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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier. The dossier includes a response to this article by Matthew Potolsky. 

Signe Leth Gammelgaard–Flowers Without Meaning: Literary Decadence as Finance Aesthetics

In chapter eight of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, the protagonist Jean Des Esseintes muses on his collection of hothouse flowers. The novel is one of the most prominent examples of the literary decadence of the late nineteenth century and such artificially cultivated flowers (as well as the hothouse itself) are a recurrent motif in decadent literature. In his “Préface écrit vingt ans après le roman” Huysmans himself describes the flowers of À rebours as “aphonic” or “mute” (atteinte d’alabie, muette). This imagery of organic flowers, cultivated to mimic artificial flowers as the text explains, conjures up a rather striking scene which epitomizes the decadent aesthetic. This aesthetic can be understood, I want to propose, in light of contemporaneous economic developments, specifically the intensification of the impact of finance – as portrayed in other literary works from the same period, for instance the classic stock-exchange novels of Émile Zola’s L’Argent or Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.

In what follows, I use Giovanni Arrighi’s model of financial expansion as a recurrent phenomenon throughout the history of capitalism. The final decades of the nineteenth century were one period of such expansion, where a major part of the money capital became invested rather in financial instruments and assets than in material production. The late nineteenth century, then, in some ways productively mirrors our current period of financialization which began in the 1970s, even if it is not understood as the same period of financial expansion in Arrighi’s framework (Arrighi 2010, 6–7). The significant rise in the impact of finance in the latter half of the nineteenth century occurred especially in the imperial centers of France and Britain. This rise has been portrayed in various ways in the literature of the period, and particularly within the framework of the realist novel, a subject of numerous studies in the past decades. In new economic criticism, the Victorian period specifically has been the focus of several important works, like Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy and Catherine Gallagher’s The Body Economic. However, less attention has been paid to the literary fin de siècle, the stylistic developments of decadence and aestheticism.

In this article, I propose to outline some key parallels between the aesthetic traits of these movements and the concurrent development in the economic system, in particular the steady rise of financial instruments, trades, and structures. I start by analyzing the core decadent aesthetics traits as opposed to earlier realist aesthetics, and then contextualize these by their relationship to the development of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics. I then show how Saussure’s linguistics parallel another theoretical shift, namely the marginal revolution in economic theory. Finally, I will examine how these three shifts respond to larger economic trends in the period; specifically, the switch from an emphasis on material production to an emphasis on financial investment and instruments.

The parallels between linguistic and economic systems have been illuminated before. My central point in this article is that the decadent aesthetics, specifically, render a representational shift in a way that generates an existential and perceptive view on this period and on its changes in both economics and language; namely a loss of meaning. It also presents a strategy of response to such a situation in the form of a renegotiation of the relationship between signs and material reality.

The mute flowers of decadence

Huysmans’s À rebours is a peculiar novel. While it has often been described as plotless,[1] the frame of the narrative in fact provides a simple storyline and the epitome of a decadent one at that. As the last scion of an old, degenerated family, Jean Des Esseintes delves into various extreme and debauched lifestyles before he, weary with the depraved Paris life, retreats to a house he buys outside the city, in Fontenay. The majority of the book details his decorating of this house and his aesthetic choices and sensory experiences with various stimulants: art, literature, colors, interior design, gemstones, flowers, music, perfumes, culinary delights. Finally, however, his body is worn out by his excessive enjoyment, and he is urged by his doctors to return to a normal life and “to enjoy himself, in short, like other people” (Huysmans 2009a, 173).

The flower chapter outlines very clearly how these aesthetic experiences work. It opens by stating that, though Des Esseintes has “always adored flowers” he is now only interested in one kind: the hothouse flowers. The passage outlines this development: after his love of real flowers, he had, in his previous life in Paris and in line with his “natural inclination towards artifice,” amassed a large collection of artificial flowers “faithfully imitated thanks to the miracles of gums and threads, percalines and taffetas, papers and velvet” (Huysmans 2009a, 72–73). However, with his move to Fontenay, a new phase emerges and the narrator comments regarding the artificial flowers: “He had long been fascinated by this wonderful art-form; but now he dreamt of planning a different kind of flora. After having artificial flowers that imitated real ones, he now wanted real flowers that mimicked artificial ones” (Huysmans 2009a, 73). As such, the hothouse blooms become an almost parodical expression of a crisis of representation, with plants cultivated artificially in “the carefully measured warmth of stoves” (Huysmans 2009a, 72), to look like fake ones, that in turn look like real ones.

Des Esseintes tours the horticulturalists of the area of Fontenay and orders a collection of plants. When they arrive, the narrative describes how some “were extraordinary, pinkish in colour, like the Virginal which looked like it had been made out of oilcloth or court plaster; some were entirely white, like the Albany, which could have been cut from the transparent pleura of an ox,” some “mimicked zinc, parodying pieces of punched metal that had been dyed Emperor green and stained with drops of oil-paint and splashes of red and white lead” (Huysmans 2009a, 73–74). As such, the sensory impression of the flowers takes center stage: how they look and what they look like. Conversely, the narrative does not in any way refer to the symbolic language of flowers, that is, metaphoric, traditional or symbolic meanings of love, hope or virtue.

This point is at the center of both Suzanne Braswell’s and Robert Ziegler’s analysis of the hothouse flowers of À rebours. Ziegler underscores, by reference to Huysmans’s own preface from twenty years later and thus written after his conversion to Catholicism, precisely the muteness of the flowers (Ziegler 2015, 51–52). In this “Préface écrit vingt ans après le roman,” Huysmans notes:

It would have been difficult, in that novel, to endow an aphonic flower, a mute flower, with speech, for the symbolic language of plants died with the Middle Ages and the exotic flora dear to Des Esseintes were not known to the allegorists of that age. (Huysmans 2009b, 190)

Ziegler’s analysis portrays this muteness through comparison to Huysmans’s later work, in particular the novel La Cathédrale, where the flowers and plants have become re-endowed with meaning through the work of religion, through Huysmans’s conversion. However, as the quotation shows, the mute flowers adhere to a modern condition, albeit the modernity that began already with the end of the Middle Ages.

Braswell’s analysis takes a broader view on this modernity and traces discourses on the symbolic language-of-flowers. Her reading stresses specific changes in these discourses precisely towards the end of the nineteenth century and she argues that, while Stéphane Mallarmé’s work nuances and elaborates the earlier traditions, the flowers in À rebours in turn “attack the tradition and parody its discourses, particularly those promoting the healthful and chaste aspects of horticulture” (Braswell 2013, 76, 83). The point that emerges is that these elaborate, exotic, and artificially cultivated plants have become such a perverse manifestation that they no longer signify; rather, they look like various forms of dying or diseased flesh, rendering distinct “necrotic dimensions” as Braswell terms it (Braswell 2013, 83). In the novel, this is seen in the passage on the next round of flowers to arrive:

they simulated the appearance of fake skin scored by artificial veins; and the majority, as though eaten away by syphilis and leprosy, exhibited livid flesh marbled with roseola and damasked with dartres; others were the bright pink of scars that are healing, or the browning tint of scabs in the process of forming; others were blistering from cautery or puffing up from burns (Huysmans 2009a, 74).

This imagery of decaying organisms, diseased tissue and putrefying flesh, however, links the floral passages to linguistic developments as they are described both in À rebours and in the movement of decadence more generally. In a previous chapter Des Esseintes meditates on his literary preferences, specifically among the Latin authors of the Roman decadence. Here, the narrator explains that:

Des Esseintes’s interest in the Latin language remained undiminished, now that it hung like a completely rotted corpse, its limbs falling off, dripping with pus, and preserving, in the total corruption of its body, barely a few firm parts, which the Christians took away to steep in the brine of their new idiom. (Huysmans 2009a, 31)

The advent of Christianity is given a key role in the development where the language of the Pagan Rome “decomposed like venison,” in fact “falling apart at the same time as the civilization of the Ancient World crumbled into dust, at the same time as the Empires, rotted by the putrefaction of the centuries, collapsed under the onslaught of the Barbarians” (Huysmans 2009a, 28).

The decadence of a civilization is thus matched by the decadence of its linguistic forms – forms that are in turn described in the same language as the appearance of the mute flowers, the flowers that have lost their metaphorical meanings. However, the idea of a decomposing organism of language is not specific to Huysmans. Indeed, in his Decadence and the Making of Modernism, David Weir comments on an earlier example of decadent criticism, namely Theophile Gautier’s essay on Baudelaire from 1868 (Weir 1995, 88–89). In this essay, Gautier, similar to Des Esseintes’s reflections, connect the decadent Latin literature to the literature of his own time. Moreover, he examines Baudelaire’s relationship to the “masters of the past,” in whom he cannot find an adequate model for his own period, since these masters had been born “when the world was young,” and “when as yet nothing had been expressed” (Gautier 1908, 38). Gautier writes further:

The great commonplaces that form the main stock of human thought were then in their first flush, and sufficed for simple geniuses addressing a people yet childish. But by dint of being repeated, these general poetic themes had become worn, like coins that have been too long in circulation and have lost their sharpness of outline; besides, life has become more complex, contains more notions and ideas, and is no longer sufficiently reproduced in artificial compositions inspired by the spirit of another age. (Gautier 1908, 38)

The metaphor of the worn-out coin instantly establishes a parallel between the representational system of money, and that of language. In the original French the wording is “perdent leur empreinte” rather than “lost their sharpness of outline”, so the image underscores how the coins have gradually lost their imprint, their stated value, effecting a mismatch between the form and content of the coin: its “meaning” has been skewed. The passage thus describes a shift in representation, and Gautier links this shift to a decadent Zeitgeist.

With recourse to Roland Barthes’s “L’Effet de réel,” this gap between form and content can be inscribed in a larger narrative. While Barthes’s short essay revolves mainly around his conception of the reality effect, towards the end of the text he speculates on a more general meaning of this particular effect. He argues that realism, conceived around the notion of this reality effect, is in fact a forerunner to the problematized representation of his own time, described in Barthes’s words as a “disintegration of the sign – which seems indeed to be modernity’s grand affair” (Barthes 2006, 234). Furthermore, he states, “the goal today is to empty the sign and infinitely to postpone its object so as to challenge, in a radical fashion, the age-old aesthetic of ‘representation’” (Barthes 2006, 234).

Barthes describes the concept of the reality effect, key to his understanding of realism, in a way that aligns with the decadent aesthetic seen in Huysmans’s flowers, namely that of a mute, unsignifying materiality. The reality effect thus invokes the material world not to signify anything specifically in a narrative context but merely to denote the reality of the stated utterance. Barthes writes:

Semiotically, the “concrete detail” is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; the signified is expelled from the sign, and with it, of course, the possibility of developing a form of the signified, i.e., narrative structure itself. […] in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced, the basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity. (Barthes 2006, 234)

What Barthes describes here is essentially a “flat” material world, a disenchanted and meaningless observation of the purely material properties. However, Barthes’s analysis identifies this aesthetic through the conception of the “absence of the signified.” To understand this in more depth, I now turn to Ferdinand de Saussure’s original conception of the dual sign consisting of signifier and signified.

Saussure’s structuralism and the disintegration of the sign

Saussure’s most famous work is presented in the Cours de linguistique générale, a work based on a series of lectures given by him between 1906 and 1911 and compiled from notes by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Though Saussure never published this work himself, the course has had a large significance for various fields outside of linguistics and, according to letters and notes that have since been found, Saussure started thinking about issues in general linguistics already in the final decades of the nineteenth century – in other words, contemporary to the decadent movement (Culler 1976, 15). In fact, economics seems to have been an inspiration for the ways in which Saussure wanted to redefine linguistics, and in the Cours he refers to the content of the linguistic sign as its “value,” but only insofar as the signified, the concept or meaning of a sign, has a value exactly because it is part of a system of language and compared to other values and signs (Saussure 2011, 114–17).

The Saussurian innovation resides largely in the dual nature of the sign: it consists of two parts, namely signifier and signified. According to Saussure, language is not made up of connections between signs and the material world but is rather a system of signs comprised by signifiers and signifieds. The signifier is the sound-image (the image of sound exists even if it is not pronounced) and the signified is the mental concept, meaning what we think of when we hear the sound-image. The relation between these two parts of the sign is arbitrary; though there are some onomatopoetic words, in general the relation between a specific word and its mental concept is random. Saussure refers specifically to the signified as the “meaning” or “content” of the sign, which then has value in a system (Saussure 2011, 65–78, 114–17). As such, the signified also holds the mediating function of language, the process by which we interpret arbitrary signifiers into meaningful content which we can then draw upon in our interaction with the physical world. When the reality effect in the decadent aesthetics is conceived as a “direct collusion” between referent and signifier, a lack of a proper signified, it signals a loss of narrative meaning.

However, for Saussure this understanding also enables a new conception of linguistics itself. Language can be understood as a structure or system in which each sign has meaning only in relation to other, different signs. The material world – termed “the referent” in semiotics ­– lies beyond the scope of linguistics according to Saussure, as it is the structure of language that should be studied in this discipline. Hence, structural linguistics brackets the idea of an underlying material reality: Linguistics should thus not be concerned with the connection between referent and signified, or for that matter between referent and signifier, but should only study linguistics as a differential relationship between signs. It is the difference of one word from that of another that gives it its meaning, not its connection to any actual thing.

Barthes’s analysis shows a very explicit use of Saussure’s dual sign: the duality of signifier and signified enables an analytical description of what is happening when representation becomes problematic, when the materiality becomes mute and meaningless. The conception that the “form of the signified” is the narrative structure itself is, moreover, interesting in the sense that, while Barthes’s examples in the essay refers to realist works that do have a storyline or plot, À rebours is often described as a novel without a plot. While it is a feature of realism (and only realism) in Barthes, I argue that the reality effect is a core component of the estrangement of the mute flowers in À rebours. In Huysmans’s novel (and in decadence more generally) the reality effect becomes not only a specific aesthetic strategy but the whole point of the narrative: it is central to the loss of meaning that drives the novel.

Following the work of scholars like Mary Poovey and Jean-Joseph Goux, I would now like to contextualize this shift from the meaningful narrative of realism to a decadence describing a loss of meaning beyond Saussure’s contemporaneous structural linguistics, namely in a parallel to the economic sphere (which is present in Saussure’s theory, as I have already shown).

The liquid values of marginal utility

Around 1870, the field of political economy spawned a significant new set of ideas that, similar to the decadent literature, augurs a new relationship between material reality and language or signs, in this case the language of values and economics. Independently of each other, three theorists in three different countries simultaneously developed theories based on the notion of marginal utility: W. Stanley Jevons in England, Léon Walras in Switzerland, and Carl Menger in Austria. The basic tenet of these theories is the idea that the value of anything can be determined by the thing’s marginal utility, that is, the utility of the “last available item” of a specific commodity. The amount and availability of something thus becomes the central parameter, because its utility will decrease with the amount available. Thus, when there is plenty of water, even though it is necessary for survival, its value will be low. On the other hand, when water is a scarce resource, its value will be incredibly high. The value of a commodity is thus expressed by the commodity’s exchange value, its price in a market (Jevons 1999, 143). The notion of value in this way becomes tied to the concept of scarcity.

With the marginalist perspective the value of something thereby shifts away from the earlier focus on the cost it takes to produce it, and towards the intensity of the desire that it can create – essentially the shift goes away from production and towards consumption, and this has consequences for the relationship between prices – the monetary sign – and material world of commodities. To understand precisely what the shift in economic theory entails and how it parallels decadent aesthetics and structural linguistics, a brief review of Marx’s notion of value is useful.

