Before the 2007–2008 global credit crisis, the study of finance as a particular economic form with a cultural resonance was already well underway. In texts as varied as Randy Martin's The Financialization of Everyday Life (2002), Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee's Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (2004), Mary Poovey's Genres of the Credit Economy (2008), Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty's Capitalism with Derivatives (2006), Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century (1994), and Fredric Jameson's essay ‘Culture and Finance Capital’ (1997), interdisciplinary scholars began to isolate and define what, heretofore, had been the rarefied field of financial economics as a historical, literary, and political economic problem. Sometimes this effort was to fortify a Marxist critical theory (as with Jameson and Martin), and sometimes it was to break with it (as with Poovey). We are now seeing the second wave of what has come to be called ‘critical studies of finance’ or ‘cultural studies of finance’ (neither term is perfect; I use them for lack of a better catch-all phrase): monographs, edited collections, special journal issues, companion volumes, dedicated conferences, and (now in press) guides to the field. Some studies are specific to literature and finance, others to film and finance; we have ethnographies of corporate and quotidian finance, as well as new histories of debt and credit. Many of these newer works are in position to critique and extend the groundbreaking analysis of an earlier generation to a post-crisis world in which ‘financialization’ has become a topic with real currency.
Max Haiven has now given us one of the first looks at how finance might structure and resonate in the field of popular culture with his book Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Palgrave, 2014). By ‘popular culture’ and the ‘everyday’ Haiven signifies topics as disparate as Walmart's extractive corporate culture, Pokemon trading cards, the subjectivity of the investor, the urban composition of creativity, and the specter of resistance. With popular culture as his focus, we see less of the sustained formal analysis or the tracking of specific historical transformation that we might see in more archival, textual, or ethnographic work. This strategy has both potential risks and rewards. The reward is that the book provides the reader with a glimpse of various cultural and economic transformations as they work in tandem. Haiven excels at adjoining different bibliographies and unexpected sources, and this book offers a wonderful overview of some of the key debates within cultural studies of finance: the ontological consequences of the repeated assertions that finance is ‘fictitious’; the question of whether finance is somehow ‘new’ or a continuation of previous tendencies within historical logics of capitalism; the problem of critique and refusal when sites such as universities and non-profits are just as imbricated in financialization as any corporate outfit.
However, the potential risk of Haiven's approach is that the book trades scope for methodological specificity. And, indeed, in several sections of the book, I wanted more of a deliberate temporality of thought, a sense of process and mediation as habits and anxieties, profits and possibilities, become financial logics and emerge into the contested space of culture either to be stunted or to proliferate. This is a matter of both method and archive. For example, Haiven's chapter on ‘Wal-mart's Financialized Empire’ is reliant on the late Randy Martin's excellent work on risk and securitization, addressing how both become embodied logics of experience distributed unevenly across social bodies. Yet, Haiven engages Martin without showing, for example, how his own reading of Wal-Mart might change the coordinates of risk that Martin establishes. Is Haiven's an example of Martin's work, or a critique of it? This is true as well with his use of Bethany Moreton's trenchant To Serve God and Wal-Mart. What is the relationship between Wal-Mart's financilization in Haiven's account and its evangelical culture as established by Moreton?
Haiven's central argument is that we must think of finance as a kind of metaphor. ‘Like metaphors, financial instruments [are] attempts to explain the world.’ He continues: ‘My argument is that the price of a financial asset, like the meaning of a word, is suspended between multiple competing claims to meaning, amidst an ecology of play.’ For Haiven, because metaphors themselves show how meaning can change, how borrowed qualities of one object may be transposed onto another, its structure also demonstrates that economies can change, and with them the ‘social fictions’ that structure our now financialized world. There is a long history on the literature of metaphor and its relationship to money, Jean-Joseph Goux and Marc Shell in particular, which Haiven chooses not to engage. Instead he borrows from Derrida: ‘metaphor is a process at the very core of language', in Haiven's reading. For Haiven this means that all financial values (both embodied in money and embodied in us, subjects of finance) are also open to new possibilities and meanings as well. Finance, for all of its global coordination, governmental backing and capacity for violence, might well be, in this account, more modifiable than other economic forms.
I found this part of the book less compelling than some of Haiven's specific readings, partly because I was never sure what the ontological status of metaphor was within the argument. Does finance transform the structure of metaphor? Is an asset-backed security metaphoric in a way that a credit card is not? Would our world have less of the global violence Haiven attributes to finance were there less metaphor? What is the temporality of metaphor, a crucial problem since finance is fundamentally a temporal medium? I remain unsure. But I do think metaphor is an important part of Haiven's argument in ways he might acknowledge more. Finance in this book functions as both metaphor (transposed quality of) and metonym (selected part of) for capitalism itself. What is historical about the representation of capitalism now, it seems to me, is not that capital is ‘more heavily and directly invested than ever in the realm of belief, ideology and social fiction', as Haiven claims, but that finance might be the dominant historical logic for our understanding this condition. That claim, I think, differs from Haiven's claim that finance is a metaphor and that ‘financial assets or metaphoric wealth,’ are one in the same.
Interestingly, Haiven's attention to the slippage and metamorphoses of meaning is a crucial methodology in his own analysis of culture, and scales of meaning along various literal and figurative axes do much work for him. Risk (the asset) and risk (of impairment) are paired together; security as physicality and securitization as expansive commodification are also enjoined, along with social security; derivatives as instruments and derivative as a pejorative adjective are paired, as is fictitious capital with social fiction. This strategy can work well: think of Peter Linebaugh's incisive history of ‘capital’ in eighteenth-century England in The London Hanged: the rise of capitalism is occasioned by the intensification and institutionalization of capital punishment. Again, it is to Haiven's credit and our benefit that he draws these connections, but I would have liked to see a more specific archive that is itself an argument for how methodologically such semantic connections and mutations relate to historical problems and cultural forms.
What, finally, distinguishes Haiven's book is an avowed commitment to social transformation. That may seem redundant in a book that critiques finance as a cultural form, but, in fact, many works in this field do not make such a claim; rather they are content with a cool analysis in which the reader is supposed to deduce for herself how and why our current political economy needs to change. Sometimes the language is a bit heavy-handed. Haiven calls finance ‘rampant and pathological,’ for example, which, to my mind, risks shifting his critique from structural to moral. Nonetheless, Haiven's insistence on an immediacy and possibility for social transformation is a welcome addition to our conversation. And he reminds us, I think, that we need to take our own risks in the analysis of political economy, including the risk of making the demand for another social world.