Critical Finance studies

Julia Leyda focuses on the sitcom Arrested Development and the ground-breaking drama Breaking Bad. Both shows portray the moral and ethical laxity—in the business world and in US-American society and the family—that would later be invoked as the fulcrum of popular understanding of the economic crisis. However, both also depict the commonplace neoliberal appeals to self-improvement and individual responsibility that provided justification for the risky financial behavior that fueled the housing boom and ultimately brought down the economy. Leyda examines the ways in which the material and emotional spaces of the home were opened up to public scrutiny during the early years of the millennium, revealing the ways in which financialization had begun to permeate televised domestic spaces in the USA.

This special issue explores how finance deploys time, structures the future, and interacts with actors and institutions that sometimes function according to very different temporal regimes. Finance capitalism's logic of recurrence, repetitive cycles, and successive ruptures has long been with us, but the essays in this special issue are particularly interested in how recent decades of intensified financialization have restructured temporal experience. They interrogate the production and dissemination of agency in an age of acceleration, risk, and uncertainty, asking how the temporality inscribed in financial transactions emerges from and simultaneously shapes individual and social practice. Topics covered range from the logic of finance and foundational concepts of financial theory to the intersection between objective structures and social practice, the role of literature, and finally questions of social insecurity, political action, and the possibility of resistance within a context of competing temporalities. In this introduction, the editors delineate some fundamental concepts and questions for our financial times.

This essay reads novels responding to the 2008 financial crisis against the backdrop of competing definitions of risk and uncertainty in our financialized economies. Whereas finance produces profits by turning future uncertainty into stochastically modeled, tradable risk categories, Ulrich Beck’s “world risk society” is haunted by the anticipation of non-computable catastrophes. Disavowing such radical uncertainty and allowing only for a probabilistically variable continuation of the present, financialization effectively forecloses the future while it also invades daily life. Financial risk-taking has been reframed as a precondition for success and self-acquisition—a promise that the recent financial crisis crushed for many. The representative contemporary subjectivities therefore alternate between the self-managing agent navigating global financial flows and the “indebted man” caught between the moral obligation to honor his debt and apparatuses of social control (Lazzarato). Paul Auster’s Sunset Park and David Eggers’s Hologram for the King address the interplay of risk and uncertainty, our cultural investments in the future, and the divergent and gendered poles of financial subjectivity in the wake of the financial crisis. Dwelling in an “aesthetic of uncertainty” (Heise) and presenting a crisis of masculinity, these novels’ nostalgia is representative of a wider cultural response to the uncertainty brought on by the triumph of financialization and the failures of the financial markets. If finance transforms future uncertainty into present risk, nostalgia in these novels projects an idealized past to deal with present uncertainty. In turn, the nostalgia for an economy grounded in material production in these novels creates a space of resistance vis-à-vis the logic and temporality of finance and potentially generates alternative, open, and indeed uncertain, futures.

Can we rethink the ‘disruption’ of money from another perspective? Many of us have been educated or habituated to look upon money as the powerful see it: either as a neutral tool of commerce or as a useful lever for the transformation of society. What if we learned to see money from a different viewpoint, for instance from the perspective of those for whom money has always felt like a whip, a thief, or a bad lover? This might prove necessary if we truly want to disrupt money in ways that look to the kind of common egalitarian horizons the world so desperately needs. I share some optimism that new digital technology will open new methods for coordinating and sharing the fruits of human cooperation—an almost sacred role our societies have increasingly trusted to capitalist forms of money, backed by state power. But, I am concerned that the common discourses surrounding blockchains, cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and similar emergent technologies – which often posit themselves as revolutions in money, payments, and economics – all too often replicate the perspectives of the powerful and, as such, threaten (often against their designers’ or proponents’ intentions) to either supplement or supplant the ruling state-capitalist power nexus, rather than to abolish it.
In this chapter, I look at money ‘from below’ to problematize our utopian dreams so that we might dream more dangerously together. I take up the almost forgotten examples of convict love tokens, hobo nickels and Notgeld to illustrate how proletarian subjects have transformed money into an experimental medium of mutual aid, class struggle and solidarity, representing a ‘hidden ledger’ of meaningful ‘disruptive innovation’ that can inspire us today.