While the earlier field of political economy spearheaded by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, and Karl Marx had many disagreements, the prior theories all revolved around the concept of a labor theory of value. Marx divided the concept of value into three separate notions, namely “use value”, “exchange value”, and “value” itself (Marx and Engels 1996, 45–51). The latter one is at the core of his theory of capitalism as it elucidates how the exchange between capitalist and worker takes place. Capitalism, according to Marx, is the specific situation where the worker has nothing to sell but his labor power, and where the capitalist, conversely, holds the means of production including the necessary capital to establish a production of some commodity. Labor power is also a commodity and it is the only commodity a worker can sell. Contrary to other commodities, however, labor has the specific feature that it can produce more value than it takes to reproduce it – basically, a laborer can work more and produce more than what is required for her own reproduction and survival. This “more” is what Marx defines as surplus value, and the relationship between capitalist and worker is defined by the fact that the surplus value falls to the capitalist. While the basic level of reproduction is historically and geographically variable, the central mechanism remains the same, even if the worker is granted higher wages for her own reproduction (Marx 2016, 885).

However, the way Marx links the concept of labor time to value is central, because it shows how the whole economic system is linked to the material needs of a given society, and thereby anchors the theory in material reality. For labor to be the basic universal equivalent, namely the thing that enables the exchange of two qualitatively different commodities, Marx introduces the concept of abstract labor time. This concept expresses the amount of labor time necessary for a given society to uphold its current state and it is thus an abstract concept, not possible to measure in any exact way. The value of a given commodity is the labor time it takes on average to produce it, expressed as a fraction of the total socially necessary labor time of a society. Thus, the value of a specific commodity is not larger if it is produced by a slow worker than a similar one produced by a fast worker (Marx and Engels 1996, 48–49). As such the concept of abstract labor time both lodges the labor theory of value in a concrete material reality (namely the necessary amount of labor to sustain a society) and gives a commodity an underlying value described as a part of this necessary labor. It is this relationship to reality that changes with the new economics, and that change can in turn be related to the shift from realist narrative language to decadent mute description.

According to Marx the exchange value will over time stabilize around the actual value of something. Indeed, he states in volume one of Capital that “the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature” (Marx and Engels 1996, 86). Thus, while exchange values (that is, the prices) does figure into Marx’s theoretical edifice, they function mainly as expressions of the underlying value that has a relationship to societal value as a whole – and these expressions can be more or less representative or accurate (Marx 2016, 460). In the marginal utility theory, this calculation of labor time vanishes and production cost is assigned a different role, namely as a component of a cost-benefit analysis on the part of the producer. In marginal utility theory, also called neoclassical economics, value expresses only intensities of desire – the desire for the pleasure of consuming something versus the pain of acquiring it (the labor necessary for obtaining it), and relative to other things that can be acquired for the same amount of “pain.” These calculations of pleasure and pain then meet up with the similar calculations of other actors in a marketplace, and generates a price: the desire of the buyer for consumption meets the “pain” that the producer has put into creating it and therefore needs compensation for. The price becomes an exact expression of value, because value is no longer defined as some underlying quality, but only as the price that a good can obtain in a marketplace (Gallagher 2008, 126–27).

Jean-Joseph Goux expands on this point and claims:

Any questioning of “value” beyond a state of equilibrium momentarily offered by a market, or auction, of pure competition becomes a futile, useless, metaphysical and unscientific pursuit. For Walras, Karl Marx, like Adam Smith, remains a metaphysician; both Marx and Smith seek a unique and enduring principle that would fix value, the universal law regulating the exchange of products, which they find in the time of labour. (Goux 1997, 163)

I have dwelled at some length on this precise difference because the central shift regards a conception of labor and of the material reality to which prices refer. Thus, when we saw in the decadent literature a changed relationship between the referent and the signifier, expressed as a loss of the meaning – a loss of the signified – here we have a system of thought that is no longer interested in the relationship between signified and referent. Signs refer only to other signs in the system. As Goux portrays it, there is no longer any fixed point to which value refers, no concrete reality. Value only expresses wants, and these wants fluctuate according to scarcity (real or artificial), usefulness and, last but not least, the ability of something to create desire. Goux describes this conception of value as the “stock-exchange paradigm” as it fits with the way the stock exchange works. For Goux, this is not merely a change in economic theory, but a development that describes modernity as such, and like Barthes’s idea of “modernity’s grand affair,” it concerns a specific change in the way that signs work (Goux 1997).

However, while Saussure’s linguistics and marginalist economics both bracket the relationship of signs to the material world, the decadent aesthetics present a very precise way that the loss of a connection between societal values and material reality can take on an existential dimension and be perceived as a loss of meaning tout court. A few decades after Gautier’s aforementioned text, in 1881, a different critic of decadence, namely Paul Bourget, examines the relationships between linguistic and societal meaning through the example of Baudelaire in relation to decadence. The parallel Bourget sees between these two registers is through the image of the organism. A decadent society, he holds, is characterized by a state of affairs where the individual units, the smaller cells and lesser organisms, become independent and no longer work by subordinating their energy to the total organism. Same principle for language, he claims:

The very same rule governs the development and the decadence of another organism, language. A decadent style is one in which the unity of the book falls apart, replaced by the independence of the page, where the page decomposes to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence makes way for the word. There are innumerable examples in current literature to corroborate this hypothesis and justify this analogy (Bourget 2009, 98).

This quotation, often cited and used as definition for the decadent style, describes fragmentation and lack of any conception of totality or coherent whole, and the text describes this “anarchy” as a state of decline of both the organism of society and that of language. With the parallels between the new economic thinking and the new linguistic theory of the final decades of the century, falling apart and lack of unity of the decadent aesthetics can be understood in relation to shifts in the economic sphere. However, while the marginalist theory shows a system that becomes unlinked to the material necessities of a given society’s reproduction, it does not explain what happened in the actual economy of the period and how that relates to literary expression. To explain this link, and why it results in an aesthetics of fragmentation and disunity, Mary Poovey’s work is more instructive than Goux’.

In Genres of the Credit Economy (2008), Poovey expounds on the parallels between money, economics, language, and literature in a historically grounded perspective, reading two centuries of British literary and economic history in conjunction. By doing so, Genres makes a key point about the historical dynamic between these two systems. In Poovey’s account, they do not only display parallel features, they also actively influence one another. Concerning specifically what Poovey terms the “problematic of representation” – that is, “the gap that separates the sign from its referent or ground (of value or meaning), whether the gap takes the form of deferral, substitution, approximation, or obscurity” (Poovey 2008, 5) – she states:

Unlike most Literary critics, however, I do not present the problematic of representation as a property of all systems of representation. Instead, I argue that representation becomes problematic—it presents problems that are both social and epistemological—only at certain times and under conditions that are historically and socially specific. A system of representation is experienced as problematic only when it ceases to work—that is, when something in the social context calls attention to the deferral or obfuscation of its authenticating ground. (Poovey 2008, 5–6)

The thing in the social context that can cause this awareness is mainly economic events, for instance crises, crashes, bubbles, and mania. Thus, Poovey foregrounds the notion that the representational function is historically variable, at the same time as she stresses the connection between linguistic and monetary systems. While Poovey does not operate with the Saussurian concepts of signifier and signified but rather conflates the notions of signified and referent in the above passage, it is clear that her point relates to the problem of materiality and meaning. Like the shifts related to decadent aesthetics, Saussure’s linguistics, and Goux’s reading of marginal utility theory, the sign begins to work differently. Huysmans’s novel shows, indeed, how such crises of representation can be interpreted through an aesthetics of the lost signified, in Barthes’ words the “direct collusion of a referent and a signifier.”

À rebours thus portrays a situation in which its protagonist experiences a ‘mute referent’ in place of a narrative signified for the flowers. However, for the reader of the novel the words themselves naturally still have a meaning – they still have a signified. Telling the story of a lost signified for the character – the story of a mute and meaningless materiality – thus becomes the narrative signified for the reader: the text becomes a meaningful expression about the loss of meaning in both a linguistic and an existential sense. Furthermore, while these flowers are no longer endowed with metaphorical meaning, they still look like something, namely decaying bodies, an image which is also used to describe the linguistic disintegration of representation in both Huysmans and elsewhere. In so far as these descriptions of flowers still do signify, they signify on the one hand the mute referent in a Barthesian sense, and on the other connote an imagery of disintegrating organisms. In both cases, they signal a shift in representation, a shift in the mediating function of the signified. With Poovey’s notion of economic events as a trigger for such representational issues in mind, I will now turn to the actual economic changes of the period.

The late nineteenth century crisis

The final decades of the nineteenth century saw an economic situation in the old European empires that in some central ways matches that of the US today: repeated crashes and volatile economy, a huge increase in the impact of the financial sector, staggering growth and a cut-throat price competition. In terms of imperial affairs, this period is known for the “scramble for Africa,” the intense round of colonization of African territories which increased the European control from 10 percent to 90 percent over two decades. Literary scholars and historians alike have described the massive boom in financial instruments and stock-companies, accompanied both by new legislation and the pressure for better information through a reliable, critical press (Kornbluh 2014, 1–2; Henry and Schmitt 2009; Poovey 2002, 17–18; 2008, 274; Taylor 2014). According to Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, the year 1870 augurs the financial phase of the period of capitalist development that he terms the British cycle, and this financial phase followed an initial phase of material expansion (characterized by increased production, colonial ventures and intensification of trade). The financial phase of this period was characterized by capital agencies withdrawing from investment in material production and trades, and concentrating instead on banking, money trades and finance, and such change indicates the decline of a period of capitalist development in Arrighi’s model. Drawing on the work of Fernand Braudel, Arrighi states that “financial expansions are taken to be symptomatic of a situation in which the investment of money in the expansion of trade and production no longer serves the purpose of increasing the cash flow to the capitalist stratum as effectively as pure financial deals can” (Arrighi 2010, 9). The late nineteenth century financialization thus spelled the end of the British (and French) cycle while the United States became the new power center, breeding new material growth.

The onset of literary decadence, the shift towards the financial phase, the invention of a new conception of economic value and modeling, and the birth of a new linguistic theory thus all center around these decades and the 1870s specifically. At the same time, these four events all display issues in the functioning of the signified: the role of the signified as mediator to the referent is challenged by the way that the referent appears irrelevant in marginalism and in structural linguistics, and the role of the signified is in turn replaced by images of a mute material referent in the later forms of realism and in the movement of decadence especially. However, I have yet to show the role of the signified in financialization. In order to do so I will turn once more to Marx’s writings.

In the Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865 (his only full draft for volume III of Capital), Marx analyses the dynamics of loan capital and interest and describes the basic mechanism through the model of capitalist production and surplus value. Where the typical cycle for capitalist production is expressed by the formula M–C­­­–M’, where an amount of money (M) is used to produce commodities (C), which can then be sold for a larger amount of money (M’ = the original amount + the surplus value), the expression of loan capital (that is, investments) becomes M–M’ to the lender-capitalist, where the surplus money derives from the interest paid on the loan. What disappears from the formula, then, is precisely the materiality of the commodity and, in Marx’s understanding also therefore the embodied abstract labor power required to produce said commodity. Instead, the formula expresses an amount of money that appears to be growing by itself over time. In chapter 5, part 1, he discusses the expression that the rate of interest is the “price of money,” calling this price a “purely abstract form, completely lacking in content” (“rein abstrakte und inhaltslose Form”) (Marx 2016, 458; Marx, Engels, and Müller 1992, 4:426). What is meant by this lack of content is outlined through a comparison to the prices of regular commodities governed by the following rule:

If supply and demand coincide, the market price of the commodity corresponds to its price of production, i.e., its price is then governed by the inner laws of capitalist production, independently of competition, since fluctuations in supply and demand explain nothing but divergences between market prices and prices of production (Marx 2016, 460).

Marx goes on to emphasize, then, that no such divergences exist for the “price” of capital (that is, the interest) as there simply “is no natural rate of interest. What is called the natural rate of interest means rather the rate established by free competition” (Marx 2016, 460). Marx thus outlines that the interest, the price of capital, is equal to what came to be understood as value by the marginalists, a value determined by competition and with no ties to the amount of labor needed to reproduce a given society. It is value in the sense that Goux terms the stock-exchange paradigm, and what is omitted from this conception is the labor of production, embodied in commodities, and which in Marx’s schema can be seen as the signified of money. I therefore suggest that these shifts–the shift of aesthetics, the shift of linguistics, the shift of economic theory–are in turn related to the larger shift from a society based on the production and commerce of commodities produced by labor power, to the commerce of various forms of financial products. Arrighi stresses this point of going from Marx’s theoretical model to a conception of historical phases and explains:

Marx’s general formula of capital (MCM’) can therefore be interpreted as depicting not just the logic of individual capitalist investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as world system. The central aspect of this pattern is the alternation of epochs of material expansion (MC phases of capital accumulation) with phases of financial rebirth and expansion (CM’ phases). In phases of material expansion money capital “sets in motion” an increasing mass of commodities (including commoditized labor-power and gifts of nature); and in phases of financial expansion an increasing mass of money capital “sets itself free” from its commodity form, and accumulation proceeds through financial deals (as in Marx’s abridged formula MM’). Together, the two epochs or phases constitute a full systemic cycle of accumulation (MCM’). (Arrighi 2010, 6)

This historical shift might perhaps also be used to understand why the theoretical framework of Capital, with its pinnacle of the labor theory of value, was not, after the 1870s, the most adequate framework to explain market dynamics, because, in a phase dominated by finance capital, the marginal utility theory more adequately explains how value is conceived since the economy is no longer organized mainly around material production. However, invoking the larger framework of the world systems as Arrighi does, reinscribes the finance capitalist systems as phases in a larger dynamic. And within this dynamic, what happens in phases of financial expansion, is that the signified of money (commodities and labor), disappears from view. We then get two new theories that explain how sign systems begin to work, and we get a decadent aesthetics that tries to renegotiate a material world that the theories are no longer concerned with.

The decadent literature, then, does not simply decouple language from the material realm like the structural linguistics or marginalist economics, but presents, rather, a different kind of connection to it. Most decadent works place a premium on the concept of sensory and sensual enjoyment, epitomized in Des Esseintes’s practices as an aesthete. While on the one hand, this enjoyment undeniably parodies consumption by taking it to the utter extreme, it can also be interpreted as an attempt to reconnect with the material world, to reinvent “meaning” as “sense” in a situation that is no longer mediated by the previous social functioning of the signified. The material world appears meaningless but at the same time menacing, strange, and incomprehensible, accessible only by the sheer sensory properties it invokes. And thus, these properties must be examined, dealt with, experienced, in “a new Hedonism” as it is termed in Oscar Wilde’s The picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde 2006, 22). The success of this “solution” however, is questionable, as most of the decadent works end on a somber note. Thus, when Des Esseintes ponders his return to normal society the book ends with his prayer to a divinity he fails to believe in: “Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who longs to believe, on the galley-slave of life who is setting sail alone, at night, under a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of the ancient hope” (Huysmans 2009a, 181).

Conclusion

While previous research has in various ways established parallels between language and money or economics, I have focused on decadent aesthetics because they show a very precise way that large economic changes in society can impact the ways in which we perceive the social and material world. They suggest, in particular, one way in which the subject can react to a phase of financial intensification: by a rather fetishistic relationship to materiality. In the decadent aesthetic, the properties of things in the material world become defining for our experience of them, rather than their social meaning, function, or usefulness. In decadent novels, this is also linked with excessive consumption, even hedonism. As there can no longer be found any social meaning, the only grounding principle for the subject is the sensory experience of the material world. This world, however, lacks any substantive ordering principle and becomes an excess of impressions.

By establishing the structural parallel between literary decadence and the economic and financial developments of the period, I am also suggesting that the free-floating, differential values of the Saussurian linguistics, and of the neoclassical economics, are responses to the same global developments in the mode of production. The final point I want to emphasize is that decadent literature’s way of responding to the changes I have discussed, differs from the theoretical responses in linguistics and economics by insisting on the relevance of sensory experience and materiality. In a sense, À rebours is trying to figure out what to do with a materiality that can no longer really be understood through the models we know, and it describes the loss of tethering that this social fragmentation results in. The protagonist becomes, quite literally, unhinged from a topsy-turvy world in which meaning remains at large.

