Rob Aitken

‘A direct personal stake’: cultural economy, mass investment and the New York stock exchange

Although it is often conceived as a key aspect of neo-liberal globalization, appeals to ‘mass investment’ have actually occupied much longer and more complex historical contexts than are often acknowledged. This paper draws upon archival material of the advertising, educational and ‘cultural’ campaigns developed by the New York Stock Exchange in the immediate postwar period in an attempt to recover one fragment of these earlier lines of force occupied by mass investment. In doing so, this paper pursues a ‘cultural economy’ of the NYSE programs to accomplish two objectives: 1) to foreground finance as something that is culturally constituted, and 2) to underscore ‘capital’ not as a macro-structural entity but as something made possible in the spaces of everyday life and through the processes in which individuals govern themselves in those spaces. Cultural-economic analysis, this paper concludes, can help complicate critical conceptions of ‘finance’ by moving away from epochal analysis and by developing more historically-situated accounts of the financial world and the ‘everyday’ contexts it has occupied.

Capital at Its Fringes

Marieke de Goede has recently emphasised the need for critical genealogies of global finance which can make visible the ways in which ‘finance’ and ‘capital’ became constituted as discrete categories – categories that are often depicted and governed as highly rational, technical and instrumental sets of practices. The constitution of finance over the past centuries as a formalised and morally acceptable domain required practices and forms of knowledge designed to separate it from a range of dubious categories with which it was entangled. This ordering of finance as a technical and rational universe also entailed the development of contemporary accounting techniques and a body of legal jurisprudence designed to construct a separation, in both discourse and practice, between finance and other practices from which it sought to distance itself, namely, gambling and predatory commercial activity. As de Goede notes, ‘understanding finance as a performative practice focuses debate on the exclusions made for finance discourse to emerge as a rational, normal, scientific, and respectable practice’. The attempt to separate finance from a range of other practices continues to occupy a key location in the global political-economic landscapes of our present time. Much of the policy response to the instabilities in global financial markets of the late 1990s, for example, sketched out a ‘new financial architecture’, part of which orbited around calls for ‘transparency’ and new macro-prudential indicators designed to re-inscribe a boundary between finance and other forms of economic activity labelled as corrupt or ‘incestuous’. The processes through which finance is marked off from other domains, however, are incomplete and uneven. As global financial markets increasingly exert a staggering pressure across the global political economy, the border between ‘finance’ and its more shadowy ‘others’ is blurred. Liberalised international financial markets have often been implicated in money laundering, illicit drug finance, arms trade financing and the movement of ‘hot money’. In addition, the recent high profile accounting scandals – the Enron, WorldCom and Nortel debâcles – have directed renewed attention to the illegalities that often accompany modes of financial reporting which are central to the AngloAmerican model of capitalism. Perhaps the fastest growing of finance’s ‘others’, and a case that forms the core of this article, is the world of ‘alternative financial services’ – a world I refer to as New Political Economy, Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2006

Notes on the Canadian exception: security certificates in critical context

This paper attempts to place the Canadian security certificate program in critical context. The program is a mechanism of arbitrary detention targeted to non-citizens the state has certified as ‘threats’ to national security. As a mechanism of arbitrary detention the program fully locates Canadian policies inside of, and not in some manner external to, the worst abuses and ‘exceptional practices’ associated with the ‘global war on terror’. To place this program in critical context, the author draws upon the notion of ‘exception’. Although the security certificate program does invoke an exceptional practice in the terms made legible in recent discussions in critical security studies, it also points to ways in which critical discussions of ‘exception’ might be deepened and complicated. To this end, the paper put forwards the notion of the ‘legal complex’ to highlight the mundane and often contested ways in which the exception is invoked to certify which racialized bodies might be governed as political citizens and which will be governed as ‘bare life’.

Financializing security: Political prediction markets and the commodification of uncertainty

The logics of ‘finance’ and ‘security’ have been enmeshed within each other in complicated ways since at least the start of the 20th century. As fields deeply alive to the possibilities and dangers associated with risk and uncertainty, finance and security occupy overlapping but uneven fields of operation. This article examines one particular financial mechanism – political prediction markets – in order to trace out the tensions and intersections of finance and security in one particular site. Political prediction markets are designed to harness the predictive power of the market to address an inherently uncertain object – the weather, political events, terrorism, etc. A series of recent cases – most notoriously a proposal by the Pentagon to construct a ‘terrorism futures market’ – have sought to recast political prediction markets as a security practice and to enlist these markets in the ongoing ‘war on terror’. This article argues that these attempts at financializing security offer a particularly useful glimpse into one point of overlap between security and finance. As markets constructed to measure and manage uncertainty, experiments in security prediction markets foreclose political space not only as a ritual of securitization that places certain issues above or beyond political deliberation but also as a reinvocation of a conception of ‘finance’ as a somehow rational and technical domain. As the terrorism futures case reminds us, however, the rational ambitions associated with these two governmentalities of financialization and securitization can become corroded or can lose coherence in unpredictable ways. It is in the political tension that is generated through such corrosions that the future of these kinds of experiments in the financialization of security will ultimately be decided.

