The Financial Image: Finance, Philosophy and Contemporary Film 3031406540, 9783031406546

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, CULTURE AND ECONOMICS

The Financial Image Finance, Philosophy and Contemporary Film Alasdair King

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics

Series Editors

Paul Crosthwaite School of Literatures, Languages & Culture University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK Peter Knight Department of English and American Studies University of Manchester Manchester, UK Nicky Marsh Department of English University of Southampton Southampton, UK

This series showcases some of the most intellectually adventurous work being done in the broad field of the economic humanities, putting it in dialogue with developments in heterodox economic theory, economic sociology, critical finance studies and the history of capitalism. It starts from the conviction that literary and cultural studies can provide vital theoretical insights into economics. The series will include historical studies as well as contemporary ones, as a much-needed counterweight to the tendency within economics to concentrate solely on the present and to ignore potential lessons from history. The series also recognizes that the poetics of economics and finance is an increasingly central concern across a wide range of fields of literary study, from Shakespeare to Dickens to the financial thriller. In doing so it builds on the scholarship that has been identified as the ‘new economic criticism’, but moves beyond it by bringing a more politically and historically sharpened focus to that earlier work.

Alasdair King

The Financial Image Finance, Philosophy and Contemporary Film

Alasdair King Queen Mary University of London London, UK

ISSN 2946-5397     ISSN 2946-5400 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics ISBN 978-3-031-40653-9    ISBN 978-3-031-40654-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40654-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jorg Greuel/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

This book has been indelibly marked by my location in the singular academic environment of the Department of Film at Queen Mary University of London, where colleagues and students have created such an innovative and generative environment for the creation and study of moving image forms, recently in the most challenging of circumstances. I am particularly grateful for the many discussions I have had on areas of film philosophy, film cultures, decolonising film, and film practice over the duration of writing this book with so many at QMUL and for the generous research support from the School of Languages, Linguistics, and Film and from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Part of this support came in the form of funding for collaborative research under the QMUL Undergraduate Research Bursary Scheme in 2021 and 2022 and I was fortunate to work with the most outstanding undergraduate research assistants in Vanessa Zarm (Climate Finance on Film: Anticipation and Catastrophe in Film and Artists’ Moving Image), Moses Ochs (Mixed Semiotics in Contemporary Film: Hito Steyerl), and Xinyuan Wang (Mixed Semiotics in Contemporary Film: Maurizio Lazzarato). Their careful research and bibliographic input is significant at key points in this book and in work to come. I am grateful too to the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) for funding support in 2015 under the Re-invitation Programme for Former Scholarship Holders for my work on ‘Frankfurt: Film and the Financial City’. This research project set in train the categories and concepts on which much of the current wider study has built. Vinzenz Hediger and colleagues in Filmwissenschaft at the Institut für Theater-, Film- und v

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Medienwissenschaft at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main proved the perfect hosts and created a supportive intellectual environment where my early thoughts were sharpened in many generous exchanges. I am also grateful to Carmen Hoffman at the EABH (European Association for Banking and Financial History, Frankfurt am Main) for guidance in those early stages. My thanks go too to the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) Doctoral Training Hub that generously provided funding in 2020 for the organization of a finance-related Arts and Humanities PhD Reading Group and Interdisciplinary Workshop under the banner of ‘Capital Forms’. This LAHP award made possible a series of collective discussions with colleagues and research students from across London and further afield on contemporary capital, financialization and aesthetics. Although the COVID pandemic would curtail the scheduled series of events, planning and working with my colleagues in the School of English and Drama at QMUL, Shane Boyle, Ruby Tuke, and Martin Young, was always stimulating and another reminder of the gains of collective academic work. And thank you to Cathy Lomax for the fabulous Capital Forms artwork. Parts of the manuscript were read at various points by Jonathan Beller, Solange Manche, Emily Rosamond, Amin Samman, and Peter Szendy, to whom I am hugely indebted for the perceptive comments and generosity of spirit in all cases. For the many discussions on the subject of finance and the moving image, I owe thanks to a number of research events and networks, not least to the pioneering Critical Finance Studies group, to the interdisciplinary Finance and Society editors and contributors, to the German Screen Studies Network, and to the European Network for Media and Cinema Studies (NECS), at all of whose conferences I presented draft papers and was able to discuss ideas in progress. Many thanks for their insights and generosity over my years of viewing, thinking, writing and speaking to, among so many others, informally or at conferences or online, Marco Abel, Ivan Asher, Daniel Beunza, Alice Bardan, Aretousa Bloom, Lucy Bollington and Annie Ring at UCL, Lucy Bolton, Clea Bourne, Martin Brady, Rebecca Bramall, William Brown, Erica Carter, William Carter, Ruth Catlow, Michelle Chihara, Arne De Boever, T.J. Demos, Raphael Dernbach, Ashvin Devasundaram, David Flood, Paul Gilbert, Joyce Goggin, Lee Grieveson, Max Haiven, Jérémy Hamers, Mark Potocnik and colleagues at the University of Liège, James Harvey, Ben

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Holgate, Alison Hulme, Emiliano Ippoliti and Phinance (Philosophy and Finance Network) at Sapienza University of Rome, Geraldine Juarez, Sarah Bartley and Tonia Kazakopoulou at the University of Reading, Bogna Konior, Magdalena Krystoforska, Richard Langston, Sasha Litvintseva, Suhail Malik, Johnna Montgomerie, John Hogan Morris, Fabian Muniesa, Gerald Nestler, Gözde Naiboglu, Bahar Noorizadeh, Constantin Parvulescu and colleagues at Babes-Bolyai University, ClujNapoca, Jason Read, D. N. Rodowick, Araceli Rodríguez Mateos, Richard Rushton, Barnabé Sauvage, Elke Schwarz, Brett Scott, Quinn Slobodian, Olga Smith, Milan Stürmer, Teet Teinemaa, Joseph Vogl, Calum Watt, and Christopher Wood. I am grateful also to the Victoria Miro Gallery in London for allowing access to key material and to filmmakers and artists Marc Bauder, Emma Charles, Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell at Bank Job and Power Station, Zachary Formwalt, Femke Herregraven, RYBN, and Vermeir and Heiremans, for their help in responding to questions and providing access to material. Many thanks to the series editors, Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight and Nicky Marsh, for supporting this book from commission through to production, and to the anonymous manuscript reviewer whose detailed reaction prompted much reflection and some tighter writing in the final stages, even if not ultimately the necessary engagement with the financial images of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. At least, not yet. Parts of this book have appeared in earlier form as articles. Many thanks to the editors of the following for permission to reuse and rework ideas and case studies first explored in: ‘Film und Finanzzeit’, Medien der Finanz, Archiv für Mediengeschichte, Winter 2017, pp. 45–54. ‘Film and the Financial City’, Studies in European Cinema, 14:1, 2016, pp. 7–21. ‘Documenting financial performativity: film aesthetics and financial crisis’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 9:6, 2016, pp. 555–569. And finally, to Fan, Theo, and Tess, who have been there for all of it, all love. And my deepest gratitude to you for everything, and everything else, the world.

Praise for The Financial Image “Culling from the trove of the last 60 years of cinema, The Financial Image reveals how temporality, the gaze, subjects, objects, futurity, spaces, places, performativity and narrative are recast in film form by the pressures of finance and financialization. Cinema, often a machine for the promulgation of financialization, may also encode critical, analytic and indeed alternative modes of semiotic–and therefore political–world constitution and co-creation. Viewing cinema with an eye deeply affected by immersion in the critical study of finance capital, King writes about money and the screen with perceptual acuity, analytic sophistication, and a fine attention to filmic detail.” —Jonathan Beller, Pratt Institute, NY, author of The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism “The Financial Image offers a timely and sophisticated study of how film grapples with finance, both formally and representationally. Its astute and captivating readings of popular Wall Street classics, lesser-known gems and multi-channel installations refuse to treat film as if it were merely representing the financial world. Rather, King grasps how films construct ways of seeing and experiencing the world, which are deeply entangled with financial means of constructing and capturing value. A riveting contribution to debates on financialization and culture.” —Emily Rosamond, Goldsmiths, University of London “The Financial Image tackles contemporary finance through its modes and realms of appearance. King’s approach, as well as his choice of visual material, represents a vital contribution to the study of financial culture, revealing the way finance today registers as spectacular, surreal, sordid, sublime. The world is a screen for the financial image.” —Amin Samman, City, University of London, author of History in Financial Times “In order to understand how finance has pervaded our daily experience, Alasdair King lets himself be guided by contemporary cinema. But he goes well beyond the traditional filmic genres that narrate or represent trading, banking, and financial capitalism in general: he develops what truly deserves to be described as a critical finance aesthetics.” —Peter Szendy, Brown University, author of The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of Images

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Locating the Image   2 Defining Financial   5 The Financial Image in Film Studies   8 Culture and Finance Capital  14 Money: The Obverse of Every Image That Cinema Screens  18 Bibliography  32 2 The  Financial Regime and the Financial Image 35 The ‘Mutation of Capitalism’: The Financial Regime and Control Society  35 Case Study I: Foucault, Frankfurt, and the Birth of the Financial Aesthetic: The Girl Rosemarie   43 Mixed Semiotics in the Financial Regime  53 Case Study 2: Hito Steryerl’s Liquidity Inc.  59 Bibliography  74 3 Film  and the Financial Gaze 77 Imaging Value: Harun Farocki’s Nothing Ventured (2004)  78 Constituting the Female Financial Gaze: Equity (Meera Menon Broad Street Pictures, 2016)  99 Complicity and Delusion: The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, Red Granite Pictures, 2013) 114 Bibliography 127 xi

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4 Film  and Financial Time131 Film and Financial Time: Zachary Formwalt’s Three Exchanges (2009, 2011, 2014) 137 Carnival of Financial Souls: Yella (Christian Petzold, Schramm Körner, and Weber, 2007) 151 Bibliography 179 5 Film  and Financial Space183 The Spaces of Financial Labour: Nightcleaning in the City of London 189 The Spaces of Financial Labour: Nightcleaning in the Financial Zone of Dubai 197 ‘There’ll be a Commotion’: Financial Turbulence in The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler, Wdr/Arte, 2010) 220 Moment One 229 Moment Two 229 Moment Three 230 Moment Four 231 Moment Five 231 Bibliography 239 6 Film  and Financial Performativity243 Introduction 243 Documenting Financial Performativity: Master of the Universe (Marc Bauder, Bauderfilm, 2013) 246 Possibilities for Collective Struggle: Melanie Gilligan and Financial Performativity 269 Bibliography 303 Bibliography307 Index321

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Drawing on a range of narrative feature films, documentaries and moving image installations primarily from filmmakers based in the United States (US) and Europe, The Financial Image: Finance, Philosophy, and Contemporary Film explores how contemporary cinema has registered and rendered financial and economic issues. The book focuses on how artists and directors have found formal means to explore, critique, and counter, and occasionally to celebrate, the increasingly important role that the financial sector plays in shaping global economic, political, ethical, and cultural life. The series of major financial crises unfolding between roughly 2008 and 2010 in much of the global North triggered the production of a number of highly successful major feature films and independent fictional, documentary, and moving image artworks that seek to examine the role of major financial hubs such as Wall Street, the City of London, and Frankfurt am Main, home of the European Central Bank, and associated international branches of the financial sector, in underpinning our social world.1 If we assume that how non-experts make sense of the complex contemporary processes of financialization depends to a great extent on how these processes are articulated and visualized, it is timely to pay attention to the body of moving image works that have engaged with the financial sector and the processes of financialization. In its interdisciplinary aspirations, The Financial Image aims to bring together and to bridge innovative work in the studies of film and new media art with the exciting © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. King, The Financial Image, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40654-6_1

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ideas and concepts emerging from scholars working within economic and social philosophy and critical finance studies and so to contribute to the ongoing growth of the economic humanities. The Financial Image, then, aims to consider how the aesthetics of the contemporary moving image contribute to and challenge positions within philosophical and historical debates on finance’s reshaping of time and space, and its power to mould subjectivity and desire.

Locating the Image The title is deliberately chosen. By ‘image’, there are unavoidable echoes initially of the way that Deleuze uses the term ‘image’ in his two philosophically inclined books on film that together explore the ‘movement-­ image’ and the ‘time-image’, the two key overarching ideas and blocks of thought that, according to Deleuze’s taxonomical argument, narrative cinema produced in its first century and which relate to the incredible ways in which, for Deleuze, cinema has been able to think through and register both movement and time.2 Here Deleuze’s ‘image’ stands in as a collective term for an aesthetically and philosophically related overall ‘idea’ that cinema discovers, works, and reworks over and across countless framings, shots, and sequences taken from innumerable individual films. Deleuze’s cinema books offer a vast exploration of these two key ‘images’— the two predominant cinematic ‘ideas’ that Deleuze isolates up to the point in the early 1980s when his cinema books appeared. These cinematic ideas that Deleuze isolates now appear fundamental to any account of the first century of projected moving image narratives. Could we even imagine the cinema that we have experienced so far without thinking about how it has offered us such rich aspects onto understanding movement and time? But the financial image discussed here, while borrowing conceptually from Deleuze’s terminology, is of a different and vastly smaller order, offering in its constrained scope nothing like the labyrinthine studies of movement and of time in film undertaken by Deleuze. The scope of the financial image here aligns itself more closely with the title of T. J. Demos’s recent work, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Demos’s work is organized around a series of globally disparate case studies that allow the writer to investigate ‘a series of key questions regarding the relation between politics and aesthetics, mediums and mobility, socioeconomic disparity and emancipatory artistic promise that sheds further light on globalization’s crises’.3 Demos draws regularly

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in this study on the writings on politics and aesthetics of Jacques Rancière, explaining that his investigation into the ‘migrant image’ engages with Rancière’s proposition that ‘art holds the potential to reorganize the realm of visibility so that, unlike governmental politics’ and mass media’s hierarchical channels of access, representation is rendered equitable’.4 Although Demos’s book is aimed more squarely at an intervention into debates in contemporary art criticism rather than to mainstream film studies research—his cinematic case studies examine the way that contemporary artists use documentary practices to address migration and dislocation— his Rancièrean frameworks can be utilized to support an investigation like the one at hand into finance and film that does not halt at traditional film generic boundaries but is interested also in how practitioners working with cinematic conventions configure the financial, whether their works are destined for the multiplex, film festival circuit, gallery space, or Youtube distribution. As Demos writes, utilizing the concept of the ‘moving image’ to group together his wide-ranging corpus, ‘I use the term moving image to refer to a new type of cinematic affect, and to designate the hybrid condition that transcends video and film, as well as the projected image and monitor-based presentations’.5 The quality of hybridity here extends to categorize the types of cinematic project at stake, as well as their internal formal strategies of composition that often involve drawing on a range of footage sources and modes of filmmaking. As Demos notes, again citing Rancière, what we have at hand when we encounter the contemporary cinematic image is the ‘“heterogeneous sensible” regime of the image – to invoke the term used by Rancière, which helps to define the irreducible hybridity of film’.6 Demos’s overriding research question here, namely ‘what are the advantages and risks of such moving images, and how can we define their political significance?’, is one that resonates with this encounter with the financial, rather than the migrant, image. Cinematic images are, as Rancière reminds us, ‘never a simple reality … [they] are primarily operations, relations between the sayable and the visible, ways of playing with the before and after, cause and effect’.7 This is a definition that recurs through much of this study and that is explored directly in the work by Melanie Gilligan that forms a major part of the final chapter. Similarly, the financial image that structures my study refers to and builds from a series of case studies of some of the ways that cinema, in its diverse contemporary forms, that include mainstream narrative films, documentaries both realist and experimental, essay films, and moving image gallery installations, addresses through visual and acoustic means in its

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moving image sequences questions relating to our current financial times. In its eclecticism in terms of what counts as contemporary film, this study also owes a debt in terms of framework and methodology to the work of D. N. Rodowick, particularly to his recent study, What Philosophy Wants from Images, wherein he discusses how new media of art are emerging ‘that profoundly test our criteria for what counts as a “moving image,” and so provoke what I call a naming crisis that contests our confidence in knowing what these new images are and how they are meaningful for us’.8 The financial images under consideration in subsequent chapters are drawn from moving image sequences that emerge from what Jihoon Kim describes as ‘the material, technical, and aesthetic components of existing moving image media—namely, film, video, and the digital’.9 As Kim argues in detail, this is not to completely disregard medium specificity and to assume that all moving images float ahistorically and freely of their specific material conditions and artistic and generic traditions. It is instead to work from the basis that it is productive to embrace the way that filmmakers working on contemporary financial images are familiar with and often draw on resources gleaned from across combinations of moving image media forms. I subsume these forms generally into the terms ‘film’ and ‘cinema’ in this study, in the looser contemporary sense of embracing moving images of various kinds rather than in terms of the stricter historical materially- and medium-specific definition as based in all cases on the projection of a film strip. Several of the filmmakers that Kim’s detailed study of the range of hybridity at work in what he calls the ‘post-media age’ are discussed here, such as Hito Steyerl and Harun Farocki, as are others such as Isaac Julien, Zachary Formwalt, and Melanie Gilligan not included in Kim’s monograph. The financial images under discussion here are also largely drawn from the work of filmmakers whose practice takes them into the proximity of the major financial hubs of the global North mentioned earlier, Wall Street, the City of London, and Frankfurt am Main. These are images produced largely from within what I discuss in Chap. 2 under the rubric, the ‘financial regime’, as Joseph Vogl terms it, that dominates the economy of the global North and from which it derives much of its contemporary wealth and power.10 They are also territories with whose cultures and histories I have longer-standing familiarity and a measure of linguistic competence. There are all kinds of financial tales emerging in other parts of the world that should be considered in equal if not greater detail, not least, given their distance often from the centres of financial power, their

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ability to see financialization through different lenses, and to tell the tales of those rendered most vulnerable to the movements of contemporary capital: narratives that are emerging in central and eastern European cinemas, in Indian, Japanese, Chinese, South Korean, and other Asian filmmaking, and across Latin American and African screens. Financial images from the edges of, and from far outside, the global Northern hubs have been beyond the scope of this already lengthy project, regrettably, and they deserve sustained attention. Such accounts would help to decentre what is often a narrative of finance capital positioned with the global North as its sole focus.11 As Emily Rosamond has noted succinctly, such a reorientation would ‘complicate the often Western-centric narratives of financial crisis that … are obsessively returned to in the press. This predilection arguably reiterates and perpetuates a colonial narrative disposition, which depends on narrating “the West” as a site of financial crisis (thereby sidelining other, far more long-term forms of marginalization, impoverishment, crisis, and financial servitude), even as “the West’s” own wealth has depended on continually expropriating wealth from both the Global South and racialized populations’.12 The impact of decisions taken in the financial hubs of the global North on the less powerful and often marginalized and exploited, both at home and in nations outside its alliances, is explored in the case studies in Chapter Four on Film and Financial Space, suggesting that, as Kish and Leroy have argued, ‘financialization has been and continues to be a deeply racialized process’.13 As Jonathan Beller has maintained recently, the emerging image economies linked to computational media only expand the wholly racialized frame of contemporary financialization.14

Defining Financial In terms of the ‘financial’ in the phrase ‘the financial image’, a useful starting point to clarify terms is Joseph Vogl’s short piece, ‘The Financial Regime’, that is explored in more detail in Chap. 2. Vogl’s main argument concerns the way that the operations of the financial markets are now of immense significance for political decision making at the local, national, and supranational levels. For Vogl, this has occurred not as a direct reaction to the wave of linked financial crises that hit in the years between 2008 and 2010, but as a direct revelation, in that that period of extended financial crashes made visible what had been a growing trend and a transition to a geo-economic underpinning of governmental power. For Vogl,

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as will be explored in more detail in Chap. 2, the financial regime that has now emerged into visibility is part of the shift to the ‘control society’ identified by Gilles Deleuze in his short essay in the early 1990s.15 Following Deleuze, Vogl posits that the key break in our economic order can be traced back to the early 1970s and measures that instituted a clear shift in economic organization and policy from the preceding post–Second World War consensus. Among these changes were the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the unpegging of the US dollar from the gold standard as well as changes in tax policies and regulation that heralded the burgeoning of the financial sector and the enormous growth of its new financial instruments such as derivatives. As well as making national economies more interlinked and interdependent, the growth of speculative sectors in the economy around particularly financial instruments and land ownership, has made economies more vulnerable to economic turbulence and to financial crisis. This has extended down even to the recurrent vulnerability and precarity experienced by large percentages of the less affluent waged and unwaged population, pulled into participation in financial speculation through the expansion of credit, loans, mortgages, pensions, and the increasing privatization of housing, transport, health care, and education. Vogl argues that under the financial regime, we can see an enormous growth in private wealth accompanied by record levels of debt, particularly among the most economically vulnerable as financial risk is increasingly redistributed downwards.16 For Vogl, as for a number of economic historians, the forces of financialization have seen a major redistribution of wealth from the least affluent to those already well off, yet with little scope, given the current organization of essential resources, for the least affluent and the most vulnerable to avoid having to negotiate the financial sector in one form or another. Randy Martin had already drawn attention in 2002 to what he termed the ‘financialization of daily life’, the shift in government policies and corporate culture to encourage increased participation on the part of much less wealthy layers of American wage-earners in financial management, investment and risk-taking, activities that had previously been the domain of the rich.17 Martin had presciently noted the exposure to risk and the accompanying anxiety that such a shift brought with it, particularly for those not among the few ‘winners’ who would greatly increase their wealth as a result of such processes of financialization. Martin had ended his study by warning of the increased individualization of the self under financialization, yet at the same time of the subsequent danger of the

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exposure of large swathes of the population to events happening in markets that might be countries and even continents away because of the great interconnectedness of global financial markets. In his critique of the financial regime, Vogl echoes many of these concerns about the exposure of the less wealthy to the processes of financialization. He points out that at an everyday level, and of direct relevance to the experience of workers globally across many cities and regions, is a further consequence of financialization, namely the way that economic growth has been financed by low interest rates and cheap money that, he proposes, leads to the accumulation of future risks as surplus money has flocked into financial and real estate markets rather than to reinvestment in industry, infrastructure, or wages. This has led to a dangerous cycle of financial vulnerability as the stock market has boomed and house prices and consequently whole areas of cities have been transformed because of an explosion in property prices. Combined with the increasing political influence that the financial markets seem to wield in discussions with national and supranational governments, Vogl declares that this all amounts to ‘a class struggle waged by the agents of finance against the rest of the population’.18 In Vogl’s short piece, then, is an overarching argument that posits how the financial regime, as a term to define our current era, covers both questions of sovereignty and democratic decision making at the broader macrolevel, while also having major effects on the everyday lives of the general population. The ascendancy of finance, which Vogl expands on in his book of the same name, encourages an analysis and reaction that, in Vogl’s terms, must culminate in a ‘pessimistic realism’ about the current state of things and a call for interventions, disputes, and struggles to counter the hegemonic power of the financial regime.19 The case studies in this book participate in these disputes and struggles in specific ways. Vogl’s pessimistic realism about the extent of the financial regime and its effects on everyday life and processes of subjectivation has been shared by recent studies carried out in the years following the financial crises of 2008–2010. Emily Apter and Martin Crowley provide an overview of these extensive processes of financialization, and their contestation in theoretical and cultural spheres, giving them the broad but useful descriptor, ‘economies of existence’. For Apter and Crowley, what is at the heart of recent sociopolitical transformations might be described as ‘the increasingly capillary monetization of human existence’.20 Drawing together a number of social and cultural studies of the economies of existence, a broad field but one that generally follows a line that can be traced back to

