Teoría de la Empresa Individual de Responsabilidad Limitada

abstract

In critical accounts of the global financial crisis, public commentators and academic investigators alike have sought to capture the causes and consequences of these disturbing events through figures of the supernatural. This paper sights three such supernatural figures: Vampires, zombies, and ghosts. Whereas the paper explores the figurative qualities and functions of each, the ghost is given special attention for two reasons: First, finance itself may be conceptualized as a fictitious form with no substance, a spirit with no body – a ghost. Second, the ghost is not only a conceptual figure of finance, but also holds a special place in the conceptualization of the figurative on which the paper relies. Thus, the paper is not only concerned with analysing figurative uses of ghosts in accounts of finance, but also with conceptualizing finance and figures as ghostly. As such, the main contribution is conceptual rather than empirical: The paper offers a grid that combines various functions of metaphor – stylistic, transactional, and constitutive – with their appearance in the guises of vampires, zombies, and ghosts, respectively, in the particular context of finance.

Introduction

A time of change and upheaval, Gramsci as popularized by Zizek (2010: 95) asserts, is a time of monsters. This certainly seems to be true of the years following the global financial crisis. Not only have monsters proliferated in popular culture (Newitz, 2006), public commentators and academic investigators alike have seized upon images of the monstrous as a means of grasping what, to return to the Gramscian paraphrase, was dying and what struggled to be born in those troubled

ephemera: theory & politics in organization 19(1): 129-151

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and troubling times. Most notably, vampires and zombies feature prominently in critical accounts of the financial crisis, indicating the causal greed as well as the consequential grief of what went on (McNally, 2012). While unpacking these two figments of our social imagination will be one central concern of the present paper, emphasis will be placed on a third figure: That of the ghost. Ghosts appear to be, well, more ethereal than the vampires and zombies who more readily embody finance and its discontents. However, I will argue that it is particularly important to attend to ghostly matters in accounts of finance and financial crises. Turning to ghosts, I claim, does not only provide us with a fuller understanding of the use of a particular set of literary figures to explain recent events in finance, but points to the figuration of finance itself.

Beginning with Marx, the increasingly fictitious or speculative character of finance has been conceptualized as a ghostly matter (Knight, 2013: 5). To say that finance is spectral, then, is no mere figure of speech, but a conceptualization of finance as such; when finance is defined as detachment from material value it haunts the ‘real’ economy. However, this does not make accounts of finance in the ghostly vein any less figurative than those invoking zombies or vampires. Rather, it means that the figural element is more ingrained in the matter at hand and, hence, harder to detect; finance as such is possessed and possessive – its metaphors may be ‘dead’, but their spirits linger. Thus, the present paper goes in search for that by which finance is possessed – and that which finance possesses. Aiming, more particularly, to explore the critical potential of different supernatural metaphors for engagement with financial speculation, the search will take us from unashamedly embellished expressions through subtler conceptualizations to the vanishing point of the figurative. The endpoint may be to discover ‘the ghost in the financial machine’ (Appadurai, 2011), but exploring the figurative use of vampires and zombies offers independent insights just as it helps establish the contours of the financial ghost. Thus, all three analyses operate at the same level of explaining how finance is figured and neither claims privileged knowledge of the nature of finance – beyond the common claim that finance is, by its nature, figurative. Still, ghostly figurations of and in the studied accounts do stand out in so far as they relate to the systemic level of finance. Whereas vampires and zombies figure particular actors, institutions, and/or theories, the ghost is figurative of finance as a whole.

In the following, I will first consider the nexus between finance and literary studies at which the present study is specifically situated. Next, I will introduce the papers’ mode of ghost-hunting; establishing the method of sighting metaphors that guides the search for supernatural figurations of and in critical accounts of finance – and explicating its connection to ‘ghostly matters’. The analytical encounters with these figurations will constitute the bulk of the paper, and only in their wake will I

position the findings in relation to the broader field to which this study arguably belongs; namely, critical finance studies. By way of conclusion, then, I will consider what the supernatural figurations of finance may teach us about issues of agency and responsibility in finance.