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1 The of Fictitious : The Social Fictions and Metaphoric of Financialization

It is no exaggeration to say that, since the 2008 crisis, there has been an explosion of academic interest in the financial sector, its peri- odic crises, and the impacts and implications of both for society at large. I started my own research into finance capital in 2005, and it was my great misfortune to be trying to complete a PhD thesis on the topic as a monumental and historical financial crisis unfolded, in a time when, every week, new analyzes of the very sector I was looking at were emerging from nearly all political and disciplinary quarters. The only option, really, was to continue with the lines of inquiry with which I had begun: how do we account for not only the tremendous power of financial wealth in a moment of neoliberal (see Bryan and Rafferty 2006; Lapavitsas 2013; LiPuma and Lee 2004), but also the fact that what is perhaps the most pow- erful and pervasive economic force in human history is made up of what are, at first glance, imaginary assets? After all, the fabled default swaps and collateralized debt obligations at the core of the 2007/2008 meltdown were, essentially, made up. Sure, they referred back to “real” assets in terms of the homes owned by sub- prime borrowers, but, as financiers and the rest of us were to learn as the crisis unfolded, the ascribed to these assets was dramatically less than the price at which these financial instruments circulated. In other words, there is something profoundly and tantalizingly cul- tural about contemporary finance capital, about the way confidence, belief, identity and rhetoric are rolled into an evolving economic

15 M. Haiven, Cultures of Financialization © Max Haiven 2014 16 Cultures of Financialization landscape dominated by themes of , immateriality and communication. It is tempting here to reach for the postmodern canon, for the work of Jean Baudrillard (1997), for instance, and identify these speculative objects as “fourth-order” simulacra: objects which have abandoned all reference to the real world, which just refer back to an eternal hall of mirrors, an infinite play of signification. There is merit to this approach, and I have used it myself (Haiven 2013b), drawing on Jacques Derrida’s (1974; 2007) theory of metaphor to help explain the character of financial wealth. Derrida’s intervention was to suggest that the line between metaphor and other elements of speech is “always already” blurred. This is in contrast to ana- lytic theories that see metaphor as merely a second-order element of speech, an artificial creative substitution of meaning used for stylis- tic purposes. Derrida argues that a large number of the words we use every day were once metaphors, and that metaphor is a process at the very core of language. Take, for instance, the word invest- ment. It stems from the Latin vestire, from which we also derive the word vest: it means to dress or to cloak oneself. Early-modern Italian merchants used this as a metaphor for the different profitable purposes to which could be put – they were dressing their money up when they lent it to trading or manufacturing ventures that would bring a favourable return. This metaphor resonated, and the word invest became independent of its original meanings, fold- ing into living language. It began to become what linguists call a dead metaphor, a metaphor whose metaphoric quality has disappeared or goes unremarked or unobserved. Lo and behold, by the late 20th century not only named the most profitable activity in a hyper-financialized global capitalist , but was increasingly borrowed as a metaphor to explain all manner of activities in our social lives. Education, for instance, is increasingly talked about as an indi- vidualized “investment in the future,” rather than a shared social good (Williams 2006; 2008), and, likewise, we are constantly being told that the fostering of children by parents and society at large is an investment. Books are being published that advise people to learn to invest time and affect in their relationships for later payback (see Martin 2003, 91–107). All these new meanings of investment are now being folded into common parlance: they elicit almost no Reproducing 17 response any more. And this is where metaphor gets dangerous: as George Lakoff (2003) and others have noted, metaphors function to hide social violence – they often work to disguise or normal- ize unstated or unacknowledged ideological assumptions. Think, for instance, about the way the term “at risk” has been deployed as a dis- ciplinary metaphor to euphemistically describe certain populations, a discursive slight of hand that at once erases the specificity and ori- gins of poverty or marginalization and at the same time focuses the subject in question under the scrutiny of power (see Martin 2007, 37). Metaphors, in this sense, are elemental to the composition of discourse in the Foucauldian sense of the term: a “regime of truth” or an order of knowing, speaking and understanding that both emerge from social power relations and help reinforce or reproduce those relations. As such, the recent application of the metaphor of investment to all areas of social life is far from innocent. It is both symptomatic and constitutive of a shift towards financialization. That is, the fact that the metaphor of “investment” has become an expedient way for people to articulate their relationships and choices is, from one angle, evi- dence of the saturation of the general consciousness of society with financial ideas. But it is also a key means by which that saturation is advanced, the way financial modes of thinking and understanding are stitched into and throughout the social fabric. This cultural and linguistic shift both reveals and advances a broader socio-economic reality of financialization. Financialization has two overlapping meanings. Political economists tend to use the term to refer to the increased power and influence over the global economy of the so-called FIRE sector, an acronym for high Finance (banking, , speculation), Insur- ance and Real Estate) (see Epstein 2006; Foster 2010; Levitt 2013). They point to the massive growth of financial firms, largely thanks to years of neoliberal deregulation which, for instance, in many jurisdic- tions eliminated the distinction between investment and commercial banks, or opened up mortgage markets to new forms of securitiza- tion. Financialization refers, in this sense, to the way multinational , since the so-called “revolution in shareholder value,” have come to be seen less as producers or distributors of and services and more as vehicles for speculative capital (Fine 2010; Hudson 2010; Ho 2009). It refers to the profound and corrosive 18 Cultures of Financialization power of financial markets, especially bond and currency markets, over the policy choices of governments around the world – not only the governments of nation-states but also those of cities, provinces and, as we are seeing in Europe, supra-national organizations as well (Albo, Ginden and Panitch 2010; Bello 2013, 43–61; Strange 1997). Financialization in this sense refers to the increased mobility of transnational capital flows, as well as to the way those flows are accel- erating and becoming more and more chaotic thanks to increasingly sophisticated forms of securitization and automated high-frequency trading, a system in which computers are, by some accounts, execut- ing the majority of exchanges (Tiessen 2012). It also refers to the way financial markets are increasingly shaped by almost sublime formu- lae and technologies for managing risk, for creating new, overlapping, interconnected derivative products whose scale and complexity defy the human imagination (Holmes 2010; Stark 2009). But financialization also means something more, as the above example of the metaphor of “investment” indicates. It means deep penetration of financial ideas, tropes, logics and processes into the fabric of everyday life (see Martin 2007). We can return to the exam- ple of education. Not only has it come to be understood as a highly individualized in which students are told they should invest in order to get the payoff of a stable, middle-class life. It has become a key means by which individuals are integrated into the global financial economy (Blacker 2012; Caffentzis 2010; Williams 2006). In the United States, student loan debt has topped $1 trillion, and, as with the sub-prime mortgage market, these loans are broken apart, rebundled and securitized, their spectral presence haunting the global financial architecture, casting its shadow over perhaps the majority of investment portfolios. It is not just student loans, of course. From mortgages to credit-card debt, from retirement sav- ings to amateur stock trading, we are all increasingly involved in a form of everyday financialization that is integrated into a global financial system where individual debts and investment disappear into an interconnective æther of speculation (Martin 2003; 2007). Even the poor are not immune. In North America, of course, we have seen the rise of sub-prime lending, but this is only one aspect of a larger financial poverty industry made up of extremely prof- itable pay-day loans operations, pawn shops and discount financial services aimed at short-term profiteering from social immiseration Reproducing Fictitious Capital 19

(Aitken 2006; Rivlin 2010; Wyly et al. 2009). Likewise, in the last decade world political and economic leaders have been seduced by the lure of micro-finance schemes where small loans are extended to the world’s poorest populations (notably to women) in order to share with them the magic of free-market and the uplift- ing responsibility of debt (Bateman 2010; Roy 2012; Young 2010). To this we might add the increased financialization of public pol- icy, including the recent fascination with things like “social impact bonds” and the lure of “” which seek to replace decrepit and underfunded services with market-driven proxies beholden to financialized metrics of success (see Chapter 5).

Financialization: Between the economic and the cultural

So, financialization is not merely an economic and political shift; it is also a socio-cultural one. This, no doubt, has much to do with the dynamics of economic struggle as they play out today, includ- ing the war over the future of the heavily indebted post-middle class and the afterlives of the post-war welfare state (see Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 2013). After all, it is only through debt that the major- ity of individuals can cover the costs of the erosion of the welfare state after years of neoliberal assault, whereby the costs of education, healthcare, childcare, transportation and housing have been down- loaded onto individuals in the form of user fees (Soederberg 2013), representing a massive shift of societal risk (Hacker 2006). But this is where the question of financialization becomes tricky. It does not allow us a clear or clean distinction between the economic and the cultural. What do we make of a form of capitalism depen- dent not only on the time but also a form of ever-increasing based largely on debt (Dienst 2011; Ross 2014)? What do we make of a system where the rise and fall of whole appear to hinge on the performative speech acts of chiefs, or on the confidence and credulity of increas- ingly fickle (Marazzi 2008, 13–36); of a system where stock markets are so jittery and interwoven that they can tumble because of a leaked memo at a Fortune 500 ? What do we make of a system that, ultimately, is in the grip of imaginary money, where nearly unfathomable flows of immaterial wealth define and deter- mine the material lives of nearly everyone on the planet? There is 20 Cultures of Financialization something here about the relationship of culture and economics that troubles our established understandings and frameworks. Metaphors like “investment” tend to emerge as linguistic inno- vations to serve certain social purposes: they help explain reality and, if they resonate with people’s experience and expectations, they become part of the vernacular. To the extent metaphors work, they begin to die – to recede or retreat into language, their metaphoric nature forgotten or overlooked, to the extent that, even- tually, they disappear completely. For instance, words do not actually “disappear” – they never “appeared” in language at all; I just used a dead metaphor, but, until I pointed it out, you likely did not notice I had done so. For Derrida (1974; and also Nietzsche 1976, 42–46), language itself is ultimately composed of dead metaphors. Derrida does not believe there is any original, metaphor-free language on top of which metaphors rest, nor is he interested in discovering some deep, hidden structure to language. In a classic Derridean post- structuralist move, he posits that all language is metaphoric, even those words we imagine are fixed and stable or that we assume are unproblematic and unimpeachable connections between signifying word and signified world. Because metaphor is always retreating into language, all language is tainted and influenced by metaphor (2007). Language is a set of mutually suspending claims to meaning, as each word relies upon its connection to others. It is a fabric woven through endless “play” (1967), a polyseme that indicates (among other things) the constant creative (semi-competitive) repurposing of language and meaning, and also the inherent malleability or plasticity of language. In other words, your ability to understand my metaphoric use of “disappear” relies upon a whole variety of linguistic metaphoric rela- tionships – we can never trace language back to its “real” root. If all language is metaphoric, our ability to use and understand language is not simply our comprehension of the meaning of each word and their syntax; it is our involvement or participation in living language, our constant use of and innovation within language. This demands that we constantly reinvent metaphor. We are constantly delving into the trove of language to invent new meanings and repurpose old words like “delve” and “trove” or “invest.” What does this have to do with finance? Derrida’s theory of metaphor offers us a useful metaphor for what happens in the world of financial speculation. Like metaphors, financial instruments are, Reproducing Fictitious Capital 21 from one angle, attempts to explain the world (McGoun 2003). A share in a or a government bond is an attempt to express or represent an underlying value. Or so we might like to imagine. Certainly, this is the mainstream economic view of the matter. But the reality is more complex. As we will see in a moment, while the real world of value exists, financial instruments are never per- fect or unproblematic representations of that value. The prices at which financial assets are exchanged are not direct representations of the underlying value of the “real stuff” to which they allegedly refer. For instance, in 2007 the price of a sub-prime mortgage had almost nothing to do with the value of the house in question, nor was it an accurate reflection of the mortgagee’s ability to repay the loan (see McNally 2011, 97–112; Wyly 2012). Rather, the price of a sub-prime mortgage was a function of its circulation in a broader speculative financial economy (see Chapter 2). Its price represented its relationality to a vast array of interconnected speculative gam- bits. For those influenced by , the of the market is supposed to aggregate market actors into a sort of collective intelligence that, through the magic of competi- tion, will ascribe the “real” (or at least a realistic) value to assets. In other words, if markets worked properly (“all else being equal,” as the economists, fatefully, like to say), the price of a credit default swap based on sub-prime mortgage-backed collateralized debt obliga- tions would be an accurate monetary representation of (or at least a good-faith reference to) some underlying real-world asset (poor peo- ple’s homes). But, for these thinkers, markets are, of course, imperfect and are susceptible to all sorts of distortions. Those still clinging to the scraps of neoliberal orthodoxy, for instance, see these distortions as the result of the corrosive influence of government in markets, especially the mortgage markets, including the hybrid corporations of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (and their equivalents outside the United States), which, in their zeal to encourage private lending to poor homeowners, used the public coffers to mitigate risks in the secondary mortgage market, thus throwing into crisis the sys- tem’s inherent ability to arrive at the proper price (cf. Greenspan 2008). My argument is that the price of a financial asset, like the meaning of a word, is suspended between multiple competing claims to mean- ing, amidst an ecology of play. So the value of a government bond 22 Cultures of Financialization is not merely a good-faith reflection of that nation’s or city’s ability to repay the original loan plus interest, which is what it essentially claims to represent. Instead, just as the meaning of a metaphor is sus- pended between and part of a linguistic ecology made up of multiple claims to meaning, so, too, are the prices of financial assets suspended within financial markets made up of multiple competing claims to value. While all financial assets may claim to be a real representation of underlying “real-world” values, they are, in fact, inter-referential within their own economy of meaning. So, for instance, a share in British Petroleum (BP) ostensibly represents a given fraction of the underlying assets and productive capacity of BP. But, in reality, the price of that share will also (perhaps predominantly) depend on what potential investors imagine the future of BP might be. It will depend on the geopolitics of oil and of the probability of environmental reg- ulations or political instability. More generally, it will depend on the fluctuations of markets more broadly. This is a relatively simple exam- ple, but it gets more complex when we recognize that shares in BP are rarely valued on their own, but typically as part of portfolios or as col- lateral for loans, or are fragmented and securitized, incorporated into derivatives contracts and otherwise lost within an increasingly com- plicated financial economy. Here we can get a sense of the metaphoric value of financial assets. If we believe Derrida, language never touches down, never settles on a stable and eternal relationship between sig- nifier and signified. It is endlessly metaphoric. But the reason it works and does not just descend into postmodern chaos is because it is use- ful. We manipulate our world and cooperate as social beings through language. So, similarly, finance may never have a moment when a finan- cial asset accurately and unproblematically refers to a real-world value (whatever that is, and we would have good reason to ques- tion anyone who proposed that there is some accurate measure thereof). And, indeed, as we shall discuss, this is the fundamen- tal root of its crises. But finance as a sector, in spite of this, is useful. It is useful because, as I shall illustrate, it is an essential ele- ment of capitalist accumulation, in spite of its problematic relation to the reality it aims to measure. In the same way as metaphor facilitates and occludes social violence, finance disciplines and (mis)measures the financialized capitalist economy, with typically tragic consequences. Reproducing Fictitious Capital 23

