018, 80).
The question of whether videogames were or could be art inspired a moment of mutual panic for scholarly and popular videogame critics. This duality is a process accounted for by Winko and von Heydebrand’s schema and is evident in the canonization of Bioshock as described by Parker. Bioshock was used to produce a “special class of AAA game that is expected to excel commercially but has a distinction from other popular favorites and best sellers by the grace of its supposed artistic quality and canonical status,” known familiarly as the prestige game (Parker 2017, 740).[11] This definition purposefully conflates popular and scholarly consumers because, for these games to achieve the status of prestige and warrant canonization, they must be commercially, culturally, and critically successful. This formula produces games that feature dense textual experiences and raise philosophical, ethical, political, social, or cultural questions without limiting market shares by remaining “neutral enough in…politics to be widely marketable” (Parker 2017, 747). “Attractive, marketable gameplay is seen as a kind of delivery mechanism for the game’s highfalutin subject matter, and in this sense, the prestige game purports to be both more entertaining and more effective than other ‘message’ games” (Parker 2017, 748). That is, Bioshock and other prestige games juggle accessibility, entertainment, “literary” value, and novelty, culminating in an experience that Parker argues “is designed from the ground up to invite sustained reflection, debate, and criticism” and thus operates as a justification for “the whole enterprise of games criticism and scholarship” (Parker 2017, 751–52).
The traits that render Bioshock legitimate art and warrant its canonization skew strongly to the technological and economic. The game includes “attractive, marketable gameplay” and requires the newly evolved technological capabilities of the seventh generation of videogame consoles, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as well as the ability of developers to anticipate and respond to the needs of broad audiences. As Grant Tavinor writes in The Art of Videogames, “the stunning representational advances may also provide one of the most compelling reasons to see videogames as a form of art” (Tavinor 2009, 70). Similarly, Smuts considers art to be those games that meet the following conditions: “integrated narratives, graphics, nearing photo-realism and elaborate three-dimensional worlds with rich and detailed textures” (Smuts 2005). We can see a clear correlation between technological capability and perceived artistic legitimacy. Notably, the games chosen as art by both Tavinor and Smuts, Grand Theft Auto IV, Max Payne, Halo, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, and, of course, Bioshock, are all games that, while demonstrating cutting-edge technological capabilities, were also exceedingly successful on the commercial market. It should come as no surprise that these are hardly attributes that legitimize other cultural artifacts as “art.” After all, art films are collectively imagined to be the most inaccessible (and often unappealing) of films, and literary fiction is much less often profitable in the book and adaptation market than genre fiction. It matters that the attributes of “prestige videogames” are counterintuitive to other mediums’ conceptions of prestige. That these attributes are promoted and valued by popular videogame culture should be a point of, if not worry, then inquiry to videogame studies.
These prestige games, as marked by their success in the marketplace and culture, are ideologically aligned with the dominant logic of computation and the oozing toxicity it produces within popular “hardcore” videogame culture. It is also these games that were used within academic and popular contexts to nullify any lingering arguments for the potential illegitimacy of videogames as art. Scholars arguing for the artistic legitimacy of videogames positioned themselves in opposition to social sciences research on potential correlations between videogames and violent or antisocial behavior, put succinctly by Liam Dee in Against Art and Culture, in that “the pathology of the obsessive gamer is such that computer game addiction is recognized as a mental addiction, while poetry addiction is not” (Dee 2018, 206). To finally move beyond this discourse, videogames must be legitimized as art, for as Dee argues, “once an image is deemed aesthetic, it is abstracted from the representational hurley-burley, no longer treated as a document of reality,” which permits the aesthetic image as art to bypass sociological concerns and discourses of obscenity (Dee 2018, 68). This is not to say that I believe in a narrow or reductive relationship between videogames, violence, or addiction as the social scientists of the day were investiating or that games scholars should not play or study Bioshock because it happens to be a favorite title of “hardcore” gaming culture and the reactionary Internet bigots and trolls “hardcore” gaming culture contains. Rather, I argue that the conversion of culture to art is an established remedy to such concerns. As art, neither a text’s content nor popular fandom can be used against it. This remedy is made all the more appealing by the fact that so many videogame scholars can be described, as Simon Deterding does, “as aca/fans who turn their passion into a research profession, defending their lifestyle through research that defuses moral panics and elevates gaming as a valuable cultural practice”(Deterding 2017, 525). Yet, this solution to the crisis of legitimation is ultimately harmful, concretizing and reduplicating some of video games’ worst aspects.
But, is it possible these problems are exclusive to AAA games? Is there a form of game that has separated itself from the poisonous swamp of the mainstream games industry? Perhaps the solution is simply to canonize different games as the “ludologists” once did to avoid the domination of the field by narrative and text heavy games like Adventure and Myst. Perhaps upon the release of Bioshock: Infinite, with its ludic stagnancy, implicit racism, and questionable political commentary, the problems in these new canonical texts, like those before them, would float to the discursive surface. This scenario could then allow for corrective actions without sacrificing the newfound artistic legitimacy of the videogame (Parker 2017, 753–55). This has happened over the last decade or so in game studies, in which a new dichotomy rivaling that of ludology and narratology has emerged: that of mainstream and independent (indie) gaming. It is this confrontation that emerges as the third and most recent moment of canonization.
The advent of indie games has come with benefits, including greater insight into abstract procedural rhetorics, the trickle-down ideological effects of binary logic in computing, increased probes into and criticism of dominant gaming cultures, and a more welcoming venue for marginalized scholars to enter and thrive within game studies. That indie games offer salvation from the hellish mire of mainstream gaming is an explicit sentiment, unlike the presence of a canon. In the 2022 special edition of Critical Studies in Media and Communications dedicated to the future of game studies, Amanda L. L. Cullen et al. argues that “it is also the role of game studies to fight for the legitimization of creators who do not engage with the games industry in normative fashions,” ultimately working towards “making queer games a sustainable alternative” to mainstream gaming (Cullen et al. 2022, 203). In this scenario, we see queer used almost synonymously for independent, for it is posed as oppositional to the mainstream. The reader must assume Cullen’s “queer” games are not merely the inclusion of diverse identities in the newest $250 million Dragon Age game but the independent. In videogame studies, the subaltern speaks through itch.io.
The veneration of the indie game as an alternative to mainstream AAA games imbues the indie game itself with a level of ontological benevolence that should immediately set off alarms. In fixating on indie games as a social good, one sees metaphysical reorientation that extrapolates more from legitimate art’s cultural function than gamers’ potential to accumulate cultural capital. As Cullen et al. conclude their argument for non-normative creators, their definition becomes apparent in their desire to look towards “creators who are making games and content for non-monetary practices” (Cullen et al. 2022, 203). Despite this, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux rightly characterize indie games as a concretized “genre” of videogames that are “games about games” (Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 28–29). And the games these indie games are about are, more often than not, the “mainstream” games to which they are positioned as alternatives (Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 31–32). On the level of creative production, indie games are created through the cannibalization and regurgitation of the mainstream, not its opposite regardless of the intentionality of their production.
This is, in effect, the sort of “mystical bullshit” that Liam Dee argues still “dominates” the concept of art itself, in which “creative expression is seen as special and wonderful precisely because there is a non-creative quotidian for it to be contrasted with” (Dee 2018, 3; 24). The quotidian in question is, of course, day-to-day existence under capitalism. In art, however, “even when commercial relationships are explicit, there are many strategies that are undertaken to make it seem that commerce is not what our culture is really about and that, in fact, it is anti-commercial” (Dee 2018, 114). When Cullen et al. and others praise the indie game for its ability to shirk the economics of the marketplace and instead free the artistic vision of the creator, they transpose onto videogames the bourgeois logic of literary hierarchy that begets canons in the first place. As Raymond Williams explained,
Art is a kind of production which has to be seen as separate from the dominant bourgeois productive norm: the making of commodities. It has, then, in fantasy, to be separated from ‘production’ altogether, described by the new term ‘creation’; distinguished from its own material processes; distinguished, finally, from other products of its own kind or closely related kinds—‘art’ from ‘non-art’; ‘literature’ from ‘para-literature’ or ‘popular literature; ‘culture’ from mass ‘culture’ (Williams 2009, 154).
Or, perhaps, Indie Game from AAA Game.
Little exemplifies this problem better than Melissa Kagen’s resounding critique of the production and representational logic of the former indie darling Eastshade. Kagen argues that the game’s creator, Danny Weinbaum, “threads the needle between presenting himself as the visionary artist he is…and humble laborer” and that Weinbaum is not alone in this rhetoric of self-sacrifice for artistry amongst indie developers (Kagen 2022, 60). What is really happening “in this paradigm [in which] successful independent game development consists of a complicated cocktail of work, luck, and affect” is the possession of “enough privilege to survive precarity and the promise of overcoming it through hard work, patience, and (crucially) the subjugation of both personal needs and artistic vision in deference to player/consumers” (Kagen 2022, 62-63). In totality, Eastshade is “a fairy tale of late capitalist precarity,” in which “twenty-first-century ideologies and prejudices…make sense to have and do no harm. They aren’t underhanded, racist, or backstabbing, and they result in a gorgeous experience where everything is beautiful, and nothing hurts” (Kagen 2022, 63; 56).
“Everything is beautiful, and nothing hurts” just as easily describes the now-canonical indie game Stardew Valley, which possesses a similar production narrative of the bootstrapping auteur in developer Eric Barone.[12] In Stardew Valley, the player experiences the quotidian of small-scale agriculture in a contemporary village in a simulacral Euramerica, farming, managing livestock, retailing crops, and marrying townsfolk. The game has been nearly universally acclaimed and ushered in a new wave of non-mimetic farming simulators, which are indeed the games that, as an indie game, Stardew Valley is about on a metatextual level.
Stardew Valley is a quintessential indie game. It is emblematic of the manner in which “indie games circulate as a form of cultural imperialism that both colonizes profitable forms of independent production and sanitizes them for mass consumption” and which “reduces all independent development to this particular aesthetic and mechanic genre of videogames and also reduces all independent developers to those white, Noth American men able to make a living developing games” (Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 33). Like Eastshade, “Stardew Valley may appear anti-capitalist and environmentalist in its invocation of a slow, community-oriented life that leaves the office cubicle behind. The gameplay…suggests a different attitude” (Jagoda 2020, 68). Patrick Jagoda argues that this different attitude is the neoliberal ideology underpinning all videogames, indie or mainstream, problematic or ameliorative. For Jagoda, “Stardew Valley is something more than a representation of neoliberal life: it is a participatory training ground for the types of processes, modes of thinking, and habits necessary to survive and thrive within—and in many active senses to build—a neoliberal lifeworld” (Jagoda 2020, 69). And, as Golumbia once wrote, “a more apt name,” for the state of the contemporary world under computationalism itself “might be ‘neoliberalism” (Golumbia 2009b, 144; Jagoda 2020, 13).
