‘This could be our reality in the next five to ten years’: a blogpost platform as an expectation generation device on the future of insurance markets

William James (1919) characterises hypotheses as either live or dead. A hypothesis is live when it is taken into account as a ‘real possibility’. We follow James’ suggestion to not attribute intrinsic properties to hypotheses, but rather investigate how they came into being and look at the effects they generate. Expectations of digital technologies are a topic of vivid debate in the insurance industry. Before these expectations can become ‘live’, they have, in the first place, to be generated by market devices. We investigate how the reinsurance blogpost platform Open Minds functions as an ‘expectation generation device’ on the future of insurance markets. Combining Beckert’s work on the role of fictional expectations with the pragmatist turn in sociology of markets, we propose to study ‘expectation generation devices’, provoking expectations on economic markets. In our empirical analysis, we demonstrate the explicit fictional character of the Open Minds contributions, and analyse how a contained space of openness is generated to provoke expectations. We demonstrate how Open Minds can become live through circulation to other expectation generation sites in the insurance industry and beyond. We conclude by reflecting on the importance of expectation generation devices as a particular type of market devices.     

Making news of value: exploiting dissonances in economic journalism

This article explores the multiple modes of valuation that pervade newsmaking in economic journalism. It does so by exploring the different ways in which journalists at Valor Econômico, the leading economic newspaper in Brazil, compete and cooperate in the production of news. Valor is a paradigmatic case for discussing valuation practices in newsmaking since its institutional promise is to produce news of value. How, if at all, do Valor journalists embrace the promise of producing news that generates value? Elaborating on Stark’s (2009. The sense of dissonance. Accounts of worth in economic life. Princeton University Press) idea of dissonance, it is contended that different orders of worth collide and cooperate within Valor newsroom. Moreover, journalists engage in a variety of valuation practices through which these orders of worth are shaped, defined, and refined, reflecting different understandings of economy and society, and different conceptions of what journalism is good for. I argue that Valor’s direction intentionally fosters a plural space of value dissonance in order to improve the quality of news reporting. I emphasise, however, that these dissonances are only productive against a larger background of consonance about what actually there is to disagree about. The article is based on a seven-month ethnography of Valor’s newsroom in São Paulo between 2013 and 2015.     

Markets of Islam: performative charity and the Muslim middle classes in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways in which middle class Muslims in Turkey talk about Islamic ‘community’ and analyses these discourses in relation to the phenomenon of market Islam. The evidence is drawn from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with donors, managers, and volunteers of a government friendly Islamic NGO, the Light House (Deniz Feneri Sosyal Yard?mla?ma ve Dayan??ma Derne?i) in 2009–2010, followed by subsequent trips in 2013 and 2015. I argue that Islamic charity is not merely a calculative economic behaviour or a reflection of deep-seated religious values, but rather a performative site of market Islam. In seeking to reconcile a faith-based understanding of charity with diverse interpretations of the neoliberal economy, I show that middle-class Muslims adhered to two discourses of ‘community’: whereas donors saw charitable giving as a market-enhancing mechanism, NGO managers defined their charitable work as part of an Islamic project focused on economic redistribution. Although they conceptualized the relationship between faith and markets in divergent ways, both discourses of market Islam posit ‘community’ as an intrinsic component of governing the poor in Turkey.     

Re-imagining the future in finance capitalism

ABSTRACT

What is the role of imagination in the constitution of finance capitalism? How do the fictions, myths, and (ir)rationalities of finance shape society's ability to imagine the future in the face of mounting political instability? Well over a decade since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, today's financialised economies are still marred by stagnation and uncertainty. Against this backdrop, the increasingly speculative nature of economic forecasting, and the accelerated trading of promises of all sorts (from algorithmic and derivative markets to contemporary electoral politics) put the role of imagination centre stage. This special issue contends that, contrary to conventional wisdom, imagining the future is not necessarily equal to ‘fantasising' or to ‘irrational exuberance' or the ‘animal spirits'. Rather, it points to something much more fundamental: the power of finance to produce new social and political morphologies under conditions of radical uncertainty. The articles of the special issue confront these issues by mapping out a novel field of investigation into different, unique types of imagination undergirding finance capitalism in the years since its most recent crisis: from the future-making practices of mineral exploration and agricultural derivative markets, to the imagined futures of financial education programmes, the financialisation of creative work, and the role of future-oriented legitimacy in today’s populist politics.     

