Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Fictions of fictitious capital: American Psycho and the poetics of deregulation

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950236x.2011.594316

1470-1308

Richard Godden,

Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

Abstract Patrick Bateman (American Psycho, 1991 [set 1989]) lives on the dash between the M's (M-M1-M2), as represented by Marx's formula for finance (or 'fictitious') capital. M differs from M1 (and so on) insofar as the increase represents money made from money (or from financial instruments) rather than from production (or M-C-M1, where 'C' may be understood either as Commodity [produced, distributed, consumed] or as Capital [accumulated prior to investment in manufacture]). This essay takes the financier Bateman's preferred activities, brand display, torture, and the serial liquification of 'hardbodies', as quasi-allegorical representations of the working of finance capital during the Reagan presidency. In the thin phenomenology of Bateman's experience, an anxious experience of pain-making, fetishism, and disavowal, traces of a means whereby fictitious capital might be critiqued may be discerned. Keywords: Fictitious capitalfinancecreditfetishdisavowalpainallegorydematerialization Notes Karl Marx, quoted by David Harvey, The Limits of Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 269. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 62. John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (London: Atlantic Books, 2005), p. 25. My equations are taken from Karl Marx, Capital (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), Vol. 3. pp. 383–384. See also Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 256–257. My definition of hedge funds derives from Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 84–86. David Harvey comments, '[T]he strong wave of financialization that set in after 1973 has been … spectacular for its speculative and predatory style. Stock promotions, ponzi schemes, structural asset destruction through inflation, asset-stripping through mergers and acquisitions, and the promotion of levels of debt incumbency that reduce whole populations, even in the advanced capitalist countries, to debt peonage, to say nothing of corporate fraud and dispossession of assets … by credit and stock manipulations – all of these are central features of what contemporary capitalism is about …. But above all we must look at the speculative raiding carried out by hedge funds and other major institutions of finance capital as the cutting edge of accumulation by dispossession in recent times'. The New Imperialism, p. 147. Giovanni Arrighi, 'Tracking global turbulence', New Left Review, Vol. 20 (March–April 2003), p. 48. Doug Henwood writes of '[T]he debt-mad years 1987 and 1988', noting of the decade as a whole, '[a] telephone-book-sized compendium of studies by New York Fed economists (Federal Reserve Bank of New York 1994) confirms the thesis that the fevered boom of the 1980s was fuelled by an exceptionally heavy use of credit – federal, business, household'. Much of what passed for finance capital in the period was unredeemable fictitious capital founded on empty assets and sustained by questionable accountancy. See Henwood, Wall Street, pp. 158–159, and Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 190. For figures, see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 316–317. Henwood, Wall Street, p. 279. Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 227. Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (London: New Left Books, 1986), p. 283. Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 1979), pp. 4, 24. Harvey, The New Imperialism, pp. 62–67. The terms, phrases, and quotations cited in this paragraph are drawn from Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, Ch. 24, pp. 383–391. Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho (London: Picador, 1991), p. 137. Subsequent references will be to this edition, and will be included in the text. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 165. Letter from Adorno to Benjamin, 29 Feb. 1940, in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin (ed.), The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, trans. Nicolas Walker (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), p. 321. Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2000), pp. 5, 7–8. Total advertizing expenditure in the USA stood at $50 billion in 1979 and at close to $130 billion in 1990. For figures see Klein, No Logo, p. 11. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 89. Ibid., p. 89. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 193. Taussig makes use of 'the Emperor's New Clothes' to illustrate the workings of public secrets in 'Part 3: In That Other Time: Isla Grande'. I am reminded also of Donald Trump's Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City or of Trump Tower, New York, both founded in the late 1980s on a superstructure of credit, resting in turn on the net worth of Trump (a Bateman hero), 'held together by slick, publicist-generated magazine articles about how rich and successful he was'. Doug Henwood, Wall Street, p. 239. Close to the end of American Psycho, Bateman 'look[s] up, admiringly, at Trump Tower, tall, proudly gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight' (p. 385). Taussig, Defacement, p. 161. For useful accounts of 'disavowal' see Henry Kripps, Fetish: An Erotics of Culture (London: Cornell, 1999), pp. 7–8, 45–46; Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York: Schoken Books, 1985), pp. 66–72. Kripps, Fetish, p. 75. See also Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 198. Timothy Bewes, Reification or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002), p. 80. Ibid., pp. 44, 89. American Psycho famously opens with 'ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE … scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank' (p. 3), and closes with the sign 'THIS IS NOT AN EXIT', again in red (p. 399). Henwood, Wall Street, p. 237. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 5. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., pp. 16, 27. Ibid., see particularly Ch. 4, 'The structure of belief and its materilization into material making: body and voice in the Judeo-Christian scriptures and the writings of Marx', pp. 181–277. Ibid., p. 211. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 256. Ibid., p. 138. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 1982), p. 248. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 248. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, p. 248. Henwood cites Keynes, 'the professional investor is forced to concern himself with the anticipation of impending changes, in the news or in the atmosphere' in order 'to anticipate … what average opinion expects the average opinion to be', and by such anticipation 'to beat the gun'. Keynes likened such speculation to Snap or Musical Chairs, games involving serial prolepsis in which players are liable to snap or sit in panicked anticipation of the snapping or sitting of others. See Henwood, Wall Street, p. 208. Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 16, 125. Quoted by Henwood, Wall Street, p. 206. Keynes notes, 'Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity …. It forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole. The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future. The actual, private object of most skilled investment today is to … outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating, half-crown to the other fellow'. Henwood argues that most merger waves are 'empowered by some financial fad' such as junk bonds in the 1980s: 'the logic behind the odd and ever-changing-flood of paper was explained by an anonymous investment banker … "most mergers do not make sense. Therefore you have to use securities that the buyers do not understand and that are different from the last round of bad merger securities"' p. 282. See Daniel Cohen, Our Modern Times: The New Nature of Capitalism in the Information Age, trans. Susan Clay and Daniel Cohen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 56–57. 'As long as the influence of financial capital eclipses the importance of human capital, the dissonance between private and public consumption will persist, and modern men and women will experience as a new 'calvary' the entry into this new age of his history'. Cohen, Ibid., p. 114. Herman Melville, 'The Affidavit', Moby Dick, Ch. 45 (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 172. See Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 184–187. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1997), p. 184. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 175.