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the pioneering study of the financialization of daily life by Randy Martin mentioned above, Apter and Crowley argue that by describing this field as united by an interest in economies of existence, what becomes the focus of study are questions relating to the psychic and phenomenological effects of a host of disparate but linked financial concerns: ‘unequal distribution, the loss of the living wage, food insecurity, factory farming, the human and environmental damage wrought by resource extraction, the ascendance of big pharma at the expense of public health programs, the poverty of students and the chronically unemployed and underpaid, the social impact of finance structures based on tax havens, LLCs, offshore hoarding, and flash trades, the financialization of sovereignty and political agency, the actuarialization of risk, decision, and genetic identity, the predominance of leveraging, hedging, and limited liability as ways of life, and the capitalization of self-exposure … are arraigned as ontological preconditions of the new precariat’.21 For Apter and Crowley, it is important to note the ‘recursive relation’ between the economic and existential whereby the forming and deforming tendencies of the financial regime institute changes in social behaviour as people adapt and attempt to survive and even perhaps to thrive under such speculative and risk-bearing conditions.22

The Financial Image in Film Studies This study cannot hope to address the breadth of issues raised by Apter and Crowley as pertaining to our current economies of existence. Nevertheless, by setting out the broader horizon of work in adjacent disciplinary areas, it becomes easier to suggest just what this study into the relationship of our current financial times and the moving image is attempting to do and what it does not. From the perspective of adjacent work in Film Studies, it is in part related to work in the political economy of the moving image, though in possibly unorthodox ways. It attempts to address the ways that the moving image interrogates the processes of financialization and our current financialized condition through a set of case studies. It does not set out to offer a genre history of the finance (or banking) film, although genre is important here, not least in the sections that engage with specific feature films. Readers wishing to trace the history in mainstream cinema and documentary of the cinematic representations of finance, financiers, and financialization are referred immediately to the Oxford Bibliographies on Cinema and Media Studies and to the detailed

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annotated bibliography compiled by Constantin Parvulescu. This invaluable reference work argues that the broad category of the so-called ‘Finance Film’ has been with us since the early days of cinema in both Europe and the United States, and, significantly, has made an appearance under all kinds of political regimes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the high point of Soviet montage cinema, via Brecht and Dudow’s seminal Kuhle Wampe (1932) and via Nazi anti-semitic propaganda films that relied heavily on representations of evil bankers and usurers, through to various waves of Hollywood films, beginning with D.W.  Griffiths’ A Corner in Wheat (1909) and Keaton’s The Saphead (1920), before engaging extensively with the Great Depression of 1929–1939. This eclectic category then becomes prominent for mainstream audiences with films depicting the growth of the US economy after deregulation and the rise of the yuppie in the 1980s and 1990s onwards, and then maintains its visibility with the many films, both documentaries and features, that returned to economic questions in the decade following the financial crisis of 2008, leading Parvulescu to the proposition that there is also a recent subcategory of ‘The Finance Film’, namely the ‘Wall Street Film’.23 It is hard to deny that scores of features and documentaries have explored and dramatized economic issues over the past century and more across the global cinematic landscape and the ‘Finance Film’ bibliography charts much of the scholarship written in English for Film Studies and sociological journals that engages with predominantly North American mainstream productions, with a quantitative high point in publications between 2012 and 2018, when the bibliography was compiled. However, one of the aims of this study is to open up to reflection those areas of contemporary film that might go under the radar of the categories, as set out above, of ‘The Finance Film’ and the ‘Wall Street film’, to broaden and deepen our corpus of financial images, thus augmenting scholarly articles to date, if not monographs as yet, on the Hollywood ‘Finance Film’, and to explore the modes that the rich diversity of moving image forms around us are utilizing to address financialization and its implications. To pave the way for this move requires us to reflect on what constitutes cinema, and, of course, to return briefly to those debates, often ontological, on ‘what is cinema?’ that have regularly accompanied the discipline of Film Studies since its emergence in university departments. In her introduction to the book, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, Erika Balsom reminds readers that one of the major questions that frames contemporary investigations into film is that

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of making sense of the current diversity of exhibition locations that viewers might encounter in their interactions with the moving image: this is the question of location or, ‘where is cinema?’.24 Balsom sets out two diverging views, that of Raymond Bellour, who argues that what (still) defines cinema is the projection of a movie before an audience in a movie theatre, with Bellour placing other moving image practices in the less exclusive category of ‘film’, and that of Francesco Casetti who argues instead for a definition based on the continuity of a specific kind of experience in our encounters with moving images that persists across a range of locations and sites.25 In terms of categorization, the ‘Finance Film’ and the ‘Wall Street film’ frameworks might sit nearer to Bellour’s definition, while the spirit of Casetti’s ‘galaxy’ of different forms of the contemporary moving image provides an enlivening concept that is productive for this study. As Casetti writes, ‘[a]long the full arc of the twentieth century, cinema has been a brilliant and immediately recognizable star shining over our heads. This is no longer the case. A cosmic deflagration has taken place, and that star has exploded into a thousand suns, which in turn have attracted new celestial material and formed new systems: These new suns govern new planets. The stuff cinema is made of is still present in these heavenly spheres, but what we now face is a configuration of a vast and differentiated array of celestial bodies. There are fountains of light at the center of the spiral and at the borders of universe: some ultraviolet, others now almost fully spent. There are new constellations and new orbits. And there is a resplendent Milky Way that occupies our entire sky and which is not only visible on dark nights’.26 The title of this study uses the word ‘film’ rather than ‘cinema’ to register that it is consciously looking across moving image practices that might not all be encountered through traditional projection in traditional locations, though it acknowledges, as Casetti’s theoretical account does, how a century of cinema in its familiar guise is also formative for contemporary gallery installations, Youtube uploads, and the more experimental pieces appearing in recent years. Casetti offers readers a detailed and compelling account of ‘where cinema is’ to show how even as its sites of exhibition change fundamentally, its vitality and relevance remains profound. Casetti argues that the ‘cinema is no longer only a strip of film to be passed through a projector aimed at a screen inside a public space; it is also a DVD that I play at home to relax, or a video I follow in a museum or in a gallery, or content that I download from the Internet onto my computer or my tablet’.27 His case studies range across contemporary films, filmmakers, and film theorists of all

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kinds, and include mention of the likes of Hito Steyerl and Harun Farocki, of major importance to this study. Casetti moves the argument away from linking cinema’s essence to specific and unchanging technologies, although he notes the significance of the ‘technical complex’ that allows moving images to be made, circulated, and enjoyed, and towards ‘a more complex framework, in which technology does not play a causal role, especially in an epoch like ours, in which it is increasingly light and available for different purposes. In this context, what identifies a medium is first and foremost a mode of seeing, feeling, reflecting, and reacting, no longer necessarily tied to a single ‘machine’, not even to the one with which it has been traditionally associated. It is the case of cinema: Born as a technical invention, it soon came to be identified as a particular way of relating with the world through moving images, as well as of relating with these images.’28 Casetti’s definition of contemporary cinema as composed of both traditional, previously ‘consecrated’, forms, and of the ‘profanation’ of these high forms through their disassembly and reworking by filmmakers active across a diversity of modes draws on Giorgio Agamben’s essay on the apparatus,29 a productive analysis that also informs Janet Harbord’s similarly innovative idea of ‘ex-centric cinema’, the study of moving image practices that lie outside and never quite cohere into, our traditional histories of cinema.30 Casetti’s rich argument is useful to understanding the corpus used in this study in the way that he sees contemporary cinema as encompassing not just mainstream narrative and documentaries that we might watch at a conventional movie theatre but also practices that utilize moving images to explore a subject that are encountered outside of the traditional screening spaces of our cinemas. Casetti’s book was written in part as a dialogue with another US-based critic, Dudley Andrew, who had offered a less enthusiastic response to the fragmentation of film practices in the early twenty-first century.31 Andrew’s position seems initially more restrictive, as his Prologue attempts to answer the charge that the passage to the digital from analogue filmmaking, the rise of newer media forms, and the journey of moving images into the gallery, currents that mark out the circulation of contemporary moving images, have all suggested that ‘traditional’ film studies is on the defensive as ‘“the idea of cinema” is changing underneath us’.32 Although he sees the feature film as at the heart of cinema’s decades of cultural dominance, Andrew’s traditionalism, if it can even be called that, lies not so much in a restriction on the mode that cinema can take—the feature, documentary, essay film, short, art film, are all seen as significant endeavors—but in

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preferring a cinema of discovery, of the encounter with the real, over the synthetic, composited, special effects-saturated image. Despite these material changes, that, the author proposes, have also affected mainstream cinema’s confidence in itself from about the late 1980s onwards, Andrew argues that the ‘films that some of us most care about  – and consider central to the enterprise of cinema in toto – have a mission quite other than lying or agitating: they aim to discover, to encounter, to confront, to reveal’.33 If Andrew’s Prologue is adamant about its starting position, that sees the twentieth-century emergence of the classic feature film that narrates and dramatizes issues of social and historical relevance and that seeks out a large collective public, a certain ambiguity comes into play later in the book with his comment, that demands to be quoted at length, that ‘cinema’s vitality, its necessary impurity now comes through contact with comic books, television, popular music, video games, and computer culture … cinema must press forward into the new century, by taking into itself the subject matter that surrounds it, increasingly a new media culture. The impure films that result will no doubt comprise a different cinema from the one that we have known, but it will be a cinema worthy of its past, to the extent that it maintains what might best be termed the cinematic ethos. An attitude, rather than a doctrine …, an attitude of curiosity, spontaneity, and responsiveness to a reality conceived of as indefinitely enigmatic and worthy of our care’.34 So, for Andrew, what constitutes the truly cinematic, the centrepiece of what cinema is, and of what film can properly do, is situated in an encounter between the recording and registering mechanism and the world that lies outside it, a world that is changing rather than constant, caught as it is in historical contingency and flux. But Andrew’s ‘cinema’ is fixed in its entirety by neither technology nor format and is defined more by the openness of its relationship to the ‘real’, to the world around it as it is. How that ‘cinema’ might respond to the abstract and numerical processes of finance and to the more material social changes that financialization brings with it, is a challenge that does not lie within the scope of either Andrew’s or Casetti’s books, but which underpins the diverse selection of case studies in this project. After this necessary interlude around the question of ‘where cinema is’ in contemporary culture, it should be clear that this is not a conventional study in film genre, and similarly, neither does it aim to provide a stock take of all those films, many well-known, that emerged in the wake of what cultural historians often summarize for heuristic purposes as Tooze’s ‘Great Financial Crisis’. Both projects would be worthy, and indeed

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Miriam Meissner’s Narrating the Global Financial Crisis that appeared in 2017 and Constantin Parvulescu’s edited collection on Global Finance on Screen, that appeared in 2018, both do a fine job of addressing the latter subfield.35 Meissner analyses how what she refers to for the sake of simplicity as the Global Financial Crisis is portrayed in contemporary popular culture, using examples from film, literature, and photography. In particular, the book explores why particular urban spaces, infrastructures, and aesthetic choices recur in contemporary crisis narratives. Meissner’s approach opens productive lines of argument in its treatment of urban space, particularly of the ‘skyscraper’ skylines of financial sectors and is discussed in more detail in Chap. 5. The essays in Parvulescu’s anthology on the Global Finance on Screen are similarly productive and timely and make a major contribution to our understanding of finance on film. The edited collection focuses specifically on how mainstream narrative films and documentaries made predominantly in the US have offered a critique of the growing dominance of the financial sector in the years leading up to and after 2008. As a collection, it is acutely aware of how narrative and documentary cinema help to shape and inform popular opinion and understanding. The contributors argue that recent finance films offer us a crucial public sphere for reflection on the economic state that we’re in and show us routes to forms of critical intervention in the name of economic and social justice. In this, Global Finance on Screen tends to treat films as having a generally representational function: illustrating to their audiences some of the pitfalls of the dominance of the financial sector in skewing political and social culture and responding to events caused by sudden moves in the market. As I argue in Chap. 2, there are grounds to be wary of assuming that moving images are only politically useful in their ability to represent, rather than to reconfigure relationally, a given historical situation. The films addressed in both books are largely mainstream and US-led, whereas this study offers a comparative reading with films registering different aesthetic and national traditions, addressing non-US financial districts centred on financial hubs such as London, Frankfurt am Main, Dubai, and Shenzhen, in addition to Wall Street. The research here draws substantially on philosophical understandings of spatiality and temporality, of debt and speculation, in relation to financialization, considerations of which I argue are crucial to understanding the huge impact of financial processes on our contemporary ways of seeing and thinking. As set out above, The Financial Image also looks at finance not directly as an

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event—a stock market crash or period of depression, stagnation, or hyperinflation—that is then registered on screen in the form of, often, a melodrama or occasionally a financial thriller. Rather than looking at finance as a singular occurrence or event that we non-bankers generally stand outside and look on at in dismay or horror when our social order threatens to collapse, this study proposes that we might think of finance as being in part definitive of our contemporary condition, and in this way, we are all increasingly financial. The films that seem to demand detailed attention are those that find narrative and formal means to interrogate that condition.

Culture and Finance Capital Before I set out my own specific starting points in this Introduction, it would be misleading to suggest that the kind of work attempted here is without hugely important precursors. Newer studies cannot but be in the debt of broader work on culture and the economy and this book’s themes are unavoidably articulated in the shadow of the analysis of the contemporary economic environment and the associated questions for cultural production set out by scholars such as Fredric Jameson in his seminal article on ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, published initially in 1997. Jameson’s essay begins as a useful assessment of Giovanni Arrighi’s major work in economic history, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, that had appeared in 1994.36 Arrighi’s central argument, and one that I discuss in more detail in Chap. 5, is that we might understand capitalism as operating according to a clearly repeated cycle whereby over a period of ‘long centuries’ a number of emerging powers had established and sealed hegemony over a growing sphere of economic influence. Arrighi’s historical case studies comprised both city and nation states and move in ever-expansive fashion from the Italian supremacy of Florence, Venice, and Genoa through to the trading operations of the Spanish, the Dutch, the British, and finally the ‘long twentieth century’ that sees the emergence of the might of the US that in this period comes to economic dominance of a globally linked trading and, subsequently, financial system. For Arrighi, it is possible to trace a recurring cycle of economic activity across each successive world power that can be identified in specific stages: the initial achievement of control of internal and external territory, often through violence and conquest, that allows for primitive accumulation through dispossession and exploitative trade, followed by the utilization of the fortunes hitherto gained for investment in

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systems of production and manufacturing, so that the overall territory under control becomes a centre of production, distribution, and consumption, followed by a third and final cyclical stage, by the time of speculation and the withdrawal of profits from modes of production and their reinvestment instead into, inevitably given saturated markets for manufactured and similar goods, a more abstract search for profit via financial transactions. Assessing the accuracy of Arrighi’s cyclical history is beyond the scope of this study but it is important for Jameson in two ways: First, it identifies for him a way of understanding the structural underpinnings of the mutating features of capitalism and of the parameters and characteristics of a historical stage that can be termed one of ‘finance capital’. Second, it allows him in the latter part of his essay to identify ways in which cultural practices are formed by and respond to their historical context, which at the time of writing in 1997, for Jameson was clearly a period in the US and in much of the US-influenced global North wherein finance capital was again the dominant form. Because of this, it stands as an important early analysis of the ways that cultural forms respond to periods of financialization, and to financial times. As Jameson writes in his opening paragraph, Arrighi’s book ‘is remarkable for … producing a problem we did not know we had, in the very process of crystallizing a solution to it: the problem of finance capital’.37 For the purposes of this study, in this essay Jameson’s analysis of the relationship between culture and finance capital is most relevant, rather than his detour through the claims of Arrighi’s cyclical model versus alternative histories of capitalism but it is worth noting in passing something of Jameson’s own theoretical framework here and his methodology. After listing several characteristics of the dominance of finance capital—the disappearance from immediate sight of industrial production and the dominance of the stock market, the overall growth in profits despite the shrinking of (national) production, excessive speculation, particularly in relation to land and to real estate—Jameson suggests that this overall process of what we might now call financialization leaves ‘nagging questions [which] were also secret doubts about the Marxian model of production, as well as about the turn of history in the 1980s, stimulated by the Reaganite/Thatcherite tax cuts’.38 Although Jameson sees the ascendancy of finance capital as marking out a period of a return to ‘the most fundamental form of class struggle’, he explicitly turns away from, as explanatory models, ‘all those Western-Marxist and theoretical subtleties that the Cold War had called forth’ and which had focused on an analysis of

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ideology. He moves towards both ‘an older vulgar Marxism’ and in several places the use of poststructuralist terminology from philosophers Jacques Derrida and, more regularly, from Gilles Deleuze to address finance capital.39 Jameson’s employment of Deleuze (and Guattari) in this essay is far from uncritical: He has little time for the concept of the ‘recoding’ of axiomatic materials, for example. However, when it comes to ways of thinking through aspects of finance capital like the incalculability and irrepresentability of the ‘lightning-like movements of immense quantities of money around the globe [that] already have clearly produced new kinds of political blockage and also new and unrepresentable symptoms in late-­ capitalist everyday40 life’, to understand fully the reach of Arrighi’s thesis, he draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘deterritorialization’ that, for Jameson, ‘implies a new ontological and free-floating state … in which capital shifts to other and more profitable forms of production, often enough in new geographical regions [and/or] in which the capital of an entire centre or region abandons production altogether in order to seek maximization in those non-productive spaces, which, as we have seen, are those of speculation the money market, and finance capital in general’.41 Like Jameson, I have found some of the concepts introduced by Deleuze writing alone and in his collaborations with Guattari to be productive in thinking through not just the mutations of capitalism under finance capital but also the entanglements that financialization has with cinema. But there is one important difference between Jameson’s essay and the following study. Jameson argues that ‘any comprehensive new theory of finance capitalism will need to reach out into the expanded realm of cultural production to map its effects’.42 However, in the second half of his essay, when Jameson does address contemporary cultural production he is content to consider primarily the new forms that cultural practices take under the contemporary financial regime, presumably because, as he writes earlier in the essay, the new free-floating state that ‘deterritorializing’ capital assumes is one ‘in which the content … has definitely been suppressed in favour of the form’.43 Jameson then produces a typically brilliant analysis of the circulation of the ‘fragment’ at this point of great historical change as capitalism’s mutating trajectory becomes recognizable as one characterized predominantly by finance. He looks at the centrality of the trailer to contemporary film consumption, constituting as it does a fragmented form of the full film, and at the television commercial, as a fragment that is circulated during other longer types of programming. He looks also at the long form of the fragment, the ‘junk bonds’, as Jameson

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sees them, that comprise Derek Jarman’s film, Last of England (1987). These ‘image-fragments’ of finance capital, as Jameson terms them, force him to consider the structural forms via which images circulate in contemporary visual culture, although his examples are indicative rather than in any way exhaustive. Although the fragment comes to the fore in some of the films I discuss below, not least in Chap. 2 with Hito Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc., the financial images that I discuss are largely those where the filmmakers have attempted at the level of both form and content to address aspects of the nature of contemporary financialization. In this way, the financial images under consideration here are not, in the Jamesonian sense, symptomatic of the era of finance capital but specifically aim to address its implications. Many of the filmmakers give evidence of a deep understanding of aspects of both contemporary continental philosophy and of recent historical and theoretical studies of finance. In some cases, filmmakers are producing concepts and affects in their construction and use of financial images that correspond to or even in some cases challenge, the arguments put forward in critical accounts of financialization. In this, I would hope that the chapters and case studies below remain true to the spirit of Jameson’s questions about the crucial relationship between culture and finance capital while also opening space for subsequent scholarship to move in turn into related and equally productive directions. Two books stand out as significant relatives of The Financial Image. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle’s Jamesonian project, Cartographies of the Absolute, appeared in 2015, and attempts to provide a cognitive mapping of how cultural practices have responded to the challenge of depicting the abstractions of capital in its contemporary mode. As the authors survey a broad range of cultural productions that have appeared over recent years, like Jameson they see this challenge as almost insurmountable and that many such productions result in merely replicating an ‘aesthetic of capital’.44 The case studies in The Financial Image, as I argue below, attempt to meet the challenge of interrogating finance capital in innovative aesthetic ways. Similarly aligned with the aims of this project is the very recent monograph by Calum Watt, Derivative Images: Financial Derivatives in French Film, Literature and Thought that begins from a related framework. Watt’s book offers a compelling and sophisticated analysis of the derivative form and how it has been taken up in diverse ways in French cultural production and debate. As his title makes clear, his corpus covers a range of cultural practice—films, literature, theatre, philosophy—and is centred solely

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on the reaction in mainland France to the series of financial crises in the US and the Eurozone between 2008 and 2010. The Financial Image is not as geographically concentrated in its reach and focuses not on the specific nature of the derivative form, as Watt’s does to strong effect, but on the interrelationship between the moving image and the general financial regime outlined above. In this, it recognizes the significance of the problematic set out by Morgan M. Adamson concerning what she refers to in a short piece as the ‘financialization of the image’.45 As Adamson writes, her essay aims to ‘analyze the cinematic image within the context of … a historical situation in which every moment …is shot through with the logic, the temporality, and the violence of finance’.46 Adamson’s essay, which revolves around the interactions of power and subjectivity under finance capital, focuses initially on ways of understanding cinematic perception before producing an exciting analysis of the relationship between money and the moving image in Hitchcock’s classic Psycho (1960). Adamson is particularly interested in cinema made in the historical period immediately after the unpegging of the dollar from the gold standard in 1971 rather than in the contemporary moving image works that constitute this study. Nevertheless, her conclusions concerning ‘the immanent relationship between cinema and money and the financial logics that structure this relationship’ are aligned substantially with the case studies that I examine over the following chapters.

