Reply to Respondents

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Notes

1. Gramsci contrasted arbitrary, rationalistic, willful ideologies with organic ideologies, which he noted (alluding to Marx) could become “a material force.” (See Smith 2006: 221.)

2. There is no harm in getting in there and learning what subaltern people do. That is, in fact, what I thought I was doing in my first ethnography (Smith 1989). But the street creds thereby attained do not give an intellectual any special Left authority. As one of the friends who helped me write this piece, Judy Whitehead, put it: “It seems to me, at this juncture, that we have had two decades of ‘popular voices’, i.e. a focus on ethnographic subjects, their identities, their representations, voice and agency. This populist subject has, in fact, been often privileged over critical analysis. (Both should be there, I think in good ethnography). But capitalism, as we know, is hidden, totalizing, and individualizing” (Whitehead: Personal Communication).

3. This is the precise opposite of Foucault who proposed its reverse: archaeology/genealogy—out of which came not immanence but “assemblage” (H. Ford's empire strikes back!).

4. For an interesting discussion of its strengths and weaknesses in the hands of David Harvey, see Castree (2006).

5. One of these might be the unfolding of liberal citizenship from the French and American Revolutions on. Because I believe citizenship can lead to very misleading politics of claims, I tried to disentangle it from issues specifically having to do with subjection to or insertion in relations to capital. I am, therefore, a little puzzled by Susser's discomfort that my article is preoccupied with citizenship.

6. As Collins notes, finance can be used to seed real capital formation and long-term investment, but high-frequency traders (abitraging within nano seconds) now account for 56 percent of total United States stock market trading and over 30 percent of futures exchanges. To cater to this trading, Spread Networks Inc. have built a 1,000-kilometer fiber-optic link from Chicago to Cartaret, New Jersey, for the sole purpose of reducing trading time between Chicago and New York City by 3 milliseconds. The trade now takes to 13.33 milliseconds. Hibernia Atlantic has announced plans for construction of a similar cable between Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Somerset, UK, for the same purpose. When Sassen counteracted social scientists’ fixation on ‘pure’ finance and ‘pure’ knowledge economies, by noting that even these needed their physical infrastructures, perhaps she was not yet aware of the fact that M.I.T. now hosts a Laboratory for Financial Engineering. (See Bowley 2011.)

7. One political implication for this is that the problem of regulation does not result just from the crazy antics of casino capitalists who, unread in Foucauldian theory, refuse to be self-regulating. The problem of regulation has to do with the nature of the system that needs regulating.

8. Diversity based on real differences is the major means for securitizing the market but as I noted in the article, pretty much all market instruments that can regulate can also do the opposite. In the 1980s, some twenty years after I left investment banking on Wall Street, mortgage-backed loans served the former purpose by distributing risk associated with home mortgage loans. This continued to be so into the new century, when a more sophisticated instrument, the synthetic CDO, reversed this effect. One way in which a highly rated securities firm, like Goldman Sachs, enhanced the value of mortgage bonds was by taking the lowest (i.e., most risk-prone) of their tranches and packaging them as a bond-of-other-packaged-bonds. While this would appear simply to reproduce the low value of the original tranches, the argument was that the high risk to be found in the tranche of one of the original bonds was of a different kind than that of another of the original bonds. So by packaging them together, greater security was achieved, hence lower risk, hence higher value (Tett 2009). The value given to these “synthetic mortgage bond-backed collateralized debt obligations [synthetic CDOs]” relied on accepting that the differences alluded to were real differences. “By assuming that one pile of subprime mortgage loans wasn't exposed to the same forces as another—that a subprime mortgage bond with loans concentrated in Florida wasn't very much like a subprime mortgage bond concentrated in California—the engineers created the illusion of security” (Lewis 2010: 74). This especially stark pattern is repeated across an almost infinite number of trading possibilities, making difference—from massive to microscopic scale—and its assessment, the bedrock of market regulation.

9. Meanwhile, in Britain the prime minister has given jobs to heads of GlaxoSmithKline, and Argos (among the country's largest firms), the former BP head, and the notorious tax evader, Philip Green, head of Topshops (Gopal 2011).