This essay examines the political theology of credit and debt in contemporary fiction and politics. It examines work by Karen Bender, Don DeLillo, and Gary Shteyngart, focusing on the ways in which the represent the connection between financialization and personhood. The essay argues that the critical function of these fictions lies in their questioning of the moral economy of finance, specifically, their critique of the redemptive logics of finance. This critique situates itself on a biopolitical level insofar as finance becomes a question of mortality, survival, fantasies of immortality, and racialization.

This article is a re-evaluation of recent discourses around financial subjectivity and debt, popularised in the wake of the 2008 crash, from the perspective of critical media studies. Through an examination of the history and development of the Nasdaq market - the world’s first electronic stock exchange which came to serve as the engine for the ‘New Economy’ and the dot-com boom of the 1990s - this paper complicates recent theoretical conversations around the way that financial capitalism shapes political subjects in the neoliberal era in order to take into account the machinic and pre-individual operations of financial markets and the computational infrastructures that undergird them. It argues that the Nasdaq offers insight into the unfolding of a unique socio-technical apparatus that defines contemporary capitalism, one not adequately accounted for in either the popular or scholarly discourse on finance written since the crash. Paying particular attention to the role of the Nasdaq in producing the myths of the New Economy, this paper examines how the Nasdaq model was instrumental in an attempt to resolve the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. It argues that the Nasdaq marks a crucial moment in the integration of financial markets and new mechanisms of control in contemporary capitalism that work on the dividual, always rendered in a subjugated and reactive position to the flow of automated financial information.

The chapter presents two modes of critical discussions about financial models. One mode refers to criticizing finance as a science involved in developing and spreading unrealistic models that are detached from the complex reality of economic life. The proponents of this strong critical position take the "ideological" or even "political" standpoint and show how finance is always enmeshed with social and political power and contributes to inequality, unjust risk distribution, market crashes, etc. (critical as political). The other approach-as pursued, for example, by social studies of finance-shifts the attention from how financial models fail to adequately represent the economic reality to how they are used and shape, or perform, reality. The performativity approach questions the traditional representational view of finance and aims for a deeper understanding of financial practices and their interplay with models and theories (critical as analytical). The connection between the two modes in form of politics of performativity is explored.

What was actually produced when the first derivatives wriggled their way out of the conventional financial trajectories? When one understood that a transaction did not have to be a transaction of something, but that the transaction itself, which was nothing, could be transacted? And what does this tell us about the functioning of the economy? These questions will be addressed by making a detour through some passages in Aristotle’s economic writings, hoping thereby to demonstrate that financial derivation, far from being simply a hyperbolic tool of speculation, is an economic geno-practice, the productive play, the mobility itself, of economy, its inventive, deviatory clinamen or line of flight on which new ‘economies’ are engendered.

Finance as we know it emerges from early 1970’s market deregulations. It is now everywhere but is culturally accepted as a background condition for the majority not to understand. In this liberalized finance, derivatives can be understood as the core innovation to increase wealth through speculative agreements. Because they shape our cognition and social relations, the inquiry of financial derivatives is a cultural and historical problem. Whether you believe they create massive wealth, caused the latest financial crisis, or perhaps both, the impact of the derivatives is major. To understand the logic of the derivative as a cultural issue this thesis inquires which type of knowledge derivatives produce and how it does so; it explores the poetics of the derivative.

Derivatives quantize uncertainty into risks through the logic of probability in stochastic models. This calibrates the present in the aesthetics of the speculative future. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler and Edmund Husserl, this thesis analyses the derivatives as time-distributing technologies distorting our sense of time and social condition. Following Joseph Vogl’s and Randy Martin’s presentations on the market and its agents, I propose that the market understood as an equilibrium through the efficient market hypothesis shares the logic of a tautology that makes us accept fatal economic consequences as necessities under the idea of a greater good. By introducing Elie Ayache’s notion of contingency in derivative trading, the concept of probability will be deconstructed as an impossible temporal cognition, thus risk and uncertainty cannot be separated. The discussions of these topics aim to articulate that the poetics of the derivative is simultaneously participating in the temporal logic of securitization while breaking with such a position. The aggregated poetics of the derivative are used to analyze Jonas Eika’s short story “Alvin” from 2019, as it challenges how we culturally understand the abstract, economic character of the derivative. Finally, I will argue that the derivatives are characterized by heterogeneity and that they might hold the key to investigating a new model of social cognition that cannot be encapsulated by the logic of securitizing and the stability fixed in tautological market principles. Thus, we ought to no longer accept financial fatalities as a given.