Signe Leth Gammelgaard is a postdoc in comparative literature at Lund University. Her research focuses on the intersection of literary and economic history.

References

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Huysmans, J.-K. 2009a. Against Nature. Translated by Margaret Mauldon. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2009b. “Appendix: Preface ‘Written Twenty Years after the Novel.’” In Against Nature, by J.-K. Huysmans, translated by Margaret Mauldon, 183–97. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Jevons, William Stanley. 1999. “Brief Account of a General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy.” In Sources: Notable Selections in Economics, edited by Belay Seyoum and Rebecca Abraham, 1. ed, 141–46. Guilford, Conn: Dushkin/McGraw-Hill.

Kornbluh, Anna. 2014. Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form. First edition. New York: Fordham University Press.

Marx, Karl. 2016. Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864-1865. Edited by Fred Moseley. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Historical Materialism Book Series 100. Leiden ; Boston: Brill.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1996. Marx & Engels, Collected Works. Volume 35. Karl Marx – Capital Volume I. Collected Works 35. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, and Manfred Müller. 1992. Gesamtausgabe. Abt. 2. Das Kapital und Vorarbeiten Bd. 4. Ökonomische Manuskripte 1863 – 1867 / Karl Marx Apparat: Teil 2. Vol. 4. Berlin: Dietz.

Poovey, Mary. 2002. “Writing about Finance in Victorian England: Disclosure and Secrecy in the Culture of Investment.” Victorian Studies 45 (1): 17–41.

———. 2008. Genres of the Credit Economy, Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. University of Chicago Press.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 2011. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: Columbia University Press.

Taylor, James. 2014. “Financial Crises and the Birth of the Financial Press, 1825-1880.” In The Media and Financial Crises, 203–14. Routledge.

Weir, David. 1995. Decadence and the Making of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

White, Nicholas. 2009. “Introduction.” In Against Nature, by J.-K. Huysmans, translated by Margaret Mauldon, vii–xxvi. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Wilde, Oscar. 2006. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited by Joseph Bristow. New ed. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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This article is based on parts of my doctoral dissertation. (Gammelgaard 2020)

[1] White, “Introduction,” xx; in Wilde’s Dorian Gray, the book that so influences Dorian, and which is loosely based on À rebours, is described precisely as a “novel without a plot” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 106).

This text is published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier. It can be read as an accompaniment to Ryan S. Jeffery’s ENTER_FACE (8 min. video, 2023).

What Are Your Moves Tomorrow

Ryan S. Jeffery

How to make your way in a world of declining growth?

One way to understand history is as a struggle between capital and labor. In January 2021 that struggle was eclipsed by a struggle between two types of capital – financial capital and so-called human capital – in the by now infamous GameStop short squeeze. This was the arrival of the meme stock, confidentially, but defiantly, held by Diamond Hands.

A battle cry in the parlance of emojis, Diamond Hands is internet slang that came to prominence on the subreddit forum r/WallStreetBets. More specifically, it arrived during the global economic shut-down due to the Covid-19 pandemic, when droves of individual, non-professional, so-called “retail” investors banded together to bid up the stock price of the floundering video game retailer GameStop – as well as the movie theater chain AMC. In less than a month GameStop’s stock price went form $17.25 a share to a closing price of $86.88, at a point reaching an all-time high of $500. The result was extraordinary profits for the lucky ones that got in and out early, which simultaneously caused huge losses for so-called institutional investors, i.e. hedge funds who had shorted against the stock.[1]

It’s this secondary effect that afforded Diamond Hands the ability to see their actions as some form of righteous justice, sticking it to the citadels of Wall Street while finally getting in on some of the action of casino capitalism. This was certainly how the story was broadly told. (Consider, for example, how it’s most recently been depicted in the tepid Hollywood version Dumb Money, a pseudo Big Short part II minus any of Michael Lewis’s trademark smartest people in the room). This populist take pits a David and Goliath scenario in which unruly plebs flew in the face of supposed market fundamentals.[2] In the end, a couple of hedge funds did loose massively – most famously, Melvin Capital shuttered its doors – but other Wall Street players cashed in right behind the wake of chaos created by Diamond Hands. Despite some hand-wringing by financial journalists, the seductive read of a populist revolt was thus short lived: Wall Street’s power remained firmly intact.

The Diamond Hands short squeeze did succeed, however, in pulling back the curtain, if only for a moment, to reveal just how unwieldy the allocation of value really is within financial capitalism. Unwieldy, if not corrupt: the momentary shutdown of the Robin Hood trading App, which made the short squeeze play possible for traders on the subreddit community, only seemed to confirm just how rigged the game really is. Put simply, it might just come down to the word “bets” in r/WallStreetBets that’s really the greatest provocation to Wall Street insiders who spin narratives of “fundamentals” and “market logics.” Commentator Doug Henwood was even more pointed, noting that despite the fact that these inexperienced traders were using Reddit and the free App Robin Hood, they were really just behaving like any other professional trader: passing information, talking up some stocks and others down. As Henwood argued, what it boiled down to was that simply “the wrong type of people” pulled off such a highly sophisticated Wall Street play.[3]

Indeed, it didn’t go unnoticed that the aggressive adolescent masculinity found on the r/WallStreetBets message board differs little from the toxic bravado of the rank-and-file on Wall Street. What does separate the professional behind a Bloomberg terminal from the amateur on Robinhood tends to be wealth and power, in other words access to capital, or “liquidity” in the parlance of finance. Short on liquidity, Diamond Hands found their power by organizing and coordinating their numbers through discipline and a perverse sense of solidarity. One retail investor’s paltry position has essentially no effect on market dynamics; if they all pour into a single body, however, then they can become a sizable market actor that other institutional players must contend with. Diamond Hands must act in numbers and they must be committed. In order to act like one: they have to count each other, and also count on each other.

Described “like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal,” the entire discourse on r/WallStreetBets is like most anywhere else on the internet, a mix of shit-posting and clever memes but also a genuine exchange of information and a form of community with its own unique vernacular and coded language.[4] The result is an uncanny culture jamming of dominant and overturning media forms that puts the likes of Thanos from the Avengers, Gordon Gekko and Jim Cramer all in one universe. This is the arena in which Diamond Hands emerges. At first appearance, Diamond Hands passes for just another cryptic juvenile insider joke intended just for the lulz, and yet the sophistication of the psychology and utility behind the meme is profound. The challenge is straightforward: the short squeeze play by the r/WallStreetBets traders works only as long as no one sells. So when the stock price begins to move upwards after enough people have bought in, if just a few cash out early, it could spark a wave of selling that would make the whole play collapse. The task is therefore to create an ideology of self-discipline. Diamond Hands relies on the promise—the sacred pact–that you will not sell no matter what, no matter the instability, the incoherence of it all. Your hands are made of diamonds; they will not move no matter which way the price moves. It’s your commitment to holding that’s making the price go up. Once you sell that, everything vanishes. You might not have the cash but you are spiritually rich and linked in this community so long as you keep holding out.

This is a discipline of equal parts valor and shame, the anti-social sociability of a more perverse Protestant work ethic. But it also reveals how the community of Diamond Hands implicitly understands that they are all atomized and isolated–together. It’s the logic of human capital taken to its conclusion, what Michel Feher has called “investee politics”, a historical shift in the site of capitalist struggle by which individuals no longer look at their labor power as a commodity to sell, but instead view the self as a type of asset that appreciates with particular skills, connections and crucially reputations–all of which either facilitates or bars one’s access to credit-worthiness.[5] It’s a collective vision but without a collective horizon. The struggle is to change their world, not the world. In this light, the GameStop short squeeze play can be understood as Diamond Hands’s recognition that this is likely their only means to reach beyond the precarity of the wage-relation and join the class of capital. In the face of the seemingly immeasurable power of high finance, most will go bankrupt but some might make it through. A nihilistic kamikaze run at the barricades, not necessarily to destroy them but to somehow scale over them. To borrow a phrase: get rich or hold trying.

In the current configuration of platform capitalism, the original libertarian dream of an emancipatory internet seems naïve, if not delusional. Yet Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou provocatively takes up a more ambivalent position towards both the forms of communication in online spaces as well as the financialized logic that undergirds it. In the face of rapidly accelerating social and political uncertainties, Athanasiou argues that even more radical speculation could act as a pharmakon for the seemingly intractable state of social and political life, wrought by decades of neoliberal reason and digital financialized capitalism. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and the origins of nationalism, Athanasiou describes a new societal formation made up of what he calls speculative communities. Where Anderson looked to the role of print media in the 19^th century in the formation of nationalism, Athanasiou sees the current story as one also shaped by media. In this schematic, the “commodified digital infrastructures” of the internet produce speculative technologies be it social media, dating apps, or gig work apps–all built on a high-octane venture capital and so-called creative destruction. The result is the all too familiar experience of modern life reduced to a routine of anxious endless swiping and scrolling in a constant state of competition, precarity, and indebtedness. But counterintuitively, Athanasiou identifies how this increasingly shared experience contains a potential for new forms of collectivity, and in particular collective actions which he calls counter-speculations. Strikingly, these are not moves against the drivers of speculative logic away from uncertainty, but rather its embrace. An accelerationist doubling down of sorts, that only leans harder into uncertainty.

As he describes it, this is “a speculative politics that does not simply resist the all-encompassing specter of finance but wields it against oppressing structures in all realms of social, political, and even intimate life”.[6] Citing movements as wide-ranging as France’s Gilets Jaunes, the Tea Party, and BLM, along with tactics like divestment campaigns, hashtag-highjacking and Ticktoker pranksterism, Athanasiou claims that what unites them all, is less a concern in resolving the chaos of radical uncertainty. Rather, they are united by an implicit acceptance that this is the precondition for anything different to emerge. In this argument, speculation becomes the means to take action and grasp some form of agency in the face of all-encompassing drowning uncertainty. It’s a logic of fighting fire with fire: speculation got us here, but speculation in the right hands can somehow get us out? Here, r/WallStreetBets’ Diamond Hands falls into sharper relief. From the vantage point of Athanasiou’s speculative communities, the wry cynicism, or even all-out nihilistic juvenility of Diamond Hands, begins to look less like a spectacle in itself, but rather like the spastic response to the already existing spectacles at hand.

Writing at the time of the GME short squeeze, Max Haiven shrewdly observed how the collective financial play by r/WSB could be understood as a warped version of such explicitly anti-capitalist aims like the Debt Collective, an activist debtor’s union that has collectively organized on behalf of millions of indebted households across the US.[7] Despite r/WSB’s run towards capital as opposed to the Debt Collective’s aim to abolish it, Haiven’s provocative juxtaposition is instructive precisely because of the two groups shared reliance on organizing vast numbers and leveraging structural weak points and contradictions within financial capitalism. This relies on a firm distinction between means and ends. For Haiven, with no unified vision, the “happy accident” of the GME short squeeze urges the question: “What would it mean to leverage the power it revealed towards other ends?”[8]

On its own, the accomplishment of the GME short squeeze by traders on Reddit offers only a dialectical riddle narrowly within the field of media and culture: is this the financialization of the social or the socialization of finance? But if we widen the lens on this acute moment during the global pandemic to include the split-screen of soaring stock evaluations juxtaposed with precarious worker unrest over who and what is “essential”, deeper questions of politics and agency emerge. Whether an act of action or reaction, the collective market intervention organized on the r/WSB thread reveals innate tensions within networked communications technologies and finance capital, longstanding debates between the so-called real and financial economy, and the very nature of capitalism.

By January 2024, three years after the GME short squeeze, the share price of the stock was hovering just south of $15, far from the glory of its near $90 high at the height of the short squeeze. Still, it was, and to this day, remains higher than its doomed dollar value just before the Reddit traders of r/WSB intervened in January 2021. Snatched from the predatory jaws of hedge funds, the brick-and-mortar video game retailer can still be found in scattered malls across the world. r/WSB continues on as well, the subreddit currently has fifteen million members, two half million more since the GME short squeeze. Scroll the feed right now and you are less likely to spot the murmurings of such an audacious play than before. What you will find on the thread reads much like a satirical rag about the financial news on any given day. It’s the Financial Times meets the Onion: cleverly decoding and trolling the ideologies spouted by the financial media that are cloaked in the language of objective market signals.

Perhaps the whole GME affair could simply be chalked up as the freakish byproduct from the reign of Zero-Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP). (The r/WSB short squeeze was of course not the only financial spectacle during the pandemic lockdowns and resulting US monetary interventions, which also saw an accelerated cryptocraze, the rise and fall of NFTs, and continues to roll on in the current speculative wave of so-called generative machine learning technologies.) Michel Feher’s “investee politics” is helpful here in understanding the dynamics between politics and technology, and how they animated the GME affair. For Feher, “the Reddit insurgency” served as evidence that the platform might be supplanting the market as prime mover. He writes: “As coordinators of supply and demand, markets enable profit”, where platforms on the other hand, “play an increasingly important role in the allocation of credit–financial but also moral credit”.[9] The speculative gambit, however seemingly naïve, is to ask how the latter might be leveraged over the former–and crucially towards whose and what moral vision?

Folding the market into the platform has also long been the vision behind such fintech ventures, going back to the origins of Paypal, Facebook’s failed Libra, and Elon Musk’s current ambitions for X. Silicon Valley is paved with the broken dreams of an “everything app”. But for now, each day the user account u/OPINION_IS_UNPOPULAR pins a version of the same post on top of the r/WSB’s thread: “What Are Your Moves Tomorrow”. Whether the speculative community of r/WSB is a lumpen stratum that can really be mobilized towards a different vision, or the vanguard for a more ruthlessly anarchic market society, remains open.

Ryan S. Jeffery is a filmmaker and moving image artist. His work focuses on the relation between technology, media and economics.

[1] See, Davies, Rob. 2021. “GameStop: how Reddit Amateurs took aim at Wall Street short-sellers” The Guardian, January 28. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jan/28/gamestop-how-reddits-amateurs-tripped-wall-streets-short-sellers. See, Stewart, Emily 2021. “The GameStop stock frenzy, explained” Vox, January 29. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22249458/gamestop-stock-wallstreetbets-reddit-citron.

[2] See, Winck, Ben. 2021. “GameStop short-sellers lost $1.6 billion in a single day as Reddit traders rebelled against them” Business Insider, January 25. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/gamestop-stock-short-seller-squeeze-losses-reddit-traders-citron-gme-2021-1-1030000080. See, Kim, Heejin. 2021. “Michael Burry Calls GameStop Rally ‘Unnatural, Insane’” Bloomberg, January 26. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/michael-burry-calls-gamestop-gain-unnatural-insane-dangerous?sref=apOkUyd1.

[3] Henwood, Doug. 2021. “The GameStop Bubble is a Lesson in the Absurdity and Uselessness of the Stock Market” Jacobin Magazine, January 27. https://jacobin.com/2021/01/gamestop-stock-market-reddit.

[4] See, r/WallStreetBets  https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/.

[5] See Feher, Michel. 2018. Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age. New York: Zone Books.

[6] Komporozos-Athanasiou, Aris. 2022. Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World. Chicago: Chicago University Press. pg. 11.

[7] See the Debt Collective https://debtcollective.org.

[8] Haiven, Max. 2021. “The power, potential and peril of the GameStop affair” Roar Magazine, February 3. https://maxhaiven.com/power-potential-peril/.

[9] Feher, Michel. 2021. “Another Speculation is Possible: The Political Lesson of r/WallStreetBets” PPE, February 5. https://www.ppesydney.net/another-speculation-is-possible-the-political-lesson-of-r-wallstreetbets/.

