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:

1. “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades”: euphoric hubris of the 1980s.
2. “And as Things Fell Apart…”: schizophrenic horror of the 1990s and early aughts.
3. “The Day the Music Died”: predominant resignation after the financial crisis of 2007-2008.

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.

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Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious – Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review, no. 146 (July-August, 1984): 59-92.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London & New York: Verso, 1991.

Jameson, Fredric. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 246-265.

Jameson, Fredric. “The Aesthetics of Singularity.” New Left Review, 92 (March-April, 2015), pp. 101-132.

La Berge, Leigh Claire. Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Lanchester, John. Capital. London: Faber and Faber, 2012.

Lewis, Michael. Liar’s Poker. New York: Norton, 1989.

Mandel, Ernest. Late Capitalism. London & New York: Verso, 1978.

Marx, Karl. “The Power of Money” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970.

Marx, Karl. Capital vol 3. London: Penguin, 1981.

Murray, Paul. The Mark and the Void. London: Penguin, 2015. Apple Books.

McClanahan, Annie: Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 2017.

Plato. “Sophist.” In Theaetetus. Sophist. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921.

Rahman, Zia Haider. In the Light of What We Know. London: Picador, 2014.

Spinoza, Baruch de. Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005.

Shteyngart, Gary. Lake Success. New York: Random House, 2018.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Wolfe, Tom. The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Picador, 1987.

[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.

This article was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier.

The Anxiety of Inflation (On Ben Lerner’s The Lights)

Peter Makhlouf

“Then he was aware of moving at an impossibly smooth rate, and there was the Brooklyn Bridge, cablework sparkling, Liza was cursing at the little touch-screen television in the taxi, which she couldn’t seem to turn off, and he reached out a hand to help her and experienced contact with the glass as a marvel, like encountering solidified, sensate air.”

—Ben Lerner, 10:04

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift

Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,

Beading thy path—condense eternity[i]

Hart Crane’s inspired dedication to Brooklyn Bridge revisits ancient paradigms of influence. Originating as a late antique astrological concept, influence or influentia, as it was known, named the astral flux emitted from heavenly bodies. This starry stuff formed the material substrate for an otherwise immaterial soul. The common substance of star and soul underwrote the belief that stars exercise an outsized “influence” on our earthly fate, particularly our poetic faculty (or lack thereof).  Crane’s invocation transmembers[ii] the astral idiom of the ancients: the influxus stellarum (“starry flux”) filling the soul of the poet becomes the artificial lights sweeping across the bridge’s steeled thews. Modern tectonic feats become a well of inspiration for modern American poetry.

According to this ancient doctrine, starry influentia shapes both our productive and reproductive capacities, both creation and procreation. The formative thrust of influence is thus bound to the projection of futures plastic and possible or fated and foregone. In newspaper columns, among the blogosphere exegetes of the zodiac, this ancient doctrine persists into our culture today—but transformed. Witness the determinist lore that populates modern astrological occultism, which so infuriated Theodor Adorno at mid-century.[iii] Adorno detected in Americans’ starry-eyed fascination with astrology a displacement of the fatal sense of helplessness incited by capitalism and its unfettered technological domination.

Inlayed in the ocean floor beneath the Brooklyn Bridge is one of North America’s densest concentrations of fiber optic cables.[iv] The proliferation of these vast undersea networks in the last half century has been driven by the exigencies of high-volume, high-frequency trading.[v] Beginning in the 1980s, telecommunications companies carried out Promethean feats of engineering in order to outfit Lower Manhattan with one of the globe’s most sophisticated infrastructures for lightspeed internet connection. The Brooklyn Bridge is just “[d]own Wall [St. -PM],” Crane reminds us in his invocation, and financial markets have served as the engine driving continued private investment in these local fiber optic networks. For competitive advantage often comes in the form of milliseconds won thanks to faster connections.[vi] “[M]odernization project[s] will make lower Manhattan ‘future-proof,’”[vii] Verizon proudly informs us. Such infrastructures will ensure that automated future trading can progress unabated even if New York City is swallowed up by the very environmental catastrophes that these energy-intensive systems exacerbate. The ancients figured starry influence as a luciform body (αὐγοειδές/φωτοειδής)[viii]; Crane romantically re-metaphorized physical lights as stars; the pulses of light that speed along fiber optic cables and transmit reams of data (whether a poem or a derivatives trade) literalize the metaphor once and for all.

Crane’s The Bridge and Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” are the two primary influences on Brooklyn resident Ben Lerner’s recent collection The Lights[ix], which, as the opening poem “INDEX OF THEMES” informs us, is composed of:

Poems

about stars and

how they are erased by street

lights (3) […].

We awake in a desolate wasteland of light pollution, a lambent storm of celestial rays, blue light, metaphors, materials, the “soft | glow of the screen [which] comes off on our hands” (4), as ink once might have. The poet is fretfully aware that technological development has eclipsed these once stalwart symbols of poetic influence:

At some point I realized the questions were the same questions. […] I’m tracking the advent of the credit economy. The implications for folk music of the fact that stars don’t twinkle—the apparent perturbation of stars is just a fluctuation in the medium—is something we want to understand. (18)

The stars have been erased first by street lights (still quaint) and, eventually, by the credit economy’s pulses of light, darting below the East River. Fluctuating media expose this primary trope of influence as an optical illusion. What Lerner here terms “folk music” names the object of his quest in these poems: a form of collective enunciation with which the lyric voice may or may not be commensurate. But why is the evanescence of starlight a matter for folk music? And why is this the same question as delving into the advent of the credit economy?

As I explore in what follows, the lights of Lerner’s title figure nothing less than the prodigious effectivity of today’s fusion of finance and media, which generates influence at a scale far surpassing that of literary writing. Rather than understand the anxiety of influence at play in Lerner’s work within the Bloomian drama of literary history—a gigantomachia of poet against poet[x]— the theory of poetry here proposed reconstrues the post-Romantic condition of belatedness as the fate of the poet in the age of digital technology, with its propensity to colonize futures through self-realizing financial models. Lerner’s poetry vies with the financial fictions of traded futures, which foreclose upon poetry’s ability to imagine alternative worlds. [xi]

On the example of The Lights, this essay seeks to reconceive “the exhaustions of being a latecomer” (to borrow a Bloomian locution) in light of the atrophy of imaginative power precipitated by market logics. Fernand Braudel famously christened the advent of financialization “a sign of autumn,” a late-stage in the palingenetic cycle of capitalist accumulation.  For scholars of literature, such autumnal metaphorics are mainstays of the poetic tradition. In the feuilles mortes of Verlaine’s “Chanson d’Automne,” the “limp leaves” rounding out Eliot’s The Wasteland, fall surfaces time and again as a guiding trope for the burden of modern literature’s belatedness, the impotence of its influence.[xii] What could be an antiquarian project of constructing a genealogy of influence becomes rather a critique of the exhaustion of our social imaginary by economic speculation.[xiii] For the “sign of autumn” may have once figured a poet’s anxious stance towards predecessors. But today it names not only an anxiety in the face of finance’s power, but the consciousness of how the poetic act relates to the possible end of today’s economic system, of final-stage late capitalism in its lateness.

I. Voice (Flatus vocis)

Lerner is an undeniably intelligent bard of the digital age, whose recent writings offer a diagnosis of the increasingly belligerent tenor of our public discourse. His 2019 The Topeka School proleptically sketches the political consequences of our frenetic mediasphere, while his recent parable of the internet age, “The Hofmann Wobble,” asks what it means to write imaginative prose in an era in which contemporary literature and the information economy both depend on the discursive production of fiction.[xiv] His works of the last decade evince a “promethean anxiety”[xv] as to the perceived superiority of technology’s productive and creative—that is to say, poetic—capacities. Implicitly naming a literary dynamic, this anxiety is not simply directed at print literature’s uncertain place in the world of technical media (a facet of our media ecosystem that can be dated at least to 1900[xvi]), but at the fusion of finance and media particular to the past half-century of economic reforms. “Iridescent unregulated financial derivatives,” in Lerner’s words, are responsible for the “vast human poem” woven by today’s platform capitalism.[xvii]

Such platforms thus inherit the vision of a collectively laboring chorus envisioned by Bloom on the first page of his book proper: “Shelley speculated that poets of all ages contributed to one Great Poem perpetually in progress.”[xviii] We are far from a hermetic doctrine of poet against poet. The Lights asks what remains of poetry’s ability to shape collectivity (the implicit concern of Bloom’s above quote) in the face of the internet’s idée fixe of connectivity. “Imagine a song,” opens an early poem:

that gives voice to people’s anger. […] The anger precedes the song, she continued, but the song precedes the people, the people are back-formed from their singing, which socializes feeling, expands the domain of the feelable. (6)

In an age of rage and ressentiment, what generates collective forms of feeling is not poetry but the algorithms of social media so finely attuned to the mutual circulation of anger and profit.[xix] The poem remains uneasy about the potential for song being swallowed up by “talk” (6), the dizzying torrents of online chatter that found group identities through targeted feedback loops.[xx] The verb “socialize” rather impishly suggests that the social-democratic dream and the social-media nightmare are photographic negatives of one another.