Ontological violence: Catherine Malabou on plasticity,performativity, and writing the feminine

ABSTRACT

Catherine Malabou's opinion of non-essentialist models of gender identity and art is unambiguous: in her words, they are ‘catastrophic’ to women and to artists (Malabou [2014]. ‘Sujet: Femme'. de(s)générations des féminismes 21, 29-38: 135). What, then, are the implications of Malabou's hallmark concept of ‘plasticity’ on theories of performativity? Has plasticity come to supplant performativity, just as Malabou believes that it has come to supplant Derridean writing? Or if, as Malabou suggests, philosophical concepts are inherently plastic, may we maintain that performativity was always already plastic? In the following article, I read Malabou's work on writing alongside her work on the feminine in order to question how plasticity and performativity might be examined together to theorise the ways in which the discursive and the material interact in the production of subjectivities. By highlighting the performativity at play within Malabou's own writing about the end of writing, I propose that her work challenges her claim that literature cannot deconstruct philosophy. In response to Malabou's anti-essentialist plastic theory of the essence of woman, I underline the parallels between performativity and plasticity and suggest that the two concepts overlap in their mutual configuration of identity and form as mutable and transformable.     

EROTIC ECONOMICS

Since their inception, capitalist markets have been associated with a wide variety of psychological disorders. Freud argued that many of these neuroses were the result of repressing Eros, or the pleasure principle, in the interest of building a broader society or ‘civilization’. Drawing on the work of the Italian autonomist Franco Berardi and the psychology of Carl Jung, I argue that Eros, defined more broadly as relatedness, is an integral part of capitalist markets that has been consistently devalued and repressed both in economic discourse and economic policy. Identified with the ‘feminine’ behaviours of hysteria, emotion and irrationality, this aspect of capitalist markets was moralized throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the market was re-conceived as masculine. As both Berardi and Keynes have noted, however, we have paid a price for this absorption of Eros by the Logos of the market. By recuperating the erotic aspects of capitalism, we can build a more embodied, relational concept of the market.     

From the moral to the neural: brain scans,decision-making,and the problematization of economic (ir)rationality

Advances in brain imaging techniques have opened new fields of investigation and often challenged conventional assumptions concerning human behaviour. This ‘neuromolecular gaze’ [Rose, N. &; Abi-Rached, J. (2013) Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ] also heralds new ways of intervening in the regulation of social phenomena, based on the objectification of the cerebral processes that underlie individual conducts. Neuroeconomics applies this brain-centric perspective to the study of economic decision-making. This paper engages with the two dominant approaches in neuroeconomics. The first section concentrates on the work of Paul Glimcher, who considers economic models and their correlative notion of ‘utility maximization’ as providing the neurosciences with a theoretical framework as to how the brain solves decision problems. The second section discusses the findings of behavioural neuroeconomics, which attempts to model departures from the rationality axiom by measuring the cognitive and emotional biases that have their sources in the brain’s complex architecture. Whereas both strands of neuroeconomics rely on a benchmark of economic rationality, this paper argues that they reformulate in allegedly neutral neuroscientific terms a behavioural norm that is basically moral in nature. If rational decision-making conditions economic and indeed evolutionary survival, and yet if most people regularly fail as utility optimizers, then understanding the neural causes of such failures should help people better themselves and behave as good homines ?conomici.     

Silicon Valley,disruption, and the end of uncertainty

ABSTRACT

This paper reflects on the relationship between high-tech disruption narratives and uncertainty. My main argument is that an economic sociology of the future is incomplete without addressing the ‘demonic’ or rather eschatological elements apparent in the promissory twin rhetoric of disruption and inevitability that a number of contemporary technology firms employ. The conjuring up of liberatory high-tech futures implicates a political-philosophical perspective of the end game. It utilizes at once the productive power of uncertainty to create visions of ‘absolute riches’ and societal gain but at the same time narrows these futures down to one inevitable alternative to the status quo. Through the examples of two Silicon Valley disruptor firms, I argue that these eschatological narratives need to be opened to social scientific critique in order to examine their potential societal consequences above and beyond the narrow geographic confines of ‘the Valley.’     