Indie games may appear to provide a break from the dominant concerns of mainstream gaming, such as technological development, homogeneity, conquest, and heroics, and that delicate balance of difficulty and accessibility that makes for a respectable prestige title. However, on a sublimated level, they replicate the same underlying ideologies of pseudo-meritocratic neoliberalism, bourgeois cultural hierarchy, and artistry while obscuring the harmful realities of the videogame as a medium. Even when the invisible hand attempts to correct itself, it cannot escape the systems that animate it in the first place. The only way out of the double bind is to get outside of it. To do so, we must acknowledge that the issues we take with some games are present at some level in all. This is to say, Stardew Valley is not special. It is not special either as a beacon of cozy comfort amidst the dominance of the epic and brutal conquests of mainstream gaming or as a reaffirmation of the neoliberal capitalist world order. Under a system of canonicity in scholarship, when only touchstone texts are ever given complete critical treatment, both our praise and critique of Stardew Valley have the same effect: reinforcing its canonical status and unrivaled cultural importance.
The prominence of indie games brings forth one peripheral problem that haunts the videogame canon and the maneuvers of the hand itself. This is the specter of a stubborn, implicit Orientalism. That is to say, for all of the influx of interest in Stardew Valley within popular and scholarly gaming cultures, there has been little interest in uncovering, addressing, and analyzing the game’s immediate East Asian ancestor, the storied and still in production, Harvest Moon series.[13] Christopher B. Patterson argues that “videogames are Asiatic even when they contain no explicit racial representations, as they are manufactured and innovated upon in Asian contexts and remain colored by Asian associations as new media products” (Patterson 2020, 27). Meanwhile, the list of 38 canonical games compiled by Frome and Martin features only seven games developed in East Asia, and if we discount arcade cabinets which carry loose regional associations despite their origins, only five remain: Super Mario Bros., Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, the Legend of Zelda, and Metal Gear Solid. Much like the conversation around issues of inclusion and diversification in the Western canon, the canonical texts of game studies are remarkably homogenous despite the fact that East Asian products overwhelmingly dominate the global videogame marketplace. We must ask if the videogame is indeed Asiatic in the collective cultural imagination, how can a canon of videogames be no more than 13-18% East Asian in origin? The pivot to indie games over AAA titles has made no more room for a discussion of these regional biases. As Stardew Valley’s cannibalization of Harvest Moon demonstrates, the games that indie games are so often about are East Asian. An uneven distribution of cultural capital is visible, and it is predicated upon a reductive conception of regional origin. Geographically and racially coded exclusion is a profound consequence of sheer inattention to the systemic mechanisms at play in the discursive formation of a games canon.
As the three moments detailed above demonstrate, the academy’s structural conditions empower the invisible hand of canonicity to propagate the generation, maintenance, and dissemination of cultural capital embodied through canon formation and organization. In this way, canonicity operates in a manner equivocal to computation by obscuring the operations of already-established systems that constantly accumulate, condense, and employ power. The presence of a canon in game studies doubles the relationship between the game and hierarchical power, manifest in both games themselves as software and in canons as creations of institutionalized cultural capital. When we write about games only because other scholars have discussed them, ignored them, undervalued them, or overvalued them, we replicate the binary logic of value judgments predicated on the individual tastes of others. When we endlessly discuss the merits and demerits of the same AAA games, we reproduce them and all that comes with them. When we value games made by individual creators or studios because of their relationship to an authorial or artistic presence, we reinforce the bourgeois ideology of art as a metaphysical product of genius, discrete from the material production of commodities. When we write about only those games we think other people want to read about, we allow imagined demographics to shape material knowledge production. Each of these moments arose because of the implicit presence, fluid though it may be, of a canon of games deemed worthy of research, which shapes the how, why, and for whom we research games at the cost of all possible alternatives. When we replicate and reinforce the shadow canon of videogame studies, we allow ourselves to be manipulated by an invisible, immaterial, and unnecessary presence created by and for institutions and cultural ecosystems very incongruent with the videogame.
Like many scholars working in and around the field right now, I am concerned for the future of videogame studies. Following Alex Gekker, I am concerned that “the emphasis on certain types of (commercial) gaming phenomena” within the field, e.g. canonicity, “leads to a path of dependence that pushes game scholars to focus on a limited number of highly visible games, genres, and related practices, limiting publishing opportunities to those lacking in certain gaming capital” (Gekker 2021, 74). These limitations are what Kelly Bergstrom worries are a defining reason for the lack of diversity within videogame development and videogame studies, encapsulated by young scholars’ (including my own) worry that “their work [is] too niche, too concerned with edge cases, and too far afield to be considered within the boundaries of game studies” (Bergstrom 2022, 178). Gekker suggests a solution grounded in reframing game studies as a post-humanities field in which scholars intermix “various forms of humanities and social sciences analyses to better account for the material shift in media technologies,” or essentially, an opening up of the boundaries of game studies to include all scholars who work on, around, with, or even in videogames (Gekker 2021, 78). Bergstrom’s suggestion is similar. She asks that “we reframe our field’s genesis point,” positioning issues of identity and culture at the forefront (Bergstrom 2022, 178).
While I do not disagree with either of these suggestions, and attempt to uphold them in my own work, I question whether the amount of coalescent organization required from the field of game studies to make an organized and concerted effort of reform is not simply a reproduction of the problem itself. An organized game studies that can make a majority decision to correct its own course is a narrow game studies. This narrow game studies then once again excludes those who, Gekker writes “might be participating in game studies but not defining themselves according to their affinity with the field” (Gekker 2021, 75). Simon Deterding has already pointed out that game studies is an “increasingly narrow inter-discipline” intellectually dominated by humanities scholars and game developers within the field, and as such, an orchestrated reorientation of the field predicated on identification with the extant field only replicates the same omissions (Deterding 2017, 532).
I am also concerned that taking on any actions at the strategic level reinforce Soraya Murray’s worries about the effects of neoliberalism in the university. Like Gekker and Bergstrom, Murray is troubled about the state of game studies, emphasizing “the residue” of game studies’ origins in “entertainment writing” and “the overwhelming priority given within the academy” to “technical, training, development, and interaction” (Murray 2018, 9; 12). However, as a post-colonialist scholar, Murray is also concerned that “the neoliberalism of the university has resulted in an environment in which the critical cultural theorist of technological forms is often made to feel that, as they are not ‘making’ something, what they are doing is not productive” (Murray 2018, 17). That is to say, we do not need to make videogames, make things from video games, or (re-)make the field of videogame studies to produce insight into the cultural functions of the videogame. And yet, because videogames as objects and videogame studies are closely tethered to production, both in the material production of games themselves or the theorized production of new skills, affinities, attitudes, and information through interaction with them, it is often especially difficult to escape the logic of productivity when dealing with them in any capacity. This potential to lapse into the whims of neoliberal capitalism is especially worrisome, considering that, as we have already seen, the videogame can often double as a rhetorical instrument of neoliberalism itself. As such, instituting a post-humanities turn, reframing our field’s genesis, the promotion of specific creators, or even Christopher A. Paul’s “obligation” to address problems within videogame studies, while noble and beneficial projects, verge on simply other ways to “make” things, to prove productivity under neoliberalism (Paul 2018, 2).
What I suggest here, then, is tactical action, attention, and inattention to the field in tandem so as to produce scholarship that responds to inquiry and need. The implicit production of a canon that results in numerous chapters on Bioshock, treatises on Stardew Valley, and conference panels on The Last of Us is simply one of many components that maintain and limit the purview of game studies. It is one boundary spurring on an “increasing coalescence” of game studies “into a relatively closed community” (Deterding 2017, 536–37). Despite the depth to which canonicity is ingrained in Western scholastic culture and textual studies, de-canonization seems to be one of the easiest reparative projects to initiate within game studies. When players over 100,000 players gather in the subreddit for Palia or when Splendid Land, the working name for developer and artist Samanthuel Louise Gillson, publishes simple, short, metatextual games like Franken which comment on and promote the consumption of other niche or dying genres, they are doing de-canonization through the selection and rendering visible of these works. For, if the canon is crafted in the shadows by an invisible hand who picks and chooses, values and devalues, remembers and forgets, includes and excludes, and if we can agree that the presence of a canon in game studies is as, if not more, problematic than the existence of a canon in literary or film studies, then we must render the hand visible in game studies, as well.
The title of this subsection refers to the glitch through which the final boss of Super Smash Brothers Melee, Master Hand, a hostile, disembodied, gloved hand, can become a playable character. By plugging in two controllers, one in the 3rd slot of a Nintendo Gamecube, loading the character select screen, lingering over the select name option on Player 3’s character slot, and pressing A on both controllers simultaneously, the player can enter battle as Master Hand. As neat as access to an otherwise forbidden character may be, playing as Master Hand is less than fun. It freezes frequently in battle and is unusable in certain game scenarios. The Super Smash Brothers fan wiki describes the pros and cons of utilizing Master Hand succinctly: “if Master Hand is allowed in a game, he may at first appear to have a considerable advantage, as he does not take knockback and thus cannot be KOed at all,” but “since the Master Hand glitch most often causes a major disadvantage to the player using it, few players even consider the option, preventing the situation from being a competitive issue” (“Master Hand Glitch” 2024). As a boss, Master Hand is a hostile NPC and a part of the encoded structures of the game itself, an unchangeable, essential quality of it. With the glitch, however, Master Hand becomes interactive, controllable, and strategically deployable as a broken character capable of breaking itself, others, and the game it inhabits. I suggest here that the system of canonization that has taken place over the last forty years of game studies has occurred through an invisible hand that we, as games scholars, might do well to think of as Master Hand. To ameliorate some of the harm it has enacted on the field, we might consider using the glitch and becoming Master Hand.
To become Master Hand, we must become aware of our own actions in the field and how they shape it. If we want to see it changed, we must be willing to make those changes on an individual, tactical level in our own scholarship. This could mean anything from a fundamental refusal to acknowledge the existence of Bioshock to a persistent, granular inquiry into those games that are neither prestigious nor subversive like Madden ’13, Cat Quest, or The Sims: Medieval. If we desire not only the survival of game studies but the realization of its transformative power, we must accept games as they are: as a diverse array of commodified software. Eventually, if the structural logic of canonicity is left in place, the field will be reduced to a true echo chamber, appraising and sponsoring the same games, the same types of games, the same players, and the same game cultures. We cannot kill our personal Master Hand any more than we can kill the one that lives inside a tiny disc for the Nintendo Gamecube; attempting to do so will only cause it to respawn, perhaps a bit wilder this time, as Crazy Hand. Rather, we must control the Hand. Before this sounds too much like the neoliberal reforms suggested above, I want to clarify that the control I imagine is that of small, imprecise, and often ineffective gestures, just as controlling Master Hand for a round of Smash feels.
To control the Hand, we must become it and simultaneously ignore it. And as the Master Hand, we could study and theorize those games that we are interested in, that our students (all of them) are interested in, that the world at large is interested in, and those games that carry meaning for us, for others, or no one. We could study games broadly, diffusely, and carefully. We could contradict ourselves and others within our field and allow those contradictions to hold without the easy answers of reform or replacement. We could both continue to write, as we have, about the ways in which Stardew Valley offers the image of liberation from the oppression of late-stage techno-capitalism and simultaneously reinforces it under a more quaint, rural veneer. We could also write about the way the game plays, the way it was created, the way it was received culturally, its lineage as a Western descendent of East Asian non-mimetic farming simulators, and its relationship to ultra-realistic Western-produced farming simulators, and who plays it, why they play it, where they play it, and why they enjoy playing. We are also able to ask and answer all the same questions for those quaint, cozy, lightly fantastic farming games that came before it and the genre of “cozy” indie games that have come after it, and finally, we must compare our answers. We could ask if Stardew Valley is exceptional amongst its peers, and if so, try to articulate why, even if that answer turns out to be, disappointingly, nothing more than a matter of historical timing. We could acknowledge that videogames as objects are computational commodities, born in the military-industrial complex and nurtured to maturity on the sustenance of exploited labor, resource extraction, abuse, hate, and profound misogyny just as often as we rightfully acknowledge the radical, liberatory, speculative, ameliorative, healing, and educational possibilities equally embedded within the medium. Acknowledging these things means choosing not only what we say about games but also what games we say things about and why. Even when Master Hand freezes up and cancels out the game, we could always continue to try to control it to prevent it from controlling us.
Rian C. Johnson is a doctoral candidate in the Media, Art, and Text program at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he is also an adjunct instructor in the English department. His primary areas of interest are critical video game studies, speculative fiction studies, and cultural studies. Rian is currently in the process of completing a dissertation exploring representations of the mundane, the quotidian, and the everyday in high-fantasy single-player Japanese role-playing games.
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[1] No matter how hyperbolic, provocative, or subjective it may sound to call videogames bad objects, I am not the first. Ian Bogost once characterized games as “gross, revolting heaps of arbitrary anguish” in which players engage in a desperate, unnecessary “attempt to get a broken machine to work again” (Bogost 2015, 1). Videogames are, Bogost claimed, “grotesque” (Bogost 2015, 1). As the theorist behind procedural rhetoric, Bogost’s orientation towards games has always been markedly more computational than most of the field and equally hyperbolic. While Bogost was referring to Flappy Bird in the above quotation, his descriptors apply to videogames in general and should do so explicitly.
[2] See Golumbia’s “Games without Play” for more on the inextricable relationship between games and labor (Golumbia 2009a).
[3] The anchor, Jayne Secker, received substantial online blowback, including demands for an apology from anonymous netizens. Yet, an apology was never issued, nor was the comment acknowledged by the anchor or the network which in and of itself demonstrates a pervasive cultural, if not dismissal of, or at least disinterest in videogames as valuable artifacts.
[4] Unlike Concord’s simultaneous flop, publications ranging from film news to entertainment news more broadly and to mainstream general news platforms like CNBC, NPR, BBC News, and the Guardian were all invested in the post-mortem of Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie a Deux (Kim 2024; Barber 2024; Whitten 2024; Hoad 2024).
[5] On Adventure’s equivocation with storytelling and literary textuality in early game studies see Espen Aarseth’s 1997 monograph, Cybertext, which takes the game as a primary case study, Chris Crawford’s 2003 chapter “Interactive Storytelling” which names Adventure as a sort of videogamic proto-narrative, Aarseth’s 2004 chapter “Genre Trouble” in which he does much the same, taking Adventure’s narrative identity as a priori, Jesper Juul’s Half-Real, in which Adventure is used again as an early prototype of Juul’s category of “progression” games in which linear, teleological ludic and narrative progression is valued above freeplay or exploration, and finally, Nick Montfort’s 2003 Twisty Little Passages, named after a quotation from the game itself. (E. J. Aarseth 1997; E. Aarseth 2004, 51; Crawford 2003, 259–60; Juul 2005, 76; Montfort 2003)
[6] For more recent research on or around Adventure, see Reed, Murray, and Salter’s 2020 Adventure Games, which encapsulates both Adventure and Kentucky Route Zero, Stuart Moulthrop’s 2021 chapter on the legacy of hypertext fiction, “Hypertext Fiction Ever After,” Andrew Reinhard’s 2021 archaeological investigation of the game, Jérémie LeClerc’s work on race, Adventure, and Kentucky Route Zero, Dennis G. Jerz, Tiffany Funk, and Jesse Snider’s work on the relationship between the in-game world and the real Mammoth Cave complex, and finally, Aubrey Anable’s phenomenal affective reading of the metatextuality between both games in Playing with Feelings (Reed, Salter, and Murray 2020; Moulthrop 2021; Reinhard 2021; LeClerc 2024; Jerz 2007; Funk 2022; Snider 2023; Anable 2018, 1–37).
[7] A few exceptional examples are Mark J.P. Wolf’s early article on video game spatiality utilizing Space Invaders as a primary example, King and Krzywinska’s formal analyses of Space Invaders, Raiford Guins’ discussion of the Space Invaders cabinet, Jaroslav Svlech’s semiotic reading of the depiction of enemies within Space Invaders, and works from within popular video game culture like Steve Bloom’s Video Invaders or Martin Amis’ Invasion of the Space Invaders. (Wolf 1997; King and Krzywinska 2006; Guins 2014; Švelch 2023; Bloom 1982; Amis 1982)
[8] The most glaring relation between this turn and Space Invaders as an early “non-canonical” text that was then incorporated into the canon is Jesper Juul’s “Games Telling Stories?” which uses the game as a primary example in investigating the existence and presentation of narratives within videogames, but the phenomenon is what Sky LaRell Anderson considers “ludic anxiety” and provides a discursive summary in “Start, Select, Continue,” (Juul 2001; Anderson 2013)
[9] Consider the fundamental relation between texts like Ultima IV, Dragon Quest, Missile Command, Mystery House, or even Puyo Puyo and contemporary, canonical video games as well as their relative absence from anglophone video game scholarship.
[10] For insight into Mary Ann Buckles’ time as a graduate student, see Michael Erard’s 2004 profile (Erard 2004).
[11] AAA games are those games produced by major video game studies which receive the largest investment of resources, including economic, creative and skilled labor, manufacturing and distribution, and the most popular attention within and without gaming culture.
[12] For a particularly succinct and ostentatious example of this, see GQ’s 2018 photoshoot-accompanied feature on Barone as the “alchemist” of gaming (White 2018).
[13] The series’ first iteration was released in 1996, and new installments have been released regularly since then. However, in 2015, the series changed its title in the Anglosphere from Harvest Moon to Story of Seasons due to changes in licensing, localization, and publication deals. Despite this, the Japanese title, Bokujō Monogatari, and the series continuity have remained unchanged.
b2o is pleased to announce the publication of a special issue in honor of our friend and b2o as well as b2 colleague, David Golumbia, who passed away in September 2023. Edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, the issue brings together two terms that we associate with David’s work in digital studies: “critique” and “care”. The special issue launched with a first essay by Adin Lears on April 24th, 2025 and further contributions will be published as they become available.
Read Alexander Galloway’s review of David’s book Cyberlibertarianism here.
This response to Torsten Andreasen’s article “The Day the Music Died” was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier.
Mapping Affective Landscapes within Financialized Capitalism through Speculative Fiction
Ali Rıza Taşkale
Introduction
In ‘The Day the Music Died’, Torsten Andreasen explores the link between Robert Brenner’s theory of a ‘long downturn’ in advanced economies and Fredric Jameson’s concept of the ‘waning of affect’. Brenner argues that capitalist economies have faced low profit rates since the 1970s, while Jameson describes postmodernism as the cultural logic of financialization, leading to a shift in affective responses from deep historical engagement to surface-level intensities. Andreasen expands on Jameson’s notion of affect as a historically specific capacity to perceive and act in a given social context, exploring how the genre of finance fiction both depicts affective reactions to finance and itself constitutes such a reaction.
Andreasen identifies three stages of affective response to financialized capitalism: the euphoric hubris of the 1980s, the schizophrenic horror of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the resignation following the 2007-2008 financial crisis. To Andreasen, these stages mirror broader cultural shifts in responses to financial capitalism, from optimism to crisis-induced alienation and eventual acceptance, as illustrated by films like Wall Street, American Psycho, and Cosmopolis.
I find Andreasen’s periodization helpful, as it reflects shifts in how speculative finance and capitalism are culturally represented. Moreover, his exploration of the evolution of finance fiction is particularly insightful, as it frames a transition from the optimism of the post-war era to a growing recognition of the breakdown of industrial capitalism, ultimately leading to the post-crisis affect of resignation. Thus, the strength of his argument lies in his critique of finance fiction’s focus on individual crises, highlighting how this emphasis often overlooks the systemic violence embedded in financial capitalism. Ultimately, Andreasen calls for a more critical engagement with the structural forces sustaining financial capitalism, rather than perpetuating the individualization of crises within finance fiction.
However, Andreasen’s piece is not without its limitations. These become particularly visible in his references to Raymond Williams’ ‘structures of feeling’. Williams’ concept is closely tied to a political economy of affect, which Andreasen hints at but does not explicitly explore. This is important because some of his analyses illuminate affective logics shaped by the values embedded in specific historical and material processes. This raises an important question: what, exactly, are the prevailing affective states within speculative financial capitalism, and how are we to understand them?
Affective Landscapes through Pattern Recognition
In his piece, Andreasen alludes to affective states, but he does not capture what I refer to as ‘speculative fatigue’, which I argue is the dominant affective state of contemporary financial capitalism. Speculative fatigue, I argue, is the exhaustion caused by continuous market volatility and high-risk investments, leading to disillusionment with financial systems that appear disconnected from real-world stability. To address this, I suggest turning to speculative fiction to gain a deeper understanding of the affective modes within financial capitalism. Speculative fiction brings distinctive powers, pleasures, and textual and visual richness to the issues discussed by Andreasen (Canavan 2017; Chambers and Garforth 2020; Vint 2021). It not only exposes the inherent contradictions of financial speculation but also unveils the predominant affective dynamics associated with it.
Several works of speculative fiction effectively make legible the prevailing affective states of financial capitalism. Examples could include Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017) and Jonas Eika’s After the Sun (2021). I want to focus, however, on one particular novel: William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003, hereafter PR), a work of speculative fiction that explores the intersections of branding, marketing, and finance in a digital age. Although written in 2003, just after the 9/11 attacks and before the 2007–2008 global market crash, the novel’s portrayal of homo-economicus as the affective subjectivity and speculative fatigue as the dominant affect remains strikingly relevant today.
