John Lanchester's Novel Capital

John Lanchester, author of a book on the Great Recession titled I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, has penned a novel on the subject. Simply titled Capital, the novel is set in London during the financial crisis. 


The Amazon book description: 

Celebrated novelist John Lanchester (“an elegant and wonderfully witty writer”—New York Times) returns with an epic novel that captures the obsessions of our time. It’s 2008 and things are falling apart: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are going under, and the residents of Pepys Road, London—a banker and his shopaholic wife, an old woman dying of a brain tumor and her graffiti-artist grandson, Pakistani shop owners and a shadowy refugee who works as the meter maid, the young soccer star from Senegal and his minder—are receiving anonymous postcards reading “We Want What You Have.” Who is behind it? What do they want? Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.

The novel has inspired an "innovative online story" called PepysRd.com. 

Shop Class as Bust Proof?

Matthew Crawford's bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft defends the value of manual trade work in a society that privileges the abstractions of knowledge work. Much of the book has the timeless appeal of philosophy. If not timeless, Crawford's arguments focus on epochal problems, many of which call to mind Heidegger's sweeping criticisms of modernity. Nevertheless, Crawford situates his inquiry into the "value of work" within the context of the Great Recession. In the introduction, he writes:

The scope of the economic crisis is still uncertain as I write this; it may turn out to be a mere disturbance, soon forgotten. But, however briefly, we are experiencing a genuine crisis of confidence in our most prestigious institutions and professions. This presents an opportunity to reconsider some basic assumptions. The question of what a good job looks like--of what sort of work is both secure and worthy of being honored--is more open now than it has been for a long time. Wall Street in particular has lost its luster as a destination for smart and ambitious young people. Out of the current confusion of ideals and confounding of career hopes, a calm recognition may yet emerge that productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity. The meta-work of trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people's work suddenly appears as what it is, and it becomes possible once again to think the thought, "Let me make myself useful." (9-10)

From this premise, Crawford proceeds to make a "progressive-republican" argument for a "yeoman aristocracy" (209, 32). Crawford's ability to eschew contemporary political divisions fascinates (although his gender politics strike this reader as regrettably reactionary and unnecessarily so); however, he seems to fall into what we might call the "Michael Moore Problem": the nostalgic glance backward to a time where capitalism worked for working class and small, independent business folk. Undergirding this nostalgia are the assumptions that the good spirit of capitalism lies hidden within its now corrupted manifestation and that real, productive labor can co-exist with the reifications of capitalism (reifications Crawford is well aware of, as is demonstrated by his discussion of "abstract labor" (40).


Much of bust culture exhibits blue-collar nostalgia and is preoccupied by the belief in a bad capitalism excisable from the good, i.e., capitalism with a human face. Consider, for example, the politically intriguing Move Your Money project:

Not coincidentally, Crawford brings up banking in his book. In a review, Douglas Harper summarizes:

One of the most prescient arguments in Crawford's book describes the changing work of the mortgage banker. Not long ago they were integrated into communities and served as their moral arbitrators. A mortgage created a thirty-year relationship. The banker was part of a community of shared goals and mutual respect. Laws prohibited banks from serving more than their local communities, so the connection between the bank and its customers was assured. The work was meaningful because it required a kind of craftsmanship of interpersonal judgement. We now know what happens when this system is replaced with one in which greed-driven smartness creates an illusion of rationality while creating a financial system that is crazy to its core."

If a financial system is crazy-to-its-core, how can it be preceded by an Edenic economy? What other works of bust culture perpetuate the ideological myth in a capitalism before its corruption?   

