Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980S

Scandals and Abstraction Scandals and Abstraction financial fiction of the long 1980s Leigh Claire La Berge 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data La Berge, Leigh Claire. Scandals and abstraction : financial fiction of the long 1980s / Leigh Claire La Berge. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-19-937287-4 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-19-937288-1 (ebook) 1. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Money in literature. 3. Finance in literature. 4. Capitalism and literature. 5. Financial crises in literature. I. Title. PS374.M54L3 2014 813.009'3553—dc23 2014033968 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To my parents, Ann La Berge, Bernard La Berge, and Marshall Fishwick; but especially for you, Mom { contents } Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1. Personal Banking and Depersonalization in Don DeLillo’s White Noise 37 2. Capitalist Realism: The 1987 Stock Market Crash and the New Proprietary of Tom Wolfe and Oliver Stone 73 3. “The Men Who Make the Killings”:American Psycho and the Genre of the Financial Autobiography 113 4. Realism and Unreal Estate: The Savings and Loan Scandals and the Epistemologies of American Finance 149 Coda 191 Notes 195 Index 223 { acknowledgments } This book got its start as a dissertation in the American Studies Program at New York University. Now that I myself have been through the program, and have researched and taught at other universities, I look back on my time at NYU and think: I can’t believe how lucky I was. Andrew Ross is as generous and critical an advisor as one could hope for; Kristin Ross is not only a role model intellectually and ped- agogically, but also a trusted friend; Mary Poovey is one of the most perspicacious readers I’ve encountered; Randy Martin continues to provide an example of how to think about value across disciplines and mediums. Outside of my committee, the Marx Reading Group, which morphed into the Dissertation Writing Group, was a place to refine my ideas and learn how to help colleagues refine theirs: Thank you, Maggie Clinton, Michael Palm, John Pat Leary, Quinn Slobodian, Ipek Celic, and Diego Benegas. At the University of Chicago I found an inspired and inspiring community in the Society of Fellows, including Nitzan Shoshan, Anita Chari, Mara Marin, Emily Steinlight, Reha Kakadal, Ben McKeon, and Dina Gusejnova. Away from the Society, Lauren Berlant and the Affective Publics groups provided a space to work through methodo- logical problems in genuinely new and creative ways. Now at Saint Mary’s University, my colleagues in the English department provide intellectual support and a collegial home: Phanuel Antwi, Teresa Heffernan, Steph Morely, and Goran Stanivukovic, I’m thinking of you; outside of the English department Darryl Leroux and John Munro are models of political scholarship. Other scholars such as Andrew Hoberek, Annie McClanahan, Alison Shonkwiler, Alissa Karl, Megan Obourn, Miranda Joseph, Richard Dienst, Aimee Bahng, Joshua Clover, Marcia Kay Klotz, Harry Harootunian, Richard Godden, Maria Farland, Andy Cornell, J. D. Connor, Sarah Brouillette, Doug Henwood, Colleen Lye, Mathias Nilges, Fiona Allon, and Max Haiven, have had large and small conversations with me. Anna Kornbluh is trusted scholar, colleague and friend. Debra Channick helped me with the introduction and the beginning; Doug Barrett helped me with formatting and finishing. x Acknowledgments The readers’ reports for this book were quite encouraging; one reader in particular took the time to read this manuscript as empathetically and critically as anything of mine has ever been read. I want to thank this person not only for their incisive and generous criticism, but for modeling for me a form of collegiality and collaboration. At Oxford University Press, Brendan O’Neill and Stephen Bradley have been a pleasure to work with. Martha Rosler gave me permission to use her photograph on the cover. My father, Bernard E. La Berge, and my stepfather, Marshall Fishwick, are in these pages in spirit, but no longer here in actual fact. I find it a wonderful historical irony that Marshall taught Tom Wolfe and shared with me their correspond- ence. Louisa La Berge and Robert, Jack, and Elisabeth Emmett provided a home away from home; Bette Druck provided an actual home. And the Mitten. Finally, two people, both wonderful scholars in their own right, have been my editors, my critics, my soundboards, my en- couragement, and my support since, basically, 1999, when I began to think about the relationship between capital and culture in a way that is still recognizable to me today: Ann La Berge and Dehlia Hannah. For Mom, your early morning editing and phone calls have sustained me through many a paper, presentation, application, chapter, and now book; and, for Dehlia, you will always be on my dance card at the predators’ ball. To both of you: “Thanks” is a modest return on your investments in me, but it follows the law of compound interest. Scandals and Abstraction Introduction When Marcus Burns, a fictional character important to my book’s late twentieth-century archive, articulates his personal philosophy of money, the resulting statement is as ridiculous as it is profound: “Money these days is like water, it’s just looking for a place to go.” Marcus, who appears in Jane Smiley’s Good Faith, a novel set during the 1980s savings and loan (S&L) scandals, occupies the recognizable American literary role of a confidence man.1 He employs a diversity of phrases and idioms to explain in his own vernacular what exists for political economists as a historical fact and for me as a literary one: The United States in the 1980s was beset by a phase of overaccumulation of money capital. Money, Marcus explains, is now “like cockroaches, for every dollar you see there’s a hundred more in hiding and it’s looking for a home.” Indeed money in the 1980s did search for higher profits, as it arrived from abroad through the third-world debt crisis and as money already here was given the freedom to circulate more quickly and expansively as a result of banking deregulation.2 Surveying the time and space around him, Marcus periodizes the American 1980s as so: “It’s like all of a sudden the whole world turned into money . and you can invest in everything and it’s all the same.” His claims resemble those made by another 1980s confidence man, Ronald Reagan, who, when he signed the 1982 Garn-St Germain Depository Institutions Act that removed interest-rate caps at savings banks, announced that he had penned “the emancipation proclamation of America’s savings institutions.”3 Scandals and Abstraction is a literary history of what happens to narrative form when too much money circulates at once. The particular scene of overaccumulation that the book concentrates on dates in the United States to the late 1970s and 1980s. An event whose effects continue into the present, the fact of too much money was most re- cently, and spectacularly, represented in the 2007–8 credit crisis. But before that crisis, the presence of overaccumulated money capital had 4 Scandals and Abstraction already staked out an impressive archive in literature, film, and the expanse of horizontal, textual space that I call financial print culture. When there is too much or too little money—and the condition of possibility of capitalist exchange is that there never is the right amount—finance assumes the difference, as it allocates credits and debts, intentions and expectations, from the present into the future.4 How this tension and possibility between present and future is represented, I argue, is a crucial part of a financial process that political economy does not theorize but that contemporary American literature does. This book tracks how a surplus of money in the 1980s cre- ated new financial devices and logics as well as new channels for the production and contestation of literary meaning and narrative form.5 The larger transition that Scandals and Abstraction provides through its literary and cultural history is that of how finance came to stand in metonymically for “the economy” in the sense that the represen- tation of the financial sector of economic activity

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