This video is published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier. The dossier also includes a text by Ryan S. Jeffery that can be read as an accompaniment to the video.

Since 1982, the financial data vendor Bloomberg L.P. has provided real-time financial market data accessible only through an interface called the Bloomberg Terminal. For an annual fee of $20,000 you can buy and sell financial assets on Bloomberg’s secure proprietary network with 325,000 other subscribers throughout the world. Since 2012, the user account u/OPINION_IS_UNPOPULAR has moderated the subreddit page r/Wallstreetbets accessible on the public internet forum Reddit, which can be interfaced by web browsing software on most any computer or smartphone. For a zero annual fee you can exchange information, financial trading strategies, videos and memes with 12.9 million other subscribers throughout the world. What would happen if r/Wallstreetbets found a Bloomberg terminal? The interface is where the two systems, subjects, organizations meet and interact.

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

In “Learning from Madoff: On Fiction and Finance in 21st Century,” Frederik Tygstrup describes Bernie Madoff and his famous financial scam as an allegory for the 2008 crisis and the rise in speculative capital at the turn of the 21^st century. Madoff’s split-strike conversion strategy (as he called it) was pure fiction.^[1] Tygstrup positions the story of Madoff’s fictional trades in an age of enormous growth in fictitious assets.

Madoff took money from investors and claimed to be trading it, but he was just parking the money in a bank account. When clients wanted to withdraw their funds, he pulled money out of the bank account and called it return on investment. Then he went looking for more clients whose new deposits would cover the gap. This is a classic Ponzi scheme. Madoff, the investor with two sons and a blonde wife and a home in the Hamptons, was arrested a couple of months after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, just as the scale of the global crisis was coming into focus. The man’s entire financial career was a lie. Unlike the derivatives traders who built a house of cards on mortgage-backed securities, Madoff had no financial cover story. He was faking it one hundred percent. But the size and timing of his fraud raised a question: Is the entire economy a scam?

The Madoff case engendered a number of documentaries and book-length investigations into what the scheme did and did not mean. Tygstrup quotes Colleen Eren’s book, whose very title calls the case “the public trial of capitalism.” Tygstrup describes the affect swirling around Madoff as excessive, then offers an “allegorical reading” of this fascination. He finds that “the case becomes a kind of a slightly convex mirror in which we not only see his (devious) deviation from normal market behaviour, but also a replication of it, only in a slightly distorted fashion.” The judge who sentenced Madoff to 150 years in prison had a “striking” tone of indignation, and the conviction was “quite exuberant,” Tygstrup writes, for “what was, after all, a fairly trivial white-collar crime, the big numbers notwithstanding.” The level of affect, for Tygstrup, was extra, given the big but humdrum crime.

The amount of emotion that Madoff provoked was “remarkable,” for Tygstrup, given “the very normalcy of what he was doing.” Based on trades he was not in fact making, Madoff kept promising money managers that he could bring in high returns forever. But of course, at some point, the debt would have to be called in. For Tygstrup, only the size of the heist was “sublime,” and Madoff got away with it for so long in part because he was reflecting the market back to itself: “Madoff’s fictitious investment fund also tells us something about the nature of fictitious capital in an age of accumulation by financialization: precisely not as an anomaly, but as an allegory of unsustainable credit-based and highly leveraged capital accumulation.”

Tygstrup’s argument thus relies on setting Madoff’s normalcy off against a historically specific change in the overall level of financialization. It relies on a relatively common claim about a quantitative increase in the fictitiousness of capital at a particular moment in time. The idea is that Madoff might have been easier to clock, he would have stuck out more, if not for a quantitative growth in fictitious capital. Later, Tygstrup summarizes financial history by saying that after 1929, “certain limits were set for how much banks should be allowed to leverage.” After the run on the banks that triggered the Depression, in other words, the regulators put some limits on fictitious assets. Speculation was kept in check by reserve ratios, where those reserves served as a foundation or referent for financial activity. After the 1980s, according to Tygstrup, deregulation allowed the degree of leverage to rise, and it “skyrocketed.” He cites Martijn Konings’s Capital and Time for a description of “inflated positions” that “performatively built up supplementary market value.”

There’s no question that the fascination with Bernie Madoff, an ideal Jewish scapegoat and record-breaking Ponzi builder, emerged out of both a desire to punish the entire rentier class and a desire to excise a bad apple. His normal qualities made him a good stand-in for finance generally. And at the same time, if Madoff was an unusual criminal, then getting rid of him might allow finance to get back to the status quo. In this way, punishing Madoff served both a desire to see and not to see systemic problems. And Tygstrup is correct in pointing out that the financier who was called a monster exhibited a real lack of monstrosity. The scale of his crimes may have been monstrous, but he didn’t seem particularly devious and the money wasn’t spent on cocaine and hookers and yachts–just one mistress and a second home. The fear that Madoff provoked came from the subtlety of the distortion. If, generically, Madoff served as an allegory for the events of his era, perhaps affectively he entered the category of the uncanny. Madoff was so familiar that he was eerie, unheimlich.

So Madoff’s performance was uncannily successful at a historically specific moment, granted. But Konings’s point, in Capital and Time, is precisely not that 2008 indicated that capitalism had breached some kind of objective boundary. Tygstrup almost seems to accept the reasoning that Konings is pushing against. Konings critiques argumentation that relies on a distinction between “real and fictitious forms of value and sees the tendency of finance to exceed its natural limits” (Konings 2018: 36) His point is precisely to critique the critiques that see limits and foundations, or that rest on the idea that something has objectively “skyrocketed,” leading to a quantitative imbalance.

For Konings the temporal dynamics of speculation and austerity are themselves fundamental to an inherently self-referential system:

If a kind of double movement is at work in capitalist life, this involves not a periodic oscillation between foundational values and speculative impulses but, instead, the constant need to respond productively to speculative provocations, to reconstruct reality around a new connection that cannot be undone and has irrevocably altered how things work. (Konings 2018: 12)

Meanwhile for Tygstrup, the emotional excess in the fascination with Madoff depends on something being “conspicuously bloated” within capitalism itself. That bloat implies something swollen beyond its normal size, where normal is defined in reference to a real or a more real type of value, and where the idea of real value usually involves some nostalgia for Fordist production. But Konings wants us to see a system defined by its self-referentiality, with no outside to the logic, and no ultimate ground. The historically specific detail that makes Madoff’s case fascinating is only the crisis itself, which of course differs from the last crisis, but not because the quantitative growth creates a qualitative difference. Any implication that reserve ratios or Glass-Steagall-style regulations might let the air out of finance’s bloated core is a fool’s errand, a path to further complicity. When there’s a run on the bank, everyone gets swept up looking for the monster. Before that, the monster always appears as an innovator. But it’s important to remember that the finance sector has no path to a healthy flat stomach.

Perhaps Madoff should be considered in conjunction with another allegorical figure, Jordan Belfort, the inspiration for the movies Boiler Room and The Wolf of Wall Street. Belfort ran penny stock scams for years. He spent 22 months in prison and then went on to sell his memoirs and become a kind of self-help guru who gives workshops on investing. He too was emblematic of the 2008 crisis. He was first indicted in 1999, the first movie came out in 2000, and the second, directed by Martin Scorcese, followed in 2013. Madoff was the subject of a number documentaries, but never got quite the auteur treatment that Belfort did. In a performative economy, Belfort was the better performer.

In 2014, a former enforcement attorney for the SEC wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal entitled, “How ‘the Wolf of Wall Street’ Really Did It: The stock scam wasn’t emblematic of greed in the Financial District. These guys were just shrewd crooks working out of Long Island.” In the body of the article, former prosecutor Ronald L. Rubin insisted that the offending firm depicted in the Wolf movie “was not a real Wall Street firm, either literally or figuratively. Its offices were in Long Island…” The fraudulent acts, the cocaine and the strippers and the toxic masculinity that became Hollywood’s inspiration? These were not emblematic of Wall Street. These guys weren’t even from Manhattan.

In 2014, Rubin was concerned with defending the legitimate men of finance from the figurative implications of The Wolf. Belfort’s scam depended on high-pressure sales and stock IPOs. Rubin wanted it to be clear that Belfort was “just a thief.” But Belfort’s methods were remarkably close to the standard practices of the industry. He told stories about investments in particular companies, built trust, and then suggested that if his marks balked, they were leaving money on the table. If this is highway robbery, the highway is still the stock market. Both in real life and in fiction, Belfort fit the archetype of the hard-charging, hard-partying, hypermasculine Wall Street trader. Belfort could have been a Master of the Universe straight out of the The Bonfire of the Vanities, or a Gordon Gekko-type from the movie Wall Street, or one of Liar’s Poker’s big swinging dicks.^[2]

For Rubin’s way of thinking, Madoff was monstrous because he seemed so normal, and the toxic masculine archive was exaggerated in order to sell spicy stories about bad apples. The real Bear Stearns just wasn’t like that. As a prosecutor, he wrote that he had learned: “[E]very business, especially those involving large sums of money, attracts criminals. For example, after the real-estate market collapsed in 2008, scammers began peddling worthless loan-modification products to impoverished homeowners facing foreclosure. Such predators were no more characteristic of the mortgage industry than Jordan Belfort was of Wall Street.”^[3]

Rubin directed attention to the figure of the criminal precisely in order to exonerate the industry. So for Rubin, the mortgage originators peddling NINJA loans (No Income No Job or Assets to back them) on the way up, then packaging those NINJA loans into tranched securities in special purpose investment vehicles, passing them off their books, and privatizing enormous profits on commissions and sales? Those were real, regular, businessmen.

When those businessmen socialized the losses after the crash, people like Rubin relied on the idea that the crisis was a kind of organic natural disaster, an objective reality that made victims of regular people, including mortgage originators and securities brokers.

Rubin understood that the market, writ large, needed public trust, and so he was concerned with appearances, with the problem of representation. In order to make Belfort seem abnormal, Rubin aligned him with criminal others. “Scammers” preyed on homeowners who needed help modifying their loans. In search of fakes to stand in contrast with the real, Rubin bemoaned fraudsters who were taking advantage of vulnerable people. Madoff had pretended to be a normal trader before the crisis. Scammers pretended to be helpful bankers after the bailout. But all of these symbolic negotiations, of masculinity and emblems and fakes, were part of the creation of value within the system.

Arguably, homeowners were vulnerable to fake bankers because the state wasn’t forcing the bailed-out banks to provide help, for real. In courts across the nation, creditors who had profited from the securities on the way up were trying to claim assets they no longer owned. When it wasn’t convenient to own the assets, they had passed on the responsibility, but now they wanted money from foreclosures. The creditors were abusing the bankruptcy process to such a degree that a US Senator had to pass a law to try to get them to stop.^[4] Everyone, in other words, had to work hard to distinguish the mortgage industry from the criminals. Rubin needed fictional representations of criminals to do so.

Rubin’s interpretive work distinguishing the real from the fake, the allegory, and the morality tale, was part of the work of reconstructing capitalist realities. Distinguishing the monsters from the scammers from the innovators is part of the performance that creates value forms. Money refers only to itself. Thus in a capitalist context, the relationship between referent and representation, between productive labor and fictitious asset, creates a gap. In that gap, we find both the creation of value forms and constant analysis, in a dance that often imagines that the next round of speculation will find a way to keep us safe from its ravages, that the next round will respect some objective limit or fundamental economic reality (Konings 13-19). Rubin wanted to distinguish “real” trades from “fake” money, and real creditors from fake bankers. He wanted to retroactively validate past investments in mortgages, precisely as a means of getting financiers back to the business of creating new and better speculative positions—this time, they promise!

Tygstrup seems correct to the extent that the fascination with Madoff revealed a productive ambivalence. Madoff was both a bad apple and a stand-in for the whole rotten mess. But that ambivalence isn’t peculiar to Madoff, and it doesn’t herald a quantitative level, in relation to the ever-receding bottom line, at which finance will finally topple over.

The promise that if we validate this round, or rein something in, the solution to the mystery of real value will be just around the bend—that is a seduction inherent to neoliberal reason. In a discussion of The Sopranos as something of an allegory, Matt Seybold put it this way:

Neoliberalism is a regime that governs by fiscal arbitrage, and laws exist only to establish a baseline against which we can measure financial risk. The question then becomes, what can you get away with: “Can you make more money breaking the law than is required to mount a successful legal defense…? Is the grift worth more than the graft it takes to pull it off?” (Seybold)

This makes it seem that, yes, the entire economy is a bit of a scam, and Madoff and Belfort were both looking for an answer to the same question. Madoff moved more money than Belfort, he just managed to pull off less and fell harder. It then struck everyone as truly weird, almost uncanny, that Madoff never had a plan.

When the creation of value forms shifts, and alters how things work, it’s a worthwhile exercise to understand who is being served up as a bad apple, and why. It’s worthwhile keeping an eye on where neoliberal reason is directing our attention—perhaps especially in moments of crisis. But if these crooks are representative of anything, it was of their provincial specificity, of the last gasp of Wall Street, before the apotheosis of global dark money. And of course, the film of The Wolf of Wall Street, which narrated the rise and fall of a powerful American trader, couldn’t get funded until its backers found a kleptocratic Malaysian financier.[5] The Wolf of Wall Street, in that sense, is both meta-allegory and big, fat, bloated symptom. But the ground, the material referent to keep in mind, is not some elusive final limit but the suffering of the Malaysian people, when the theft of their sovereign fund was made real by the markets. The system isn’t getting more objectively fictional, it’s getting more unequal.

Michelle Chihara is currently on book leave as Associate Professor of English at Whittier College, where she teaches contemporary American literature, media studies, and creative writing. She has also served as Associate Dean and Director of the Whittier Scholars Program for individualized curricular design. Recent publications include an entry on “Men” in Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary (forthcoming 2024 from Goldsmiths Press); a chapter in New Directions in Print Culture Studies from Bloomsbury Press (eds. Daniel Worden and Jesse Schwarz); articles in Distinktion: A Journal of Social Theory, American Literary History and Postmodern Culture. She co-edited The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics (2018). From 2016-2022 she was Economics & Finance editor at Los Angeles Review of Books, before serving as Editor-in-Chief through 2023. Before academia, she worked as a reporter and has published reportage and essays in a variety of publications, including Mother Jones, n+1, Post45: Contemporaries, Bloomberg and Avidly.org.

References

Bernard, Carole, and Phelim P. Boyle. 2009. “Mr. Madoff’s amazing returns: An analysis of the split-strike conversion strategy.” The Journal of Derivatives 17, no. 1: 62-76.

Chihara, Michelle. 2020. “The Rise of Behavioral Economic Masculinity.” American Literary History 32, no. 1: 77-110.

Konings, Martijn. 2018. Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

La Berge, Leigh Claire. 2015. Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Morath, Eric. 2011. “Bill Strengthens Trustee’s Power to Protect Homeowners.” Wall Street Journal, May 27.

Rugin, Ronald L. 2014. “How the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Really Did It.” Wall Street Journal, January 3.

Seybold, Matthew. 2022. Podcast episode: “The Sopranos Revival (Remember the End of the End of History?)” with Peter Coviello and Xine Yao. The American Vandal, September 29. The Center for Mark Twain Studies.

Hope, Bradley; John R. Emshwiller and Ben Fritz. 2016. “The Secret Money Behind ‘The Wolf of Wall Street.’” Wall Street Journal, April 1.

^[1] See: Bernard 2009, which makes clear that it was relatively obvious that Madoff’s returns could not come from the strategy he claimed to be using.

^[2] See: La Berge 2015 for a discussion of hypermasculinity, scandals, and abstraction. I also discuss masculinity and epistemic authority in economics in Chihara 2020.

^[3] See: Rubin 2014. Rubin had initially helped Elizabeth Warren set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Later, according to his own website, as an attorney in private practice he “defended clients against CFPB enforcement attorneys he had trained,” and still later he wrote an article for the conservative magazine The National Review about the CFPB’s “Tragic Downfall.” Rubin felt the CFPB had become too politicized. (The CFPB still exists, so this is a metaphoric downfall.)