Reading against culture in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism

Edward Said is the literary critic most cited by American anthropologists, but there has been relatively little anthropological examination of his concept of culture. Apart from an isolated attempt by Lila Abu‐Lughod to ‘write against culture’, most anthropologists have ignored Said’s approach. In Culture and Imperialism, Said draws on Matthew Arnold’s ‘best of the best’ definition, while American anthropologists owe their holistic culture to fellow Victorian Edward Tylor. Claude Levi‐Strauss is praised by Said, but other major anthropological approaches to culture are ignored. Said assumes anthropology is on the wrong side of the colonial divide, although he holds out hope for those who are now reading the work of literary and cultural critics. In this essay I compare Said’s reading of anthropology, exemplified by Kipling’s Colonel Creighton, to the influence of Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas on ethnographic method.     

Trust the artist versus trust the tale: performance implications of talent and self-marketing in folk music

Based on a unique dataset of artists that are active in the German market for folk music—the third largest music genre in terms of popularity and sales—I study what factors determine the artists’ success. Following Rosen (Am Econ Rev 71(5):845–858, 1981), I test if differences in artistic performance have a direct effect on financial rewards as regards physical and digital record sales (“direct superstar effect”). Following Adler (Handbook on the economics of art and culture. Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1985), I also study sales effects of a media presence of artists (“classical superstar effect”). Controlling for various contingency factors (e.g., record labels’ support, artists’ socio-demographics), I deal with an economic issue of general interest: Does it pay more to develop your skills in your core business to perfection or to maintain the current level of skills and invest in self-marketing; and do these effects apply to all folk artists alike? Rather contrary to studies on pop and rock genres, I find that higher ability increases artists’ revenues disproportionately, but simultaneously, openly competing for the recognition of one’s talent holds substantial economic risk. I also observe a positive effect of various types of media presence on financial rewards. However, these income determinants have different impacts on sales in physical versus in digital markets, and their effects vary across the success distribution from low- to top-selling artists as well.     

The nature of markets: on the affinity between masculinity and (neo)liberalism

ABSTRACT

The relationship between masculinity, neoliberalism, and capitalist economy is difficult to analyse. This is apparent when we consider recent studies of neoliberal capitalism, which are almost entirely books about men, and yet this feature consistently escapes critical attention. In contrast, this article brings this relation into focus, and suggests that the critique of hegemonic masculinities is an important feature of the critique of neoliberalism. The article first reviews existing literature on the intersection of masculinity and capitalism, which is increasingly being drawn towards the analysis of neoliberalism. It then briefly takes up Michel Foucault’s study of neoliberalism, especially his contention that classical liberalism’s concern with the nature of markets maintains an ambiguous persistence within the neoliberal project, in order to consider what it may have to offer to an analysis of masculinity and neoliberalism. Finally, I turn to one of the key thinkers in the intellectual development of neoliberalism – Ludwig von Mises – and provide a critical rereading of his 1944 book Bureaucracy. I argue that, beneath its veneer of economic rationality, the text mobilizes masculinity as a technology that is crucial to managing both the affective and economic insecurities generated by neoliberal conceptions of freedom in market-based societies.     

Subaltern voices and postcolonial schizophrenia: The political tensions of M.I.A.’s Kala

ABSTRACT

Banned from the U.S. during the “war on terror,” the British/Sri Lankan hip-hop artist M.I.A. responded by recording her 2007 album Kala in multiple locations throughout the global South, collating indigenous musical styles and unorthodox recording techniques. Via a critical/cultural analysis, this paper explores M.I.A.’s work on Kala as subaltern resistance mobilized by “differential movement,” particularly in its mode of production, which operated outside of, and in opposition to, institutional mechanisms designed to expunge or neutralize politically subversive art and artists. Yet M.I.A.’s musical sampling also surfaces conflicts between creative freedom and cultural appropriation, emblematizing “postcolonialist/postmodern schizophrenia” (Vályi, 2011. Remixing cultures: Bartók and Kodály in the age of indigenous cultural rights. In K. McLeod & R. Kuenzli (Eds.), Cutting across media: Appropriation art, interventionist collage, and copyright law (pp. 219–236). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.).     

