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Fictions of fictitious capital:American Psycho and the poeticsof
deregulationRichard Godden aa English Department , University of
California , IrvinePublished online: 22 Sep 2011.
To cite this article: Richard Godden (2011) Fictions of
fictitious capital: AmericanPsycho and the poetics of deregulation,
Textual Practice, 25:5, 853-866,
DOI:10.1080/0950236X.2011.594316
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Richard Godden
Fictions of fictitious capital: American Psycho and thepoetics
of deregulation
Patrick Bateman (American Psycho, 1991 [set 1989]) lives on the
dashbetween the Ms (M-M1-M2), as represented by Marxs formula
forfinance (or fictitious) capital. M differs from M1 (and so on)
insofar asthe increase represents money made from money (or from
financial instru-ments) rather than from production (or M-C-M1,
where C may beunderstood either as Commodity [produced,
distributed, consumed] oras Capital [accumulated prior to
investment in manufacture]). This essaytakes the financier Batemans
preferred activities, brand display, torture,and the serial
liquification of hardbodies, as quasi-allegorical represen-tations
of the working of finance capital during the Reagan presidency.In
the thin phenomenology of Batemans experience, an anxious
experi-ence of pain-making, fetishism, and disavowal, traces of a
meanswhereby fictitious capital might be critiqued may be
discerned.
Keywords
Fictitious capital; finance; credit; fetish; disavowal; pain;
allegory;dematerialization
A producer who receives credit against the collateral of an
unsold commoditymay well use that paper or electronic promise to
purchase fresh means of pro-duction or labour power. The lender
takes into his possession that which isbacked by something unsold
or even unproduced a fictitious value which,should he circulate it
in the form of credit money, compounds the initialfiction. And so,
as Marx would have it fictitious capital double[s] andtreble[s]
everything into a mere phantom of the imagination.1 Expressedas
equations the dematerialization2 or vaporization3 of money, as it
separ-ates from the real economy, might be read as the transition
from M-C-M1 toM-M1, where money (M), as interest bearing capital,
does not pause to fixand risk itself in commodity production (C),
and in the creation of extended
Textual Practice 25(5), 2011, 853866
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online#
2011 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2011.594316
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social networks of manufacture, distribution, and exchange, but
insteadenters into relations with itself, becoming itself the
tradable good fromwhich more money is created (M1).4
Take, for example, hedge funds, the high end of mutuals: a
hedgefund pools the capital of perhaps a hundred partners.
Virtually free fromregulation and often registered off-shore
(though managed fromNew York or London), such funds borrow
aggressively from 5 to 20times their own paid-in capital, moving
that capital and those borrowingsrapidly from investment to
investment: that is, resting lightly in the realmof the promissory
rather than the fixed, the fictional rather than the real.Mutual
funds, including hedges, grew by 22 per cent during the 1980s(as
against an 11 per cent increase in the 1970s): between 1983
and1987, the average US hedge made an annual return of 20 per cent,
as com-pared with 13 per cent on direct investment in the US stock
market.5
Where US manufacture faces irruptions into its home market of
lowercost competitors (say from Europe or Asia) and trades in a
context of overcapacity at the global level, hedge funds and other
mechanisms of financecapital may prove irresistible. Accordingly,
during what the economistRobert Brenner casts as the persistent
stagnation of US manufacturebetween 1973 and 1993, the share of US
corporate profit accounted forby finance, insurance, and real
estate increased: indeed, during the1980s, that share approached
for the first time the profits of manufacture,and more importantly
non-financial firms themselves sharply increasedtheir investment in
financial assets relative to that in plant and equipment,and became
increasingly dependent on financial sources of profit relative
tothat earned from productive activities.6 That financial market
rested oncompound promises to pay (or credit), from which credit,
in the formof interest bearing capital resold, further monies might
be taken.