The novel’s protagonist, Cayce Pollard, is a marketing consultant with an exceptional ability to recognize patterns in cultural trends and advertisements. When tasked with tracing the origins of enigmatic film clips known as ‘footage’ circulating online, Cayce becomes entangled in a global conspiracy. As her investigation deepens, she not only confronts her own inner demons but also navigates a reality increasingly shaped by virtual connections and speculative agendas. This journey mirrors the broader thematic concerns in PR, especially the commercialization and commodification of life within late financial capitalism. Cayce’s search for the origins of the footage can be seen as a metaphor for the way financial capitalism shapes our affective valuation of life, reducing personal and emotional experiences to marketable and commodified elements.
In the novel, one of the most potent tools of such market commodification is a strategy called ‘cool-hunting’. Cool-hunting, or trendspotting, as defined by Cayce, involves identifying ‘a group behavior pattern around a particular class of objects’ (Gibson, 2003, p. 86). She further explains that this tactic relies heavily on pattern recognition, with cool-hunters aiming to identify ‘a pattern before anyone else does’ (Gibson, 2003, p. 86). Following this, she describes the next process: ‘I point a commodifier at it […], it gets productized. Turned into units. Marketed’ (Gibson, 2003, p. 86).
Trapped in the Perpetual Present: Homo Economicus in Financial Capitalism
The commodification of everyday life, where even the most intimate moments can be analyzed and monetized by pattern-recognizing experts and cool hunters employed by profit-driven multinational corporations, poses a significant threat as life is reduced to ‘homo economicus’, driven solely by market and corporate interests. Homo economicus is the ideal figure within the financial market. Just as financial capitalism creates markets, it also shapes homo economicus as a form of subjectification and affect. Within financial capitalism, therefore, ‘we are everywhere homo economicus and only homo economicus’ (Brown, 2015, p. 33). In this framework, the subject is left to fend for itself and is addressed affectively. Its wants, desires, passions, and instincts are duly noted and turned into a financial narrative. It is in this space that financial capitalism aligns with its affective subjectivity – the subject of homo economicus, motivated only by self-interest.
Thus, what is distinctive about the figure of homo-economicus, and necessary for the functioning of financial capitalism, is that it legitimizes and ultimately (re)produces individuals based on market-defined self-interest(s). This system has become so pervasive that it has transformed everyday human existence into a vast game, or an endless stream of derivatives and speculative instruments. Individuals are increasingly defined by their ‘speculative value’ (Davis, 2018), a phenomenon that extends beyond consumers to include those working within the system, such as the cool-hunters themselves.
This is further illustrated in PR, which shows how the dominance of techno-financial culture, the surplus of consumer goods, and the illusion of instant gratification collectively transform society’s perception of time. This transformation gives rise to what Fredric Jameson (1991) terms a ‘perpetual present’. This is not just a structural shift but is also deeply affective, reshaping how individuals experience and internalize their place in the world by establishing a regime of ‘indifference’ (Martin, 2007). This affective state of perpetual present manifests in a world where the boundaries between the past, present, and future are increasingly blurred, as technological advancements and financial imperatives accelerate the pace of life. The constant flood of new products, information, and experiences generates a sense of ‘immediacy’ (Kornbluh, 2023), where the future is always deferred, and the past is continually reinterpreted to serve present speculation. In a world dominated by the logic of speculative finance and branding, time becomes a commodity – something to be sold, consumed, and constantly redefined. The notion of inhabiting a perpetual futuristic present also resonates with the statements of the sinister entrepreneur in the novel, Hubertus Bigend:
We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which “now” was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient “now” to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. [. . . ] We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition. (Gibson 2003, p. 57)
Therefore, for Bigend, history has effectively ended, and resistance is deemed futile. To project meaningfully into the future from a ‘perpetual present’ characterized by constant change, has become an impossible task. The novel also suggests that we, as readers, may be vulnerable under such circumstances to ‘apophenia’, a concept defined within the text as ‘the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things… an illusion of meaningfulness, faulty pattern recognition’ (2003, p. 115). While cool-hunters recognize real patterns to be economized, we merely imagine them in a desperate attempt to give meaning to our lives. They are hunting for cool; we are seeing patterns where there are none.
In the novel, people become more and more fixated on the footage, attempting to decipher patterns and significance within it. They engage in speculation about the meaning, function, or nature of the footage within Internet forums and across various digital networks, fostering the creation of new channels through which objects can be circulated and marketed (Nilges, 2019, p. 47). This reflects the relationship between interpretation and object, speculation and value, which forms the system through which the footage circulates.
This obsession with patterns must be understood differently depending on the historical period, allowing us to expand Andreasen’s periodization. In the 1980s, it aligns with Baudrillard’s critique of the simulacrum, where the proliferation of signs detached from reality creates existential uncertainty and a loss of meaning. By 2003, it reflects early Internet culture’s optimism about digital connectivity and the democratization of meaning, generating excitement and a belief in new possibilities, even within an emerging neoliberal landscape. By 2025, the affective response shifts again, shaped by a highly financialized, algorithm-driven digital economy, where engagement with content is driven by monetization and speculation. This fosters anxiety, compulsive interaction, and a sense of precarity, as meaning itself becomes a commodity. This shift does not follow a simple linear progression, nor does one phase completely replace another. Instead, it highlights how the pursuit of meaning moves from existential uncertainty to optimism, and finally to a precarious, commodified engagement with digital networks and financialized attention economies.
PR captures this historical trajectory while dramatizing humanity’s endless quest for meaning in a world dominated by signs and symbols – a pursuit for authenticity (amidst simulacra), continuity (in a culture celebrating fragmentation), and depth (in a society increasingly shaped by surface-level engagement and algorithmic immediacy). In the novel, this is an obsession that Hubert Bigend seeks to capitalize on financially. The objective is not to uncover patterns that might imbue the footage with meaning but, rather, as he sees it, to exploit and commercialize the footage. At this point, Bigend makes an important statement that aptly describes today’s financial market, which has increasingly become a simulacrum or a speculative construct rather than a tangible entity: ‘Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves’ (Gibson, 2003, p. 67). Thus, Bigend serves as a living embodiment of financial capitalism, wherein speculative value and profit supersede all other considerations. To him, life is viewed primarily through the prism of marketing and speculation.
However, the rise of speculative financial instruments does not signal the end of production and labor in today’s economies, nor a decrease in the focus on commodities. Instead, it reflects a shift from traditional consumer- and production-based capitalism to speculative financial practices, which are altering our understanding of value. Under financial capitalism, value increasingly derives from activities like ‘debt trading, financial market activity’ and ‘rentier practices’ (Davis, 2018, p. 5). This reflects a transformation in how economic value is generated: it is no longer grounded in production, but in abstract financial mechanisms that reshape wealth distribution and economic power.
This transformation is portrayed in PR, where Bigend’s pursuit of the footage is driven purely by financial motives. Cayce’s search, by contrast, is motivated by a desire to uncover something of genuine value, revealing a tension between speculative financial practices and the human need for meaning beyond profit and homo-economization. This contrast demonstrates how speculative capitalism not only redefines value but also influences individual desires and perceptions of worth.
Jameson (2003, p. 114) offers a reading of Gibson’s PR in which he observes that the clips’ absence of pattern and style provides ‘an ontological relief’ to Cayce, granting her ‘an epoch of rest, an escape from the noisy commodities themselves, which turn out […] to be living entities preying on the humans who have to coexist with them’. Although Cayce’s abilities develop within an overpowering technological market, she manages to avoid being reduced to homo economicus or having her life fully economized. She possesses what is known as a ‘trademark allergy’, which evolves into a phobia or nausea towards certain trademarks like Tommy Hilfiger and Bibendum, the Michelin Man. This reaction can be described as a side-effect of too much exposure to the world of branding and marketing. To cope, she removes trademark logos from her clothing and avoids contact with fashion brand names. As Gibson describes it, this rejection reflects Cayce’s conscious effort to resist being consumed by the hegemonic power of the techno-financial system and avoid becoming merely a commodified entity.
In her journey to find the creator of the footage, Cayce travels to various cities, including Tokyo. Upon her arrival in that city, she is confronted with what Gibson (2003, p. 125) describes as ‘the manically animated forest of signs’, leading her to seek nature and authenticity in the city. Cayce perceives Tokyo as a place where reality has been exiled, to the extent that even the paved streets seem to conceal no soil beneath them; everything appears artificial. She reflects, ‘she’s never actually seen soil emerge from any incision they might make in the street, here; it’s as though there is nothing beneath the pavement but a clean, uniformly dense substrate of pipes and wiring’ (Gibson, 2003, p. 125).
Tokyo thrives on signs and simulacra; yet, through her individual re-appropriation, Cayce resists the overwhelming dominance of financial instruments and cultural discourses, managing to prevent her life from being economized and commercialized. In other words, she refuses to be consumed by the simulacrum. In this sense, Cayce’s radicality and authenticity do not lie in overthrowing the oppressive systems of capitalism in which she is immersed, but rather in surviving within that system with some degree of agency.
Speculative Fatigue
PR anticipates a technologized future where financialization becomes ingrained in daily life. In this world, the distinction between the actual and the virtual blurs, and speculative finance takes center stage. The result is a subject reduced to a mere number, shaped by the totalizing forces of financial capitalism, where individuality is obscured, and the capacity to engage with or make sense of events is suspended. In this condition, the subject embodies homo economicus – driven by market logic rather than personal agency. Paralyzed by brands, speculative financial instruments, and AI technologies, this subject inhabits the world without truly interacting with it.
But how is the dominant affective state presented in the novel? While there are many affective responses throughout, PR illustrates an affective state in which speculative financial capitalism creates a life of suspended agency, where individuals are trapped in an endless loop of commodification and abstraction, shaped by the banality of corporate logos, technologies, and financial instruments. I call this affective state speculative fatigue, as it frames the affective and psychological toll of living under the constant pressure of financial speculation. If homo economicus is the product of financial speculation, then speculative fatigue could be seen as the affective residue left from being constantly subjected to its logic. In this sense, speculative fatigue isn’t just about an individual’s weariness with financial markets; it’s about how these markets and the perpetual self-calculation they demand leave people exhausted, emotionally drained, and disconnected from anything other than their economic value. It acknowledges the toll that the pervasive logic of financialization takes on people, whether or not they’re actively participating in it.
Speculative fatigue diverges from the affective states of euphoria and resignation, as described by Andreassen, through its distinct tone and lived experience. Euphoria, seen in the early stages of financialization, is driven by optimism and belief in the limitless potential of financial markets. In contrast, speculative fatigue arises from the constant pressure of engaging with financial speculation, leaving individuals mentally and affectively drained rather than energized. Resignation, often following a crisis, involves passive acceptance of the financial system’s dominance. While speculative fatigue shares some emotional distance with resignation, it is more about the ongoing toll of living in a financialized world that limits agency and connection, rather than simply giving up. In short, euphoria is driven by hope, resignation by acceptance, and speculative fatigue by the affective weariness of navigating a financially-driven reality.
