Analysts, Assholes, and Acolytes: Representations of Financial Agency within Capitalist Realism
My current writing project examines the role that advertisements for financial instruments and services play in the pernicious ontology Mark Fisher calls “Capitalist Realism.” I argue that these texts function as a privileged forum where capital is articulated as a fantastical, omniscient subject position demanding awe, veneration, and identification within Capitalist Realist discourse.
As Jameson notes, it is “beyond the capacity of the normal [individual] mind… to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system” placing the contradiction between the world system’s calculability-in-principle and its ineffability-in-practice at the heart of the experience of “the postmodern sublime” (Postmodernism, 38). Yet a central tenet of Capitalist Realism is that while this overdetermining totality escapes the grasp of individual subjects (leading them into the “immobilization” of “reflexive impotence” (21)), the complexities of the present—and hence the shape of the future—can still be apprehended by the heroic collective subjectivity of The Market, whose mythical impartiality and mystical hyperrationality transmute the limited perspectives and irrational passions of individuals into the august “wisdom of crowds.”
Financial advertisements stoke a desire to partake in The Market’s privileged relation to the totality, offering a communion with Capital which enables the consumer-as-investor to take on its godlike perspective and confidently scour the otherwise ineffable networks of the present for traces of profitable futures.
Yet, as Arjun Appadurai argues in The Future as Cultural Fact, while the dispassionate rationality of panoptic surveillance and procedural risk management touted in the public rhetoric of finance may describe financial capital’s speculative methodologies, it cannot account for the recklessness and exuberance of the financial class. “Markets may be about efficiency,” Appadurai notes, “but financial actors are not” (240), creating a disjunction or “torque” (251) at the heart of Capitalist Realism’s claims of exceptionalism—opening a space of opportunity in which to expose cracks in the naturalization of its ontology.
I draw on Fisher and Appadurai, as well as Randy Martin’s work in The Financialization of Everyday Life, to examine how this torsion is negotiated in financial services advertisements 2007-2010. The idealized representations of financial agency in these texts must triangulate among distinct and contradictory orientations to the market: the dispassionate calculation of risk identified with the market itself, reckless confidence in uncertainty associated with the professional trader, and the immobilizing confrontation with the postmodern sublime that remains the experience of the general public.
Tracking how these negotiations changed in the face of the great collapse of 2008 has the immediate goal of exposing the ideological work that went into re-articulating Capitalist Realism’s legitimacy during this crisis. The larger goal of this project is to develop critical tools that destabilize representations of finance capital as a heroic collective subject. Such tools could be used to disrupt the allure of fantastic identifications with capital as a valorized subject position, as well as diminishing the influence of those who claim to commune with and speak for such an entity.