The book’s third poem “Auto-Tune,” serves as an ars poetica for the whole. The title refers to the famous audio processing program used to correct the infringements of timbre and pitch once cherished as uniquely expressive elements of the voice.[xxi] The vocal frequency domain thus “signifies the recuperation of particularity by the normative” rather than Barthes’s “grain of a particular performance” (8). The verdict is delivered in an affectless prose whose line breaks coincide only too comfortably with punctuation. Instead of the age-old communitarian paradigms of sacred polyphony that unite individuals in a choral mass, Auto-Tune’s dumb mathematics sum up the world’s voices to produce the statistical illusion of human totality—in a single voice. The poet would like to occupy this position of enunciation, at once singular and collective, in order “to sing of the seismic activity deep in the earth and the | destruction of the earth for profit” (8). But the tweaked voice that could do so depends on the very computational logic that is today at the forefront of “permanent wars of profit” (11).[xxii]

This vocal bereftment is articulated in the language of influence. Lerner tries his hand at myths of priority. Caedmon, “the first poet in English” (8), discussed at length in his 2016 essay The Hatred of Poetry[xxiii], re-appears in “Auto-Tune” as one asked to sing “the beginning of created things”:

Here my tone is bending toward an authority I don’t claim

(“founding moment”),

but the voice itself is a created thing, and corporate; (9)

The reference to Cadmon is a mythologizing feign that allows Lerner to shroud the dilemma of technology’s monopoly on utterance in the garb of prophetic inspiration. Despair is re-cast as the hallowed origin of a poet otherwise riven by the stress of molestation and “authority”.[xxiv] For in the end, one “can only sing in a corporate voice of corporate things” (9). The pun has a way of truth about it. A better vision of collectivity is foreclosed upon if corporate control monopolizes the means and media to do so. If poetry can’t offer a vision of a better world, then all we are left with is “the sound of our | collective alienation” (10).

Not simply the voice but the breath that propels it returns throughout the collection as the medium of these “bad forms of alienated collective | power” (55): in the toxic waste of Fukuyama inhaled continents away (38, 55) or “all the beautiful conspiracies, which means ‘to breathe together,’ the ancient dream of poetry” (71). Social media’s conspiracies see to fruition what poetry could only fantasize. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner returns time and again to Whitman’s oneiric politics of an “I” that could serve as metonym for corporate fictions such as the nation or humanity. In the poetry, the problem returns as one of the medium. Lerner remains enthralled by a 50-second phonographic recording of Whitman reciting lines from his “America”:

what I miss most

is the distortion, noise of the wax cylinder,

the flaws in the medium that preserve

what distance it closes […]. (37)

The repetition of dis- in metrically proximate positions twice in three lines leaves a sonic trace such that “what distance it closes” stutters into “what distance it discloses.” Nostalgia’s love affair with distance is a kind of media effect because media bring us close to a given reality while also holding us at bay (the fate of celebrity images, Whatsapp voice notes from lost lovers, pornography, and Eucharistic adoration). Here, the media effect of nostalgia is a nostalgia for lost media effects. The distributed totality of poetic voice that Lerner dreams of through the Whitman recording is as chimerical as a longing for the phonograph in the digital age, or the living voice in the age of the phonograph. For all has been converted to bits of data anyway.

To hear Whitman’s voice, Lerner undoubtedly listened to one of the many recordings available on Youtube. Perhaps no such recording is more famous than the one found in a conversation between Paul Holdengräber and Harold Bloom at the New York Public Library, when Holdengräber plays the recording for an initially oblivious Bloom who only later realizes what he has heard: “Oh! That was the voice himself!” he exclaims, “Play it again.”[xxv] This primal scene of influence between the great theorist of the agon and “the voice himself”—did Bloom envision a capitalized V?—is shaped by medial conditions. Only fitting for the man whose memorious powers won him the popular image of “Literature, Incorporated” thanks to the medial metaphors of tape recorder and computer invoked in the endless string of articles hyping Bloom’s monstrous poetic recall.[xxvi] Indeed, Bloom found himself embroiled in his own anxieties of influence when, in answering his question “And what is Poetic Influence anyway?”, he was sure to distinguish his approach from the industry of “allusion counting […] that will soon touch apocalypse anyway when it passes from scholars to computers”. But Bloom’s anticomputational anatomy, like Lerner’s dream of a mass medium that could synthesize the masses, proffers figments of total vocal incorporation only to retract them through the spectral drift that recording technologies introduce into vocal presence. For technologies of inscription preserve authenticity on the condition of reproducibility. The a priori of the recorded lyric “I” reaching a collective audience is that it forfeits its status as authentic speech.

II. Lights (Influence)

Today, primordial scenes of influence do not involve the voice etched in the record but the cool blue-white of the laptop open to Youtube. The guiding trope of The Lights figures the prodigious effectivity of today’s culture of the screen—the TV, the smartphone, the laptop—in shaping communities, leveraging affects, channeling desires, fostering communication and crafting selfhood. Screens unite us in forms of greater or lesser sophistication, whether through network effects or the sheer fact that we’re all plugged in to an increasingly centralized mainframe.[xxvii] What is the place of poetry in today’s United States where Whitman is a recording (now watched, now heard) on Youtube and online influencers have arrogated to themselves the clout (and money) of the sorts that the literary ilk may once have earned?[xxviii] In a recent interview about the book, Lerner slinks towards an answer when asked about the collection’s persistent figuration of the lights as extraterrestrial contact. “Who or what are ‘the lights’?,” asks the reviewer, “Are they actual aliens? Muses? Ghosts?” Lerner replies:

All of the above. The lights are definitely the imagination of alien contact. In the title poem of the book, they are presented most explicitly as extraterrestrial. But it’s also about the human possibility of a certain kind of mis-reading—how we experience atmospheric effects or light pollution or whatever as a sign of possibility or mystery. Unexplained phenomena represent a kind of otherness or alterity, but then come back to us as just a way of understanding our own alienated version of the self or collective. Bad forms of collectivity can become a figure for collective possibility, an old and inexhaustible idea.[xxix]

We learn little that’s new here. The poems themselves reflect time and again on the warped perceptions and paranoid delusions fostered by online networks and the glowing screens that grant us access to them. Striking here, rather, is Lerner’s eminently Bloomian locution “mis-reading,” a gloss on “mis-prision,” which Bloom defines as “a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation […] self-saving caricature […].”[xxx] Mis-prision is one of the many useful lies for parrying influence.[xxxi] Lerner’s imaginary of alien presences and ancient muses is a salvific etiology, a way of disavowing the fact that the lights are the screens and light pulses with which today’s poet must vie. This disavowal forms the flimsy pretext for reintroducing the Romantic language of (poetic) mystery or the MFA theoryspeak of ‘alterity’ in order to endow contemporary poetry with the hieratic sway of which fiber optic networks have dispossessed it.

Lerner’s response distances accordingly: the lights are not UFOs but rather “the imagination” thereof. Just as the imaginary of extraterrestrial contact is already a psychic displacement of our own collectivity, so is Lerner’s myth of alien contact a swerve away from the reality that digital infrastructures possess a near monopoly on crafting collectives. But just as…so clauses are, as every good high school literature student knows, rhetorical operations, which, it turns out, replicate at the level of figurative language a metaphoric operation inherent to computational technology itself.

