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  • Arne De Boever–G for Glossary: Some Thoughts on Finance Aesthetics as Cultural Logic

    Arne De Boever–G for Glossary: Some Thoughts on Finance Aesthetics as Cultural Logic

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

    G for Glossary: Some Thoughts on Finance Aesthetics as Cultural Logic

    Arne De Boever

    A Missing Term

    In what follows I propose to reflect on a term that I consider to be missing from Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary, a book that one of the editors of this dossier, Mikkel Krause Frantzen, co-edited, and to which I contributed a term.

    That missing term is the term “glossary” itself.

    Indeed, I would like to posit that a critical glossary of the kind that Frantzen and his co-editors have generated—a critical glossary of finance aesthetics–is symptomatic of the financial era itself, part and parcel of the financial mindset. I posit this based on the number of books published in the field of critical finance studies that come with a glossary. I haven’t encountered this phenomenon in any of the other fields I’ve worked in, each of which are quite technical (as any academic field is perhaps bound to be). But finance really takes the cake: it seems that it is so abstract and complex in its language that almost every book that is published about it requires a glossary. Even if you’re unfamiliar with the field, you may have come across the phenomenon in popular culture about finance: Adam McKay’s film The Big Short, for example, compiles something like a glossary over the course of its narrative, splicing in segments in which certain financial terms are explained:

    This glossary phenomenon also exceeds the realm of finance. In recent years, a remarkable lot of glossaries or glossary-like books have been published, making me wonder whether it’s not just finance but the world at large that has become so abstract and complex that more and more glossaries are needed. The glossary has become something like a cultural form, perhaps reflecting or producing something like a glossary brain as the symptom (if you want to talk not just critically but also clinically) of what’s been called “the information era” and “the network society”: our contemporary, highly digitized times dominated by a form of both input and organization that doesn’t narrate but merely counts, as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has it in his book The Disappearance of Rituals (2020). Going against the invitation of such a form, then, I propose to ask: what story does the glossary allow us to tell? What does it allow us to think?[1]

    Glossary as Cultural Form

    Readers of the Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson will recognize that kind of approach. First in an article published in New Left Review in 1984, and then later in a book published in 1991 with Duke University Press, Jameson presented “postmodernism” as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” (Jameson). A big, ambitious book that ranged across “culture”, “ideology”, “video”, “architecture”, “sentences”, “space”, “theory”, “economics”, and “film”, Postmodernism fit right in with some of the novels—say Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow or Roberto Bolaño’s 2666—that are considered textbook examples of the cultural logic that Jameson considers. If I bring up Jameson’s book, it’s not to engage the text in any detail but because the question it raises—what is the cultural logic that attends any given economic formation?—is important for thinking through our contemporary moment and the glossary’s role within it.

    In the Introduction to his book Glossary of Cognitive Activism (For A Not So Distant Future)—another recent example of the glossary form–the artist and theorist Warren Neidich suggests that we are now living in late cognitive capitalism (he writes specifically of a “late stage cognitive capitalism”). That era, which brings “another transformation and crisis of labor and the laborer”, is one

    in which the subject will become “unsituated” and agentless. No longer posed between sensation and perception, information arising, for instance, from the Internet and virtual displays, will directly engage with the brain’s higher cortical centers, like the frontal and parietal cortices. As such it will bypass the bidirectional sensory-motor-affective schemas, embedded in its thalamocortical networks, which had facilitated its relations to the material world in the past. As a result a non-thinking zombie controlled by streams of analyzed and activated data without free choice will emerge. This constitutes the endpoint of an ontogenesis of tool use that begins in aiding the laborer to accomplish their job faster and more efficiently to one that makes them obsolete [sic]. This is especially true for the cognitive laborer or cognitariat. (Neidich xi)  

    Let us accept this as a more or less adequate clinical description (from a neuro-aesthetic point of view) of our current economic formation. After Jameson—an “after” that Neidich’s own Marxist orientation in this passage and his Introduction at large invites–, one would then be inclined to ask what might be the “cultural logic” that attends that formation. What is the cultural logic of the late cognitive capitalism that Neidich diagnoses?

    This is where the glossary comes in. Defined as “an alphabetical list of terms or words found in or relating to a specific subject, text, or dialect, with explanations”, a glossary is effectively “a brief dictionary”, and in that sense it has some connection to the encyclopedic form that is related to the maximalist novels of postmodernism that I mentioned before. (Lists, by the way, are a typical feature of such novels—consider, for instance, Bolaño.) Etymologically, “glossary” goes back to the word “gloss”, defined as “luster or shine on a smooth surface”; “a superficially attractive appearance or impression”. The verb “gloss over” for example—“to conceal or disguise something unfavorable by treating it briefly or representing it misleadingly”—is related to “gloss” and ultimately to “glossary”, a form of writing that thus, by its very name and in its very form, treats terms briefly, perhaps even in a superficially attractive way that looks smooth and shiny, but may in fact be hiding something else.

    Those descriptions could also be applied to some of Neidich’s recent artistic work: say, The Statisticon Neon (2016-2020), a sculpture that in its various iterations includes many of the terms included in Neidich’s later glossary.[2]

    In the sculpture, however, those terms are diagrammed on a wall, as the glossy realization of an artwork that looks shiny and lustrous, smooth even, but is in fact showing us through the diagram it provides the dark underside of our contemporary economic, political, and aesthetic era. It’s Jeremy Bentham’s troubling panopticon—in Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault’s diagram for disciplinary power (1978)–rethought for our age, and rendered in neon. There is a lot to unpack here, and a serious consideration of the glossary-form can guide us in that direction.

    I mention all of this not to criticize Neidich’s artwork and book, but to draw out a dimension of those works that we would (after Jameson) do well to consider if we are interested in the cultural logic of late cognitive capitalism. Indeed, I want to propose that the glossary, and more broadly speaking the list, is a key component in that cultural logic, to the extent that the list-like form of Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary can be said to call up a veritable listomania that is the pathological condition of late cognitive capitalist societies—from the list of unanswered emails and text messages that awaits us when we turn on our phones in the morning (this is assuming—optimistically–that you had turned it off at night), to the X feeds we generate and follow, to Amazon’s suggestions for what we may want to buy next, to Spotify’s music streaming recommendations, to the episodes of television series waiting to be binge-watched (let’s just get it over with…), to—yes—books that read like lists.

    It would be wrong, of course, to limit the form of the list to the era of what Neidich calls “late cognitive capitalism”. I already pointed out that as a phenomenon of late cognitive capitalism, the list can be traced back to postmodernism and the era of late capitalism that Neidich’s phrase references, and that was Jameson’s era of focus. But any consideration of for example literary lists, which are an ancient writerly device going back in the Western literary tradition to Homeric and even Biblical times (think of the ship catalogues in Book 2 of Homer’s war epic The Iliad or the genealogical list in Genesis 10 and 11), will immediately reveal the fallacy of uniquely associating the list to the era of late capitalism, and thus marking it as postmodern, as well. Indeed, and staying with the literary for now, lists also feature in realist novels, whose aesthetic is often placed in tension with postmodernism. Clearly, it simply will not do to locate the list in any particular literary period, or associate it with any particular literary aesthetic—late capitalist, late cognitive capitalist, or whatever.

    And yet, there are ways in which the list, and specifically the glossary, stand out as a typical form of our time, to the extent that the form of our lives under late cognitive capitalism at times appears to be list-like, or glossary-like: doesn’t your life sometimes begin to feel like a list of brief impressions or superficial appearances that project the shine or luster of the smooth but in fact disguise something more troubling? Think of your Instagram account, for example; what it shows, but especially what it doesn’t. Much is glossed over in such a form of life. There is no overarching narrative—just a couple of keywords with explanations–, no diagram to bring it all together, but a mere list of terms or words found in, or relating to, a specific subject—and that subject is you. The only order available, in the glossary, is that of the alphabet.

    And one could even go further than that. The listomania of the present may be transforming our very brains into organs that list rather than narrate, that gloss over rather than think through, that are associated with brief impressions and superficial attractions rather than in-depth engagements. Post-critical organs, if you will, rather than critical ones (and post-criticalism may be a good name for the cultural logic of our time[3]). It’s in this overall context, within these overall transformations, that our glossary needs to be situated. Glossary, then, ought to be read as a further realization of a cultural logic that is already clinically and critically present in a work like Neidich’s Statisticon Neon. But whereas the diagram in Statisticon Neon still provides some narrative of how the terms featured in it cohere—a narrative that Neidich also performs, as a key supplement to the work–, the book form of the glossary moves further in the direction of the mere list, a formal shift that solicits our careful attention.

    In the field of what’s called “theory”, Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary is hardly the only recent publication to take the form of a list. I’ve already mentioned (and commented on) Neidich’s book. Emily Apter’s Unexceptional Politics also reads in this way, as a collection of loosely connected short entries that bring a change to the traditional format of the academic book (Apter 2018). It’s a form that goes back to Apter’s Against World Literature (2013), a book whose entire second part is constituted by entries that present themselves as “Keywords” (this recalls, of course, Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society). That book came out around the time that Apter’s translation and reworking of Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables was published (Cassin 2004), and it seems that the dictionary format somehow worked its way into Apter’s writing. Consider also Karen Pinkus’ Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary; or the edited collection Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking.

    “Lists” are also a central stylistic trait of one current of contemporary theory, object-oriented ontology, where, according to Ian Bogost for example, they perform serious philosophical work. In his book Alien Phenomenology, Bogost discusses what he calls “ontography” “as a name of a general inscriptive strategy, one that uncovers the repleteness of units and their interobjectivity … Like a medieval bestiary, ontography can take the form of a compendium, a record of things, juxtaposed to demonstrate their overlap and imply interaction through collocation” (Bogost 38). “The simplest approach to such recording,” Bogost observes towards the end of his paragraph, “is the list, a group of items loosely joined together not by logic or power or use but by the gentle knot of the comma” (Bogost 38). He suggests in his chapter that the exploded-view drawing, invented in the Renaissance, is a kind of visualization of an OOO list in which “everything sits suspended” (Bogost 50).

    This isn’t exactly the same as the glossary—but it is formally similar, there is an isomorphy here that deserves to be considered. And of course the question that I am asking is to what extent the list, as a philosophically serious and thus critical (or perhaps better, post-critical?) tool in OOO, is also a clinical symptom of the information era.[4]

    While those examples of theorists working with lists or glossaries are chosen almost at random, the format seems widespread enough—and the attention that the list has received is large enough—to warrant my claim about the glossary as a cultural logic. One can think, for example, of Eva von Contzen’s “listology” project, which is supported by a grant from the European Research Council of 1.38 million euros over a period of five years.[5] It’s enough to make one wonder not so much whether academics can’t write books anymore (though this may be part of the condition we are diagnosing) but whether, in this new form of the glossary and the list that they have chosen, something like a cultural logic might be at work—the cultural logic of the very economic era that, in our glossary, the form of the list seeks to capture.

    The spin on the glossary and the list that I’ve given so far (with the goal of provoking you a little bit, of course) is the pathological one—the glossary or list as the pathological form of the era of late cognitive capitalism. But although pathology is part of the glossary-form and the list-form, it cannot tell the whole story. For when we’re putting together or contributing to a book like Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary, we obviously do not only think of the glossary as a pathological form but also as a kind of tool or even weapon that enables activists to find a new poetry, a new common language to talk about our contemporary situation (or un-situation, as Neidich puts it). It’s also the first step towards a narrative moment that we hope will follow.

    Towards a Glossopharmacology

    By thinking of the glossary as a kind of “arsenal of concepts” (as Bernard Stiegler might allow us to call it; when he uses this phrase in his work, he has in mind concepts for artists in particular, artists who are working “neganthropically” [Stiegler’s coinage] against what he calls the entropic dissipation or fall of spirit in the digital era), I am now trying to draw out the other side of the glossary-form’s politics. I do so in light of the recent revival of a “political formalism”, a thinking about the politics of forms—rather than about the politics of formlessness that is characteristic of much “theory”.[6] (Stiegler’s neganthropy is precisely about that: about thinking form against entropic formlessness.) That means to think across aesthetics and politics to assess the positive/ affirmative politics of forms—in this case, the politics of the glossary-form and, by extension, of the glossary brain. I mention Stiegler because the glossary-form is important for thinking what I would characterize as the pharmacology of the late phase of Stiegler’s work. I am trying to think a pharmacology of the glossary, a glossopharmacology, which is operative in Stiegler’s own work.  

    Consider, for example, how in Stiegler’s book The Neganthropocene there are many indications that the author was perpetually running out of time. “Had there been time” (Stiegler 2018, 102), “but, unfortunately, I’m out of time” (Stiegler 128), “If we had more time” (Stiegler 2018, 129), and again “If we had more time” (Stiegler 2018, 131): these are just some of the phrases that punctuate the talks that are collected in this book. Reading the talks that Daniel Ross edited, translated, and introduced for this collection, one gets the impression that one of the reasons Stiegler was running out of time was the burden, if I can put it that way, of his thought itself and especially of the elaborate terminology in which and through which it developed. The term “neganthropocene” is part of that terminology; but any page in the book by that title will reveal many more such terms, with sentences at times appearing to have been put together with jargon alone:

    The epiphylogenetic supplement thus inscribes a bifurcation in vital différance, where it makes an exosomatic différance, which in the Upper Palaeolithic becomes that which makes a noetic différance—by passing through hypomnesic tertiary retention. (Stiegler 2018, 221)

    Always the poetic inventor of philosophical concepts, Stiegler had by the time of the Neganthropocene lectures arrived at a stage where his reliance on what preceded, the fact that when he was speaking he was developing further a thought that had already started, actually risked to prevent him from getting something new across, especially to those not familiar with his work. A lot of his time was taken up by explaining what he had already accomplished (often with reference to other lectures given elsewhere, and sometimes with reference to unpublished work), and introducing his audience to the vocabulary of his thought. The beginnings of his lectures often involve a summary of what’s preceded (in no less than “12 points” [Stiegler 2018, 93], for example); for the non-initiated, they can come across as a language lesson. To think with Stiegler one has to learn Stieglerese. Anyone who has tried to write about or teach the late Stiegler—consider unpacking the passage I quoted about with a group of students–will know what I mean.

    I remember this very issue—Stiegler’s terminology, the increasingly intricate language of his quickly developing thought (he wrote and published at a rate that made some of his fellow philosophers suspicious about the quality of his work)—being a topic of after-hour garden conversations at Cerisy-la-salle, when both Stiegler and I were guests there for the “Décade” on the work of Gilbert Simondon. This was around the time that Stiegler’s book Pharmacologie du Front National had been published (Stiegler 2013). It came, tellingly, with a “Vocabulaire d’Ars Industrialis” (written by Victor Petit), a glossary of the key terms not just of the political organization he co-founded but also—by extension—of his thought. This was also around the time when he was starting his philosophy school in Épineuil-le-fleuriel, and both the book on France’s National Front (now National Rally) party and the plans for the school revealed a concerted effort to translate his thought to readers not necessarily specialized in academic philosophy.

    The addition of a glossary indicated, however, some sense of concern about accessibility: developing a new thought always requires developing a new language, but Stiegler seems to have realized that his work, as a poetic intervention, had begun to spiral terminologically to such an extent that it may have reached a high step-in threshold that prevented him precisely from getting the general reader on board. One could consider this an example of how the tertiary retention of poetic philosophical writing operates pharmacologically to produce the very opposite of the noesis to which it aspires. And if you didn’t quite get that: that’s precisely my point. We’re arriving at a phase of thought in which the terminology becomes a burden, and a glossary is needed. It’s the thin line between a conceptual arsenal and the potentially pathological aspects of a list of concepts—and this is where I would situate the financial glossary.