(This paper is in danish)

Finance Capital & the Ghosts of Empire:
Revisiting Colonial Debts, Extractive
Nostalgias, Imperial Insolvencies
April 5th & 6th, 2019

Centre for Global Political Economy & Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Sussex
In collaboration with the Reimagining Value Action Lab, Lakehead University (Canada)

Submit an abstract by February 22 or register to attend at: https://goo.gl/forms/p2UCOxzaaKHPbnHj2

How are today’s contemporary financial practices, innovations and architectures shaped by, and how have they helped to shape, colonialism, empire and the global production of race, racism and racialization?
What does attending to colonial legacies and lineages of the sphere we now call ‘finance’ contribute to critical political economic analysis?
Likewise, how can the rigorous tools of political economy reveal the nuances and patterns of empire, historically and today?
How is the world economy, past and present haunted, culturally and materially, by the trace of racialization, enslavement, indenture and odious debt?
Can postcolonial studies and the political economy of finance be drawn into a productive dialogue?
How can such a dialogue be in a productive exchange with the forms of art and activism that challenge existing power relations?
Is a ‘decolonial’ political economy of finance possible, and what would it look like?
And how can we reframe today’s political-economic and cultural challenges, from the persistence of global financial power to the revanchism of neonationlisms in light of such investigations?

Following an initial 2017 workshop exploring Colonial Debts, Extractive Nostalgias, Imperial Insolvencies (Bourne et al. 2018), this two-day event will bring together scholars, artists and activists working in fields including but not limited to anthropology, cultural studies, history, political economy, geography and sociology.

The recognition that Empire has been consequential for the geo-political configuration of international financial markets is almost a commonplace in certain approaches to economic history (Cain & Hopkins 2016) and global political economy (Palan 2015). Likewise, scholars assembled (rightly or wrongly) under the banner of “post-colonial” approaches readily accept that finance, debt and speculation have been key aspects of the colonial and neocolonial project (Baucom 2005; Wang 2018). But invoking empire as part of capitalism’s history itself does not necessarily break free of the Eurocentric perspectives and methodologies that characterise much of political economy (Kayatekin 2009; Dale 2009). Meanwhile, much work remains to be done to fortify our growing understanding of the cultural and sociological relationships between money, risk, race and global exploitation with the tools of political economy.

This gathering responds  to recent works that have examined the role of Wall Street banks in the colonization of the Caribbean (Hudson 2017), insurance ‘innovations’ in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and settler colonialism (Rupprecht 2016; Park 2018), the persistence of imperial “technologies” of race and racialization in the contemporary debt economy (Chakravvarty and da Silva 2013; Kish and Leroy 2015; Roy 2012) and colonial conquest as a crucible for the forging of contemporary understandings of property and corporate personhood (Birla 2013; Bhandar 2016; Yates 2018).

Towards these ends, we invite abstracts for 15-minute presentation with a strong but not exclusive focus on early-career scholars, artists and activists on themes that include but are not limited to:

The ‘haunting’ of contemporary financial orders and practices by colonial legacies;
Colonial genealogies of contemporary finance and their significance;
The relationship between historical colonialism and contemporary forms of ‘data’ colonialism;
Methodological tensions or convergence between de/postcolonial studies & political economy
Intersections of gender, race/racialization, sexuality and contemporary forms of exclusion and exploitation with orders of debt, credit, extraction and neocolonialism
The vitality and challenges of activist and artistic responses to the above
Visions of the decolonization of the economy and the social relations in which it is embedded, including questions of reparations, repatriation of lands and artefacts and radical movements for collective liberation.

Please submit your abstract by February 22, 2019 at the following link: https://goo.gl/forms/p2UCOxzaaKHPbnHj2. Likewise, if you wish simply to attend but not present, please use the same form. We will strive to inform successful applicants by March 1, 2019. Limited and modest stipends are available to assist successful applicants with the costs of travel (eg. to/from London) and accommodation.