Speculative fiction, in this context, provides a lens through which to explore the speculative fatigue produced by financial capitalism, though such explorations are not exclusive to the genre. PR exposes how financial speculation actively shapes cognitive and emotional experiences, leading to an endless state of homo economicus – a condition of perpetual economic calculation and self-optimization. This state is not abstract or universal; it is a direct result of how speculative finance permeates daily life, inducing affective overload and fatigue. Thus, speculative fatigue emerges as the emotional and psychological toll of this constant engagement with the logic of financial speculation, leaving individuals disconnected and mentally drained. The novel not only depicts the speculative fatigue of living in a financialized world, but also critiques the very systems that generate this fatigue. By revealing how homo economicus is both constructed and perpetuated by the very forces it critiques, and how speculative fatigue emerges from this process, PR illustrates how speculative financial capitalism reshapes not only our material world but also our affective landscapes, reducing individuals to economic units within a system that demands constant self-commodification.
In this sense, PR reveals the inherent contradictions of contemporary speculative financial capitalism, showing how speculation functions not only as an ‘immanent critique’ (Nilges, 2019) but also as a mechanism that cultivates homo economicus – a state where the pursuit of financial success, self-optimization, and market-driven choices supplant deeper values and genuine social connections. This homo economicus is not a passive backdrop but a central feature of the narrative, embodying the instability and uncertainty that come with speculative finance, where future outcomes are unpredictable. The affective experience of homo economicus, which manifests as speculative fatigue, is not incidental to financial speculation; rather, it is an intrinsic consequence of the constant cycle of self-assessment and recalculation of worth. This perpetual recalculation, driven by the fluctuating demands of financial markets and speculative mechanisms, exhausts individuals emotionally and psychologically, leaving them trapped in a state of ongoing fatigue.
Conclusion: Speculative Fiction as Critique
Andreasen identifies three stages of affective response to financialized capitalism: the euphoric hubris of the 1980s, the schizophrenic horror of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the resignation following the 2007–2008 financial crisis. In PR, however, speculative fatigue transcends this periodization, presenting a perpetual state of homo economicus, shaped by the pervasive logic of speculative finance.
Yet this is not the entire story. PR is also illuminating in its depiction of Cayce’s resistance to speculative fatigue generated by commodification and financialization, extending beyond Andreasen’s understanding of the affective stages of financial capitalism. The novel concludes with Cayce peacefully falling asleep after achieving her initial goal: finding the maker and revealing the mystery of the footage. However, just before drifting off, Cayce’s trademark allergy is suddenly cured. She no longer fears the Michelin Man or Tommy Hilfiger products. This cure symbolizes her ability to save herself from the ‘logo-maze’ that threatened to erode her, as she has gained a deeper understanding of the system. Her consciousness reaches a new level. From now on, she continually works to expose, challenge, and resist the coercive system attempting to dominate her. Furthermore, of equal significance in the novel’s final scene is Cayce’s weeping ‘for her century, though whether the one past or the one present she doesn’t know’ (Gibson, 2003, p. 356).
Resistance, though not an affect in itself, is fueled by a complex blend of emotions – frustration, anger, hope, and determination – that arise in response to the fatigue caused by speculative finance. This dual perspective, combining the affective state of speculative fatigue with the resistance that follows, highlights the transformative potential of speculative fiction. It does not simply capture the affective landscape of life within financialized systems but also weaves in acts of defiance, fueled by these very emotions. In this way, PR illustrates how resistance is both a reaction to the speculative fatigue of financial capitalism and a catalyst for imagining alternative futures.
Thus, it is crucial to engage with speculative fiction, not merely as a realm of flying cars and futuristic gadgets, but as a toolkit for examining how speculative financial practices shape social and cultural dynamics. Speculative fiction exposes how desires, fears, and imagined futures are engineered by economic systems, while also offering a glimpse of new possibilities and forms of resistance that can disrupt and transform those systems.
Ali Rıza Taşkale is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University. Prior to joining Roskilde University, he held positions at Near East University, Northern Cyprus, and Hacettepe University, Turkey. His research has been published in journals such as Critical Studies on Security, Urban Studies, Utopian Studies, Distinktion, Thesis Eleven, Rethinking Marxism, Northern Lights, New Political Science, Contemporary Political Theory, Third Text, Theory, Culture & Society, and the Journal for Cultural Research. His book, Post-Politics in Context, was published by Routledge in 2016. He serves on the editorial board of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, overseeing special issues and the forum exchange section and is actively engaged in a project exploring the logical and structural relationship between speculative fiction and speculative finance.
References
Andreasen, T. (2024). The day the music died – the waning of affect in finance fiction of the long downturn. Boundary (forthcoming)
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books.
Canavan, G. (2017). Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press.
Chambers, A. C., & Garforth, L. (2020). Reading Science: SF and the Uses of Literature. In N. Ahuja, et al. (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (pp. xx-xx). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_14.
Davis, A. (2018). Defining speculative value in the age of financialized capitalism. The Sociological Review, 66(1), 3-19.
Frantzen, M. K. (2024). Making a Killing: The Birth of the Financial Thriller in the 1970s. Edinburgh: UEP. (forthcoming)
Gibson, W. (2003). Pattern Recognition. Putnam Adult.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Jameson, F. (2003). Fear and loathing in globalization. New Left Review, 23, 105–114.
Nilges, M. (2019). The Realism of Speculation. CR: The New Centennial Review, 19(1), 37-59.
Vint, S. (2021). Science Fiction. MIT Press.
This article was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier.
The Day the Music Died: Finance Fiction and the Affects of the Long Downturn
Torsten Andreasen
All About that Base…
Since the late 20th century, finance fiction has evolved through distinct affective phases – euphoria, schizophrenia, and resignation – both reflecting economic transformations and shaping the cultural logic of financialized capitalism. By bringing Robert Brenner’s theory of the long downturn into dialogue with Fredric Jameson’s waning affect, this article proposes a periodization of finance fiction that traces how affect mediates the contradictions of financial accumulation, not only registering crises in capitalism but also framing the ideological terms in which they are understood.
Robert Brenner’s theory of a “long downturn” in advanced capitalist economies since 1973 and Fredric Jameson’s description of the same period as a “waning of affect” have each inspired innumerable analyses and diagnoses of late capitalist society and its cultural artefacts[1]. The theory of the long downturn grapples with enduring low industrial profit rates due to persistent overcapacity despite decreased investment in labor and equipment (Brenner 2006). The waning of affect is characteristic of postmodernism as the superstructure correlate to the base of financialized economy’s compensation for waning industrial growth (Jameson 1991: xx-xxii): the transition from Munch’s Scream to Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, from depth hermeneutics to simulacral surface, from a psychic experience and cultural language dominated by historical temporality to a fragmented hyper-spatiality transcending the modernist alienation of subjective anxiety and thus surpassing the capacities of the human sensorium and mutating the now ungraspable totality of the world system into impersonal schizophrenic experience.[2]
Brenner’s long downturn and the financial bubbles and busts obfuscating it, have been analyzed and debated in minute historical detail, while Jameson’s waning of affect has been an important reference for discussion of both other affects and other kinds of waning—for example, the waning of genre. However, it is much less frequent for the two to be considered together.
In an attempt to think through certain shifts in the historical development of cinematic and literary finance fiction, this article scrutinizes and further periodizes the waning of affect as a historical claim. It does so by considering affect in light of the long downturn, as specific affective reactions to concrete historical operations of financial capital after the post-war boom.
The concept of affect is often employed in a somewhat vague manner. Jameson considers affect to be the interior feelings or emotional states of a historically specific subject: the bourgeois ego. Since postmodernity entails the fragmentation of the subject, there is no longer any ego to contain the emotions of old, and instead of feelings and emotions, the postmodern subject is left with free-floating and impersonal intensities.
Holding on to Jameson’s notion of affect, I also consider a further, although more general, tradition of questioning affect: From Plato and Aristotle to Brian Massumi’s reading of Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, the question of affect has been framed as the ability to “affect and be affected”. In Plato and Aristotle, the ability (δύναμις) to affect (ποιεῖν) and be affected (παθεῖν) is a fundamental “property of being” (ἴδιον τοῦ ὄντος) (Aristotle 1960: V, IX) or of that which has “real existence” (πᾶν τοῦτο ὄντως εἶναι) (Plato 1921: 247 d7-23). Focusing on human existence, Spinoza was in search of “that which so disposes the human body that it can be affected in many ways (ut pluribus modis possit affici), or which renders it capable of affecting external bodies in many ways (ad corpora externa pluribus modis afficiendum)” (Spinoza 2005: IV, prop. 38). Human affect, then, can be considered not so much a question of subjective or even impersonal emotion but as the ability to perceive, comprehend and react to the surrounding world: it is emotion as linked to perception, cognition, and, most importantly, agency.
Jameson’s periodizing analysis of the waning of affect as characteristic of postmodernity reminds us that although there exists a long and varied philosophical tradition of analyzing as “affect” the ability to affect and be affected, it should not simply be read as a transhistorical subjective category, where each encounter is one of either joy or tristesse. Affect relies on historically specific material conditions, and Jameson’s argument implies that in this stage of late capitalism, the joy or tristesse of Spinoza’s encounter are displaced by euphoria and schizophrenia.
Jameson himself defined the “ideological task” of the concept of postmodernism by referencing Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling” which, according to Williams, defines “forms and conventions in art and literature as inalienable elements of a social material process” (1977: 133) and describes how these structures constitute emergent, dominant, or residual social forms. I thus take affect to be a historically specific subjective ability to experience, feel, understand, and act within a given social material process – an ability enabled and mapped by cultural representation.
My question is, then, whether it would be possible to consider the waning of affect as discontinuous constellations of shifting cultural dominants and their accompanying residual and emergent forms in late capitalism. I tentatively answer this question by looking at the representation of financialized affect in a selection of films and novels ostensibly about finance to distinguish various affective modes in the cultural depiction of the financier subject.[3]
Jameson claimed that anxiety and alienation had been replaced by schizophrenia and euphoria as the two intensities available to the postmodern subject. I argue that within the cultural representation of the financier, euphoria and schizophrenia are historically separate modes, the second following the first, and both followed by a third. I thus propose to further periodize the conjecture of “waning affect” by sketching out three successive modes of perceiving, understanding, and reacting to one’s surroundings as they appear in finance fiction:
Through this periodization, I hope to analyze the cultural logic of financialized late capitalism as manifested in fictional renditions of finance in novels and movies.
The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades
The financialized economy that superseded the production-based economic expansion of the postwar boom is, in Marxian terms, based on the belief that it is possible to cut out commodity production from the general formula for capital, M – C – M’, so that money is exchanged for more money with no value-adding labor required. The formula for this is M – M’, what Marx called the “most superficial and fetishized form” (Marx 1981: 515) of the capital relation, it is “fictitious capital” (1981: Chapter 25).