I’m referring here to the manner in which the vast majority of us, civilians in matters of digital media, only have access to the ineluctable material infrastructures of fiber optic cables and computer hardware through the prosopopoeitic (>προσωποποιία, “to fashion a face, personify”) functions of the aptly-named interface. The reference of the eponymous “lights” slides from the “actual” pulses of light to the lit-up display of the screen on which are projected the metaphoric translations of computer processing. As Wendy Chun has argued, it is precisely the inaccessibility of the “Real” of computing that is responsible for the close link between fiber optics and paranoia.[xxxii] Re-formulating what Jameson first formulated as “cognitive mapping,” one could say that paranoia re-figures material processes as secret conspiracies in the same way that computers re-figure hardware as software.[xxxiii] The resulting “technical delusion” metaphorizes the relationship of media and power through an occult imaginary of spirits, flows, waves, aliens (in short: influences)—a representational process “deluded” because fictional, while also generative of the sorts of political delusion endemic to our conspiratorial Zeitgeist.[xxxiv]

Thus, Lerner’s anxiety of influence here is scarcely reducible to the dominance of new media over print or even the present-day forms of influence that threaten to outstrip the literary. Rather, it is in no small part the prodigious effectivity of these metaphorizing operations that challenges poetry on its own grounds. (Need we recall that at least as far back as Aristotle metaphor was considered the bread and butter of poetics?) It is with this in mind that we can read Lerner’s poetry anew, beginning with the title poem in which this luminescence is granted its faux-etiology:

At least the white poets might be trying to escape, using

the interplanetary to scale

down difference under the sign of encounter and

late in a way of thinking, risk budgets

the steal, the debates about face

coverings, deepfakes, we would scan

the heavens, discover what we’ve projected there

among the drones, weather events, secret programs […]. (14)

The hope that the singular white poet may speak for the body politic is ironized along with visions of the interplanetary.[xxxv] Extraterrestrial imaginings conveniently produce a humanity devoid of difference given that, from the perspective of the aliens, we are indeed a single race. In the wake of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol Building, no one reading the fifth line can help but hear “The Steal,” another myth—facilitated by the media landscape—of alien invaders trying to seize power. (Who the aliens are depends on your party registration.) But against whom is the charge of belatedness levied? Is “late in a way of thinking” to be read in apposition to the poets who only now repurpose technical delusions as a literary technique? Or is it the commoditized “risk” traded in the form of personified light pulses (today’s form of personified capital) that are dismissed as epigones?

Literature and the internet uncannily resonate, as poetry anguishes over the influence of other media and the internet agonizes over the influence of anti-Semitic bogies, secret cabals. Both produce fiction: verse on the one hand, “deepfakes” vel sim. on the other. In 1973, Bloom insisted that “the meaning of a poem can only be another poem,”[xxxvi] his own swerve away from McLuhan’s pronouncement one decade earlier that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.”[xxxvii] McLuhan illustrated his claim on the example of “electric light [which] is pure information.”[xxxviii] Lerner’s “lights” level the difference between their competing sentences anyway.

For at the extreme, contemporary poetry is this mis-prision of literature’s impotence in the face of computers:

I came into the cities at a time when stray military transmissions

were confused for signs of alien life, a kind of poetry

I came into the cities at a time in which all but the poorest among us

had been colonized by blue light […]. (55)

But one need neither be an “intelligent” poet (the critical consensus on Lerner) nor possess an Eliotian idiom in order to employ aliens as a last-ditch effort to influence the public: all Orson Welles needed was a radio. In a now infamous 1938 CBS broadcast, Welles presented his adaptation of War of the Worlds. In the play’s carefully scripted opening sequence, an announcer “interrupted” the program to relay to listeners that alien troops had descended from Mars and begun their conquest of planet Earth. Panic ensued when a number of the listeners believed that Martians had indeed landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Already in 1938, the test of literature’s enduring relevance was whether it could adapt to a new media format so as to leverage influence, where leveraging influence was defined as the ability to incite mass hysteria.[xxxix]

The transition from two-way wireless to one-way broadcasting formed the media-historical backdrop against which the War of the Worlds episode unfolded.[xl] From its advent, radio had been the object of popular fantasies of catching stray Martian transmissions. As radio transformed into a strictly receptive device for commercial programming from a select few companies, unease about the corporate control of this mass medium arose in turn. The paranoid reception of Welles’s broadcast thus figured the political economy of influence as an alien “invasion” in the homes and ears of the American listener, in part by reaching back to an imaginary of radio’s capacities prior to corporate control. In metonymically collapsing alien transmissions as a kind of poetry[xli], Lerner’s figuration follows the same arc in a different direction: he usurps for his art an effectivity akin to corporate-backed mass media. The efficacy of Welles’s extraterrestrial fable depended on a narratological metalepsis, a seeming intrusion of the extra- into the intradiegetic as the narrator “interrupts” this fictional program. Lerner’s collection proves to also depend on such a narrative legerdemain.

III. Money (Inflation I)

“THE DARK THREW PATCHES DOWN UPON ME ALSO,” (a quote from Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”) the longest and in some respects most significant poem of the collection, originally stems from Lerner’s unclassifiable 2014 work 10:04.[xlii] Part Four of the autofictional novel recounts the author’s residency in the city of Marfa, Texas, a cultural hub famous for the phenomenon of the Marfa lights. Believed to be atmospheric distortions of the headlights beaming across from Highway 67, the Marfa lights have been ascribed to an array of otherworldly phenomena, from UFOs to ghosts to errant spirits of the departed. Lerner the poet is keen to hold on to this “misapprehension” of “our own | illumination returned to us as sign” (36). What he terms a misapprehension is a process of re-estimation, the dumb medium of light now endowed with the significance, value, and meaning in which poetry transacts.

An allegory of influence emerges. For Bloomian misprision is fundamentally founded on a manipulation of values (“an ironical over-esteeming or over-estimation”[xliii]). Marfa’s light pollution and the static of Whitman’s recording, debris produced as technological side effects, here become the sources of poetic inspiration. Lerner’s quest for a medium of collectivity culminates in the ultimate fiction of value:

I deliver money to boys with perforated organs:

“unionism,” to die with shining hair

beside fractional currency, part of writing

the greatest poem.

[…]

the small sums

will grow monstrous as they circulate, measure:

I have come from the future to warn you. (33)

Much of the poem, like the 10:04 chapter from which it derives, is devoted to Lerner’s reading of Whitman’s 1892 autobiography “Specimen Days.” Of special importance is the scene in which Whitman darts through the wards of the Union wounded to leave behind “fractionals,” banknotes issued in place of the coinage that had fallen victim to currency speculation since the start of the Civil War. It is in this dissemination of money that Whitman comes closest to Lerner’s dream of fictionalizing a social body. “[W]riting | the greatest poem” is akin to investment, while the representative capacity of national currency serves as salve for the perforated bodies of the soldiery, metonymically: a body politic fractured by Civil War. Fear not that Whitman usurps his epigone’s task, for the contemporary poet rises up in admonishment in the final quoted lines: rampant inflation secures Lerner a victory, as poetic worth is measured in sheer number.[xliv] The voice from the future offers a poetic calque on influentia and its cognate inflatio. Indeed, our current use of the word “inflation” to mean the devaluation of currency derives from the monetary crisis of the Civil War, for which fractionals served as a stop-gap measure.[xlv] (Lerner terms it a time when “inflation rages” (30).) But since inflation’s inverse mathematics swell numbers while diminishing real value, we’re left wondering who exactly can be said in the end to possess the greater share of influence.

Both words ultimately derive from infl(u)are, to flow or breathe in(to), and carry with them an entire lexical field of currents, gusts, winds, and ultimately: specters, spirits and ghosts.[xlvi] According to the guiding conceit of the Marfa lights and the spectral projection that makes them possible, the poetry of The Lights is revealed to be but a secondary effect, like wave interference, produced by the circulation of money and its attendant inflated values. Just as these scenes of literary encounter with Whitman and other predecessors become imbricated in the dynamics of the credit economy, so too does the task of fictionalizing collectivity. In “Autotune,” Lerner’s ponderous “dream of a pathos capable of redescription, | so that corporate personhood becomes more than legal fiction” reveals him to be a careful reader of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies. Among Kantorowicz’s exhaustive catalogue of corporate political fictions, we find his account of fiscus, the body of wealth and goods that figure the national body, a premodern precursor to today’s national treasuries. With the fiscus began a strand of political thought connecting corporatist metaphors with the circulation of money that ran through the veins of the body politic.[xlvii]

Poetic subjectivity’s constitution by the alien invasion of influence renders poetic personae dependent on porous passivity, that immoral seizure of the self that Wilde took to be the marring stain of influence.[xlviii] Like Whitman before him, Lerner retropes this passive “loafing”—which he defines in the corresponding passage in 10:04 as “a condition of poetic receptivity” (168)—as an active embrace shuttling between the one and the many. Being open to influence through one’s “perforated organs” becomes the sine qua non for the poetic production of the commons:

the almost-work of taking everything personally

until the person becomes a commons,

a radical “loafing” that embraces the war

because it also dissolves persons, a book

that aspires to the condition of currency. (36)