Arguably, the modern US credit culture can be dated from
Nixonssevering of paper monies from the gold-dollar-standard in
1971, uppingthe ante on moneys function as lubricity rather than
mean. But theReagan years, saw the mechanisms of interest bearing
capital prosper.Reagans tightening of the US money supply,
inherited from the lastyear of the Carter administration, induced a
radical upward jump in thereal interest rates, which coupled with a
deregulation of banking, effectivelyrecentred the institutions of
global finance in New York (they havingdrifted to London in the
1960s, and off-shore in the 1970s).7 Pecuniaryincentives, in the
form of tax concessions to the rich, allied to a
spectacularexplosion in state indebtedness,8 drew the surplus
capital of the worldthrough New York, where, on Wall Street
(according to its historianDoug Henwood), between 1983 and 1989,
bubbles, manias, liquidityinnovations, and fantasies ruled.9
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Such concentration of global monies concentrates the cadre of
itshandlers and beneficiaries, the financiers and Corporate
Executive Officers,and the rentier block provisioned by their
labours. High speculative profitsprompt high fungibility between
officers and parasites in the financialsector, and an attendant
empowering of a contracting elite. While, in1980, the top 1 per
cent of US income earners claimed less than 8 percent of the
national income, by 2000 their return stood at 15 per cent.10
David Harveys figures confirm what Mike Davis describes as the
patho-logical prosperity and over consumption of Reagans
rentiers,11 thosewho, from a Marxist perspective, might be thought
to live in and on thegap between M and M1.
With luck, my economic prelude may serve to foreground a
problemof representation. The regulation economist Michel Aglietta
insists thatwithout expressing the social content of economic
relations we cannotinterpret the forces and conflicts at work in
the economic process. Headds that production is production of
social relations as well as materialobjects.12 It follows that an
economy should be understood as a maskworn by social relations.
Agliettas claim is particularly problematic ifapplied to a period
during which a fragment of the bourgeoisie (theNew York financial
class) is central to what Harvey calls the new-liberalconsensus as
it emerges towards global hegemony through financebetween 1970 and
2000.13 Given that the workings of the financialsector occur within
a medium speculative capital which systematicallyseeks to avoid
uncomfortable collisions with the more material practices ofthe
economy, how might such an immaterial mask be rendered expressiveof
the social relations that give rise to it? Or, put aphoristically,
how doesone figure the gap between M and M1 in the absence of C
(where C may beunderstood either as Commodity [produced,
distributed, consumed], or asCapital [accumulated prior to
investment in manufacture])?
Marx is clear about what goes on in the gap, mystification whose
typehe terms fetish. Money, for Marx, is itself a fetish insofar as
it obliteratesand renders invisible the specific attributes and
real elements of thereproduction that it represents. Consequently,
money that expands itsown value independently of reproduction, that
which is pregnant withitself (or interest bearing capital), is
doubly fetishistic, in that the fetish(M) yields a further fetish
(M1). We see here, laments Marx, onlyform without content . . ..
The fetish form of capital and the conceptionof fetish capital.14
As the fetish compounds, and the usage of the term pro-liferates in
Chapter 24, Volume 3 of Capital, it becomes essential to
restorecontent to the form by fixing the experiential effect of
fetishism.
An example, from Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho (1991):
Armstrong is wearing a four-button double-breasted
chalk-striped
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spread-collar cotton shirt by Christian Dior and a large
paisley-patterned silk tie by Giovenchy Gentleman. His leather
agenda andleather envelope, both by Bottega Veneta, lie on the
third chair atour table, a good one, up front by the window. Im
wearing a nail-head-patterned worsted wool suit with overplaid from
De Rigeur bySchoeneman, a cotton broadcloth shirt by Bill Blass, a
Macclesfieldsilk tie by Savoy and a cotton handkerchief by Ashear
Bros.15
Patrick Bateman, Ellis narrator, works on Wall Street, during
the late1980s, for the financial firm Pierce and Pierce. His
description typifiesthe novels preoccupation with brand names,
whether of fashion or interiordesign, electronic goods or
restaurants. Brands in the 1980s might be readas the fetishists
fetish, in that as their letters move from the label inside tothe
external insignia, so the purchasers perception cramps around a
pro-missory life style or attitude available through possession of
the brandbecome logo. The substitutions here are several and
abstractive. Yet thewearing of a shirt by Dior or a Savoy tie must
acquire an affectivedimension in excess of the price paid, or the
wearer might as welldisplay a receipt.