The real and the imaginary

This excursion into Derridean metaphor theory illustrates a key conundrum in the study of financialization. What is the connec- tion between finance’s economic and cultural registers? How do we explain the dependence of financial markets on representational paradigms (see Knorr-Cetina and Preda 2005)? And how do we explain the influence of increasingly powerful financial sector on the imagination more broadly (Haiven 2011)? Are we prepared to suggest that finance has no relation to the real economy it claims to rep- resent, or that this relationship is purely parasitical? If the financial sector is utterly made up of imaginary conjectures built on imaginary conjectures, how can we account for its tremendous power over the global economy and daily life? We can find few better starting places than recent sociologies of finance, including the work of scholars like Michel Callon (2007) and Donald MacKenzie (2006; 2011), who have sought to identify finance as a sphere of relationality, guided by a combination of norms, value paradigms and technologies which draw market actors into a community of shared belief and cultural . Whether it is Callon’s investigations of financiers’ use of modelling technology or MacKenzie’s analysis of the production of financial instruments, these scholars are interested in what we might call the sociology of financial meaning-making. MacKenzie, for instance, has been at the forefront of identifying financial instruments as “performative”: according to MacKenzie, formulae like the famous Black–Scholes mechanism for derivative pricing do not simply reveal underlying market realities. Because they influence and shape subsequent finan- cial decisions and the financial milieu more broadly, these formulae actively shape and build market realities. They are, in MacKenzie’s words, “an engine, not a camera”: they do not simply measure market realities; they help bring them into being. Both MacKenzie and Callon, and many other sociologists of finance, are interested in the role of culture, belief and discourse in financial markets and have done invaluable and sometimes breath- taking work showing that, at the heart of the global capitalist econ- omy, so much based on the seemingly scientific and technocratic calculation and manipulation of risk, there is an intimate human world animated by belief, communication and, indeed, culture. But 24 Cultures of Financialization both are reticent to link their analyzes of the financial system to the paradigm of capitalist accumulation more broadly. Such an approach exists in the shadow of older Marxist frameworks that have tradi- tionally ignored or belittled these complexities and reduced them to merely the contingent, superstructural ephemera of the “real” eco- nomic base (see Butler 1998; Williams 1973). If this is the form of on offer, then perhaps we are better rid of it. Not only does it fundamentally delimit our curiosity as to how the world works, but it also forecloses the possibilities of resistance and change from the places we would least expect it (Gibson-Graham 2005). It reduces individuals to cogs in a machine, animated purely by their economic vocation (Cleaver 2000). And it does a fundamental disservice to the power of and the imagination. It is also for this reason that recent anthropological accounts of the financial sector likewise tend to avoid Marx, though they are more attentive to the broader sociological patterns that influence financial speculation and are reproduced by it. For instance, Caitlin Zaloom’s (2006) studies of financier culture have revealed the way financiers internalize a culture of risk management and are guided by an imagined relation to a highly circumscribed future. She also illustrates the way that norms and patterns of belief and behaviour are created and sustained within the largely (though not exclusively) homosocial world of financiers, and the importance of these norms to what we might call the reproduction of the financial industry (see also Czarniawska 2005; La Berge 2010; Prügl 2012). Similarly, Karen Ho (2009) has illustrated the way that financier culture is driven by a cult of “smartness” and chronic overwork and a form of hyper- individualized and inhumane flexibility. Ho illustrates how, in the name of “shareholder value,” the financial sector has imposed these norms on the rest of society through its influence over corporations and governments. And Melissa S. Fisher (2012) has provided an ethnographic depiction of “Wall Street Women” and the ways in which gendered patterns of behaviour, oppression and exclusion help reproduce financial culture. But, like MacKenzie and Callon, Zaloom, Ho and Fisher are reluc- tant to tether their analyzes to capitalism as a whole. All these scholars are part of a tendency, which stretches across the polit- ical spectrum, that seeks to demonstrate the cultural dimensions of financial economics. It includes, on the more pro-capitalist side, Reproducing Fictitious Capital 25 scholars like Deirdre McCloskey (1985; 1995), whose work on the role of metaphor in economic thought is indispensable but who offers it as a means to explain why markets are not operating at maximal efficiency and whose analysis aims towards the more effi- cient articulation of market forces. But it also includes the recent work of autonomist Marxists like Christian Marazzi (2008; 2010), Maurizzio Lazzarato (2012) and Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2012), for whom the cultural dimensions of finance specifically and the econ- omy more generally are evidence of a shift towards what they term “cognitive capitalism”: a system based on the capture of increasingly precarious workers’ creativity, conviviality, connectivity and affect (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009; Vercellone 2007). For instance, Maurizio Lazzarato’s recent book The Making of Indebted Man (2012) does the invaluable work of framing finance capital through a Foucauldian and Deleuzian lens. For Lazarrato, finance represents a historic bloc of capitalist forces. The wealth of the financial sector exists because of the debts of actors as small as individuals and as large as nation-states, and this wealth and this debt are used to discipline these actors into compliance with an emerging global capitalist paradigm which is based not as much on the extrac- tion of but more on the production of financialized, debt-driven subjectivities. Finance’s goal, according to Lazzarato, is to compel us all to imagine ourselves as “financiers of the self,” and embrace precariousness, risk, and economic and existential insecu- rity. For Lazarrato, debt and finance operate biopolitically: they are techniques of power whereby both bodies and whole populations can be enlisted into the reproduction of capitalist power relations. Finance’s ultimate objective, then, is not simply profit but the cre- ation and reproduction of compliant subjectivities, workers germane to a decentralized and disorganized form of global capitalism. Similarly, Randy Martin has illustrated how finance is about more than, on the one hand, brute economic power and, on the other, the particular cultural atmospheres of trading floors and bank offices. His 2003 book Financialization of Daily Life illustrated the way finan- cial ideas, understandings, metaphors and modes were creeping their way into the cultural climate of North America in spheres as diverse as “financial literacy” education, self-help books and, of course, the realms of investments, pensions, credit and debt. This work joined the scholarship of Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty 26 Cultures of Financialization