But the persistent figuration of poetry as monetary circulation warns us against reading for the intersubjective psychology of the Bloomian account. The classical desiderata of literary hermeneutics—assessing authorial subjectivity, qualitative influence (strong vs. weak poets), and semantic value—yield to an economy of social forms: personifications of the body politic, literature’s inflationary rhetorics, and the quantitative scaling-up of (internet) influence.[xlix]

When returned to its place within the narrative economy of 10:04, Lerner’s poem proves to be obsessively concerned with inflecting the the anxiety of influence towards the anxiety of inflation. Taken as a whole, 10:04 itself is organized by a plait of subplots. First, as Arne De Boever has amply reconstructed, the work is fixated on the financialization of the novel and the possible inflation of its value in the interstice between the virtual (the future novel for which Lerner receives a handsome advance) and the actual (the novel, 10:04, which we have in our hands).[l] Constructing “futures” through influence—a financial term to which Lerner returns time and again—extends to the second subplot: his attempt to impregnate his best friend Alex by various means. In accord with the ancient lexical field of influentia, the starry flux said to bear the immaterial soul was believed to be contained within the sperm. (The Latin word influxus named both the starry flux descending to earth and the act of insemination.) The final subplot concerns literary influence in the most literal sense, as the narrator hatches a plan to forge his own papers so as to sell his archive (at a premium) to a willing librarian.

Inflatio, influxus, influentia—three subplots each in some way organized around the financialization of influence, broadly conceived. The impregnation subplot is markedly queer, as we readers are left wondering whether the narrator’s “abnormal sperm” reaches its destination thanks to the wonders of financialized medicine (costly IUI treatments) or good old-fashioned sex, both of which he and Alex indulge in. “Biological and textual mortality”[li] are thematized in tandem, and the novel’s inflection of influence towards alternatively financial, biological and literary-historical senses probes narrative possibilities for fictionalizing the future beyond self-realizing market models. The late Mark Fisher, in his now epochal Capitalist Realism, made a compelling case for reading narratives of sterility in film and literature as a displaced “anxiety” of the inability to imagine a different future.[lii] Fisher invokes Bloom explicitly, whose poetic theory is based in the forging of genealogical relations between past, present and future through the medium of influence. Admittedly, Alex is not sterile; she becomes pregnant; a future is possible. The question is simply whether the obsessive talk of money grafted on the discussions of insemination means that the financial imaginary now completely dictates how that future may be envisioned.

Within the intradiegetic fiction of the text, all that the narrator produces upon his publisher’s advance is the poem “THE DARK THREW PATCHES DOWN UPON ME ALSO,” included in Lerner’s future collection The Lights. And though the narrator insists, “[n]obody is going to give me strong six figures for a poem,”[liii] Part IV, set in Marfa, is prefaced by an apodictic “Money was a kind of poetry.”[liv] What does it mean to inflate poetic value in this manner? Consider the textual history of the novel. Part III’s autofictional short story “The Golden Vanity,” rife with metaleptic intrusions of the narrator in his story, appeared first in the June 11, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, prefaced a day earlier by an interview in newyorker.com with the author(-cum-narrator?) Lerner about the interplay between self, author and narrator[lv], the very triad at play in this short story about an author forging his correspondence for money. The short story was subsequently included in this autofictional novel, organized around the same rebarbative triad of personae and devoted to recounting the writing of the very novel we have in our hands (10:04), within the frame of which all that is written is a poem (“THE DARK…”) published in Lana Turner Journal ahead of the novel and subsequently included in The Lights. Discourses on autofiction (which have shaped the reception 10:04 as much as The Lights) have tended to remain mired in moralizing plaints about narcissism.[lvi] But this refraction of writerly selves deserves, rather, to be understood as a function of how fiction is financed[lvii], how influence is inflated, in the contemporary literary market.

IV. Debt (Inflation II)

“Bundled debt” is Lerner’s choice phrase, repeated twice in the collection, for a form of society produced through money, one of “the bad forms of alienated collective power.” The imposition of financial policies since the 70s has led to a constitutive shift in the capital structure of social welfare, which no longer relies on interest-free state investment but rather the ruthless predations of financial markets. What facilitates this process is securitization, the transformation of debt into tradable assets on the market.[lviii] Securitization structurally shifts the risk of economic investments from private creditors and financial firms to state actors while, conversely, eliminating social services through austerity, privatization, and increasingly personalized indemnity. “Bundled debt” thus represents a kind of perverse contre-jour (the title of one of the poems on the Russian revolutionary Victor Serge) in which we find the image of our own socialized existence returned to us in the form of expropriated debt. Lerner manages to capture at the level of syntax the very ambiguity of the figure here in question (I cite again the lines quoted above):

late in a way of thinking, risk budgets

the steal, the debates about face

coverings, deepfakes, we would scan

the heavens, discover what we’ve projected there

among the drones, weather events, secret programs […]. (14)

One way of understanding the enjambed “risk budgets | the steal” is that the budget for risk in today’s debt economy is itself the steal (taken as predicate), the plundering of public wealth for the sake of a few private beneficiaries. According to the other reading, with its implied reference to the 2020 election, risk accounts for (“budgets” as verb) the public paranoia of “the steal” as an intrinsic part of how the financialization of debt and online media produce these deformed specters of society and its others. Together, economic deprivations are experienced by vast swathes of the disenfranchised American population as personal slights, a sense of being “owed” by elites, Communists, immigrants, Democrats, Jews, whomever “we’ve projected there.”[lix]

These lines rest on a delusional metaphorization of political economy into a paranoid panoply of figures (aliens, aura, waves), a process that could be traced back to the attempt to represent the otherwise unrepresentable hardware of digital technologies. Part and parcel of this metaphorization process is the re-figuration of predatory financial mechanisms (a material process) as the scheming of a secret cabal (a spectral undertaking), a process precipitated by recent developments in the economic sphere. For the fiscal orthodoxy regnant in recent decades figures class warfare as a neutral monetary policy, concealing economic machinations (a material process) beneath the necessary ghost of the “invisible hand” (a spectral undertaking). Post-Bretton Woods and, even more intensively, in the years following the 2008 crisis, the liberalization of credit through state treasuries has rendered monetary policy—most often under the pretext of combatting inflation—a feverishly politicized domain of financial decision-making. Inflation generates political delusion due to the delusional re-casting of austerity measures as apolitical, objective necessities.[lx] Of such concern to the modern poet is the manner in which bundled debt, risk, and currency—inextricably fused as they are with the digital media of today’s computer networks—are able to exercise an outside influence on the citizenry through this financial fabulation.

Thus the drama of influence staged in Lerner’s verse pits the poet not against the rival literary predecessor, as Bloom’s poetic agon would have it, but rather against the forces of finance. Bloomian agon here bends towards a political agonistics as theorized by Chantal Mouffe, who employs the term to name the interminable conflict of dissenting actors necessary for democratic participation.[lxi] Actualizing a political latency in Bloom’s theory, Lerner’s poetic agonistics stages the monopolization of the democratic sphere by capital personified. In opposing finance’s usurpation of the place of poetry, he agonistically opposes its usurpation of the space of democracy.

Lerner takes up this line of thought again in “The Circuit,” which opens with a fantasy of porous boundaries between flesh and light worthy of David Cronenberg. The dream of “hit[ting] the body | with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet | or just very powerful light” is a verse arrangement of Trump’s April 2020 musings on the possibility of healing a body politic then ailing from the pandemic. Indeed, what passes for politics today is the passing of light through the body, from fiber to screen, screen to retina, corporate device to corporate collectivity. (Who knows this better than Trump and Musk?) The effulgent light of poetic influence is usurped. Fiber optic pulses can translate any media, any linguistic utterance, into the same form. Thus the late nineteenth century task of upholding semantic intractability against the language of the mass media is now defunct. Even if the poet offers a reboot of Mallarmé’s opposition to newspeak and writes in the language of today’s information systems—”malware | poets uploaded into language” (65)—the point remains that:

the fascist reaction and I

was mimetic of what I thought I opposed

with my typing […]. (66)

The singular “was” implies a singular subject, fascist reaction and lyric “I” now fused.