Busted Science Fiction

I was introduced to Ghosts with Shit Jobs via the excellent www.boingboing.net this August; the site is a daily must-read, and alongside other elements of interest in web culture, they often feature Internet curios from the Great Recession.  This short creative film trailer is a real find: a Chinese news program set in the year 2040 follows the exploits of people in a broken United States as they toil in the bowels of the global economy.  Exploiting the faux-documentary styles of The Office and Christopher Guest films, GSJ incorporates such near-future elements as a catastrophic data collapse and a middleclass couple home-assembling refurbished robot babies.  The trailer is funny, but it also trades on the dystopian mood haunting recent films such as District 9 or Children of Men.  Science fiction has always been particularly potent in times of economic crisis.  Jack London described the future rise of fascism in 1907’s The Iron Heel, written and published against the backdrop of financial panic and an industrial recession, and Ridley Scott’s 1982 film, Bladerunner, deployed a dingy, neon noir setting invoking the global failures of Reagan-era trickle-down economics.   Critics such as Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin point out science fiction’s tendency towards cognitive estrangement that doubles as entertainment and critique: the genre breaks habitual readings by refracting the present back as the future’s past, altering perceptions of the contemporary moment.  Science fiction’s roots in the grand imperial projects of the early twentieth century, when travel fiction and adventure stories traded on orientalized descriptions of exotic cultures and foreign spaces, are profitably reversed here: the alien territory is an exhausted post-collapse United States, and the image is uncanny.  Ghosts with Shit Jobs is Speculative Bust Art, both in its concept and in its execution, the kind of crowd-sourced, self-published, kick-started text that might help us frame the shape of the Great Recession.  I, for one, would love to see a longer version.  

Tower Heist (A.O. Scott Review)

from "Crime Doesn't Pay. Oh, Wait." a review by A.O. Scott of Tower Heist.

...Rich guys are among the most reliable villains in Hollywood movies, and it takes no special insight to point out that the guys who make and star in those movies tend to be pretty well off themselves. You can call this hypocrisy, but I prefer to think of it as one of the cultural contradictions of capitalism that all of us have to live with.

Today’s specimen is “Tower Heist,” an action comedy produced by Brian Grazer, directed by Brett Ratner and starring Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy. The previous sentence could be expressed mathematically as a whole bunch of zeros, which is to say that the $20 million that is one object of the heist in question is small change. The movie’s makers and marketers surely expect to take much more than that from you and your friends in the next 48 hours or so, and you could do worse than to chip in your share, with a little something extra for the Coca-Cola Company. 

What you will receive in return (in addition to high-fructose corn syrup) is a mild, chaotic and cartoonish dose of populism, set in a Manhattan luxury high-rise at the southwestern corner of Central Park from which the name “Trump” has been excised with the utmost digital care...  

...Mediocre entertainment is not a crime — this is still America, dammit! — but “Tower Heist” could and should have been much more. Mr. Ratner goes for the safe bet and the easy score, which means that, for all his shows of solidarity with the working stiffs, he has more in common with the wealthy scam artist who took their hard-earned money.

To read the whole review, click here. 

A Visual Vocabulary for the Great Recession

In the last half of 2008, images of stock traders in various poses of disbelief served as an easy visual shorthand for the collapse.  Almost exclusively men, these figures were cartoonish in their pantomime of despair, emoting to the cheap seats in the style of professional wrestling.  Their transparent anxiety wasn’t nearly as interesting as the improbability of their continued existence: are stock traders on the floor still necessary?  Surely they have become a curio by now, figures from turn-of-the-century naturalist novels or easy visual jokes in 1980s movies.  Our financial doom wasn’t setoff by a run on the floor or a trading panic, but by the kind of routine deals and abstract financial math that only Michael Lewis can manage to make riveting.  These men in ill-fitting suits holding Star Fleet issued clipboards seem a quirky holdover from a previous era of embodied business now lost in a sea of Matrix-like data spilling endlessly down computer screens.  Hence these images were both funny and comforting: ah, finally, one thought, here is some real, traditional, and knowable human anxiety. 

What is the visual vocabulary for the Great Recession? I mean the kind of poses of human suffering that broker a structure of feeling invoking sympathy.  The stock traders just don’t fit the bill. These images never moved beyond the level of presenting human beings as canaries in the coal mines: they let us know how panicked we should be, but they told us very little about the actual suffering. The long 20^th century produced a cultural expectation for photographic evidence; Susan Sontag describes photographs as “routes of reference” in her brilliant book, Regarding the Pain of Others, visuals that help construct a sense of the past while at the same time conditioning a habitual response to that past.  That is the profound power of the camera: to direct our attention in productive ways, both making and unmaking habits.