^[4] See: Morath 2011. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) was one of three senators who recognized that the actions of creditors in the bankruptcy process rose to the level of abuse and fraud, and so the politicians introduced legislation to curb the behavior.

[5] See: Hope 2016 for one example of the many articles and books written about the 1MDB scheme.

This article was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier. The dossier includes a response to this article by Michelle Chihara.

It’s just money! It’s made up! Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don’t need to kill each other just to have something to eat. It’s not wrong. And it is certainly not different today than it has ever been.

John Tuld (played by Jeremy Irons), in J. C. Chandor: Margin Call

The idea of fiction and the use of paper money came into being more or less at the same time: in the mid-18^th century, at a time when Western modernity developed its characteristic propensity for speculation. Fictions were understood then as imaginary tales that had no real referent in the world, but that nonetheless retained interest by presenting something that could arguably have been, once one had willingly suspended one’s disbelief. Paper money, meanwhile, was acknowledged to have no intrinsic value whatsoever, but to nonetheless possess the very practical quality of being a measure of comparative value, if backed by a belief in its ultimate convertibility by the state. In both instances, we see on the one hand a speculative leap into a universe of conjecture–the plausibility of a given event, or the compatibility and eventual exchangeability of different goods–; and, on the other, a self-conscious caveat that this leap is only warranted if, in the first case, we don’t take the speculative face of fiction for something real, and, in the second, we don’t take the speculative face of money as something unreal. As long as we believe firmly enough in fiction not having an actual referent, and in money having an actual value, we are able to manoeuvre these otherwise slippery media. But, every so often, these intricately balanced equilibria tend to falter and we discover that what we took for fiction should really be understood at face value, or that what we took for good money is really nothing but fictitious assets.

Much more can be said about this peculiar kinship between fiction and money, their long common history, and the many ways in which they have shown proclivity to forage into the domain of the other, often with strange and disquieting consequences. In the following, I will examine a recent case where the domains of fiction and of money intertwine and eventually demonstrate the contemporary (although long-standing) fragility of their twin orders.

*

In June 2009, Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years of incarceration for a fraud of more than 65 billion dollars. Through the golden years of financial accumulation, spanning from the abolition of the Bretton-Woods agreement in 1973 to the crash of 2008, Madoff worked his way up to become one of the most prominent fund managers on Wall Street, a pioneer of digital trading, co-founder of the NASDAQ, and at a certain time owner of one of the five biggest trading agencies on Wall Street with a net credit of more than 150 billion dollars. It was only after the crisis of 2008, when liquidity froze and capital was suddenly withdrawn from the markets, that the Madoff fund was revealed to be thoroughly insolvent: the generous returns were not the outcome of felicitous investment strategies but were simply paid from the steadily incoming deposits to the fund. A Ponzi scheme, in other words, where no investments were taking place, and where returns were paid for by taking on more credit, demanding more returns, and so on. For a certain period of time, anyway. In Madoff’s case, for probably more than 20 years.

For those 20 years, Madoff was considered a wizard, a genius in the creation of more money out of money. And then he turned out to be just another crook. A crook whose trick was to feign, to all the investors he ruined, that he could do precisely what the rest of Wall Street was doing too, transforming money into more money—although he, of course, could do it just a little better. There were no investments taking place in the firm. Madoff simply deposited the incoming funds to his account in Chase Manhattan Bank and withdrew what was needed to pay returns and eventual repayments to investors who wanted out (which was rare), all the while producing neat and reassuring statements that itemized the alleged buying and selling of assets, citing their real market values at the time, and vaunting the merits of his unfailing “split-strike conversion strategy”. An elaborate fiction, in other words.

The Madoff case has drawn huge amounts of media attention, much more than other Ponzi schemes that have blown up both before and after Madoff. This is not least—according to the sociologist Coleen P. Eren, who has mapped the media turmoil—because of the sheer size of the amounts involved and the duration of the scheme. The international press of course covered the unravelling of Madoff’s scheme and the 6 month-process from indictment to conviction. The case also provided, however, a fecund “human interest” angle that allowed the media to delve into the auctioning of the family’s houses and yachts, Ruth Madoff’s wardrobes and jewelleries, the painful conflict between Madoff and his sons, as well as with the victims that lost their fortunes. Since the case blew up, there has been a steady flow of books and articles; a film, The Wizard of Lies (2017), based on a book by New York Times journalist Diana Henriques, featuring Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert de Niro as Ruth and Bernie Madoff; and the 2023 Netflix show Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street. The Madoff case clearly provided a veritable drama of dethronement, as if it was tailored for public attention.

This flood of cultural production testifies to a distinct combination of fascination and outrage. On the one hand, one easily recognizes the default fascination with the rich, the case offering a peep into the life in the upper echelons of banking and brokerage, mobilizing sentiments of admiration and awe. And Madoff’s life did indeed have, in every detail, the appearance of the successful modern financial entrepreneur: penthouse, villas, private jets, charity galas, board meetings, conspicuous parties. It’s a lifestyle that is admired and desired by many, and a profession that many believe in—that of making money out of money. The intensity of this belief, desire, and admiration also explains, then, the concomitant feeling of outrage when it was revealed that the wizard was a crook, who took investments from family, friends, philanthropists, pension funds, reassuring them all that their money was safe and thriving with “uncle Bernie”, all the while funnelling them into a scheme that would definitely—and fatally—prove unsustainable in the long run.

It is tempting, of course, to speculate on the close relations between these expressions of fascination and outrage and the mixed feelings they display, involving disappointment (what we admired was not admirable after all), frustration (what we believed in is not to be believed), Schadenfreude (let the mighty fall), and class anger (the superrich are getting richer all the time, time to call it out). Whatever the exact case may be, the vilification of Madoff did seem to have a particularly affective tension to it, as when the cover of New York Magazine portrayed him as a “monster”, diligently photoshopped. One of the books about Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, Brian Ross’s The Madoff Chronicle, has Madoff’s personality laid out by an ancient FBI criminal profiler who casuistically portrays him as a typical “sociopath” and “cold-blooded” narcissist. Others have called him a crook, a liar, a schemer, a seducer, and much more (all these reactions are richly documented in Eren’s book mentioned above). Even one of the more sober renditions of the Madoff story, Diana Henriques’s The Wizard of Lies, cannot resist succumbing to indignation when glossing Madoff’s crimes (“only a soulless, heartless monster could have inflicted such pain on those he knew and supposedly cared about,” and “no human being could construct a life of such brazen, destructive lies” (346)).

The tonality of indignation is in fact striking, as is the, by all standards, quite exuberant conviction for what was, after all, a fairly trivial white-collar crime, the big numbers notwithstanding. What did Madoff do? He swindled rich people and money managers who found themselves entitled to have a 20 percent annual gain on their fortune, and who believed that the well-dressed and soft-spoken Madoff in his sleek office could deliver this.

In this sense, the remarkable affect sparked by the Madoff case might not even be his criminal acts, but the very normalcy of what he was doing. Coleen Eren points to what she calls the metaphoric nature of the trial: “Talking about the trial became a way of talking about punishment not only for Madoff but for those responsible for the financial crisis […] He offered a “fix” for all the other improprieties and crimes that went unpunished, including the class inequalities and greed and the ressentiment” (Eren 120).

The Madoff case, pace Eren, can thus come to represent what is flawed in contemporary financialized capitalism. This representative identification of Madoff with something bigger might indeed be metaphorical (or even metonymical: representing a totality by one part of it); I would like, however, to suggest an allegorical reading, by which the case becomes a kind of a slightly convex mirror in which we not only see his (devious) deviation from normal market behaviour, but also a replication of it, only in a slightly distorted fashion.

One of the big issues that keeps coming up in the reactions to the case is not only the magnitude of the fraud—the unimaginable, sublime number of 65 billion dollars–but also its longevity: how on earth, everybody exclaimed, could Madoff keep his fraud running for several decades? One answer to this is evidently that he was hedged by a financial market that expanded in volume with the same pace as his need for supplementary capital deposits to cover the interests he paid to his creditors. For twenty years, the amount of idle capital in the financial markets kept growing at a rate that matched the Madoff fund’s need to take on credit. Nobody wanted their money back for any purposes (of course some did make withdrawals and made a lot of profit by exiting the Ponzi scheme in time; however, the net growth of the fund sufficed to keep the pyramidal expansion of the business going for an exceptionally—and uniquely–long period of time). In other words, Madoff’s business didn’t stand out as an anomaly, but the exponential growth requirement of his Ponzi scheme was underwritten by the market at large. In this sense, Madoff’s fictitious investment fund also tells us something about the nature of fictitious capital in an age of accumulation by financialization: precisely not as an anomaly, but as an allegory of unsustainable credit-based and highly leveraged capital accumulation.

*

In the third volume of Capital, Marx discusses an array of different forms of so-called interest-bearing capital (credit, bonds, and shares) and the idea that comes with them, as he puts it, that it is “the property of money to create value, to yield interest, as it is the property of pear-trees to bear pears” (Marx 516). The sweet dream, in other words, shared by Madoff’s investors and the rest of us, that money has its own particular fertility. Marx’s analysis of interest-bearing capital highlights two particularly noteworthy features: first, that its value is essentially promissory. If money, after all, does not procreate all by itself, interest refers to a value yet to be produced, that is, an anticipation of a valorising process that is expected to take place in the future. If liquid capital results from previous valorising processes (at some point Marx calls it “frozen labour”), fictitious capital—in all its forms—is a promise of value to be produced at some point in the future, a “frozen future”, if you like. Secondly, fictitious capital has the particular feature that it can, by way of its promissory nature, be promised more than once. One given asset—or one specific claim on the future—can be counted, for instance, both as somebody’s fortune and as a security for a credit, or for a second or third credit, for that matter. “Everything in this credit system appears in duplicate and triplicate, and is transformed into a mere phantom of the mind” (603). Capital here retains its fictitiousness in that promises can be stacked up, to an amount where the aggregated claims cannot be honoured. Due to these two features, the trader in credit appears, with Marx’s characteristic penchant for one-liners “as a prophet and a swindler at the same time” (573).

Marx’s concept of fictitious capital is itself almost prophetic. In Capital, it was an addendum to the primary analysis of valorisation of labour, just as in his time speculation was a marginal source of valorisation in comparison with the decisive means of valorisation, that of production. Today’s financialization has turned the hierarchy between the two upside-down, and the twin mechanisms of fictitious capital—claiming a value in the present that is only to be produced in the future, and using credit to obtain more credit—are now ubiquitous and central to the economy. Where the role of finance has generally been considered, by modern economists as well as by Marx in his time, as a means to create liquidity, that is, to move capital to wherever it is needed, the combination of the deregulation of financial markets, the stagnation of production, and advanced technologies of finance, has created a situation where financial transactions, rather than production proper, have become the main means of capital accumulation. Credit is by now—as Michel Feher has argued in Rated Agency—the most yielding commodity of all, and consequently the wave of financialization has amassed an immense volume of credit by securitizing still more assets. Real estate, infrastructure, health, education, and everyday consumption have all been turned from dormant values into assets that, when securitized with the tools of finance, can provide immediate access to liquid capital. Credit, then, however, of course also entails debt. And the massive securitization of almost everything has built up momentous positions of debt: commercial debt, private debt, national debt. This is the contemporary version of the “prophetic” side of fictitious capital: there are more outstanding claims on values to be produced in the future than ever before. Or, put differently, the return on capital assets remains high as long as more debt is heaped up in in the future—precisely the mechanism that allowed Madoff’s Ponzi scheme to remain hedged by the rising market.

There is more to financialization, however, than this heaping up of obligations that by now weigh down so heavily on the future. To properly gain profit from possessing credit, the finance markets moreover accommodate different ways of gearing up credit. One of them is to systematically leverage any given credit position, that is, to use credit to buy more credit. After the 1929 crisis, certain limits were set for how much banks should be allowed to leverage, but since the 1980s, these precautions have been gradually suspended and the degree of leverage of banks, financial institutions and corporations has skyrocketed, using existing claims to issue more claims, and indeed using these inflated positions to performatively build up supplementary market value, as Martijn Koonings has compellingly shown in Capital and Time. When banks (in the recently broadening sense of the word, now covering all kinds of financial institutions and agents) are allowed to lower the reserves ratio, and when the economy is at the same time “eased” with generous issuing of public debt—that is, when there are both ways and means for leverage at hand—claims on future production of value are multiplied over and over again. Banks, as pointed out by Stefano Sgambati, “are impelled to come up with financial innovations that, besides enhancing their leverage, propel an ever growing marketization of other people’s debts” (Sgambati 309). This is also the point at which fictitious capital comes to refer not only to the “prophet”, but also to the “swindler”: where the same promise pertaining to the future is given more than once for every given asset.

And we can go even further. One thing is to obtain more credit with the credit already at hand; yet another—and this is a second defining feature of financialization—is to constantly re-mediate credit in order to create more liquid capital. This is the business of derivatives, contracts betting on the future value of credit positions, contracts that can again be bought and sold and eventually exchanged again to liquid capital. Derivatives can price risk, or put differently, they are a means of packaging risk as a commodity that can be bought and sold on a new and lucrative market—a market presently estimated to an outstanding gross value of some 500 trillion dollars. Derivatives are what Cédric Durand has called a “second generation fictitious capital” (Durand 148), and the surge in issuing derivatives (following another set of de-regulations) has led to the invention of a brand-new commodity: a piece of securitized contingency. Practical as they might be, derivatives in their present, rogue form have produced another layer of outstanding claims on the future: not only multiple claims on every asset, as in the case of the present leveraging techniques, but now also factoring in the price of the risks inherent in the contingencies of the future, to be paid by the very same future.

When finance is no longer a supplement to the traditional mode of capitalist valorisation, that is, buying labour and collecting a surplus value by selling the products of this labour, but a primary means of accumulation in itself, it appears to have found potential surplus value in new places, beyond the “secret abode of production” analysed by Marx. Throughout the last four decades, where the increase in production has stagnated, the returns on capital to be obtained in the financial markets have nonetheless increased handsomely. And if we do stick to Marx’s insight that money does not yield interest like pear-trees bear pears, we should look somewhere else to gauge the source of this abundant creation of wealth. Saskia Sassen has observed that financialization has by now become “a capability to securitise just about everything in an economy and, in doing so, subject economies and governments to its own criteria for success” (Sassen 118). To pinpoint this new mode of subjection, she picks up another concept heralded by Marx, namely that of “enclosure”, given that today financial firms, as she puts it, “enclose a country’s resources and its citizens’ taxes” (15). And more specifically, the resource being enclosed comes down to being the future itself, the future in which the momentous debts incurred by the credits produced by way of financial instruments eventually reach maturity.

Looking at contemporary financialization this way, the allegorical nature of Madoff’s scheme becomes immediately apparent. The market in its totality and Madoff shared the inability to honor the outstanding debt positions, and the coy expectation that in the future somehow this gap will be filled. In Madoff’s case this would happen by multiplying depositions (which again had worked for decades); in the financial markets at large, it would happen by the belief in a steep increase in productivity to cover the enormous heaps of debt. The latter is an expectation with no historical evidence to back it up—one that is unsustainable to boot.