Money: The Obverse of Every Image That Cinema Screens All projects have starting points and the immediate origin of the concerns of The Financial Image is the confluence of two encounters: the first, a narrational encounter, occurred watching the film Yella (2007), directed by Christian Petzold, the temporality of which I explore in detail in Chap. 4, and the second encounter, an aesthetic idea from Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time Image book. In Yella, one venture capitalist asks the eponymous central character the specific question, ‘Oh are you interested in balance sheets?’. This quite banal question and the surrounding mise-en-scène of images on a laptop in a bland hotel on the edge of a bland mid-size city sets in play a kind of Hitchcockian descent into a ghostly world. In fact, as Adamson points out in her reading of her case study, Psycho, the last action that we see of the early victim Marion in Hitchcock’s masterpiece is her

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‘flushing her torn up balance sheet down the toilet before entering the shower’.47 Two films that are separated by almost fifty years of film history and yet which seem to exhibit a shared obsession with how cinema finds images for the circulation of money and finance within its chosen narrative forms. The second starting point comes in Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time Image, the book that explores how cinema reacts in its forms and in the ideas it produces after what Deleuze sees as its crisis of confidence in basing its operations on registering purposeful movement. As Deleuze discusses the Wim Wenders’s, The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge, 1982), a film about the impossibility of getting a film finished, Deleuze argues that ‘[t]he cinema as art itself lives in a direct relation with a permanent plot [complot], an international conspiracy which conditions it from within, as the most intimate and most indispensable enemy. This conspiracy is that of money; what defines industrial art is not mechanical reproduction but the internalized relation with money. … Money is the obverse of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place, so that films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film.’48 We could read this as a kind of determinant political economy: Films are costly enterprises, whether they are subsidized by the state or funding councils, or whether they seek investment and profits on a more open market. The only films that get made and circulated are the projects that have attracted money. And the films only last for as long as, and are as potentially good as, the budget that they can raise. And when the money runs out the shooting stops. There is a kind of direct equivalence between money and the film image. Many political economies of the cinema would start from this point and would agree with the basic proposition, that there is a constitutive relationship between a film’s budget and the scale and duration of the finished film. But Deleuze’s idea moves in unexpected ways as he adds some comments about film’s relationship to time: ‘If it is true that movement maintains a set of exchanges or an equivalence, a symmetry as an invariant, time is by nature the conspiracy of unequal change or the impossibility of equivalence. It is in this sense that it is money: in Marx’s two formulations, C-M-C is that of equivalence, but M-C-M is that of impossible equivalence or tricked, dissymmetrical exchange.’49 Deleuze argues that Wenders discovers ‘the impossibility of a camera-time equivalence, time being money or the circulation of money’. The Financial Image largely grows out of these two points of origin, that pose first, the question of the narrational forms that cinema finds for

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exploring the dual circulation of finance and images and second, the philosophical connections between these circulations, and their relation to time and to space. Of course, Petzold’s images, like those of many of the filmmakers in this study, like Deleuze’s formulation and ideas, are complex and often ambiguous and their precise meaning elusive. Even defining what Deleuze has in mind with his idea of money, and more broadly finance, is to enter what to a non-economist can feel akin to an infinitely generative hall of mirrors, whether we see money as essentially a form of debt that circulates50 or finance overall as ‘the buying and selling of claims of one kind or another’.51 In what ways would we want to propose that either debt that circulates, or the financial trade in claims, constitute the obverse of all the images that cinema screens for us? Close to this study is the intent, as Adamson puts it, of transforming Deleuze’s observation ‘into a systematic analysis of the relationship between moving image production and finance capitalism’. Adamson’s route is in part terminological and conceptual, to produce a ‘more nuanced ‘terminology specific to finance capitalism, turning credit, inflation, and financial liquidity into historical and formal concepts relevant to the discussion of film’.52 This approach aligns closely with the study at hand. Peter Szendy takes Deleuze’s idea of money being the other side of all images in fascinating directions and his essays have become one of the nodal points in thinking through the relationship between cinema and the economic, and particularly between images and money as related forms of circulation. Szendy’s work on the relationship of cinema and money, between moving images and the movement of money, is set out in his recent book, The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of the Visible. Szendy’s book covers three related public lectures given by the philosopher and cultural analyst in 2014 relating to the circulation of images and economic circulation. The three lectures, that are indebted initially to Deleuze’s ideas but which develop them in productive directions, explore respectively money as the other side of all images, the permanence of credit and debt that is linked to the impossibility of symmetrical exchange in our encounter with images, and the growing commodification of the act of seeing itself. Szendy’s reading of Deleuze is arresting in that he emphasizes that Deleuze’s point in his claim that ‘money is the obverse of all the images that cinema shows and sets in place’ should be understood not in the narrow way that films need to be financed to exist, but in the broader ontological sense that images demand to be seen as an economy in circulation, in their mode of production and exchange, in the

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way that money is generally understood as a circulatory universal equivalent. Images, for Szendy, are a form of currency and are closely linked in the way that they are circulated to coins and denominational notes, both of which display key images as part of their form. According to Szendy, images are part of their own economy, or ‘iconomy’ as he defines this ‘iconic economy’, aligning his perspective with Maria-José Mondzain’s work on the history of the minting of coins in Byzantium and the struggles over the display or not of the use of the image of Christ on the coins. In developing the concept of iconomy, Szendy draws on what he identifies as Mondzain’s affirmation of ‘what we might call the double iconomic equivalence: not only is currency made in the image of the image, but the image, in turn, is made in the image of money.’53 Szendy takes Mondzain’s insights into the iconomic relationship of images and currency forward historically to the century and more of cinema: ‘Isn’t film, on the contrary, the name for a generalization without limit of the iconomic equivalence between the image and money?’.54 It is from this starting point that Szendy can claim, following Deleuze, ‘that it is indeed all images that, with cinema, have become the recto of a monetary verso that they carry structurally inscribed on their back’.55 By cinema, and again Szendy goes back to a specific broader reading of Deleuze, what is meant is all images and not merely those that are projected and circulated by past and present forms of the cinema sector, no matter how expanded and inclusive. Szendy reads Deleuze as proposing that the term, cinema, can also mark out a way of how we generally perceive the world as a series of images that our brain screens for us, rather than in the limited sense of the technical apparatus of the projection of moving images. It is important to return to this more general reading of cinema as the circulation of images because it suggests a dehistoricization and despecification in Szendy’s reading of both the histories of technologies at play in producing and distributing images and the changing economic and financial conditions that might inform the relation between the two forms of circulation, that of the image and that of the economic. We may usefully summarize Szendy’s argument in his engagement with the Deleuzian idea that ‘money is the obverse of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place’ as one that foregrounds that images and money are connected because of their capacity to circulate and because of their exchangeability. It is in this sense that French philosopher Catherine Malabou has written recently that Deleuze’s observation needs to be considered in view of the increasing challenges to the circulation of our

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traditional money forms through the rise of virtual, blockchain-supported, and cryptocurrencies: ‘What happens to the reversibility of images and money when money no longer has an image, no longer has a face and takes the form of a virtual currency?’.56 Malabou suggests that we are entering a new ‘anarchic’ phase of capitalism, an emergent phase that is not left uncontested by the sovereign and hierarchical forms of the monetary economy dominated by the banking system. For Malabou, the Deleuzian idea of ‘money as the obverse of all images’ ushers in, as Szendy has suggested, an iconomy where images are indeed always already financialized and circulating in exchange form, a condition that anticipates what is currently emerging, ‘with electronic currencies, circulation with no intermediaries, no central authority, in the strict horizontality of coded exchanges’.57 For Malabou, the relationship between money and images that Deleuze highlights and that Szendy takes forward, is itself a kind of anticipatory cinema, ‘an imaginary production of the film of the future’.58 Productive though it is for our present – and possibly future – configurations, Szendy’s use of Deleuze in this essay suggests a move away from history and towards the idea of the recurrence of money and images in eternal circulation. Szendy argues elsewhere for a more definite historicization of our money and image forms, not least in the other two lectures collected in The Supermarket of the Visible.59 For example, drawing extensively on Walter Benjamin, Szendy proposes that through our exposure to the cinematic medium in the long century of cinema so far, we have ‘innervated’ a form of perception whereby we see the world across our urban spaces and shopping malls outside the cinema auditorium as a series of quasi-cinematic images. Our gaze has become increasingly monetized across these spaces, leading to an increasing commodification of our capacity to see and to what has been described elsewhere, particularly in the work of Jonathan Beller, as the broader parameters of an ‘attention economy’.60 Beller suggests that the twentieth century has seen the emergence of a specifically ‘cinematic mode of production’, where cinema is the foremost way among many that the act of looking has been reclaimed by global capital as a means of producing and extracting financial value. For Beller, the act of looking has become a process subject to global industrialization and commodification that underpins the current order of capital. As Calum Watt has argued, the gap between the way that Szendy addresses the general exchangeability and circulatory mode of images and money, and Beller’s historically and technologically grounded cinematic mode of production define not just differing ways of constructing economies of the

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image but also the ways that a counter strategy to the ongoing commodification of perception might be set out. As Watt summarizes Szendy’s distinctive stance, ‘[w]hat is striking in this account of the construction of the visible, then, is the idea that our sensibility has been commodified in the contemporary era because our senses are in some way already structured like a market.’61 A key difference between Szendy’s account and that of Beller’s is, therefore, that Szendy works from a position that the psyche is always already constructed like a market, a point of circulation for competing ideas and perceptions of all kinds, rather than organized in such a way as a result of a historically specific way of organizing economic and social relations under capitalism, as Beller posits it. Although Szendy does draw on Marx in his accounts, and offers space for discussion of the ways that developments in modes of industrial production have moulded the way that we recognize and act upon our sensations, the tradition that he is primarily working in, as Watt points out, might be seen as the line from Deleuze that is more consistently Nietzschean than Marxist: ‘The contested place of the market in human life and in the calculating human psyche of course has a long history, and may remind us of Nietzsche’s remark: “Fixing prices, setting values, working out equivalents, exchanging – this preoccupied man’s first thoughts to such a degree that in a certain sense it constitutes thought”.’62 Watt summarizes Szendy’s overall position, that has been disseminated and refined across several pieces of writing, as one that proposes that ‘it is as if, in our deepest interiority, we are not the individual idly browsing market stalls but rather the market square itself over which sensations and buyers and sellers flow’.63 This study of the financial image, without becoming mired in certain versions of the political economy of the cinema that stress narrowly the cinema’s significance as a commodity form or that produce histories of film production and distribution, orients itself closer to Beller’s framework in positing that we should pay full attention to the specific histories of economic exchange and technological circulation in our encounter with financial images. It works from an argument that our affective engagement with financial images is historically specific in that the workings of finance capital mould our psychical responses and therefore subjectivity rather than build on an always already existing market-like human psychical capacity to be placed in the centre of competing affects and attractions. Indeed, the Deleuzian framework for thinking through the financial image comes here from a combination of the proposal that ‘money is the obverse

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of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place’ and Deleuze’s comments in the celebrated short essay on the historic emergence and formation of the control society, taken up in the opening Chap. 2. Chapter 2: The Financial Regime and the Financial Image provides a theoretical and historical framework to what follows and outlines more clearly how we might define the condition of financialization that structures the social order of much of the global North. Using Joseph Vogl’s work on the financial regime and the challenges to democratic accountability that arose in the wake of the Eurozone Debt Crisis that peaked in 2009 and 2010, it addresses Vogl’s description of financialization as connected to the mutation of capitalism that Gilles Deleuze writes about in his essay on ‘Postscript on Control Societies’. Deleuze’s characterization of the emergence of control societies from the preceding disciplinary societies discussed extensively by Michel Foucault are set out in detail. The question of whether cinema, in any of its contemporary definitions, can provide appropriate forms to register and to counter the increasing control of finance is elaborated through the work of Maurizio Lazzarato, itself in part a response to Deleuze’s control society thesis, and particularly Lazzarato’s argument that cinema’s mixed semiotics can be effective in opening possible and virtual worlds for us that finance capital would rather remain unrealized. Foucault’s ideas on new financial orders and the emergence of entrepreneurship are discussed alongside Rolf Thiele’s film, The Girl Rosemarie (Roxy Films, 1958), and Lazzarato’s counter cinema of mixed semiotics is held up as a theoretical counterpart to Hito Steyerl’s finance video installation, Liquidity Inc. (2014). Chapter 3 explores the power relations in play as films encourage us to look at finance, and as finance looks generally at the world and back at us in particular. In Chap. 3: Film and the Financial Gaze, I address the question of how financial interests see and model the world and I examine ways that films critique and occasionally celebrate the financial gaze. As Fabian Muniesa has argued recently using Harun Farocki’s 2004 documentary film, Nothing Ventured, we can start to understand how valuation and capitalization work through the imaginaries of value negotiated between investors and entrepreneurs in specific scenarios and through attention to what Muniesa suggests is the gaze of the investor. Farocki’s documentary provides images of the rhetoric and narrativity at work on the part of the investor, and also the way that the investor’s gaze is crucial for negotiating the value of the object in which investment might take place. More broadly, film analysis has long been concerned with the powers of looking

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and with the relationship between the viewing subject and the viewed object. In this chapter, I expand on Muniesa’s work and investigate the viewing relations set up by Farocki concerning the valuing gaze, before considering the gendered nature of the financial gaze through case studies of mainstream US narratives, Equity (Meera Menon, Broad Street Pictures, 2016) and The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, Red Granite Pictures, 2013). Chapter 4: Film and Financial Time explores what might be considered a central aspect of the relationship between film and contemporary finance, namely how can we understand, through moving images, the new temporality that finance creates with its reliance on debt and derivatives, present futures and future presents? Although in his major film philosophy work Cinema 2: The Time Image, Gilles Deleuze argues that cinema has ultimately internalized its relationship to money, this chapter sets out the ways that financial time may rupture our inherited sense of temporality. It looks at how the moving image is beginning to explore these new post-human, and possibly post-cinematic, temporalities. Zachary Formwalt’s moving image gallery installations, Three Exchanges (2011–2014), are addressed, as is the engagement with financial temporality in the contemporary art cinema of Christian Petzold’s Yella (Schramm Film Körner and Weber, 2007) with its attempt to find temporal forms that allow for the narration of complex financial relationships. Crucial for Formwalt is the question of the representation of the financial market at a point in history where actual trading is executed in forms beyond the threshold of human perception. The space and time of financial trading processes now occupy largely post-­ human, post-mechanical, electronic realms, beyond human perception and traceable only by means of the triggers of light whereby pricing information is communicated along cables between servers. In Petzold’s haunted narrative, the financial images we encounter both build directly on Farocki’s own visualizations of the act of valuation discussed in Chap. 3, but also register the spectrality of finance and the dangerous allure of its journeys into the future. In Chap. 5: Film and Financial Space, the discission moves to consider how films have negotiated the changing nature of space under finance capital. It looks at how the financial city—Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt am Main with its ‘Mainhattan’ skyline, and Dubai—has been figured in recent cinema as key spatial hubs in what is sometimes perceived as the placeless circulation of globalized finance capital. Established tropes for representing financial crisis, such as the image of panicked trading

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room floors, are not adequate to our current phase of deterritorialized finance capital in which financial operations have become largely decoupled from the materiality of production and consumption whilst at the same time the financialization of everyday life has become increasingly pervasive. This chapter considers the reterritorialization of capital in the image of the financial city using films that depict global hubs haunted by financial crisis. Here, in both Isaac Julien’s installation Playtime (2014), set in the City of London, Iceland, and Dubai, and the Frankfurt am Main film The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler, WDR/Arte, 2010) the materiality of the architectural image stands in for the immaterial economic forces that both structure and are structured by these urban centres of financial power. In the concluding section, Chap. 6: Film and Financial Performance, I end with a consideration of the ways that filmmakers have focused on performance and performativity as key constituent elements of contemporary finance capital and as modes of critique themselves. This chapter analyses two contrasting case studies of the way that financial performance and performativity have been explored in contemporary film by the artist and writer Melanie Gilligan and by German documentarist Marc Bauder. Gilligan’s trilogy, Crisis in the Credit System (2008), Self-Capital (2009), and Popular Unrest (2010) uses modes and genres taken from popular narrative cinema, drawing on science fiction, crime thriller, financial news parody, to offer one of the most interesting engagements with the processes and effects of financialization. Bauder’s finance film, Master of the Universe (Bauderfilm, 2013) won the European Documentary Film Prize in December 2014. It offers a depiction of the self-constitution and self-­ understanding of a banker-turned-whistleblower, focusing on speech acts of explication and justification. In both case studies, the performativity of financiers is highly significant in our understanding of the workings of the financial markets, from the financiers’ own descriptions of the market as ‘complex’, ‘abstract’, and ‘unrepresentable’, to the verbal phrases and bodily gestures employed to underpin statements about the sector. Despite their very different aesthetic strategies, both filmmakers ultimately offer an argument to reconnect the financial system to the field of politics and thus to extend democratic accountability to the financial regime. As Deleuze writes in the essay, ‘Control and Becoming, a conversation on power and resistance conducted with Toni Negri in 1990, on the possibility of a counter politics to the dominant society of control with its basis in a geo-economic order that includes the pervasive financialization

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of much of everyday life, what is needed are creative forms of subjectification and events that elude control. The financial images that the films in this study circulate to audiences contribute to these creative forms. According to Deleuze, ‘If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-­ times, however small their surface or volume. … Our ability to resist control or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move. We need both creativity and a people.’64 The films discussed in this study are evidence of this needed creativity at work in the ways that they address questions of finance. In many cases, they act as contributions to the constitution of something emergent, something new, that might encourage ways of understanding our financial times and ways of eluding its control.

Notes 1. Dating the ‘global financial crisis’ precisely is challenging. In Adam Tooze’s economic history of the ‘Great Financial Crisis’, he proposes that we should consider that a ‘decade of financial crises’ has changed our world. He locates the temporal centre of these events as initially occurring between approximately 2008 and 2010, although the aftershocks still haunt the countries affected. See Adam Tooze (2018), Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, London: Allen Lane. 2. Gilles Deleuze (2005), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London and New York: Continuum. and G.D. (2005), Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London and New  York: Continuum. 3. T.  J. Demos (2013), The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, p. xiv. 4. T.  J. Demos (2013), The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, p. xix. Demos refers here to Rancière’s work in The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum, 2004. 5. T.  J. Demos (2013), The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, fn. 20, p. 263. 6. T.  J. Demos (2013), The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, p. 152.

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7. Jacques Rancière (2009), The Future of the Image. London: Verso, p. 6. 8. D. N. Rodowick (2017), What Philosophy Wants from Images, Chicago IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, p. xi. 9. Jihoon Kim (2016), Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-Media Age, New York and London: Bloomsbury, p. 3. 10. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, p. 55. 11. Here it is useful to note the recent edited work brought together by Paul Gilbert, Clea Bourne, Max Haiven, and Johnna Montgomerie on The Entangled Legacies of Empire: Race, Finance, and Inequality, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023, that appeared just as this study was going to press. 12. Emily Rosamond (2020), ‘Financial Narratives in Crisis’, Finance and Society 6 (2), p. 131. Here Rosamond draws on Cedric J. Robinson (2000), Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press and on Zenia Kish and Justin Leroy’s examination of the American slave trade as a key site for financial experimentation: Zenia Kish and Justin Leroy (2015), ‘Bonded life: Technologies of racial finance from slave insurance to Philanthrocapital’ Cultural Studies, 29 (5/6), pp. 630-51. 13. Zenia Kish and Justin Leroy (2015), ‘Bonded life: Technologies of racial finance from slave insurance to Philanthrocapital’, Cultural Studies, 29 (5/6), p. 630. 14. Jonathan Beller (2021), The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism, Durham NC and London: Duke University Press. On the ‘techno-racial imaginary’ that underpins current data modelling that is then used in the service of projects of financializaton, in this case in the university sector, see Ramon Amaro (2022), ‘Threshold Value’, in Marina Vishmidt (ed) Speculation. Documents of Contemporary Art series, London and Cambridge MA: Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, pp. 84–98. 15. Gilles Deleuze (1995), ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, in Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, pp. 177–182. 16. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, p. 57. Vogl draws attention here to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, which offers a detailed analysis of this growing inequality under financialization. 17. Randy Martin (2002), Financialization of Daily Life, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 18. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, p. 59.

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19. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, pp.  59-60. See also Joseph Vogl (2017), The Ascendancy of Finance, Cambridge: Polity Press. 20. Emily Apter and Martin Crowley (2019), ‘Economies of Existence’, Diacritics 47 (1), p. 3. Apter and Crowley refer here specifically to how the publication in 1979 in France of Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition opened up in prescient fashion discussions of what have since been termed processes of financialization and their general socio-political implications. 21. Emily Apter and Martin Crowley (2019), ‘Economies of Existence’, Diacritics 47 (1), p. 6. 22. Emily Apter and Martin Crowley (2019), ‘Economies of Existence’, Diacritics 47 (1), p. 6. 23. Constantin Parvulescu (ed.) (2018), “The Finance Film” Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/ obo-­9780199791286/obo-­9780199791286-­0299.xml?rskey=2C0DpY &result=135. Last accessed June 2023. 24. Erika Balsom (2017), After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 3. 25. Erika Balsom (2017), After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation. New  York: Columbia University Press, p.  3. Balsom refers here to Raymond Bellour (2014), La querelle des dispositifs: Cinéma  – installations, expositions, Paris: POL, p. 14 and to Francesco Casetti, author of (2012), ‘The Relocation of Cinema’ NECSUS 2, Autumn, https:// necsus-­ejms.org/the-­relocation-­of-­cinema/ and (2015), The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, New  York: Columbia University Press. 26. Francesco Casetti (2015), The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 16. 27. Francesco Casetti (2015), The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 2. 28. Francesco Casetti (2015), The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 5. 29. Francesco Casetti (2015), The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, New  York: Columbia University Press, p.  79. Casetti draws here on Giorgio Agamben (2009) What is an Apparatus? Stanford: Stanford University Press. 30. ‘The ex-centric does not designate an ontology for cinema, a medium specificity, nor a material substrate that conditions its form indefinitely. The ex-centric designates a practice, a set of relationships and an outside to actuality’. Janet Harbord (2016), Ex-centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben

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and Film Archaeology, Thinking Cinema Series, London: Bloomsbury, p. 218. 31. Dudley Andrew (2010), What Cinema Is! Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell and Francesco Casetti (2015), The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, New  York: Columbia University Press. At the time of publication, both authors were based at Yale as professors of Film; Andrew’s book is (co-)dedicated to Casetti and Casetti responds to Andrew’s work in his Acknowledgements, stating that Andrew’s ‘suspicious attitude toward so-called post-cinema has been a constant caveat in the face of my excess of enthusiasm; I have been impelled to dive deeper into my topic. This book is in dialogue with his.’, p. viii. 32. Dudley Andrew (2010), What Cinema Is! Chichester: Wiley-­ Blackwell, p. xiv. 33. Dudley Andrew (2010), What Cinema Is! Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, p. xviii. 34. Dudley Andrew (2010), What Cinema Is! Chichester: Wiley-­ Blackwell, p. 94. 35. See Constantin Parvulescu (ed.) (2018), Global Finance on Screen: From Wall Street to Side Street and Miriam Meissner (2017), Narrating the Global Financial Crisis: Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth, Palgrave Macmillan, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. 36. Giovanni Arrighi (1994), The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, New York: Verso. 37. Fredric Jameson (1997), ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, Critical Inquiry, 24, Autumn, p. 246. 38. Fredric Jameson (1997), ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, Critical Inquiry, 24, Autumn, p. 246. 39. Fredric Jameson (1997), ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, Critical Inquiry, 24, Autumn, pp. 246–247. 40. Fredric Jameson (1997), ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, Critical Inquiry, 24, Autumn, p. 260. 41. Fredric Jameson (1997), ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, Critical Inquiry, 24, Autumn, p. 42. Fredric Jameson (1997), ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, Critical Inquiry, 24, Autumn, p. 252. 43. Fredric Jameson (1997), ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, Critical Inquiry, 24, Autumn, p. 260. 44. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle (2015), Cartographies of the Absolute, Alresford: Zero Books, p. 182. 45. Morgan M. Adamson (2013), ‘The Closure of the “Gold Window”: From “Camera-Eye” to “Brain-Screen”, Film-Philosophy, 17 (1), p. 247.