Regul(ariz)ation of Fringe Credit: Payday Lending and the Borders of Global Financial Practice

The recent financial crisis has been punctuated by a discussion of the future of global financial governance in terms of a ‘regulation/deregulation’ formula. This paper argues for a broadening of this frame by taking seriously recent claims of performativity. To place changes associated with financial globalization in a more complicated critical context, this paper explores the ways in which global finance has often entailed a redrawing of the boundaries between the financial and the everyday. To develop this argument, the paper focuses, in particular, on practices of payday lending and on recent regulatory changes which have performed payday lending in a particular set of ways. Reading payday lending as both a repertoire of market devices and a set of dividing practices, this paper concludes that regulation performs the object it seeks to manage by invoking ambiguous, and not singular, territories of governance.

Performativity, Popular Finance and Security in the Global Political Economy

Throughout the fall of 1954 and into 1955 and 1956 the US Advertising Council managed a complicated public service campaign it called People’s Capitalism. Buoyed by the earlier successes of its Our American Heritage campaigns of the early 1950s (which featured the Freedom Train, a portable public service advertisement that criss-crossed America), the Council trained its attention onto more explicitly geopolitical topics. ‘It was felt,’ the Council emphatically claimed, ‘that a dramatic rebuttal was needed of the communist claim that the common man must turn to communism to be “saved”‘ (The Advertising Council 1956: 9). This confrontation with the communist threat did not, however, inspire a campaign directed explicitly against the Soviet Union. Rather, the Council sketched its dramatic response by targeting the practices and habits of America’s own working and middle classes. Its campaign, consisting of radio, print and television advertisements, paid particular attention to the ownership of capital and attempted to dramatize the ways in which the American economy and its productive enterprises were owned and controlled by its great mass of workers. The campaign was conceived, the Council reports, ‘as a way of dramatizing the fact that in the US of today the people both supply much of the capital and receive the benefits’ (The Advertising Council 1956).

Everyday Debt Relationalities: Situating peer-to-peer lending and the rolling jubilee

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, there have been important experiments in alternatives to mainstream financial practices. This paper situates two of these experiments – peer-to-peer (p2p) lending and the Rolling Jubilee – alongside each other. Both these experiments, I argue, attempt a kind of repositioning of ‘finance’ and the ‘everyday’ in ways that resist the transformation of debt into abstract or instrumentalized sources of financial value. Over the past number of years, however, p2p lending networks have increasingly become financialized in ways they initially sought to supplant. The Rolling Jubilee, by contrast, offers a unique critical gesture. This gesture stages a creative point of contact and confrontation between the detached technical sophistication of financial arrangements and the intimately painful everyday experience of the debts that populate those arrangements.

‘All data is credit data’: Constituting the unbanked:

Global financial and data capitalism has constituted new forms of knowledge, novel inscriptions which make that knowledge tangible and new ways of visualizing sources of value and profit. This paper examines a cluster of new practices designed to make visible – and extract value from – those without formal credit scores in contemporary financial markets. Many ‘financial inclusion’ projects now attempt to score the ‘credit invisible’ by drawing on a range of alternative data – non-financial payment streams, academic records, behavioural signals gleaned from online or social media footprints and results generated via digitized psychometric testing – and by assessing that data in relation to models of risk assessment based on the analysis of big data. I argue in this paper that these experiments in alternative credit scoring constitute the unbanked as an important, and dubious, category of knowledge and intervention. I also argue that attempts to score the unbanked offer a revealing glimpse of many of the social and political limitations associated with projects of ‘inclusion’. Although often imagined as forms of pristine incorporation, inclusion projects often constitute troubling new kinds of social sorting and segmentation.

“The Vital Force”: Visuality and the National Economy

Although it has often been conceived as a material or already‐existing kind of category, the “economy”, before it can be governed, must first be “made up” and constituted in particular ways. This paper seeks to contribute to recent genealogies of the “economy” by highlighting the role of one particular “cultural” technology–the techniques of visuality–in the making up of the national economy during the interwar and postwar periods. To develop this analysis, this paper reviews the ways in which private and public financial initiatives turned to visuality and advertising as a way to appeal more directly to and mobilize working class and everyday populations. In these appeals to “popular finance” visual techniques were used to diagram both a reworked conception of the national economy as well as the modes of citizenship key to this rationality of national economic space. This case also helps underscore the heterogeneity with which the national economy was assembled as a mode of economic governance constituted in multiple and never‐completed kinds of ways. Highlighting this heterogeneity, this paper concludes, is important especially in the context of discussions of “globalization” which are, once again, provoking questions relating to the very making of economic space, practice and identity.

Performing the limits of finance

Recent financial turmoil has put emphasis once again on the very meaning and reach of ‘finance’. In doing so, recent financial crises have also provoked questions about the very ‘ends’ of finance: Where are the borders of finance? Given the expansive reach of financial innovation over the past two decades, are there any serious limits to the kinds of practices that can be converted into financial objects? Does the culture of finance (expansive and all encompassing) encounter meaningful interruptions? This paper explores these questions by reviewing a cluster of public-art responses to the 2008 financial crisis mounted by artists critical of the expansive logic of financial abstraction. This paper pays particular attention to the work of Fergal McCarthy and Fred Forest, two public artists who have confronted finance and its rational culture with practices of gameplay, whimsy, and carnival. In doing so, these artists invoke a strategy designed to lay the all-encompassing claims of financial abstraction alongside its own impossibility; alongside performances which undermine the expansive claims of financial abstraction. These are strategies, I conclude, which can interrupt the technocratic discourses which dominate the contemporary cultures of finance; strategies which, in the words of one artist, evoke ‘plausible states of uncertainty’ about our faith in financial abstraction.