The financiers in 1980s fiction all seem to subscribe to such a fantasy. Historically, this specific version of that recurring fantasy came out of the general slowdown in manufacturing profitability in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The slowdown was combatted by government facilitated debt creation – public, corporate, and private. Because of low profit rates, firms were unable to meet debt-fueled increases in demand by investing in production, and without an increase in supply prices went up (Brenner 2006: 157-159). The subsequent inflation peaked at 14.8% in March 1980, which was combatted by Fed Chair Paul Volcker by increasing the Fed funds rate to its peak of 20% in June 1981. The shift from Keynesian stimulus in the 1970s to Volcker’s monetarism at the end of the decade brought an abrupt end to subsidized demand and recession inevitably ensued.
Wall Street had suffered during this slowdown in production, and “Between 1968 and 1975 over 150 firms were absorbed or closed” (Bruck 1988: 29). But while Volcker’s decision to fix money supply and let interest rates float inaugurated a recession in the American economy from 1979-1982, it also marked what Michael Lewis called “the beginning of the golden age of the bond man” (Lewis 1989: 43). This period saw the invention of the securitized mortgage loan and its repackaging in the so-called Collateralized Debt Obligations and “between 1977 and 1986, the holdings of mortgage bonds held by American Savings and Loans grew from 12.6 billion dollars to 150 billion dollars” (142), i.e., more than a ten-fold increase over the course of a decade.
The early eighties also saw an explosion in Junk bonds (bonds rated below investment grade, i.e., BB+ or below) and the related debt-fueled hostile mergers and acquisitions which enabled the emergence of that crucial figure of the age: the corporate raider. This explosion in debt also drove stocks toward new highs before the crash in October 1987. The specific version of the fantasy of M – M’ which constitutes the clear cultural dominant of 1980s finance fiction should no doubt be seen in the light of this bull market run-up to the crash.
This first stage of my proposed periodization, the stage of euphoric hubris where the future is so bright that shades are strictly necessary, is the age of what has been called the “Masters of the Universe.” The financial masters were famously described in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) as the proud moniker which the protagonist, Sherman McCoy, awards himself:
[…] one fine day, in a fit of euphoria, after he had picked up the telephone and taken an order for zero-coupon bonds that had brought him a 50,000$ commission, just like that, this very phrase had bubbled up into his brain. On Wall Street he and a few others – how many? – three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? – had become precisely that… Masters of the Universe. There was… no limit whatsoever! (Wolfe 1987: 11)
These masters were also known as Big Swinging Dicks, as famously documented in Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker: “If he could make millions of dollars come out of those phones, he became that most revered of all species: a Big Swinging Dick” (Lewis 1989: 56). Limitless accumulation of capital through the technologically mediated and thus seemingly immediate exchange of paper: this is the fantasy of the masters of the universe. In terms of affect, Jameson’s euphoria is clear, even explicit. The ability of the financier to immediately affect the world renders the M – M’ relation sensible as the absence of material limits. Money is transformed into more money, just like that!
However, confronted with the stratified realms of production – the white working class (e.g., the airplane builders in Wall Street (1987) and ship builders in Pretty Woman (1990)) and racialized precarious labor (e.g., Eddie Murphy’s character Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places (1983) and the depictions of Harlem and the Bronx in Bonfire) – these masters are generally depicted as incorporations of hubris. They are figures of Icarus who, in their euphoria, fly too close to the sun and fall as a result of their moral transgressions.
The immediate expansion of finance capital via M – M’ as cultural dominant is accompanied by the residual forms of the manufacturing sector, presented as the sound but betrayed foundation of the American economy. The machine maintenance workers of Bluestar Airlines in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street are the salt of the earth betrayed by the soaring immoral greed of Gordon Gekko and his protégé Bud Fox. When Bud’s analyses of publicly available stock data find little demand in his one-shot ideas pitch to Gekko, he proposes the airline in which his father is a machinist and union representative. His insider’s knowledge of the company’s troubled financial situation enables him to argue that there is money to be made if the unions agree to a 20% salary cut to be reversed if the company turns a profit. Gekko pretends to go along but in fact intends to break up the company, sell the parts, and siphon off the surplus in the pension fund.
As has been pointed out by Leigh Claire La Berge (La Berge 2015: 99), Bud is caught between his two fathers, the two ideals: on the one hand, the corporate raider for whom “Greed is good” and who clearly states “I create nothing; I own” and, on the other, the honest hard-working man who advises his son to “stop trading for the quick buck and go produce something with your life, create, don’t live off the buying and selling of others…”
The two confronting ideals are narratively deployed to organize a moral showdown between labor and predatory ownership, between “the real economy” and “fictitious capital”, between a post-war production economy and the financial “zero sum game” where “Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred from one perception to another. Like magic. […] The illusion has become real”, as Gekko puts it.
Wall Street and other finance fiction of the 1980s condemn finance in moral terms: the immorality of finance is to claim the reality of financial illusion, a claim rendered dubious in the film’s staging of the ideological confrontation between Gekko and Fox. During their heated exchange, the camera swivels restlessly around the two interlocutors, almost desperately avoiding a steady shot. But exactly at the transition from Gekko’s “I create nothing” to “I own”, the camera finally rests on Gekko in a satisfied pose, drink in hand, and New York skyscrapers as a backdrop. That brief image of capital’s self-satisfaction is only disturbed by the worker on a lift outside the building, cleaning the windows with long strokes from top to bottom.
Gekko’s demonstrative pose as master of the universe is only minimally tainted by the slow movement of manual labor. I disagree, here, with La Berge’s description of the window cleaner as an evocation of “cleansing” (110). I would argue, rather, that he is an almost comical stain on the fantasy of frictionless transition of money from illusion to reality. Even in the most glorious image of the dominance of finance capital, the residual head of manual labor pops into the frame and by the strokes of its servicing hands discretely insists on labor as the inescapable material reality behind financial euphoria.
A similar confrontation between the dominant fantasy of financial profit without cumbersome labor and the residual postwar ethos of a production-driven economic expansion appears in Pretty Woman where the corporate raider Edward Lewis is brought onto a more virtuous path by a sex worker with a heart of gold. The movie presents several forms of labor: the sex work of Vivian and her friend Kit, the corporate raiding of Edward and his icky lawyer Stucky, the service work of the hotel manager Barnard, the Rodeo Drive saleswomen, other service workers, and, finally, the family founders of the shipbuilding Morse Industries.
Although the movie hints at the troubles of sex work by briefly mentioning the death of Skinny Marie (who Kit repeatedly dismisses as a flake and a crack head who is thus not worthy of Vivian’s “Cinder-fucking-ella”-like social ascent), the material conditions that constitute such work are quickly occluded by the question of inner subjective nobility predetermining social destiny. Because Vivian flosses her teeth and weeps with emotion at the opera, she proves a true princess who should, surely, be rewarded with a true prince protruding from a limousine sunroof, that preferred steed of budding financial royalty.
Pretty Woman’s particular rendition of several age-old narrative schemata (e.g., Cinderella and Pygmalion) gets historically specific, however, when depicting the two mutually constitutive transformations in Vivian and Edward. In the opening scene, midway upon the journey of his life, Edward finds himself without a straightforward pathway. Lost in a Lotus, descending into the inferno of Hollywood Boulevard, Edward encounters real-world wisdom and grace united in the form of Vivian. The financier in the penthouse suite whose vertigo announces his inability to confront the material conditions of his social status is brought out of the euphoric hubris of his station by the straightforward humanity and nobility of the sex worker. The nobility of physical labor enables him to realize the ignominy of the M – M’ fantasy. As he says to Stucky: “We don’t build anything, Phil. We don’t make anything.”
Instead of buying Morse Enterprises to break the company apart and sell the pieces in a replica of Gekko’s plan for Bluestar, Edward decides to invest in the company’s production: “Mr. Lewis and I are going to build ships together. Great big ships” as Mr. Morse says, thus providing Edward with a new and more benevolent father of industrial production than the one of inherited wealth who divorced his music teacher mother and thereby drove Edward towards the immoral quest of corporate raiding – a quest initiated by taking over and splitting up his father’s company in a fit of oedipal frenzy.[4]
While Edward is obviously the knight in suit and shining armor, Stucky is the villain, insisting on maximizing profits through corporate raiding and even venting his frustrations with Edward’s newfound nobility by violating its source, Vivian, who, as a sex worker, is supposedly obliged to obey the proposition of an impromptu stint of wage labor. But the villainy of Stucky is the very condition of possibility of Edward’s nobility, just as Vivian’s nobility rests on the backdrop of a dead Skinny Marie. Only because the raw greed and dirty business tricks have been outsourced to Stucky – “That’s why I hired you, Phil, to do my worrying for me” – can Edward maintain the shine of his armor, and only because of the crackhead flakyness of certain colleagues can Vivian’s nobility stand out enough for her to ascend beyond her station and, from there, engage in the benevolent financing of Kit’s education. Carved of less noble wood than Vivian, Kit needs a philanthropic push from those of natural worth to work her way towards middle class respectability while Vivian takes the express elevator straight to the penthouse.
The problem with this plot where innate moral nobility redirects the dominant 1980s fantasy of M – M’ back towards the residual M – C – M’ of a supposedly healthy and noble postwar industrial economy, is that such a turn enacts an ideological intervention in the historical causality of capital. Contrary to the movie’s claims, a return to an earlier era of production is not a question of morals. The laws of capital demand profit and you can neither morally nor magically restore the profitability of the manufacturing sector.
The residual aspect of Pretty Woman does not solely spring from its fairy tale plot, then, but from the persistence of a postwar ethos of production as a valid response to the beginning cracks in the 1980s fantasy of finance, cracks that became exceedingly manifest on October 19, 1987, the day of the so-called Black Monday stock crash. The depiction of finance as moral corruption is a very real “imaginary resolution of […] objective contradictions” (Jameson 1981: 118). Pretty Woman and its contemporaries thus provide a residual affective response to the failing affective dominant of the 1980s. It is not simply a nostalgia for the good old days, but the claim that only the immorality of a few Gekko’s and Stucky’s inhibit the restoration of the supposedly more sustainable and more noble character of production and honest labor. The failure of this residual affect of the post-war boom to actually and not just imaginarily resolve the failing affect of euphoria becomes the main problem in my two subsequent periods.
And as Things Fell Apart…
Something emerged in the cultural representations of finance in the beginning of the 1990s. A new threat of a schizophrenic disintegration of signifying surfaces seems to accompany a shift in the cultural perception of the financial sector after the Black Monday stock crash on October 19, 1987. The bull market of 1981-1987 came abruptly to a halt, and what could, in relation to the crash, be considered the euphoric hubris of Wall Street traders bound to fail and fall soon turned out to be a systemic negation of reality.