    So, as a kind of provisional conclusion, I would say that broadly speaking, and by way of the glossopharmacology that I’ve developed after Stiegler, an analysis of today’s listomania—of the ways in which our lives, and possibly our very brains, are starting to operate in the glossary-form—would need to include two components, one clinical, the other critical.

    • On the one hand, and this is the clinical component, the list is the symptom of an era in which, as per Neidich’s description, the subject becomes “‘unsituated’ and agentless”, a transformation that is closely linked to the information era and the rise of the internet, digital image culture, social media networks, digital devices, and so on and so forth. That transformation has had an effect not just on our lives, but— Neidich argues, and research has shown—on our very brains. Neidich’s conclusion does not miss the mark: as a consequence of that transformation, a “non-thinking zombie” will be produced, “controlled by streams of analyzed and activated data” and “without free choice”. I am suggesting that the glossary, tied to today’s societies of information overload, formalizes the cultural logic of that un-situation of the subject—something that Neidich does not state explicitly, but that lies nevertheless contained in his work, for example in Statisticon Neon and in Glossary. While those works contribute to the critical analysis of late cognitive capitalism and its culture, we need to acknowledge that they are also a product of both—their very form already expresses, in its analysis, the cultural logic of the era. This reveals those works to us as symptomatic, as part and parcel of our era’s listomania. Neidich but also we ourselves by consequence, appear in this un-situation as a listo- or glosso-maniacs, suffering from a kind of “mental illness marked by periods of great excitement or euphoria, delusions, and overactivity” (as an online definition of mania has it)—critics of the culture but, to recall Theodor Adorno’s comments on “cultural criticism”, very much part of the culture we criticize. The shiny, lustrous smoothness of both Statisticon Neon and Glossary can thus be understood in the context of what Byung-Chul Han has characterized as a society of the smooth (Han 2018), where the absence of injury risks to ultimately lead to the absence of poetry, art, thought and existence. It’s the neon society of superficial impressions and brief attractions. Life as we know it on Instagram.

    This is not the life of the book—of the narrative or the thought that demands a longer attention-span. We are in the realm of tweet-fiction, of the short story at best, of the novel reconceived as a collection of loosely connected tales that are written with an eye on their future adaptation into a television series. No need to set aside a few hours to dedicate to reading. The time between two zoom meetings or subway stops or art openings will do. It’s the glossy life, made up of keywords that are good conversational value at the next vernissage or finissage.

    Not all of this is bad. Laments about the effect on our attention-spans of significant transformations in the media are legion; there were the same warnings when the novel itself was becoming established as a genre (see, for example, Carr). In some ways this is just the progress of time, the transformation of the contemporary media-scape, and its concomitant effects on our lives and brains. In some ways it is about the always-in-progress generation of our future brains, which will inevitably be different from our past brains (how could it be otherwise?). Not all of this is uniquely tied to the era of late cognitive capitalism—the short story, for example, obviously exceeds that time period. In many ways, then, all of this is normal, and nothing to worry about; criticisms of the glossy life may just be conservative and cantankerous responses to the inevitable progress of time. Consider me guilty.  

    • One thing ought to be clear, however: that a laissez faire attitude towards the developments that the various glossaries I’ve commented on chart, might underestimate the gravity of our “un-situation”. In other words, there very much is something to worry about, and we need to become activists in response. This is the critical component (the “other hand” of what I announced above) of the glossary. For the interesting thing about glossaries—and this is the other side of today’s listomania—is that they are also the weapons that are mobilized to counter the very developments that produced them: there is a dialectic of the glossary here that allows the glossary to be mobilized against the very forces that produced it. The poison thus becomes the cure in a kind of pharmacology of the list.

    To sum up: in glossaries, editors and authors lay out our time’s terms of analysis, and hint at how they are connected (how they are to be diagrammed, or put together as part of a narration). Part symptom, but also pitched as part of the solution, glossaries seek to provide, then, something like a new, and unknown language, a kind of glossolalia, that would open up an understanding of our contemporary list-like, glossary-like, times, and enable a resistance to them. Glossaries realize such a project both through their content and their form. Importantly, the resistance they propose does not strike from the outside but from within. Rooted in a deep understanding of what it counters, a critical glossary would not be a knee-jerk response that simply rejects what it resists. Rather, it promises to take on that very thing in order to assume agency over it, and make it ours.

    Arne De Boever teaches contemporary comparative fiction, literary theory, and aesthetic and political philosophy in the School of Critical Studies and the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at the California Institute of the Arts. His most recent book is Post-Exceptionalism: Art After Political Theology (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). De Boever is part of the boundary 2 editorial collective and co-edits boundary 2 online.

    References

    Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. New York: Verso, 2013.  

    —. Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic. New York: Verso, 2018.

    Boever, Arne De. “Giorgio Agamben’s Political Formalism”. Distinktion 23: 2-3 (2022): 259-273.  

    Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

    Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. New York: Norton, 2011.  

    Cassin, Barbara. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Ed. and Trans. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, Michael Wood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

    Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome and Lowell Duckert, eds. Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.  

    Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1978.  

    Han, Byung-Chul. Saving Beauty. Trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity, 2018.

    —. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity, 2020.

    Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

    Kornbluh, Anna. Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. New York: Verso, 2023.  

    Liming, Sheila. “Fighting Words”. Los Angeles Review of Books, 12/14/2020, accessible: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/fighting-words/.

    Neidich, Warren. Glossary of Cognitive Activism (For a Not So Distant Future). Berlin: Archive Books, 2019.

    Pinkus, Karen. Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.     

    Stiegler, Bernard. Pharmacologie du Front National. Paris: Flammarion, 2013.

    —. The Neganthropocene. Ed. and Trans. Daniel Ross. London: Open Humanities Press, 2018.

    Tucker-Abramson, Myka. “Make Literary Criticism Great Again”. boundary 2 online, 09/26/2018, accessible: https://www.boundary2.org/2018/09/myka-tucker-abramson-make-literary-criticism-great-again-review-of-david-alworths-site-reading-fiction-art-social-form/.

    Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

     

    [1] Here it is worth noting the importance of the list, a term that will appear in my argument momentarily, in Anna Kornbluh’s work on immediacy as the “style of too late capitalism” (Kornbluh 175ff). Indeed, I have no hesitation in positing the glossary as one indication of immediacy as the style of our time.

    [2] The sculpture has various iterations. For the work from 2016, see: https://www.warrenWarren.com/01-Warren-statisticon-neon-2016/. For the work from 2020, see: https://vimeo.com/496263760.

    [3] I am evoking the rise of post-critique in academic discourse. For two critical takes, see: Tucker-Abramson, 2018; Liming, 2020.

    [4] We shouldn’t forget Bogost’s ties to video-game culture and the centrality of the Cold War as a reference point in his thought–especially in Alien Phenomenology, which begins with a Cold War story from Bogost’s childhood. It would be interesting to place next to each other Neidich’s Statisticon Neon, Bogost’s exploded-view drawing (with its Cold War resonances), and a work by Jackson Pollock, and note the CIA’s interest in Pollock’s so-called automatic painting–because of the patterning that it produced. So there are connections here between Pollock, the Cold War moment, and algorithmic governance in the information era that interests Neidich.

    [5] See: https://www.listlit.uni-freiburg.de/.

    [6] On this, see Boever 2022.

  • Matti Leprêtre–Modernity, Lebensreform, and MAGA’s Grassroots: On Some Economic Contradictions of Trumpism

    Matti Leprêtre–Modernity, Lebensreform, and MAGA’s Grassroots: On Some Economic Contradictions of Trumpism

    This Intervention is published as part of the b2o Review’s “Stop the Right” dossier.

    Modernity, Lebensreform, and MAGA’s Grassroots: On Some Economic Contradictions of Trumpism

    Matti Leprêtre

    The MAGA movement presents a paradox: it rails against globalization and modernity, yet it is led by billionaire capitalists who thrive on both. This contradiction echoes the coalition that brought Hitler to power—a mix of industrial elites and working- to middle-class Germans drawn to the reactionary, anti-modern rhetoric of the Lebensreform. The same fractures that ultimately weakened that coalition could be exploited today to challenge MAGA’s hold on power. But if left unchecked, its path is just as clear: when economic promises fail, all that remains is the persecution of minorities.

    *

    There is something deeply amiss in the way the memory of Nazi Germany is invoked in contemporary debates about American politics. Trump’s bid for a second term has inspired countless comparisons between him and Hitler—comparisons that, aside from their historical dubiousness, merely stimulate MAGA supporters’ libidinous drive to trigger woke liberals. Instead, there is value in fixating not on the Nazi era from 1933 onward, but on the more fluid, transformative period of 1920s Germany.

    In that turbulent decade, a wounded cultural pride lingered after the 1918 defeat, and deep anxieties about losing world-power status permeated society. Gender-based challenges to the patriarchal order, the growing assertion of gay rights, and other emancipation movements met with fierce resistance from traditional authorities and conservative reactionaries. Most importantly, the profound crisis of modernity caused widespread anti-modern sentiments—all of which eventually coalesced into the conditions that allowed the Nazi Party to seize power.

    There is little doubt that dealing with the first element—hurt cultural pride—is the chasse gardée of the Republican Party, while the struggle for emancipation remains the preserve of the Democrats. As an outsider, I have long been struck by how readily the U.S. left has allowed anti-modern sentiments to be co-opted by Republicans, with figures like Steve Bannon at the helm.

    The caution is understandable. Anti-modern sentiments have long been associated with the rise of fascism in Europe and Nazism in particular. Yet before these ideas became the exclusive domain of the Nazis, they circulated freely across the political spectrum for more than half a century. They not only fueled nationalist and anti-Semitic currents but also underpinned a proto-environmentalist critique of modernity as part of a popular movement that came to be known as the Lebensreform.

    Emerging in the latter half of the 19th century in a rapidly industrializing Germany, the Lebensreform (or reform of life) movement chiefly championed the “return to nature,” in a country where factories mushroomed across the landscape. For some, this “return” meant rejecting modern medicine in favor of natural remedies; for others, it meant embracing long hikes in the mountains; and for still others, it meant seeking an alternative to a worldview that treated nature and humanity as mere cogs in the economic machine.

    Though largely driven by the bourgeoisie, the movement mounted a sharp critique of globalization, the dehumanization of factory labor, and the environmental devastation wrought by capitalist accumulation—even giving birth to Germany’s first utopian communities. For all these reasons, the Lebensreform has been described as the matrix not only for Nazism but also for future environmentalist and anti-globalization movements.

    As a historian of Germany, I have always been struck by the parallels between the Lebensreform critique of globalization and the rhetoric of the grassroots of the MAGA movement. The far-right’s critique of “globalists” finds a clear parallel in the Lebensreform’s disdain for the emerging globalized world; and Bannon’s scathing attacks on technological progress, Elon Musk, and the “broligarchs” are reminiscent of earlier Lebensreform-ist critiques of technological advancement. Likewise, the widespread rejection of academic medicine and science—exemplified by the nomination of Robert Kennedy Jr. as Health Secretary—bears an uncanny resemblance to the alternative medical views championed in Germany a century ago. Yet, because of their common historical root in the Lebensreform, these elements also appear in leftist anti-globalization movements.[i]

    I am not equating anti-globalization leftist movements with MAGA, nor suggesting that an alliance between the two is possible or desirable at this point. MAGA’s anti-modernity departs sharply from the traditional leftist critique—with its crude racism, nationalism, Christian fundamentalism, and mysticism. Yet these tensions were already present in 1920s Germany, and largely because the German left failed to harness these popular energies, a significant portion of the movement fell into Nazi hands. This historical precedent suggests that if a new left is to succeed where the old faltered against the far right, it should develop a critique of globalized capitalism able to prevent the growing number of those left behind by globalization from joining MAGA, or even capture the grassroots energies now under the MAGA banner.

    For that, the left has a rich political repertory to draw upon. The critique of globalization and capitalist modernity has never been primarily a far-right one. From the first utopian communities to the “small is beautiful” movement of the 1970s, from Ivan Illich’s critique of biomedicine to the Our Bodies, Ourselves of the Boston Women’s Health Group Collective, from the anti-G8 protests of the 2000s to post- and decolonial propositions for finding an alternative to—or even an exit from—modernity, a range of options exists, more or less appealing, more or less viable today, but all worth considering for the emergence of a New Left. What is certain is that discarding the slightest critique of academic medicine as a conspiracy theory, scorning even the smallest enthusiasm for a life lived closer to nature as reactionary, and claiming to be “progressive” at all costs in a world so deeply embedded in a crisis of modernity will only seem repulsive to the growing number of people who see techno-industrial progress and globalized capitalism as the main cause of their torment.

    It is only a question of time before MAGA’s disparate coalition begins to disappoint its working- and middle-class members. A coalition built around an omnipotent, transhumanist tech billionaire and a cadre of like-minded oligarchs will most likely do very little to address the real impacts of globalization and technological change on millions of American workers. Trump’s wavering stance on tariffs reflects this very contradiction: every time he tries to deliver on the aspirations of his working-class base, he is reined in by the cast of oligarchs he ultimately serves. To conceal this, the oligarchs have to double down on the one fight in which they can seem to stand with “the people” against “the regime”—cultural war. In effect, the only arena in which the Trump administration can thrive is in the persecution of minorities.

    This, too, was the case in 1920s Germany. The coalition that eventually propelled Hitler to power brought together Lebensreform-inspired anti-modern peasants, factory workers, and middle-class employees, alongside wealthy industrialists terrified of the rising tide of communism and emancipatory movements.[ii] This uneasy alliance forced the Nazis to adopt a vehement anti-modern rhetoric to placate their grassroots supporters, while simultaneously embracing cutting-edge techno-industrial policies and deepening the logics of global capitalism. Even the Nazis’ de-globalizing measures emerged only when war loomed and autarky became a national security imperative. Their only ideological common ground was the cultural war they waged against emancipatory movements and, most notoriously, against ethnic and religious minorities—a war that would ultimately pave the way for the Shoah.

    So far, Democrats have largely fallen into the trap of fighting Republicans on the terrain of cultural war, the only domain in which MAGA’s coalition remains united. While there is indeed an urgency in responding to the Trump administration’s “flood the zone” strategy and its constant targeting of minority rights, history suggests that a more promising strategy would be to stop fighting solely on the terrain of values and start exposing the internal fractures within MAGA’s vision—particularly its conflicting ideas about globalization, technology, and the meaning of life and work. At the same time, they must put forward viable alternatives; ones that embrace more localized, low-tech ways of living.

    Engaging in a dialogue with people currently attracted by MAGA’s anti-modern rhetoric might feel uncomfortable at first. In France, the left faced a similar unease in 2018 when the Yellow Vest movement erupted. Initially a reaction against an oil tax, the movement soon broadened to encompass grievances common to MAGA’s grassroots—demands for a decent life in one’s village, resistance to the concentration of services in big cities, a rejection of unrestrained globalization, and a critique of the ultra-connected, ultra-mobile elite’s way of life. In retrospect, it became clear that the movement had emerged from those left behind by globalization.[iii] The French left, initially repulsed by the protests—deeming them the product of politically illiterate people with no clear views on immigration, gender politics, and ecology—gradually joined the movement, imposing leftist slogans and even sidelining its more overtly far-right, violent elements.