Thanks to a deep repository created under the auspices of the FSA and WPA by photographers like Berenice Abbott, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, and others, a constellation of images continues to orient viewers into the human costs of the Great Depression.  Though many of the famous photographs of this period have a problematic relationship to their subjects – see the revisionary selectivity of Walker Evans, for example – and they privilege certain kinds of subjects over others – see the dramatically different levels of popular familiarity between Dorothea Lange’s remarkable portraits of Depression-era motherhood – this archive has effectively conditioned our interpretation of the emotional history of financial deprivation.  

Walker Evans

Dorothea Lange

The human figure is absent from another type of image that continues to proliferate after the 2008 collapse.  Stock shots of row after row of foreclosed homes from places like California, Nevada, Florida, and Michigan stand as continual evidence of the ongoing crisis.  Yet, often enough, these empty McMansions left to rot cannot signify suffering or provoke much sympathy.  Few cultural phenomena outside the SUV have come to stand in more for the excesses of the 1990s boom; these houses are often garish, architecturally barren, relentlessly manufactured.  They seem pathologically resistant to personality.  The photos themselves are poorly framed, almost out-of-focus.  Aesthetic fatigue is almost instant, as every foreclosed house looks miserable in the same way.  And the real estate signs sprout up like happy grubs squirming in a dead carcass; there’s still money to be made, even here.  

What will be the visual vocabulary of the Great Recession?  

Drag Me to Hell as Bust Cinema

Originally posted at Bitch Flicks.


"Movie Review: Drag Me to Hell" By Stephanie Rogers

"...I personally read [Drag Me to Hell] as an attempt to uphold the qualities our society traditionally categorizes as "feminine" characteristics: compassion, understanding, consideration, etc. I'm not suggesting that men don't also exhibit these qualities, but when they do, they're often considered weak and unmanly, especially when portrayed on-screen, which is demonstrated quite effectively when Christine confronts her male coworker about his attempts to sabotage her career; he bursts into tears in a deliberately pathetic played-for-laughs diner scene. 

But it’s only when Christine rejects these qualities in herself (the sympathetic emotions she initially feels toward Mrs. Ganush), and consciously coaxes herself into adopting hard-nosed, traditionally "masculine" characteristics (which her male boss rewards her for), that she’s ultimately punished—and by another woman, no less. The question remains, though, is she punished for being a domineering corporate bitch, or is she punished for rejecting her initial response to help out? Regardless of the answer, the film makes a direct commentary on the can't-win plight of women in the workplace, and, newsflash: it still ain't pretty...."

Read the whole review here.

Matt Taibbi on OWS

In a short piece for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi offers advice to the Occupy Wall Street movement. In encouraging the organizers to adopt a short list of concrete demands, Taibbi hits upon a key problem confronting "Bust Culture" at large (which is not to imply that OWS is strictly or essentially a cultural phenomenon; without a doubt OWS is a legitimate political movement. However, OWS must wage its battle on the cultural front as much as it protests in the streets and "occupies" public spaces. It must be counter-cultural as well as politically and economically oppositional). Taibbi highlights a discrepancy between the representation of OWS in the now infamous image of the college women maced by NYPD and the reality of what the movement is trying to resist. The image of the maced college women, he writes:

speaks volumes about the primary challenge of opposing the 50-headed hydra of Wall Street corruption, which is that it's extremely difficult to explain the crimes of the modern financial elite in a simple visual. The essence of this particular sort of oligarchic power is its complexity and day-to-day invisibility: Its worst crimes, from bribery and insider trading and market manipulation, to backroom dominance of government and the usurping of the regulatory structure from within, simply can't be seen by the public or put on TV. There just isn't going to be an iconic "Running Girl" photo with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup or Bank of America – just 62 million Americans with zero or negative net worth, scratching their heads and wondering where the hell all their money went and why their votes seem to count less and less each and every year.

In a nutshell, Taibbi claims that representing white collar crimes in simple visuals is not so simple. Capturing "dialectical images" (Walter Benjamin) of the financial crisis proves to be exceedingly difficult. Do you know of any dialectical images of the Great Recession? Has our contemporary Bust Culture produced, intentionally or unwittingly, any notable still visuals? Do you agree that "there just isn't going to be an iconic 'Running Girl' photo with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup or Bank of America"?