(2006) in identifying financialization as a key moment of neoliberal transformation by which capitalism shrugged off the necessity of the welfare state and its promise of collective security, replacing it with increasingly individualized and speculative forms of under the rubric of “risk management.”

Speculation, transformation, discipline

Martin’s work merges the latest sociological approaches to financial- ization with a sensibility honed by Marxist cultural studies, a tradition in no small part indebted to Frederic Jameson (1993; 1994), whose work on finance capital and culture in the early 1990s opened the doors for this sort of analysis. Jameson argued that the increasingly abstract nature of the financial economy was find- ing its articulation in popular culture, from the frenetic pastiche of postmodern film and art to the money-centric architecture and design of an increasingly homogenized archipelago of global cities on whose speculative real-estate empires the financial sector depended (1997). For Jameson, the rise of finance capital is inseparable from the postmodern turn, and its disjunctive and hybridizing cultural prac- tices and texts cannot be understood except within the context of a post-gold-standard world, where money has no fixed meaning and where debt and credit rule. We can increasingly see popular cultural texts and everyday life practices as, on the one hand, symptomatic of a seismic transfor- mation in towards financialization and, on the other, critical and essential elements of that transformation. As the finance sector reaches ever deeper into everyday life, as it increas- ingly relies on each of us performing as financialized subjects, it becomes more profoundly invested in what we once might have called . For instance, in Chapter 3 I explore how Pokémon cards are a technology by which children interpret a financialized cul- ture and interpolate themselves into it. And in Chapter 4 I argue that Walmart is a financialized space that both appeals to and thrives on a financialized indebted subject. In Chapter 5 I examine the creativity of finance, and the way financialization depends on a highly circum- scribed form of creativity from all of us, and how this has led to an interest in the ways artists are attempting to envision and represent money and finance. Reproducing Fictitious Capital 27

This approach seeks to move beyond reductionist notions of financialization as top-down ideology or “.” Ide- ology is, in ’s (2014) definition, an imagined rela- tionship to real economic conditions. Today’s brand of capitalism demands subjects who identify themselves as miniature financiers, or, as Robin Blackburn (2006) puts it, “two-legged cost-and profit centres.” The study of financialization, then, is not merely the study of how capitalist culture beguiles and charms, nor merely of how it threatens and cajoles. It is the study of how, on the one hand, the economic depends on the cultural and how, on the other, the cultural depends on the economic.

From metaphoric wealth to fictitious capital

It is here that I think a return to Marx’s idea of fictitious capi- tal (1981, 594–606) is most instructive. Marx used the term largely ironically. It had been used before by a variety of commentators, including Marx’s liberal correspondent , to describe the ill begotten proceeds of speculation and their corrosive effects on the social order, though some early political economists sought to recuperate its role as a facilitator of economic growth and what we would today call risk management (see Perelman 1987, 173–183). Yet Marx deployed the term with his idiosyncratic and merciless scorn. Like Mill, he was disgusted by the way that the financial sector was able to effectively multiply money by lending on the basis of presumed returns, rather than actual capital. Marx, like most other political economists of the day, observed that this was inherently unsustainable. But, unlike Mill and other more liberal the- orists, Marx was not content to simply see the financial sector as a realm of venal folly and unmitigated greed. Unfortunately, Marx never wrote a comprehensive treatment of the financial and bank- ing sector, and what has reached us are those fragments collected in Volume III of Capital, published some years after his death and heav- ily edited by Engels. The reason Marx never developed a full analysis of finance is not because, in his day, it was a less important force than in our own. Indeed, Marx’s career was witness to many bank failures and financial crises, as well as to the tremendous power of the financial sub-class over state policy. His reluctance to address the financial sector in detail stemmed, instead, from his insistence that 28 Cultures of Financialization any understanding of it would need to be grounded in the analysis of capitalist exploitation more elementally: the extraction of surplus value from workers (the subject of volume I) and the processes by which capital reproduced itself in circulation (volume II). It is for this reason that the attention Marx does pay to banking and finance in volume III is largely dedicated to pointing out the fallacy of his contemporary economists who believed that banking, finance and speculation could, of their own accord, create value (see Harvey 2006, 293–329; Perelman 1987, 170–217). For Marx, of course, all value came from labour, and from the manufacture of goods for exchange. Finance is a means by which the elemental contradictions of this exploitation are managed (see Chapter 6). Importantly, Marx makes the key point that a stock or bond is, in essence, a claim on the future surplus value yet to be extracted from labour. In other words, a share in BP may have a price for which it exchanges on the speculative market, but its underlying value is really a claim to a certain share of surplus value yet to be extracted from its workers as they are, in turn, compelled to exploit the planet. For Marx, the vast majority of financial wealth was, ultimately, ficti- tious. The price of financial assets was a hallucination, a conjecture created when multiple claims to the same underlying surplus value were sold to multiple parties. As long as all the capitalists did not seek to claim the real surplus value at once, the fictitious capital could continue to function and could, in fact, “double and triple” as promises built upon promises. Should they all attempt to exchange their fictitious capital for the assets for the material wealth or pro- ductive capacity it claims to represent, this would lead to a crisis. The full consequences can perhaps only be seen today, when, before the financial crisis, the total circulating value of over-the-counter deriva- tives contracts was estimated to be at least 70 times the total planet’s gross domestic product, and when in one day the volume of specu- lative currency transfers alone equalled the world’s annual economic output (Foster and Magdoff 2010, 58). Fictitious capital indeed. But Marx’s full development of the idea of fictitious capital was never entirely spelled out, and later Marxist scholars had to do this work, each contending with his or her own situations of crisis. Crit- ical in this regard was the work of (2003, especially Chapters 4–7), who drew on Marx’s writings to more fully theorize the reproduction of capital, and the way that capitalism’s inherent Reproducing Fictitious Capital 29 propensity for crisis led to an intimate connection between bank- ing and finance capital and imperialism. Giovanni Arrighi (1994) and (2006), among others, have more recently drawn out this line of Marxist thought. For Harvey, fictitious capital rep- resents not a claim on actually existing value but a share of future surplus value yet to be extracted (2006, 265–268). But, for Harvey, finance does not exist purely as the realm of elite skulduggery, it is a crucial set of economic institutions by which capital “fixes” its inherent tendency towards overproduction and, as such is an essen- tial, if crisis-prone, component of capitalist accumulation. In order for capital to expand, it requires mechanisms by which multiple otherwise competitive capitalists can pool their to under- take ventures that are too risky or too large for any single capitalist to undertake alone (270–273). As capitalists are not by their nature , a financial system becomes necessary which can put capital to work, rather than sitting in a vault in the money form. Colonial expeditions, railways, mines and certain forms of technolog- ical innovation are all examples of aspects of capitalism that require this sort of financialized collaboration between otherwise competi- tive capitalists. These necessitate a speculative market. However, one problem, as Marx noted, is that, for various reasons, it is easy for the financial sector to become more profitable than other sectors of capital, and it increasingly comes to dominate the economy as capitalists seek to invest in speculative returns based on the dif- ference between the buying and selling prices of various securities (Harvey 2006, 316–324). But, since finance does not actually produce any “real” value itself, its increased power means a gradual widen- ing of the gap between the price of financial assets, which might be said to escalate geometrically, and the actual underlying value of labour to which those assets lay claim, which might increase only arithmetically. Those familiar with Marx’s work will recognize here the ghost of the famous “,” or the theoretical and math- ematical incongruity between the theoretical value of commodities, which is based on the socially necessary labour time it took to produce them, and the monetary price at which the commodities cir- culate, which is dependent on the contingencies of the crisis-ridden capitalist marketplace (for a thorough discussion, see Kliman 2007, 139–174). Much has been made of this problem in the history of 30 Cultures of Financialization

