Transcript Culture, Capital and Representation: 1700-2000

Culture, Capital and Representation:
1700-2000

An interdisciplinary study incorporating a range of genres
and a range of disciplines from within the ambit of the
social sciences and humanities:
seventeenth- eighteenth century political pamphlet
ii) eighteenth century autobiography
iii) eighteenth century poems
iv) nineteenth and twentieth century novels
v) nineteenth century journalism
vi) twentieth century architecture
vii) twentieth century film
i)
Methodology & Outcomes
Aim: to find scholars interested in representations of
capital:
 From a range of historical periods;
 Across a range of humanities genres.
Problem: few humanities scholars working on capital. Few
economic historians working on culture and representation.
Outcomes:
 in 2005 in an international Colloquium hosted by the
Institute for Commonwealth Studies & Institute of English
Studies (London);
 in 2010 a book publication (Palgrave) of eleven chapters
focusing on three centuries of changing value in relation
to capital and representation.
Strengths of the project

The changing relationship between land, labour and
capital demonstrates the increasingly remote relationship
between value and its signifier (money);

Finance capital began as speculation. As finance capital
gained ascendency over a period of three centuries, so
too did the fissures become greater between value and its
increasingly disassociated commodity base (gambling,
speculation, risk and goods).
Strengths of the project…(cont).

Globalisation suggests closer proximity, mobility and
access to opportunities and the achievement of a
democratisation of the market through ‘free’ trade.

The practices of globalisation are influenced by old ideas
of race, gender and power associated with Western
metropolitan centres.
Strengths of the project…
(cont).

Tacitus: “we made a desert
and called it peace”. Hardt
and Negri (2001) “Empire”:
“discourses of empire are
clothed in peace, but the
practices of empire are
bathed in blood”.
Strengths of the project…(cont).

From Foucault we have
the idea that cultural
forms and the disciplines
work to allow or disqualify
particular discourses
through legitimization
processes.
Limitations of the project…

An economic(s) account would describe clearly
the development of capital historically;

A literary, or arts, or architectural account
would provide a more cogent argument for
change in the ‘representation of capital’;

A Variety of genres loses something of the
historicity of focus. A single genre loses the
value of comparison.
The 17-18th Centuries: a moment in
the transformation of capital (Goodacre)
The late seventeenth and early eighteenth century political
pamphlet (Sir William Petty and his satirists) shows a moment
in representation where...
i) colonised
peoples (like the Irish in this example) had not yet
been rendered invisible,
their suppression was planned;
and extirpation was publically contemplated in political
and economic discourse.
i) Transfer
the bulk of the Irish population eastwards into
England to increase population density, or ‘’compactness’,
of England’s population (seen as a key advantage to the
economic competitiveness of Holland where labour costs
were low).
William Petty: foundations for
capital & genocide
i.
ii.
iii.
Ireland would become a ‘kind of
ranch’ for rearing livestock for
England;
Transportation would also:
 end Ireland’s independent
national life;
 end anti-colonial resistance and,
 effect a ‘perpetual settlement’ (or, in the term used
prophetically by Petty’s editor in 1899, a ‘final solution’)
 make Ireland ‘less burdensome to England’.
What do we see? Capital and the need for an ultimate
system of market regulation (labour, costs, production
processes, and commodity values)
19th Century iconic architecture: building
the fantasy of capital’s triumph over
labour (Evrard)
i.
Colonised markets of the 19th C began to develop their own
representations of capital’s growing ‘unrelation’ to labour.
ii. Progressive
architecture of the period was influenced by
philosophical concepts such as utility and modernity (Le
Corbusier) where labour was rendered absent;
iii.Grain
elevators were described as ‘triumphs’ of organised
planned agriculture over small scale and labour-intensive
farming in France (a strategy, according to de Certeau).
iv.In
Canada, they were the representations of market oriented
capitalism (de Certeau terms this a ‘tactic’). Two forms came
to embody both a critique of the past and a nostalgia for a
future.
Architecture & Capital’s Fantasy
i) What
are World Trade Fairs? Power & Capitalist fantasy.
French Display: Modernist buildings to educate about
values:
 Imperial values (race and gender hegemonies) of the
earlier period were erased in favour of ‘the cooperative’ ,
 An appeal to an earlier agrarian sensibility concerning
land and value (money): a reaction to the Depression.
ii)
iii)
Canadian Display: Modernist buildings :
 invite immigration (the pursuit of displaced populations)
and opportunity;
 they were also ‘transitional spaces’ in which a product
(grain) moved to become a commodity.
20th Century icons of capital: greed
as the virtue of the market (McGoun)
I.
The ascendancy of speculative capital is highly ambiguous;
 it’s both valorised (eg Sorros), and demonised (eg Madoff).
20th Century icons of capital: greed as the
virtue of the market (McGoun) cont.
II.
The dilemma, when represented is faustian (attach a value
to the ephemeral);
 Allusions to Mephistopholes, seen in Gide’s The
Counterfeiters, and Dreiser’s The Financier, de Lillo’s
Cosmopolis abound.
III. The manipulation of capital:
 involves rendering visible