    The convergence was by no means easy. A sensible component of the Yellow Vests eventually turned back to the far right as the movement faded—partly due to quasi-military repression and partly because some of its most basic revendications were fulfilled. Yet this turn toward Marine Le Pen also occurred because the institutional left was unable to articulate a critique of modernity compelling enough to keep the Yellow Vests from falling into the open hands of France’s MAGA equivalent. As uncomfortable as this dialogue might feel, it is a necessary one.

    Debates after the election have focused on whether the Democrats should have leaned further to the left or more toward the center to win the votes they needed to secure victory. This assumes that political positions can be summed up along a single line from far right to far left. Yet, depending on the issues considered, there is sometimes less distance between an anti-globalization leftist activist and a MAGA grassroots supporter than between that same activist and a centrist Democrat. MAGA supporters may soon come to see that the strongest “regime” of all is the one that binds together the guardians of globalized capitalism—a regime spanning large swathes of both the Democratic and Republican parties, with Trump and Musk as its most zealous artisans.

    One can only hope that the American left will have made its aggiornamento by the time this day comes, to welcome the disillusioned adherents of Trumpism. The Democratic Party’s current stance—as the last firewall between Trump’s erratic populism and Wall Street, and as the staunch defender of free trade and the post-1945 global economic order—raises serious doubts about the American left’s ability—or willingness—to reclaim a critique of globalization that should always have remained central to any party still dreaming of itself as the voice of the working class[iv].

    Matti Leprêtre is a Teaching and Research Fellow at Sciences Po Paris and a PhD candidate at the EHESS. His dissertation examines the history of medicinal plants in the German Empire from the 1880s to 1945. He trained in postcolonial studies as an undergraduate and earned a dual degree from Sciences Po and Columbia University in 2017. He has been invited to present his research at a wide host of institutions across France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, including Oxford and Harvard. His work has appeared in several edited volumes and journals such as the Journal of the History of Ideas. He is currently co-editing an edited volume and a journal special issue on the relationship between health, nature, and the pharmaceutical industry.

    [i] Detlef Siegfried and David Templin, eds., Lebensreform Um 1900 Und Alternativmilieu Um 1980: Kontinuitäten Und Brüche in Milieus Der Gesellschaftlichen Selbstreflexion Im Frühen Und Späten 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019).

    [ii] Johann Chapoutot, Les irresponsables. Qui a porté Hitler au pouvoir ?, NRF essais (Paris: Gallimard, 2025).

    [iii] Thomas Porcher, Les délaissés: Comment transformer un bloc divisé en force majoritaire (Paris: Fayard, 2020).

    [iv] For a recent example of what a leftist criticism of globalization could be, see Stathis Gourgouris, Nothing Sacred (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024).

  • Shrobona Shafique Dipti, Naveeda Khan and Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury–How to Capture a University: Lessons from Dhaka

    This post is Part Three of “The Bangladesh Chapter” of the b2o review’s “The University in Turmoil: Global Perspectives” dossier.

    How to Capture a University: Lessons from Dhaka

    Shrobona Shafique Dipti, Naveeda Khan and Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury

    Figure 1: Dhaka University. 

    The Cast of Characters

    Sheikh Mujib, Founding father of Bangladesh

    Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Sheikh Mujib, head of AL, and till recently Prime Minister of Bangladesh

    AL, Awami League, the ruling party

    BCL, Bangladesh Chhatra League, AL student wing, also referred as Chhatra Leaguers

    BNP, Bangladesh Nationalist Party, opposition party

    JI, Jamaat-e-Islami, religious party

    Shibir, JI student wing

    Hefazat-e-Islam, coalition of religious parties and groups

    DU, Dhaka University

    BUET, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology 

    Universities in Comparative Perspective: Two Types of Capture

    2024 will surely go down in history as the year that students in U.S-based universities revolted against their government’s stance on Gaza.  Expressions of gratitude emblazoned on the tent roofs of displaced Gazans gave voice to an almost global appreciation of the students in the face of threats by university administrators.  While for a bit it seemed that university campuses were the last bastion of free speech in the U.S., the subsequent attacks by police on students at the behest of administrators made clear that universities in the Global North were already captured spaces and had been for a long time.  Between zealously grown and protected endowments, entrenched boards of trustees, and administrative bloat, faculty, students, research and teaching had long been mere excuses for the existence of corporatized universities.  

    In other parts of the world this pernicious combination of liberalism and capitalism has not quite set in the same way, although there are some indications that it may yet do so, judging by the growing numbers of private, for-profit universities in places where capital is rapidly accumulating, such as China and India.  Consider, for instance, the case of Bangladesh.  Here public universities, such as Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) and Dhaka University (DU) – both British, colonial-era institutions – are still hallowed places of education and training, where teachers are respected, and young Bangladeshis strive to get admission to better their life chances.  This has remained the case even as the Bangladesh economy has turned rapaciously capitalist, private universities steal away teaching talent, and university coffers are depleted, with a baleful impact on infrastructure and services.  

    But it is not the case that universities of Bangladesh are free of capture.  The capture is just of a different kind than that by capital.  Historically, university students, most notably at Dhaka University, have been associated with anti-colonial and nationalist politics.  Since Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971, political parties have evolved student wings that carry out a version of national politics on campus.  Depending on which party is in power, their equivalent wings dominate in universities, extending into higher education the politics of patronage and insinuating themselves into the lives of students.  

    Given this scenario, it was quite shocking to most that the 2024 Student Anti-Quota Movement, very clearly critical of the government headed by the Awami League (AL), started from Dhaka University, which was at that point very much under the thumb of the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL), the student arm of the ruling party.  Given this unlikely development, it is incumbent upon us to inquire how a space as state dominated as Dhaka University could also be the site of an anti-state revolt.  It requires us to inquire how the BCL’s vice grip upon the campus may have created the conditions of possibilities for its downfall.  The battle within the university grounds on July 15th, 2024, when the Awami League let loose BCL students upon peers involved in the Anti-Quota Movement, an encounter which ended in considerable bloodshed, death, and the chilling images of Chhatra League men in helmets with hockey sticks bearing down on unprotected bodies – often with the support of law enforcement authorities –will probably serve for all time as the moment when Bangladesh civil society realized that the Prime Minister and her party had gone mad.   

    In Part Three of “The Bangladesh Chapter” of the b2o review’s “The University in Turmoil: Global Perspectives” dossier, we explore the spatial experience of the university as a captured space, that is, how the AL-led government and its student wing came to take over the space of the university, before turning in our next contribution to how this space was reinhabited to launch a movement against the state.  We hope that getting a sense of the lay of the land may provide a glimpse into how small incursions into space becomes a full-throated capture of every domains of existence, including the imagination, and what living under active oppression feels like while one is trying to simply go about the business of getting educated.  

    Mapping Dhaka University

    Dhaka University occupies a central location in the capital, on the way from the older residential neighborhoods of west Dhaka to the business district in the east, but which, crossroads though it may be, still feels like a haven, thanks to its wide roads, tree-lined avenues and historic buildings set back from the roads.  In this section, we provide in three maps an overview of the location and layout of the university before homing in on the monuments that dot its landscape and that provide an important vantage on how students have been central to politics in Bangladesh, for better or for worse.  

    Map 1. 

    The first map shows the form of the university area and its placement within the heart of downtown Dhaka.  We see that it is relatively green, indicating trees and parks in its vicinity, such as the Ramna Park, a site of romantic liaisons, sports, and other leisure activities.  Otherwise, very densely occupied neighborhoods and areas throng the campus.

    Map 2. 

    The second is a road map of the University.  When we zoom into it, we see that the campus is overlaid by four roads, although university buildings spread out beyond these thoroughfares:  the New Elephant Road to its north, Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue/Abdul Gani Road somewhat to its east, Nilkhet Road to its south and Azimpur Road to its west.  All four of these roads are busy commercial thoroughfares and sites of important student mobilization.  

    Map 3. 

    The third map is a creation of the graphic art group Dhakayeah, known for producing images of urban and semi-urban areas of Bangladesh – visual pastiches, suffused with elements of the past, espousing a certain romantic view of Bangladesh as both familiar and lost.  The pale green color palette reinscribes this view.  The image of a woman in a white overcoat and that of a woman in a sari perusing a book alongside the image of a man sitting on the grass looking at something or the man playing football puts forward the university as a co-educational space.  While we are alerted to the distribution of educational buildings through icons indicating laboratories, libraries, science, art, etc., and we are also given the names and images of several historical buildings and cultural sites, such as Curzon Hall, Shahidullah Hall, Bangla Academy, National Museum.  Among the residential buildings, the one for non-Muslims, primarily Hindus, Jaganath Hall, is indicated by the icon of the Hindu Goddess Saraswati, associated with wisdom, with her sitar and white goose. 

    On the Dhakayeah map we are pointed to the presence of notable monuments, such as the Central Shahid Minar (Martyrs Monument), the 1963 national monument to the martyrs of the 1952 Language Movement composed of five forms of white pillars and arches.  There is the 1979 sculpture of three freedom fighters holding guns, including a woman, titled Aparajeyo Bangla (Unvanquished Bengal) to commemorate the 1971 liberation struggle.  The Anti-Terrorism Raju Memorial, composed of men and women looking outwards while forming a circle with interlocked arms and hands, was created in the late 1990s to commemorate the student Moin Hossain Raju, killed while protesting terrorism within the university campus. 

    Figure 2, ©jagonews24. 

    The map represents several others, but inevitably omits many, as the campus is awash in monuments.  One significant to the story of how the campus has come to be the resting place of the memories of violence faced by the country’s young is called the Road Accident Memorial, unveiled in 2014 and representing the car crash that killed the Bangladesh filmmaker Tareque Masud and his companions in 2011.  These memorials, like others, indict the country’s two major political parties, the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), for their reigns of violence and neglect of student safety.  These monuments were once counterpoised by large murals of Sheikh Mujib, the founder of Bangladesh, and Sheikh Hasina, his daughter and Prime Minister of Bangladesh until 2024, on the pillars of the Metrorail.  The murals were defaced during the Anti-Quota Movement (figure 2), but are worth keep in mind, as we note how monumental sculptures and images indicate the diverse political strivings of the university students.

    A Recent History of the University, 1990s-2020s

    To understand our story of the capture of the university by the ruling party, and the seeds of unrest that this planted, it would help to trace the recent history of Dhaka University from 1990 to the present. In the early part of the period, we see students becoming involved in national movements to depose a dictator, but also teachers and administrators getting politicized.  In the later part of this period, we see the student wing of the ruling party consolidating its hold on the university with the aid of senior administrators.  We also see the university expelling all other student parties across the political spectrum.  

    1990 stands out as the year in which a broad swathe of civil society organized to lead a movement against the standing military leader turned dictator, General Ershad.  Students at Dhaka University were part of this movement.  What is particularly noteworthy in the decade following Ershad’s being forced out of power was the entrenchment of teachers within national politics by means of the university.  Until the 1990s, it was students who had played a conspicuous role in national politics through the student wings of various parties, but the 1990s brought party-linked teachers’ organization to the fore: the BNP-backed teachers of Shada Dol (White Party), for instance, or Awami League-backed teachers of Nil Dol (Blue Party).  The students remained markedly more influential than their teachers within this changing dispensation; it was students, for instance, who secured positions for teachers, such as those of the vice chancellor, proctor and hall provosts.  The teachers expressed their gratitude through shielding and protecting students from criticism and the repercussions of their violent acts.  

    The next two decades, the period from 2000 to 2019, saw the steady encroachment of the state into the university, leading to growing political influence over university governance, including the dispensing of justice.  One event that especially colored this period was the 2010 murder of Abu Bakar, widely regarded as a student of great promise, who was killed during clashes between two Chhatra League factions fighting for control over access to a room in a residential hall referred to as a “hall seat.”  Despite overwhelming evidence, the students accused of his murder were acquitted, and the victim’s family was not even informed of the verdict.  Even the President of the country ignored the family’s appeals for justice.  Such incidents were in step with the state growing in power in the country more widely, and starting to perpetrate violence against its own citizens, in the form of enforced disappearances and illegal detentions.

    Figure 3, ©Global Voice. Dhaka, Bangladesh. 18th February 2013 — A woman shouts on a microphone. — A demonstration for the death penalty to be given to war criminals, is continuing at Shahbag crossroads, and has reached its fourteenth day. 

    Figure 4, ©Maciej Dokowicz.         

    Figure 5, ©JagoNews24. Scenes from Shapla.                                         

    Figure 6, ©Syed Zakir Hossain. 

    This period also saw the rise of sizeable movements in which university students, including seminarians, played a leading role.  Two, the Shahbag Protests of 2013 and the Shapla Square Protests of the same year, were defining moments in the country’s recent history, driving home the cultural divides that marked the Hasina era.  Locating themselves at one of the main entry points of Dhaka University, tens of thousands of people participated in the Shahbagh Movement, which were led by pro-liberation activists, aligned with Bangladesh’s bid for self-determination from Pakistan in 1971, and strongly supported by left-leaning Dhaka University students.  These activists expressed their desire for the state to impose stiff sentences, including death, on those they considered war criminals for having sided with the Pakistan army in 1971, for having, that is, assisted in the violence that the army inflicted against East Pakistanis at that time.  When the war criminal Abdul Quader Molla was handed a life sentence by the tribunal overseeing his trial, the movement demanded that he be sentenced to death instead.  The movement thus served the state’s interests by pushing for the rigorous punishment of those seen as traitors to the nation – Molla’s sentence was transmuted, and he was promptly hung; it was also used by the state to suppress the political activities of the student wing of the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami’s student wing, and other groups within the university campus.[1] 

    This movement was followed by the Shapla Square Protests, led by Hefazat-e-Islam, an advocacy group consisting of religious leaders and students within the Qawmi Madrasa system, a privately run religious educational system parallel to the state-run one.  They called for the adoption of a blasphemy law, citing perceived offences to religious sentiment caused by Shahbag protesters.  This movement ended in a violent crackdown, with security forces brutally dispersing protesters.  Even though Hefazat as a group backed the war crimes trials, which was used to persecute leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) Bangladesh, JI and its student wing Shibir, contributed heavily to the group, seeking common ground against the Awami League and a shared goal of integrating Islam into Bangladesh’s governance and laws. 

    The two movements, Shahbagh and Shapla, symbolized a deep political and cultural divide: Shahbagh was framed as upholding the spirit of 1971 (muktijuddher chetona), while Shapla was portrayed as anti-liberation (bipokkho shokti).  This binary allowed the government to homogenize and demonize madrasa students and anyone visibly religious, such as those with beards and skullcaps, as enemies of the state.  By constructing this division, the ruling party justified widespread repression under the guise of protecting the nation’s independence, a strategy that they continued for the next decade.[2]

    While the Shahbagh and Shapla movements have provided the frame for political narratives since 2013, Dhaka University students also led the first version of the anti-quota reform movement that same year.  Though overshadowed by the massive Shahbagh movement, anti-quota activism would return in 2018 and again in 2024 to challenge the established polarities of the nation’s politics, its divvying of the field between progressives and reactionaries, that framed the Awami League’s encroachment upon and the Chhatra League’s dominance on the DU campus and elsewhere.

    The Micro-capture of University Space

    Amid this growing capture and repression of the university by the state by means of its student wing, the entire social, cultural, and educational landscape of the university underwent a transformation.  Chhatra League’s dominance extended beyond student politics, infiltrating academic and professional spheres.  Academic opportunities, teaching positions, and even government jobs increasingly required loyalty to them.  Many joined not out of ideological conviction, but as a means of survival: to secure protection from violence, gain access to institutional privileges, or ensure career advancement.  But once they joined, they soon learned of the BCL’s mode of operation: the loyalty that it expected of its members and the incessant jockeying for power within the organization.