Marxist political economy, but, as long as we are not expecting a direct arithmetic relationship between labour time and commodity price, I am inclined to side with Michael Perelman (1987, 110–127): the transformation problem is not a problem at all – it is a dialectical heuristic. It is not a flaw in Marx’s logic that leads to the irreconcil- ability of real value and price – it is that these two are never reconciled under capitalism. The gap between the two is a productive lacuna in Marx’s work which allows us to pinpoint a key element of capital- ist crisis, and also, importantly, to locate finance as a key element of a much broader system of exploitation, not just a particularly ugly form of economic power in its own right. The reasons why capital never accurately measures the value of labour as embodied in commodities are varied, but one key reason is the tremendous influence of finance and banking over the value and quantity of money. At no moment has capitalism been free from the influence of finance, and at no moment has finance failed to produce fictitious capital – that is, freely circulating claims to future surplus value that act as money and so distort the ideal capitalist economy. The result is that, for this and other reasons, there is always more capital than value to which it has a claim, and this excess fictitious capital, while to a certain extent necessary to overcome certain crises in capitalist economics, fundamentally and essentially skews capital’s reckoning of value. As I have argued elsewhere (Haiven 2011), capital consistently mis-imagines value. Price is an essential but inherently flawed means of measuring underlying value. But, as we have seen in the case of metaphor, just because finance is incorrect in the way it represents value does not mean it is not useful. The financial system acts, in Harvey’s (2006, 270–271) terms, as a central nervous system for the capitalist economy, both inter- preting price signals across an increasingly integrated global market and disciplining global actors. As Lazzarato (2012) notes, the sum effect of this is biopolitical: it serves to shape subjects and institu- tions and punish them if they fail to live up to the dictates or ideals of an increasingly neoliberal form of capitalism. Massimo De Angelis (2007, 213–223) calls this system a “fractal panopticon” where, under the gaze of transnational financial flows, subjects and institutions increasingly survey and discipline one another, and where both gov- ernments and individuals internalize the norms and values of the global capitalist idiom. Reproducing Fictitious Capital 31

It is here that we can draw upon the idea of fictitious capital in full. Its primary utility is to remind us that finance is a central, if inherently problematic and crisis-prone, element of global capitalist accumulation. From one angle, financial crises occur when the gap between fictitious capital and the real value it claims to represent becomes too great. The culture of belief and credulity that under- scores the financial sector and the proliferation of fictitious capital stutters or grinds to a sickening halt (see Marazzi 2008, 128–135). Financiers stop returning one another’s calls and cease to accept one another’s metaphors for wealth. There is a necessary contraction that brings the volume of fictitious capital into greater proximity to the volume of actually existing . Some financiers’ claims to that labour power must be sacrificed, or other social resources must be privatized or liquidated to fill the shortfall, which is precisely what is happening in our current age of austerity. Indeed, it is here that the alpha and the omega of capitalism meet: primitive accumulation (de Angelis 2007, 97–101; Federici 2005; Midnight Notes 1990) or “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2003, ch.4) is relied upon in times of crisis to fill the vacuum left by the evaporation of ficti- tious capital as social programs and public assets are liquidated and privatized.

Capital’s fictions

But there is a second meaning to fictitious capital too, and this is where I find its greatest utility in addressing the problem with which I began this chapter: how to explain or address the increas- ingly cultural dimensions of finance without losing sight of the broader economic paradigm of which it is a part. What if we take this speculative capital’s “fictitious” quality seriously? Literary his- torian Mary Poovey (2009) has argued that the emergence of the modern financial and credit economy in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries was made possible by, and also made possible, the dis- tinction between fact and fiction. The need to increasingly account for discrete and stable values, and the needs of expanding European empires to have reliable forms of writing, whether they be reports from colonial administrators or “true” and “valid” bills of exchange or promissory notes, was part and parcel of the development of the discrete separation between factitious texts, including modern 32 Cultures of Financialization journalism and economic ledgers, and fictitious ones, including, notably, the novel. Poovey’s argument is largely Foucauldian and textual. She is interested in a genealogy of thought, rather than a political-economic argument. But what her work, and work like that of Marieke de Goede (2005), illustrates is that finance has always depended on a discursive politics, or what we might call social fictions. Poovey draws upon a long history in literary studies of seeing fic- tion as working at the intersection of the real and the imaginary. From this approach, fictions do not represent as much as they act. As with MacKenzie’s (2005) performative account of financial instru- ments, fictions are not an entirely accurate depiction of the world, but neither are they simply false. As literary criticism has insisted for decades, fiction is best imagined as a strategic narrative or imag- inative intervention that does not merely seek to amuse or please but to change reality by transforming the reader and causing them to act differently (see Jameson 1981). In this sense, fictions, like metaphors, are inherently social and intertextual: they depend on the reader understanding a broader cultural context and, in turn, con- tribute to that broader context. Indeed, we live by and through our fictions. As Cornelius Castoriadis (1997) argues, all our social forms and institutions, even our identities themselves, are the momen- tary solidifications of the social imaginary (cf. Haiven 2011). Social fictions are the means by which we comprehend and intervene in this process, by which we try to understand (always partially) how we are both composed by and composers of social relations. Social fictions, then, are never innocent: the way we tell a story affects how we can act in the world and to what ends. Finance is both dependent on and productive of social fictions. This is true at the level of its primary operations, where a finan- cial asset’s claims to value are essentially fictitious. Fictitious here means partially true, and it implies that the function of the story is to approximate reality for certain purposes. By the same token, how- ever, finance also depends on and produces fictions on the level of lived culture and everyday life. On one level, this includes the sort of stories financiers tell themselves about how and why their work is valuable and important (de Bondt 2005). But, more importantly, it speaks to the way that the fictions of finance increasingly creep into daily life as we narrate meaning and value in a financialized age. Reproducing Fictitious Capital 33

I am not simply arguing that financial wealth is a mere fiction, and for this reason we must distinguish fictitious capital as something significant and unique. All wealth, all value is a fiction, whether it exists under capitalism or any other (see Graeber 2001). Certainly, material culture is valuable, and much of it appears to be intrinsically valuable (things like food and shelter). But the value we ascribe to things is a matter of cultural intercourse. A thing is just a thing until it is backed by a story, and this is as true of the value of a loaf of bread as it is of the value of an Andy Warhol print, an hour of a massage therapist’s time, or a futures contract. While there is political and rhetorical utility in contrasting the hyperbolic wealth of the financial sector with the emaciated “real economy,” the reality is that all value is a fiction, a story about what is valuable used to shape social cooperation. The reason why the idea of fictitious cap- ital is useful is because it draws our attention to the way that finance foments and depends on the production of social fictions. It is ficti- tious not simply because it is a fiction, but because it helps transform the social fictions that order social cooperation. It is productive of fictions and reproduced by fictions. It may be true that all forms of capital demand and depend on social fictions: But my concern here is with the particular characteristics and intensity of the relationship of fiction to value in a moment of profound financialization, and the unique and complex social fictions demanded by a financialized system. Unlike the other social fictions woven by the rich and power- ful, these advance through subtle and nuanced harnessing of agency, creativity and the imagination. Such an approach should not be seen as counter to descriptions of finance capital that see it as a disciplinary force of capitalist accumu- lation (Lazzarato 2012), or from those that see it as the expression and elevation of inherent crises of that accumulation (Harvey 2006; Lapavitsas 2013). Its fictitious nature operates alongside and enables these functions. Likewise, I am not among those who believe over- coming finance’s pernicious influence over our economy and social life is merely a matter of ceasing to believe in it. Nor do I believe that a post-capitalist future of abundance and peace can be won merely on the cultural front. But I do believe that this expanded idea of fic- titious capital can help us begin to come to grips with the creative power that, on the one hand, is harnessed to drive the reproduction of the capitalist system and the subjects germane to it and, on the 34 Cultures of Financialization other, is the wellspring of resistance and refusal. This approach to fictitious capital does not trump or supersede the important work of political economy, sociology, anthropology or critical finance studies. But it does remind us that capital is produced by people, and that cap- italism today is more heavily and directly invested than ever in the realm of belief, ideology and social fiction.