This structural homology between the Madoff case and the larger case of 21^st century financialization becomes even more blatant if viewed through the lens of Hyman Minsky’s 1992 “financial instability hypothesis”. According to Minsky, historical periods where accumulation is based on debt expansion rather than increase in production will move through stages of hedged finance (where interest on debt is paid and capital preserved), speculative finance (where interest can still be paid, but the invested capital needs to be “rolled over”), and finally Ponzi finance (where the cash flow no longer suffices to cover neither repayment nor interest, and where credits might eventually need to be depreciated). This is what has become known as the “Minsky moment”, the cusp of a crisis of speculation with insufficient growth to sustain the demand for valorisation. That Minsky moment occurred, one could say, both to Madoff and to the rest of the financial world in 2008. It occurred on different scales, one where the Ponzi fiction did violate legislation and restrictions, and one where the Ponzi-version of fictitious capital, providing the conditions of possibility for the credibility of the former, did not. There is a similarity here that has even made economic sociologists suggest we don’t talk about different magnitudes of Ponzi schemes, but simply about financialization as a “Madoffisation” of the economy (Monaghan and O’Flynn 2017)—a process through which were issued cascades of deferred claims that can be immediately monetized–or, put differently: an enrichment in the present to the detriment of the future.

*

The allegorical relation between the Madoff case and the crisis of financialized capitalism that co-occurred in 2008 sheds an interesting light on the present relationship between fiction and finance. If our everyday understanding of the two rests, as I claimed at the beginning, on our creed that fiction does not represent actual beings, and that money does represent an actual value, our two cases testify to all kinds of transgressions of this understanding. Madoff’s meticulously crafted fictitious fund was taken to have a referent, and as long as it functioned, it thrived because it was hedged by growth in financialized accumulation, the lies and subterfuge notwithstanding. The break-down of the financial market—when the inflated edifice of assiduously fashioned varieties of fictitious capital fell apart and left the world economy and the livelihood of millions and millions of people in deep crisis—similarly established that the nominal value of most of the circulating assets was eventually non-founded. Or, to put the conundrum differently: when the fictitious character of money was being exacerbated by financialized capitalism and conspicuously bloated itself, we at the same time learned that fictions, even if they are un-founded, still have the power of world-making on even the largest scales.

This disquieting muddle, where the epistemic designs of fiction and of finance lose their neat contours, is at the heart of the scandal that broke out when the Madoff fund bankrupted. Madoff’s fiction, eventually avowed, was telling the truth about a bigger but stubbornly non-avowed fiction, like a distorted mirror reflecting the state of things at the onset of the financial crisis. This perplexity can be read in the conviction of Madoff, which of course enumerated all the infringements on current laws and regulations the Madoff fund had perpetrated. However, it also went quite a bit further in the statement of the honourable judge Chin:

In a society governed by rule of law, Mr. Madoff will get what he deserves and will be punished by his moral culpability… Trust was broken in a way that has left many—victims as well as many others—doubting our financial institutions, our financial systems, our government’s ability to regulate and protect. (qtd. Eren 125)

The judge is impeccably blunt: Madoff is morally condemned for discrediting our financial system. The exorbitant sentence is bestowed on Madoff to establish a distinction between his fiction and the bigger fiction of financial engineering and in order to reassure us all that we, and the frenzy of financialization that we cannot imagine escaping, are still situated in an orderly reality. That we are not just the secondary characters in somebody else’s fiction, in which they are about to seize what we believed was our future, appropriating that future and whichever aspirations we might have for it, for their own immediate gain.

There is no doubt that judge Chen’s sentencing “sent a message,” as the saying goes—the message being that there are beliefs that should not be tinkered with. But still, Madoff and his crimes were not solely placeholders for potential misconduct in the finance sector at large. I would suggest that his true moral crime—the one that might instigate doubts about the financial system—was revealed in the sentencing to be not his fraudulent fictions, but the way his business came to act as a displaced representation of the mundane, all-too-common practices of the contemporary financial sector that had set off the crisis. As an allegorical demonstration, the Madoff case could harbinger an undesired insight into the state of things. A play in the play, a fiction within a larger fiction, like the famous allegory devised by Hamlet:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,

Could force his [the King’s] soul so to his own conceit

(Shakespeare 270)

The allegory is, of course, educational; but just as the ancient king of Denmark in Shakespeare’s drama eventually proved unfit to read the allegorical message of the embedded play, so our present, more than ten years after the sentencing of Bernard Madoff—and ourselves as spectators to the unravelling of his Ponzi scheme—have been equally deaf to the message.

This deafness is undoubtedly a structural one, supported by a disposition to uphold a strict distinction between what morally suspect financiers do and what is the logic of the financial system at large, even to the detriment of a foreboding but better sense that these two are actually quite in synch. A mixed feeling, in other words, like the one encompassing both admiration for the financial wizard and the incipient suspicion that the system itself is somehow rigged. Psychoanalysis has taught us that the force of a rejection mirrors an affective investment. When rejecting the insight provided by the allegory—the formal homology as well as the practical metabolism between Madoff’s scheme and the logic of financialized capitalism—, our present might somehow obliquely be recognizing this lesson. At the same time, however, it must determinedly disregard it because it is strictly non-admissible within the present world-image.

This mixed feeling is probably nowhere more tangible than in the rapidity and vehemence with which Madoff’s crime was identified and denounced as a Ponzi scheme. Such a swift identification and denunciation are manageable for the cultural imagination, because they leave the actual interdependence between Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and the larger economical (and political) context of the fund’s activities in the shadows. Instead of taking in the allegorical lesson and recognizing the Ponzi-like character of financialized capitalism at the cusp of the 2008-bubble, the public eye on Madoff—again, ranging from yellow press to the New York Southern District Court—focused on Madoff’s fraud as “one of the most egregious financial crimes of our time” and as “extraordinarily evil,” as reiterated in 2020 by Judge Chun when rejecting Madoff’s bid for compassionate release. (New York Law Journal, June 4, 2020). Keep the focus on the man, we are told, and on the 11 counts to which he pleaded guilty. Let Madoff remain a metaphor of dishonest financiers—by all means, do not allow him to become an allegory of the financialized economy itself. Condemn the man, exonerate the system. Could we do otherwise?

Frederik Tygstrup is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen and PI of the research project “Finance Fiction. Financialization and Culture in Early 21^st Century,” funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark 2018-22.

References

Chandor, J. C. Margin Call. 2011.

Eren, Colleen P. Bernie Madoff and the Crisis: The Public Trial of Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2017.

Durand, Cédric. Fictitious Capital. How Finance is Appropriating Our Future. Trans. David Broder. London: Verso 2017.

Feher, Michel. Rated Agency. New York: Zone Books 2019.

Henriques, Diana B. The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust. New York: St. Martin’s Press 2011.

Koonings, Martijn. Capital and Time. For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2018.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 3. London: Pelican Books 1981.

Minsky, Hyman P. The Financial Instability Hypothesis. New York: Levy Economics Institute of Bard College 1992.

Monaghan, Lee F. and Micheal O’Flynn. “The Madoffization of Irish Society: from Ponzi Finance to Sociological Critique.” The British Journal of Sociology 68/4, 2017.

Ross, Brian. The Madoff Chronicle. New York: Hyperion Books 2009

Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2014.

Sgambati, Stefano. ”The Art of Leverage: A Study of Bank Power, Money-making and Debt Finance.” Review of International Political Economy 26/ 2, 2019.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen 1982.

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

In the text “Wu Wei (無爲) on Wall Street,” Arne De Boever notes the curious ubiquity in finance fiction of references to the ancient Chinese war general Sun Tzi, author of the perennial bestseller The Art of War. De Boever ponders why ancient Chinese theories of war crop on Wall Street (in fiction as well as in reality) and whether there might be a deeper relation between Sun Tzi’s doctrine of “wu wei” and neoliberal ideology more generally.[i]

To get at the question of the “content” of the neoliberal “parallelism” between war, finance, and management, De Boever returns to the French sinologist François Jullien’s tri-partite work on “efficacy” written over the last two decades before the turn-of-the millennium. According to De Boever, Jullien’s thought—at the center of which stands the Chinese notion of “wu wei” or, in French, “laissez faire”—facilitates a particularly easy exchange between discourses of war and management and thus provides an intellectual template for neoliberal thought.

De Boever is thus suggesting how Jullien might have assisted—in a much more direct way than someone like Foucault, who has often been accused of intellectual alignment with neoliberalism (Zamora and Behrent 2016)—in the historical transformation of ancient Chinese military thought (broadly informed by Daoist principles of “action through non-action”) into neoliberal management theory:

China’s non-Western model of warfare as it is exposed in Jullien’s Treatise becomes highly productive both within Jullien’s work (where it leads to his Lecture) but also outside of it, in its reception in management studies, as part of the development of contemporary management strategies not just for China but at large.

This is a compelling argument, particularly so since Jullien, as De Boever notes, did not merely theorize “efficacy” in management but actively participated in shaping new management doctrines for the neoliberal era through his work as a prominent international business consultant. By zooming in on the “unexceptional” thought of Jullien, and on the doctrine of “wu wei” in particular, De Boever thus offers a fresh perspective on the genealogy of neoliberal thought.

In what follows, I will respond to this argument by taking a slightly different but, I hope, complementary approach to understanding why Sun Tzi became a reference for Wall Street stock traders as well as a stable of new management theory.

Let me begin with a recent remark by Junius Frey, who in the foreword to Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics touches briefly upon the topic of Chinese Daoism and notes, à propos the doctrine of “wu wei”:

The idea that to govern is to follow the vagaries of Nature, and that power ideally merges with the order of things, already captivated Quesnay in the 18th century in his eulogy of China’s despotism. The fascination with Chinese politics during this whole episode went hand in hand with consternation over American politics. One can maintain, along with the Marxists of Chuang, that “     the Chinese Communist Party functions as a vanguard for the global capitalist class” and that “its experiments are important precisely because they are situated on the first line of expansion of capital today, in both its industrial and financial dimensions, and are suited to the confrontation with the very limits of accumulation on its largest scales (Chuang, Social Contagion).” (Frey 2021)

Though the consequences that Frey draws from this observation are to my mind rather obscure (in short, Frey claims that today’s “imperial domination” is essentially “Chinese”), the embedded quote by the Chinese anti-authoritarian communist collective Chuang usefully shifts the focus away from the terrain of competing “ideas” to the real terrain of the material struggle between classes or class war.

*

One of the most incisive strategists of class war is the French situationist Guy Debord. Debord’s thinking on war in the expanded social setting of late capitalist society not only prefigures key insights in so called “French theory” but also points to the transformation of war theory, via François Jullien, into management theory.

While it is well known that Debord and the situationists played a key role in the (failed) revolutionary events of May ’68, it is less well known that after the dissolution of the Situationist International (SI) in 1972 Debord (re)focused his attention to the study of the history of war, military theory and the question of strategy (Guy 2018). Debord believed that late modern warfare was no longer isolated to the battlefield, with two opposing armies confronting each other. Instead, Debord believed that war had transformed itself into a form of generalized class war that “should be understood in its social omnipresence.” (Debord 2018, 449). For Debord, the study of war was more than simply an intellectual pastime: it implied the question of strategy—when, how, and where to fight—for those who, like Debord himself, actively sought to overthrow capitalist society’s class-rule.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, against the backdrop of anti-colonial wars and uprisings in Algeria, Congo, Vietnam, and many other places, Debord studied, excerpted, and commented on a number of historical strategists from Sun Tse (the spelling Debord preferred to distinguish from the French Maoist spelling then in vogue, as noted by Laurence Le Bras) to Machiavelli, Jomini and Clausewitz (who appears in De Boever’s text), to mention just a few of the most well-known (Debord 2018).

Read in the light of the voluminous dossier on strategy that Debord left behind, his entire late oeuvre comes across as a sustained strategic study of the dynamics of “the social war” as a continuation of traditional warfare with other more “spectacular” means (Debord 2018, 111: Debord uses the term “la guerre sociale sous le spectacle”). Debord was not alone in turning to military theory to understand society. Debord’s interest in military theory may be seen as continuous with a broader intellectual turn in France where “from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, with the Vietnam War also in recent memory, the topic of war began to attract the attention of a number of leading French thinkers” (Engberg-Pedersen 2022, ?).  A key figure in this context is André Glucksmann whose Discours de la guerre from 1967 took up aspects of Mao Tsé-Toung’s writings on Chinese guerilla warfare and became an intellectual touchstone for the French rethinking of strategy and war (Glucksmann 1979).

However, by contrast to Foucault or Deleuze & Guattari, who would become well-known for their repurposing of Clausewitz, Debord’s key role in the rediscovery of the “classics” of war, and hence his influence on French radical thought, remains partly obscured. Debord himself contributed to the obfuscation of his role in reconfiguring war theory for revolutionaries by withdrawing into the shadows of French public intellectual life, publishing scarcely, and conspiring with a still smaller circle of trusted comrades and friends. Debord’s correspondence with one of these comrades, Jaime Semprún, provides an interesting view into French (post)war thought.

Believing that Debord had recommended to the prestigious French publishing house Champ Libre to reject his manuscript, Semprún accused Debord of being a kind of literary puppet master working behind the scenes to actively curate the available body of knowledge to fit his particular ideas of social revolution. Debord vehemently refused to have played any such role. Interestingly, however, Debord admits in his letter to Semprún to have had a certain influence on the resurgence of classical war theory, the perspectives of which he felt had been intellectually compromised:

Concerning the majority of the re-published ‘classics’—Clausewitz, Gracian, etc.—I absolutely do not see what my revolutionary reputation might add to them and still less what they might add to my revolutionary reputation (or even to my not-too-spectacular personal notoriety), since I have kept myself far from consecrating scholarly prefaces to them or adding to them my name as the person responsible for the collection or any other affair. Moreover, I find that all this—for the happy few who know that I recommended these books (in any case, my name is not used to recommend these books to the public)—is only testimony to a certain general culture, about which I have never sought to brag, but I do not dream of being embarrassed about it due to Vincenno-cadrist illiteracy (Debord 1976).[ii]

Though he preferred to take no credit for it, Debord was in fact, indirectly, responsible for the republishing of major works of strategy by Clausewitz and others during the 1970s. But his interest in war theory reaches much further back, to the 1950s if not before. In fact, by 1965 Debord devised his own wargame, called Kriegsspiel; a ludic device to aid strategic thinking that Debord and the Chinese born situationist Alice Becker-Ho, later Alice Debord, would play together and about which they would co-author an entire book (Becker-Ho and Debord 2006). The literature on Debord’s wargame is vast, and growing, and for the tech savvy there’s even a digital version of the game available (Guy 2020; A. Galloway 2022; A. R. Galloway 2021).

One little-noted fact in the history of Debord’s war game, however, is that the 1963 “prototype” for this game was produced by fellow situationist René Viénet (Guy 2018, 466). This is an  interesting detail in the context of De Boever’s thinking about Jullien as Viénet was, incidentally, a sinologist like Jullien, and a quite influential sinologist at that. Viénet, then, was perhaps not only “the main person responsible for informing the Situationist understanding of Maoist China” but also in all likelihood one of the main avenues through which the stream from French radical thought flew back to inform, and shape, the ideas and intellectual problematics of someone like Jullien (Zacarias 2020, 224).[iii] Whether or not Jullien’s conception of Chinese strategy as starting from “the potential inherent in the situation” [Jullien qtd. De Boever     ] was shaped by situationist thought is less important than the fact that certain ancient Chinese ideas about the “vagaries of Nature” clearly resonated in French postwar thought. Debord, for one, seems to latch on to the Daoist elements in Sun Tse’s Art of War, noting how “an army’s form resembles water” and “an army is exactly comparable to water because in the same way as a stream flows around peaks and throws itself down slopes, an army avoids strength and strikes weakness” (Debord 2018, 317–18).