    The president and general secretary of the Dhaka University branch of BCL were considered the most powerful positions within the branch, as these served as steppingstones to central leadership within the all-Bangladesh student party.  So important were these two posts that both the national media and the wider student body watched to see who secured them.  Those who aspired to political careers on the national scene often prolonged their studies artificially, declining to complete their degrees to hang onto positions of influence.  Departments were organized to allow students to stay enrolled despite failing their exams multiple times.  In fact, the longer one stayed at the university, the greater were one’s chances of rising to the top. 

    Students within the Chhatra League competed for these positions.  Having control over hall committees, enjoying a monopoly over rackets enabling rent seeking and patronage, known locally as “cartels,” and cultivating close ties with the university administration all contributed to one’s prospects of rising through the ranks.  And the path to leadership began within the residential halls.  Political leaders often referred to their time in the halls as laying the foundation for their careers.   

    At Dhaka University, the number of students admitted often exceeded the available accommodations, leading to overcrowding.  As a result, the university authorities had long ago stopped offering housing to first-year students, leading to tremendous insecurity for those coming from outside Dhaka or from poorer backgrounds, given the exorbitant rental costs in the capital.  Hall leaders, backed by their loyal followers, consolidated power by securing the support of hall provosts and house tutors.  Through such political maneuvering, BCL activists gained control over specific rooms, with Chhatra League leaders and their followers receiving rooms more easily.

    The leaders typically had separate rooms with amenities, while students, depending on their patronage of BCL activists, were assigned spaces within rooms, called Gonorooms (mass dormitories), which housed 20-30 students, far exceeding their normal capacity.  They were overcrowded, unsanitary environments, severely affecting students’ health and well-being.  Nonetheless, the premium on space meant that they were sought after and served as spaces of control and political tutelage.  For instance, students new to Chhatra League were required to attend Guest Room sessions, where they were instructed on so-called political courtesy, including how to show deference to student leaders.  These sessions often lasted several days; refusal to participate often resulted in bullying and even physical abuse.  Fear was pervasive, as the Chhatra League’s power was absolute as they had both impunity and deep resources to draw on to impose their will.  

    The 2016 death of Hafizur Molla, a student from the Marketing Department of Dhaka University, highlighted the harsh living conditions and political control exercised by the Chhatra League over students at the university.  Molla moved into Salimullah Muslim Hall in January under the good graces of a Chhtra League activist, but was forced to sleep in the veranda, which some halls also use as makeshift living spaces.  Less than a month after his admission, he contracted pneumonia and typhoid and died.  His family and classmates claimed that his illness worsened due to the exposure to cold living in the veranda and being forced to attend Chhatra League nightly programs, including AL-led political processions.  

    This power over students and their residential lives extended to the food canteens in the halls.  Canteen owners were required to provide food and stay open late to serve the leaders or else face beatings and assaults.  According to an example provided by the newspaper Daily Jugantor, leaders ate food worth 18 lakhs of takas ($18,000) from the canteens between 2019 and 2024 without paying for it.  In turn, the canteen owners passed on their losses to the students, who had to pay inflated prices for their food, while the canteen ownership saw a fast turnover.  

    Despite widespread awareness of the ongoing situation at Dhaka University and other campuses, one incident deeply shook the public.  This incident occurred not at Dhaka University but at the neighboring Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), a campus traditionally known for its apolitical stance.  On the night of October 6, 2019, Abrar Fahad, a second-year BUET student, was tortured to death by Chhatra League activists inside Sher-e-Bangla Hall.  The attack was likely brought on by his Facebook post, which was critical of India. Accused of being affiliated with Shibir, the religious student wing – a common justification for violent hazing – he was severely beaten.  CCTV footage later showed his lifeless body being dragged down the stairs, an image that quickly spread across the country through national media.  In response to Abrar Fahad’s murder, BUET students launched a massive protest demanding justice and the banning of political activities on campus.  This movement led to the BUET administration officially prohibiting student politics, marking an unprecedented step by an avowedly apolitical but also relatively passive administration, which now committed to quashing student influence within public universities.

    Figures 7 and 8, Modhur Canteen, 1904 and Present. 

    The BCL’s mode of extending its influence over the campus was to capture sites that had historically been associated with the fight for freedom (of various kinds) and that retained symbolic importance within the history of the university.  One such site, Modhur Canteen, was long associated with student social gatherings and political activism.  Originally a dance hall in the garden house of a zamindar from Srinagar, on whose property Dhaka University was later built (figures 7 and 8), it would host the planning of significant student-led anti-government movements in 1948 and 1952.  During 1971, Madhusudhan Dey otherwise known as Modhu Da, the man who served in the canteen, was shot dead by Pakistani forces.  After independence, the canteen came to bear his name in recognition of his sacrifice.  Its symbolic importance for student politics is indicated by the fact that it became the site of press conferences by various student wings.

    Figure 9, ©Jannatul Mawa. 

       Figure 10, ©amarbarta.                                      

    Figure 11, ©Mehedi Haque. 

    Under the BCL the canteen became a site for the performance of power by their leaders.  After gaining control of the space, its leaders arrived every day on motorcycles, revving their engines to produce an awful din.  Their helmet-covered heads and shielded eyes gave them an ominous look.  This look even acquired a certain iconic character (figures 9, 11 and 13).  Modhur Canteen also served pragmatically as the site of BCL meetings.  Factional infighting took place here in full view of passersby and those living close by (figure 10).  

    Another example of a space captured, and its original symbolism overturned was the Teachers-Students Center (TSC).  The capture of TSC allowed Chhatra League to expand its scope from being a political force to asserting cultural hegemony, becoming the “Cultural Chhatra League.”  TSC housed a cafeteria, beside which stood the Anti-Terrorism Raju Memorial Sculpture, a significant piece expressing the students’ struggle for spaces to learn without the threat of political violence (see section “Mapping Dhaka University”).  TSC’s auditorium and rooms were allocated for various long-standing and popular students – film, IT, debate, etc.  In time these clubs too fell under the control of Chhatra League.  Club leaders had to be affiliated with BCL.  This included the presidents of the film and debate clubs, which had once been the most independent-minded of the student clubs, generating high levels of cultural and political excitement, but which now operated under Chhatra League’s command. 

    TSC was once a stronghold of leftist political organizations.  Even as the clubs fell under BCL control, they maintained some independence by putting on concerts, film screenings, and other cultural events.  However, the rigged Dhaka University Central Students Union (DUCSU) election of 2019 (discussed below) brought about a drastic change, tilting the Center entirely into BCL’s camp.  All funds allocated for cultural activities were appropriated by the BCL, which started organizing large concerts with massive banners and extravagant expenses amounting to lakhs of takas ($100,000s), both as a racket and to draw attention to their presence and power.  Without any school funding, the leftist groups were forced to rely on crowdfunding.  While the much-weakened leftist groups were allowed to stay on campus the student organizations affiliated with the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) were expelled from campus in 2010.  The party was then allowed to participate in the 2019 DUCSU elections – and thus allowed back on campus in some limited way – because elections, even rigged ones, require opposition groups and BNP was deemed the most acceptable of the lot.  Students affiliated with Jamaat-e-Islami and other religious parties were forced to hide their political identities or else were banned from campus.  In fact, dissimulating one’s political identity became the norm. 

    Women in the BCL

    Although there were women in the Chhatra League, they were often excluded from the image of Chhatra League politics, where leadership was typically associated with men – the kind of men who led motorcycle processions, exerted control through violence, carried out extortion, and exuded dominance by wearing biker helmets as though they were armor.  Women’s spaces were also a site of BCL power politics, though of a muted kind.  And while not free of the BCL’s clientism, they still provided the space for some iota of resistance.  

    As a resident of Ruqayyah Hall, one of us, Shrobona, witnessed firsthand how power operated in women’s halls.  While the violent capture of student halls by Chhatra League members was rampant in men’s dormitories, women’s halls experienced a more subtle form of control.  Rooms in each hall were designated for Chhatra League leaders—at least two to four per building spread across different floors.  These rooms belonged to senior apus (sisters), each of whom had her own group of followers.  Some of these followers joined the BCL willingly, hoping to advance in politics, while others were recruited for reasons of geography or because they were squatting and were vulnerable to intimidation.  Women who were conventionally attractive and deemed obedient were often targeted for recruitment. 

    Every week or month, these women were required to meet with BCL leaders, who then selected a few to be introduced to party officials at the AL headquarters.  Despite never holding major leadership positions, these women were often deployed to suppress protests.  I remember one such incident when we marched to the Vice-Chancellor’s office to protest sexual harassment. There were around 200 students, yet Chhatra League mobilized nearly 2000 men and women to attack us – under the pretext of protecting the university administrator.

    While residents were only allowed to stay out until 10 PM, female Chhatra League leaders could enter halls at any hour of the night.  There were extravagant birthday celebrations of apu leaders.  One such event went viral during the 2024 protests that led to Hasina’s downfall.  In the footage, Atika, a BCL leader from Ruqayyah Hall, was seen celebrating her birthday in grand style, with the TV room lavishly decorated with flowers and followers chanting slogans, a festivity that seemed ill-judged at a time of national crisis.  

    Unlike men’s halls, where religious segregation was enforced (e.g., male students of minority religions had to stay in Jagannath Hall and were not welcome in the other halls), women’s halls accommodated students of all religious backgrounds.  This encouraged a degree of pluralism.   While BCL monopolized university-wide cultural activities – determining, for instance, who could or could not participate in sports, debates or music – Hindu festivals, such as the Saraswati Puja, were celebrated within the women’s halls, providing some spaces for socializing outside of BCL control.

    Women’s halls were also frequently sites of protest, as students came to challenge the treatment of rooms as property and the partisan exploitation – indeed, extortion – of hall resources.  During the fasting month of Ramadan, female students protested the unfair distribution of food, although dissent was soon suppressed by hall authorities threatening to revoke residence permits.  One striking example of resistance to the consolidation of power within the hall emerged following the 2019 DUCSU election.  Professor Zeenat Huda, the provost of Ruqayyah Hall, was accused of colluding with Chhatra League leaders in demanding Tk 21 lakhs in bribes for university jobs in the Class IV category, that is, lower administrative jobs.  Two students posted on social media an audio recording of a conversation in which the demand was made.  In retaliation, the provost canceled their legally allocated residential seats.

    The 2019 DUCSU Elections: A Turning Point?

    Figure 12, ©Maloy Kumar Dutta.                                                           

    Figure 13, ©Reesham Shahab Tirtho 

    The Dhaka University Central Students’ Union had long been a crucial means of political engagement in Bangladesh for students.  Sultan Mohammad Mansur Ahmed, elected as DUCSU Vice President (VP) in 1980 during the Ershad era, underscored the enduring importance of the union in shaping the political trajectory of Bangladesh.  He remarked in 2019 that, “If we consider DUCSU only as the Dhaka University Central Students’ Union, its significance will not be fully understood.  DUCSU has served as the birthplace of Bangladesh’s liberation struggle and all democratic movements.  From the Language Movement to the fight for self-determination and independence, DUCSU has led every major political movement.”  After Bangladesh’s independence, DUCSU continued to serve as a platform for political dissent, notably in the 1990s, when it spearheaded the student uprising that ultimately led to the fall of Hussain Muhammad Ershad’s military dictatorship, mentioned above.

    There is a stark irony in the fact that DUCSU elections were regularly held during both the Pakistan era and General Ershad’s rule.  However, after the 1990 uprising that toppled Ershad, the tenure of those who had been elected in 1990 was allowed to lapse without another election for 28 years.  Between 2016 and 2018, left-wing and non-partisan student activists campaigned for elections to be reinstated, seeing these as a solution to the deteriorating conditions on campus.  Through the DUCSU Chayi (We want DUCSU) movement, they organized protests, gatherings, and graffiti.

    Surprisingly, after decades of inaction, the Awami League government agreed to hold Student Union elections in 2019, just months after the notoriously rigged national elections of December 2018.  This was thought to be a concession, as demands for change had been gaining momentum on campus.  The 2018 Anti-Quota Movement, led by Nurul Haq Nur, had launched a popular panel, Bangladesh Sadharon Chhatra Odhikar Songrokkhon Parishad (Bangladesh General Students’ Rights Protection Council).  Meanwhile, a new student group, Shotontro Jot (Independent Alliance), emerged, consisting mostly of non-resident students from the science departments who claimed to be apolitical and sought a campus free of partisan influence.  Leftist student groups also organized campaigns, addressing critical issues such as the entrenched system of loyalty-based politics (lejurbrittik rajniti), the overcrowded and exploitative conditions in Gonorooms (mass dormitories), and the poor quality of food in campus canteens.  Their manifestos called for greater rights for students and a better quality of campus life.  

    Any hope for change was badly shaken when the Student Union began to resemble the discredited national election.  The AL-government’s apparent concession to student demands appeared to be mere window dressing.  For instance, on the night before voting, ballot papers were discovered hidden in a canteen storeroom.  Students and candidates stood guard to prevent further interference, but BCL activists forcibly entered, clashing with hall tutors and teachers as voting descended into chaos.  When students discovered rigged ballots in another residential hall, they demanded the provost’s resignation on the day of voting.  Despite widespread protests, threats of boycott, and calls to halt the election, officials rushed through with the process and counted the votes.

    To appease the students at large, the BCL strategically conceded the VP position to Nurul Haq Nur, the leader of the 2018 Anti-Quota Movement and a general position to a member of his party, while securing control over the remaining 23 positions.  Upon his election, Nur visited the parliament in session and controversially praised Sheikh Hasina as the “mother of education.” His statement shocked many students who had hoped for continued resistance, reinforcing skepticism about whether any real change was possible within the existing political structure.  But what became clear from the 2019 DUCSU elections was that student participation and protests directly challenged the dominance of the Chhatra League. 

    In Conclusion

    Even in a space as thoroughly captured as Dhaka University, resistance fomented.  As the gains from the previous 2018 Quota Movement were eroded back to nothing, above all through the 2024 High Court ruling that reestablished the hated quotas for the family members of freedom fighters, students in various universities took to protests.  What such spontaneous protests showed more than anything else was that students maintained a belief in the power of collective action above all else.  The monuments we spoke of earlier that dotted the campus of Dhaka University embodied this belief.  And as we saw in the sketch of student politics over the past few decades, despite all efforts at repression by BCL, the space of Dhaka University was riven by unrest always just below its surface, materializing in intermittent protests.  In effect, the July Movement of 2024 that toppled the Awami League government and its mode of student politics could be taken to be just one more protest along a long trajectory of such protests.  We next move to the scene of the movement to explore how it became the means of undoing an authoritarian regime and the possible undoing of the state capture of the university campus.

    Naveeda Khan is professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She has worked on religious violence and everyday life in urban Pakistan. Her more recent work is on riverine lives in Bangladesh and UN-led global climate negotiations. Her field dispatches from Dhaka in the middle of the July Uprising may be found here.

    Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury is a campaigner working for the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association on climate, policy, renewable energy and human rights. 

    Shrobona Shafique Dipti, a graduate of the University of Dhaka, is an urban anthropologist and lecturer at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh with an interest in environmental humanities and multi-species entanglements.

    [1] Through these trials much of the leadership of Jamaat-e-Islami was also executed. There were also torture and repression of students at this and other universities, such as Rajshahi University under the presumption that they were supporters of JI or Shibir.   

    [2] At the same time as the religious right was being suppressed, there was considerable concession to their demands.  The 2018 Digital Security Act allowed in through the side door the surveillance and punishment of utterances deemed blasphemous by criminalizing any insult to Sheikh Mujib, the founding father of Bangladesh, and the Prophet Muhammad. 