Before attempting to locate the affect in the logo, I had best
gloss theeconomy of the fetishistic substitutions that gives rise
to it. For Marx,fetishism attaches to the production of commodities
insofar as the subjec-tivity of the worker passes, in a fantastic
transubstantiation, into theobjectivity of the worked thing.16
Adorno notes that reification is alwaysattended by forgetting:
objects become purely thing-like the momentthey are retained for us
without the continued presence of their otheraspects: when
something of them has been forgotten.17 Amnesia overlabour is
arguably eased in late twentieth century America by the
systematicoutsourcing of production, itself facilitated by Reagans
rapid dismantlingof anti-trust laws (initiated in 1982). Mergers,
of which Reagans term sawthe ten biggest in US history (up until
that point), allowed new andenlarged transnational companies to go
global in their hunt for cheaplabour. With the material world of
manufacture and distribution increas-ingly displaced to
subcontractors elsewhere, corporate headquarters mightconcentrate
on the brand itself, understood as the real source of value.Naomi
Klein, in her study of corporate branding, speaks of the
brandequity mania of the eighties, whose nadir occurred in 1988
with PhilipMorris purchase of Kraft for six times the paper value
of the company;the price difference being the cost of the word
Kraft18 . . . less a wordthan a fetish, or an affective space,
eliciting a rapid translation fromword to material image, the
better to speed consumption. Any associativepatterns in names such
as Kraft or Dior has been pre-arrayed there by
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advertising, on which American corporate expenditure more than
doubledduring the decade.19
Merger, financialization, out sourcing, advertising costs
keyelements in a political economy of the brand none of which
sufficientlyexplain Dior[s] affective power. Note how in Batemans
inventoryof male haute-cuture, hyphenated phrases (double-breasted,
chalk-striped, spread-collar) establish a rhythm in which
non-hyphenatedterms seem lost for an accessory (leather agenda,
wool suit, silk tie),and the compressions nailhead and broadcloth
elicit covert acts ofnotional repunctuation. The master term is the
double-name brand; ofeight brands mentioned, six take a double
form. Yet the brand namesare not hyphenated. To hyphenate or not to
hyphenate? The questionelicits an anxiety mirrored in the absence
of punctuation between thefive features of Armstrongs shirt. Sans
commas, Batemans annotationof the garment shifts among tonal
options: the careless indifference ofone who reads a catalogue;
pleasure at conspicuous consumption, notedand shared; unease,
located as a quasi-structural expectation of formalerror, encrypted
within a grammatical mistake. Environments likeDuPlex, the new Tony
McManus restaurant in Tribeca (137), designedfor the display of
brands, are intensely competitive (hence the studiedmarker of
distinction available through the table allocation, a goodone). Yet
the uneasy pleasures of logo spotting do not result in thedirect
sensuality of, say, Gatsbys shirts, available through Nick
Carrawaysassonantal appreciation:
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by
one,before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine
flannel,which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table
in manycoloured disarray.20
My sartorial comparison is entirely qualitative: Gatsbys shirts
are notbranded (we know only that a man in England sends over a
selection atthe beginning of each season, spring and fall21),
consequently their mate-riality differs from that of shirts
according to Bateman, for whom agarment is inseparable from its
logo. As such, the shirts of the New Yorkfinancial dealer in 1989
owe more to The Emperors New Clothes thando those of the
bond-speculating Gatsby in 1925. Hans Christian Ander-sons Emperor,
you will remember, believing in the repute of trickstertailors,
walks naked in the street to exhibit their garments, confident
intheir reassurance that the splendour of those garments will be
visible tothe discerning. Yet when a boy on the street, ignorant of
that assurance,cries, Hes naked, the Emperor does not cover his
genitals and run, hecontinues with the mask, displaying the
invisible brand rendered visible
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(and quasi material) through his subjects sharing with him a
fetish (orsecret as public as money), which fetish hardens into a
workaday fact becoming that fictional matter which makes matter
matter.22 (My phras-ing derives from the ethnographer Michael
Taussigs discussion of thepower of the public secret, or of that
which we know but know also andequally that we must not know). The
problem with such affectivesecrets, or fetishes, as Dior, the
Emperors new clothes, or indeed fictitiouscapital, is not that
their fictionality yields no matter (without matter,fictionality
would be easily discredited), but that the matter which ityields,
often excessive in its realness (the Emperor is both without
astitch and gorgeously attired), includes within that realness a
constantanxiety that the secret will explode, the fetish self
destruct. Witness shirtsaccording to Bateman; freighted with
stylistic features, each subordinatedto the rhythm of the brand,
yet so difficult to visualize that they barelyamount to a shirt.23
Taussig might claim that the overwhelming realnessof the fetish
stems from the presence of absence itself24: to translate fetishes
are affective because formed through an intense disavowal of
thatwhich they displace; so, absence is constitutive of their
presence, a presencethat it doubles, doubts and haunts.
Disavowal is a Freudian term; but first, to backtrack and
perhapsclarify. The successful brand requires that we forget
production and vir-tually forget the product, substituting in their
stead promissory imagesmade available through the logo as it mimes
of great price. So described,the experiential affect or excess of
the brand lies in a tissue of displace-ments and substitutions at
its core. For Freud, the fetish is a technologyfor translating loss
into desire, absence into erotic presence: mostfamously, a child,
at a loss for its mother, throws a cotton reel, only todraw the
reel back to itself on a piece of string. What Freud calls thefort
da game enables the child to master loss by infusing an object
withanxiety over maternal departure and pleasure at maternal
return. Ofcourse, the child knows that the reel is not a breast,
but its charged activi-ties elide the wooden and the mammalian,
producing a curious object thatis and is not mother. Such an object
is subject to what Freud calls dis-avowal; that is to say, those
who experience desire through the fetishknow that the fetish is and
is not what is desired, but even so knowthat it is.25
I can best gloss disavowal by way of an adaptation of Henry
Krippsdiscussion of Lacans recasting of Freuds fetish as the object
a: the object astands in the way of what is desired; like a
chaperone, it blocks the route tothe loved one and so incites
desire without itself being desired. The footexcites but is not
itself the forbidden mons venires.26 As with the reel orfoot, so
with the logo Dior: each is an object of fascination,
promptingpleasures inseparable from a disavowal of anxieties over
loss.
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In his study of reification and late capitalism, Timothy Bewes
arguesthat since the commodity represents process or dethingitude
the com-plexity of the relations of production, for example as
thingitude; itbrings dethingitude, precisely, into the realm of
visibility and represen-tation.27 It would follow that, brought to
visibility by anxious conscious-ness, reification and its fetishes
exist in a state of suspended annulment, orthat the moment of
reification is pregnant with the moment of liberationfrom
reification,28 initiated within anxiety or through disavowal. All
welland reassuring, since, to continue with American Psycho as a
representativetext for Reaganomics, Bateman has his anxieties. To
the ungrammaticalityof the shirts, one might add public tears
restrained over the distinctionbetween Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke (p.
98); trembling fingers and shortenedbreath induced by trying for a
late reservation at a select restaurant (p. 258);minor anxiety
attack[s] over video returns (p. 112); a pounding migrainein a
downtown telephone booth because he has forgotten who he had
lunchwith, and even more important, where (p. 148); panic over the
questionof mousse (pp. 230, 332); panic . . . intensified on entry
into Saks in theChristmas season (p. 177). The list might be
extended, but in truncatedform evidences that Batemans anxieties
are commodity induced, Pepsi,the Zagat restaurant guide, video
titles, Italian hair mousse, Saks . . .. Yetwhere for Bewes anxiety
prefaces critique, for Bateman it most typicallyinduces further
anxiety, constituting anxiety itself as the compound andmaterial
ground through which matter (whether Pepsi or mousse) ismade to
matter.
Fetishized and fetishistic, mired in brands and committed to
ficti-tious capital, both a financier and rentier (he is possessed
of a trustfund), Bateman experiences the affects and anxieties
inherent in thefetish form, but not as access to critique.
Arguably, given the narcissismof the central consciousness a
narcissism entirely in keeping with themonetary endogeneity of its
speculative means (credit financed byfurther credit) Batemans
anxiety discovers no exit having nowhereto go save into the
ramifying conviction that its source lies in itself.29
Yet even here, anxious enquiries yield little more than a litany
ofrepeated and formulaic cliches, of which surface, surface,
surface andnameless dread (times eight) are representative. Stated
structurally:since fictitious capital seeks limited engagement with
the matter ofmanufacture, its class agents are unlikely to
recognize the complexityof relations of production when they
glimpse it through their anxieties.As Henwood observes, [i]n higher
rentier consciousness, productiondisappears from view,30 prompting,
in the unhappy rentierconsciousness, such homilies to derealization
as, there is no real mebeyond some kind of abstraction (p. 376), or
I simply am notthere (p. 377).
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Derealization: I began this essay with a discussion of Marxs
formula,M-M1, and its implied vaporization of money (lost for C).
If Bateman,vaporized by his medium, is quasi immaterial, that
immateriality(located in a decade long financialization of the US
economy), maybegin to explain his other activity the production of
pain via serial atro-city. Bateman is famously a serial killer
primarily of women or hardbodies(though he also details his murder
of a tramp, a gay man, a co-financialworker, and two dogs). In her
study of torture, war and Marx, The Bodyin Pain, Elaine Scarry
suggests that pain, having no referentialcontent,31 is best
described as a state of unmaking.32 The pained body,she argues,
contracts around itself to such an extent that the world
isdestroyed,33 with the exception of the body: which body, although
notitself the pain, is felt as the weapon (shooting, stabbing,
burning)which best expresses the pain that it contains, but which
it is not eventhough the cry, grunt or whimper that emerges through
the body fromthe pain, anterior to language, expresses without
voice (an exhalationfrom the inexpressible). Pain, therefore, has
no referential contentbeyond negation: pain is a pure physical
experience of against, of some-thing being against me.34 Yet Scarry
adds that pain possesses [a] frighten-ing power of substantiation
because physical pain seems to confer itsquality of incontestable
reality on that power that has brought it intobeing.35 Witness, the
God of the Old Testament, who, lacking voice orgraven image,
verifies his presence most typically through hurt (plague,flood,
fire, sword, storm), achieving substantiation via the
intensificationor wounding of the material world (the human body)
which he is not.36
That hurt, a materialization of the refusal to be materilized,37
in itsfragile intensity, embodies presence in the absence of that
presence. Con-sequently, the provenance of Yahweh remains absolute
because finallyveiled in pain and unfixed in any specifiable act of
representation. Pain,after all, has no referential content.
My scant summary of Scarrys case (interestingly first
articulated in1985), may serve to motivate Batemans interest in the
manufacture ofpain, particularly if one substitutes for the hubris
of Yahweh, the hubrisof fictitious capital. For Marx, M-M1
represents the self-moving sub-stance38 of finance capital, into
which, in the absence of C, not anatom of matter enters.39 To live,
like Bateman, on the dash between theMs, is to submit to a
materiality founded on immateriality. Perhaps, inreaction, Bateman
makes pain as a vehicle through which he may verifythe bodiless
economic form that he, in his fetishistic
quasi-materiality,embodies?
Consider what he does: he kills serially. Bubbles, booms and
bustsare mechanisms driven by panic, whose structure is serial. In
a financialpanic, an informer phones urgently, Sell. Sell now. Sell
big. If the
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recipient of the rumour believes it, he does so because he
senses otherphone calls extending or about to extend as a series.
In selling hebehaves as another, and becomes that other for yet
another (ad infinitum).The informer, as Sarte puts it:
propagates a material wave: he does not truly inform: his report
is apanic; in a word, the truth, as other, is transmitted as a
state bycontagion.40
Insofar as the action of he who sells is not his own but other
to him in itsorigin, that action is liable to return to him as
something that may laterseem alien. Jameson notes:
[In] the structure of such phenomena as panics . . .. Each
isolatedindividual feels being to be elsewhere, to be outside of
him andserial action to be something to which he passively
submits.41
Bateman, having penetrated one hardbody, will persuade her to
leave hisapartment because, something bad is going to happen (p.
339); yet willtrust that another, during torture, realizes that
this would have happenedto her no matter what, that if she had
simply not taken the cab with [him]. . . this all would have
happened anyway. I would have found her. This isthe way the earth
works (p. 328). The brief shift to italic suggests citation;as if,
Bateman, about to insert a rat into the vulva of his victim,
momen-tarily perceives himself as subject to a type whose voice he
merely reiterates.His immediately subsequent decision not to bother
with the cameratonight (p. 328) further implies that since his
actions replicate theactions of another, he need not compound that
replication via filmicrecord. In Sartes terms, as the Other-being
of the series which realizesitself through it [the series] in
him,42 Bateman necessarily pivotsbetween source (I would have found
her ) and symptom (something . . .is going to happen), even as the
financial informer founds the contagionwhich he merely transmits.
Bateman (named in citation of Norman Bates),kills serially in
accord with the ur-structure of his financial profession andrentier
class.43
He kills slowly to make pain, but unlike Scarrys torturer,
Batemandoes not insert the words of the regime into the pain the he
has made, inorder to ratify and specify the power of the regime.
Rather, screams, viathe severing of a tongue, are made to make
blood (p. 246). WhenScarrys prophet opens a sacrificial animal and
reads the entrails, inorder to announce the date and location of a
city, the coming of thatcity may be believed, received as a
compelling truth, because the openbody [with its frightening power
of substantiation] has lent it its
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truth.44 In contradistinction, when Bateman eviscerates, he eats
a bluishrope of intestine, detailing texture and smell as part of
his extendedliquefying of a hardbody, during which process that
body is turned,quite literally, inside out, so that its dismembered
interiorities maymark the apartment walls, adorn the furnishings,
engore his body, andconvert every aspect of the environment into an
extension of pain(pp. 326329, 343346). Yet it may be a mistake to
deploy Scarrysformulation, concerning the analogical and
substitutive purposes ofpain, in order to rebuke Bateman as one who
wastes pain; to suggestthat the pain he makes, lacking a realizing
structure, and so, at a lossfor analogical transfer, lends its
substance to no concept. Instead, onemight argue that blood and
dismemberment, in the context of Batemansde or better re
materialization by the fetishistic practices of financiali-zation,
might themselves be understood as substantiating through
theirverifying hurt those activities within the political economy
which theymirror, and to which (in mirroring) they lend the
substantive form oftheir pain.
In a late and private thought, Bateman glimpses blood pouring
fromautomated tellers (p. 343). Money, ever since Adam Smith, has
beenlikened to a liquidity subject to variable velocity and moving
in circuits.Bateman counters abstractive metaphor with a painfully
literal image:the bleeding cash machine and the liquefied hardbody
demonstrate,with force, John Maynard Keynes conviction that the
fetish of liquidityis deeply anti-social.45 So, for example, and in
the same vein, Batemanpronounces mergers and acquisitions, murders
and executions(p. 206); his ramifying pun links his several
dismemberments to the finan-cial activities at Pierce and Pierce,
where, presumably, the promotion ofmergers (with fees running at 1
per cent of the total merger value to thebroker)46 is central to
business. Mergers may be understood as the rentiersrevenge on the
worker; in which, most typically during the 1980s, stockholders,
empowered by raiders, broke up conglomerates, sold subsidiariesand
recentred restructured activities in the core business thereby
violat-ing trust, implicit contract, prior labour patterns that
which consti-tuted the socius of the workplace.47 Money made from
merger, in that itdismembers human capital,48 necessarily
bleeds.
My interpretive gambit (to modify Melville), risks
translatingAmerican Psycho (a dead, deadening and deadly book),
into a hideousand intolerable allegory.49 But perhaps allegoresis
may be thought tocomplement Ellis point, in that it is arguably an
apt poetic for a deadclass-fragment. Borrowing from Walter
Benjamins The Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama (1925), I shall ghost a
bare case for the claimthat a financial culture dedicated to the
delivery of mortal wounds isliable to generate allegorical
commentary. Benjamin deals with literary
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responses to the Thirty Years War, and arguably by analogy to
theWeimar.50 Those on whom he comments confront a fallen
worldmarked impermanent by historical catastrophe. For Benjamin,
allegoryrenders the ruins runic:
in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies
hippocratica ofhistory, as a petrified, primordial landscape.