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46. Morgan M. Adamson (2013), ‘The Closure of the “Gold Window”: From “Camera-Eye” to “Brain-Screen”, Film-Philosophy, 17 (1), p. 247, italics in the original. 47. Morgan M. Adamson (2013), ‘The Closure of the “Gold Window”: From “Camera-Eye” to “Brain-Screen”, Film-Philosophy, 17 (1), p. 259. 48. Gilles Deleuze (2005), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London and New York: Continuum, p. 75, my italics. 49. Deleuze (2005), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London and New York: Continuum p. 75. 50. Samuel A. Chambers (2023), ‘The money array; or, show me the debtor’, Finance and Society, 9 (2), pp. 1–20. 51. Amin Samman (2020), ‘Strange loops: Producing history in financial times’, Finance and Society 6 (2), p. 151. 52. Morgan M. Adamson (2013), ‘The Closure of the “Gold Window”: From “Camera-Eye” to “Brain-Screen”, Film-Philosophy, 17 (1), p. 253. 53. Peter Szendy (2019), The Supermarket of the Visible: Towards a General Economy of Images. Translated by Jan Plug. New York: Fordham University Press, p. 7. Szendy refers in this section to Marie-José Mondzain (2005), Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. 54. Peter Szendy (2019), The Supermarket of the Visible: Towards a General Economy of Images. Translated by Jan Plug. New York: Fordham University Press, p. 8. 55. Peter Szendy (2019), The Supermarket of the Visible: Towards a General Economy of Images. Translated by Jan Plug. New York: Fordham University Press, p. 8. 56. Catherine Malabou (2020), ‘Inter-Iconomics: A Currency Within Sight’, in Peter Szendy with Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa (eds) The Supermarket of Images, Paris: Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, p. 256. 57. Catherine Malabou (2020), ‘Inter-Iconomics: A Currency Within Sight’, in Peter Szendy with Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa (eds) The Supermarket of Images, Paris: Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, p. 260. 58. Catherine Malabou (2020), ‘Inter-Iconomics: A Currency Within Sight’, in Peter Szendy with Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa (eds) The Supermarket of Images, Paris: Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, p. 260. 59. See Peter Szendy (2019), ‘Derivative Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice and Dividual Capitalism’ Diacritics, 47: 1, p. 64 ’ in which he argues that the derivative form is a key element of the ‘historical configuration [….] described by Deleuze as “control societies”’, and the two other Sydney lectures, ‘The Point of (No) Exchange, or the Debt-Image, pp. 27-42, and ‘Innervation, or The Gaze of Capital’, pp.  43-75, both in Peter Szendy

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(2019), The Supermarket of the Visible: Towards a General Economy of Images. Translated by Jan Plug. New York: Fordham University Press. 60. On the ‘attention economy’, see Jonathan Beller (2006), The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. 61. Calum Watt (2022), Derivative Images: Financial Derivatives in French Film, Literature and Thought, Edinburgh Studies in Film and Intermediality, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 77–78. Italics in the original. 62. Calum Watt (2022), Derivative Images: Financial Derivatives in French Film, Literature and Thought, Edinburgh Studies in Film and Intermediality, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 78. Italics in the original. The citation from Nietzsche can be found in Friedrich Nietzsche (2007), On the Genealogy of Morality, Keith Ansell-Pearson (ed.), trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 45. 63. Calum Watt (2022), Derivative Images: Financial Derivatives in French Film, Literature and Thought, Edinburgh Studies in Film and Intermediality, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 80. 64. Gilles Deleuze (1995), ‘Control and Becoming’, Conversation with Toni Negri, Negotiations 1972-1990, Translated by Martin Joughin, New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, p. 176.

Bibliography Adamson, Morgan M. 2013. The Closure of the “Gold Window”: From “Camera-­ Eye” to “Brain-Screen”. Film Philosophy 17 (1): 245–264. Amaro, Ramon. 2022. Threshold Value. In Speculation, ed. Marina Vishmidt, 84–98. Documents of Contemporary Art series, London and Cambridge MA: Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press. Andrew, Dudley. 2010. What Cinema Is! Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Apter, Emily, and Martin Crowley. 2019. Economies of Existence. Diacritics 47 (1): 3–15. Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. New York: Verso. Balsom, Erika. 2017. After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation. New York: Columbia University Press. Beller, Jonathan. 2006. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. ———. 2021. The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press. Casetti, Francesco. 2015. The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Chambers, Samuel A. 2023. The Money Array; or, Show me the Debtor. Finance and Society 9 (2): 1–20. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. What is a Dispositif? In Two Regimes of Madness. 2006, ed. David Lapoujade (trans: Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina). New  York: Semiotexte. ———. 1995a. ‘Control and Becoming’, Conversation with Toni Negri, Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin, 169-176. New  York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. ——— 1995b. Postscript on the Societies of Control. In Negotiations 1972–1990, Trans. Martin Joughin. 177-182. New  York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. ———. 2005a. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London and New York: Continuum. ———. 2005b. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London and New York: Continuum. Demos, T.J. 2013. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press. Gilbert, Paul, Clea Bourne, Max Haiven, and Johnna Montgomerie, eds. 2023. The Entangled Legacies of Empire: Race, Finance, and Inequality. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harbord, Janet. 2016. Ex-centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology. Thinking Cinema Series, London: Bloomsbury. Jameson, Fredric. 1997, Autumn. Culture and Finance Capital. Critical Inquiry 24: 246–265. Kim, Jihoon. 2016. Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-Media Age. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Kish, Zenia, and Justin Leroy. 2015. Bonded life: Technologies of Racial Finance from Slave Insurance to Philanthrocapital. Cultural Studies 29 (5/6): 630–651. Malabou, Catherine. 2020. Inter-Iconomics: A Currency Within Sight. In The Supermarket of Images Peter Szendy with Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa, eds., 255-260. Paris: Gallimard/Jeu de Paume. Martin, Randy. 2002. Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Meissner, Miriam. 2017. Narrating the Global Financial Crisis: Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. Parvulescu, Constantin, ed. 2018a. Global Finance on Screen: From Wall Street to Side Street. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. ——— (ed.) (2018b). The Finance Film. Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordbiblio g r a p h i e s . c o m / d i s p l a y / d o c u m e n t / o b o -­9 7 8 0 1 9 9 7 9 1 2 8 6 / obo-­9780199791286-­0299.xml?rskey=2C0DpY&result=135. Last Accessed June 2023.

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Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. ———. 2009. The Future of the Image. London: Verso. Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Rodowick, D.N. 2017. What Philosophy Wants from Images. Chicago IL and London: The University of Chicago Press. Rosamond, Emily. 2020. Financial Narratives in Crisis. Finance and Society 6 (2): 130–135. Samman, Amin. 2020. Strange Loops: Producing History in Financial Times. Finance and Society 6 (2): 148–156. Szendy, Peter. 2019a. The Supermarket of the Visible: Towards a General Economy of Images. Trans. Jan Plug. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2019b. Derivative Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice and Dividual Capitalism. Diacritics 47 (1): 62–79. Tooze, Adam. 2018. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. London: Allen Lane. Toscano, Alberto, and Jeff Kinkle. 2015. Cartographies of the Absolute. Alresford: Zero Books. Vogl, Joseph. 2017. The Ascendancy of Finance. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2020. The Financial Regime. Coils of the Serpent 6: 55–60. Watt, Calum. 2022. Derivative Images: Financial Derivatives in French Film, Literature and Thought, Edinburgh Studies in Film and Intermediality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

CHAPTER 2

The Financial Regime and the Financial Image

The ‘Mutation of Capitalism’: The Financial Regime and Control Society In this chapter, I look more closely at the characteristics of the financial regime and at the emergence of the control society from the disciplinary society, its relationship to both finance and to the image, and trace through how we may think of the current financial image in circulation through two case studies of significant financial films, The Girl Rosemarie (Das Mädchen Rosemarie, Rolf Thiele, Roxy Films, West Germany, 1958), and Liquidity Inc. (Hito Steyerl, Germany, 2014). Before examining our finance film case studies, it is imperative to consider in more detail what is at stake in the current financial system operative across much of the world and steered largely by the global North. As was mentioned briefly in the Introduction to this book, this contemporary condition has been referred to as ‘the financial regime’ by Joseph Vogl, and it is a recent shift in the economic and political order that Vogl sees in his eponymous essay as part of the emergence of what Deleuze famously termed the ‘control society’. Deleuze’s description of control societies will be explored in this chapter, but initially it is useful to set out in more detail Vogl’s characterization of the financial regime as it allows for an historical contextualization of the form of social, political, and economic order within which the films under consideration are produced and circulated. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. King, The Financial Image, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40654-6_2

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Vogl’s main argument concerns initially questions of governance, power, and democracy, all of which Vogl sees as inseparable in the current political order from the operations of the financial markets. Vogl proposes that in recent years, and certainly since 2008, we live in a transnational space in which there has been a major transition from a geo-political to a geo-economic order. Vogl defines the current financial regime as ‘a conglomerate of state organs, central banks, international organizations treaties, and privileged private companies, an ensemble of public, semi-private, and private actors. One should not speak of free markets here, but of a ‘regulatory capitalism’.1 Vogl refers back to Gilles Deleuze’s prescient short essay on contemporary manifestations of power, the ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ that appeared first in French in 1990 and was published in English in 1992. Vogl picks up on the way that Deleuze sees in the emerging societies of control, that are coming to replace the disciplinary societies that Foucault had identified across a number of his works, a specific ‘mutation of capitalism’. Vogl quotes Deleuze’s comment that ‘[t]he operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters’.2 Vogl sees this new ‘financial regime’ as constituting a critical turning point in politics and in the workings of democracy as policy decisions are increasingly taken by ‘decision-making entities made up of government representatives, international organizations, and private companies (major banks, rating agencies) that have come together in informal bodies, represent the interests of creditors, and operate outside legal ties’.3 This is a situation that has not arisen as a specific response to the run of financial crises since the turn of the millennium, but its operation has become more visible because its role in crisis management leaves it more exposed to public gaze, and certainly so, for Vogl, in the consequences of the crisis in the Eurozone and the interventions of the European Central Bank: ‘Insofar as crises represent intellectual strokes of luck driving forces out of their latency that remain inconspicuous under normal conditions, the last financial and economic crisis provided an appropriate diagram: here one could observe a style of government that deserves the title of a subtle coup d’état.’4 In exploring the alliance between government and finance capital, Vogl, like a number of economic historians, makes the claim that the key shift in what has become the current economic order occurred in the 1970s. Several events and measures originated in this decade that enabled a shift from an overall post–Second World War consensus around labour, capital,

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and welfare provision that, taken together, constituted the end of a specific historical period and the emergence of a period of extensive financialization. The key markers of this transition according to Vogl’s account should be seen as the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, whereby the US president Nixon was forced to remove the dollar from the gold standard, a move which led to the era of the ‘floating rates of exchange’ that Deleuze discusses as central to the emerging societies of control.5 Vogl lists a series of measures and occurrences that came in the wake of the dollar’s exit from the gold standard: the growth of new financial instruments such as currency derivatives, the expansion and deregulation of the financial markets under President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher in the United Kingdom (UK), whose interventions led to the reform of labour markets and the loss of workers’ rights, the reduction of corporate taxes, the privatization of state-run enterprises including parts of the social security system, and specific tax privileges for asset holders. This period saw the growth of international agreements on the liberalization of finance and the changes to the articles of agreement of the Washington, DC-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) that promoted and implemented stability criteria and financial discipline generally and particularly as a strict precondition of loans to emerging economies along with the easing of conditions constraining foreign investment. For Vogl, then, the financial sector has in recent years assumed an increasingly political and governmental function, constituting what he terms the ‘fourth estate’, that sees itself as responsible to the international financial community in the first instance rather than to governments, parliaments, or voters.6 For Vogl, what is key to understanding the history of the financial regime is not the sudden irruption into the public gaze of local, national, or near-global financial crises, but the reversal of the preceding economic order that had operated under the long-term aspiration of reducing inequalities through progressive taxation, labour and union rights, and strong welfare provisions. This has led, for Vogl and others, to an enormous growth in private wealth and to record levels of debt, particularly among the most economically vulnerable.7 In the history of this emerging financial regime, Vogl identifies two trends that have less to do with issues of governance and more to do with how all of those employed as workers and wage earners might have experienced the recent decades. First, there has been a pronounced deindustrialization (and deliberate outsourcing to cheaper countries) of factory and manufacturing production processes and an increasing proportion of profits invested in financial

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products, a set of processes that has increased job insecurity and precarity across many sectors while allowing companies to make greatly increased profits because of their reduced commitment to wages and to infrastructural investment in expensive countries. Second, our general experience of our proximity to, and exposure to, financial decision-making has intensified as, according to Vogl’s account, ‘the financial regime thus functions as a bottom to top transfer system which turns the lower half of the population into net interest payers for the owners of financial assets. This has been accompanied by the passive inclusion of wage earners into the financial economy: through the expansion of consumer credit and mortgages, through pension funds supported by the financial market, and through the privatization of health and retirement provisions. The upward redistribution of interest payments corresponds to a downward redistribution of financial risks’.8 For Vogl, this was most pronounced from a European perspective when the dynamic described above ensured that the weakest members of the European Union’s ‘Eurozone’ bore the brunt of the financial disciplinary measures imposed in the aftermath of what became termed the ‘European Debt Crisis’ of 2009–2010, occasioned as a result of severe balance of payments problems. For Vogl, this resulted in a kind of ‘internal colonization of European populations’ whereby ‘the dynamics of the financial regime thus not only unleashed political and economic centrifugal forces in Europe … but also attacked one of the most important resources of democratic politics and led to an overall erosion of solidarity’.9 Reinforcing this move from a system whereby governments and their central banks had a large degree of control of liquidity and the supply of money to one where the markets have a far larger degree of control has come with the erasure of the difference between money and financial instruments and assets. Although Vogl’s argument may seem to be anchored in a particularly European dynamic, as Adam Tooze has argued in Crashed, his magisterial historical study of the decade of financial crises that was marked early on by the collapse of the Lehman Brothers financial services firm in September 2008, the subprime crisis in the United States (US) and the ‘Eurozone debt crisis’ in the European Union were linked parts of a (near) global financial crisis. The cascading events of 2008–2010 revealed the vulnerability of many financial institutions, not so much to specifically domestic issues but to their intertwining at an international level, much of this owing to the inadequacy of regulation that had allowed banks to become so enmeshed globally.10

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In summary, then, for Vogl, our current financial regime can be thought of as the ‘mutation of capitalism’ that Deleuze had identified as central to the emergence of a new form of power and governance, that of the ‘control society’.11 For Deleuze, the control society emerges out of and supplements as an organizational model the disciplinary regimes that Foucault had so acutely diagnosed across several major publications. In his essay, Deleuze explicitly compares the systems for organizing power in the emerging control societies with those that Foucault had articulated as characteristic of the preceding disciplinary modes of organization. As Deleuze clarifies, disciplinary models of organization were dominant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as ways of organizing and exploiting the bodies of the general population, having succeeded in their turn a form of government based on the sovereign. It is in the twentieth century that Deleuze sees the growth of governmental models of control, particularly in the latter decades. As we shall see below, Foucault was also writing in his later works about the changing nature of governmentality and anticipating a new social model that called forth a different relationship between economics and politics than that seen in disciplinary societies and a model of subjectivity based on entrepreneurship. Deleuze too argues that it is in their relationship to financial organization that we can see a key difference between disciplinary and control societies, as we move from the factory system of the organization of production to one based on the dominance of the corporation. Importantly for Deleuze, it is the mode of circulating and handling transactions and payment that best characterizes the difference between disciplinary and control societies. As Deleuze writes, ‘[m]oney, perhaps, best expresses the difference between the two kinds of society, since discipline was always related to molded currencies containing gold as a numerical standard, whereas control is based on floating exchange rates, modulations depending on a code setting standard sample percentages for various currencies’.12 Deleuze’s distinction between disciplinary and control societies, then, aligns itself with the timeline of the move of the dollar from being pegged to the gold standard and to the free-floating valuation of currencies that mark out the financial regime. Deleuze’s control society sets out a new historical regime in which capitalism has been radically transformed both by the free circulations of finance capital, that is no longer anchored to either the materiality of the gold standard or to the borders of nation states and national banks, and by the emergence of digital technology and media, communication, and information forms. Additionally, we can understand the rise of neoliberal governmentality as

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a project, as William Davies has argued, to ‘accelerate the shift from discipline to control, in which markets are simply the best available technologies for this, with entrepreneurship the idealized mode of subjectivity for the control society.’13 From this perspective, Deleuze’s control society characterizes the entire system of power and social forces within which life in much of the global North in the early twenty-first century takes place. Deleuze characterizes the control society as one under which bodies are controlled not through the utilization of extensive physical buildings of confinement, closed environments with their own rigidly applied system of laws and rules, like the prison, the wards of the hospital or the mental asylum, the family home, the school, the university, the factory, the barracks of the military, in which individuals are continually under potential human surveillance and through which individuals must pass as discrete stages before moving to the next one, all organized to maximize efficiency and productivity through an externally applied force. The control society instead relinquishes this degree of corporal constraint and physical confinement with its discrete stages and operates instead through a never-­ ending state of requiring that individuals modulate themselves to adapt to current economic, social, and political goals. It demands a constant condition of self-monitoring and self-surveillance and responds by allowing access or not to specific information, incentives, and rewards through a series of codes and passwords, rather than by means of physical appearance or physical signature. For Deleuze, the disciplinary society had applied rigid moulds as forms of confinement, whereas the control society works in the manner of a ‘“modulation”, like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another.’14 As we shall see below in the examination of our film case study, the quality of adaptability, of self-­ modulation, of a certain liquidity, is precisely the attribute required not to flounder under the conditions of the control society. The control society is also resolutely digital, as compared with the analogue measurements of the disciplinary society. Its physics are based on information technology and computers, and information is drawn from individuals, now termed by Deleuze ‘dividuals’, and turned into usable data whereas disciplinary societies utilized energy derived from thermodynamic machines and extracted physical labour from its population. This is not to say that these older conditions do not still apply, they are just rarely at the centre of the economic model of much of the global North as manufacturing of all kinds has largely been outsourced onto the bodies of those in the global

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South. The control society, for Deleuze, is defined by the business rather than the factory, a commercial entity that is ‘a soul, a gas’, a liquid, or gaseous form.15 It would be misleading to posit too great a difference between Foucault’s analysis of the disciplinary society and Deleuze’s observations about emerging forms of control. Deleuze sees his essay as offering not a correction of Foucault, but more as a supplement, benefitting from his, that is Deleuze’s, ability to experience over a longer duration the crystallization of certain key political, economic, and technological developments. Foucault’s reckoning with the mutations in capitalism perceptible more fully after the exit from the gold standard are set out in the Birth of Biopolitics lectures, given at the Collège de France in 1978 and 1979, and first collected, edited, and published in French in 2004. As several critics have pointed out, it is useful to read Deleuze’s ‘Postscript’ piece in dialogue with Foucault’s own lengthy analysis of the mutations of political and economic thinking in his The Birth of Biopolitics lectures.16 As Shaviro notes, Deleuze’s work on the control society is part of the way that he sees how Foucault’s model of the disciplinary society has evolved. But importantly here, Foucault himself also sees this evolution, and the lectures in The Birth of Biopolitics trace out this shift. As Shaviro argues, in the context of the emergence of neoliberal forms of economic governance, both Deleuze and Foucault ‘shift their focus away from biopolitics, or the regulation of bodies and populations, and return to a kind of quasi-Marxist concern with political economy. Almost in spite of themselves, they both rediscover political economy at the heart of the social processes that had previously seemed to be of an entirely different order’.17 For Flaxman, it is clear from Deleuze’s book on Foucault, that had come out originally in French in 1986, four years before the first appearance of the ‘Postscript essay, and in several subsequent interviews, that in Deleuze’s view Foucault too was fully aware that the disciplinary regime was being supplanted by something new that was markedly economic in relation to its utilization of forms of power. Ironically, Deleuze does not seem aware of the arguments of the Birth of Biopolitics lectures concerning neoliberal capital and governance.18 Deleuze does not address this in his book on Foucault, and, as Flaxman argues, ‘Deleuze doesn’t write the ‘Postscript’ in response to what was left unsaid by Foucault but, rather, in relation to what he’d left unsaid in Foucault’.19 The Birth of Biopolitics lectures cover a wide and detailed history and prehistory of forms of liberal governance that are beyond the scope of this study to address in full. In the next section, I look

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at how Foucault narrates the emergence of a new economic and financial order in the new state of west Germany and how we might identify and consider the financial images that emerge from this new order. But it is useful to summarize how Foucault underlines the ‘endless attenuation of the state and transfer of authority to enterprises themselves’, a promotion of entrepreneurialism over state constraint that extends to the ability of individuals to see themselves ‘as both an investor and an investment’, no longer the homo oeconomicus of classical liberal thought who is a participant in market exchange but now an entrepreneur whose capital includes himself or herself as a source of profit, as ‘capital is whatever can be made a source of future income’.20 Importantly, for Foucault as it will be subsequently for Deleuze, the mutation of capitalism and the movement from a disciplinary society based on forms of confinement and spatial constraint to a more free-floating social formation that is ordered through its access (often by way of digital codes) to flows of finance, services, and rewards, is one in which we are still surveyed, valued, and assessed on a permanent basis. But for Foucault, this emerging social order, as Steven Shaviro notes citing Foucault, ‘involves “the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes,” and “in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals”’.21 It is not hard to see that Foucault’s formulations about a post-disciplinary regime align with, rather than are contradicted by, Deleuze’s control society designation. As Shaviro writes, ‘[b]oth accounts see multiplication of differences, and the continuing “optimization” or “modulation” of loose, “fluctuating processes,” as a practice of control.’22 Foucault’s point about the ‘image, idea, or theme-program of a society’ is useful here. Before looking more closely at how the financial images that arise from Deleuze’s control society essay and the subsequent intensification of the financial regime might be addressed, I want to offer a case study of an earlier historical point, that we might want to think of, in a nod to Foucault, as one of the moments at which it is possible to see the birth of the contemporary financial image.