Publication opportunities will follow for participants and other interested parties.

For more information, please contact: P.Gilbert [at] sussex [dot] ac [dot] uk

Organisers:
Dr Clea Bourne (Senior Lecturer in Promotional Media, Goldsmiths, University of London)
Dr Paul Gilbert (Lecturer in International Development, University of Sussex)
Dr Max Haiven (Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice, Lakehead University)
Dr Johnna Montgomerie (Reader in International Political Economy, King’s College, London)

Insider trading regulation produces excess speculation and stimulates deceptive stock exchange trading—the very things that it is supposed to eliminate.  In Sweden, this was part of a deliberate political agenda to make financial markets livelier and more exciting, almost as if they were games. Now, the so-called “outsiders” (the public) are in fact confined inside the game, while the “insiders” (the market professionals) remain outside the game controlling the action.

In this essay we propose a reframing of the Bloomberg Terminal, an interface used to track financial trades and values, by using it as a creative, critical and curatorial device to explore the relationship between the art and finance. To contextualise this approach, we offer a history of the Bloomberg Terminal alongside an analysis of the power of interfaces to shape both the user and the represented information. We use the terminal as a way to critique the relationship between art acquisition and financial trading companies. We then describe some outcomes of a series of workshops themed around the idea of ‘building an alternative Bloomberg’. We conclude by offering some potential applications of a re-framed Bloomberg Terminal as an open and modular interface for engaging with issues around art and finance, both in terms of content and curation.

This essay is an attempt at examining the general logic of derivation, the organisational geno-practice of financial derivationowhat I have called: reiterative derivation. I will endeavour to reiterate, to repeat otherwise, to displace the derivative distinction which apart from providing the financial markets with ever new business opportunities, makes financial instruments like options and futures the potential turning point, the crisis, the utmost risk, the pure possibility, of any economic reality. Stated another way, reiterative derivation is the opening of economy, the economyis way out, its line of flight, its passibility, the invention of its future. A derivative is a financial strategy designed to handle price risks, value fluctuations in its underlying economy; it performs this task by acting simultaneously as either an instrument or a marketable commodity. Offering itself not only as a forceful appendage, a financial device, but as the possibility to deterritorialise disp...

Despite growing interest in the last few years among filmmakers in tackling themes and stories related to the world of global finance, finding aesthetic means to depict the forces of contemporary capital has proven exacting. One route to understanding how the moving image makes sense of the current state of finance capital is to look at the way that specific financial hubs – significant banking cities that act as nodal points in the global economy in hosting major financial institutions and in initiating financial transactions – are registered on film. In this paper, I address the difficulties of constituting a financial aesthetic generally before looking at how the financial city plays a key role in allowing European filmmakers working across very different modes to find a material architectural representation for the abstract exchanges of contemporary finance capital. I discuss Isaac Julien’s gallery film, PLAYTIME (2014) that features the financial hubs of the City of London, Rekjavik and Dubai, and also recent films set in Frankfurt, the financial centre of the Eurozone and Germany’s leading financial hub, The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler, 2010) and the documentary, Master of the Universe (Marc Bauder, 2013).

(forthcoming, 2016) in Journal of Cultural Economy

Marc Bauder’s finance film, Master of the Universe (2013) won the European Documentary Film Prize in December 2014. Bauder’s film focuses on a series on interviews with a former leading investment banker, Rainer Voss, high up in one of Frankfurt’s deserted bank skyscrapers. Voss’s statements, set against the skyline of Frankfurt’s ‘Mainhattan’ financial sector, allow Bauder to constitute an aesthetic that, I argue, successfully addresses a key problem in moving image studies, namely how to find an appropriate film form to register the workings of contemporary finance. Bauder’s film offers an unusual depiction of the self-constitution and self-understanding of a banker-turned-whistle-blower, focusing on Voss’s speech acts of explication and justification. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of performative agency and of the separation of economics and politics through iterative perlocutionary acts, I argue that Bauder’s investigation into the performativity that establishes the autonomy of the financial sector and grants it extensive social power offers a significant aesthetic engagement with financial performativity and contributes to debates about documentary and performativity and about routes to a reconnection of economics and politics.

