Rogue Traders, Suspect Citizens and the Invisible Hand: Crisis in the Theater of Responsibility

Abstract

Since 2008 the language of economic crisis has dominated American political discourse. In this article it is argued that within the context of the current economic crisis, there has been a shift from market-talk that displaces human agency to an active naming and production of blameworthy subjects. This, it is suggested, serves a political and ideological function by focusing attention on individuals and groups and away from a confrontation with the normative and systemic violence of capitalism itself. By attending to the multiple corollary discourses of responsibility through which the economic crisis is framed this article interrogates the ways in which responsibility renders political moments intelligible through ascriptions of blame and accountability that both structure how economic crisis is perceived and delimit possible responses to economic events. It is suggested that in order to respond effectively to normative problems, systemic violence, and structural injustice we must first deconstruct the economic discourse that shuttles between a market-centered model of responsibility and an agent-centered blame model of responsibility, both of which serve to sustain the sanctity of the market.

Notes

I would like to thank Alyson Cole, Daniel Skinner, Alex Zamalin, Jonathan Keller, Rachel Gurstein, Jeffrey Broxmeyer, Nicholas Robbins, Joanna Tice and Elizabeth Swearingen for their insightful comments and feedback on previous drafts of this article. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the co-editors of New Political Science for their helpful comments.

¹ David Brooks, “The Bailout Artists,” The New York Times, March 18, 2008.

² Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Guilded Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 20.

³ Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Guilded Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 20.

⁴ Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Guilded Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 29.

⁵ Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 232.

⁶ Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 237.

⁷ For an argument about the denial of rhetoric as a powerful rhetorical force see, Gerald B. Wetlaufer, “Rhetoric and Its Denial in Legal Discourse,” Virginia Law Review 76:8, 1990, pp. 1545–1597. On the use of reason and positivism as a form of rhetoric see, Daniel Skinner, “Theory Beyond the Rhetoric-Reason Divide: Hobbes, Semantic Indeterminacy and Political Order,” The Review of Politics (forthcoming, Fall 2011).

⁸ Deirdre McCloskey, “The Rhetoric of Finance,” in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance (New York: Palgrave, 1992), p. 352.

⁹ For examples of this see: Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents the Definitive Edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Random House, 1997).

¹⁰ Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978–79 (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 31.

¹¹ Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978–79 (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 32.

¹² For example see: James G. Carrier, Meanings of the Market: The Free Market in Western Culture, Explorations in Anthropology (Oxford; New York: Berg, 1997).

¹³ For examples of this see: Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009); David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

¹⁴ Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, p. 10.

¹⁵ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Including Theses on Feuerbach (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998).

¹⁶ Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature (New York: The New Press, 2006), p. 41.

¹⁷ For examples see: Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecco Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); and Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 2003).

¹⁸ Carrier, Meanings of the Market: The Free Market in Western Culture, p. 1.

¹⁹ Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 153.

²⁰ Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 154.

²¹ Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, p. 241.

²² Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 46.

²³ Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 19.

²⁴ Brooks, “The Bailout Artists.”

²⁵ Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 71.

²⁶ “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis,” Time, 2009, < http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877339,00.html>.

²⁷ Thomas Friedman, “All Fall Down,” The New York Times, November 26, 2008.

²⁸ John Steele Gordon, “Greed, Stupidity, Delusion and Some More Greed,” The New York Times, September 22, 2008.

²⁹ Daniel Gross, “The Guilty Men of Wall Street,” Economist.com , 2008, < http://www.economist.com/node/12410288>.

³⁰ “Absence of Leadership,” The New York Times, Editorial Section, September 25, 2008.

³¹ Nelson D. Schwartz and Katrin Bennhold, “European Leaders Vow to Fight Financial Crisis,” The New York Times, October 5, 2008.

³² Capitalism: A Love Story, directed by Michael Moore, produced by Dog Eat Dog Films, released September 27, 2009. Inside Job, directed by Charles Ferguson, Sony Pictures Classics, released October 10, 2010.

³³ “Charles Ferguson's Oscar Speech Rips Wall Street: ‘Inside Job’ Director Levels Criticism During Acceptance,” Huffington Post (2011), < http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/28/charles-ferguson-oscar-speech-inside-job_n_828963.html>.

³⁴ CNBC, “Santelli's Tea Party” (2009), < http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video = 1039849853>.

³⁵ Brooks, “The Bailout Artists.”

³⁶ Brooks, “The Bailout Artists.”

³⁷ For examples of this argument see, Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

³⁸ Media Matters, “Cavuto Suggests Congress Should Have Warned That ‘Loaning to Minorities and Risky Folks Is a Disaster’” (2008), < http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200809190021>.

³⁹ Michelle Malkin, “Kill the Bailout: Illegal Immigration and the Mortgage Mess” (2008), < http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/24/illegal-immigration-and-the-mortgage-mess>.

⁴⁰ As Francois Raffoul argues in his recent work, The Origins of Responsibility, Western conceptions of responsibility as accountability operate with a host of assumptions about the self and the world in which that self exists. Responsibility is positioned within a matrix of causality, agency, will, and intention. Francois Raffoul, The Origins of Responsibility (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010). For instance, Aristotle in his discussion of moral responsibility in the Nichomachean Ethics, makes the question of causality central to the concept of responsibility. Simply put, for Aristotle, responsible actors are those who can be said to have voluntarily caused or made something happen in the world. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, Further revised edition (London; New York: Penguin Books, 2004). For Kant, it is his argument regarding the nature of human freedom and the subject as self-cause in the Critique of Pure Reason that allows for what Kant refers to as the imputability of actions to human subjects. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co., 1996).

⁴¹ William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, Expanded edition (Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 96.

⁴² William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, Expanded edition (Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 96.

⁴³ Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 5.

⁴⁴ Chad Lavin, The Politics of Responsibility (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. xii.

⁴⁵ Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, p. 62.

⁴⁶ Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, 62.

⁴⁷ Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Vintage, 1982), p. 215.

⁴⁸ Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Vintage, 1982), 216.

⁴⁹ Lavin, The Politics of Responsibility, p. 14.

⁵⁰ For more on how the current financial crisis is linked to these developments see, Harvey, The Enigma of Capital.

⁵¹ Young, Responsibility for Justice, p. 11.

⁵² Foucault raises this relationship in his third lecture on biopolitics in, Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978–79, pp. 69–70.

⁵³ Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 119.

⁵⁴ Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2003).

⁵⁵ Butler has this problem in mind with the title of her piece, “Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear,” in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 1–18.

⁵⁶ Butler has this problem in mind with the title of her piece, “Explanation and Exoneration, Or What We Can Hear,” in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 11.