The Specter of Capital (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Softcover

Vogl, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804792925 ISBN 13: 9780804792929

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

In his brilliant interdisciplinary analysis of the global financial crisis, Joseph Vogl aims to demystify finance capitalism—with its bewildering array of new instruments—by tracing the historical stages through which the financial market achieved its current autonomy. Classical and neoclassical economic theorists have played a decisive role here. Ignoring early warnings about the instability of speculative finance markets, they have persisted in their belief in the inherent equilibrium of the market, describing even major crises as mere aberrations or adjustments and rationalizing dubious financial practices that escalate risk while seeking to manage it.

"The market knows best": this is a secular version of Adam Smith's faith in the market's "invisible hand," his economic interpretation of eighteenth-century providentialist theodicy, which subsequently hardened into an "oikodicy," an unquestioning belief in the self-regulating beneficence of market forces. Vogl shows that financial theory, assisted by mathematical modeling and digital technology, itself operates as a "hidden hand," pushing economic reality into unknown territory. He challenges economic theorists to move beyond the neoclassical paradigm to discern the true contours of the current epoch of financial convulsions.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joseph Vogl is Professor of Modern German Literature, Cultural, and Media Studies at Humboldt-University Berlin and Permanent Visiting Professor at the Department of German at Princeton University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Specter of Capital

By Joseph Vogl, Joachim Redner, Robert Savage

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 diaphanes, Zürich-Berlin
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9292-9

Contents

Preface, 
1. The Black Swan, 
2. Idyll of the Market I, 
3. The Time of Capital, 
4. Idyll of the Market II, 
5. Economic and Social Reproduction, 
6. Fault Zone, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

The Black Swan

Cosmopolis

It happened in New York on an April day in the year 2000. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were still standing. The American economy had been growing non-stop for more than a hundred months; the Dow Jones Industrial Index had just climbed above 11,000 points to reach an all-time high, while electronic trade on the NASDAQ was rallying steadily. From the top floors of the Trump World Tower, not far from UN headquarters, a view of the East River emerged as day broke, revealing the bridges and smokestacks of Queens and in the distance, beyond the suburbs, a misty haze and seagulls swarming far below.

After a sleepless night, a twenty-eight-year-old billionaire fund manager decides to leave his apartment on Manhattan's East Side to go to a hairdresser on the shabby West Side, his part of town as a child. He rides down in one of the private elevators and climbs into his white armorplated stretch limousine, fitted out with cork sound-proofing, surveillance cameras and numerous screens relaying world news and stock exchange prices. His chiefs of security and technology are already waiting for him, along with the chauffeur. The vehicle turns into Forty-seventh Street on its way west, passing one high-rise apartment building after another. As the night wears on, it gets caught up in a series of adventures and complications that may rightly be called an odyssey.

On the way, the fund manager meets his wife and one or other of his mistresses. There is a report that the IMF director has been murdered, and likewise a Russian oligarch, a media entrepreneur, who had been a friend of this young billionaire. Crawling through the traffic, the limousine crosses Park and Madison Avenues, drives through the old Jewish neighborhood and reaches the Broadway theater district, only to be trapped in the chaos of an antiglobalization protest. A bomb explodes at the entrance to an investment bank; as a young man sets himself on fire, our speculator looks on, unaware that he himself will soon fall victim to a pie attack. Suddenly, and for no particular reason, he kills his chief of security and reaches his childhood hairdresser's near the docks. Then, equally inexplicably and abruptly, he leaves the hairdresser, gets involved with three hundred naked extras in a late-night film shoot, and coincidentally runs into his wife for the last time. An ex-colleague is waiting for him in a deserted ruin, and this man, he must finally understand, will be his murderer.

With this strange story, Don DeLillo's 2003 novel takes us right into the arena of the modern financial market, touches on the question of whether that market lends itself to narrative treatment and offers a series of narrative and rhetorical figures to represent the riddle of the finance economy, its protagonists and their operations. In his 1977 novel, Players, DeLillo had already pursued the question of how business finance and stock market speculation can be presented in narrative form. The narrative device he has chosen inCosmopolis—a New York speculator's trip one day to the hairdresser's—amounts to a synopsis of modes of perception and problems which must still be termed capitalist. The key to this achievement is DeLillo's depiction of his main character. Around this figure he develops an allegory of modern finance capitalism, invoking both received historical ideas and contemporary economic theories. At the same time, the particular narrative method employed by the novel, with its hypertrophic amassing of events, raises fundamental questions about how different incidents are interconnected in the current global economy. An opportunity thus presents itself to question the inner workings of the capitalist economy, this system that appears to be our destiny.

Capitalist spirit

DeLillo's first move is to give his fund manager cum speculator some of the proven, canonical features that have distinguished the careers of financial and stock market speculators for at least two hundred years—and ensure that we recognize them. "Young, smart and raised by wolves" (12), renowned for the ruthless efficiency and killer instinct that make him the embodiment of finance capitalism in all its riskiness, DeLillo's hero belongs in a series running from the "condottieri," "pirates," and "werewolves" of the money business in Balzac, through Marx's knights-errant of credit, up to the "mad dogs," "rogue traders," and "wolf packs" of today's foreign exchange markets. Furthermore, DeLillo's protagonist, sporting the vigorous-sounding name of Eric Packer, enters the scene in disguise, as a character mask—or rather, a dream figure, an apparition—personifying the most recent form of finance capitalism. He is not only hyperalert and sleep-deprived, manic and prone to excess, he is at home everywhere and nowhere, an Odysseus of globalization and citizen of a monetary cosmopolis. He is marked, above all, by his longing to leave behind the ponderous heaviness of the material world, where physical conditions of ownership still prevail. He dreams that use values will die out and that the referential dimension of reality will vanish; he dreams, too, of the dissolution of the world into streams of data and the absolute tyranny of the binary code, and he places his faith in the spiritual appeal of cyber- capital, transposed into eternal light via the shimmering and flickering of charts on countless screens.

It is the dream of ultimate, radical transubstantiation. Émile Zola's novel about financial speculation, Money, had already referred to poets of sublime sums of money. This novel deals with a more recent mutation: Verlaine's poète maudit returns in a new generation of professional symbolists. Obsessive and extravagant, they devote themselves to making money "talk to itself" (77) in a free, artificial and self-referential play of signs, sealed against the rest of the world like the cork-lined office-limousine that is so reminiscent of Marcel Proust's insulated bedroom. What is finally accomplished here is nothing less than a raid by the future on the rest of time.

The words and concepts of everyday language, we are told on one occasion, are still overburdened with remnants of historical meaning: they are all too "cumbrous" and "anti-futuristic" (54). By contrast, oscillating share market and foreign exchange mechanisms dictate a rhythm, measured in nanoseconds, from which the traces of history have been erased, annulled in the maelstrom of futures and their derivatives: "The present is being sucked out of the world, to make way for a future of uncontrolled markets with huge investment potential. The future becomes urgent" (79). Just as the market is interested only in prospects for future profit, disregarding past and present, so this form of capitalism dreams of oblivion; it deals with the power of the future and fulfills itself in the end of history.

Faced with the mysteries of the most modern form of finance capitalism, DeLillo responds in his novel by combining elements of the old and the new capitalist mentality. On the one hand, this allows him to portray the addiction to change and the continual...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804792925
• ISBN 13: 9780804792929
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 168
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland