Culture, Capital and Representation : 1700-2000

1. 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 • eighteenth century autobiography • eighteenth century poems • nineteenth and twentieth century novels • nineteenth century journalism • twentieth century architecture • twentieth century film

2. 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.

4. 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).

5. 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.

6. Strengths of the project…(cont). • Tacitus: “we made a desert and called it peace”. HardtandNegri (2001) “Empire”: “discourses of empire are clothed in peace, but the practices of empire are bathed in blood”.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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... • 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. • 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).

10. William Petty: foundations for capital & genocide • 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)

11. 19th Century iconic architecture: building the fantasy of capital’s triumph over labour(Evrard) • Colonised markets of the 19th C began to develop their own representations of capital’s growing ‘unrelation’ to labour. • Progressive architecture of the period was influenced by philosophical concepts such as utility and modernity (Le Corbusier) where labour was rendered absent; • 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). • 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.

12. Architecture & Capital’s Fantasy • 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. • 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.

13. 20th Century icons of capital: greed as the virtue of the market (McGoun) • The ascendancy of speculative capital is highly ambiguous; • it’s both valorised (egSorros), and demonised (egMadoff).

14. 20th Century icons of capital: greed as the virtue of the market(McGoun)cont. • 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’sCosmopolis abound. • 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;

15. Film: values & capital • 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. • 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). • Trust in markets is costly, and there is consequent crisis in representations of value and labour. Is market volatility is a prerequisite for “progress”?

16. 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.

17. 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).

18. Colour MeBad: 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.

19. 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 pathologised: • it sweats, is hungry (third world), • is diseased, feverish and contagious (pathologised); • is child-bearing and demanding of equal pay (gender).

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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.