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Case Study I: Foucault, Frankfurt, and the Birth of the Financial Aesthetic: The Girl Rosemarie For Foucault, the birth of neoliberal finance, and consequently the birth of a new manifestation of biopolitics, comes in 1949 with the establishment of West Germany and with the debates around the constitutional formation of a political state that would have as its rationale the maintenance of a specific formation of economic liberalism. West Germany sees the first manifestation of the radically economic state wherein the traditional legitimising relationship of political sovereignty and economic activity is formally reversed. How is economic activity—work—in this new state constituted in cinema? In this case study, I look at the representation of entrepreneurship, economics, and power in Frankfurt am Main, Germany’s financial hub, in the award-winning film satire, The Girl Rosemarie (Das Mädchen Rosemarie, Rolf Thiele, Roxy Films, 1958) that attempts to find images and sounds to register the changing nature of work, subjectivity, and power after the West German ‘Wirtschaftswunder‘, the ‘economic miracle’ that had seen the western part of the now-divided Germany emerge from the rubble of the Second World War as a European economic power again in barely a decade. Before looking in more detail at Foucault’s lectures on neoliberal finance and at the attempts in The Girl Rosemarie to find a visual and acoustic strategy appropriate to this new situation, it is useful to anticipate some of the concerns around the nature of the image and its relationship to power that will be explored below by way of a short detour into another of Foucault’s essays, this time directly on art. In 1971, he gave a lecture in Tunis that addressed how the painter, Manet’s, major pieces displace classical notions of light, space, and spectatorship making the paintings self-­ consciously material objects that interpellate the spectator directly.23 Writing about Olympia, a revisiting of Titian’s Venus and of a whole series of female nudes in Western art, Foucault argued that the depiction engendered a moral scandal as the subject was clearly coded as a prostitute. Her calmly defiant gaze out to the spectator challenges propriety. But more than this: Olympia’s confrontational gaze constitutes an aesthetic scandal24 too because the source of the light in Manet’s painting comes from the very point from which we view her. As Foucault writes, ‘[o]ur gaze upon the Olympia is a lantern, it is that which carries the light; [….] She is nude only for us since it is we who render her nude and we do so because, in looking at her, we illuminate her, since the whole of our gaze and the

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lighting add up to one and the same thing. [….] we are [….] necessarily implicated in this nudity and we are to a certain extent responsible’.25 It is helpful to bear in mind the terms of Foucault’s art criticism here concerning the distinction between an aesthetic scandal and a moral scandal where both supplement each other as we make a dissolve from Manet’s painting, that itself reappears in the film under consideration, to a consideration of the film The Girl Rosemarie, that has as its subject the rise and fall of another sex worker, Rosemarie Nitribitt, in West Germany’s booming financial capital, Frankfurt am Main, in the 1950s. This dissolve allows for a consideration when we address the film in question, as to whether the scandal at its heart is similarly both moral and aesthetic, in that instead of focusing on an individual’s offences against propriety through her work, the film searches for a form to indict a new mode of governmentality and that in turn includes the viewer directly in that indictment. Here we might turn to Foucault’s account in his 1979 lectures on the emergence of neoliberal capital noted above, published in English as The Birth of Biopolitics. Although the lectures hold a more provisional and tentative status than the more fully revised published monographs, these talks are the only point in the latter period of Foucault’s life where he looks at contemporary formations of power. His interests at this time are more generally on questions that follow through from antiquity or from the emergence of the early Church and its focus on ethics.26 They point to a sustained engagement with the ideas underpinning the neoliberal mutation of governing capital at an early point in what becomes as our financial regime before Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan had even been elected. West Germany takes its place, for Foucault, as the key site in understanding the emergence of neoliberal finance. His main argument is that the establishment of the Federal Republic in 1949 sees the application of a fundamentally new form of governmentality, a new relationship between the state and the people. For Foucault, it is arguably the first example in modern European history of the ‘radically economic state’.27 History, Foucault argues, had ruled against the idea of the political German state, the political state as sovereign being seen as synonymous with the extreme racist statism of National Socialism. The key question for political scientists and politicians would be how to ground a state in what he terms a ‘non-state space’ – and the answer to that would be in a reversal of the traditional relationship between political sovereignty and economic activity, whereby ‘[t]he economy produces legitimacy for the state that is its guarantor.’28 Foucault argues that there is a kind of circuit constantly

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going from the economy to the state that produces a ‘permanent genealogy of the state from the economic institution’.29 For Foucault, the period of National Socialism constitutes a crisis of temporality in that any new Germany would have to understand itself in relation to its barbarous and catastrophic political history. The move to grounding a new society on neoliberal capital, on the centrality of the economy and the market to all aspects of self-understanding, opens up a rethinking of time. For Foucault, ‘[h]istory had said no to the German state, but now the economy will allow it to assert itself. Continuous economic growth will take over from a malfunctioning history. It will thus be possible to live and accept the breach of history as a breach in memory, inasmuch as a new dimension of temporality will be established in Germany that will no longer be a temporality of history, but one of economic growth. A reversal of the axis of time, permission to forget, and economic growth are all, I think, at the very heart of the way in which the German economic-political system functions. Economic freedom is jointly produced through growth, well-­ being, the state, and the forgetting of history’.30 In this way, the new political state only derives its legitimacy to the extent that it can construct a space of freedom for workers as economic participants and potential partners.31 The market-oriented economy envisaged by the Freiburg School theorists is specifically not about establishing a society of mass consumption, even if that becomes one of its most visible effects. Foucault argues forcefully that what is at stake here in this new art of government is not about guaranteeing the exchange of commodities— ‘we have gone beyond that stage’32—as it is about ensuring the ‘mechanisms of competition’.33 For Foucault, ‘[t]his means that what is sought is not a society subject to the commodity effect, but a society subject to the dynamic of competition. Not a supermarket society, but an enterprise society. The homo oeconomicus sought after is not the man [sic] of exchange or man the consumer; he is the man of enterprise and production’.34 Rosemarie Nitribitt was found murdered in her apartment in Frankfurt am Main in November 1957. The case was never solved and may have been subject to a high level cover-up, causing a major scandal in West Germany on account of Rosemarie’s affluent and publicly visible lifestyle and a client list that reputedly numbered members of the West German industrial and banking elite. The swift production of the West German film, The Girl Rosemarie, itself caused a moral scandal with politicians trying to block the making of the film, to censor key images, and finally to pressure the 1958 Venice Film Festival, where it proved to be a great hit

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and was nominated for the Golden Lion, into retracting it from the screening schedules. The Girl Rosemarie went on to be the most popular film in West Germany that year, it shared a Golden Globe for the Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for numerous prizes in Germany and abroad. The film presents a scandal for the West German government, not just because of the lifestyle of the sex worker, Rosemarie, and the involvement of so many key figures leading the German economic recovery, but because, as I argue below, the film tries to narrate Rosemarie’s ascent and death as a systemic part of West Germany’s move to the neoliberal economics described so acutely by Foucault rather than as a morality tale about an anomalous figure’s work practices. The scandal surrounding the film is also an aesthetic one, in the sense of Foucault: what the economic miracle seems to provide visually, a new stability, wealth, employment, individual freedom, a break with the Nazi past, is undercut by what the film articulates about the cost of such an enterprise. In this way, the film registers an early attempt to think through how to constitute a financial aesthetic through a separation of the ‘seeable’ and the ‘sayable’, to use the terms that dominate Deleuze’s reading of Foucault’s overall archival and archaeological projects. For Deleuze, Foucault himself in this way ‘is uniquely akin to contemporary film’.35 Although the film has not received much critical attention to date, what essays there are to date have proposed that The Girl Rosemarie maps West Germany’s economic miracle onto the body of a sex worker as a way of charting the increasing immorality and corruption at the heart of the country’s recovery, thus linking public history to private work and lifestyle experience. However, in these earlier accounts, Rosemarie has been seen largely as a ‘consumer, prostitute, and puppet’ in Germany’s economic renaissance.36 The overemphasis on consumption in such accounts misses the degree to which the film foregrounds Rosemarie’s agency as would-be entrepreneur where consumption is a by-product of her actions, not her goal, that for much of the film is upward social mobility through management of the self-as-enterprise. As Foucault writes in his lectures, ‘I think this multiplication of the “enterprise” form within the social body is what is at stake in neo-liberal policy. It is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society.’37 Towards the end of the lectures, Foucault returns to this way of thinking about the new form of governmentality that he is describing, asserting once more that its aim is not to produce consumers but to create the conditions for everyone to imagine themselves as

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entrepreneurs who are incentivized to participate in economic competition at all stages of their lives. For Foucault, the enterprise form in neoliberal economies involves ‘extending the economic model of supply and demand and of investment-costs-profit so as to make it a model of social relations and of existence itself, a form of relationship of the individual to himself [sic], time, those around him, the group, and the family. So it involves extending this economic model’.38 We can underline here how in Foucault’s reading of West Germany’s economic and political history, the role of the state is to ensure the willing participation in the complex relations of economic and business activity by all in society, not primarily to enforce a worker-consumer model in order to stimulate consumption and thus to generate the continued flow of commodity purchases and therefore manufacturing profits. It is the state’s role not to intervene unduly but to organize and to maintain the ‘rules of the game’ in this transactional social model. Foucault stresses the game-like nature of this form of governmentality explicitly in his lectures, writing that ‘the economy is basically a game, …. it develops as a game between partners, … the whole of society must be permeated by this economic game, and … the essential role of the state is to define the economic rules of the game and to make sure that they are in fact applied. What are these rules? They must be such that the economic game is as active as possible and consequently to the advantage of the greatest possible number of people, with simply a rule— and this is the surface of contact, without real penetration, of the economic and the social—a supplementary and unconditional rule of the game, as it were, which is that it must be impossible for one of the partners of the economic game to lose everything and thus be unable to continue playing.’39 What is so fascinating about this film is the way that it does suggest that Rosemarie is a player, one among many, in a kind of government-­ supported economic game. This link to government policy is referred to both visually and acoustically, in the lyrics of one of its key musical numbers, as we shall see below in the discussion of the pivotal ‘Kanal Voll’ sequence. In fact, censors tried to downplay this connection by ordering the removal of a portrait of Economics Minister, Ludwig Erhard, from Rosemarie’s bedroom wall, and images of Erhard and other leading politicians from the ‘Kanal Voll’ sequence.40 We might consider Rosemarie as an example of Foucault’s homo oeconomicus, central to the new market economy, not a partner of exchange, according to Foucault, as much as an entrepreneur of the self, ‘being for himself [sic] his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for

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himself the source of [his] earnings.’41 Rosemarie’s fashioning of the entrepreuneurial self includes her agency in positioning herself close to the network of economic power by entering the lobby of the Palast Hotel without her pimps at the beginning of the film, her agency in taking driving lessons and insisting on her reward from her lover, Hartog, in the form of a precisely specified model of Mercedes sports car, her evolving ability to dress in haute couture fashions as she moves from her rubble-era trench coat to Dior dresses and furs, aided substantially here by a French spy, Fribert, who promises to teach her to be a cosmopolitan, European, coquette with Parisian styling, and significantly, her desire to educate herself, buying books on French language and engaging a student to help with French lessons. Rosemarie is figured as something other than the iconic ‘consuming woman’ of the earlier part of the 1950s, who in a number of films and advertisements had been positioned as a key West German citizen across political, economic and social discourse, whose workplace was in the home as the manager of the domestic sphere and who made a political contribution to West Germany’s economic recovery through her rational consumer habits, savings, and prudent investments.42 If we follow the line in Foucault’s lectures, then it follows that the neoliberal economic system has been productive here of a new kind of social identity in Rosemarie’s case, one that challenges gendered participation in Germany’s wealth-­ creating economy along the lines of man entrepreneur, woman consumer, a state that Foucault’s own use of gendered masculine pronouns throughout the lectures tends to erase.43 Rosemarie’s individual story, her secret recording of her clients and her selling of state secrets to foreign powers, her spectacular luxury consumption, personal mobility, and promiscuity as a sex worker, all of which run counter to the newly dominant national identity of woman as domestic consumer, are ultimately not the focus of the film’s critique. The film is less moralistic and normative about Rosemarie’s path than might be anticipated from late 1950s mainstream commercial cinema in West Germany. A sense of moral righteousness is not explicitly constructed as a counterpoint to the economic exchanges of the self-interested entrepreneurs but is instead displaced and made hyperbolic and impractical through the extreme Biblical exhortations of the unworldly figure of Rosemarie’s student companion, the uptight seller of Der Wächter, a newspaper that in its title echoes the widely circulated The Watchtower journal produced by the Jehovah’s Witnesses denomination. The student ends up storing Rosemarie’s spy tapes for her, an aligning of

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a would-be moral voice with the voiced truth of the economic miracle in a single space if not in a single body. Rosemarie’s downfall comes when she refuses to exchange the tapes she has secretly made of her clients’ pillow talk for vast sums of money. As an entrepreneur, it is only logical that she should commit to the most favourable deal. But her price is no longer economic: she wants Hartog to divorce his wife and marry her instead, cementing her upward climb. The West German society constituted in the film is one that understands itself as both stratified along traditional class lines socially but also permeated by an upwardly mobile entrepreneurial sensibility. The fact that she possesses the tapes in the first place is less of a fundamental problem than that she reaches a point where she refuses to sell, undermining the organizing power of the market. The French spy Fribert tells her not to provoke society as after all, ‘she is its product’. This is a warning to know her place, yet it is also about allowing the economic game of competition between enterprises to continue unhindered. The industrialists are not unsympathetic to her position and do not seek to punish her. Their initial concern is to make sure she isn’t ruined, either socially or financially. Rosemarie’s refusal to accept the neoliberal primacy of market relations puts at risk the cartel and by extension the operations of the West German neoliberal settlement. In this, the film wants to find the aesthetics means to narrate the death, just as much as the rise, of Rosemarie Nitribitt as a systemic misfunction of entrepreneurial work in the Wirtschaftswunder, as a symptom of an emerging and potentially catastrophic neoliberal order that cannot function as a pure game of enterprises. In the film’s early set piece, the celebrated ‘Kanal Voll’ sequence, Rosemarie’s place as a key participant in wider social forces that constitute this increasingly financialized world is addressed through both the lyric and montage of visual images.44 The zoom and dissolve that begins this sequence goes from a point of view shot of a copy of Manet’s Olympia, the painting discussed by Foucault that we noted at the beginning of this case study. Diegetically, this point of view should be that of her lover Hartog’s, but we go from a frontal view of the painting, implicating us as viewers, to a precise graphic match on the reclining figure of Rosemarie assuming the position of Olympia, with one of the pimps composed behind her like the black maid in Manet’s painting.45 The electronic synthesized non-diegetic sound accompanying this dissolve disorients the viewer and suggests a transitional moment in the film. What fascinates here is how Rosemarie doesn’t match up in key ways to what is suggested might be Hartog’s

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contemporary framing of Manet’s prostitute. The careful positioning of her body to match the painting does not extend to her gaze. In such a self-reflexive dissolve, it is remarkable that she doesn’t look directly out at us, especially in a film that regularly breaks the fourth wall. Given the way the scene is constructed to match closely Manet’s Olympia and yet to deviate from the painting with respect to how the central figure’s gaze is composed, we see her here not as the direct inheritor of Olympia, of the ‘prostitute-as-commodity’, the eroticized nude with a confrontational gaze in Foucault’s analysis, but also as a calculating entrepreneurial agent now able to be oblivious to our look because she is not directly confronting society, staring out at us to reinforce this fact, but she is in fact, in playing the economic game, in accordance with society’s emerging entrepreneurial principles. Her hands block her body, in a posture similar to Olympia’s, but her gaze fixes offscreen on the pimp with whom she is negotiating and the discussion, as so often in the film, is about financial transactions: ‘a capitalist who doesn’t pay is unfair’ we hear. Although she is placed in a private domestic space in this scene, she has little to do with domestic management or consumption. It is Hartog who has been the consumer and the pimps who are contracted to undertake the domestic chore of carrying up the new goods she has purchased. The sequence provides viewers with a tv insert, where we encounter images of mink coats, banks, insurance companies and soldiers marching across the screen, thus giving us visual fragments of elements of the new order as well as of the importance of the newly emergent media form in communicating the signs and images of the new regime. It is the lyric that tries to tie these disparate visual elements into a coherent whole. Like the pimps’ discussion with Rosemarie about the need to get cash, the four stanzas of the song make repeated reference to finance and to economic transactions as key drivers in the reconstruction of West Germany. The West Germans have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, we hear, and have reached prosperity overnight. The four stanzas suggest that finance is intrinsically linked to freedom, and reference is made to the Freedom Bell, given to West Germany by the US after the successful Berlin Airlift a decade earlier. Yet the lyric also suggests that the National Socialist past has only partially been addressed, with the reluctant burning of Mein Kampf and the inset of marching feet suggests that a remilitarization of Germany is secretly planned, underscoring the problems with the forgetting of history promised under neoliberal finance. The ‘Kanal voll’ sequence articulates the German present: financialization,

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entrepreneurship, consumption, rearmament, and the disavowal of history: luxury consumer goods, secret bank accounts, and blocks of shares, some of the rewards when we ‘pray for the economy’. Sound plays an essential role in the aesthetics of the film, suggesting that neoliberal finance cannot be communicated purely through what is seeable. The predominantly realist visual aesthetic is often undercut by abstract sound suggesting that mainstream cinema is struggling with a crisis of representation when faced with this financialized world. This disjunction of sound and image is at odds with most popular West German cinema of the 1950s, although increasingly in the latter part of the decade there were attempts to use sound to experiment with film form.46 The film begins with Rosemarie entering via revolving doors the lobby of a prestigious Frankfurt hotel, an opening that echoes that of F.  W. Murnau’s silent classic, The Last Laugh (UFA, 1924). The door’s revolutions are accompanied by disorienting and repeated electronic sounds. The long shot of Rosemarie taking stock of this strange environment and walking across the lobby to take a seat, in the hope of engaging a wealthy client, is accompanied by a man’s voice speaking English loudly on the phone, revealed subsequently to be the head receptionist at the hotel, who throws Rosemarie out dismissively and later in the film is shown himself to be the keeper of a thick black book of contact numbers for sex workers whom he provides for the hotel’s distinguished clientele, suggesting that all levels of society, even its supposedly reputable institutions, are equally participants in its new economic and moral order. Outside the hotel, the camera shows the Frankfurt skyline, in pre-­ Mainhattan guise, with its church towers and department stores, and still with distorted sound effects, swoops down on a main shopping street. After a lengthy pan up a modern office and apartment block, the kind to which Rosemarie will move as she begins her economic and social ascent, as the soundtrack changes to a cabaret number, a pan down a ruined building bearing the scars of the Second World War and the figures of the two street musicians who act as pimps to Rosemarie and who provide a choral commentary using Brecht and Weill type cabaret songs.47 As they sing about ‘The fruits of our economic miracle’, the camera pans down Rosemarie’s crumpled raincoat, thus associating her with the unrestored ruins of pre-economic recovery Germany.48 In the city centre, rows of black Mercedes sweep around a modern, concrete, spiral car park, again accompanied by repetitive electronic sound effects.

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It is through the clever counterpointing of acoustic track and visual imagery, that the Frankfurt of the economic miracle is constituted here, a synthetic, repetitive, and disorienting world that calls on specific skills of adaptation to survive and thrive. The sound effects propose that this is a constructed world from which we are initially distanced, unless, like Rosemarie entering the hotel lobby, we step over a threshold. It proposes that the visual images of Frankfurt are not capable of articulating the full truth of the economic miracle. There is a separation between the visible and the acoustic, the seeable and the sayable. The song lyrics suggest that West German neoliberal modernity is understandable and narratable, yet the electronic sounds disrupt both the diegetic, realist sounds and the commentary itself. The spectacular appeal of an increasingly but unevenly affluent Frankfurt is here called into question.49 The electronic sounds, produced by an uncredited Oskar Sala on the Trautonium, a combination used famously later on Hitchcock’s The Birds,50 are disorienting rather than the atonal threatening sounds of horror and thriller films, and accompany processes of movement—revolving hotel doors, lifts, luxury cars—and thresholds, changes of state or transitions—dissolves—in this layered world. These transitions, often between the vertically hierarchized spaces of the city, underscore the irony of any kind of progression, as if everything really is a strange kind of game. They are used particularly to accompany the markers of new wealth and power in the emergent German neoliberal order. Given that Rosemarie believes for much of the film that she controls sound—she holds the ‘truth’ of the Isoliermattenkartell and of Fribert through her secret recordings—the abstract non-diegetic repetitive sounds underscore that she has agency but within a larger, repetitive, disorienting, whole. Rosemarie’s relationship to sound is complex. Although the actor, Nadja Tiller, could sing, her voice is underused. Yet for much of the film she has partial control of sound: she is the entrepreneur not only of how she looks, how she displays and uses her body, her clothes, her car, but how she sounds too, with her eagerness to learn French and her confidence in telling Fribert he ‘doesn’t sound French’. She also secretly records Fribert, undermining the sense that she is a voiceless puppet of the industrialists. However, this reading stresses Rosemarie’s entrepreneurial agency and care of the self, without suggesting that she is necessarily more than a systemic placeholder. 51 She is clearly replaced by a new sex worker entering the hotel at the end of the film, suggesting that while the entrepreneurial apparatus promotes individualism, it is eminently able to replace

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the individual entrepreneur. In aural terms, Rosemarie begins the film in silence, crossing over the threshold of the hotel lobby where she doesn’t speak until spoken to, achieves her own ‘voice’ in her economic and social ascent, and is finally silenced, losing aural control as we hear her involuntary death scream after she refuses to acquiesce in selling the tapes. The aesthetic scandal of critiquing West German neoliberal economics rather than the moral impropriety of an individual makes The Girl Rosemarie an interesting case study in the evolving ways that Frankfurt, Germany’s financial city, is constituted on screen. The separation of the seeable and the sayable in this film marks an early exploration of a financial aesthetic that is often registered as an influence in more recent films set in Frankfurt am Main’s financial quarter, as we shall see in Chaps. 5 and 6. Before that, and before analysing the financial images that have emerged in the decades since the release of The Girl Rosemarie, it is necessary to move on from Foucault’s initial work on the emerging economic-led governance of the state and the individual to a consideration of Deleuze’s subsequent theorization of the control society, the financial regime that dominates its political decision-making, and its implications for framing recent financial images. Indeed, as Fredric Jameson has argued in his recent lengthy essay on contemporary culture, a piece that returns to supplement his ‘Culture and Finance Capital’ article of 1997 addressed above in the Introduction, ‘it does seem to me more and more obvious that no description of the postmodern can omit the centrality of the postmodern economy, which can succinctly be characterized as the displacement of old-fashioned industrial production by finance capital’. 52 Although Jameson is pessimistic about the capacity of any cultural practices emerging from this formation that can offer challenges to the ways that finance capital exploits and appropriates time and space in its ability to extract all value from lives and resources, in both theoretical models and in practical projects finance capital is resisted at the level of the image, as we shall explore drawing on the theoretical work of Maurizio Lazzarato and, as a second case study, the video installation Liquidity Inc. (2014) made by Hito Steyerl.