Poetic programs, modernist or postmodernist or neo-existentialist (“a new language of commitment” (66)) will not save us so long as any form of inscription is completely owned by a set number of conglomerates who dictate the terms of its circulation. Nothing short of seizing the means of poetic production will change the lyric landscape. The unholy marriage of fiber optic networks and financial markets issue in the birth of

the lightning-fast trades

of bundled debt, among the most beautiful phrases

in American English […]. (65)

Figured in this debt is not just the bundle of fibers that transmit securities traded on the market, but also what the poet owes in the drama of literary influence, his penury in the face of a technology that can craft the finest phrases.[lxii] Perhaps the last historic acts of writing were the paper blueprints on which Intel engineers sketched designs for the hardware architecture of the first integrated microprocessor.[lxiii] Today’s poet can only languish in nostalgia:

I want to make that sound

of setting something down

on paper as opposed to under

glass, ghostly opposition […]. (26)

When Lerner grafts the modifier “late in a way of thinking” onto his phrase “risk budgets” or describes how in today’s media ecology,

the book idles

In the chest, the new-old decadence

The fast-slow time of it

The arriving early to lateness (74)

the temporality that he is outlining is specific to the financial episteme under which we live. “[A]rriving early to lateness” articulates, in one fell swoop, anxieties about the fate of print media as well as a prescient definition of the financial markets that transact in securities and derivatives. Futures and options, two of the key assets traded in today’s economy, depend on a temporal involution by which the future is retroactively priced as a present-day asset.[lxiv] In Bloom’s genealogical saga, the temporality of influence functions in much the same manner, as paternity and primacy become negotiable, subject to refiguration. As Edward Said once described it: “The past becomes an active intervention in the present; the future is preposterously made just a figure of the past in the present.”[lxv] While his summary of influence’s labile tempo is particularly fitting, I cite Said because he had foregrounded (already in 1976) the historical and political dimensions of Bloom’s account, over and against its reduction to a rarified theory or closing exercises in canonicity.[lxvi]

In the above-cited interview with Hitzig, Lerner speaks of the “direct threat” to the “possibility of reception and transmission today” by the “debased rhythms and flattening and aggression of such ‘platforms’.” But the threat extends beyond the local anxieties of internet chatter to a felt impotency before the task of voicing collective demands, imagining alternative futures, and refusing the retreat of each into a private corner of rage. Luddism offers little succor. By the collection’s end, we find Lerner attempting to imagine what it might mean to recognize digital media as the sine qua non of our collective vision. Whitman’s omnivorous odyssey across Brooklyn Ferry and Crane’s mystical synthesis of America in The Bridge suddenly yield to a network of hyperlinks that recompose the organicity of the folk tradition (now composed of blue light):

the words of the song from and for the future I recorded on my phone in a common dream, for dreams are commons. The screen is badly cracked and I get glass in my finger every time I touch it. Something is lost in the transcription because it doesn’t have words, but room tone is gained, a sound bed is made. That’s why I’m sending my friends links: I want all my friends linked and listening as they fan out across the bridges until it is part of the folk tradition, the blue tradition, the wordless silent part I anonymously contributed by living. […] Its basic idea is that time can be defeated for an hour if everyone breathes together, but songs are not made out of ideas, they’re made out of glass, the aerosolized glass that damages performers. (112)

The cracked looking-glass becomes the precondition for (re-)finding totality. For when the screen breaks the illusion of interface is shattered and we are forced to come to terms with the dumb materiality in our hands. Lerner’s collection forces us to consider that which is repressed in order to produce the seamless spectacle of the lit-up display, alias, The Lights.

Peter Makhlouf is Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He has published widely in both academic and public-facing venues and is currently completing his first book on the decadence problematic in twentieth century German culture. His next book project explores the category of influence at the crossroads of poetics, media, and political economy over the past century.

[i] I cite from the excellent edition Hart Crane’s ‘The Bridge’, ed. Lawrence Kramer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 4.

[ii] Transmemberment being the at once conjunctive and dissociative rhetoric integral to Crane’s poetic vision: see Lee Edelman, Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

[iii] See the writings collected in Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth (London: Routledge, 1994).

[iv] For a readable introduction to the physical infrastructures of the internet see Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (New York: Ecco, 2012); on New York specifically see the fascinating little volume Ingrid Burrington, Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2016).

[v] On the latest chapter, see https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-frequency-traders-push-closer-to-light-speed-with-cutting-edge-cables-11608028200

[vi] https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a7274/a-transatlantic-cable-to-shave-5-milliseconds-off-stock-trades/

[vii] https://www.verizon.com/about/news/critical-steps-completed-bringing-fiberoptic-connectivity-lower-manhattan

[viii] See Abraham Bos, The ›Vehicle of the Soul‹ and the Debate over the Origin of this Concept,” Philologus 151, (2007), 31–50.

[ix] Ben Lerner, The Lights (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2023).

[x] It has, to my view, never been noted that Harold Bloom’s epochal The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: 1973) appeared in that annus horribilis of 1973, which fell under the influence of an ominous star. Oil shocks rippled through the developed world; the collapse of the Bretton-Woods agreement spelled the end of the gold standard; and the industrial boom of the postwar period finally sputtered to an unprofitable end. The US economy’s transition from industrial to financial capital was well underway, facilitated by the Black-Scholes equation for derivatives trading which appeared in print in the same year. So began the epoch that Ernst Mandel in his 1972 book would term Late Capitalism. Though no one foresaw this conjuncture, Bloom’s concept of “influence” would go on to play a defining role in the financial markets and digital media that were, in 1973, just beginning their precipitous rise. The fullest account of the significance of 1973 in financial history may be found in Mikkel Frantzen, “1973: A Monument to Radical Instants,” in The Birth of the Financial Thriller: Making a Killing in the 1970s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024).

[xi] See Cédric Durand, Fictitious Capital: How Finance is Appropriating Our Future, trans. David Broder (London: Verso, 2017).

[xii] For the most thoroughgoing study of this theme, see Ben Hutchinson, Lateness and Modern European Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[xiii] My aim is thus neither to seek new digital tools for the study of influence nor to trace the shifts in literary form born of the pressures of new media. For the most concerted attempt to take stock of this new media landscape, see Alan Liu, Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

[xiv] Ben Lerner, The Topeka School (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2019); Ben Lerner, “The Hofmann Wobble: Wikipedia and the assault on history,” Harper’s Dec. 2023, 23-32.

[xv] Hannes Bajohr,”Algorithmic Empathy: Toward a Critique of Aesthetic AI,” Configurations 30 (2022), 203-31, cites this term as an expression of human’s alienation in the face of technologies’ superior creative powers and thus, implicitly, as a literary dynamic emerging from the anxieties of technology’s perceived poetic capacities.

[xvi] According to Friedrich Kittler’s account in both Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 1990) and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 1999).

[xvii] “The Hofmann Wobble,” 30

[xviii] Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 19.

[xix] See Joseph Vogl, Capital and Ressentiment: A Brief Theory of the Present, trans. Neil Solomon (London: Polity, 2022).

[xx] See Brian Judge, “The birth of identity biopolitics: How social media serves antiliberal populism,” New Media & Society 26/6 (2024), 3273-89.

[xxi] On the history and cultural politics of autotune see the excellent essay by Simon Reynolds, “How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music,” https://pitchfork.com/features/article/how-auto-tune-revolutionized-the-sound-of-popular-music/.

[xxii] See Justin Joque, Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2022).

[xxiii] Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2016).

[xxiv] On molestation and authority in the endeavor to found a literary beginning, see Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975).

[xxv] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi0AMyniYc, 4:33f.

[xxvi] See Marc Redfield, “Literature, Incorporated: Harold Bloom, Theory, and the Canon,” in Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 103-124.

[xxvii] See Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). In her “Common Sensing? Machine Learning, ‘Enchantment’ and Hegemony,” New Left Review 144 (Nov/Dec 2023), Hito Steyerl probes how tech companies are carrying out data mining operations in the Global South in order to rope populations worldwide into new financial networks that wed blockchain to AI.

[xxviii] On the economics of influence see Emily Hund, The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).

[xxix] “Ben Lerner in conversation with Zoë Hitzig,” November (2023) https://www.novembermag.com/content/ben-lerner.

[xxx] Anxiety of Influence, p. 30

[xxxi] On the logic of lie and metaphor effected by the finance economy see Amin Samman, “Capital of Lies” in boundary2online, Special Issue: The Gordian Knot of Finance (Dec. 2024), https://www.boundary2.org/2024/12/amin-samman-capital-of-lies/.