  • Ali Rıza Taşkale–Mapping Affective Landscapes within Financialized Capitalism through Speculative Fiction

    Ali Rıza Taşkale–Mapping Affective Landscapes within Financialized Capitalism through Speculative Fiction

    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.

     

  • Torsten Andreasen–The Day the Music Died: Finance Fiction and the Affects of the Long Downturn

    Torsten Andreasen–The Day the Music Died: Finance Fiction and the Affects of the Long Downturn

    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.

    Works cited

    Aristotle. “Topica.” In Posterior Analytics. Topica. Translated by E. S. Forster, and Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.

    Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century. London & New York: 1994.

    Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.

    Brenner, Robert. “The Boom and the Bubble”. In New Left Review, no. 6 (Nov Dec 2000): 5-43).

    Brenner, Robert. Economics of Global Turbulence – The Advanced Capitalist Economies from long Boom to long Downturn, 1945-2005. London & New York: Verso, 2006.

    Brenner, Robert. “What Is Good for Goldman Sachs Is Good for America: The Origins of the Current Crisis,” April 2009, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/cstch/papers/BrennerCrisisTodayOctober2009.pdf.

    Bruck, Connie. The Predators’ Ball: the Junk-Bond Raiders and the Man Who Staked Them. New York: The American Lawyer, 1988.

    Cartwright, Justin. Other People’s Money. London: Bloomsbury, 2011.

    Clover, Joshua. “Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital.” Journal of narrative theory 41, no. 1 (April 1, 2011): 34–52.

    Clover, Joshua. “Playing by the numbers.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Spring 2012a), pp. 7-9.

    Clover, Joshua. “Value | Theory | Crisis.” PMLA 127, no. 1 (2012b): 107–114.

    Clover, Joshua. “Crisis.” Pendakis, Andrew, Imre Szeman, and Jeff Diamanti (eds). The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

    De Boever, Arne. Finance Fictions – Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.

    Dee, Jonathan. The Privileges. New York: Random House, 2010.

    DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Picador, 2003.

    Dornbusch, Rudiger. “Growth Forever,” Wall Street Journal (30 July, 1998).

    Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Picador, 1992.

    Faulks, Sebastian. A Week in December. London: Hutchinson, 2009.

    Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell, 1990.

    Haslett, Adam. Union Atlantic. London: Tuskar Rock Press, 2010.

    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.

  • Naveeda Khan, Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury, and Shrobona Shafique Dipti–Shomonnoyok or Who Wants to be a Student Leader?

    Naveeda Khan, Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury, and Shrobona Shafique Dipti–Shomonnoyok or Who Wants to be a Student Leader?

    ©Mashruk Ahmed

    This post is Part Two of “The Bangladesh Chapter” of the b2o review’s “The University in Turmoil: Global Perspectives” dossier.

    Shomonnoyok or Who Wants to Be a Student Leader?

    Naveeda Khan, Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury, and Shrobona Shafique Dipti

    On July 26, 2024, the police in Dhaka city picked up three students by the names of Nahid Islam, Abu Baker Majumdar and Asif Mahmud. Over the next two day, three more students were taken into custody: Sarjis Alam, Hasnat Abdullah, and–the only woman in the initial group–Nusrat Tabassum. The 2024 Quota Reform Movement had already turned violent by this time: the Awami League’s student organization had begun beating the protestors; the police had fired on unarmed crowds; and some in the public had retaliated by burning government buildings and infrastructure.

    This instance of the police detaining students had broader consequences. It had broader consequences because by taking in specific students the Sheikh Hasina government was for the first time acknowledging that the movement was not just composed of innocent (read “ignorant”) students being manipulated by anti-state agitators; it was after all an organized effort led by the students themselves. The government could not help but identify several students as leaders of the movement simply by picking them up, supposedly for their own protection. Among these student leaders, Nahid Islam had already been picked up earlier and beaten, no doubt because he was most visible in the media. But this group sweep suggested that the Awami League government felt they had identified and seized the most influential of the student leaders, without whom the protests would surely come to a halt. This action repeated the strategy of the government during the 2018 Quota Movement when several key leaders were taken into custody by the detective branch of the police to break the movement.

    This performance of concern for the student leaders—they weren’t being arrested; they were being taken into protective custody—was also violent in a psychological sense as it forced the six students to partake in televised displays of their cordial relations with the police. They were filmed sharing a meal with their captors. For many, the scene of the students gathered in the main detective branch of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police to take a meal with the notorious chief of the branch, Harun-ur Rashid (also referred to as DB Harun), evoked many earlier scenes. In them DB Harun was shown on television to be breaking bread with those he had picked up without warrant and, one heard, was mistreating, if not torturing, sometimes before these tablemates were permanently “disappeared.” There was a macabre humor to the students being feted in what had come to be referred to as “Harun’s Rice Hotel” (“Haruner Bhater Hotel”).

    ©Shrobona Shafique Dipti, graffiti at Dhaka University of the six students in custody.

    Under ordinary circumstances, the leaders appearing on television, being made to read out a statement calling off the movement, would have marked the end of the student action, cut off at the head, with viewers savoring the forced jollity of condemned prisoners partaking of a last meal. But not this time. Not only did viewers balk at this effort to quell a movement by excising the efforts of the young, but the other students also watching the television performance rejected the statement to call off the movement and openly repudiated the leadership of the six.

    The act of seeking out and gathering student coordinators in the police station marked a moment of failed recognition by the government. It failed to recognize that the category of the student coordinator, the self-named shomonnoyok, well exceeded the six who had been picked up, having evolved into a generic category to include anyone willing to take up the reins of organization as befitting the decentralized nature of the movement. True to form, the extorted call to end the protests was answered by other self-proclaimed shomonnoyoks vowing to continue the protests regardless. Many shomonnoyoks in cities such as Chittagong and Rangpur, previously unknown to the public, came to dominate the TV screens and front pages of the newspapers, marking the proliferating lines of the movement in towns and cities outside of the capital.

    A precursor to such organizing was the 2018 Road Safety Movement, which had followed the first Quota Movement of 2018. This had been initiated by schoolchildren, who had concluded that their erstwhile pleadings with the government to make roads safe for the young would go unheard. The young protestors had unintentionally adopted a decentralized mode of gathering, shouting slogans such as “neta hotey ashi nain” (“We have not come to be leaders”), only to be met with violence. Perhaps, the decentralized nature of organizing by the current shomonnoyoks was informed by that earlier movement. Undoubtedly many of the school children involved in it were now of age to participate in the 2024 Quota Movement. They likely drew upon their past practices and encounters with the state and violent memories of that past to fuel their mobilization in the present. Or perhaps it was just the call of the hour; the 2024 movement had come too far and reached too deeply into the conscience of Bangladeshi society for it to falter on a statement made clearly under duress by the six shomonnoyoks in the police station. “Bhoi kete giyeche,” “Fear has gone.” The fear that had once tempered protests and empowered the regime had given way.

    While a message was shared widely across social media clarifying that students were to offer themselves as mere coordinators and not take on the mantle of leaders, it is not clear by what modality any decision on this question was taken, agreed upon, faithfully transmitted and taken up. The mimetic doubling, redoubling, multiplying of the figure of the shomonnoyoks was so forceful within the movement that the term, previously in general use in Bangladesh to refer to the coordinator of any movement, be it garment factory workers protesting better work conditions and wages or environmentalists protesting pollution, seems likely henceforth to refer only to the countless, effectively nameless leaders of the Quota Reform Movement, a number of whom gave their lives to bring down Hasina.

    The importance of the category of the shomonnoyok is manifest even after the fall of the Hasina government and the winding down of street protests. However, it has now gone from being a labile, even generic category donned by anybody to being a marker of some distinction, of a person backed by a successful uprising. Some, such as Abu Sayeed, deemed the first student to be killed in the movement, have been memorialized as martyred shomonnoyoks. Others, such as Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud of the original six who were imprisoned, have taken up seats in government and acquired distinction that way. Others, such as Umama Fatema, have gained publicity by complaining of women students being left out of government despite being in the maelstrom from the start. But what is interesting is how the very act of claiming the title of shomonnoyok or being deputed by a shomonnoyok has come to indicate that one is authorized. Since the fall of Hasina, there have been notable incidents of those claiming to be shomonnoyoks or authorized by shomonnoyoks to carry out a range of activities, from enforcing change within institutions to rid them of Awami League loyalists to carrying out extortion rackets.

    As if to remind us that the title of the shomonnoyok carries no particular distinction and may be time-bound to the movement alone, Nahid Islam, one of the original six and now in the interim government as an upadeshta or advisor overseeing post, telecommunication and information technology, recently felt compelled to address a letter to various ministries assuring them that he had nothing to do with anyone claiming to be acting on his behalf: “Recently, some individuals have been using my name or claiming to be my relatives to seek favours in different offices, to fulfil their personal interests and gain illegal benefits, which is entirely unethical. This is tarnishing my reputation.” Newspaper reportage had him saying that if anyone tries to use his name or claim to be his relative in order to get something done or make a request, it should not be considered under any circumstances (The Business Standard, 2 January 2025). In effect, he was disavowing that his name meant anything in particular, as in the original meaning of shomonnoyok.

    At present, students in the government, such as Nahid Islam, are seen to be growing more pragmatic by the day: they have lost their shomonnoyok quality of splitting off and leading in the face of opposition. They are seen to emphasize instead broad-based consensus across political parties. Meanwhile others have gathered to take on the mantle of shomonnoyok, leaning into its demonstrated capacity to proliferate. The umbrella group of the movement, the Boishommo Birodhi Chhatra Andolon (Anti-Discrimination Students Movement) formed in 2024 has been joined by the 55 member-Jatiya Nagorik Committee (National Citizens Committee), also spearheaded by student coordinators during the July Uprising. The first seeks to represent students, while the second seeks to represent citizens more widely.

    These newest versions of shomonnoyoks have vowed to pressure the interim government to deliver on its promise of reforms to the country’s constitution, election process, and civil administration such that fascism may be forever stayed. Yet they were foiled in their most recent effort to get a declaration from the government, dubbed the July Proclamation, attesting to the rightfulness of the student uprising. They had sought such a proclamation so that the uprising may go down in the history books as necessary and legitimate, securing the legacy of the shomonnoyoks. They also sought to protect those who had been involved in the movement from future retaliatory action, as in the form of a general amnesty. The Proclamation was deferred, as the interim government sought consensus across party lines. However, such deferral is seen to be having a deleterious impact on the ability of students to deliver change, compounded by the fast recouped strength of traditional political parties who have been quick to capture political spaces. It is notable that Nurul Haque Nur and Rashed Khan, who had been leaders of the 2018 Quota Movement, became national level leaders in the aftermath of the movement, just as Nahid and others are now on their way to being. They may have wanted to stay shomonnoyoks, as Nahid’s recent words quoted above indicate, but it appears that they may be becoming student “netas” (“leaders”) in the old way.

    The July Uprising was a moment of unity in the face of unprecedented brutality by a regime that ultimately had no recourse for the decentralized and multitudinous movement of shomonnoyoks. But just as the population came together from different ideological fronts to uphold and support the evolving movement, in a post-uprising Bangladesh, they are fracturing once again. Islamists, nationalists and leftists marched together in July but have since recovered their differences. The shomonnoyoks have decided to focus on building a new political front. But that requires originality of thought and pursuit. Can an identity premised on schismatic mimesis to be effective provide such focus and newness?

    Naveeda Khan is professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.  She has worked on religious violence and everyday life in urban Pakistan.  Her more recent work is on riverine lives in Bangladesh and UN-led global climate negotiations.  Her field dispatches from Dhaka in the middle of the July Uprising may be found here.

    Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury is a campaigner working for the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association on climate, policy, renewable energy and human rights. 

    Shrobona Shafique Dipti, a graduate of the University of Dhaka, is an urban anthropologist and lecturer at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh with an interest in environmental humanities and multi-species entanglements. 

  • Naveeda Khan, Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury, and Shrobona Shafique Dipti–The July Movement of 2024

    Naveeda Khan, Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury, and Shrobona Shafique Dipti–The July Movement of 2024

    ©Rahul Talukder

    This post is Part One of “The Bangladesh Chapter” of the b2o review’s “The University in Turmoil: Global Perspectives” dossier.

    The July Movement of 2024

    Naveeda Khan, Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury, and Shrobona Shafique Dipti

    Raised on stories of the rebellious 1960s, we are aware of the large role played by students across the world protesting war, racial inequities, and human rights violations, among other issues. We are also well versed in the stories of reaction that set in soon afterwards, as police and armies beat back students, conservative governments came to power, and free-market ideology became dominant nearly everywhere. What, then, would it mean to encounter student protests in the present without this past determining its reception? How should we think about protests in parts of the world other than those which have been endowed with the capacity for historical change? Can we take our learning from emergent events whose trajectory we cannot claim to know in advance?

    In “The Bangladesh Chapter” of “The University in Turmoil”, we explore what the country’s student-led July Movement of 2024 has to teach us in terms of the contours of student demands, the nature of student organizing, the spatial conditions of possibility for protests, and the narrative battle over the past in order to secure a different future. From the outset we do not claim the movement to be a success or even that it has been liberatory; we will, rather, follow its grain to arrive at a dense emplotment of what it is to struggle for meaning and political salience from within universities in our present. We begin with an account of the July Movement to contextualize our contributions to this chapter.

    ©Faysal Zaman

    Starting in June 2024, students at the University of Dhaka, the eminent public university established in 1921, gathered in Shahbag, an area in the capital city well known for hosting protests. They demanded what seemed like an oddly specific thing. They wanted the reform of a quota system for lucrative government jobs that held a large quota (some 30%) for the children and grandchildren of those who had fought in the liberation struggle of 1971, which had secured Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan. This quota for freedom fighters and their families had been reduced once already in the face of strong student protests in 2018, when it was brought down from 56% to 30%. The students’ request in 2024 to get rid of quotas entirely, including those for women, seemed specific and retrograde to boot. Intellectuals and ordinary people alike watched the protests from afar, uncertain as to whether it ought to matter to them or not.

    A series of discursive missteps by then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina soon made clear that the protests turned on more than policy, that she herself was a problem, particularly her personalistic and paranoid mode of running the country. Hasina was the child of an assassinated politician, the very same one generally credited with liberating the nation from Pakistan. Almost her entire family, barring her sister, was assassinated in 1975. Her framing of the protests exposed her Manichean view of the world, divided between those who were with her and those against her. And the students who protested a quota system that favored those who fought in the liberation struggle alongside her father were clearly not with her. Despite putatively accepting their demands, her hostility to the students was made apparent by the escalating attacks on them, first by the student wing of the Awami League, the ruling party, then by law-enforcement personnel, and finally to an extent by the military, alongside a campaign of disinformation and an unprecedented internet and communications blackout. Joined by their peers from other educational institutions, notably both public and private, the students took to the streets with bricks, sticks and rods to engage in street battles with state forces. Those from the working class soon joined the fray.

    Many expected the government to dig in and massacre as many as required to hold onto power, but this was averted when the army chief of staff, who, reading the unrest in the streets and among rank-and-file soldiers, forced Sheikh Hasina to leave the country. It was a testimony to the hold that Hasina had over her party that her resignation couldn’t be salved by placing a more conciliatory member of the party as the interim head of the government. Her removal from the scene meant the collapse and universal discrediting of the Awami League party.