Mixed Semiotics in the Financial Regime If the case study of The Girl Rosemarie throws light on the emerging entrepreneurialism that Foucault sees as a key trait of the move out of the disciplinary management of bodies within confined spaces, then its

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financial images give us evidence not only of the historical context of West Germany’s path at the early stages of what will become the financial regime analysed by Joseph Vogl, but they also suggest something of the challenges to representation of the mutation of capitalism towards finance. As we move in the late twentieth century and after into the period characterized by Deleuze as the control society, the question of cinema’s relationship to control becomes paramount. As Deleuze was well aware, the movement from sovereign-based societies, through disciplinary societies, to the emerging control society was not only characterized by changes in its predominant economic and monetary models but also in its relationship to how power is constituted through its audiovisual regimes.53 For Gregory Flaxman, in addressing this question it is useful to begin not with the ’Postscript’ essay but to look five years earlier at the way that Deleuze ends the second volume of his vast books on cinema. Flaxman points out that it is in Deleuze’s conclusion to Cinema 2: The Time Image that Deleuze begins to sketch out a framework for a never-completed analysis of cinema’s images under a new regime that is constructed on the rise of ‘a new computer and cybernetic race, automata of computation and thought, automata with controls and feedback’.54 This regime clearly aligns with the characteristics set out in the ‘Postscript’ essay: a regime in which power is decentralized and dispersed. As Flaxman insists, while in the two Cinema books Deleuze uses cinema to frame political, philosophical, and historical questions, in his concluding analysis on understanding the contemporary regime of images, Deleuze turns this around and suggests that cinema is now framed by the evolution of the machinic. For Flaxman, ‘Deleuze poses the question that broadly concerns us here, namely: is there “a new regime of images like that of automatism” [Cinema 2, p. 253]. In other words, is there a regime of cinematic images that corresponds to the emergence of computer technology, information science and digital media?’55 This is a question of major significance, but in this form it, of course, downplays the importance of the mutation in capitalism and the evolution of capital forms that are so central to understanding the control society in Deleuze’s ‘Postscript’ essay. As this study proposes, the financial images explored here contribute to ways of thinking that propose that there might be a new regime of images under finance capital, images that are formed out of a consideration that ‘money is the obverse of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place’ and that, as Deleuze says in ‘Postscript’, the mutation of the money form is the best way to understand the division

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between the older disciplinary society and the emerging society of control. How are we to understand what is potentially a new regime of images in Deleuze’s sense when these images are produced not with the moulded materiality of the traditional money form on their obverse side but with what Deleuze terms an ontology based on ‘floating exchange rates, modulations depending on a code setting sample percentages for various currencies’ and produced, as Deleuze proposes in his concluding paragraphs in Cinema 2, not an analogue cinema but as specifically digital images, what at the time of writing Deleuze was calling ‘electronic’ and ‘numerical’ images that he saw just coming into being.56 This new regime of images that corresponds to the mutation of capitalism into the financial and the growth of the digital and the machinic has been diagnosed productively by Maurizio Lazzarato, who builds on Deleuze’s ‘Postscript’ piece across several attempts to set out the way that, as Lazzarato argues, finance and the contemporary image are connected in intertwining ways in that capital itself acts as a semiotic operator and cinema, in its broadest sense, through its recourse to a sophisticated employment of ‘mixed semiotics’, allows for a contestation of finance capital’s immense reach.57 As Lazzarato proposes, we should understand that ‘[t]he economic war currently played out on a planetary scale is indeed an “aesthetic” war for many reasons’.58 Lazzarato argues that in its contemporary form, ‘capitalism is not only a mode of production but a production of worlds’.59 Lazzarato suggests that in its intended production of the world in the form that capital prefers, one in which we accept our subjectivation as (exploited) producers and consumers, capital is always aware that there are alternative worlds, virtual in kind, that may not be realized but which are always an immanent threat to its own hold on power: ‘Another possible world is always virtually there. The bifurcation between divergent series haunts contemporary capitalism. Incompatible worlds unfold in the same world. For this reason, the process of the capitalistic appropriation is never closed onto itself, but is always uncertain, unpredictable, and open. … Capitalism tries to control this bifurcation – the worlds are always virtually there – through continuous variation and modulation.’60 And as Lazzarato proposes in a sweeping passage on ‘finance and the machines of expression’, it is through its mutation away from production and into the realm of finance capital that capitalism has attempted to control and constrain this sense of openness, of the coexistence of alternative virtual worlds. Lazzarato writes that ‘[b]ut why has finance acquired today such a power of choice, valuation, and

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decision on the economy that it reverses the relationship between industry and finance characterizing disciplinary societies? Because money is, in the same way as language, the existence of the possible “as such”. It is for this reason that money, rather than the “real economy”, is able to control and capture the organization of difference and repetition and its motor: the virtual. In societies of control money represents the colonization of the power of virtuality by capitalists’.61 However, given that capital works to produce worlds, and in Lazzarato’s view, following Guattari, works through controlling a flow of signs, through semiotics, as a ‘semiotic operator’, there is scope given for the realization and communication of currently virtual worlds under the financial regime.62 Lazzarato accords a substantial degree of agency to cinema, in its wider sense, as a mode of constructing moving images that has the capacity to alter the effectiveness of the way that finance capital presents itself semiotically and thus to offer a possible reordering in the constitution of the worlds available to us. In his longer work, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Lazzarato declares that ‘cinema can represent a chance for salvation, a possibility for a change of course’ and it offers this chance to the extent that it moves away from situating itself as a humanistic and anthropological eye on the world and become, itself, more embedded in drawing on and circulating moving image sequences of ‘mixed semiotics’.63 Lazzarato sets out his analysis in a long chapter on ‘Mixed Semiotics’ that moves directly from an exploration of how the stock market trader’s subjectivity is formed from an encounter with the ‘diagrammatic semiotics’ that form the sign system of finance and that are circulated at every moment of the trader’s working life by means of computer screens and the omnipresent Bloomberg terminals.64 Lazzarato’s key point is that the trader represents the most fully advanced current version of the classic homo oeconomicus and yet unlike the historical liberal version of that formation, the trader’s subjectivity under the financial regime ’has nothing sovereign or rational about it’ as it is one reliant in its decision-making on ‘machines, asignifying writing systems, and information codified and produced by mathematical instruments’ whose signs and diagrams, systems and data banks, mobilize the trader’s ‘machinic subjectivity’.65 As Lazzarato argues through his examination of the example of the trader, but in an analysis which extends from this example across what appear on the surface to be non-financialized branches of society, what is at stake is the production of an ‘individuated subject’: ‘[t]he refrains of neoliberalism (be an asset, be a self-starter, get rich, etc.) are there to ensure this

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happens. The latter do not hide a reality from us; instead they endow us with a relationship to time, space, and others by making us exist somewhere in a world that refers every subjectivity which capitalist deterritorialization produces to the entrepreneur, individual success, competition, social Darwinism, and so on’.66 As Lazzarato argues subsequently in this chapter, it is specifically in cinema that we see the contestation of this process of the individuation of the subject through machinic and asignifying semiotic systems. As he proposes, ‘[a] political battle has unfolded and continues to unfold around cinema for control of the effects of subjectivation and desubjectivation that the “non-human” semiotics of the cinematographic image produce on the individuated subject’.67 Although Lazzarato’s argument rests on an overly strict separation of the attempts of commercial cinema to support the processes of the fabrication of the individuated subject and the output of the non-commercial or art film sector as specifically contesting this process, his framework is helpful in the way that it sets out the semiotics at work in and available to contemporary cinema. Drawing on Guattari’s lists of signifying (dialogue), symbolic (gestures and movements), and asignifying (music, editing, rhythms) semiotics, Lazzarato proposes that we should consider too the ways that asignifying semiotics can also be found in the operations of finance capital in the forms of ‘stock market indices, unemployment statistics, scientific diagrams and functions, and computer languages [that] operate by putting to work and multiplying the power of the “productive assemblage”’.68 These flows of asignifying signs act directly on material flows, acting directly on the real, in the way that, for example, computer languages drive the functions of computers or that monetary or mathematical signs produce actions in the economy or in engineering. Lazzarato draws attention particularly to the asignifying semiotics of finance, the ‘most formidably efficient’, and to the way that contemporary finance capital aims to control the various asignifying apparatuses in order to ‘depoliticize and depersonalize power relations.69 Lazzarato agrees with Guattari that the cinema offers brief moments that enable it to open up possibilities that extend beyond dominant subjectivations. Cinema’s constitution as a form that utilizes a mixed semiotics, a capacity, that derives from its invention as an industrial and non-anthropomorphic aesthetic practice, to utilize both signifying and asignifying modes in its mixed semiotics, allows it to challenge the dominant models of capitalist subjectivity at work under the financial regime.

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Importantly, Lazzarato rejects the view that political practices and art practices, and here he explicitly foregrounds ‘works that employ moving images’, are at their most effective when they work predominantly with a representational function. As he writes, cinema should be seen as offering to audiences the constitution of an event, rather than of a representation. Within the paradigm of representation, he argues, ‘the images, the signs and the statements have the function of representing the object, the world, whereas in the paradigm of the event, images, signs and statements contribute to allowing the world to happen. Images, signs and statements do not represent something, but rather create possible worlds’.70 It is in this way that in Lazzarato’s theory, moving images can contest the processes of subjectivation utilized by finance capital to constrain the sense of openness noted above, the capacity to realize virtual alternative worlds. Moving images, therefore, and from the perspective of this study particularly financial images, are effective not when they represent back to viewers the world as it is constituted under finance capital but when they actively intervene and disrupt our preexisting alignment with the world constituted by finance. What moving images must do, for Lazzarato, is to constitute ‘possibilities, possible worlds, which affect souls (brains) and must be realized in bodies. Their effect is that of the creation and realization of what is possible, not of representation. They contribute to the metamorphoses of subjectivity, not to their representation’.71 Neither in this short piece nor in the extended theoretical analysis in Signs and Machines does Lazzarato offer a detailed analysis of how this theoretical approach might work in relation to a specific film. Although Lazzarato has attempted with some success to put these ideas into practice over the course of a number of film and video installation collaborations, not least with the acclaimed experimental documentarist Angela Melitopoulos, it is to the German artist and theorist, Hito Steyerl, that I now turn for a case study of how the financial image might be considered according to Lazzarato’s frameworks based on mixed semiotics and on the moving image installation as an event created within the world of finance capital, itself precipitating possible worlds, rather than representing directly our current financialized one. Lazzarato’s analysis of cinema’s formal potential, that in its ability to draw on various signifying systems and to operate according to a ‘mixed semiotics’, it might challenge the world-­ constituting power of finance capital, is given full rein in Steyerl’s film. Although Steyerl is less bullish than Lazzarato on the role of cinema in creating possible worlds that resist finance capital’s constraints, her use of

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mixed semiotics in her critical moving image works build on his arguments in productive ways. Steyerl writes frequently about the way that art practices of all kinds are often complicit with finance capital and mainstream cinema falls clearly within her sights: ‘[c]inema today is above all a stimulus package to buying new televisions, home projector systems, and retina display iPads. It long ago became a platform to sell franchising products – screening feature-length versions of future Playstation games in sanitized multiplexes’.72 Steyerl’s version of a post-cinema that avoids some of the pitfalls noted above involves producing new images alongside the curation of found images and cultivating the capacity to work with and against what Hal Foster terms in his review of Steyerl, the ‘algorithmic unconscious’, seen as a key condition of our time, and in doing so to filter out useful information from the vast oceans of images and data in current circulation.73 Steyerl’s methodology generally is to turn this overwhelming flow of images back on itself, to ‘unpack the dimensionless space of digital images, data and assets, and to reverse engineer some of its typical forms’.74

Case Study 2: Hito Steryerl’s Liquidity Inc. Steyerl’s moving image works and theoretical essays certainly intertwine with Lazzarato’s philosophical frameworks. She reprinted Lazzarato’s essay on ‘Struggle, Media, Event’, cited above, in a co-edited anthology with Maria Lind on documentary and contemporary art, alongside her own piece on ‘The Language of Practice’.75 In one of her subsequent essays, on the ‘cut’ in both cinematic and economic senses of the word, Steyerl cites Lazzarato’s long work on the debtor/creditor relationship as underpinning the contemporary form of the economy, in which Lazzarato talks about how debt is used to constitute the subject and how ‘both debt and guilt are inscribed into the body very literally in the form of cuts’.76 In order to set out how we might understand the relationship of finance capital to the formations of subjectivity, it is useful to think about the way an installation like Hito Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc. (2014) might be considered from such a perspective, offering as it does a series of specifically financial images alongside sequences of moving images taken from various popular cultural forms. Liquidity Inc., a thirty-minute single channel HD video, was commissioned for the 2013 Bergen Assembly (it was finished after the deadline, a stressful process that is discussed in the film itself via emails) and first exhibited at Artists Space in New York in March 2015. It

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draws on the strategies noted above to provide what seems initially to be a loose collage of images that do not represent our current moment as much as provide essayistic illustrations of some of its manifestations: images taken from high-frequency trading sequences and financial advice videos, from mixed martial arts (MMA) training sessions and fights, from iconic works of art such as Hokusai’s much-reproduced image of The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1829–1832) and Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) that inspired Walter Benjamin’s melancholic reading of the passage of history, and from mock weather reports and climate system documentaries that reference catastrophic storms such as Hurricane Katrina. The entwined themes of liquidity and turbulence, both financial and environmental, have at their centre a condensed biography of the film’s main protagonist, Jacob Wood, who was born in Vietnam and adopted in the 1970s by American parents and brought to the US, before becoming a trader through the years of the dot-com boom and crash, up to the period of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when he was also made redundant, before turning to MMA as a full-time professional career. Like Rosemarie in our previous case study, Wood is attempting to modulate his subjectivity in order to align with the emerging financial order. His is an intensified entrepreneurialism and investment in the self, that now extends to all spheres of his life, as he embraces the dictum of liquidity, of ‘being water’, being adaptable, becoming liquid. In French philosopher Frédéric Lordon’s account of how we become, as the English title argues, ‘willing slaves of capital’, Lordon puts the desirability or the attribute of ‘liquidity’ at the centre of his critique. For him, liquidity is the ‘fantasy of capitalist master-desire’, the paradigm above all else of deregulated finance capital.77 For Lordon, liquidity signals both immediate access to ready cash, and so signals the holding of money as the general equivalent, and, in the financial sector, liquidity also counts as the capacity to exit an asset market at any desired moment with the certainty of finding a buyer and at a volume and price point that will not result in significant damaging price fluctuations. It offers to the potential investor the rare form of ‘perfect reversibility’ as it allows for a seamless exit and requires a minimal commitment to the investment, unlike investments in industrial or manufacturing plant in which money can be tied up and difficult to extricate. It characterizes, then, in this form, a capacity not to have to commit for too long a duration. Following Keynes, Lordon notes the anti-social nature of the desirability of liquidity. It signals ‘the refusal of any durable commitment and Desire’s desire to keep all options

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permanently open – namely, to never have to take the other into consideration. Perfect flexibility – the unilateral affirmation of a desire that engages knowing that it can disengage, that invests with the guarantee of being able to disinvest, and that hires in the knowledge that it can fire (at whim) – is the fantasy of an individualism pushed to its ultimate consequences, the imaginative flight of a whole era’.78 Lordon proposes that the attribute of liquidity was once confined to certain niche asset markets but that it has spread as a general condition throughout the whole of capitalist society. This quality allows those who can manage liquidity, that is, under the financial regime, primarily the powerful, to believe that they can fulfil their desires at all times because of the absence of commitments, regulations, and fetters. As Lordon summarizes this condition, he suggests that it is ‘the subliminal message of the theory of pure and perfectly competitive markets: everything should be capable of adjusting itself instantaneously. But to what? … [I]t fluctuates and is open to continual reorientations. As the property that allows the incorporation of information in real time and the resulting ability to instantaneously modify the composition of a portfolio, liquidity in the narrow sense (financial liquidity) acquires a broad signification: the unconditional right of desire to do as it pleases’.79 In Steyerl’s title, we can see how this quality of fluidity, of mutation, of adaptability is foregrounded in the flows and turbulences that characterize the various elements that constitute the overall installation: the biography of Jason Wood, the financial market in which he worked, the MMA environment within which he is trying to succeed, the liquid water that constitutes so much of our bodies and of our world, and the constantly volatile weather systems. But the ‘Inc.’ or ‘incorporated’ is also noteworthy in that it is pertinent to the financial sector in denoting the process in business law by which the liability of shareholders as individuals is limited as the business or corporation itself, as after ‘incorporation’, the institution becomes the liable legal body in cases of lawsuits or bankruptcy. But ‘incorporation’ in Steyerl’s title also suggests the way that a person ‘incorporates’ the attribute of liquidity into their own subjectivity.80 And further, as Rafael Dernbach argues, ‘we as viewers witness an incorporation, the embodiment or personalization of an abstract principle: liquidity, the optimized dissolution and integration of matter into the flows of capital’.81 As Jason Wood tells the viewers, after the major financial collapse at Lehman Brothers and his redundancy, an event that he doesn’t rail against but accepts as something always in finance to be anticipated given the pressures that large corporations are under to maximize profits, he was able to

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adapt and to reposition himself in the world of MMA. As he argues in his voiceover, ‘[t]hat’s why you got to position yourself, be defensive, be ready for those shocks. Have a shockproof portfolio. You’ve got to adapt to whatever’s happening in the market. It’s like if you’re fighting, you know, you gotta adapt to your situation. It’s very fluid; it is kind of like fighting. And what you saw was people became hybrid fighters, right? They became versed in everything. That’s what makes it so exciting that’s what keeps things liquid and fluid’. The use of the qualities of a winning MMA fighter here to mark out the successful adaptive subjectivity under finance capital is fitting here. Unlike the modern forms of the separate martial arts from which it has emerged, MMA has evolved to incorporate and to encourage a broad range of fighting styles, comprising primarily the often-separated arts of striking, takedowns, and ground fighting, or submission grappling. As these individual styles take years to master and MMA fighters, although often expert across these broad styles, tend to draw more readily on specific strengths, opponents have to be able to continually adapt to new situations according to the styles employed in any given bout. This is liquidity not solely, as Lordon reminds us, as the desire to do what it pleases in a proactive sense, but increasingly to be able to react successfully, to adapt and survive in hostile circumstances, whether in the broader financialized world or in the immediate physical danger of the MMA octagon. The liquidity that Wood draws on to understand his own subjectivity and capacity to be resilient to the turbulence he encounters in his everyday life as well as in his professional career is echoed in the financial advice given out in Liquidity Inc.: we are told that ‘when you have liquidity you’re in control. Liquidity means to be able to get your money when you need to get to it. If you lost your job, if you had any type of setback, if the economy threw a curve ball at you, the most important thing is to be able to access funds when you need them. … You can avoid financial disaster’. Steyerl’s installation opens to a black screen with the voiceover repeated several times in the film, of the famous Bruce Lee guidance on achieving the appropriate mental disposition for fighting and for living generally, ‘Be water, my friend’ where the audience is urged to ‘[e]mpty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend’. Steyerl follows this with a screen that is divided roughly halfway horizontally, with in monochrome, the scene of a calm ocean

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below and then a black sky above on which a text is written out that is simultaneously voiced, describing how the voice, that stands in for water, is not ‘from here’ but originates from outer space. This same water, we hear, runs ‘through your veins. Your eyes. Your touchscreens and portfolios. I am gushing through your heart, plumbing, and wires. I am liquidity incorporated’. The screen shows the ocean becoming increasingly turbulent and, on the spray caused by crashing waves, Steyerl superimposes vocabulary taken from different fields—climatology, finance, biology—to propose that we are surrounded by systems that share common features as they veer from a laminar flow state to volatility and turbulence, and in the worst case, the viewer might assume, to crashes and systemic collapses, such as in the period of the financial crash of 2008 onwards. This spectrum of flow and turbulence in the natural as well as the social world would not be to see the financial regime through a naturalized, dehistoricized lens, given the overwhelming climate crisis, but to raise questions about the ontological condition of ‘being water’, of being flexible and adaptable, unpredictable and fluid, at our current historical juncture in both the financial and environmental realms. It also draws attention to the formal means by which the moving image can actually engage with these processes, can intervene and turn this encounter into an event in the way that Lazzarato has depicted in his essay. Steyerl’s installation does not simply address the question of the liquid and adaptive subject but also the challenges of finding appropriate formal means to examine this condition using systems and infrastructures of the visual media and environment at hand. The staging of the installation anticipates the key themes of the film and already frames the viewing encounter with the video screen used for the installation. Liquidity Inc. is projected on to a large screen that meets at its base a long-curved skateboard-­type ramp covered in blue tatami padded flooring material of the kind used in Japanese houses but also, of significance to the narrative, as the dojo floor for judo and Brazilian jiu jitsu martial arts practice. The audience is invited to sit on large blue cushions that are placed on the wave-shaped ramp that itself is based in soft blue lighting, that taken together with the sounds of water that are also projected in the viewing space, creates a quasi-liquid viewing ambiance even before the video commences. Taken together, we as the audience are enveloped, if not fully incorporated, in the various layers of liquidity encountered. As Cadence Kinsey has argued, we should note that ‘at the heart of the work is an exploration of the entanglement of capital with the circulation of digital

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images’.82 As Kinsey makes clear, in this, Steyerl is contributing to an ongoing debate in contemporary art practice on how to represent the relationship of the audience to digital technology, that often draws on water and other liquid forms in its works and discourses. Kinsey argues that the representation of water in contemporary art practices has ‘provided such a strong visual metaphor for digital technologies from CGI to the Internet. … [T]his is rooted in water’s multivalent associations with notions of immateriality and materiality, and is symptomatic of a historical moment conditioned by economic and environmental crisis’.83 The fluidity addressed by Steyerl’s installation is also encountered at a formal level through the use in the projection of images appearing on screen from a variety of devices, from smart phones to tvs, to shots of tumblr searches on a computer screen to rendered images and animations. Steyerl proposes that all these screen forms and types of image participate in a non-­ hierarchical fashion both competing for our attention and in providing visualizations—of language and phrases, of data, of maps, of money, of technology—overall of how we currently encounter and make sense of the world around us. Steyerl’s installations broach the question of the virtual, of the possibility of other worlds raised in Lazzarato’s thinking on capital and cinema, at the level of form as well as content. The image forms used are rarely specifically representational and mutate across screens and modes, incorporating computer-generated imagery, rendering, superimposition, and dissolves of different visual elements, found footage of various kinds, so that there is no strong sense of a dominant visual form, just a non-­ hierarchical sense of the installation itself scrolling through multiple possibilities of imaging. And this is reinforced in the dialogue, with Jacob Wood relating the perception that he and other traders shared in the late 1990s of the emergence of a new world that would completely disrupt and decentre what had gone before: ‘You could just throw money anywhere at that time, ‘98/99, and things were blowing up. At that time, you know, we thought that everything would be, you know, Internet based and, you know, we were entering a new world’. This sense of other possible worlds is reinforced by a strong theme that runs in the middle of the installation that is based on mock weather forecasts delivered by the ‘Weather Underground’, terroristic weather presenter figures whose facial identity is obscured by black balaclavas and sunglasses and who wear distinctive t-shirts that have enlarged owl faces on their front. Their commentary, that draws upon a text by Brian Kuan

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Wood, about increasing turbulence, disrupts the previously optimistic sense of liquidity narrated by interviewees in the installation about adapting smoothly to changing events. It offers in the guise of a weather forecast, carried out in front of a detailed global weather map annotated with often-turbulent descriptors of a territory’s political and governmental status, a series of statements that suggest that behind all the positivity about liquidity there are greater environmental forces bringing with them enormous social disruptions, with the decentering and eventual collapse of the whole sociopolitical system that Jacob Wood’s financial trading is built with and upon: ‘Trade winds blow from the South China Sea up across the Pacific, over to the West Coast of the United States, down to Los Angeles, and back to the South China Sea again. Tomorrow, these trade winds begin moving in reverse, blowing people back to their homes, blowing goods back to their factories, blowing factories back to their countries, blowing their countries back to their assumed origins’. This Benjaminian-­ like storm—and an image of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) is referenced in the installation—what might be Steyerl’s revolutionary ‘emergency brake’ in the movement of history, is described as if a film is spooled backwards. The storm culminates both in the decentering of subjectivity and the destabilization of the idea of technological progress: ‘How did this gust arrive here? Where did it come from, and who am I to be blown by it? The storm is blowing people back to their homes, blowing goods back to their factories, blowing factories back to their countries, blowing people back to their past’. The text here might suggest an apocalyptic warning to the audience and an exhortation about the need to divest from a belief in liquidity and to break the shackles of the individuated subjectivity that Lazzarato warns about. It is difficult overall to conclude that Steyerl’s film shares fully Lazzarato’s optimism in his account about the capacity of the contemporary financial image to challenge directly the constraints on the possibility of other worlds and other subjectivities that finance capital brings with it, given that the installation is in the final instance not directly didactic and affects a blackly comedic and hypnotic tone in parts in its deliberate non-­ representationalism. For Hal Foster, Steyerl’s ‘thinking is less dialectical than paradoxical: rather than intensify contradictions, she likes to collapse them [….] [s]uch criticism has a special knack for catastrophism, which it also craves. With enormous ambition it challenges the culture of capitalism, but finally it is too much in awe of this leviathan – which it regards as the sole engine of history – to do so effectively, and settles for a default

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position [….]; we are leftovers in a sea of historical debris’.84 While it is true that as viewers, we seem to be left adrift in a turbulent sea of data and images with little to hold on to, there are oblique critical gains from Steyerl’s methodology. For Cadence Kinsey, it offers a ‘critically useful diagnosis of dis-ease’ in its refusal of representation and its seamless flow of disparate digital images that forces us to reconsider the technologies that are drawn upon to produce, circulate, and interpret images in our current social order. Raphael K. Dernbach likewise proposes that Steyerl produces a kind of ‘anticipatory’ documentary whose images are allowed to recirculate freed from their present role in sustaining contemporary power regimes and that thereby her films offer a critique from an imagined future.85 In this, of course, one would want to point out that Steyerl’s future-oriented works may well then be the most fitting correlate for our derivative-based financial times, where present pricing is tied in to an often hugely complex speculation and wager about future circumstances. We might return here to Lazzarato’s essay about the possibilities of cinema, particularly when it moves away from a representational regime, and towards a condition that engenders an event, to open up for us ‘possibilities, possible worlds, which affect souls (brains) and must be realized in bodies.’86 Its effect would be that of the creation and realization of what is possible, what is currently virtual, rather than that of representation. It contributes ‘to the metamorphoses of subjectivity, not to their representation’.87 In Steyerl’s move away from a mode of representation, and her employment of elements of the collage of images and of her installations acting as events and encounters, there is a strategy to counter the hold that the financial regime might have on our bodies, minds, and souls, to use Lazzarato’s terms. This is one strategy among several that will be explored in the subsequent chapters, though it is not without contestation. In Fredric Jameson’s recent reconsideration of the relationship between culture and finance capital, he makes a strong advocacy for the importance of representation and—without mentioning her by name or suggesting that she is at all a target of his criticism—a rejection of the evasiveness of the installation as art media form, of the event, and of collage as critical aesthetic methodology, the very features that we find foregrounded so resolutely in Steyerl’s practice and essays.88 Yet Steyerl’s seamless flow of images curated and presented to instill in the viewer the awareness of control society’s obligation that we live in a state of an endlessly postponed and boundaryless surfing for appropriate information and gratification leaves everyone, as William Davies has identified, ‘in the same state of constant

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anxious fluidity as a financial trader or entrepreneur’.89 In the chapters that follow, on film and the financial gaze, on film and financial time, on film and financial space, and on film and financial performativity, we will examine some of the routes that contemporary filmmakers take to explore the contours of the financial regime and to reflect on the technologies and systems of contemporary image production, circulation, and reception. If, as Deleuze concludes, under the control society, ‘[a] man [sic] is no longer a man confined but a man in debt’, the films considered in this study provide moving images appropriate to this new condition and suggest new weapons and lines of flight to escape it.90

Notes 1. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, p. 57. 2. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, p. 55. Vogl is citing here from Gilles Deleuze (1992), ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’. 3. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, p. 55. 4. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, p. 57. 5. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, p. 56. Vogl is here citing from Gilles Deleuze (1992), ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’. 6. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, p. 55. 7. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, p. 57. Vogl draws attention here to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, that offers a detailed analysis of this growing inequality under financialization. 8. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, p. 58. 9. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, p. 58. 10. Adam Tooze (2018), Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, London: Allen Lane, pp. 321–323. 11. Joseph Vogl (2020), ‘The Financial Regime’, Coils of the Serpent 6, p. 55. 12. Gilles Deleuze (1995), ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, in Negotiations, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 180. 13. William Davies (2014), ‘The Chronic Social: Relations of control within and without neoliberalism’, New Formations 84/85, ‘Societies of Control’, Winter 2014/Summer 2015, p. 43. 14. Gilles Deleuze (1995), ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, in Negotiations, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 178–179.