This essay is an attempt at examining the general logic of derivation, the organisational geno-practice of financial derivation—what I have called: reiterative derivation. I will endeavour to reiterate, to repeat otherwise, to displace the derivative distinction which apart from providing the financial markets with ever new business opportunities, makes financial instruments like options and futures the potential turning point, the crisis, the utmost risk, the pure possibility, of any economic reality. Stated another way, reiterative derivation is the opening of economy, the economy’s way out, its line of flight, its passibility, the invention of its future. A derivative is a financial strategy designed to handle price risks, value fluctuations in its underlying economy; it performs this task by acting simultaneously as either an instrument or a marketable commodity. Offering itself not only as a forceful appendage, a financial device, but as the possibility to deterritorialise displace unsecure uproot its underlying economic reality, the derivative displays an extremely creative approach to the economic world. What I would like to indicate in and through the present essay, then, is how financial derivation works. Not so much, perhaps, in the instrumental sense, but rather as a vehicle allowing one to create and travel into economic worlds, or, perhaps better, economic assemblages, economic ensembles so complex and complicated that they can no longer be understood as either this or that, either, for instance, real or imaginary, but should rather be interstood as imaginary economic realities, either or ... or ... or ... both and ... and ... and ...
Abstract, as I use it here, should not be understood in its (perhaps) most common or ordinary sense, as a summary or epitome, as something that presents the point, comprises or concentrates the essence of my essay and thereby facilitates its comprehension. It should rather be interstood as, at one and the same time, a deviation, a diversion, an attempt to draw your attention away from the textual strategies employed (the word abstract derives from the Latin verb abstrahere, to draw away, withdraw); to “guide” your reading, that is to say, to lure you into the text’s own protocols of reading, sheltering thereby the text from being conceived too generously, a way of inviting you to invent your own reading, to write while reading, to proceed with a Deleuzean restrained step, to decide without choosing, to hold while letting go, to grasp while leaving be, to open yourself up to what is still to come, to not knowing what will happen before it happens, to the possibility of nothing happening, towards that which is (always) in the process of coming about, to adventure, the future, to the theme of this essay: the experience of financial derivation, the geno-practice of financial derivation, the economy’s monstrous other, the economic future—to, in short: reiterative derivation.

The post-disciplinary ethos is to work after and with the modern disciplines; to draw on theories and methods developed in different disciplinary contexts, but to do so in ways that might shed new light on evolving financial practices and the worlds these create.

The classical gold standard era that existed between 1880 and 1914 is often referred to as the first international monetary regime and was a key instrument of British imperialism. Interpretations of this regime in mainstream economic history gloss over the existence, let alone significance, of most African and Asian countries. Critical researchers recognised the significance of the colonised parts of the world, particularly focusing on India’s role as a stabilising force for Britain’s gold reserves. However, their approaches do not explore where the actual physical gold was coming from. Based on this limitation, I will argue that access to gold in Witwatersrand, South Africa, was key for Britain to maintain its gold standard. The importance of South African gold is seen in the following major attempts by Britain to secure its access to this gold: Firstly, British companies led the massive gold exploration in the Transvaal region in South Africa during the 1880s. Secondly, the British government was involved in a series of soft as well as hard power plays with the Transvaal government over access to the gold. Thirdly, Britain used so-called Randlords – European financiers and entrepreneurs that were on the ground in Witwatersrand – to control the mines.

This paper explores whether financial markets are games, using exchange traded derivatives, those quintessential speculative instruments, as the primary vehicle. The phrase “gaming the system” usually means taking advantage of the system; that is to say, specifically turning some-thing performing a productive social function to one’s own enjoyable ends. But “gaming the system” can also mean generally transforming a system with productive purposes into one whose purpose is enjoyment. Some might say that this is just what has occurred in recent years to financial markets with the explosion in derivatives.

Insider trading regulation produces excess speculation and stimulates deceptive stock exchange trading–the very things that it is supposed to eliminate. In Sweden, this was part of a deliberate political agenda to make financial markets livelier and more exciting, almost ...