Everything abouthistory that, from the very beginning, has been
untimely, sorrowful,unsuccessful, is expressed in a face or rather
in a deaths head . . ..This is the heart of the allegorical way of
seeing . . .. The greaterthe significance, the greater the
subjection to death, because deathdigs most deeply the jagged line
of demarcation between physicalnature and significance.51
Where reality is hollowed out by pain, and intrinsic meaning has
beenevacuated, the allegorist abridges loss by the arbitrary
introduction ofemblematic significance. For ruin read rune.52 From
the remnanttake voluptuous significance (see Note 51). On the
fragment write erup-tive expression[s] of allegorical
interpretation.53 Benjamins allegoristsmourn dead things, but do so
with disrespect, since [a]ny person, anyobject, any relationship
can [to them] mean absolutely anything else.54
I offer Benjamins reconstruction of a poetics apt to a
mortifying world,as a final gloss on American Psycho, in order
hesitantly to suggest thatEllis stumbles from a study of the fetish
(as an affective and semi-secretivedevice for dealing with loss);
through an attendant anxiety over what hasbeen lost; and so, via
immanent allegoresis, towards a critique of the work-ings of
fictitious capital within the US economy during the 1980s.
English Department, University of California, Irvine
Notes
1 Karl Marx, quoted by David Harvey, The Limits of Capital
(Oxford: Blackwell,1982), p. 269.
2 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003),p. 62.
3 John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism and the
Reinvention of the World(London: Atlantic Books, 2005), p. 25.
4 My equations are taken from Karl Marx, Capital (Moscow:
Foreign LanguagesPublishing House, 1959), Vol. 3. pp. 383384. See
also Marx, Capital,Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1976), pp. 256257.
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5 My definition of hedge funds derives from Doug Henwood, Wall
Street: HowIt Works and for Whom (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 8486.
David Harveycomments, [T]he strong wave of financialization that
set in after 1973 hasbeen . . . spectacular for its speculative and
predatory style. Stock promotions,ponzi schemes, structural asset
destruction through inflation, asset-strippingthrough mergers and
acquisitions, and the promotion of levels of debt incum-bency that
reduce whole populations, even in the advanced capitalist
countries,to debt peonage, to say nothing of corporate fraud and
dispossession of assets. . . by credit and stock manipulations all
of these are central features of whatcontemporary capitalism is
about . . .. But above all we must look at the specu-lative raiding
carried out by hedge funds and other major institutions offinance
capital as the cutting edge of accumulation by dispossession
inrecent times. The New Imperialism, p. 147.
6 Giovanni Arrighi, Tracking global turbulence, New Left Review,
Vol. 20(MarchApril 2003), p. 48.
7 Doug Henwood writes of [T]he debt-mad years 1987 and 1988,
noting ofthe decade as a whole, [a] telephone-book-sized compendium
of studies byNew York Fed economists (Federal Reserve Bank of New
York 1994) confirmsthe thesis that the fevered boom of the 1980s
was fuelled by an exceptionallyheavy use of credit federal,
business, household. Much of what passed forfinance capital in the
period was unredeemable fictitious capital founded onempty assets
and sustained by questionable accountancy. See Henwood,Wall Street,
pp. 158159, and Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 190.
8 For figures, see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century:
Money, Powerand the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 2002), pp.
316317.
9 Henwood, Wall Street, p. 279.10 Harvey, The New Imperialism,
p. 227.11 Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and
Economy in the
History of the U.S. Working Class (London: New Left Books,
1986), p. 283.12 Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist
Regulation: The U.S. Experience, trans.
David Fernbach (London: Verso, 1979), pp. 4, 24.13 Harvey, The
New Imperialism, pp. 6267.14 The terms, phrases, and quotations
cited in this paragraph are drawn from
Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, Ch. 24, pp. 383391.15 Brett Easton Ellis,
American Psycho (London: Picador, 1991), p. 137.
Subsequent references will be to this edition, and will be
included in the text.16 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 165.17 Letter
from Adorno to Benjamin, 29 Feb. 1940, in Theodor W. Adorno and
Walter Benjamin (ed.), The Complete Correspondence 19281940,
trans.Nicolas Walker (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), p. 321.
18 Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2000), pp. 5, 78.19
Total advertizing expenditure in the USA stood at $50 billion in
1979 and at
close to $130 billion in 1990. For figures see Klein, No Logo,
p. 11.20 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1990), p. 89.21 Ibid., p. 89.