[xxxii] On the dialectic of fiber optic enlightenment see Wendy Chung, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

[xxxiii] Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

[xxxiv] Jeffrey Sconce, The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2019); on the poetics of paranoid ideation, i.e., the way in which paranoid politics depends on the work of imaginative creation, see Zahid Chaudhary, “Paranoid Publics,” History of the Present 12/1 (2022), 103-126.

[xxxv] A theme that returns in The Hatred of Poetry.

[xxxvi] Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 95.

[xxxvii] Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964), p. 8.

[xxxviii] ibid.

[xxxix] For the relevant texts, see John Gosling, Waging the War of the Worlds (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2009); for a study of the event, see Brad Schwartz Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015).

[xl] I follow here the account offered by Jeffrey Sconce, “Alien Ether,” in Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 92-123.

[xli] Note the ambiguity of “a kind of poetry” referring to either “signs of alien life” or “stray military transmissions” or the metaphoric process whereby the latter is translated into the former.

[xlii] Ben Lerner, 10:04 (New York: Picador, 2014).

[xliii] Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, xiii.

[xliv] A theme famously explored by the poet-turned-hedge-fund-employee Katy Lederer in The Heaven-Sent Leaf (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2008).

[xlv] This is also the period when the term “fictitious capital” emerges in England; see Durand, Fictitious Capital, p. 41f.

[xlvi] See Rainer Specht, “Einfluß,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie online, https://doi.org/10.24894/HWPh.793.

[xlvii] Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “Christus-Fiscus,” in The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016 [1957]), 164-92; cf. 342-346. Cf. Gerhard Scharbert and Joseph Vogl, “Zirkulation, Kreislauf,” in Joseph Vogl and Burkhardt Wolf (eds.), Handbuch Literatur & Ökonomie (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 347-51.

[xlviii] Early in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry Wotton declares: “There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral – immoral from the scientific point of view. […] Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul.”

[xlix] Franco “Bifo” Berardi has laid the groundwork for a critical theory of finance poetics in his The Uprising: Poetry and Finance Capital (Los Angeles: semiotexte, 2013).

[l] Arne De Boever, “Financing the Novel: Ben Lerner’s 10:04,” in Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 152-180.

[li] Lerner, 10:04, 55.

[lii] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: zero books, 2009), 3.

[liii] Lerner, 10:04, 137.

[liv] Lerner, 10:04, 158.

[lv] June 10, 2012: Interview with Cressida Leyshon (https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-ben-lerner).

[lvi] For a recent example, see Rhian Sasseen, “Extremely Online and Incredibly Tedious,” The Baffler, June 12, 2024: https://thebaffler.com/latest/extremely-online-and-incredibly-tedious-sasseen.

[lvii] Something also highlighted in De Boever, “Financing the Novel.”

[lviii] On these developments see Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2012).

[lix] On the structural relationship between finance and political paranoia, see Fabian Muniesa, Paranoid Finance (Cambridge (UK): Polity, 2024).

[lx] On this point see the two important recent contributions of Paul Mattick, “From the Great Inflation to Magic Money,” The Return of Inflation: Money and Capital in the 21st Century (Cornwall: Reaktion, 2023), 121-46 and Stefan Eich, “Silent Revolution: The Political Theory of Money After Breton Woods,” in The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 177-205.

[lxi] See Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) and Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London/New York: Verso, 2013). On the necessity of contestation in opposing the anti-democratic nature of contemporary monetary politics see Stefan Eich, “Democracy and the Political Limits of Monetary Politics,” boundary2online, Special Issue: The Gordian Knot of Finance (Dec. 2024), https://www.boundary2.org/2024/12/stefan-eich-democracy-and-the-political-limits-of-monetary-politics/.

[lxii] On the implications of computer code for print media see N. Katherine Hayles, Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

[lxiii] On this point see Friedrich Kittler, “There Is No Software,” in The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 219-229.

[lxiv] On transactions between poetics and economy in the wake of financialization see Joshua Clover, “Retcon: Value and Temporality in Poetics,” Representations 126/1 (2014), 9-30.

[lxv] Edward W. Said, “The Poet as Oedipus,” (a review of Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading), NY Times Book Review, April 13, 1975.

[lxvi] See “Interview: Edward W. Said,” Diacritics Vol 6 no. 3 (1976), 30-47.

This response was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier.

Matthew Potolsky–Decadent Style for Critical Finance Scholars: A Response to Signe Leth Gammelgaard

Signe Leth Gammelgaard’s “Flowers Without Meaning: Literary Decadence as Finance Aesthetics” rides a wave of work from the last twenty years or so that draws upon the longue durée history of capitalism to contextualize cultural production in innovatively materialist terms. Broadening its vision from the durable leftist influences of the Frankfurt School, Pierre Bourdieu, and Louis Althusser, as well as the deconstructive New Economic Criticism of the 1990s, this scholarship supplements questions of commodity culture, symbolic capital, ideology, and the nature of value with attention to global trade and conquest, modes of production, and the history of economic crises, often drawing on world-systems theory and theories of uneven and combined development as well. One keynote of this turn is the concept of financialization—perhaps most closely associated with the work of the economic historian Giovanni Arrighi—which directs special attention to the power of the financial industry and finance as such in the culture at large.

The most impressive recent work on financialization has tended to focus on literature of the 1980s and after, a period in which finance capital grew in power and influence at a historically unprecedented rate. But Arrighi, drawing on the longue durée studies of global capitalism by Fernand Braudel, sees financialization as recurrent feature of capitalist development, and therefore as one that has marked earlier periods as well. In her essay, Gammelgaard notes that the European fin de siècle was just such a moment and proposes that we can gain insight into the decadent aesthetic of the 1880s and 1890s by seeing it as manifestly a product of the financialized age. This is a claim with which I agree, and which I have been exploring in different terms in my current book project. In this response, I want to highlight the value of the approach Gammelgaard sketches in her essay and reframe her argument in ways that, to my mind, even better comport with how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers understood both decadence and finance capital. My largest claim will be that Gammelgaard’s account of decadent aesthetics should also be applied to the conceptual history of finance capitalism. Scholars of financialization can learn as much from decadence as scholars of decadence can learn from the literature on financialization.

Let me begin by briefly summarizing Arrighi’s argument to highlight the importance of the fin de siècle to his conception of financialization and economic cycles more generally. Arrighi argues in The Long Twentieth Century that the history of capitalism has been defined by “cycles of accumulation,” in which a succession of hegemonic centers of global economic activity rise and fall as they pass from periods of material expansion, when these centers invest chiefly in production and trade networks, to periods of financial expansion, when they turn increasingly to banking, credit, and speculation. The end of each cycle foretells a shift in political hegemony from one world city, region, or empire to another. Genoa gives way to Amsterdam, which gives way to London, which gives way to New York. At the beginning of each cycle, what Arrighi calls a “long century,” technological developments, access to newly valuable natural resources, or political innovations propel a new region to productive supremacy. That supremacy eventually underwrites a new cycle of financial supremacy, during which money, going abroad in search of greater profit, leads to the decline of the current hegemon and funds the rise of another.

As Arrighi’s history makes clear, and as Gammelgaard perceptively notes, the end of the nineteenth century was a period of financial supremacy, in which dramatic capital accumulation temporarily ensured British and European hegemony over the globe. Arrighi calls such recurrent periods “signal crises,” or, evocatively alluding to the fin de siècle and following Braudel, belles époques. The years after 1870 in Europe were marked by a succession of banking crises, stock-market crashes, and the so-called Long Depression, as well as by rampant speculation in overseas colonies and in large infrastructure projects like railways and canals. Gammelgaard accordingly reads Joris-Karl Huysmans’s classic 1884 decadent novel À rebours as a response to  economic reality that, despite its celebration of aesthetic withdrawal, is no less astute in its depiction of the financialized culture than stock-exchange novels from the period, like Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875) and Émile Zola’s L’Argent (1891).[1] Highlighting Huysmans’s descriptions of exotic flowers and the Latin language, Gammelgaard connects the novel with two coeval intellectual developments—Saussure’s structural linguistics and William Stanley Jevons marginal revolution in economics—that also point to a crisis of signification that reflects the abstracting character of finance capital.[2] Yet, while Saussure and Jevons lean into that abstracting character, Huysmans undertakes a kind of rear-guard action by insisting on the sensory and material, as if, Gammelgaard writes, he were “trying to figure out what to do with a materiality that can no longer really be understood through the models we know.”