what is invisible in Wall Street
occurs in relation to a notion cunning.
Cunning, is strongly associated with the successful
movement of speculative capital in anticipation of profit
and avoidance of loss;
Film: values & capital
i) Gecko’s
cunning has long associations with heroic and mythic
figures.
Men typically ‘cun’ the gods.
But to cun authority (the gods/ the market) is not heroic
when it has consequences (eg, Madoff ).
Financial institutions cannot function in the market, already
irrational, as participants in speculation.
i) Legitimizing
greed and accumulation is a criticism levelled at
finance capital.
But: should financial behaviour have a moral value? (free
trade goods);
Does market behaviour demonstrate a kind of barbarism
(where the weak are at the mercy of the strong).
i) Trust
in markets is costly, and there is consequent crisis in
representations of value and labour. Is market volatility is a
prerequisite for “progress”?
A Golden Thread: appropriation for
survival or for profit
Particular ideas recur differently, across genres across the
centuries. Some examples:

The Market: from gambling houses of 17th Amsterdam, to
trading in stock (speculative value) and the bubbles of 18th
C, to the ‘bellying-up’ of markets, and the 1920s
‘depression’; to black Mondays and Tuesdays of late 20th C.

Moving populations: the Panama or Kenyan Railroads. The
South African migrant labour system. Re-settled populations
are ‘placed’/ transported: reservations, compounds,
settlements, bantustans – all to effect ‘population density’/
compactness to drive down labour costs.
Recurring capitalist dreams

The lowering of cost, accompanies the ‘driving
down’ of value.

As speculative capital grows, its movement
becomes a key feature in the late 20th C. Lower
commodity value appears to allows for higher
risk. This leads in turn to....

the ‘over pricing’ of risk (the discourse of the 21st
C) is used now to explain current financial
instabilities (for example, property mortgage).
Colour Me Bad: capital and the
‘discipline’ of the market
Financial transaction is highly coloured and gendered;
change over time has not obscured the phenomena. Some
examples:
Captive markets are sexed: slavery operated on the
absolute refusal to recognise coupling in legal or religious
terms; its purpose was to reproduce more slaves (see the
slave annuls of the VOC in 17th Century Cape Colony).

From captive, to colonised, to niche and ‘special’ partners,
the discourse of the market relations changes, but remains
coloured and gendered: it’s black, red, blue, or in the 20th C,
‘pink’. It’s bullish or bearish.

Colour, gender, pathology…
Speculative finance is:
 almost always white;
 in the late 20th C it sometimes becomes yellow.
 Fraud in respect of speculative capital is,
unsurprisingly, described as white collar.
While cheap labour is exploited, it’s also
 it sweats, is hungry (third world),
 is diseased, feverish and contagious
pathologised:
(pathologised);
 is child-bearing and demanding of equal pay
(gender).
No money, no honey? A few points
about value and the market
The
relationships between wealth, its accumulation, and
moral worth is problematic to religion and faith.
 Wealth can be a sign of divine favour,
 Wealth can be the corruption of divine purpose.
 Despising wealth is sometimes a virtue.
 Yet virtue is related in religious terms to the storing of
heavenly wealth (Muller, 2003).
Few
institutions focus on interdisciplinary research of this
kind continuously.
Economic phenomena affect almost every dimension of
our productive lives. But higher education seldom deal
with the world of work as also a world of worth.
Capital and Capitalism….
Speculative capital shifts between states depending on
the circumstances favourable to its continued growth.

While speculative capital depends on the fantasy of
wealth creation; its movement has real consequences
for workers and livelihoods.

Value, purpose and identity (the world of worth) finds
expression in the world of work (in which value, purpose
and identity have different functions).

Not long ago it was legitimate to enslave unbelievers,
or gas, burn, or them gun down. Value and belief
(whether motivated by religion or not) operate often to
legitimise exploitation.

Thank you &
acknowledgements

The Speculation and Displacement Project was made
possible through a Fellowship which I held at the Institute of
Commonwealth Studies in London from 2004-2007.

The Colloquium on “Speculation and Displacement: the
representation of capital” occurred in 2005 and was hosted
by the Institute of English Studies and the ICS in London.

I am currently looking for research partners to develop a
second book to explore representation and its complex
relationship with capital after 2000- in particular I would like
this volume to focus on perspectives from the global South.