    Even as students most publicly associated with what has come to be called the July Movement or July Uprising negotiated over the composition of the interim government with army officials and members of the opposition parties, long ill-treated by Hasina, they–the students–made clear that this government was not to assume the usual caretaker role of calling elections to usher in a new administration. Rather, the interim government was to reform the existing political system such that fascibad or fascism may never again triumph. Representatives of the students who organized the movement took up seats of government to ensure this, while others took to the streets first to uphold order in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the government, then to keep pressure on the interim government not to cave to reconciliation with the prior ruling party or other parties but to stay the course of reform.

    What is meant by reform, however, and how it is to be brought about are still being deliberated some six months after the fall of the Awami League government. In that time the usual ageist, gerontological reaction to the utpat or mischief of the young has set in, particularly among the intelligentsia of the elite, and even some of the working class who strongly supported the students. And the students, those in government and those on the street, seem uncertain of the way forward. Recently, a large crowd of primarily young men demolished Hasina’s father’s house in Dhaka, once memorialized as a museum, out of a desire to be done with the past. Their past is of tyranny and trauma, and not of the progress recently preached by Hasina in an online address to her followers.

    It is from within this present that we think it important to return to the July Movement, not to memorialize it, but to ask: what were the unique features of this movement that laid the foundations for its efficacy? And just how efficacious has it been? Is that efficacy faltering?  The moment is complex. There are as many answers as there are questions.

    Naveeda Khan is professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She has worked on religious violence and everyday life in urban Pakistan. Her more recent work is on riverine lives in Bangladesh and UN-led global climate negotiations. Her field dispatches from Dhaka in the middle of the July Uprising may be found here.

    Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury is a campaigner working for the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association on climate, policy, renewable energy and human rights. 

    Shrobona Shafique Dipti, a graduate of the University of Dhaka, is an urban anthropologist and lecturer at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh with an interest in environmental humanities and multi-species entanglements.

  • Winnie Wong–Why Have There Been No Great Women Forgers?

    Winnie Wong–Why Have There Been No Great Women Forgers?

    Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists Forgers?

    Winnie Wong, with apologies to Linda Nochlin

                …truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor. 

                                Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote[1]

    Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” first appeared in ARTnews in January 1971. It was described by ARTnews then as “based on a section of the anthology, Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness,” which was to be published some months later, with the not-yet past-tense title, “Why Are There No Great Women Artists?” (cf. Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, edited by Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, NY: Basic Books, 1971, 344-366). Subsequently, that original––but therefore not first––version was “reprinted,” though “in revised form,” in Art and Sexual Politics: Women’s Liberation, Women Artists, and Art History (edited by Thomas Hess and Elizabeth Baker, NY: Macmillan, 1973, 1-43), where it was further described as “a shortened version.” Meanwhile, the first-but-not-original 1971 ARTnews version appears again, with other modifications, in Linda Nochlin’s Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (NY: Harper & Row, 1988), and the same non-original was “pre-posted” on May 30, 2015 on the ARTnews website, in the “Retrospective” section of the June 2015 issue. However that pre-posted non-original essay does not appear to have been actually printed in the June 2015 issue of ARTnews, at least not in the copy currently residing in the Art History Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Separately, pdfs made from scanning the reprinted, revised, and shortened second copy (the one published in Art and Sexual Politics) appear online from time to time in various art educators’s course readings. Preferring the brevity and relative-originality of this second copy, as well as its fugitive accessibility on the internet, this is the version that I have rewritten here.

    *

    “Why have there been no great women forgers?” The question is curious, not merely to women, and not only for social or ethical reasons, but for purely intellectual ones as well. If the white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art world professional, has proven to be inadequate, then it ought to follow that women have also been secretly, deceptively, and even subversively, painting works great enough to be recognized as masterpieces, but for which they cannot, or have not yet, claimed authorship. At a moment when a series of scandals has once again forced the art world to become more self-conscious—more aware of the nature of its presuppositions as exhibited in its own sureties and valuations, we ought to be confronted by many a great woman forger, skilled yet frustrated artists who have cunningly laid waste to the false ideology of authenticity spun by art experts, dealers, auctioneers, and museum directors. An art historical record corrected of the unstated domination of white male subjectivity ought to hold as many women forgers as it does Michelangelo, Marcantonio Raimondi, Pierre Mignard (or even Menard), Han van Meegeren, Elmyr de Hory, Lother Malskat, Zhang Daqian, Eric Hebborn, Tom Keating, and Wolfgang Beltracchi.

    Today, the first reaction is still to swallow the bait and attempt to answer the question as it is put: to dig up examples of insufficiently appreciated women forgers throughout history; to rehabilitate modestly detectable, if interesting and productive, careers of forgotten copyists, insolent assistants, wayward ghost-painters, and defiant amanuenses; to “rediscover” the women behind male pseudonyms and masculine personae and make a case for them. We have indeed uncovered the careers of many wives, girlfriends, and daughters whose men appropriated their authorship in various guises. A court determined, and a movie popularized, that behind Walter Keane’s big-eyed waifs was the talent and imagination of his wife Margaret Keane. A 12th-century connoisseur fretted that the artist-emperor Sung Huizong’s personal and masculine calligraphy could not actually be distinguished from those of his palace ladies. An art historian is devoted to the theory that Vermeer’s daughter painted some of the greatest masterpieces attributed to him. A newspaper got the Australian Aboriginal artist Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula to sign a statutory declaration attesting that he autographed works that his daughters and daughters-in-law had painted for his dealer.[2] It is my own suspicion that Duchamp’s girlfriend Yvonne Chastel was “A. Klang,” the “sign painter” supposedly hired to paint the pointed forefinger of Tu m’, Duchamp’s last painting.[3] Such attempts at scholarly reevaluation are certainly well worth the effort, adding to our knowledge of women’s labor behind painting generally.

    There are also of course the women who were accomplices or even orchestrators behind fabulous forgery schemes: Glafira Rosales was the art dealer who profited US$33.2 million by consigning to Knoedler Gallery 60 forgeries painted by Chinese (male) painter Pei Qian-shen. Helene Beltracchi served a prison sentence for fraudulently selling her husband Wolfgang’s forgeries, supposedly from her grandfather’s collection.[4] Olive Greenhalgh pled guilty to conspiracy charges for helping to pass off the “antiques” made by her teenaged son Shaun Greenhalgh, the multimedia forger prodigy. While crucial to the scheme, none of these women were art forgers themselves.

    Then there are the women copyists who do not claim to be forgers, let alone great ones. Jane Stuart’s father Gilbert Stuart called her “boy,” and his “best copyist,” though as far as we know did not pass off any as his.[5] Marino Massimo de Caro, the orchestrator of the forgeries of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, stated that a woman in Buenos Aires duplicated the etchings for some of his fake books, but did not bother to name her.[6] In West Hollywood, a conservator and film set decorator Maria Apelo Cruz was tricked into copying a Picasso pastel drawing for the dealer Tatiana Khan, who pled guilty to various fraud charges in 2006.[7] The American collector Andrew Hall sued Lorrettan Gascard and her son Nikolas for selling him paintings purported to be by Leon Golub. Hall’s suit insinuated that Lorrettan Gascard (a former student of Leon Golub’s) may have forged the paintings herself, yet Lorrettan has not publicly claimed credit for those paintings.[8] We could imagine rewriting a career for these women as forgers reluctant to unmask themselves. A great deal could still be done in this area, but unfortunately, such attempts do not really confront the question “Why have there been no great women forgers?”; on the contrary, by attempting to answer it, they merely reinforce its negative (or positive) implications.

    There is another approach to the question. Many contemporary feminists might assert that there is actually a different kind of greatness for women’s forgery than for men’s. They might posit, that, due to the unique character of women’s situation and experience—their meticulous care for detail, their love of craft, their uncanny ability for dissimulation—that their forgeries are so skilled that they have thus far been impossible to detect.

    This might seem reasonable enough: in general, women’s experience and situation in society, and hence as forgers, is different from men’s, and certainly a body of forgery of all kinds produced by women secretly but entirely disunited in character and intent might indeed all be so masterful as to be unidentifiable presently. Perhaps possessing higher intelligence and survival skills in general, women criminals may simply be less likely to be caught. Unfortunately, though this remains within the realm of possibility, as far as we can know, so far, it has not occurred.

    It might also be asserted that women are simply more inward-looking, and therefore not as likely to engage in the imitation or appropriation of another’s stock or style. Perhaps self-expression is an innately more feminine drive, and route imitation and self-effacement unlikely garner their interest. But is Richard Prince really less slavish than Sherry Levine? Is Jeff Koons less subtle than Sturtevant? Is Banksy more anonymous than the Guerrilla Girls? Is Tino Seghal less evasive than Lutz Bacher? In every instance, women appropriationists would seem to be closer to other artists of their own period and outlook than they are to each other.

    The problem lies not so much with the feminist conception of what femininity in forgery might or might not be, but rather with a misconception of what forgery is: with the popular idea that forgery is the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience—a translation of frustrated ambition into artistic deception. Yet forgery is almost never that; great forgery certainly never. The making of a forgery involves a self-inconsistent language of form, more or less dependent upon, while also free from, given temporally-defined conventions, schemata, or systems of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, through study, apprenticeship, or a long period of individual experimentation. In order to defraud an art market and institutional establishment, the great forger must endure, for some period, disciplined anonymity. Yet in order to embrace the notoriety of a great forger, one must also ultimately accept criminal liability and then fascinate the public with performances of heroic iconoclasm.

    The fact is that there have been no great women forgers, so far as we know. There are not even many interesting and good ones who have not been sufficiently investigated or appreciated. That this should be the case is regrettable (or laudable), but no amount of manipulating the historical or critical evidence will alter the situation. There are no women equivalents for van Meegeren or de Hory, or even in the invented mode, Ern Malley. If there actually were large numbers of “hidden” great women forgers, or if there really should be different standards for women’s forgery than men’s—and, logically, one can’t have it both ways—then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the criminal arts, then the status quo is fine.

    In other artistic misconduct, indeed, women have achieved equality. While there have never been any great women forgers, there have been scandalous women literary forgers and impersonators. The biographer Lee Israel successfully forged fake personal letters of famous authors and signed their signatures, using her broken tv as a lightbox. After serving a short period of house arrest, she wrote a short memoir apologetically entitled, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” A Hollywood biopic made from it probed the depths of her pathos, and has her sincerely and tearfully testifying to the court at her sentencing hearing, “I think I have realized that I am not a real writer…and that it was not worth it.” Helen Darville, as “Helen Demidenko,” published a novel which readers were led to believe was based upon her Ukrainian family’s collaboration with the Nazis in the Holocaust. The book won three major literary awards in Australia. At the ceremony where she accepted one, Demidenko performed Ukrainian dances dressed in a traditional Ukrainian blouse, the kind of performance she would increasingly embrace over two years. But the intense literary debate over the book’s anti-Semitism was thrown into deeper shock when her ethnic identity—utterly lacking any Ukrainian heritage––was unmasked by her parents and high school teachers in the news media. After that, numerous instances of plagiarism were newly discovered in the novel, and Demidenko/Darville was scrutinized, in book-length academic studies, for authentic signs of remorse over the banality of her evil. By finding instances of plagiarism throughout the previously-award-winning book, it would seem that the literary world was condemning her fraud as also a forgery, multiplying, rather than vindicating, her moral crimes. It could not be that women as a whole shy away from the turpitudes of lies, fraud, plagiarism, impersonation, immorality, bigotry and other improprieties in the arts.

    It is no accident that the whole crucial question of the conditions generally productive of great forgery has so rarely been investigated. Yet a dispassionate, impersonal, sociologically- and institutionally-oriented approach would reveal the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of forgery detection, unmasking, heroization and popularization is based.

    Underlying the question about women as forgers, we find the whole myth of the Great Forger—subject of a handful of movies and biographies, masterful, impish, misunderstood, bearing within his person since birth a mysterious essence, called Thwarted Genius.

    The magical aura surrounding the representational arts and their forgers have, of course, given birth to forgers’s autobiographies and self-representations since the earliest times. Interestingly enough, the same magical abilities attributed by Vasari to Michelangelo and his forgery of an “ancient” Cupid[9]—the ability to copy anything, “the genius to do this and more,” the lack of any corrupt motivation except the hoodwinking of ignorant collectors—is repeated as late as the recent 2014 documentary on Wolfgang Beltracchi. The fairy tale of the Boy Joker, able to copy any artist’s style, quickly and easily, but finding his own art rejected by dealers and experts who therefore deserve to be outwitted, has been stock-in-trade of forger mythology since Vasari immortalized Michelangelo and embarrassed the Cardinal San Giorgio. Through mysterious coincidence, later forgers were all portrayed as tricksters who exposed the art market in similar manner. Even when the Great Forger was quite avaricious in his long-running crimes, his motivations in retrospect always seem to contain subversive artistic intent. In the end, the art establishment is portrayed as so inexpert that the forger’s greatest fear is that no one will believe he is the true maker of the fakes. Pierre Mignard painted a “Guido Reni” to test and humiliate his court rival Le Brun. Han van Meegeren demonstrated his abilities in court in order to prove that he could really paint “Vermeers,” and that he had not sold Dutch national cultural property to the Nazis. Tom Keating planted “time bombs” in his forgeries that conservators would overlook but that would later prove his hand unequivocally. Lothar Malskat ended up suing himself and serving as both expert and witness at his trial. In the theory of forgery sleuths, and often the great forgers themselves, a great forger always eventually unmasks himself, because revealing his craftsmanship is the only way to bring down the art establishment that rejected him as a great artist long ago. He then writes a memoir, a tell-all or a how-to handbook, before starring in a TV series, a movie, a documentary or two. The public cheers, admires, and respects him for the ruse, for it is only snobby experts and ignorant collectors who have committed the true crimes against art.

    Despite the actual basis in fact of some of these late-bloomer stories, the tenor of such tales is itself misleading. Yet all too often, art historians, while pooh-poohing this sort of narrative based around artistic intention, nevertheless retain it as the unconscious basis of their scholarly assumptions. Forgery biographies, moreover, forward the notion of the Great Forger’s mastery of his craft, as demonstrated by the social and institutional structures which rejected his art but that now he has duped. This is now the golden-nugget theory of Thwarted Genius. On this basis, women’s lack of achievement in forgery may be formulated in a disturbing syllogism: If women have been thwarted by the social and institutional constructions of art, they would reveal its bias through forgery. But they have never revealed it. Q.E.D. women do not have the golden nugget of artistic genius, which has not even been thwarted.

    Yet if one casts a dispassionate eye on the actual social and institutional situation in which important forgers have been valorized throughout history, one finds that the fruitful or relevant questions for the historian to ask shape up rather differently. One would like to ask, for instance, from what artistic traditions were forgers were most likely to come at different periods of art history? What proportion of major forgers work within traditions in which originality and auto-genesis are overburdened with aesthetic value? Despite the Orientalist sentiment that constructs Chinese or “Eastern” cultures as ones that prize honorific emulation or accept outright piracy, one might well be forced to admit that a larger proportion of forgers, great and not-so-great, were white and Western European.

    As to the relationship between forgery and culture, an interesting paradigm for the question “Why have there been no great women forgers?” is the question: “Why have there been no great women forgers from China?” If, in other words, Chinese civilization accords such high value to copying, why have there not been armies of great Chinese women forgers, to diametrically oppose the utter lack of Western women forgers? Even in contemporary Dafen village, a community of 6000 registered painters derided as forgers and assembly-line copyists, the vast majority of the painters are men rather than women. Could it be possible that thwarted genius is missing from the Chinese make-up in the same way that it is from the feminine psyche? Or is it rather that the kinds of demands and expectations placed before both non-Westerners and women—radical self-invention, outrageous rebellion, brazen public performance—simply makes the heroization of racialized, ethnicized, or gendered lawbreakers unthinkable?