I find this claim compelling, though to my mind it leaves perhaps the crucial question posed by the essay largely unanswered: what is it about the concept, history, or aesthetics of decadence that allows it to speak so precisely to the conditions of financialization? Many other movements in the period were immersed in sensuality (impressionism) or fascinated with images of cultural disintegration (naturalism), so these characteristics do not obviously set decadence apart. Writers like Trollope and Zola confronted the effects of late-century financialization more directly, and critics like John Ruskin pilloried bourgeois capitalism in much more incisive ways than the decadents did. Indeed, decadent writers rarely concern themselves the financial life of their characters, though matters of wealth, debt, credit, and investment do arise in their works. So, what does decadence offer that other contemporary writers and artists do not?

I want to offer two answers to this question. The first emerges from the literature on financialization itself. Since its earliest conceptualization, the notion of finance capital has been closely and persistently associated with the sense of lateness and decline. In the third volume of Capital, Marx casts finance as “the most superficial and fetishized form” of capital—a putative endpoint, in which normatively social (if alienated) relations are pushed to distorted lengths (1981, 515). Later theorists of finance capital like Rudolf Hilferding and Vladimir Lenin explicitly use the language of decadence to describe the phenomenon. In Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism, Lenin describes finance as capitalism that has “grown ripe, over-ripe and rotten” (1917, 128). The word “last” (высшая) in his title is bitingly ironic in Russian, suggesting not just the end of a temporal sequence but also the characteristically decadent qualities of excess, exorbitance, and overrefinement. Arrighi, as we have seen, associates financialization with the decline of hegemonic regions, and draws his name for periods of signal crisis from the fin de siècle. In a passage that Arrighi cites as the inspiration for his project, Braudel calls belles époques “a sign of autumn,” an image that draws from the store of decadent tropes (1984, 246).

Decadence, then, is not only an aesthetic of financialization, as Gammelgaard shows, but is also part of the received conceptual framework for describing finance capital, which emerges as a manifestly decadent object. Both before and after the fin de siècle, commentators have drawn upon the concept to explain the rapid changes in the class system and generalized sense of historical transition that characterizes signal crises. The most important modern theorist of cultural decadence, the Baron de Montesquieu, wrote his influential Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734) in the wake of the so-called Financial Revolution in England, which created the Bank of England and authorized the sale of government bonds, and little more than a decade after the ruinous South Sea Bubble of 1721. In 1796, Thomas Paine published a pamphlet entitled The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance that took aim at excessive government borrowing. Braudel’s studies of capitalist economic cycles were written during the signal crisis of the 1970s, when contemporary regimes of finance began to emerge. The pattern also holds true for our contemporary era of financialization, as in works like The Hunger Games series (2008-10), where the capitol of Panem evokes decadent Rome in both its name (panem et circenses) and in the stereotypically decadent ways of its residents. The titular protagonist of Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf (2011) is modeled in large part on decadent characters like Des Esseintes.

We can draw two salient points from the persistent copresence of decadence and finance. Decadence, to begin with, provides a durable rhetoric and set of historical examples (above all, imperial Rome) for describing the excesses inherent to moments of financialization. As Montesquieu writes in his Cahiers: “in empires, nothing comes closer to decadence than great prosperity” (1951, 82). More significantly, though, it is historical concepts like decadence that allow critics to see signal crises as characteristic and recurring features of history, and not just as random accidents, signs of divine judgment, or evidence of human perversity. Tracing its lineage to cyclical theories of political history from antiquity and early modernity (Polybius, Machiavelli, Vico), the notion of decadence encourages commentators to assimilate present crises to past ones.[3] So, while financialization helps us historicize decadence, decadence also helps us historicize theories of financialization. In particular, it helps us recognize the ways in which such theories persistently frame rapid capital accumulation in terms of a familiar narrative of rise and decline. Decadence here is a cognitive map—shared by commentators on the left and the right—which interprets financialization in moral, affective, and historical terms. Finance capital is at once natural and perverse, the epitome and the exception, its demise both inevitable and richly deserved.

The second answer to the question of why decadence would emerge as a key finance aesthetic during the belle époque of the nineteenth century can be found in the aesthetics of decadence itself. Although scholars have tended to associate financialization with postmodernism, decadence offers an even more apposite model. Gammelgaard directs us to the decadent fascination with the sensual, material, and hedonistic, which she sees as a response to the loss of meaning under the regime of finance. But there are many other ways in which decadence might be seen to thematize the logic of financialization. Consider the centrality of fiction, artifice, and the lie in decadent aesthetics. In his 1890 dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde argues that reality is the “solvent that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste to her house” (2007, 83). “Art finds her own perfection within,” he writes, “and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance” (2007, 89). It is not difficult see a parallel between Wilde’s celebration of artifice and the characterization of finance as “fictitious” or “imaginary,” an entity opposed to what has long been termed the “real economy.” Finance, according to this pervasive opposition, is the unnatural product of art and human ingenuity, not of genuine human labor. Rather than lamenting such an apparent loss of materiality, decadent writers like Wilde parodically lean into it. They criticize novelistic realism for its retrograde commitment to fact and celebrate figures like the dandy, who treats life as a work of art. As Huysmans writes: “artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius. Nature, he used to say, has had her day” (2003, 22). He compares landscapes and sunsets to unimaginative tradesmen and shopkeepers—dealers in the wares of the “real economy.” The very difference between the “real” and the “artificial” that is foundational to traditional definitions of finance capital becomes an object of contemplation. By perversely celebrating art over nature, writers like Wilde and Huysmans thus anticipate Laura Finch’s observation that “The fictionality of finance is, of course, a fiction itself” (2015, 732).

The decadent interest in collecting and collections, which scholars have long tied to nineteenth-century consumerism, might also be understood as a reflection on financial accumulation. The sheer materiality of a collection offers more support to Gammelgaard’s claim that decadence challenges the abstractions of finance capital. But collections evoke the logic of financialization on a different level as well. Joshua Clover has suggested that financialization engenders an “autumnal” aesthetic, which transmutes categories of time into space, dissimulating the labor-time that lies at the origin of value.[4] There is no better image of this transmutation than a decadent collection, which brings objects created at different historical moments and by different cultures into a single physical space. In his 1889 essay “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” for example, Wilde draws attention to collections of his subject, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, for whom “All beautiful things belong to the same age”: “we find the delicate fictile vase of the Greek … and behind it hangs an engraving of the ‘Delphic Sibyl’ of Michelangelo … Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude lamp from some Roman tomb” (2007, 108-9). There are books by French poets, antique gems, and works by Turner. These objects are at once material things and evidence of the eclectic tastes of the decadent collector, whose curatorial eye subsumes temporal differences under the evaluative categories of the beautiful, the exceptional, or (like Des Esseintes’s plants) the perverse. It is such conceptual values—and not the monetary value of the objects—that justify their inclusion in the collection. In other words, the value of the collected objects, like that of many financial instruments, is more imaginary than “real.”

Perhaps the most suggestive connection between decadence and financialization, however, lies in a key nineteenth-century analytical category that Gammelgaard’s attention to linguistic signification unfortunately obscures: decadent style. The major concept under which decadent texts were categorized by contemporary critics, decadent style was (at first) a denigrating name for literary forms that transgressed against classical harmony and simplicity. Bloated, unbalanced, and marked by a superabundance of description and erudition, this style, for critics, mirrored the pathologies of its age. In the single most important characterization of decadence, Paul Bourget describes Charles Baudelaire’s decadent style, in proto-Durkheimian terms, as an index of social of disintegration: the book gives way to the page, the page to the sentence, and the sentence to the word. Friedrich Nietzsche would famously borrow this definition to define Richard Wagner’s decadent style, and along with it the atomizing nature of democratic politics.

The concept of decadent style was first proposed by the French critic Désiré Nisard in his 1834 study of first-century Latin poetry, Études de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes Latins de la décadence. When Bourget wrote his essay on Baudelaire, he was appropriating a term that was already well-established in French critical discourse. Writing at a moment that Marx, in The Class Struggles in France (1850), associates with the rise of the “finance aristocracy,” Nisard casts the style of poets like Lucan as a figure both for the decline of the Roman Empire and for the economic conditions of his own age. Marx sees the finance aristocracy as a bourgeois equivalent of the Lumpenproletariat—a group made up of former outsiders (primarily Jews, he notes), who improbably ascended to the height of cultural power after the 1830 July Revolution. Nisard sees something similar in ancient Rome. Arriving in the imperial metropole from colonial outposts in Iberia and North Africa, decadent Latin poets like Lucan and Martial subjected hallowed Roman literary traditions to their (bad) provincial taste, casting it in what Nisard terms “the bizarre jargon of the marketplace” (1834, I, 129). Nisard concludes his study with a comparison between decadent Roman poets and “decadent” contemporaries like Victor Hugo, whose poetic innovations he accuses of the same excessive reliance on description and empty erudition as his ancient forbears.