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15. Gilles Deleuze (1995), ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, in Negotiations, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 179. 16. See Steven Shaviro (2011), ‘The “Bitter Necessity” of Debt: Neoliberal Finance and the Society of Control’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 37:1 March, pp.  73–82 and Gregory Flaxman (2019), ‘Out of Control: From Political Economy to Political Ecology’, in Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall (eds.) Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 205–221. 17. Steven Shaviro (2011), ‘The “Bitter Necessity” of Debt: Neoliberal Finance and the Society of Control’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 37:1 March, p. 73. 18. Gregory Flaxman (2019), ‘Out of Control: From Political Economy to Political Ecology’, in Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall (eds.) Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 212–213. 19. Gregory Flaxman (2019), ‘Out of Control: From Political Economy to Political Ecology’, in Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall (eds.) Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, p. 213. 20. This summary and the direct citations follow Gregory Flaxman (2019), ‘Out of Control: From Political Economy to Political Ecology’, in Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall (eds.) Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, p. 215. 21. Steven Shaviro (2011), ‘The “Bitter Necessity” of Debt: Neoliberal Finance and the Society of Control’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 37:1 March, p.  79. Shaviro cites Foucault (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979, trans. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 259–60. 22. Steven Shaviro (2011), ‘The “Bitter Necessity” of Debt: Neoliberal Finance and the Society of Control’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 37:1 March, p. 79. 23. In preparation for a never-completed book project on the painter Manet and the aesthetic regimes of modernity. 24. Michel Foucault (2011), Manet and the Object of Painting, trans. Matthew Barr, London: Tate Publishing, p. 63. 25. Michel Foucault (2011), Manet and the Object of Painting, trans. Matthew Barr, London: Tate Publishing, p. 66. 26. On the debate around Foucault’s alignment (or not) with neoliberalism, see Stuart Elden’s Progressive Geographies blog. There’s not enough space here to look at the degree to which Foucault’s views in the late 1970s can be aligned with the emerging currents of political thinking that favoured neoliberal solutions to the political malaise of the decade in parts of

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Western Europe. There has been an extensive debate on Foucault’s position with regards to neoliberalism in recent books and online fora. 27. Michel Foucault (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 86. 28. ‘In contemporary Germany, the economy, economic development, and economic growth, produces sovereignty; it produces political sovereignty through the institution and institutional game that, precisely, makes this economy work.’ Michel Foucault (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 84. 29. Michel Foucault (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 84. 30. Michel Foucault (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 85. 31. See Michel Foucault (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979, Basingstoke and New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 105. 32. Michel Foucault (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 149. 33. Michel Foucault (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. Basingstoke and New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 147. 34. Michel Foucault (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 147 35. Gilles Deleuze (2014), Foucault, London and New York: Bloomsbury, p. 55. 36. Larson Powell, (2013), ‘Allegories of Management: Norbert Schulze’s Soundtrack for Das Mädchen Rosemarie’ in John E. Davidson and Sabine Hake (eds) Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, Powell, p.  191. See Hester Baer (2012), Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language, New York and London: Berghahn, p. 246, who grants Rosemarie more agency but still sees her as primarily a consumer. 37. ‘Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2010, p. 148. 38. Michel Foucault (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New  York, 2010, p. 242. 39. Michel Foucault (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2010, pp. 200–201.

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40. Larson Powell makes the claim about the censuring of Erhard, Ollenhauer (then SPD leader), Strauss (then Defence Minister), from the ‘Kanal Voll’ sequence. Larson Powell (2013), ‘Allegories of Management: Norbert Schulze’s Soundtrack for Das Mädchen Rosemarie’ in John E.  Davidson and Sabine Hake (eds) Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, p. 188. According to Martin Brady the portrait of Erhard is still present but obscured (painted over?). 41. Michel Foucault (2010), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New  York, 2010, p. 226. 42. See Erica Carter (1997), How German Is She?: Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, p. 102. 43. Erica Carter (1997), How German Is She?: Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, p.  87. In fact, Rosemarie tries to become the ‘housewife’ to Hartog, having a surfeit of economic power, a trajectory from luxury consumer to bourgeois housewife noted by Carter as central to several 1950s melodramas, p. 179. 44. The phrase, ‘Kanal voll’ plays on the multi-layered meaning of ‘Kanal’ as both media channel, and its use in the idiomatic phase, ‘den Kanal voll haben’, to be drunk, wasted, plastered, and/or to have had a bellyful of something and to have reached the limits of one’s patience. 45. Manet’s Olympia is attended, famously, by a black maid whose significance has often been erased in art historical readings. See Lorraine O’Grady (1992), ‘Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity’, Afterimage, 20 (1), pp. 14–15. 46. Ottmar Dominick’s award-winning 1957 film and Berlinale success, Jonas, a film that combines contemporary jazz and electronic musical styles, uses an aural track voiceover narrated by poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger to articulate the ‘sayable’ beyond the ‘seeable’. See Alasdair King (2007), Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Writing, Media, Democracy, 2007, pp. 58–61. For a more general overview of the contemporary context of sound and image, see Hester Baer (2012), Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language, New York and London: Berghahn, p. 235. 47. On the relationship of Norbert Schulze, composer of the songs, to Brecht and Weill, see Larson Powell (2013). ‘Allegories of Management: Norbert Schulze’s Soundtrack for Das Mädchen Rosemarie’ in John E.  Davidson and Sabine Hake (eds) Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, p. 182.

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48. As Hester Baer notes in her detailed reading. See Hester Baer (2012), Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language, New York and London: Berghahn, p. 244. 49. See Hester Baer, Hester (2012), Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language, New York and London: Berghahn, p. 244. 50. See Larson Powell (2013), ‘Allegories of Management: Norbert Schulze’s Soundtrack for Das Mädchen Rosemarie’ in John E. Davidson and Sabine Hake (eds) Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, p. 185. 51. Larson Powell also sees Rosemarie as machinic though without necessarily granting her agency over sound, see Powell (2013), ‘Allegories of Management: Norbert Schulze’s Soundtrack for Das Mädchen Rosemarie’ in John E. Davidson and Sabine Hake (eds) Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, Powell, p. 186, 189. 52. Fredric Jameson (2015), ‘The Aesthetics of Singularity’, New Left Review, 92, March-April 2015, p. 115. pp. 101–132. 53. D. N. Rodowick makes a similar point at the end of his book on the persistence of cinema after the emergence of new media arts. See Rodowick (2007), The Virtual Life of Film, Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, p. 186. 54. Gilles Deleuze (2005), Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London and New York: Continuum p. 254. 55. Flaxman, Gregory. 2018. ‘Cinema in the Age of Control’, in Frida Beckman (ed) Control Culture: Foucault and Deleuze after Discipline. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 122. 56. Gilles Deleuze (2005), Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London and New York: Continuum p. 254. 57. Lazzarato’s early essay, ‘From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life’, opens with a citation from Deleuze’s ‘Postscript’ essay on the way that businesses claim now to have souls and is in dialogue with Deleuze’s control society characterization throughout its argumentation. See Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2004. ‘From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life’, trans. Valerie Fournier, Akseli Virtanen, and Jussi Vähämäki, ephemera: theory and politics in organization 4 (3), p. 189. 58. Maurizio Lazzarato (2004), ‘From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life’, trans. Valerie Fournier, Akseli Virtanen, and Jussi Vähämäki, ephemera: theory and politics in organization 4 (3), p. 188. 59. Maurizio Lazzarato (2004), ‘From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life’, trans. Valerie Fournier, Akseli Virtanen, and Jussi Vähämäki, ephemera: theory and politics in organization 4 (3), p. 187.

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60. Maurizio Lazzarato (2004), ‘From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life’, trans. Valerie Fournier, Akseli Virtanen, and Jussi Vähämäki, ephemera: theory and politics in organization 4 (3), p. 191. 61. Maurizio Lazzarato (2004), ‘From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life’, trans. Valerie Fournier, Akseli Virtanen, and Jussi Vähämäki, ephemera: theory and politics in organization 4 (3), p.196. Italics in the original. 62. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 39. 63. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 138. 64. For an analysis of the virtual possibilities of the Bloomberg terminal, see Christopher Wood, Alasdair King, Ruth Catlow, and Brett Scott (2016), ‘Terminal Value: Building the alternative Bloomberg’, Finance and Society, 2 (2), pp. 138–150. 65. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 96–97. 66. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 100–101. 67. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p.108. 68. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 140. 69. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 41. 70. Maurizio Lazzarato (2003) ‘Struggle, Event, Media’, transversal texts, May, trans. Aileen Derieg, https://transversal.at/transversal/1003/lazzarato/en, p. 1, last accessed 31 October 2022. 71. Maurizio Lazzarato (2003) ‘Struggle, Event, Media’, transversal texts, May, trans. Aileen Derieg, https://transversal.at/transversal/1003/lazzarato/en, p. 4, last accessed 31 October 2022. 72. Hito Steyerl (2019), Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, London and New York: Verso, p. 145. 73. Hal Foster (2018), ‘Smash the Screen’, London Review of Books, 5 April, p. 40. 74. Hal Foster (2018), ‘Smash the Screen’, London Review of Books, 5 April, p. 40. 75. Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl (eds, 2008), The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art, Berlin: Sternberg Press.

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76. Hito Steyerl (2012), The Wretched of the Screen, Berlin: Sternberg Press, p.  177. In this essay, ‘Cut: Reproduction and Recombination’, Steyerl mentions Lazzarato (2011), La Fabrique de l’homme endetté: Essai sur la condition néolibérale, Paris: Editions Amsterdam. 77. Frédéric Lordon (2014), Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, London and New York: Verso, p. 87. 78. Frédéric Lordon (2014), Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, London and New York: Verso, p. 91, my italics. 79. Frédéric Lordon (2014), Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, London and New York: Verso, pp. 92-93, my italics. 80. Karen Archey (2014) suggests that Steyerl’s title also refers to Jacques Derrida’s work, Limited Inc. (1988), a criticism of John Searle’s speech act theory. See Archey, ‘Hyper-Elasticity Symptoms, Signs, Treatment: On Hito Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc’ in Nick Aikens (ed), Too Much World: The Films of Hito Steyerl, London: Sternberg Press, p. 223. 81. Rafael K. Dernbach (2018), Anticipatory Realism: Constructions of Futures and Regimes of Prediction in Contemporary Post-Cinematic Art, unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge: University of Cambridge, p. 170. 82. Cadence Kinsey (2020), ‘Fluid Dynamics: On the Representation of Water and the Discourses of the Digital’, Art History 43 (3) June, p. 524. 83. Cadence Kinsey (2020), ‘Fluid Dynamics: On the Representation of Water and the Discourses of the Digital’, Art History 43 (3) June, p. 513. 84. Hal Foster (2018), ‘Smash the Screen’, London Review of Books, 5 April, p. 41. 85. Rafael K. Dernbach (2018), Anticipatory Realism: Constructions of Futures and Regimes of Prediction in Contemporary Post-Cinematic Art, unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge: University of Cambridge, p. 142. 86. Maurizio Lazzarato (2003) ‘Struggle, Event, Media’, transversal texts, May, trans. Aileen Derieg, https://transversal.at/transversal/1003/lazzarato/en, p. 4, last accessed 31 October 2022. 87. Maurizio Lazzarato (2003) ‘Struggle, Event, Media’, transversal texts, May, trans. Aileen Derieg, https://transversal.at/transversal/1003/lazzarato/en, p. 4, last accessed 31 October 2022. 88. Fredric Jameson (2015), ‘The Aesthetics of Singularity’, New Left Review, 92, March-April 2015, particularly pp. 108–111. 89. William Davies (2014), ‘The Chronic Social: Relations of control within and without neoliberalism’, New Formations 84/85, ‘Societies of Control’, Winter 2014/Summer 2015, p. 55. 90. Gilles Deleuze (1995), ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, in Negotiations, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 181.

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Bibliography Archey, Karen. 2014. Hyper-Elasticity Symptoms, Signs, Treatment: On Hito Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc. In Too Much World: The Films of Hito Steyerl, ed. Nick Aikens, 222–228. London: Sternberg Press. Baer, Hester. 2012. Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language. New  York and London: Berghahn. Carter, Erica. 1997. How German Is She?: Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Davies, William. 2014. The Chronic Social: Relations of Control within and without Neoliberalism. New Formations 84/85, ‘Societies of Control’, Winter 2014/Summer 2015: 40–57. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Postscript on the Societies of Control. In Negotiations, 177–182. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2005. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London and New York: Continuum. ———. 2014. Foucault. Trans. and ed. Séan Hand. London and New  York: Bloomsbury. Demos, T.J. 2013. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press. Dernbach, Raphael K. 2018. Anticipatory Realism: Constructions of Futures and Regimes of Prediction in Contemporary Post-Cinematic Art. Unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge: University of Cambridge. Flaxman, Gregory. 2018. Cinema in the Age of Control. In Control Culture: Foucault and Deleuze after Discipline, ed. Frida Beckman, 121–140. Edinburgh UP: Edinburgh. ———. 2019. Out of Control: From Political Economy to Political Ecology. In Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall, 205–221. Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham MD. Foster, Hal. 2018. Smash the Screen. London Review of Books 5 (April): 40–41. Foucault, Michel. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2011. Manet and the Object of Painting. Trans. Matthew Barr. London: Tate Publishing. Jameson, Fredric. 2015. The Aesthetics of Singularity. New Left Review 92 (March-April): 101–132. King, Alasdair. 2007. Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Writing, Media, Democracy. Bern: Peter Lang. Kinsey, Cadence. 2020. Fluid Dynamics: On the Representation of Water and the Discourses of the Digital. Art History 43 ((3) June): 510–537.

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Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2003. Struggle, Event, Media. Transversal Texts, May, Trans. Aileen Derieg, 1–5. https://transversal.at/transversal/1003/lazzarato/en. Last Accessed 31 October 2022. ———. 2004. From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life. Trans. Valerie Fournier, Akseli Virtanen, and Jussi Vähämäki. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 4 (3): 187–208. ———. 2014. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Lind, Maria, and Hito Steyerl, eds. 2008. The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Lordon, Frédéric. 2014. Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire. London and New York: Verso. Magagnoli, Paolo. 2013. Capitalism as Creative Destruction: The Representation of the Economic Crisis in Hito Steyerl’s Free Fall. Third Text 27 (6): 723–734. O’Grady, Lorraine. 1992. Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity. Afterimage 20 (1): 14–15. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Powell, Larson. 2013. Allegories of Management: Norbert Schulze’s Soundtrack for Das Mädchen Rosemarie. In Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany, ed. John E.  Davidson and Sabine Hake, 180–193. Berghahn: New York and Oxford. Rodowick, D.N. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press. Shaviro, Steven. 2011, March. The “Bitter Necessity” of Debt: Neoliberal Finance and the Society of Control. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 37 (1): 73–82. Steyerl, Hito. 2012. The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press. ———. 2019. Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. London and New York: Verso. Tooze, Adam. 2018. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. London: Allen Lane. Vogl, Joseph. 2020. The Financial Regime. Coils of the Serpent 6: 55–60. Wood, Christopher, Alasdair King, Ruth Catlow, and Brett Scott. 2016. Terminal Value: Building the alternative Bloomberg. Finance and Society 2 (2): 138–150.

CHAPTER 3

Film and the Financial Gaze

This chapter explores the power relations in play as films encourage us to ‘look’ at finance and capture the ways that finance ‘looks back’ at us. Here I address the question of how financial interests see and model the world, and I explore ways that films both celebrate and critique the ‘financial gaze’. Film theory has long been concerned with the powers of looking and with the relationship between the camera, the viewing subject, and the viewed object. Of course, when cinema addresses finance, it is inevitable that a whole series of complex framings and gazes come into play: essentially, we may start by asking how finance ‘sees’ the world that it encounters and shapes, how it ‘frames’ and values certain objects, people, and processes over others, before pulling back to considering how the camera is able to hold finance in its own sightlines and itself frame this world-framer. The world-framing capacity of finance, the financial gaze, becomes itself the subject of cinema’s financial images. In this endeavour, this chapter engages with some of the considerations raised by theorist Emily Rosamond in her ‘notes towards a cultural history of financial vision’.1 Rosamond’s essay starts from a consideration of Shoshana Zuboff’s claim that with the emergence of ‘surveillance capitalism’ in recent years, the new mode of accumulation it represents instantiates ‘new, impersonal ways of seeing users’ real-time flow of interests, and linking financial values to these acts of seeing—reconstituting and monetizing subjectivities through data-sets’.2 If this statement describes a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. King, The Financial Image, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40654-6_3

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contemporary instance of the financial gaze, Rosamond proposes that we should not think of this as the emergence of something completely new that has come to light only in the past two decades, but as part of a longer historical trajectory that comprises prehistories of the kind of interleaving of vision and financialization that we find in surveillance capitalism, the identification of how finance can take on the form of something that ‘sees’: ‘it sees’, in Rosamond’s terms.3 Rosamond’s aesthetic case studies of the financial gaze comprise contemporary drawings, paintings, and a video diary rather than the variety of moving image works that are the focus of this book. However, her emphasis on ‘the new relations between acts of seeing and acts of valuation taking shape in our own time’ is an organizing principle that also stands centrally aligned with the key themes of this chapter.4 If Rosamond’s essay explores art works and projects that participate in a longer prehistory of ‘imagining how finance “sees”’, then her case studies immediately throw up questions of power: ‘Who gets to claim affinity to money’s impersonal gaze? With whose interests and perspectives is financial vision aligned—and who gets cast in the background?’.5 Linked to these questions are those of the increasingly complex global and temporal reach of the financial sector, with the affiliated issues arising of how global finance sees and how it can be seen. The relationship between cinematic theories of the gaze and the financialization of perception has rarely been raised in Film Studies—Morgan M. Adamson’s essay on the ‘Closure of the “Gold Window”: From “Camera-Eye” to “Brain-Screen”’ forming one notable exception.6 Over the three case studies below, the way that contemporary finance frames the world and in turn is framed by cinema is explored as a starting point from which the overall question on the financial image is addressed in this study.