Along with the authorities in other countries, e.g., Japan, the US Fed decided to alleviate the collapse in equity prices by cutting interest rates. Volcker’s successor as chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan, slashed short term interest rates to zero between 1990 and 1993 to help the market and it was widely believed that, as Robert Brenner’s critical account of this time would have it, “the stock market would never be allowed to drop too severely, and the bull run continued” (Brenner 2000: 16). Nobel Prize-winning economist Rudiger Dornbusch expressed the belief clearly in 1998: “This expansion will run forever” (Dornbusch 1998). Brenner more pertinently described the asset-price run-up in the late 1990s as a stock market “climbing skyward without a ladder” (Brenner 2009: 21).
Further, the recession of 2000-2002, i.e. the bursting of the dot.com-bubble, was quickly followed by yet another ladder-less climb, this time in bonds. Driven by an initially low interest rate and the explosion of subprime loans, another bubble violently separating the financial sector from its material underpinnings was underway and about to finally burst both the euphoric fantasy of the 1980s and its haunted schizophrenic counterpart in the 1990s and early aughts.
The year after Pretty Woman attempted to save financial capital from euphoric hubris by insisting on the possibility of profitable investment in manufacturing, Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991) introduced a new cultural response to the market’s systemic negation of reality by exhibiting the collapse of fantasy into horror. As a chapter title announces, the novel stages the “End of the 1980s”. With the rambling confessions of the investment banker Patrick Bateman – the next generation financier, who is neither a new Master of the Universe “with a taste for human flesh”, as one commentator would have it[5], nor much of a master at all – we have gone from the dominant hubris of 1980s financial euphoria accompanied by industrial production as its residual moral counterpart to the dominant schizophrenic dissolution of the financier subject: “my depersonalization was so intense … I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being …” (Ellis 1992: 282).
In American Psycho, euphoric hubris joins the remnants of the industrial expansion as the residual affective forms accompanying dominant schizophrenic horror. The fantasy of a world of financial signs with immense exchange value but very little material reality behind them to limit their instantaneous circulation has begun to crack and fragment its correlated subjective form: “There wasn’t a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust” (282).
These schizophrenic intensities of the pleasure principle with no reality in sight are manifested in the main formal characteristic of American Psycho which is repetition standing in for plot: The enumeration of brands, the more or less heated arguments about table reservations, the inability of anyone to recognize anyone else, the renting and returning of video tapes, the frantic and senseless cash withdrawals from ATMs, and, of course, the forced iterations of physical violence desperately exploring new extremes to escape the dullness of the very repetitions to which they contribute.
The bourgeois ego that reached its limit in the greed of Gekko and Stucky but retained a certain affective capacity for shame or remorse in Bud Fox, Sherman McCoy, and Edward Lewis, has now fallen apart and been reduced to a narrative structure with “… no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing” (388).
Nothing is to be learned, nothing to be gained, and the bizarre, automated telling machine convincingly described by La Berge (2014: 133-138) has no point but its own continuation: “I just want to… […] keep the game going” (Ellis 1992: 394). The Automated Telling Machine seems to be a ploy to render the reader just as empty and numb as its narrator: “expecting a heart, but there is nothing there, not even a beat” (116). The listing of brand names and consumables almost challenges the reader to not skim or skip ahead, just as the violence constantly probes whether the reader maintains the ability to be affected. The purpose of this, of course, is the interpellation of any unaffected reader as the hypocritical semblable of the narrator.
La Berge argues that “American Psycho destroys the very genre that it creates” (La Berge 2014: 113). If genre, as Lauren Berlant would have it, provides “an affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold” (Berlant 2011: 6), the novel’s destruction of genre consists in the extensive use of repetition in lieu of plot to numb the reader’s sensorium so that, indeed, no hope of unfolding is possible for those who enter. Joshua Clover observes: “Narrative requires motion and change, not simple replenishment; motion and change are exactly what constitute the general formula [of capital]. Implied in M-C-M’ … is not simply change and motion but expansion beyond any limit …” (Clover 2011: 36). For Bateman, there is no possible catharsis, no possible development or systemic expansion, just the eternal continuation of the same game.
That plot development and economic expansion are both residual expectations haunting the dominant psychosis of a 1990s and early aughts bull markets with extremely distant material underpinnings is not just characteristic of American Psycho but can be read as part of a wider tendency. While the big swinging dicks of the eighties tried and failed to master the universe – they flew too close to the sun and got burnt – Bateman’s generation is frantically trying to navigate the financial imaginary in a world of signs increasingly haunted by their negated material referent.[6] Bateman’s killing spree is an attempt to break out of this postmodern Platonic cave, not to touch the sun but to reach the sunlight of actual reality.
If American Psycho is the first clear manifestation of this period of schizophrenic affect, Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) can be read as its culmination. While American Psycho was an explicit step beyond Bonfire, Cosmopolis is, in many ways, a clear continuation of American Psycho. After having his Rolex stolen at gunpoint as revenge for one of his murders, and he sobbingly expresses his humble desire to “keep the game going”, Bateman is presented with an injunction: “As I stand, frozen in position, an old woman emerges behind a Threepenny Opera poster at a deserted bus stop and she’s homeless and begging, hobbling over, her face covered with sores that look like bugs, holding out a shaking red hand. “Oh will you please go away?” I sigh. She tells me to get a haircut” (Ellis 1991: 394).
Along with an inexplicably mounting yen, this task provides the central plot device in Cosmopolis.
The financier Eric Packer rides around in his limousine manifestation of the Big Swinging Dick fantasy of an immaterial connection to the market and the future as such: pure M – M’. The limousine is, however, also the vehicle bringing him to the goal of the day: a haircut – a financial term meaning the reduction in a given asset’s value, as compared to market value, when it is used as collateral for a loan. But in this case, Packer literally wants a haircut from his old family barber, Anthony, who knew his father and gave him his very first haircut. Of course, Packer is unable to go through with this emotional confrontation with his past and leaves in the middle of the haircut.
Here, the limousine is far from Edward’s princely steed in Pretty Woman. It is now the postmodern Platonic cave on wheels, an immaterial fantasy connected to material reality via screens and data.
Material and emotional reality is the weak residual expectation or goal haunting the fantasy of high finance. Through the limousine sunroof, Packer contemplates an urban scene, focusing on the bank towers a bit further away: “They were the end of the outside world. They weren’t here, exactly. They were in the future, a time beyond geography and touchable money and the people who stack and count it” (DeLillo 2003: 36). They are so abstract that he must concentrate to see them. The material world becomes the disturbing veil through which to glimpse the abstraction of something purer. But the abstraction of the “pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable” (80) holds its own haunting. Not just the difficulty of focusing on the abstraction of information through the materiality of the bank towers, but also the inability of the abstraction of the market to encompass concrete life and death: “People will not die … People will be absorbed in streams of information” (104). But when confronted with the televised images of a man in flames, reality beyond financial signifiers crack the surface of the spectacle of the market: “The market was not total. It could not claim this man or assimilate his act. Not such starkness and horror. This was a thing outside its reach” (99-100).
Packer’s asymmetrical prostate is the subjective, physiological counterpart of what cannot be assimilated by data and should therefore, according to his doctor, be allowed to “express itself”. This becomes the ethos of a financier staring at the impossible soaring of the yen on which his fortune depends. This subjective expression of objective contradictions – in this case the soaring yen as well as generalized misery and numerous deaths (real, fake, and threatened) – plays out in a realm of surfaces with no material backing. Like American Psycho, this is formally manifested through repetition: Finance requires a new theory of time to understand the repeated temporal glitches of the limousine security camera and television screens, where the mediated events often precede their actual occurrence; Packer has multiple chance encounters with and misrecognitions of his wife, recalling the misrecognitions in America Psycho; the semiotic construction of reality is explicitly questioned by the repeated claims of the referential obsolescence of words, objects, and subjects.
This problem of referentiality comes down to what Packer’s Chief of Theory terms “an aesthetics of interaction” (86) charting what Packer describes as a “… common surface, an affinity between market movements and the natural world” (86). This is the affinity that no longer applies. The yen soars skyward without a ladder and things no longer chart. The “new and fluid reality” (83) of cyber-capital is money “talking to itself” (77) and “lines of code that interact in simulated space” (124). And the subject desiring a realm of pure information excluding subjective agency, this self-contradiction, finally expresses itself in a longing for action[7]: “He was alert, eager for action, for resolution. Something had to happen soon, a dispelling of doubt and the emergence of some design, the subject’s plan of action, visible and distinct” (171-172). A subject’s plan of action which in this period leads only to death, but which, soon, will lead nowhere.
The Day the Music Died
In the 1980s, dominant euphoric hubris was accompanied by a residual belief in the continued viability of an industrial economic expansion. The resulting moral indictment of financial fantasy – the belief in production as the true driver of economic expansion itself becoming a driver of narrative development – however, soon disintegrated into the formal repetitions of schizophrenic horror during the 1990s and early aughts. Those formal repetitions were haunted by the failure of the residual expectations of plot development and economic expansion, no longer present to restore the balance and bring Icarus to justice. The falls of Icarus – first, from the penthouse to jail and, next, the quest for reality disintegrating into death – were both historically separate versions of “the feeling of M – M’, haunted by the C to come” (Clover 2011: 46). In the 1980s, the fantasy of M – M’ was haunted by the crisis of profitability in manufacturing, i.e. in the sphere of production, while, in the subsequent period, it was haunted by the circulation and consumption of commodities as empty signifiers and immaterial data. In my final period, post-crisis resignation can be described as the affective correlate of the reassertion of the economic law of value: “The law of value asserted itself with savage clarity, fictitious capital was destroyed, jobs were annihilated, exported immiseration refluxing toward the economic cores” (Clover 2012b: 113). As the profits of a hoped-for future production proved absent, the temporal fix collapsed in an instant and the spatial fix returned only misery.
There is a vast archive of narrative fiction representing the resignation of the post-crisis financier and questioning the narrative structuring of the financial economy through plot: Sebastian Faulks’ A Week in December (2009), Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges (2010), Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic (2010), Justin Cartwright’s Other People’s Money (2011), John Lanchester’s Capital (2012), Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014), Adam McKay’s movie The Big Short (2015), Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015), and Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success (2018) all stage financiers, nostalgically longing for lived reality, and a financial profession no longer understanding what it is doing or why it is doing it.
Murderous horror in the quest for reality has been replaced by the longing for simple things like childhood memories, romance without consideration for social status, a sense of control of one’s destiny, a sense of nation, a sense of family… It is the hope to be delivered from abstraction while resigning to the acknowledgement that reality is not readily available. The hubris of finance remains as a residual affect but without the euphoria, i.e., only in the form of explicit renunciation of sensible reality and emotional ties in favor of a focus on the numbers and the ensuing profit – without desire, horror, or haunting. The dominant affect is therefore, quite clearly, resignation.