How to Make your Audience Suffer: Melodrama,Masochism and Dead Time in Lars von Trier's Dogville

Abstract

Both fans and critics of Lars von Trier's work would likely agree with his capacity to make his audience suffer. This essay canvasses the devices through which the suffering of women in von Trier's melodramas is rendered excruciating to watch. Drawing on Deleuze's influential account of masochism, the first part of the essay discusses how von Trier's film Dogville foregrounds the complicated relationship that suffering has with pleasure and power. The second part of the essay focuses on the temporal dynamics of melodrama and the creative ways in which Lars von Trier disturbs the rhythms of suffering on screen. In particular I argue that von Trier introduces intervals of ‘dead time’ that make the passage of time itself painful to the audience and that open up a larger cultural history of temporal disorder. This part of the essay looks back to von Trier's early experiments with time in Psychomobile 1: The World Clock (2000) and forward to more recent innovative play with time and movement in Melancholia (2011) to make the case for rethinking the temporal dimensions of mediated suffering and the significance of time in the work of Lars von Trier.     

LIVE Baccarat calculations: Macau machine gambling and the production of the post-socialist subject

ABSTRACT

Following Portugal’s return of Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, and the subsequent liberalization of the city’s 150-year-old casino monopoly, Macau was transformed into the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming. Today Macau attracts more than 30 million annual tourists, the majority of whom are from mainland China. This article analyzes an electronic casino game called LIVE Baccarat, which was created by a Hong Kong biopharmaceutical company, and designed to appeal to Chinese gamblers in Macau. Drawing on the work of Michel Callon and Michel Foucault, I explore the ways in which the LIVE Baccarat gaming machine ‘economizes’ the game of baccarat by introducing novel betting functions which require gamblers to engage in various forms of financial calculation, including calqulation, hedging, arbitrage, and portfolio management. LIVE Baccarat is a biopolitical apparatus of subjection of a post-socialist Chinese homo economicus, a form of ‘human capital’ which Foucault might call an ‘entrepreneur of the self.’ This subject not only plays a remunerative role in Macau’s gaming industry, but conforms to China’s macroeconomic goals to engender ‘quality’ citizens equipped to support a domestic consumer market which may supplant the unsustainable production-for-export regime that drove the country’s initial post-reform development.     

A good hustle: the moral economy of market competition in adult webcam modeling

In this article, we examine how models working on Chaturbate, one of the world’s most popular adult webcam platforms, negotiate and make sense of the dynamic ways in which this platform configures their competitive environment. By combining different perspectives from the field of economic sociology, we demonstrate how competition on Chaturbate is shaped by various market devices whose strategic negotiation informs – and is informed by – the moral economy articulated on web forums where models gather to discuss their work experiences and market strategies. We first introduce Chaturbate and the ways in which it organizes market competition, surveying the environment models have to negotiate. We then zoom in on two controversial strategies for beating the competition, each of which upset the moral economy of Chaturbate’s model community. Subsequently, we turn to what models term ‘the hustle,’ which encompasses a number of competitive strategies and criteria judged to be fair and thus legitimate. The final part of our analysis considers the limitations of the hustle, as well as the meritocratic and entrepreneurial discourse that surround it, in light of what we identify as Chaturbate’s ‘manufactured uncertainty.’     

The moral economy of face: marketized gift and depoliticized solidarity in South Korea’s fair trade

ABSTRACT

Metaphors of ‘face’ are often found in South Korea’s fair trade activism, as fair trade is frequently described as ‘face-to-face commerce’ and its goal is presented as pursuing ‘global trade with a human face.’ By asking how and why fair trade relies on the metaphors of face, this article analyzes the political implications and limits of the trope. I first examine the intimate connection between gift-exchange and face based on Marcel Mauss’s analysis of the gift and I present face as a locus of symbolic recognition and politics. Next, drawing on ethnographic research into Beautiful Coffee, the largest fair trade organization in South Korea, I illuminate fair trade as a hybrid practice of ‘marketized gift-exchange’ in which the various faces of producers and consumers are produced and circulated along with market transactions. In examining the meanings of those faces, I maintain that the prevalent metaphor of face in fair trade betrays the contradictory nature of market-based solidarity that is sought through the activism to redefine the whole economic structure based on moral and ethical practices.     