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22 Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of
the Negative(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p.
193. Taussig makes useof the Emperors New Clothes to illustrate the
workings of public secretsin Part 3: In That Other Time: Isla
Grande.
23 I am reminded also of Donald Trumps Taj Mahal Casino in
Atlantic Cityor of Trump Tower, New York, both founded in the late
1980s on a super-structure of credit, resting in turn on the net
worth of Trump (a Batemanhero), held together by slick,
publicist-generated magazine articles abouthow rich and successful
he was. Doug Henwood, Wall Street, p. 239.Close to the end of
American Psycho, Bateman look[s] up, admiringly, atTrump Tower,
tall, proudly gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight(p. 385).
24 Taussig, Defacement, p. 161.25 For useful accounts of
disavowal see Henry Kripps, Fetish: An Erotics of
Culture (London: Cornell, 1999), pp. 78, 4546; Leo Bersani and
UlysseDutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and
Modern Culture(New York: Schoken Books, 1985), pp. 6672.
26 Kripps, Fetish, p. 75. See also Jacques Lacan, The Four
Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis, ed. Jacques Alain Miller,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:Norton, 1981), p. 198.
27 Timothy Bewes, Reification or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism
(London: Verso,2002), p. 80.
28 Ibid., pp. 44, 89.29 American Psycho famously opens with
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO
ENTER HERE . . . scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of
the ChemicalBank (p. 3), and closes with the sign THIS IS NOT AN
EXIT, again in red(p. 399).
30 Henwood, Wall Street, p. 237.31 Elaine Scarry, The Body in
Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 5.32 Ibid., p. 20.33
Ibid., p. 29.34 Ibid., p. 52.35 Ibid., pp. 16, 27.36 Ibid., see
particularly Ch. 4, The structure of belief and its materilization
into
material making: body and voice in the Judeo-Christian
scriptures and thewritings of Marx, pp. 181277.
37 Ibid., p. 211.38 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 256.39 Ibid., p.
138.40 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume 1,
Theory of Practical
Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 1982), p.
248.41 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton
University Press,
1971), p. 248.42 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, p.
248.
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43 Henwood cites Keynes, the professional investor is forced to
concern himselfwith the anticipation of impending changes, in the
news or in the atmospherein order to anticipate . . . what average
opinion expects the average opinion tobe, and by such anticipation
to beat the gun. Keynes likened such speculationto Snap or Musical
Chairs, games involving serial prolepsis in which players areliable
to snap or sit in panicked anticipation of the snapping or sitting
ofothers. See Henwood, Wall Street, p. 208.
44 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 16, 125.45 Quoted by Henwood,
Wall Street, p. 206. Keynes notes, Of the maxims of
orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the
fetish ofliquidity . . .. It forgets that there is no such thing as
liquidity of investmentfor the community as a whole. The social
object of skilled investmentshould be to defeat the dark forces of
time and ignorance which envelopour future. The actual, private
object of most skilled investment today is to. . . outwit the
crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating, half-crown to theother
fellow.
46 Henwood argues that most merger waves are empowered by some
financialfad such as junk bonds in the 1980s: the logic behind the
odd and ever-chan-ging-flood of paper was explained by an anonymous
investment banker . . .most mergers do not make sense. Therefore
you have to use securities thatthe buyers do not understand and
that are different from the last round ofbad merger securities p.
282.
47 See Daniel Cohen, Our Modern Times: The New Nature of
Capitalism in theInformation Age, trans. Susan Clay and Daniel
Cohen (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 2003), pp. 5657.
48 As long as the influence of financial capital eclipses the
importance of humancapital, the dissonance between private and
public consumption will persist,and modern men and women will
experience as a new calvary the entryinto this new age of his
history. Cohen, Ibid., p. 114.
49 Herman Melville, The Affidavit, Moby Dick, Ch. 45 (New York:
Norton,2002), p. 172.
50 See Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (London: Verso, 1985),
pp. 184187.
51 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans.
John Osborne(London: New Left Books, 1997), p. 184.
52 Ibid., p. 176.53 Ibid., p. 175.54 Ibid., p. 175.
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