Read together, Nisard and Marx bring out something about financialized moments that does not often receive its due in critical finance studies: their disruption of the existing class structure. Finance elevates certain outsiders to new positions of privilege, for which they quickly come under attack by rival classes, who decry their “decadent” ways. Decadence in this case is the name given to formerly marginal members of society who have begun making their mark on a conceptual order that treats certain traditions, whether literary or economic, as unquestionably natural. While Nisard saw decadent style as something to be lamented, later decadent writers like Huysmans and Wilde, working in yet another moment of financialization, saw it as a cause for celebration. Des Esseintes’s Latin library, described in chapter three of À rebours, explicitly repudiates the scions of the Golden Age (Cicero, Horace, Virgil) in favor of precisely those “lumpen” outsiders like Lucan that Nisard and other critics of late-Latin style rejected. The sexologist and social reformer Havelock Ellis crystalized just this attitude when he compared Huysmans’s decadent style with the “fantastic mingling of youth and age, of decayed Latinity, of tumultuous youthful Christianity” that characterized African writers like Tertullian and Augustine (1898, 158). For Ellis, early Christianity embodies a condition of uneven and combined cultural development that anticipates the fin-de-siècle belle époque.^[5]

Like many other fin-de-siècle decadent writers—most of them queers, provincials, colonial subjects, and foreigners—Huysmans turns Nisard’s diagnostic category inside out, rendering what is typically a conservative cultural diagnosis potentially radical. The striking disruptions to the class structures that shape the culture of a belle époque may elicit apocalyptic prognostications from traditionalists (of all political stripes), but they also open up new possibilities for the formerly marginalized. This was certainly true of the fin de siècle, which saw the emergence of modern queer identity and the beginnings of anticolonial movements. Despite its common association with philosophical pessimism, the decadent aesthetic speaks to just this sense of new possibility. Condemnations of finance as the “last” or a “late” version of capitalism, which adopt the language of decadence only as a theory of bitter ends, crucially miss its longstanding association with new beginnings. As Neville Morely has put it, decadence “marks the moment when the future begins to come within reach, the point where the present weakens enough to make an alternative conceivable” (2004, 574).

In “Culture and Finance Capital,” his influential review of The Long Twentieth Century, Fredric Jameson, providing yet another example of the decadent logic of finance, maps Arrighi’s theory of economic cycles onto the familiar stylistic trinity of realism, modernism, and postmodernism. Each step in the stylistic sequence, Jameson argues, is marked by increasing abstraction, reflecting the growing dominance of finance capital. While realism retains a residual commitment to the concrete, modernism frees form and color from their dependence on objects, and postmodernism, as the terminal point in this evolution, detaches artistic styles entirely from their connection to history. Jameson gave no attention to decadent style in his essay, but he should have.^[6] More, perhaps, than any modern literary and artistic style, decadence is attuned to historical repetition, and since its earliest adumbration in the 1830s has been understood as the recurrent mark of so-called “decadent” ages—beginning, of course, with the paradigmatic case of imperial Rome. Jameson’s progressive narrative of stylistic change overlooks the cyclical nature of financialization in ways that closer attention to decadent writing would have precluded. The long twentieth century, as I noted above, raised financial markets to unprecedented prominence, but this is only an intensification of economic circumstances that have analogies in other long centuries, something both Arrighi and Braudel insist upon in their longue durée histories of capitalism. Indeed, as theorists from Paine to Lenin to Arrighi himself seem to recognize, if only at the level of imagery, decadence is the house style of financialization. Hence my concluding point: Not only should scholars of decadence follow Gammelgaard’s lead and attend closely to the literature on financialization, but scholars interested in financialization would learn much by attending more closely to the literature on and of decadence.

Matthew Potolsky is Professor of English at the University of Utah, where he teaches nineteenth-century literature and literary theory. He is the author of three scholarly monographs: Mimesis (2006), The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley (2013), and The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy (2019). He is also the editor of Classical Studies (2021), the eighth volume of Oxford University Press’ The Collected Works of Walter Pater; and co-editor of Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (1999).

References

Arrighi, Giovanni. 2010. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso.

Braudel, Fernand. 1984. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, III: The Perspective of the World, translated by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper and Row.

Clover, Joshua. 2011. “Autumn of the System: Poetry and Finance Capital.” Journal of Narrative Theory 41, no. 1: 34-52.

Dowling, Linda. 1983. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ellis, Havelock. 1898. Affirmations. London: Walter Scott.

Esty, Jed. 2016. “Realism Wars.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49, no. 2: 316-42.

Finch, Laura. 2015. “The Un-real Deal: Financial Fiction, Fictional Finance, and the Financial Crisis.” Journal of American Studies 49, no. 4: 731-53.

Gagnier, Regenia. 2000. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gaillard, Françoise. 1980. “A rebours ou l’inversion des signes.” In L’Esprit de la décadence I. Nantes: Minard.

Gasché, Rodolphe. 1988. “The Falls of History: Huysmans’s A rebours.” Yale French Studies 74: 183–204.

Huysmans, Joris-Karl. 2003. Against Nature (À Rebours), translated by Robert Baldick. London: Penguin.

Jameson, Fredric. 1997. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1: 246-65.

Lenin, Vladimir. 1917. Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism. London: Communist Party of Great Britain.

Marx, Karl. 1960. The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Marx, Karl. 1981. Capital, Vol. 3, translated by David Fernbach. London: Penguin.

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. 1951. Cahiers (1716-1755), edited by Bernard Grasset. Paris: Grasset.

Morely, Neville. 2004. “Decadence as a Theory of History.” New Literary History 35, no. 4: 573-85.

Nisard, Désiré. 1834. Études de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes Latins de la décadence. 3 vols. Brussels: Louis Hauman.

Sewell, William H. 2012. “Economic Crises and the Shape of Modern History.” Public Culture 24, no. 2: 303-27.

Spackman, Barbara. 1999. “Interversions.” In Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, edited by Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky, pp. 35-49. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Wilde, Oscar. 2007. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, IV: Criticism, edited by Josephine M. Guy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[1] Extending her claim, we might also place À rebours in the company of more recent finance-era classics like Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), both of which recall fin-de-siècle forbears.

[2] Gammelgaard treads overfamiliar terrain here. The comparison of Jevons and Saussure recapitulates the insights of the New Economic Criticism; Gagnier (2000) explores the connection between fin-de-siècle writing and the marginal revolution; Dowling (1983) finds a key to decadent aesthetics in the history of linguistics. Other scholars—notably Gaillard (1980), Gasché (1988), and Spackman (1999)—explore the unusual workings of language and signification in Huysmans’s novel.

[3] On the extent to which economic crises function as historical events, see Sewell.

[4] Clover associates the term with W.B. Yeats, a writer deeply influenced by 1890s poetry, but finds his chief examples of autumnal style in postmodern figures like Pynchon and Ashbury.

[5] In his 1895 introduction to The Class Struggles in France, Friedrich Engels compares contemporary socialists to early Christians: “The Emperor Diocletian could no longer quietly look on while order, obedience and discipline in his army were being undermined…He promulgated an anti-Socialist—beg pardon, I meant to say anti-Christian—law” (1960, 41). The origin for this analogy is probably Ernest Renan, but it was clearly popular at the fin de siècle. It is worth asking, in this regard, whether Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development might not also have a decadent lineage. Trotsky’s literary criticism from the 1920s demonstrates an extensive knowledge (mostly critical) of fin-de-siècle literary forms, and his familiarity with such works might well have inflected his discussion of the peculiarities of Russian development in The History of the Russian Revolution (1930). He offers there a strikingly “decadent” theory of economic development.

[6] Jameson does make a surprising reference to Wilde in “Culture and Finance Capital.” Noting that Marxist critics have tended to avoid the exploring the stylistic implications of modes of production because it requires too many mediations, he writes that this avoidance is “no doubt in the spirit in which Oscar Wilde complained that socialism required too many evenings” (1997, 253). Gammelgaard’s account of decadence, it is worth noting, would, in Jameson’s sequence, be most akin to realism. For an effort to think cyclically about the resonances of fin-de-siècle forms, specifically about their opposition to realism, see Esty (2016).