Acts of Irreconcilable Mourning: Post-Holocaust Witness and Testimony

Abstract

This essay revisits the question of post-Shoah responses to cataclysm in light of the now-urgent question of transmission – the shift in mourning and memory between first-generation survivors and later generations. Offering a different but complementary analysis to those in trauma or memory studies, I argue that post-Shoah witness and testimony are acts of ‘irreconcilable mourning’. This sense of mourning departs from post-Freudian approaches that focus on closure. Instead, irreconcilable mourning is a non-totalising approach to loss that resists ‘redemption’ and instead necessitates an ongoing, creative, and critical response to loss. In the course of this argument, I examine first-generation accounts such as Primo Levi's and Elie Wiesel's to highlight the necessity and contingency of transmission by interrogating concepts such as the ‘unsayable’ and the remnant. I then focus on Art Spiegelman's second-generation Maus: A Survivor's Tale, bringing cross-generational questions of witness and testimony as acts of irreconcilable mourning into the fold of Marianne Hirsch's ‘postmemory’ and Edith Wyschogrod's heterological history-telling.     

A care-infused market tale: on (not) maintaining relationships of trust in energy retrofit products

ABSTRACT

Issues of maintenance offer exceptional opportunities for advancing our understanding of how market-driven innovation can meet societal objectives for energy transitions. In this article, I present a case study of ongoing attempts by two spin-outs and one start-up to stabilise innovative socio-technical agencements – ‘customer journeys’ – designed to catalyse economic exchange of certain singular goods – energy retrofit products – in the Netherlands. This market-driven innovation relies on sustaining carefully crafted relationships of trust among supply-chain actants and homeowners. I mobilise the analytical lens of ‘care’ to show how the multiplicity of connections that form through socio-technical agencements – and function as a market – are tentative, contested, and unpredictable. Trust relationships are in a constant process of becoming through contestation and convergence among supply-chain actants. In doing so, I expose the precarious and arduous work involved in maintaining a market for singular public goods. This implies a knowledge politics as well: in a call to sensitise us, market scholars, to processes of maintenance integral to market-driven innovation for energy transitions I propose to advance Callon’s call to civilise markets by sharing troubled, though encouraging, care-infused market tales in an effort to counteract the storification of energy transitions as innovation fairy tales.     

Disturbance and destruction: the aetiology of trauma

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine Catherine Malabou’s concept of trauma, and argue that her replacement of the Freudian unconscious with the cerebral unconscious might fit adequately into a different framework from the one she proposes. Comparing her view of pathology to that of Georges Canguilhem, I propose a dimensional reading of pathology. Building on this – and by reference to metaplasticity – I ask whether one can explain the mechanisation characteristic of the new wounded mechanistically. I then look at her exchange with Slavoj ?i?ek to get at Malabou’s understanding of psychoanalysis. She seeks to realign Freud and neuroscience to resolve issues with both. As part of this shift, she introduces the term ‘the Material’ – linked to the cerebral unconscious – as an alternative to the Lacanian triad of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary. She does, however, leave it underdeveloped, and I argue that this points to tensions in her theory. While her concept of plasticity runs against ideas of an isolated transcendental subject exempt from the outside, Malabou seems to literalise (or ‘corporealise’) trauma. If this is correct, then how radical is her concept of trauma, and are there ways of describing trauma that are equally compatible with her concept of plasticity?     

Documenting financial performativity: film aesthetics and financial crisis

Marc Bauder’s finance film, Master of the Universe (2013) won the European Documentary Film Prize in December 2014. Bauder’s film focuses on a series on interviews with a former leading investment banker, Rainer Voss, high up in one of Frankfurt’s deserted bank skyscrapers. Voss’s statements, set against the skyline of Frankfurt’s ‘Mainhattan’ financial sector, allow Bauder to constitute an aesthetic that, I argue, successfully addresses a key problem in moving image studies, namely how to find an appropriate film form to register the workings of contemporary finance. Bauder’s film offers an unusual depiction of the self-constitution and self-understanding of a banker-turned-whistleblower, focusing on Voss’s speech acts of explication and justification. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of performative agency and of the separation of economics and politics through iterative perlocutionary acts, I argue that Bauder’s investigation into the performativity that establishes the autonomy of the financial sector and grants it extensive social power offers a significant aesthetic engagement with financial performativity and contributes to debates about documentary and performativity and about routes to a reconnection of economics and politics.