Interesting as it would be to trace the connection between Debord, Viénet, and Jullien in more detail, I want to end by shifting the methodological lens from the study of the historical transmission and evolution of ideas to the material and social conditions that produced these ideas in the first place. As already suggested, Debord’s interest in war did not arise in a vacuum but was defined by the backdrop of decolonization struggles, colonial violence and anti-colonialist liberation wars. If one studies Debord’s work there is frequent reference to anti-colonial struggles abroad in for instance Algeria, or in Congo, where the spontaneous revolts led by Patrice Lumumba was hailed as the only ‘worthy sequel’ to the interwar periods revolutionary avantgarde movements (Smith 2013, 70; Yoon 2013; Routhier 2023, 205–6). Within the constraints of this brief response, let me just gesture towards some of the existing literature on the situationists’ internationalist anti-colonialism (Dolto and Moussa 2020; Corrêra 2023). But even gesturing points us further in the right direction, I think, and helps shift the perspective from the history of ideas à la Foucault to the Marxist viewpoint of social antagonism and class war à la Debord. Method, in short, is also always a question of strategy.

From the viewpoint of social antagonism the question is perhaps not so much whether Jullien’s reconfiguring of Sun Tzi and the “wu wei” doctrine impacted or influenced neoliberal management theory. I think De Boever very convincingly shows that he probably did. What seems more urgent to ask, pace De Boever, is why a French sinologist like Jullien comes to ventriloquize Capital? Why is the reemergence of Sun Tzi’s theory of war conspicuously coterminous with the rise of neoliberalism? To what extent do the changes in the organic composition of capital during the postwar decades change the terms and conditions (literally and figuratively) of class war? And, most importantly: what is the proper strategic response for those happy few of us who would like to think, in the stinging words of Junius Frey, “that the encounter between traditional Chinese thought and the European tradition can be something more than a spiritual supplement for functionaries on the rise, à la François Jullien” (Frey 2021).[iv]

Dominique Routhier is a researcher, writer, and critic based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has most recently published the book With and Against: the Situationist International in the Age of Automation (Verso, 2023).

References

Becker-Ho, Alice, and Guy Debord. 2006. Le jeu de la guerre: relevé des positions successives de toutes les forces au cours d’une partie. Paris: Gallimard.

Corrêra, Erick. 2023. “The Internationalist Anti-Colonialism of the Situationists.” Brooklyn Rail, February 2023. https://brooklynrail.org/2023/02/.

Debord, Guy. 1976. “Letter to Jaime Semprún,” September 26, 1976. https://www.notbored.org/debord-26December1976.html.

———. 2018. Stratégie. La librairie de Guy Debord. Paris: Éditions L’Échappée.

Dolto, Sophie, and Nedjib Sidi Moussa. 2020. “The Situationists’ Anti-Colonialism: An Internationalist Perspective.” In The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook, edited by Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias, 103–17. London: Pluto Press.

Engberg-Pedersen, Anders. 2022. “War and French Theory.” In War and Literary Studies, edited by Anders Engberg-Pedersen and Neil Ramsey, 85–101. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Frey, Junius. 2021. “Sketch of a Communist Political Doctrine.” Ill Will, September. https://illwill.com/sketch-of-a-communist-political-doctrine.

Galloway, Alexander. 2022. “How I Modeled Guy Debord’s Brain in Software.” ROM Chip: A Journal of Game Histories 4 (1). https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal/article/view/162#fn-d0da464098a70e702cbc1660bb575977.

Galloway, Alexander R. 2021. Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age. Brooklyn, NY: Verso.

Glucksmann, André. 1979. Le discours de la guerre. Paris: Grasset.

Guy, Emmanuel. 2018. “Postface.” In Stratégie, by Guy Debord. La librairie de Guy Debord. Paris: Éditions L’Échappée.

———. 2020. Le Jeu de La Guerre de Guy Debord: L’émancipation Comme Projet. Paris: B42.

Routhier, Dominique. 2023. With and against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation. London ; New York: Verso.

Smith, Jason E. 2013. “Missed Encounters: Critique de La Séparation between the Riot and the ‘Young Girl.’” Grey Room (July): 62–81. https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00116.

Yoon, Soyoung. 2013. “Cinema against the Permanent Curfew of Geometry: Guy Debord’s Sur Le Passage de Quelques Personnes à Travers Une Assez Courte Unité de Temps (1959).” Grey Room (July): 38–61. https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00115.

Zacarias, Gabriel. 2020. “Détournement in Language and the Visual Arts.” In The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook, edited by Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias, 214–35. London: Pluto Press.

Zamora, Daniel, and Michael C. Behrent, eds. 2016. Foucault and Neoliberalism. Malden (Mass.): Polity press.

[i] I would like to thank Jason Smith for insights and improvements on a draft version of this text.

[ii] The term Vincenno-cadrist refers to those employed at the Centre universitaires de Vincennes, which was established in 1968 as a response to the Parisian student protests of May ’68. In the early 1970s, Vincennes was a maoist hotbed for much of what would become known as “French Theory.”

[iii] Worth mentioning here is also Simon Leys’ (the pen name of Pierre Ryckmans) important anti-maoist book Les Habits neufs du président Mao (Paris: Champ libre, 1971).

[iv] For a more nuanced assessment of François Jullien’s thought and its critical relevance, see Arne De Boever’s François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought: A Critical Introduction (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).

This article was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier. The dossier includes a response to this article by Dominique Routhier.

“Read Sun Zi”

I want to begin with a bit of locker-room talk I came across when I was doing the primary research for my book Finance Fictions (Boever 2018).[1] It’s a scene from Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (Fox, 1987). The scene shows the by now infamous trader Gordon Gekko (memorably portrayed by Michael Douglas), quoting Sun Zi, the ancient Chinese military general and strategist of war,[2] to explain his trading strategy. “Every battle is won before it’s ever fought”, Gekko tells Buddy Fox (played by Charlie Sheen). “Think about it”. The question I want to ask is simple: why is Gekko, a trader, quoting Sun Zi’s The Art of War? Why is Gekko telling us to place our bets on Sun Zi? Let’s think about it, as Gekko suggests.

I’ve started doing this in a roundabout way, through a reading of the French philosopher—Hellenist and sinologist—François Jullien (see Boever 2020).[3] Jullien is a controversial figure, and you’ll probably gather from what follows why that is so; but his work can also be helpful, I want to show, in understanding the appearance of Sun Zi in Stone’s Wall Street. Ultimately, I will also expand my frame of reference beyond finance and think about Sun Zi’s relation to theories of neoliberal government. In fact, if you’ve read some of the literature on finance and neoliberalism, chances are that you’ve come across references to Sun Zi.

Consider another example from a very different but, I would argue, related context: in To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee references Sun Zi multiple times—including, by the way, the quote “to ‘win the battle before the battle’” (Invisible Committee 2015, 137)—to theorize what earlier in the book they understand to be (silently echoing the work of Michel Foucault) neoliberal governance. When they list a range of adjectives to characterize this type of governance, they use “flexible, plastic, informal” and “Taoist” (68). Why “Taoist”?

And to return to finance, and financial fiction: when in Tash Aw’s finance novel Five Star Billionaire, the Shanghai businesswoman (and former left-wing activist) Yinghui Leong attends an event where she is nominated for the “Businesswoman of the Year awards”, Aw lets us know that “the ceremony was held in the ballroom of a hotel … decorated with huge bouquets of pink flowers and banners bearing quotes from Sunzi’s The Art of War: OPPORTUNITIES MULTIPLY AS THEY ARE SEIZED. A LEADER LEADS BY EXAMPLE, NOT FORCE” (Aw 53). Why Sun Zi at this awards ceremony? That is what I propose to think about.

In Management as in War

So, first: Jullien. In an interview with Richard Piorunski that was published in the journal Ebisu in 1998, Jullien states the following (the translation here is mine as in almost all of the other quotations that I’ll be using): “I’ve accompanied French businesses in China to help them negotiate. There are strategies, ancient, classical Chinese strategies, to which the Chinese will stick” (Piorunski 1998, 173). How did Jullien, a sinologist and philosopher, end up accompanying French businesses in China? As Jullien himself indicates in the interview, his presence in China at the side of French businesses is due to his work on efficacy. This work extends over three volumes. There was, first, the book The Propensity of Things, which (as per its subtitle) proposed to work “Toward a History of Efficacy in China” (Jullien 1995). This was followed by the much shorter A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking (Jullien 2004), which explicitly continued the thinking of the earlier book. (Both of those titles have been translated into English.) Finally, there is Jullien’s still untranslated Conférence sur l’efficacité [Lecture on Efficacy] (Jullien 2005), which is even shorter and also more informal in tone, closer to the mode of oral delivery. The title of the book’s German translation is more revealing about the origin of this particular work: Vortrag vor Managern über Wirksamkeit und Effizienz in China und im Westen (Jullien 2006)—in other words: Lecture for Managers on Efficacy and Efficiency in China and the West.

What began as a historical, and densely academic project in Propensity of Things about the notion of potentiality in Chinese thinking evidently morphed over time into a much less dense, much less formal lecture for managers about efficacy and efficiency. The book in the middle, Treatise on Efficacy, is about “warfare, power, and speech” (Jullien 2004, ix). But its opening question already anticipates the later Lecture for Managers: “What do we mean”, Jullien asks there, “when we say that something has ‘potential’—not ‘a potential for’ but an absolute potential—for example [he writes] a market with a potential, a developing business with a potential?” (vii) Treatise might be a book about war, but the theory of war it develops is framed as an inquiry into economic potential, into the potential of a business. Clearly, whatever Jullien will have to say in the book about war is presented as applying to business as well. In management as in war, one might say—a parallelism that I’ll want to extend here to “In finance as in war” and also to “In neoliberalism as in war”. But what would be the content of such a parallel construction? Everything depends here on one’s theory and practice of war.

To give some substance to the parallelism “In management as in war”, I am going to look primarily at the relatively unknown (and untranslated) Lecture for Managers. Lecture reads like an informal summary of Treatise, in other words it’s very much a lecture on war. But this is perhaps not its key concern. If it comes to naming the precise connection between military theory and management theory, it is not so much the notion of “war” as that of “strategy” that is most relevant. Indeed, at its most philosophical, the Lecture seeks to open a divergence between Western and Chinese strategies for bringing something about—strategies for efficacy, as the title of both Treatise and Lecture suggest. At this level, the central question of both the Treatise and the Lecture is not essentially related to war at all; rather, it’s because theories of efficacy have been developed mostly in theories of war that Jullien turns to those to lay out his thinking about efficacy.

After some preliminary remarks that lay out his method and address, indirectly, criticisms that have been levelled at his work, Jullien arrives in his Lecture at what he understands to be the Western approach to efficacy, which constructs a model, plan, or ideal form (eidos, to use the Platonic term) to achieve a goal (telos). Once that’s done, the subject acts according to this plan, seeking to achieve the set goal. He argues that the Western thought of war demonstrates this logic, all the way up to Carl von Clausewitz, who appears in both the Lecture and Treatise as a kind of hinge figure. This is because the late 18^th-, early 19^th-century Prussian general and military theorist both presents us with Western warfare-by-modelization, if you will, and realizes its limits, namely the fact that no war will match the model, plan, or ideal form—the geometry—that has been set for it. Jullien points out that this kind of objection to Plato already starts with Aristotle, who is much more attuned to what escapes the model (Jullien 2005, 17).

Already with Aristotle then, but this becomes particularly visible in Clausewitz, there is a gap that opens up between the theory and the practice of warfare—“[t]o think about warfare is to think about the extent to which it is bound to betray the ideal concept of it” (Jullien 2004, 11)–and it’s this gap that opens up a point of contact with the Chinese theory of warfare. Clausewitz is particularly attuned to the gap between theoretical and practical war, and theorizes what he calls the “friction” (26) between the model and the reality of it. This is the cross that the Western theory of war has to bear. But Jullien uses this realization, which comes from a gap within the Western theory of war, to jump to Chinese theories of war by Sun Zi (and Sun Bin).

Jullien points out, when he begins to discuss these authors, that “today many managers take inspiration from these authors without understanding them well, both in Europe and in Japan. Those are managers ‘à la Sun Zi’” (Jullien 2005, 29). Chinese strategy, Jullien explains, starts from the potential of a situation (30), from the shi of a situation as he discussed it in Propensity. “[I]nstead of imposing our plan upon the world, we could rely on the potential inherent in the situation” (Jullien 2004, 16). What happens in war—the efficacy achieved in war—needs to be understood as the actualization of that potential, as the natural outcome of the situation (Jullien 2005, 32). Most important when going to war is not to make a model, plan, or ideal Form, but to evaluate the situation and its potential (33): a good general will understand the potential of a situation to such an extent that, when they engage in war, the outcome of the war is entirely predetermined—the situation could not allow it develop otherwise (35). As Jullien explains, because the Chinese theory of warfare focuses on evaluating the potential of the situation rather than making a model, there is zero uncertainty about the outcome it anticipates (the outcome is “unswerving, “inevitable”, determined before the battle, etc. [42]). Whereas in the West, war is haunted by the language of chance, necessitating a plea to the gods through sacrifice for example to try to obtain a desirable outcome, Jullien points out that Sun Zi’s Art of War explicitly forbids this, because nothing in warfare should be exterior to the logic of a situation (35). It’s about a certain kind of attunement with reality that enables one to allow reality to follow its path, its course, its dao, but to one’s advantage in war. Chinese warfare is not warfare-by-modelization but warfare-by-regulation, and the dao is what regulates all things. (The model for this is in fact respiration, breathing in and out.)

If the Western model (and in the opposition that’s developed here you can of course see some of what critics like Edward Slingerland deem to be Jullien’s orientalism at work[4]) is telos-oriented and governed by a means-ends logic, Jullien points out that such an architecture cannot be found on the Chinese side (where we have “set-up” and “efficacy” instead), even if that does not mean it is illogical. Rather, efficacy is achieved by allowing the consequences of a situation to come to fruition or maturation. There is no heroism associated with generals, there is no glory in managing a business. It has nothing sensationalist to it: effective victories remain unseen[5] and they ought, in fact, to be easy: indeed, they merely realize to a business’ advantage the logic that already lay contained in nature. A manager does not so much “do” or “act”, they don’t “force”.[6]

To overstate the case somewhat, one might describe this as a theory of “non-action”,[7] as Jullien does in both the Lecture and the Treatise (Jullien 2004, 84-103). (It’s worth pointing out that this term “non-action” translates the key daoist notion of “wu wei” that you find in my title, and to which I’ll return later.) It would be more precise, however, to substitute “non-action” by “action through non-action” or “transformation” in this context: the Chinese general—like the Chinese sage, in fact–does not so much do nothing but seeks to discreetly “transform” their adversary rather than confront them head-on. After all, the Chinese model, as Jullien points out, still “leaves plenty of room for human initiative” (Jullien 1995, 203). Nevertheless, if “action” in Jullien’s summary is “of the moment”, “local”, and “subject-related”, “transformation” is “global”, “durational” and “discreet”—it does not necessarily refer back to a subject.[8] While such transformation is efficacious, it takes place “silently” (58), unnoticed. The strategy of transformation breaks with the Western mythology of “the event” (58-62), which is closely related to Christianity in Jullien’s analysis. It’s the Vietnam war, and specifically the strategy of the Vietnamese, that illustrates this best. To win without battle (an overstatement, surely?): instead, there is “a process of progressive erosion, of making the adversary lose countenance” (61), which Jullien associates with “psychological warfare” (61). In the West, warfare amounts to destruction. But in the Chinese theory of warfare, losses ought to be avoided, and on both sides: in war, it’s preferable to leave the troops intact (62; Jullien 2004, 47). He associates this with deconstruction rather than destruction (Jullien 2004, 48).[9] As Jullien also puts it in Treatise: “nothing could be more economical” (48). And indeed, we should not forget that Jullien is offering all of this theory of Chinese warfare in the context of a Lecture for Managers. Management is a little like psychological warfare, he appears to be saying; you’re trying to de-countenance your adversary not through action but silent transformation. That’s what management is all about.