Reproduction

As such, this book seeks to put forward a suite of arguments and examples that hopefully sketch the outlines of the financialized imagination and the financial sector’s resonance throughout, and dependence on, the field we know as culture. By culture here I do not simply mean the realm of formal and intentional representa- tions, ideas, aesthetic practices and objects, and interventions. Nor do I mean culture in the purely anthropological sense of the deeply seated codes, norms, performances of self and social institutions ger- mane to the reproduction of social life that are often obscured to those who practise and live by them. I mean both these ideas of cul- ture wrapped up within one another. Culture here refers both to the way we live our lives and reproduce our social surroundings, and to the way we do this through the arts, literature, play, teaching and learning, and an infinite variety of other practices. I understand culture as intimately connected to the way societies and individ- uals reproduce themselves, though in this approach reproduction does not imply mindless replication. Instead, it implies a complex, conflicted, contestatory, creative and reflexive process. I develop this approach by focusing on three different approaches to the idea of reproduction. The first is the notion of the reproduc- tion of capital, developed from Marx’s writing by Rosa Luxembourg and others. Luxemburg (2003), like Lenin (1948) and other early 20th-century Marxist thinkers, was attempting to understand the tense and conflicted class composition of her day, notably the strug- gle against nationalism within socalist and labour movements and the rise of an increasingly monopolistic corporate imperialism pred- icated on and imperialist warfare. Drawing on Marx’s , which (basically) holds that capitalism is based on fun- damental contradictions which can never be resolved, only elevated to a higher level of abstraction and violence, Luxemburg sought to show how the inherent limits of capital manifest themselves in Reproducing Fictitious Capital 35 destructive wars (notably the First World War), colonial relations of seemingly non-capitalist exploitation (slavery, unfree labour, etc.) and inter-capitalist rivalry. Importantly, for Luxemburg and oth- ers, all these more abstract, systemic processes are driven by the growth and increased power of the financial sector. War, colonialism, financialization and monopolies are all Pyrrhic strategies by which capital reproduces itself by elevating its inherent contradictions to a higher level. A second approach to reproduction emerges from another moment of Marxist crisis. The dawn of the field of cultural studies was neces- sitated by the decline and fall of the Communist dream (Hall 1996a; 1996b). Thanks to the betrayals of the Soviet regime (especially the invasion of Hungary in 1956) and the increasingly doctrinaire and conservative (and, indeed, reformistic) tendencies of European Com- munist and socialist political parties, a new generation of scholars sought to understand the way in which capitalism was reproduced, on the level not merely of global economics, but of everyday life. Early cultural studies scholars, influenced by ’s notions of hegemony (Gramsci 2000, 189–221; Hall 1996a) and the work of the , and in dialogue with new sociologi- cal perspectives on institutions – including Louis Althusser (2014), (1990) and Michel Foucault (1979) – began to speak about reproduction of capitalist realities through education, media, social institutions (like prisons and universities) and everyday social praxis (see Giroux 2001). Initially, this line of inquiry was concerned with the reproduction of class identity and subjectivity: the way, for instance, working-class youth were taught to curtail their life’s expec- tations and conform to a set of cultural codes, or, likewise, the way upper-class youth cultivated (what Bourdieu called) “” (1990) and, in so doing, reproduced their class position. Such explorations dovetailed with feminist scholarship (Balsamo 1991; McRobbie 2009) that sought to show how gender norms were socially constructed, rather than biologically preordained. This included critiques of the way the “binary gender system” is reproduced through a series of mutually reinforcing metaphoric oppositions (male/female; masculine/feminine; science/nature; rea- son/passion; strong/weak; production/reproduction) and, later, Judith Butler’s (1990) notion of “performativity,” the way gender is composed of and reinforced by the reiteration of performative acts. This archive leads us to the third and final source of our notion of 36 Cultures of Financialization reproduction. Within the orthodox Marxist framework, the source of all value, and the stakes of the struggle of workers against capital, is the productivity of labour. In a vulgar reading, this means exclu- sively labour that produces commodities to be sold on the market and is contrasted to reproduction, which (in a limited sense) means the reproduction of labour power itself (procreation, eating, domes- tic work). By the 1970s, Marxist feminists were seeking to displace the primacy of the idea(l) of production by positing the central- ity of reproduction to capitalist social and economic relations. For Maria Mies (1986), Selma James (2012), Silvia Federici (2012) and others (many of whom were active in the influential Wages for House- work campaign; see Weeks 2011), a focus on reproduction could help Marxist organizers break free of what had, up to that time, been its singular focus on the industrial (male) . A focus on reproduction had the potential to reveal the reliance of capital on , sexism and misogyny that created a situation in which women supplied the system (and men) with the free reproductive labour necessary for its reproduction. Such a perspective also had the potential to shift the terrain of struggle from the to all those sites (including the factory) where capitalist social and economic rela- tions were being reproduced, and where the reproduction of life itself was interdicted by capitalism: the classroom, the nursery, the grocery store, the fast-food joint, and so on. This trifold theory of reproduction allows us to locate culture at the heart of economics. If we understand societies as composed, fun- damentally, of patterns of reproduction, then patterns are always under negotiation, always changing, and are made up of uncount- able individual actions that either reinforce or challenge (in subtle and blatant ways) that reproduction of the status quo. Reproduction in this sense does not refer to an automatic, unthinking, agentless process by which humans, drone-like, rehearse their social life in their habituated fashion. Reproduction at all three levels is a field of contestation, refusal, negotiation, compromise and experimenta- tion. The social fabric of reproduction is, for lack of a better term, sublime: its scope, complexity, interconnectivity and – in Jameson’s (1981) terms – totality cannot be comprehended by the imagination. As such, in order to reflect, understand and intervene in repro- duction, we rely on imaginative or ideological constructs, or social fictions. These are the narratives and metaphors we use to make sense Reproducing Fictitious Capital 37 of our place (as individuals, as collectives, as societies), within which we are made to reproduce our lives. These imaginative fictions are central to our ability to cooperate and to act. To clarify, such an approach by no means assumes that capitalism is merely a cultural set of relationships; it is a material system, based on the exploitation of labour, the materialization of that labour in commodities, and the circulation of those commodities through their abstraction into price. But it is to say that, in addition to the analysis of this process, we must also see the production, and use of commodities as a set of relationships always in the process of repro- duction, and backed by relations of reproduction, and that these, in turn, flow through and change the fabric of meaning, identity, power relations, institutions and ideas. Hence, when I employ the term “fictitious capital” I am using it less as a precise analytic tool and more as a way to draw attention to a complex question: how is it that finance has come to influence and also depend on the reproduction of social life, of capitalist accumu- lation and of “culture” in the broadest and narrowest senses of the term? Fictitious capital refers not to a particular thing, but to a set of processes (some of which I strive to outline in this book) whereby social reproduction is conscripted into the of the reproduction of financial wealth. Financialization operates on all three levels of reproduction. We can better understand what financialization is, and the strug- gles germane to it, if we examine how it serves to facilitate the economic and political reproduction of capital, and how it shapes social and cultural reproduction within capitalism, and how these two processes are connected and mutually reinforcing. Further, such a framing allows us to reimagine financial crises as crises of reproduc- tion for the capitalist system as a whole and for those who struggle, labour and reproduce within it (Caffentzis 2013, 252–272). On the first level of reproduction (the one developed by Luxemburg), financialization is a key process through which global capitalist exploitation is facilitated and managed, through which the system is reproduced and expanded. Without it, capitalism stagnates, succumbing to its own contradictions. But finance also represents a key means by which the inherent contradictions of capitalism are elevated to a new level of abstraction and complexity. As I explain in Chapter 6, financialization is not only to the amelioration of 38 Cultures of Financialization inherent crises (such as the falling rate of profit and the persistence of inter-capitalist competition); it also enables and, indeed, drives war, nationalism, imperialism and (neo)colonialism. David Harvey (2006, 413–442) identifies these as “spatial fixes” to capital accumu- lation: the way the inherent crises of the system are competitively displaced, pitting nations against one another, or driving the impe- rialist expansion of economic globalization. In this sense, finance is crucial to the reproduction of capitalist accumulation, allowing cap- ital to expand and access ever more realms of social reproduction, both intensively (reaching ever deeper into daily life and commodify- ing ever more human relations) and expansively (spreading globally, taking command of the productive capacity and reproduction of whole populations). Second and relatedly, financialization is inherently a cultural pro- cess and depends on and affects reproduction in the expanded sense developed by the progenitors of cultural studies. The expansion and creep of financial ideas, metaphors, processes and structures into everyday life and social institutions create a triple movement. First, we can note the way that the financial sector itself is repro- duced to the extent that it can facilitate the reproduction of its own reproducers: a sub-class of highly specialized financial opera- tives, which we explore in more detail in Chapter 2. Second, well beyond the financial sector, today the reproduction of social and cul- tural life, identities and institutions (from education to prisons to art to games) is increasingly “financialized,” in ways we will explore in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. Third, the reproduction of the financial system itself is increasingly dependent on this financialization of popular culture and everyday life. The nuances of the sub-prime meltdown of 2007/2008 reveal how deeply and perilously the global financial economy is invested in the fabric of everyday life, not only in the sense that a large portion of speculative capital is bound up in resi- dential real estate, but in the sense that this in turn relies on finance’s influence on the murky realm of dreams, aspirations, , meanings and the “structures of feeling” (Williams 1977, 128–135) that are bound up in the bricks and mortar of the global economy, a theme we explore in more detail in Chapters 5 and 6. Finally (and this is, perhaps, the most profound and difficult argument), financialization is more than just an intervention in Reproducing Fictitious Capital 39 reproduction. It is a perverse and corrupt form of reproduction, or a viral code that seeks to reprogram the reproduction of social life. The expansion and imposition of market-integrated personal debt in a neoliberal age, for instance, represents a massive capital- ist intervention in how material and social life is reproduced. But my argument seeks to go a little deeper. I want to suggest that financialization is symptomatic and constitutive of a historically spe- cific capitalist mediation of the flows of social reproduction. It is a force not simply driven by some autonomous logic or shadowy oli- garchy, but reproduced, at least in part, on the level of everyday life. And, in turn, it provides resources for a very particular, delim- ited and, I would suggest, ultimately disastrous form of personal and social reproduction through debt, speculation and securitization. In other words, financialization (re)produces those technologies of the self, those social practices, those relationships, those forms of ‘freedom’ and ‘creativity’ and those idioms of value that, in turn, are reproductive of financialization and the forms of capitalist power it serves.

