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Notes
notes
I am grateful to David Bennett, Angelaki's anonymous reviewers, and members of the audience at the “Art and Science Now” conference hosted by Birkbeck College, University of London for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.
1 Jameson 246–65 (261, 265).
2 Sornette 51.
3 In addition to the texts cited below, mention should be made of de Goede; LiPuma and Lee; Luhmann, esp. chapter 9; MacKenzie; Taylor; Wark, esp. part 4.
4 See, for example, Abolafia; Zaloom.
5 See, for example, Goldberg and von Nitsch; Schleifer; Thaler.
6 For a useful overview of research in this field, see Shiller chapter 9.
7 David Tuckett and Richard Taffler have recently enriched the field with an explicitly psychoanalytic theorization of the phenomenon of herding in financial markets. Financial information, they argue, “is processed differently when groups of economic agents come to share an unconscious belief in the existence of what we have termed a phantastic object” (405); that is, “a mental representation of something (or someone) which in an imagined scene fulfils the protagonist's deepest desires to have exactly what she wants exactly when she wants it” (395). They continue:
The active behaviour of the believing group is sufficient to move prices and become self-rewarding, … which leads to a belief in a more and more contagious new reality. When the bubble bursts this is not due to new information; rather it seems the dizzy heights reached create an accumulation of split-off anxiety recognized … as “uneasiness, apprehension, tension, stringency, pressure, uncertainty, ominous conditions, fragility”; this ushers in a period of volatile oscillation before the return of the repressed anxieties and the crash. (406; the embedded quotation is from Kindleberger 95)
8 Sornette 4–5, 308.
9 Other major contributors to this tradition include Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski, Alain Badiou, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud themselves. On the apogee of this project in the early 1970s, its subsequent marginalization, and recent (partial) recovery, see Kaufman. David Bennett is at work on what promises to be the definitive study of the conjunction of economics and the libido in post-Enlightenment thought. Aspects of this project are elaborated in “Burghers, Burglars, and Masturbators,” “Getting the Id to Go Shopping,” and “Desire as Capital.”
10 For a detailed treatment of the financial thriller phenomenon, see Marsh chapter 4.
11 On the readership of financial thrillers, see Marsh 108–09.
12 Frey 317.
13 Rhodes 116–17.
14 Schofield 367; emphasis in original.
15 Harland 198.
16 Baker 324.
17 Finder 368.
18 Quotations from customer reviews on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (accessed 20 Dec. 2008).
19 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Complete Psychological Works 18: 1–64 (39).
20 Brooks 103.
21 Ibid. 103–04.
22 Harland 259–60.
23 Schofield 91, 329.
24 Cf. Marsh, who suggests that Cosmopolis “can be usefully read as a critique of the ‘corporate storytellers’ of the finance thriller” (117). DeLillo's keen interest in the financial markets extends as far back as 1977's Players, set largely on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
25 DeLillo, Cosmopolis 115–16.
26 Ibid. 106–07.
27 Ibid. 123.
28 Ibid. 193–94.
29 Marx 1: 929.
30 de Lauretis 547–70 (555–57).
31 I refer readers to Karyn Ball's important essay “Death-Driven Futures”; Ball's relation of Freud's death drive and certain aspects of Bataille's and, especially, Baudrillard's economic thought to contemporary finance capital has affinities with my own approach. Also of interest is Steven Connor's notion of “destitution,” under which he traces the current of economic reflection initiated by the theory of the death drive and pursued by Bataille, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and others. Destitutive thought, Connor explains, “takes seriously the idea of a principle opposed to economy which nonetheless works on the inside of economy, is immanent to economy itself” (9–23 (17)).
32 Bataille, “Notion of Expenditure” 116–29 (118; emphasis in original).
33 Ibid. 118.
34 Bataille, Accursed Share 1: 67.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid. 1: 71.
37 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death 2.
38 Ibid. 1.
39 Ibid. 4.
40 Lyotard, Libidinal Economy 103–14. For a detailed analysis of the affinities and divergences between these three thinkers over this cluster of issues, see Pefanis, esp. chapter 6.
41 Lyotard 111; emphasis in original.
42 Ibid. 220.
43 See, principally, Beck, Risk Society and World Risk Society; Giddens, Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and Self-Identity; Luhmann.
44 Georges Bataille, “La Limite de l’utile” in Œuvres Complètes 7: 181–280 (220); qtd in Goux 206–24 (215).
45 Noys 105; the Bataille quotation is from “Notion of Expenditure” 117; emphasis in original.
46 Goux 220.
47 Fred Botting and Scott Wilson comment on the relevance of Bataille's economic theory to the “neo-libertarian 1980s,” when “wealth, neither acquired gradually nor passed on steadily, was grasped at the speed of … an electronic impulse between stock exchanges” and “fortunes, gathered the day before, disappeared overnight” (introduction to The Bataille Reader 1–34 (29)). Mayfair Mei-hui Yang draws on Bataille's work in arguing that capitalism's “mechanisms of periodic self-destruction of its accumulation” include “stock market crashes which wipe out accumulated wealth in a matter of seconds” (477–509 (495)).
48 Baudrillard, “AIDS: Virulence or Prophylaxis?” in Screened Out 1–8 (8).
49 Idem, “In Praise of a Virtual Crash” in Screened Out 21–25 (25).
50 Idem, “The Viral Economy” in Screened Out 26–32 (30).
51 yotard is also the only one of the three to have attracted any notable scholarly interest in this aspect of his work (see Cooper and Murphy 229–41).
52 Lyotard 211.
53 Ibid. 228.
54 Ibid. 211.
55 Ibid. 211, 212, 227.
56 See The Long Twentieth Century. Arrighi's book is the point of departure for Jameson's essay “Culture and Finance Capital.”
57 On the cultural, and specifically novelistic, transitions that attended the terminal phase of this era of speculative excess – and their renewed resonance today – see my “Anticipations of the Accident: Modernist Fiction and Systemic Risk.”
58 Lyotard 229.
59 Ibid. 228.
60 Ibid. 228–29.
61 Ibid. 234.
62 Ibid. 229.
63 Ibid. 237.
64 Ibid. 229.
65 Zaloom 132, 109, 140.
66 Bataille published these photographs in The Tears of Eros (1961). They are reproduced in Surya, Georges Bataille and may be viewed on a website devoted to research into Chinese torture: <http://turandot.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/Event.php?ID=10>.
67 Baudrillard, “In Praise of a Virtual Crash” 21.
68 Lyotard 229.