Path into China

Given the above overview, I suppose it should come as no surprise that research on Jullien will turn up articles written by military officers and business leaders.[10] Of Jullien’s reception in management theory, I’ll discuss just one example, Dominique Poiroux’s “En quête de la voie en Chine” (“In search of the path in/into China”), published in the Journal de l’école de Paris du management. Poiroux is credited simply by the name of the business for whom at the end of 2002, he left to China: “Danone” (Poiroux 2007, 8). The article summarizes his experiences in 8 sections whose titles operate as statements summarizing their main advice. Let me list them to give an idea of their range:

• “Cent jours pour écouter” (“One hundred days for listening”)
• “Prendre du recul” (“Taking a step back”)
• “Gagner du temps” (“Gaining time”)
• “Si l’ennemi ne peut être arrêté, préparer une alliance” (“If the enemy can’t be stopped, prepare an alliance”)
• “Rester humble au quotidien” (“Stay modest in relation to the everyday Chinese person”)
• “Un demi-effort, cent succès; cent efforts, un demi-succès” (the Chinese proverb is included in transcribed Chinese as well: “shi ban gong bei; shi bei gong ban”; “half an effort, one hundred successes; one hundred efforts, half a success”)
• “Se séparer d’un collaborateur, mais rester bons amis” (“Separating oneself from a collaborator, while staying good friends”)
• and finally “Savoir se laisser mener en bateau” (here too, in the transcribed Chinese: “man tian guo hai”; “letting oneself be guided in a boat”).

Rather than explain all of these, I want to note that the first section of Poiroux’s article explicitly credits a lot of these wisdoms to Jullien, with Poiroux writing that Jullien’s book Treatise on Efficacy will often be quoted in the sections that follow. He does not clarify what Jullien’s book is about—war–, only that while he will be applying it to management, “it was not at all written in that context” (Poiroux 2007, 9). It’s worth noting that this is in fact an overstatement: as I’ve discussed, Jullien’s book is explicitly framed through a question about the potential of a business and it includes several references to the economic realm and management strategy. That Jullien’s book is a work of military theory certainly becomes visible in the short section titles that I’ve listed: suddenly, the Danone business leader can use the military language of “enmity” and “alliance” to summarize his management advice. It’s remarkable, I think, that there is no reflection on this shift in the article: it shows to what extent the presence of military language is simply accepted in this context as the language of management. “Strategy” seamlessly crosses here from military into management theory, anecdotes from military history are without any friction applied in the context of management and as part of the broader project of explaining to Western business leaders how to find a “path” in or into China, as the article title puts it. The use of the term “path” by the way is itself significant: it is a rather obvious pun on the Chinese notion of the dao, the path or way that is the flow of all things; but it is repurposed here as part of a Western business strategy for gaining an economic foothold in China.

Many other articles can be found to illustrate the easy exchange between military theory and management theory, which revolves around the term “strategy”. While those never demonstrate any deep engagement with Jullien’s work (often they aren’t even context-specific), the casual references to his thought are many and contribute to the development not only of business strategies in China specifically but—and this is worth emphasizing–of management theory in general. This is different from Poiroux’s use of Jullien in a specifically Chinese situation. China’s non-Western model of warfare as it is exposed in Jullien’s Treatise becomes highly productive both within Jullien’s work (where it leads to his Lecture) but also outside of it, in its reception in management studies, as part of the development of contemporary management strategies not just for China but at large.

Wu Wei and Laissez-Faire

This is where I want to expand the frame of reference beyond management to theories of neoliberal government. For there are elements in the Chinese theory of war that resonate with what one might call today’s neoliberal government. I can argue this theoretically, but I want to do so historically as well in order to give some factual, non-speculative grounding to this proposition.

Consider for example the chapter “Do Nothing (With Nothing Left Undone)” in Jullien’s Treatise, where Jullien as elsewhere in his work suggests that one of the models for efficacy (both in war and elsewhere) is “the growth of plants” (you will find this model discussed in the work of the later Confucian Mong Zi or Mencius, by the way) (Jullien 2004, 90). This is because

one must neither pull on plants to hasten their growth (an image of direct action), nor must one fail to hoe the earth around them so as to encourage their growth (by creating favorable conditions for it). You cannot force a plant to grow, but neither should you neglect it. What you should do is liberate it from whatever might impede its development. You must allow it to grow. Such tactics are equally effective at the level of politics. A good prince … is a ruler who, by eliminating constraints and exclusions, makes it possible for all that exists to develop as suits it. His acting-without-action amounts to a kind of laisser-faire [my emphasis, ADB] but not to a policy of doing nothing at all. (91)

The idea is repeated in explicitly political terms later on, in the chapter “Allow Effects to Come About”. With respect to political reality, Jullien writes:

The excessive fullness that burdens it is, as we have seen, that of regulations and prohibitions that, as they multiply, end up weighing society down so that it is impossible for it to evolve as it should. An emptiness needs to be created, those regulations must be evacuated, to allow reality the space in which it can take off. For as soon as nothing is codified any more (codification being nothing but a reification of fullness), because nothing any longer bars the way to initiative, this can deploy itself sponte sua. In the emptiness created by the removal of prohibitions and regulations, all that is necessary is to allow things to happen, to allow them to pass through, so that action now occurs without activity. (112)

Even if both of these quotes seem to include an idea of freedom (with the verb “liberate” being used explicitly in the first), one should not get the wrong idea here: it is by allowing the plant to grow, and to develop sponte sua, that the Chinese politician exercises control. So you get a strange situation where the notion of action through non-action, or wu wei, becomes a model for the control exercised by a laisser-faire government. This is the particular exercise of sovereign power that the ancient Chinese sages recommend.

With respect to this phrase laisser faire/ laissez-faire, I have to include here a brief historical note about its origins.[11] I do so specifically because of laissez-faire’s importance in contemporary analyses of neoliberalism. It is worth noting that the phrase laissez-faire originates in the 18^th-century French economist François Quesnay’s writings on Chinese despotism. Indeed, “laissez faire” is a French translation of the Chinese notion of “wu wei”, which means—as I’ve already discussed–“without exertion” and is closely associated with the Chinese understanding of effective government. Certainly when the phrase laisser faire appears in Jullien, in a chapter titled “Do Nothing (With Nothing Left Undone)”, that is where we should situate its origins. But as such, the notion’s appearance in Jullien can of course not be disentangled from its translation into the work of Quesnay, and by extension the work of the French physiocrats, whose ideas about the “natural”, “spontaneously” self-regulating market producing the natural “true price” of a good, so interested Michel Foucault in both Security, Territory, Population [1977-1978] (Foucault 2007) (which dedicates a lecture to the physiocrats [Foucault 2007, 55-86]) as well as The Birth of Biopolitics [1978-1979] (Foucault 2008) (which recalls Foucault’s earlier discussion of the physiocrats [Foucault 2008, 30-37]). (As far as I know, Foucault does not mention the phrase’s origins in wu wei; Roland Barthes’ course on The Neutral, however, from 1977-1978 (Barthes 2005) [in other words, at the same as the lectures by Foucault just mentioned] does include a [superficial—as far as I can tell, Barthes relies on a single, secondary source] engagement with Daoism and a discussion of wu wei.) It is this idea of wu wei or laisser faire/ laissez-faire that according to many would later on lead to Adam Smith’s notion of the invisible hand (liberalism/ neoliberalism); at the same time, one might find it present in Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the panopticon as well (sovereignty). These are by no means the only political interpretations that have been given of wu wei: it’s most commonly been associated with political anarchism.

There are at least two things we learn from this genealogy. First of all, wu wei/ laisser faire—and by extension neoliberalism–is a practice of power. Second, it does not mean doing nothing: whatever you understand by “let it be” needs to add up to a practice of acting otherwise, of acting through not-acting (enlarging what’s already happening in nature rather than forcefully going against it). Putting one and two together, we can say that wu wei/ laisser faire names a practice of power that self-occludes. This explains the references to Sun Zi and to Daoism in The Invisible Committee’s To Our Friends, when a theory of neoliberal government is laid out.

At this point we are also in a position to understand why Lao Zi, whose Dao De Jing is in spite of its mere few thousand words the foundational text of Daoism, can be appreciatively quoted in Ronald Reagan’s “State of the Union” address from 1988. The line Reagan quotes about 5 minutes into the address is: “Govern a great nation like you would cook a small fish; do not overdo it”. One year before, Gekko had already quoted Sun Zi, and specifically the idea of wu wei in Sun Zi, in Stone’s Wall Street. Applying wu wei to trading, Gekko appears to place himself precisely within the understanding of neoliberal laissez-faire that I am uncovering here. “I don’t throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things. Read Sun Zi, The Art of War: ‘Every battle is won before it’s ever fought’. Think about it”. If “probability theory” in Jullien’s view is one of the ways in which the West dealt with the tension, central to Clausewitz’ thought, between absolute and real war (Jullien 2004, 42)—and there is a great book on this by the Danish scholar Anders Engberg-Pedersen (Engberg-Pederson 2015)–, Chinese strategy by contrast “has always avoided” “the kind of gamble accompanied by risk and danger” (Jullien 2004, 82).

In today’s situation of neoliberal government, in which the overlap of finance and politics has only intensified, references to Sun Zi have also abounded, and much remains to be explored. In the Introduction to her recent new translation of The Art of War, Michael Nylan points out that “[e]ven before becoming president, Donald Trump tweeted Sunzi wisdom to his followers” (Nylan 2020, 18). Nylan continues:

            Trump, unlikely to have read The Art of War, included enthusiasts in his administration. Steve Bannon was a missionary for Sunzi. Sebastian Gorka, former deputy assistant to the president, sported a vanity license plate: “Art War”. (18)

Nylan also quotes James Mattis’ comment that while “the Army was always big on Clausewitz … the Marine Corps has always been more Eastern-oriented” (18). Semper Sun Zi.

Is Wu Wei Neoliberal?

There is a whole other discussion that I’m not completely ready to engage with about whether wu wei is indeed neoliberal—about whether wu wei’s translation into laissez faire and laissez faire’s translation into neoliberalism does indeed hold water. The issue is, perhaps unsurprisingly in the case of a translation like this across time and space, complicated. Although wu wei is typically considered to be a daoist notion (you’ll find both verbal and nominal wu-forms throughout the daoist corpus), it also explicitly appears once in Confucius’ Analects, which in fact mobilizes the notion of wu wei to capture a model of government where the people are not so much guided through “coercive regulations” and “punishments” but by “virtue” (Confucius 2003, 175)—by the ruler projecting virtuous behavior that would then trickle down to their subjects (what one might call today “trickle-down morality”). “Ritual”, not law, is in Confucius’ book, what keeps the people in line. At first sight, this emphasis on virtue may not sound very neoliberal, but that could only be a provisional conclusion: scholars like Melinda Cooper and Wendy Brown have shown, in their books Family Values and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, how crucial conservative morality is to neoliberal government (Cooper 2017; Brown 2019). Today, of course, this insistence on morality has become hollowed out: Brown writes of a merely “contractual use” of morality by today’s neoliberalism, and this is certainly one of the meanings her book’s title (that we are living in the ruins of the neoliberalism).

Interestingly, the Confucians were precisely accused of such a hollowing out of morality—of morality becoming pure form, devoid of content—by the daoists, who ridiculed what they understood to be the performance of empty ritual. They have been associated, rather, with political anarchism (Ames and Hall 2003, 14; 102), an association that I think moves too far in the other direction since it does not capture the ways in which wu wei’s action through non-action is actually a hierarchical practice of power. (On this count, however, we would need a more extensive discussion of anarchism and its meanings. But it seems this is the obvious reason why The Invisible Committee uses “Taoist” as an adjective to characterize neoliberal government, and not their own anarchist practice.)

The later Confucian Mong Zi or Mencius famously opens his book with a rejection of those who put profit over righteousness: “Why must your majesty speak of profit [he asks King Hui of Liang]? Let there simply be benevolence and righteousness” (Mengzi 2008, 1). Importantly, however, this is not a rejection of those who seek profit as such—only of those who place that pursuit over being benevolent and righteous. Mong Zi’s English translator, the eminent sinologist Bryan Van Norden, summarizes Mong Zi’s position as follows:

Mencius taught that those who are talented have an obligation to use their skills for the betterment of society and not merely their own self-aggrandizement. He said that we must look without ourselves to find our best inclinations and develop them. He argued that loving families with good values produce caring adults who have integrity. He asserted that government must aim at the well-being of all the people not just the well-off. He declared that rulers who punish those who steal because they live in poverty and lack education are merely setting traps for the people. He claimed that war is a final resort that usually causes more troubles than it solves. (Mengzi 2008, 197)

As I’ve already said, the emphasis on “loving families” and “good values” does not necessarily take us out of neoliberalism. But perhaps the focus on “the betterment of society” and the positioning against “self-aggrandizement” do; perhaps the focus on “integrity” (the position against “corruption”) does, too. Most striking here I find the proposition that government must aim at the well-being of all, not just the well-off, and should not punish those who steal because they are poor or uneducated: instead, the implication goes, the government should make sure everyone is educated and lives a good life.

It seems then, that wu wei is not quite comfortably at home on Wall Street, even if (as I’ve shown) it contains quite a few elements that have enabled many to situate it there.

Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts (USA), where for over a decade he also directed the MA Aesthetics and Politics program. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and translations, as well as several books on contemporary comparative fiction and political and aesthetic philosophy. His most recent books are Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought: A Critical Introduction (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), and Being Vulnerable: Contemporary Political Thought (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023).

References

Ames, Roger and David Hall, eds. Dao De Jing: “Making This Life Significant” (A Philosophical Translation). Trans. Roger Ames and David Hall. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003.

Aw, Tash. Five Star Billionaire. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2014.

Barthes, Roland. The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978. Trans. Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

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

—. François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought: A Critical Introduction. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.

Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Confucius. Analects. Trans. Edward Slingerland. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003.

Cooper, Melinda. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. New York: Zone Books, 2017.

Engberg-Pederson, Anders. Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2007.

—. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2008.

The Invisible Committee. To Our Friends. Trans. Robert Hurley. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015.

Jullien, François. The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China. Trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1995.

—. A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004.

—. Conférence sur l’efficacité. Paris: PUF, 2005.

—. Vortrag vor Managern über Wirksamkeit und Effizienz in China und im Westen. Trans. Ronald Vouillé. Leipzig:  Merve, 2006.

Mengzi. Mengzi. With Selections From Traditional Commentaries. Trans. Bryan W. Van Norden. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008.

Nylan, Michael. “Introduction”. In: Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Trans. Michael Nylan. New York: Norton, 2020. 9-34.

Piorunski, Richard. “Le détour d’un grec par la Chine. Entretien avec François Jullien.” Ebisu 18 (1998): 147-185.

Poiroux, Dominique. “En quête de la voie en Chine”. Journal de l’école de Paris du management 2: 64 (2007): 8-15.

[1] This text was first presented at a boundary 2 conference at the University of Pittsburgh in Fall 2019 (thank you Paul Bové for the invitation). I later presented revised versions of it at the “Finance and Fictions” event at the California Institute of the Arts in January 2020, and at Syddansk Universitet in Fall 2022 (thank you Anders Engberg-Pederson for the invitation). I would like to express my gratitude to the audiences at those various occasions—which included, in Denmark, my respondent in this forum, Dominique Routhier–for their comments and questions.

[2] The authorship of The Art of War is uncertain as in the case of many ancient texts.

[3] See: Boever 2020. Most of this text is based on what was later published as chapter three of this book, titled “In Management as in War”.

[4] I have commented on this at length in: Boever 2020, Chapter 1.

[5] Ibid., 42.

[6] Ibid., 45.

[7] Ibid., 53.

[8] Jullien, Conférence, 56.

[9] Ibid., 48.

[10] I don’t have time to discuss to military uses of his thought here (on this, see: Boever 2020), but based on articles that I’ve found I conclude that his Treatise is frequently assigned as reading at military academies.

[11] I want to thank Andrew Culp for initially guiding me in this direction.