Struggles

So, we can understand financialization as a terrain of struggle and friction between different spheres and cycles of reproduction: the reproduction of capital writ large, the reproduction of a financial sub-class, the reproduction of daily life in all its many contradic- tory forms, and the reproduction of various forms of exploitation. In other words, by examining financialization through the lens of an expanded notion of reproduction, we glimpse it as more than a brutal ideological imposition; it is a scene of crisis and contradiction, of contestation and ingenuity. The conflict and confluence between these frames of reproduction, represents an expansive conceptual terrain. Indeed, the terrain is so expansive, and the connections, influences and processes so complex, that they are impossible to imagine in their full magnitude. Indeed, to the extent that global capitalism increasingly reproduces itself by recoding nearly every- thing (corporate strategy, government policy, the value of education, etc.) in financial terms, “financialization” (like “” before it) risks describing nearly everything and nothing at all. It is here 40 Cultures of Financialization that I think the concept of fictitious capital once again becomes operative. The term is useful because it draws our attention to several inter- connected dimensions of the relationship between finance, culture and reproduction. First, financialization fundamentally relies on the conscription of culture and dramatically influences the sorts of social fictions that circulate and have meaning and value today. In this sense, financialization can be understood as the spread of financial narratives, metaphors, ideas, tropes, clichés, characters, plots and vernaculars throughout the social fabric. In other words, fictitious capital becomes a key by which social life is reproduced on the level of everyday decisions, institutional cultures, ideological predispositions and cultural narratives. Second, the reproduction of fictitious capital, in the sense of the value and power ascribed to “imaginary” financial assets, depends on social fictions. These are the fictions that operate within and among the institutional cultures of Wall Street and other financial institu- tions, but the fictions of financialization also help reproduce a culture of debt, consumerism, leveraged precariousness and securitization on the level of daily life and cultural narrative. Third, fictitious capital, in terms of the financial apparatus which both measures and disciplines the global economy, is itself a social fiction, a way of telling a story about the nature and the global circulation of value that, in turn, shapes those processes. The inter- action of different spheres of reproduction is, essentially, sublime: it defies the scope of the imagination. Hence, finance, as a sphere, offers a (flawed) means to comprehend that totality of interactions, struggles and contradictions. Though it may be characterized largely by impersonal and non-narrative quantifications, I am suggesting we can understand “fictitious capital” writ large as the way capital spins a crucial social fiction about the nature of the world. Like all fictions, this is not merely a harmless story. It has incredible power. Financialization represents the dawning supremacy of fictitious capi- tal over all other means of explaining and imagining (global) society. Financialization has become the dominant narrative of our times, and therefore shapes the imaginations of all varieties of social actors in ways that fundamentally orient their reproduction, largely towards its own reproduction. It becomes the metanarrative that increasingly influences and shapes social fictions throughout the social fabric. Reproducing Fictitious Capital 41

Yet, of course, narrative and metaphor are not the same. And the difference between them might offer us a final point of illumination. As we shall see, the past four decades of financialization (germane to the “Post-Bretton Woods” period) has seen a massive quantita- tive and qualitative transformation of the financial sector and the processes of financialization. Finance has become increasingly driven by hyper-speculative, highly scientistic practices of risk management that combine ever more sophisticated formulae and techniques for “surgically” managing risk within an ever more interconnected and computerized global marketplace. As Martin (2007), LiPuma and Lee (2004) and Bryan and Rafferty (2006) note, the emblematic construct of this new system is the “derivative,” a financial asset which is essen- tially a tradable agreement between two parties to make a specified exchange at some future point. Such an instrument was initially intended to help manage risk by allowing purchasers of a certain security or asset to lock in prices today, so as not to be caught off gaurd by future price fluctuations. Yet, in a moment when finance is driven by intense competition between markets, derivatives have become the idiomatic asset of a financialized economy, providing opportunities for speculators to gamble on future turns in the price of nearly any underlying economic reality (say, the market in sub-prime mortgages, the price of oil, or the potentiality of devastating weather systems). Meanwhile, finance today is characterized by the securi- tization of many such gambles into portfolios and new, synthetic derivative products made up of potentially tens of thousands of frag- ments of other assets or their derivatives, circulating at a sickening velocity between major investment banks and throughout digitized world markets. On this level, the “narrative” qualities of finance as a means to understand and comprehend the world take on a disjointed, abstract and postmodern character that, at least at first blush, never resolves itself into some stable overarching pattern or plot (see Nilges 2014) (for a fascinating attempt to use literary and postmodern theory to analyze markets, see Ayache 2010). So, while finance might be a modality of social fiction which functions by telling a performative story about the world, it is a story that is, essentially, almost non- sense: a frenetic jumble of metaphors built on metaphors that never resolve into a coherent or linear narrative. Wealth is generated not by seeing the greater narrative in the market, but by spinning out new 42 Cultures of Financialization metaphors and abandoning them once they have done their work. The system is held together not by internal coherence, but by sheer momentum. But, of course, for all that, the financial system continues to be among the most powerful institutions in the world. And its reliance on and transformation of culture, broadly speaking, is the topic of this book. In the same way as the financial sector sees the devolution of value into fragmentary metaphorics, so, too, does the social and cultural realm witness increased fragmentation, meaninglessness and chaos. Corporate strategy, disciplined by stock markets and finan- cial institutions, is increasingly guided by frantic short-term efforts to secure higher financial returns, rather than by any long-term con- cept of fiscal sustainability, let alone any commitment to workers or consumers. Government policy, guided by the influence of bond mar- kets, eschews any pretence to long-term planning and seeks largely to manage potential risks to the future profitability of transnational capital. Even individuals, driven increasingly by the dictates of debt or lonely financial acumen in a “liquid” world without guarantees, have difficulty envisioning the future as anything more than the end- less continuation of the present (see Žižek 2010). As Jameson (1997) observed over 15 years ago, financialization is part and parcel of a postmodern moment of wherein social narrative at all levels has been reduced to a jumble of relationalities. For our purposes, we might note the way the reproduction of fictitious capital depends on this fragmentation of life, of governmen- tality and of value into countless metaphoric shards. The purpose of this book, then, is to do the impossible work that (1969) imagined as the role of the Marxist cultural critic: not to attempt to arrive at ever more precise analytic compartmentaliza- tions of the world (as worthy as such efforts can be), but to do the endless, inherently flawed work of crafting new allegories out of the fragments, allegories which motivate and mobilize action and radical reimagining.