    When the right questions are finally asked about the conditions for producing forgery of which the production of great forgery is a subtopic, it will no doubt have to include some discussion of the situational concomitants of psychology and skill generally, not merely of artistic craftsmanship. As Foucault and others have stressed, the modern authorial persona is built up minutely, step by step, from infancy onward, and the patterns of discipline-punishment may be established so early that they may indeed appear to be innate to the ahistorical observer. Such investigations imply that scholars will have to abandon the notion, consciously articulated or not, of artistic authorship as innate, even for those who have been denied it.

    The Question of the Original

    We can now approach our question from a more reasonable standpoint. Let us examine such a simple but critical issue as the availability of original masterpieces to aspiring women forgers, from the period after the establishment of public museums to the present day. During this period, careful and prolonged study—indeed, love––of original masterworks has been imagined as essential to the production of any forgery with pretentions to pass muster, and to the very essence of a Perfect Copy, which is generally accepted as the highest category of forgery. Forgers are thought to admire and eventually develop an obsession for the artists whom they are emulating, in various ways even modeling their own lives after them. In movies, forgery schemes are often motivated by an art thief who plans to steal a work out of some misguided sense of personal ownership, while the original is meticulously imitated by the forger to hide the theft. The Perfect Copy is supposed to be what the great forger produces—a copy so exactingly duplicative of the original that no one can tell the difference.

    The hypothetical of indistinguishability has occupied many an aesthetic philosopher over the twentieth century. But in fact forgers rarely need much access to the original to make a passable forgery, for great forgers are never copyists. A brief survey of the history of forgery reveals: masterpiece forgeries are almost always inventions—original works that do not reproduce any existing work. Han van Meegeren’s infamous “Vermeers” were not intimate domestic bourgeois genre pictures but large, Caravaggio-influenced religious canvases that fooled art historians and museum directors into identifying them as the “missing link” between Vermeer’s early and late periods. Riverbank, a painting that divides historians of Chinese art into two irreconcilable camps, is either a recovered and restored 10th-century painting by Dong Yuan or a 20th-century pastiche by Zhang Daqian. As the forger Wolfgang Beltracchi put it, what a successful forger needs to do is to find is a painting that doesn’t appear in any catalogue of works, but that is mentioned or hypothesized in the art historical literature. In other words, a successful forgery is an original invention that fills in the narrative history in which the artist’s works have been organized in retrospect. As in the case of van Meegeren’s forgeries, the forger’s audacity is all the more canny when he dupes the most prominent art historian of his day, whose theory or narrative is “proven” by the newly “discovered” masterwork.

    An exception among the great forgers who successfully passed off copies is the American Mark A. Landis, famous for donating all of his forgeries to small museums throughout the United States, for no apparent financial gain. Landis’s forgeries are modestly sized reproductions of major artists’ minor works. His method is so rudimentary that he simply pastes photocopies made from art catalogues directly onto wood panels that he has cut for him at Lowe’s hardware store. He stains the wood panels with instant coffee, and then paints over the photocopies, simulating the look of thick paint with “that stuff I got” from the craft supply chainstore Hobby Lobby. Said Mark Landis while reproducing a portrait: “Heaven only knows how he painted it. They’re not going to know either, so…..” Landis’ forgeries are easily confirmed through the most cursory of visual “tests,” for example, examination with a magnifying glass would reveal the dot matrix print patterns in the photocopy beneath the paint, as would a simple visual inspection with a black light. But technically-aided visual scrutiny is not even necessary, for the registrar who first detected Landis’ forgeries figured out the scam by simply finding other copies of the same works donated to other museums by the same man—some of those gifts were even announced with photographs in press releases. What is remarkable of Landis’ forgeries is not that they are perfect fakes—in fact they are ridiculously imperfect copies. Posing as an eccentric art collector and potential benefactor, what he elegantly demonstrates is how unlikely museums would subject gifts from a benefactor to any level of scrutiny at all. As one museum director put it, “He knew where to hit us. Our soft spot. Art and Money.”[10]

    I have gone into the question of the unimportance of originals, a single aspect of the automatic, popularly maintained mythos of forgery, in such detail to demonstrate that the universality of this discrimination against women lies not in this particular facet of institutional access. In fact, the focus on the forger’s craft belies the importance of the performative role of those––often women––who pass off the forged works. This fixation sustains the ongoing fetishization of the original masterpieces and the institutions that protect and trade on them, and only rehearses the fantasy of the gendered relationship between great male artists and their preferred artistic object—the female nude. The power of this gendered relation lies in the uncritical notion that the male artists’ relationship to the nude should be the same relationship as the forger’s relationship to the original masterpiece—a relationship of possession, dominance, and (moral) violation. In perfect opposition, women are inevitably cast in the opposing role as guardians of institutional authority and caretakers of institutional property. This is most evident in popular art heist movies, where women take on the nerdy and rule-following roles of curators, archivists, insurance experts, or conservators, distracted from their professional duty by handsome but roguish male thieves. Deprived of the motivations for (counter-) revolution or even intentional disruption, it is almost unheard for women to seek redress in forgery for a higher artistic cause.

    It also becomes apparent why women who were able to compete on far more equal terms with men in literary forgery or plagiarism are vilified and deemed impersonators. When women are found to have committed misconduct in the arts, condemnation rather than heroine-ization often ensues — their fakery is never seen to serve a nobler or even picaresque causes, but seriously disturbing ones. They are understood to be misguided figures, unable to take possession of their true selves and make sense of the world with it. Naturally this oversimplifies, but it still gives a clue as to the discomforting focus on Lee Israel’s inexplicable deficiencies in personal hygiene (her inability to smell her cat’s feces under her bed), or the grave moral excoriation lodged against Helen Darville/Demidenko’s dystopian family fantasy.

    Of course, we have not even gone into the “fringe” requirements for major forgers, which have been, for the most part, both normatively and socially closed to the figure of “woman.” In the modern period and after, the Great Forger, after he is unmasked, takes on a cheeky public role as his authorship can now be revealed. He now revels in counterintuitive declarations and even contradictory claims, he establishes new relationships with biographers, historians, documentary filmmakers, travels widely and freely, and perhaps becomes involved in other postmodernist hoaxes and intrigues. Nor have we mentioned the sheer organizational acumen and ability involved in rehabilitating oneself as a celebrity. An enormous amount of self-confidence and courage is needed by a great mastermind-turned-thespian, both in the running of the production and selling of forgeries, and in the control and maintenance of numerous rehabilitative postures. In all of these performances, the great forger’s true self––his Thwarted Genius––is never in doubt.

    The Lady’s Employments

    Against the single-mindedness and commitment demanded of a great forger, we might set the image of the “lady forger” established in a popular novel that imagines one. The insistence upon a wrenching internal moral debate over the value of the original—the looking upon great art as a masculine presence, even, as the object of sexual desire—militates against any real malfeasance on the part of women. It is this emphasis which transforms serious defiance into emotional self-sabotage, busy work or occupational therapy, and even today, in urban bastions of female competence, tends to distort the whole notion of what authenticity is and what kind of social role it plays.

    In the American novelist B.A. Shapiro’s not very widely read The Art Forger, published in 2012––a book offering one of the few fictional treatments of a woman art forger in popular literature, readers are warned against the snare of forgery at which she is fully capable to excel. The novel’s protagonist, Claire Roth, is a commercial reproduction artist (working for “Reproductions.com” as a “certified Degas copyist”). She is commissioned by her former lover’s art dealer to reproduce a painting in exchange for cash and the opportunity for an exhibition of her own work. The painting she is to copy is gradually revealed to her. When she realizes that it is Edgar Degas’ After the Bath, a (fictional) painting stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, Claire responds to it with breathless, physical subjugation:

    My heart races. I’m going to have the incredible good fortune of living with a work by Degas, touching it, breathing it in, studying its every last detail, ferreting out the master’s secrets. It’s a great gift. Perhaps the greatest. One that will inform my painting forever. Sweet. Incredibly sweet. Now I really can’t breathe. …I stand speechless, mesmerized, unable to move to help him, unable even to think. Degas, Degas, Degas is the only refrain my brain can dole out.[11]

    This bit of paralyzed worship of man’s genius has a familiar ring. Propped up by a bit of Lacanism, it is the reversal of the very mainstay of artistic masterworks in the popular imagination. Of course, the popular equivalence of the 19th-century male artist’s painting of his female lover’s nude body will rear back its misogynistic head. For Claire, the Degas painting takes on the immobilizing presence of an aggressive male body: “The room is dark, and I’m lying on my mattress. I’ve been up most of the night. I feel After the Bath like a human presence: massive, breathing, haunting, yet also comforting. As if Degas himself is with me, risen from the dead. His genius, his brushstrokes, his heart.”[12] This ideological phantasy is then transferred to the charming male art dealer who owns the painting, whom Claire naturally desires. (Luckily he falls in love with her too.)

    As the plot twists its melodramatic ways, Claire comes to discover that the Degas painting is itself a forgery, but she nevertheless copies it—so hers is therefore not a forgery but “a copy of a copy.” She produces a perfect fake, and all are fooled. Meanwhile, the narrative takes us back to a period three years earlier, in which Claire attempted to claim credit for ghost-painting a work of her then-boyfriend-and-former-art-teacher (“I loved him and wanted to help him.”), a painting which was then (fictionally) in the MoMA collection. A museum committee rejected her claims, but the ordeal ended with her ex-boyfriend-teacher committing suicide, a tragedy for which she continues to blame herself. Back in the present day, her new lover-the-art-dealer is thrown in jail for selling the forgery and suspicion of being connected to the Gardner heist. Visiting him in jail, Claire reveals to him that she believes the “original” to be a forgery itself. Unfortunately, the only way to prove his “innocence” in the forgery scam would be to find the original-original Degas. She finally does so, in the home of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s (fictional) niece’s granddaughter. Differently from the forged-Degas painting, the original-original Degas depicts Isabella Stewart Gardner in the nude, which apparently suggests a tantalizing love affair between Isabella and Degas. As if this closed circle of elective affinities between painted/loved object and artist-author-lover-owner were insufficient, Claire finally discovers that the original/actual forger of the Degas painting was also the lover of Isabella’s niece.

    In sum, the fictional woman forger in B.A. Shapiro’s novel ends up occupying virtually every subject position a woman is expected to hold in the history of art: ghost-painter to her lover/former teacher, skilled reproduction painter, diligent provenance researcher, beloved of her dealer, savior of an art thief, and struggling contemporary artist. But ultimately, and most critically, she is anything but the actual, titular, art forger. That person turns out, however outlandishly, to be a man. Claire herself never produces a forgery—only a perfect fake that happens to be a copy of a copy. This exonerates her totally and makes it possible for the moralistic happy ending: she is recognized as an artist “in her own right” (that is, not exactly a great one). As in 19th-century etiquette manuals, Claire has excelled in many occupations without acclaim, and success for her is defined as a commercial gallery show put up by her lover from prison.

    Lest we feel we have made a great deal of progress in this area in the past 50 years, it would seem that even in our cultural imagination, a woman with the skills to produce a perfect fake would do so only in service of her boyfriends, lovers, teachers, and dealers, and even then only because she has found a morally-acceptable loophole. Now, as in the late-twentieth century, women’s professionalism feeds the reliance of the daring, risk-taking man who is engaged in “fake” work and can (with a certain justice) point to his girlfriend’s reliable toolkit of excellent skills. For our culture, the “real” work of women is only that which directly or indirectly serves her desire for romantic love. Any other commitment falls under the rubric of delusion, selfishness, egomania, or at the unspoken extreme, castration anxiety. The circle is a vicious one, in which self-satisfaction and meniality mutually reinforce each other, in life as in fiction.

    Accomplices

    But what of the small band of villainous women who, despite obstacles, have achieved infamy in forgery scams? Are there any qualities that may be said to have characterized them, as a group and as individuals? While we cannot investigate the subject in detail, we can point to one striking fact: almost all women accomplices in forgery scandals were either the wives, daughters, or mothers of male forgers, or, they worked in concert with another male accomplice who was their husband. In contrast, the reverse would be quite unusual for women copyists: the few we know of rarely receive artistic or criminal assistance from their lovers, husbands, brothers, or sons. It appears to be quite difficult for women to appropriate the labor of their male family members, but the opposite is true almost without exception for their masculine counterparts. In the rehabilitation of great forgers, wives and daughters too play a crucial but supportive role: Helene Beltracchi’s central role in performing the “provenance” story of Wolfgang Beltracchi’s forgeries have already been mentioned. After their release from prison, she and Wolfgang published a joint autobiography and their prison love letters—publications which generated further public endearment. Zhang Daqian’s daughter, Chang Sing Sheng, studied at Berkeley with the art historian James Cahill, who was adamant and tireless in tracking Zhang’s forgery career, and arguing for the attribution of major canonical works to Zhang’s mischievous ways.

    It would be interesting to investigate the role of wives, girlfriends, daughters and mothers in forgery enterprises more generally. We may well extend this inquiry to the role of queer partners in the successes of great forgers as well—Elmyr de Hory’s personal assistant and companion, Mark Forgy, wrote a biography honoring de Hory’s career, in which he declares “even I was a victim of his lies,” but that “nothing assails my love for him.”[13]

    In the absence of any thoroughgoing investigation, one can only gather impressionistic data about the presence or absence of affective labor by supportive women and men in the lives of great forgers, and whether women may indeed be granted less of this criminal assistance from their romantic and domestic partners. One thing, however, is clear: for a man to opt for a career in forgery has required a certain degree of collaboration, or at least quiet acquiescence, from the family and friends around him.[14] And it is probably by appropriating, however covertly, women’s labor, that great forgers have succeeded, and continue to succeed, in the world of forgery.

    Elizabeth Durack

    It is instructive to examine one of the few successful and accomplished women artists accused of “forgery,” Elizabeth Durack (1915-2000), whose work as Aboriginal male artist “Eddie Burrup,” because of the repulsion wrought upon by that revelation, stands as a challenging episode to anyone interested in faking and the history of the self generally. Partly because of the public outrage that the scandal provoked, Elizabeth Durack is a woman forger in whom all the various conflicts, all the internal and external contradictions and struggles typical of her sex and profession, stand out in severe relief.

    The success of Elizabeth Durack’s paintings as “Eddie Burrup,” an invented persona for whom she (and her daughter, also her gallerist), created an entire website, emphasizes the role of gender and racial identity in relation to achievement in global contemporary art. We might say that Durack, at the late age of 79 after a long career as a West Australian painter who primarily depicted Aboriginal land and people, picked a deplorable time to adopt the “nom de plume” or “alter-ego” of an (invented) Aboriginal male artist. She had long come into her own in the mid-twentieth century, being only one of three women chosen for the 1961 exhibition Recent Australian Paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.[15] When, in the late 1990s she began painting and exhibiting a new style of “morphological paintings” and her daughter told her that they only “made sense” as Aboriginal work, Australian Aboriginal Art had just taken the art world by storm. A major change in social and institutional support for contemporary art by Aboriginal peoples was under way: with the rise of global contemporary art, the acrylic on canvas and bark paintings from the Papunya Tula communities, whose subject matter were “Dreamings” passed down through paternal or maternal authority and collectively painted by tribal family members, were much in demand in the contemporary art galleries in New York and intertwined with a broader political demand for by Aboriginal peoples for land restitution and cultural rights in Australia.[16] In late-twentieth-century Australia, there was a dramatic reinvention of Australian contemporary art through its seemingly abstract, colorfield, Aboriginal painting. Aboriginal art was then a newly and highly fertile aesthetic field, and Elizabeth Durack—a white woman—became one of its most odious “practitioners.”