In J. C. Chandor’s movie Margin Call (2011), Jeremy Irons’ diabolic CEO, John Tuld – a less than subtle reference to Lehman CEO Dick Fuld – clearly states the dominant affect: “I am here for one reason and one reason alone. I am here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That’s it, nothing more. Standing here tonight, I am afraid that I don’t hear a thing. Just silence.”
It is the day the music finally died. The movie opens with layoffs at a large investment bank. Leading risk analyst Eric Dale is fired but, just before leaving, he hands a yet to be resolved riddle to junior risk analyst Peter Sullivan. Peter cracks it and communicates the extreme danger of the company’s current overleveraged position to higher management. This opening establishes the “epistemological distance between the players and the rest of the world” (Clover 2012a: 8) where a couple of risk analysists and higher management alone know what the markets would inevitably soon learn in the form of the 2008 crash. This epistemological distance structures both the staged separation of those who know from those who do not and the plot’s development toward dumping toxic assets onto an unknowing market at the price of annihilating all trust between trading partners and thereby ending the trader’s professional futures.
The epistemological distance clearly operates as an aesthetic instrument. While scrutinizing the numbers, Peter is acoustically cut off from the surrounding office space by his earbuds and, visually, by the illuminated screen against the darkened offices. The city is present merely as indistinct lights beyond soundproof windows. Even when Peter and his fellow analyst Seth go out to retrieve Eric, the fired source of knowledge who is nowhere to be found, the passing urban scenery is perceived as vague and hazy shapes beyond the windows of a chauffeured car. Only after dawn, when they finally find Eric and the epistemological distance is about to vanish, the world becomes distinguishable when perceived from an open convertible.
In this narrative, as in this final phase of my periodization more generally, the fundamental opposition is not between financial cynicism and the production economy but, as pointed out by Clover, between the greedy cynicism of management and the morally pure calculations of the analysts. The “ideological payload” is “precisely the proposition that quantification is not itself a problem: quantification is on no one’s side; the risk is in its misuse” (8). The hunt for the lost risk analyst is explicitly a matter of information control, but it also obviously implies that the party could have continued were it not for a new kind of hubris: this time, not the renunciation of the “sound” production economy, but of the “sound” and risk-controlled mathematical foundation of the financial system.
Although pure mathematics is the new position from which to launch the moral indictment of financial greed – a greed incorporated by Tuld who shrugs at the repeated financial crises: “It’s all just the same thing over and over; we can’t help ourselves” – the residual affect of the production economy persists. When they finally locate Eric, he continues the tradition from Edward’s “We don’t build anything, Phil. We don’t make anything” in Pretty Woman and Gekko’s “I create nothing; I own” in Wall Street: “Do you know I built a bridge once? … I was an engineer by trade.” After a lengthy calculation, he concludes: “[t]hat one little bridge has saved the people of those communities a combined 1,531 years of their lives not wasted in a fucking car.” The affect of the production economy persists, though no longer as a salute to honest and noble industrialized labor but as a means to optimize the productivity of human capital. The difference between these two perspectives on “building” – the difference between Pretty Woman’s Edward and Margin Call’s Eric Dale – is the one expressed by the transformation of Dolly Parton’s canonical song “9 to 5” (1980) from a 1980s lament of poorly waged and little-credited office work to a post-crisis advertisement jingle, “5 to 9” (2021), about the realization of human capital as the goal and meaning of life.
The dominant cultural affect in Margin Call and, indeed the whole period, however, remains resignation. At the end of the movie, the traders are paid to destroy their future ability to trade ever again by dumping worthless assets, i.e., they cut their relations to the market, their ability to affect and be affected by it. The traders lose their relation to the market, while others keep that relation but lose their personal, emotional ties. Head of Sales and Trading, Sam Rogers, is finally kept on at the company, paid to ignore his moral disgust with his own complicity. In the beginning, while preparing a pep talk for his traders about to be laid off, he is in tears, not in solidarity with his employees, but at the news of his dog’s terminal illness. At the end, after the liquidation of toxic assets, the firing of the remaining employees, and the collapse of the epistemological distance under the general market crash, after accepting management’s money offer to ignore his own inclinations and keep the game going, we find him digging the dog’s grave in his garden – the sounds of the digging continuing into the end credits.
This is the end…
By pairing it with Brenner’s long downturn, Jameson’s waning of affect can thus, I argue, be further periodized as a number of emergent and residual forms interacting in finance fiction from the 1980s until today. The emergence of the master of the universe during the run-up to the 1987 crash carried with it a residual faith in the continued viability of the post-war industrial boom and the related moral indictment of fictitious capital’s promise of economic expansion without manufacturing and thus without a certain exploitative societal distribution of wealth through wage labor.
In the 1990s and early aughts, the residual affective structure of noble industrial labor and its moral condemnation of the dominant euphoric hubris gave way to on a dominant affect of schizophrenic horror, fragmenting the subject and the ability of language to index reality. The residual structure, here, seemed less the nobility of labor and commodity production to sustain M – C – M’ but the circulation and consumption of commodities as empty signs and dubious data, exchange value without use value. The music had seemingly lost its base. Where, in the 1980s, the financier tended to end up in jail, he now surrendered himself to death and destruction, the absence of exit from haunted existence forcing an eternal repetition of violence, both exuberant in its transgressions and desperate for its own end.
As the haunted system crashed spectacularly during the financial crisis of 2007-2008, resignation emerged as the new dominant affective mode. Whether giving up on the illusion of financial mastery to recover a sense of control by retreating to personal emotional bonds or by giving up on emotional contact altogether to sustain the residual fantasy of self-sufficient financial products, resignation has become unavoidable. ‘Your money or your life’ is, indeed, the fundamental ultimatum of post-crisis finance fiction.
In a certain way, the masters of the universe subscribed to Marx’s ironic description of money from 1844: “The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. … Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities?” (Marx 1970: 324). But the master financier only considered one side of the coin, as it were. Marx continued: “If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, … [i]s it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?” (324).
The schizophrenic experience springs from the beginning realization in the finance fiction of the 1990s and early aughts that the problem of finance is not reducible to the pursuit of money by immoral means but, rather, that “[m]oney is the alienated ability of mankind”, that money turns ability “into its contrary” and operates as the “distorting power against the individual and against the bonds of society …” which “confounds and confuses all things” (325). The meaningless repetitions and repeated meaningless violence constitute the attempt to either end or transcend a world that has revealed itself as “the fraternization of impossibilities” (325).
Post-crisis resignation, then, poses the question of the possibility for a financialized “relationship to the world to be a human one” (326). The financier either attempts to abandon the exchange of paper to “exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc.” (326), or he abandons love and material reality in favor of the magical self-sufficient power of money. These two forms of resignation are not the first glimpse of a future after capital, however. What was in the 1990s the schizophrenic ambivalence – the search for the exit and hope for the game to continue – has now been separated as two distinct forms of resignation, two roads – your life or your money – both leading nowhere.
However, Marx’s analysis of money progressed from a question of the human relationship between subject and world – where the alienating mediation of money is vanquished by love, trust etc. evenly given and received – toward an analysis where money is an expression of value within capitalist social relations. Similarly, the analysis presented here of the varying degrees of universal mastery wielded by the financier subject should progress toward not simply other subjective forms than the financier – those excluded from the narrative or forced into the background on the basis of race, class, or gender as conditions of possibility for the affect of the financial agent – but toward a questioning of the insistence of finance fiction to engage with finance in terms of subjectivity, thus occluding the analysis of the impersonal structural violence operated by financial capitalism. The purpose of the analysis is therefore not just to propose a periodization of financial affect but to lay the groundwork for a further study of the ideological operations of finance fiction, which, by various imaginary resolutions of objective contradictions, tend to limit our critical scope. Immoral hubris, schizophrenic horror, or the resignation of lost illusions all partake in the same ideological claim: that the problem is caused by our errant subjective agencies within the world of capital and not by the capitalist mode of production as such. The different phases of waning affect within finance fiction are active responses to a failing fantasy, a fantasy that survives in residual forms to this day. I have tried to present the phases as historically specific affective relations to developments within capital accumulation, but the goal must be to go beyond the crises of subjective fantasy and seek an active response to the failing self-reproduction of capitalist social relations which, along with its fantasies, deserve to be laid to rest.
Torsten Andreasen’s work currently focuses on the periodization of the correlation between culture and financial capital since 1980.
Works cited
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[1] Jameson bases his economic periodization of the waning of affect on Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1978). However, in later engagements with finance capital (Jameson 1997; 2015), he turns to Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century (1994).
[2] See Jameson (1984) and (1991: chapter 1).
[3] This financier protagonist of finance fiction is predominantly white and male, a dominance only partially challenged in the last of the three phases that I intend to lay out. I hope to present a study of those occluded from the both economic and narrative universe of the financial masters in a later publication.
[4] It should be noted here, that both Wall Street and Pretty Woman associate what they consider the morally sound capitalism of industrial production with international transportation: airplanes and ships, the essential foundation for the “spatial fix” of globalization. David Harvey famously argued that the fading postwar boom sought a “spatial fix”, i.e., the inclusion of new and geographically dispersed markets and labor forces in the capitalist system. The spatial fix of globalization, however, required a further temporal fix in the form of financialization, defined as “capital that has a nominal money value and paper existence, but which at a given moment in time has no backing in terms of real productive activity or physical assets as collateral” (Harvey 1990: 182). As formulated by Annie McClanahan: “it allows capital to treat an anticipated realization of value as if it has already happened. … financialization allowed capitalism to supplement the declining profitability of investment in present production with money borrowed from the profits of a hoped-for future production” (McClanahan 2017: 13). By morally contrasting the means of international transportation and trade with the immorality of finance, the two films almost seem to propose that the spatial fix will be sufficient for sustainable economic expansion and that the “temporal fix” of finance is but immoral exuberance. That the spatial fix is necessarily linked to the colonial enterprise and war effort of empire is only hinted at by Morse Industries’ potential contract to build destroyers for the Navy.
[5] Quoted in (La Berge 2014: 130).
[6] A similar development can be seen in the use of Talking Heads songs in Wall Street and American Psycho, respectively. In Wall Street, the decoration of Bud Fox’s new apartment is accompanied by the Talking Heads song “This must be the place”, whereas American Psycho opens, as mentioned with “and as things fell apart / Nobody paid much attention” from the songs “Flowers” about the inability to live in a new paradise, where consumer society is covered in flowers. The last words of the song: “Don’t leave me stranded here / I can’t get used to this lifestyle.”
[7] Arne De Boever argues that “Packer, throughout the novel, seems to be in search of such threats and their potentially fatal consequences in a desperate attempt to encounter something – anything – real” (De Boever 2018: 2). The same applies to Bateman, though both characters also share a desire to perpetuate the game—one within the realm of simulacral surfaces, the other within pure information.