    She followed in two other scandals in which two white men acknowledged or claimed to be makers behind Aboriginal artist’s works: John O’Loughlin, an art dealer, sold works “by” an Aboriginal artist he represented, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, whom he claimed as an honorary cousin; and Ray Beamish, the Welsh-born white ex-husband of Aboriginal woman artist Kwementyaye (Kathleen) Petyarre, claimed authorship for several of her works, including a prize-winning canvas. The existence of white men behind Aboriginal artists’ works raised the specter of inauthenticity (or more specifically anti-auto-genesis or false-self-labor) that redounded as “forgery” upon Possum and Petyarre.[17] It was as though the public demanded that Australian Aboriginal artists present themselves as singular, individual geniuses in the Western tradition, though they would not be allowed to appropriate the labor of white bodies under their authorial names. In contrast, accusations of forgery against Elizabeth Durack inverted that commandment: by disallowing a white woman artist the male fantasy of artistic self-invention because she had crossed the embodied boundaries of race and gender.

    Daughter of a settler-colonial father, who left she and her sister on their own as teenagers to manage their settler property of Ivanhoe Station in Western Australia, Elizabeth Durack claimed “interfamilial” affinities with the Aboriginal peoples who labored for them.[18] She was often interviewed by the art press alongside Jeffery Chunuma Rainyerri, an Aboriginal man and elder of the Miriuwung Gajerrong community,[19] who called her his “mum,” and he her “classificatory son.”[20] Although her attitude was criticized as paternalistic (though not maternalistic), evidently he and other Aboriginal men in her life were influential in directing her toward her life’s work. Although in her late years Elizabeth Durack would acknowledge the anger and disapproval of her critics—who called her, part of the “squattocracy,” and her deception as Burrup a “fucking obscenity,” and “the ultimate act of colonization”[21]—it is obvious that her entitled self-narrative as a white female benefactor of the Aboriginal communities was developed since childhood and formed the grounds for her later course of behavior.[22]

    “I don’t think it would have worked through Elizabeth Durack,” she told an interviewer, who asked why she didn’t just claim the paintings under her own name. “I would have been lost…. It was Eddie Burrup that somehow brought it to life. I can’t … I can’t … I can’t answer it. I simply can’t answer it.” When asked whether she had only fraudulently created an Aboriginal persona in order to succeed better on the art market, she insisted that the Burrup paintings had been hung in her daughter’s gallery but were not for sale, and that her daughter only later begrudgingly sold them. After she unmasked herself to the art historian Robert Smith as the painter behind the Burrup paintings,[23] she claimed that her daughter also contacted the “very few” buyers who had bought them and only one buyer asked for a refund. Durack, in other words, did not follow in the defiant model of the great forgers[24]—whose self-narrative often begins with personal rejection of their own work by the art world (Durack had by that time been featured in over 66 solo exhibitions), and who purposefully sought to entrap gullible critics, experts and buyers. At the same time, we might speculate that the long history of male artists’ gender-bending alter-egos might have been an even stronger influence in her decision to reinvent her own destiny and to paint in the spiritual guise of a man.

    In disarmingly confusing post-Lacanian fashion, Elizabeth Durack would insist that Eddie Burrup was not a character from her imagination, but rather a real, if mysterious, force: “I can’t. I can’t explain it. It’s quite worrying. But as I say, I’m not really losing it completely. But I am part…I suppose one is…everyone’s part of certain mysterious forces, you know, that keep you…keep you going. But what’s been the strange thing is that when you most readily run of energy, there’s always energy. I could paint every day if I had the time, or if the days weren’t broken, as Eddie Burrup. Sort of something that’s ongoing, that draws me out.”[25] Resisting standard postmodern language, she also avoided calling him a fictive character or an alter-ego, preferring such imprecise claims as: “Maybe he’s a figure of my persona.”[26]

    While consistently rejecting conventional anti-heroic motivations for her actions, she insisted on disavowing an equivalence between herself and Eddie Burrup. Like Durack, Jeffrey Chunuma Rainyerri also spoke of Eddie Burrup in the third person, referring to him as “that old man behind her shoulder”:

                You tell im ‘e’s got to come up here, sit down and talk to us…It’s no good what e’s                       doing. That old man behind her shoulder. She got to stop doing that.[27]

    It is disturbing and tragic that this successful artist—unsparing of herself in her lifelong study of Western Australian landscape and figurative painting, diligently pursuing her indigenous subjects in rural isolated surroundings, industriously producing canvases throughout the course of a lengthy career; firm, assured, and incontrovertibly masculine in her style; recipient of honorary doctorates and national attention; should fail so spectacularly in life to come to terms with her white colonial privilege; it is more tragic still that she should fail, in her own self-unmasking, to evaluate her own place in the racist imperialism that undergirds Australian society more broadly. It has thus been argued that it was her subconscious, wracked with guilt from her heritage and worldly success, that spurred her to take on a neurotic-colonialist fantasy of Aboriginal identification.

    The difficulties imposed by society’s implicit demands on the woman forger add to the impossibility of celebrating Durack’s enterprise. Although widely associated with forgery, no critic actually accused her of copying or plagiarizing any formal element, nor even style, of Burrup’s paintings from Aboriginal sources or designs. Neither does Eddie Burrup exist in history, nor was he known as a great artist whose place in the history of art she had misused. In short, Durack’s “forgeries” are not copies or even fakes at all—they are new and original contemporary works that a White public troublingly (in retrospect) accepted as the work of an Aboriginal man. Moreover, though we might insist that Eddie Burrup does not exist in our reality, Durack seemed to insist he was real in some mystical sense or at least took no responsibility nor credit for inventing him. The narrative she attempted to advance after unmasking herself furthermore did not follow at all in the usual formulae of forger rehabilitation. Durack did not brazenly lay claim to upturning a cynical art market, to testing a gullible art establishment, nor to provocatively challenging gender and racial binaries. Not only did she decline to adopt the popular performances which have been typical of great forgers in the modern and contemporary eras, she, like other women malfeasants in the arts, was far from valorized for their daring to subvert the institutional norms of the art world. Even in the case of this notorious artist—and whether we like “Eddie Burrup” or not, we still must acknowledge the subversiveness of Elizabeth Durack’s apostasy—the voice of the feminine mystique and its potpourri of ambivalent narcissism and internalized guilt subtly dilutes and subverts that total inner confidence, that absolute certitude and self-determination (amoral and anti-aesthetic), demanded by the most defiant and audacious work in forgery.

    Conclusion

    Hopefully, by stressing the process of normative, or public, rather than the individual or private, preconditions for heroine-ization in forgery, we have provided a paradigm for the investigation of other areas in this field. By examining in some detail the various instances when our culture inexplicably chose not to imagine or glorify women forgers, we have suggested that it may be culturally impossible for women malfeasants to achieve notoriety or admiration on the same footing as men, no matter what their rebelliousness, villainy, or pathos. The existence of a tiny band of infamous, if not great, women accomplices, impersonators, fakers, plagiarists, ghost-painters and appropriationists throughout history does nothing to gainsay this fact, any more than does the existence of a few badasses or token mischief-makers under various adjacent definitions of forgery.

    What is important is that we face up to the reality of our history and of our present situation. Authorship has been, in our history, a white- and masculine-coded privilege. Despite what we might think, forgery does not undo that privilege. Forgery is rather a subversive takeover of that privilege, a theft of history and property that transgresses legal, artistic, moral and cultural norms. When unmasked, forgers remind us how comically unfair the art world is in its declarations of greatness, and how untenable is the false ideology that separates the good from the great. But in our culture, sympathy for those who rebelled as forgers so far extends only to men. This “himpathy” is part of the logic of misogyny that the philosopher Kate Manne decodes. It is why women can never be great, whether or not we have been bad.

    Winnie Wong is a Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade, and the coeditor of Learning from Shenzhen. Her forthcoming book is The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade.

    [1] Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, (London: Penguin Books), 1999, 94.

    [2] Susan McCulloch-Uelin, “Painter tells of secret women’s artistic business: I signed my relatives’ work”, The Weekend Australian, April 17-18, 1999.

    [3] The “A. Klang” (German for a “sound”) who “signs” underneath the wrist of the pointed forefinger in Tu m’, and traditionally said to be a professional sign painter whom Duchamp hired, has not been identified in the Duchamp literature. However, Yvonne Chastel was seen painting the colour scale of lozenges of Tu M’ in Marcel Duchamp’s studio on the evening of April 12, 1918. See Jennifer Gough-Cooper, Jacques Caumont and Pontus Hulten, eds., Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life: Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy 1887-1968, MIT Press, 1993, unpaged.

    [4] His sister-in-law Jeanette Spurzem was also involved.

    [5] “Jane, Heir of the Stuart Genius––A Rhode Island Master’s Exhibition,” Gilbert Stuart Museum Bell Gallery, Rhode Island, 2016.

    [6] Nicholas Schmidle, “A Very Rare Book,” The New Yorker, Dec 16, 2013. Schmidle does not report whether he asked De Caro for her name.

    [7] On the scheme related to Tatiana Khan, see 2010 WL 326207 (C.D.Cal.) (Trial Pleading), USA v. Tatiana Khan, No. 10-0030M, January 7, 2010. Maria Apelo Cruz is founder of MJ Atelier where she is described as a “creative force” and who has the ability “to create and paint in any style.”

    [8] Mark Haywoard, “Lawyer: Art dealers on trial still believe Golub works are not fake,” New Hampshire Union Leader, November 26, 2018.

    [9] Sándor Radnòti, The Fake: Forgery and its Place in Art, trans. Dunai, (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield), 1999, 1. According to Radnòti, Vasari’s version borrows “extensively” from Condivi, “so as to repay him in kind for lifting material from the first edition of his own book.”

    [10] The director of the Hillard Museum, quoted in Art and Craft, 2014.

    [11] B.A. Shapiro, The Art Forger: A Novel, 43-44.

    [12] Shapiro, The Art Forger: A Novel, 53.

    [13] Mark Forgy, The Forger’s Apprentice (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform), 2012, 334.

    [14] As the biography John Godley imagined van Meegeran thinking (about his wife Jo): “He must discover an intermediary who could be trusted—perhaps Theo? perhaps Jo?—but they would guess the truth…” John Godley, The Master Forger (New York: Wilfred Funk), 1951,138.

    [15] Sarah McCulloch, “What’s the fuss?” The Australian Magazine July 5, 1997, 18.

    [16] Fred Myers, “Representing Culture: The Production of Discourse(s) for Aboriginal Acrylic Paintings” Cultural Anthropology, 6:1 (Feb 1991), 26-62.

    [17] Fred Myers, “Ontologies of the Image and Economies of Exchange,” American Ethnologist 31:1 (Feb 2004), 5-20.

    [18] Marguerite Nolan, “Elizabeth Durack, Eddie Burrup and the Art of Identification,” in P. Knight and J. Long, eds., Fakes and Forgeries: The Politics of Authenticity in Art and Culture (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 2004, 136.

    [19] Chunuma was one of the lead witnesses for the Miriuwung Gajerrong land claim. The Full Federal Court recognised the native title rights of the Miriuwung Gajerrong people on December 9, 2003. Further history: MG Corporation

    [20] National Film and Sound Archive of Australia: “Australian Biography: Elizabeth Durack,” 1997.

    [21] Louise Morrison, “The Art of Eddie Burrup,” Westerly Magazine 54:1 (2017), 77. See also Julie Marcus, “‘…like an Aborigine’: Empathy, Elizabeth Durack, and the Colonial Imagination,” Bulletin (The Olive Pink Society) 9:1 an2 (1997), 44-52.

    [22] O’Connell, Kylie. 2001. “‘A Dying Race’: The History and Fiction of Elizabeth Durack.” Journal of Australian Studies 25 (67): 44–54.

    [23] Robert Smith, “The Incarnations of Eddie Burrup,” Art Monthly Australia, no.97, March 1997, 4-5.

    [24] John Paull, “The Incarnation of Eddie Burrup: A Review of Elizabeth Durack, Art & Life, Selected Writings,Arts 6:2 (2017), 7.

    [25] National Film and Sound Archive of Australia: “Australian Biography: Elizabeth Durack,” 1997.

    [26] Nolan, “Elizabeth Durack,” 137

    [27] McCulloch, “What’s the fuss?”, 18.

  • Peter Makhlouf–The Anxiety of Inflation (On Ben Lerner’s The Lights)

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

    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 asso 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.

  • Inuk Silis Høegh and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen–Melting Barricades

    Inuk Silis Høegh and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen–Melting Barricades

    Melting Barricades

    Inuk Silis Høegh and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen

    We conceived Melting Barricades in 2004 as a collaborative project to comment on the Greenlandic Home Rule 25th Anniversary. It consisted of a fictive Greenlandic army complete with propaganda material, drafting performance and a military headquarter from where the defense of Greenland and Greenland’s invasion of the world was planned.

    Greenland’s independence was already an issue back then, but we wanted to ask what Greenland wanted with its independence. Which values did it want to protect–and which values did it want to contribute–in a globalized world? The invention of a Greenlandic army was a framework to ask these questions in a different way.

    We organized a drawing competition for all Greenlandic children and found out that Greenland’s core values were peace and openness (as a nation it has never been at war with other nations). With those values as a foundation, we proposed for Greenland to colonize the world and cool down all military conflicts (back in 2004, the US and Denmark were engaged in the invasion of Iraq). Flying icebergs were our primary weapons.

    Irony, humor and speculative fiction were central to the project, which operates like a kind of Trojan horse, smuggling in difficult questions about the colonization of Greenland, but also seeking to empower a small nation to colonize the world. Today, with the US threatening to take control of Greenland through the use of economic and military power, the meaning of our propaganda video has changed once again: from absurdity to the promotion of an act of actual resistance against a new aggressor.

    An interview about the project can be read here.

    Inuk Silis Høegh (GR) graduated from the Royal Danish Art Academy in 2010 but had already established himself as an artist and filmmaker in Greenland and Denmark backed by his M.A. in Film and TV-production from University of Bristol, England (1997). Inuk works with conceptual works in a variety of techniques including installation, photo manipulation and film. His art has been shown in Greenland, France, Latvia, Canada and all around the Nordic Countries, with recent solo exhibitions in Greenland Culture House and Taseralik, Sisimiut, Greenland. His shortfilms and documentaries, among them the prize winning Sumé: The Sound Of A Revolution, has toured on TV and festivals all around the globe. Inuk received the Niels Wessel Bagges Grant in 2005 and the National Culture Award from the Government of Greenland in 2015.

    Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen (DK) was born in 1977 and is a MFA graduate from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Copenhagen University with a MA degree in literature and philosophy. He has participated in the research program at CCA Kitakyushu in Japan and between 2007 and 2015 he was based in Berlin. His artistic practice with a strong focus on architecture spans various formats from painting, installation, sculpture and theoretical writing, such as Generic Singularity, Non-philosophy and Contemporary Art and Community of Contribution. Most recently he published Danish Speciesism. In 2018 his project Flooded Modernity–a submerged replica of the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier–in Vejle Fjord gained international attention. In 2020 he contributed to the catalogue for the Venice Biennale for architecture. His works have been shown at museums and galleries throughout Denmark and Europe, such as the Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen and John Hansard Gallery in Southampton. In 2024 Melting Barricades was acquired by Nuuk Art Museum as part of their permanent collection.