Imaging Value: Harun Farocki’s Nothing Ventured (2004) How finance looks at, and ascribes value to, both the world that exists around it and the possible worlds that it may bring into being, is the subject of Harun Farocki's Nothing Ventured (Nicht Ohne Risiko), released in 2004. Farocki’s film forms part of a loosely connected series of documentaries by the filmmaker that addresses the formation of ways of being in public life. Neatly summed up in the title of perhaps the best known of these films, How to Live in the FRG (Leben—BRD, 1990), these

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observational films, numbering around fourteen and dating back to 1983 and to Farocki’s earliest film efforts, register the conversations, encounters, and situations by which people are trained, or even train themselves from instructional manuals, in how to conduct themselves to their best advantage under the contemporary social order. For Thomas Elsaesser, much of Farocki’s prolific output focuses on ‘the problems of “work” as not only categories of the economic—how a society materially produces and ideologically reproduces the means of its survival—but as the very condition of what it means to remain human’.7 These two major concerns, that of the image and that of labour, are at the heart of Farocki’s vast oeuvre and often intersect throughout his career, until, as Volker Pantenburg has written recently, they ‘overlap and become part of a single question’.8 Nothing Ventured registers finance at work, in the form of a set of negotiations between a team of potential investors and a team representing the interests of a manufacturing company that is seeking venture capital to take its next step. Farocki’s filmmaking career across six decades has centred on making often complex visual essays and documentaries that have at their heart an investigation of the power of images of all kinds, his vast output cohering to show how moving images of all kinds frame the world for us. For D. N. Rodowick, the ‘question that drives all of his work, is how to give form and expression to a critical Image. … This is a question of style and the organization of forms and, above all, a question of construction. But it is also a matter of presenting the technologies of sighting in which we are all envisioned and produced as images and, in turn, to invent new techniques for the critical interrogation of images’.9 There has been comparatively little scholarly engagement with Nothing Ventured and certainly nothing that establishes how this documentary offers to the viewer significant images of finance. Above this, though, the film registers how finance itself assumes the capacity to form an image of the world, to frame the world from its own perspective. In this, Farocki both establishes certain framing processes that come to define financial processes while also giving us a critical image of that framing capacity. Farocki’s documentary raises the question of the power of finance to frame reality, to produce images that underpin the constitution of the contemporary social order and which we can see at work across a wider body of cinema. Farocki has been a restlessly inventive and productive filmmaker who has utilized a number of modes of cinema. Farocki occupies a unique and original position in the history of European film in the decades before and

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after the turn of the millennium, exhibiting, for Rodowick, a ‘restless engagement with political and formal experimentation’ that can be followed across ‘more than one hundred works in whatever genre or format short or long, that fit his political and creative purposes, including video and gallery or museum installations’.10 The filmmaker’s exploration of experimental visual essay forms has been the most prominent feature of critical discussions of his work to date, and Farocki’s complex and innovative essay films have received increasing attention over the past two decades. However, the group of observational documentaries to which Nothing Ventured belongs has received less critical scrutiny, presumably because it seems not to participate in the exploration of form to such a degree, registering as an initially quieter, less formally ambitious mode. The observational films form an unusual set in Farocki’s oeuvre. Classified by Jan Verwoert as ‘deadpan documentaries’, they proceed without any additional voiceover or commentary, and so no overtly critical voice is offered as part of the film itself, yet they rely on precise and unobtrusive observation of a given situation and illustrate the way across a body of films that those documented recognize ‘the skills of talking and acting demanded by neo-liberal capitalism and implement them in their everyday performance on the labour market’.11 Volker Pantenburg has noted how they owe a debt to ‘direct cinema’ and are under-explored by critics in comparison with the other kinds of essayistic and critical cinema that Farocki pursued, a fact that the filmmaker himself also lamented.12 In this opening section, I want to address how Nothing Ventured, Farocki’s deceptively low-key film, is pioneering in the way that it captures the financial gaze in action and thereby initiates ways of thinking about the way that finance is a form of power that has the capacity to frame reality. Nothing Ventured offers a set of financial images that addresses how capital works to allocate value to things and processes. The images in Nothing Ventured show us processes by which things come to be assigned their price. This is risky, as the German title suggests—‘nicht ohne Risiko (literally, not without risk)—and involves a consideration of both the present situation and future possibilities. The ‘technology of sighting’ deployed by finance that Farocki registers for us here is significant and fundamental, and placed in such a way as to allow the audience to look at it critically, rather than to accept it as a given. Farocki records how he came to make Nothing Ventured in 2004, during a period in which he was involved in preparing a longer project on war and image-processing. Progress was stymied as the army and the defence

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industry took weeks and months at a time to vet and then release filmed material for Farocki to work on. As a reaction to the slow pace of working on military images, he was determined instead to set up a project where progress could be seen to be achieved quickly and where he did not have any prior limits on the quantity of images at his disposal. Working with the support of a long-time production collaborator, Werner Dütsch, from the WDR public television corporation based in Cologne, Farocki planned out a ‘direct cinema film about venture capital’.13 The form chosen here is instructive: in both ‘direct cinema’ and the related ‘cinéma vérité’ styles of documentary cinema that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the filmmaking team aims to be as unobtrusive as possible when recording events happening around them, aiming to observe impartially and neutrally and thus to capture ‘realistically’ and with minimal influence or intervention situations that may not have been made visible previously to a wider public. As Erika Balsom has written recently, while this commitment to processes of observation in documentary by filmmakers proved enormously influential initially, it became subject to a widespread interrogation and critique by both documentarists and theorists over the last thirty years because of its claims to capture the ‘real’ directly and in largely unmediated form. As Farocki wrote later about the direct cinema mode, ‘Direct Cinema films are documentary story films. They don’t have a commentary, they look for events in reality that resemble a story.’14 However, Farocki’s observational documentaries differ from the canonical direct cinema documentaries made in the 1960s and 1970s in eschewing a focus on spectacular political, social or pop cultural events and documenting instead routine and mundane workplace and training environments.15 Farocki’s own practice of making both highly constructed essay films but also at the same time continuing to produce observational documentaries over much of this period went considerably against the prevailing grain.16 Farocki made his long-standing commitment to the cinéma vérité mode clear in an interview with Hito Steyerl in 2011, arguing that ‘[t]elevision documentaries have become formulaic, something that isn’t necessarily lost in the transition from television to art world. For this reason alone, I am a devotee of cinéma vérité. It doesn’t allow you to shoot in series; it doesn’t allow you to anticipate when something will happen that looks like a story.’17 Farocki described to Steyerl how he planned to make a film about a venture capital firm but encountered little immediate support from broadcasters, as images about business transactions were ‘dismissed as uninteresting’ even though such scenes were, according to

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Farocki, rare in film.18 As Farocki later commented, ‘When making films, you have to be ready to create something meaningful from a random sequence of images.’19 Farocki explained that even though in a film like Nothing Ventured it may have been predictable that venture capital negotiations would throw up dramatic scenarios, actually capturing something usable during shooting was highly contingent and took repeated attempts, the numerous previous recordings made by the team failing either because the negotiations were too dull, too technical, or constrained by issues of client confidentiality.20 Farocki’s modus operandi for making the film was to take a 4am train every day from Berlin to southern and western German cities to film as much footage as possible of negotiations between venture capital investors and representatives of a variety of projects trying to secure funding. Farocki found exactly the kind of scenario that he had imagined in an office near Munich. What was so appealing with this situation was that the application of the technical product that needed funding was relatively easy to understand. It had been taken up by two Formula One racing teams already and the negotiators on both sides were all articulate and persistent in their discussions, able to present their differing perspectives effectively and coherently in front of the camera.21 Nothing Ventured lasts just over fifty minutes and is structured into two halves of roughly equal length that are based on the two main days of negotiations between four protagonists, the second set of negotiations taking place five days after the first. The first set of talks is dominated by quite assertive and dissensual discussions about how to value the existing company, and about whether or not it is justified to treat it as a start-up, thus a riskier proposition that incurs a higher guaranteed rate of return for the investors, or whether its prior record as an engineering firm and its current assets, including a stocked warehouse, should allow it to be seen as an established company, that consequently poses less of an investment risk and so can expect a better deal from the financiers. The first set of negotiations also focuses on establishing how certain it is that the product is ready for the market or is just in laboratory development. These discussions revolve repeatedly around the use of the word ‘realistisch’—is the business plan presented, and by extension, valuation, realistic? Can the engineers really envision that the narrative that they are proposing is constitutive of a reality to come? In addition to the four main speaking protagonists, there are two other people who feature onscreen, one man who is present throughout the negotiations, silently taking notes for the

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engineering firm NCTE, and a woman who is present for part of the second set of discussions but who doesn’t participate directly in negotiations, but who discusses with one of the venture capitalists his reasoning to date, and who agrees with him and supports his rationale. As Farocki notes, ‘all four were rhetorically skilled and well able to present themselves, and each of them clearly had a different role—in their negotiations it was immediately obvious what the money was for and under which conditions it would be invested’.22 Farocki underscores the role-playing nature of the negotiation as well as the clarity from the outset about the purposes of the investment and the conditions under which it will be made. Farocki’s film disorients the viewer from its first shots. Instead of revealing the protagonists who will negotiate the business transaction at the heart of the film, as might be expected of an observational documentary, Nothing Ventured opens silently with a basic moving animated graphic, crudely built out of garishly coloured blocks, of a crane winch system. The winch lowers to pick up what appear to be heavy slabs of material, possibly concrete. Attached to the back of the crane is an axle system that allows the winch to be raised and lowered, and attached to the back of the crane operator’s cab just under the axle is a small electronic box out of which wires run to a small electronic counter, in the foreground of the screen. As the axle rotates and the winch raises a heavy slab, the needle on the counter moves from its starting left-hand position to the far-right position, registering the strain that the axle is under as it raises the slab. There is no explanatory voiceover or intertitle to allow the viewer to make sense of this sequence. The sequence is repeated as the film opens but there is no attempt to embed these images in any kind of establishing context or to clarify their role in the film. The images stand alone, and as we view them, we are challenged to make sense of what we are seeing and of its significance which we must assume subsequently as a visual representation taken from the company’s website of the patented torque monitor for which the venture capital applicants are seeking funding. This animated sequence draws attention to the process of image-making itself, given the computer-­ generated mode used here. These animated images construct initially for the film’s viewer the reality of the patent that forms the heart of what might be a major financial investment in the region of over a million Euros. This sequence is followed by a hard cut to a black screen with the film’s title in white, Nicht Ohne Risiko, translated into English as ‘nothing ventured’, but its original German form proposing a more literal translation of ‘Not Without Risk’. Already the viewer is challenged to make the

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connection across the visual information provided so far between the graphic image sequence and the suggested risk. Is there a risk of the machinery failing? What is at stake here, if so? The screen cuts abruptly again to the graphic image of the crane and winch, this time focusing closer in on the electronic counter mechanism. We watch as the needle moves to the left, and this is followed by the black screen again with the director credits for Farocki. A sound bridge of muffled noises, which it is revealed to us in the next cut is the sound of papers, books and files being placed on a table, takes us to the main mise-en-scène of the documentary. We are placed in media res with three suited white middle-aged men talking as they prepare to take part in a meeting, located in a bland office space and filmed in medium shot, a set-up that is utilized for most of the film, with scant use of cutaways to close-ups on faces or gestures. An intertitle tells us that the three are ‘representatives of NCTE’, though there is no further detail about what those initials stand for. There is a cut, again in medium shot, to a further two white, middle-aged men sitting on the other side of the table, their suit jackets already removed, and with papers spread out in front of them. Another title tells the viewer that these men are ‘representatives of Buchanan Industrial Technologies’, and again there is no further clarification about the nature of their company. It will turn out over the course of the discussions that they represent a financial organization seeking to put venture capital into suitable projects in return for shares in the company. The nature of the discussions is not explained: the opening lines of dialogue are simply, ‘Let’s get started. Time’s short’. A title explains that ‘NCTE needs capital’, followed by another that reads that ‘Buchanan Industrial Technologies provides venture capital’. The scenario is thus established for the rest of the film as the discussions will attempt to establish the terms of the investment, and just what NCTE must give up in terms of full ownership of the company in order to get hold of much needed liquidity.23 The office space is indistinctive, with all surfaces seemingly white or grey and constructed out of various plastic materials. The window at one end looks out across light industry, roads, and in the distance a railway line. At various points in the discussions there are bottles of Coke and water on the table. The solitary attempt to brighten the banal environment is a large poster that is visible over the heads and shoulders of the financiers that shows the back of a young man’s head with the superimposed rubric, ‘Investors in Capital Ideas’. We realize from the discussions that these office spaces belong to the venture capitalists from Buchanan

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Industrial Technologies. As one of the financiers opens the discussions by summarizing the situation so far regarding an investment of €750,000 structured as part capital investment and part shareholder loan, Farocki uses a slow pan to register the reactions of the other main protagonists. Lutz, the company owner looks down at his notes, Sven, his main negotiator looks intensively at the speaker, his palms together, fingers interlinked and forefingers pressed upwards and tight to his mouth in a quasi-pistol figuration that recurs throughout the discussions. The other financier, Ostowski, listens supportively. One early sticking point is about the readiness of the key technology and whether it will gain the patent rights that its developers at NCTE anticipate. English used in this discussion ‘shareholder Darlehen’; ‘proof of concept’. Lutz explains that the take up by Formula One teams is imminent, as is the crane application. At this point there is an intercut that provides a screenshot image from the NCTE Engineering website that explains that the company’s main business is to develop ‘non-contact torque measurement devices’. The website image information is superimposed on the photograph of a Formula One car, the question, in English and German of ‘how much torque?’, and German and UK-US flags, presumably linking through to language-specific pages. The website image provides the background information about the company’s products rather than an explanatory voiceover. There follows also a website map screenshot showing how to reach NCTE in Ottobrunn, an affluent municipality to the southeast of Munich and home to the German headquarters of the European aerospace Airbus corporation. A webpage screenshot of the main founders of NCTE appears next on screen, showing Lutz May as the CEO. This page cuts to the animated image sequence seen at the start of the film, this time with an explanatory voiceover that describes how torque is measured using the non-contact mechanism, using as an example the overload security system on the crane. At stake here is the measurement of the weight on the crane hook itself. The stress on the motor shaft is measured by the gauge using NCTE’s ‘invisible magnetic coding system’ using a specially developed magnetic field sensor next to the shaft. The CEO, Lutz May, is asked about how realistic it is that the mechanism will be ready by a certain point, and he nods vigorously, although when pressed he has to make concessions and bring the due date forward to satisfy the potential investors. He looks down, somewhat chastened. The camera remains focused on his face and on his reactions, even though other parties are speaking. He is also asked about his projected turnover

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(use of English: ‘break even zu erreichen’, ‘icing on the cake’). The main investor talks about the importance of Lutz actually believing in his plan, as if he doesn’t and more money is needed, they will have to negotiate a new plan. At this point Sven takes over from Lutz, setting out the need to revisit the thirty-four per cent share required by the investors. He says, bringing a sense of emotion into proceedings, that they are somewhat disappointed at the valuation of the company and to be valued as a start­up. Here the animated graphic is used again to condense his argument, using superimposed information rather than a voiceover, that NCTE is prepared to give up only twenty per cent, and not thirty-four per cent of the company for the €750,000 investment. Nothing Ventured has taken on significance recently for sociologists and anthropologists of finance. The film is used as a case study in Fabien Muniesa’s investigation into the processes of capitalization, the act of valuation of an asset from an investor’s perspective. For Muniesa and his colleagues at the Centre de l’Innovation in Paris, capitalization is a central though underexplored feature of neoliberalism and financialization. In their recent book, Capitalization: A Cultural Guide (2017), they define capitalization as ‘a pervasive form of valuation that propels a consideration of return on investment and shapes our world accordingly’.24 According to this definition, capitalization is the process by which potential investors assess their likely return on investment and build this into an overall valuation of an asset. The process involves turning things in the world into assets, distinct entities that are capable of being owned and which have an economic value.25 What is so significant, Muniesa argues, is that capitalization ‘deeply intervenes in the shaping of our world, and … propels a quite singular form of reality’.26 Capitalization fixes the value of an asset, and in doing so, brings into being a particular framing of the world. Muniesa’s study involves seeking out a series of encounters in which the value of an asset is agreed after dialogue between interested parties. The description of the encounter itself is worth noting, involving as it does for Muniesa, ‘a scenario of valuation in which things signify by virtue of their capacity to become assets in the eye of an imagined investor’.27 This idea of the ‘dramaturgy of finance’, with its particular ‘scenarios’ and roles, and with the key idea of the ‘gaze’ as a constituent part of the process by which those empowered to confer a specific financial value on a process or product, firmly anchors the financial mode of capitalization within the realm of cultural practice. As Paul Robert Gilbert has written of the Muniesa study, ‘their pragmatist enquiry involves

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tracing capitalization via the scenarios in which value is created, and the gaze that stimulates such value-creation. The result is a field guide to the terrain of capitalization that integrates anthropological work on the dramaturgy of finance with sociological attention to the technicalities of valuation’.28 But these scenarios are often hard to grasp and intangible, as, for Muniesa, they resonate with a ‘fragile specificity’ yet are fundamentally consequential for constructing a particular world.29 We can start to understand how valuation and capitalization work through the imaginaries of value negotiated between investors and entrepreneurs in specific scenarios and through attention to what Muniesa suggests is the ‘gaze’ of the investor. Capitalization, the process of ‘becoming asset’, operates under a specific temporal logic, in that value is tied not to pricing in today’s market, but in terms of the returns that are likely to be achieved at future points. Becoming an asset is therefore not synonymous, for Muniesa, with becoming a commodity: becoming an object of investment implies a temporal relation as the price includes an assessment of future performance. As future returns are uncertain and carry a degree of risk, so current value is smaller than potential future value and hence discounted.30 What happens in the act of capitalization is a discussion of the value of the asset in terms of its likely future returns and an assessment of the risks to these returns being realized: ‘In financial parlance, capitalization is about envisaging the value of something in the terms of an investment. Valuing something means assessing the expected future monetary return from investing in it. … It is also related, perhaps more saliently, to the idea of discount: the value of something today depends on the value that can be derived from it in the future. Thus, the value today is deemed smaller than the value in the future (i.e. it is discounted), because the future return is uncertain and investing today therefore requires taking a risk. In short, in order to capitalize on something, it must be considered an asset, or turned into one’.31 Muniesa’s approach is one that insists that capital should be thought of not as an object in itself, but, in the lineage of Marx and Engels, as a process, a ‘form of action, a method of control, an act of configuration, an operation’.32 In Muniesa’s words, ‘becoming an asset is indeed about being cared for, desired and enabled but also about being caught in the focal point of the financier’s intention’.33 The focal point financier’s intention here, we can extrapolate, is the process of being placed in the gaze of finance.

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The idea of process is significant here, as Muniesa argues that what is at stake is value creation, establishing, achieving, and producing value in a particular direction, and so at the heart of financial and economic dynamics and much everyday activity generally.34 Unlike the Marxist view that there can be a mismatch or distortion between the object to be valued and the valuation imposed, that is, that the object has an intrinsically ‘true’ value based on an assessment, for example, of the labour that has gone into producing it, Muniesa argues that capitalization takes place as a particular kind of performative encounter with an identifiable repertoire of features, with role-playing, scripts, and gestures playing key parts, though of prime significance are the scenario and the gaze. During the capitalization scenario, the object in which investment might be made comes under the gaze of the investor, who then establishes with the entrepreneur a consensus about its value in terms of future returns by offering statements of valuation. Muniesa and colleagues propose that we should think about capitalization as a ‘specific configuration of reality: one that requires a particular scenario (i.e. a viewpoint, a persona, an outlook, an angle, a perspective). The scenario is, in a nutshell, that of the creation of value, and the gaze is that of an investor stimulating that creation. Needless to say, both the plot of capitalization and the perspective it prompts often (perhaps always) bear the traits of fiction: characters to be impersonated, tales to be told, excuses to put forward, meanings to reclaim. Hence our pragmatist presumption: these are the technologies for the production of reality—or to be more precise, of capitalized reality.’35 In describing capitalization using the phrase ‘framing of the world’, it is already possible to sense how Farocki, whose entire filmmaking career has centered on how images give us a sense of the world, might be interested in producing images that address the world-framing, or financial image-making operations at the heart of the venture capital project. Farocki’s documentary provides images of the rhetoric and narrativity at work on the part of the investors, and also the way that the investors’ gaze is crucial for negotiating the value of the object in which investment might take place. Muniesa’s first case study in Capitalization is a reading of Nothing Ventured, as Muniesa suggests that Farocki offers the viewer an ethnographic account of what it means to turn the world of things, both things that exist and things that are imagined and envisaged, into capital, to see things from the gaze of finance. Much of Muniesa’s reading of the film is based on the exchange of dialogue in the first half, particularly when Buchanan Industrial

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Technologies make their initial investment offer of thirty-four per cent of the company in return for the €750,000 needed by NCTE.  There is a frank exchange, where NCTE’s representative, Sven, explains calmly that the company is ‘disappointed’ at the terms of the offer. NCTE proposes instead making available a twenty per cent stake for the €750,000 injection. NCTE explains that the venture capitalists are valuing the company as if it is just a start-up, with ideas and a business plan, but nothing material to hand. Instead, Sven explains, they have at their disposal already significant tangible things: principally, technology that seems innovative, in demand, and exclusive to NCTE, and a warehouse full of already existing product. This is what differentiates their company from a more risky, less proven start-up. The ensuing dialogue addresses how the investors have come to their perspective on the value of NCTE. It sets out a timetable of expectations. Much of this dialogue is concerned with how interconnected asset value and temporality are, in two main ways. First, as Muniesa points out, the investors set out a clear sense of deadlines— ‘milestones’, in Muniesa’s terminology—that are important for the project. In so doing, they establish exactly when the product will be ready for the market, and the likelihood of a challenge to the granting of the patent. The second point that Buchanan’s negotiators clarify over the course of the deliberations, is that they have to build the risk around patent disputes into their calculations, and also that the full warehouse is not hugely significant to the way that asset valuation works. From their perspective, NCTE has to understand that the process of valuation is grounded on ensuring that the investment will make money at a future point, several years down the line. This temporality is outlined in the dialogue, and gradually NCTE understands how its business is seen in the eyes of the investors, or, as we might conclude, under the gaze of capitalization. In Muniesa’s words, ‘from the investor’s point of view … [t]he value of the company today is derived from—if not literally produced by—the value of the company tomorrow’.36 The negotiating statements work to pull NCTE around from their disappointment at the initial valuation to viewing their enterprise through the gaze of the investors, and so aligning their view of the world with the investors’ framing of reality. The investors induce NCTE to understand that future uncertainty has to be priced into their investment offer. For Muniesa, ‘Farocki is certainly capturing here a moment of realization’ and as the film dialogue makes clear at this point, NCTE acknowledges the perspective of the investors: ‘that’s totally clear. That’s the venture capital game’.37 The film, then, captures this process of

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pricing and valuation. It documents the switch in understanding on the part of NCTE as the engineers accept how the pricing mechanism works in their case. Muniesa is good at picking up this transitional moment: ‘You see the transformation? There is a shift going on, a shift in sensemaking about the value of NTCE, that is, of NTCE considered as a business. It is from one position to another—from the entrepreneur (whose task is to understand what investment means) to the investor (whose task is to help the entrepreneur understand that)’.38 Importantly, and this is where the process is of interest to Farocki, this transformation in perspective, achieved by means of the investor’s gaze, is a manifestation of a form of power operative in capitalization and in framing the world from the perspective of investment capital, with its future-oriented temporality. Muniesa is here ‘pragmatic’ on the operations of power, merely appraising the investors’ gaze and the capitalization scenario as an ‘enabling engine’ for constituting ‘reality’ rather than critiquing it.39 ‘And it is, of course, a shift in power, since it determines the distribution of the flows of money that ought to be put in motion. Is this unfair?’, Muniesa asks, ‘Is the investor just playing a trick to swindle the technologist? No. The “venture capital game” is not a vile game, it seems. The whole notion of risk is there to justify it’.40 The shift that Muniesa picks up on is caused by a strong investor gaze reframing the world from a perspective that wants not to be caught out by future events and which wants to price any disruption into its present valuation. This is the art of capitalization, for Muniesa and colleagues, who argue that ‘If one wants to say that capitalization is power, as a number of scholars rightly claim [….], it is precisely in the sense that the gaze of capitalization and the scenario in which it can thrive work as an enabling engine. They prompt the capacity to constitute reality’.41 Already this assessment indicates that we should see Nothing Ventured as belonging to the broad series of films by Farocki that explore the relationship between images and power in framing the world, from his works on the use of video games in military training to his explorations of management training techniques. Muniesa describes Farocki’s film as ‘remarkable’ and introduces it by saying ‘[t]he filmmaker simply planted his camera right in the middle of a capitalization site: the premises of Buchanan Industrial Technologies GmbH, a venture capital and private equity investment firm established in Germany’.42 As I argue below, we should take care with the implication of the phrase ‘simply planted his camera’, as if there is an uncomplicated relationship between the events occurring in Munich and the finished film

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that Farocki offers to viewers. For Muniesa, Farocki’s film works in a straightforward way to register the reality of the capitalization scenario and the constitutive effect of the investor’s gaze. Farocki’s camera captures a routine encounter between finance and investment possibility, a technology, product, or process that requires backing, and which, if it achieves that financial support, will alter, however minutely, the configuration of the world. It will have become viable as an object in the world. To decide on making this investment or not confers a power on the decision makers. The investment depends on agreeing on the value of the asset, an act of capitalization, that emerges from extensive dialogue, negotiation, and communication of differing perspectives on how to make sense of the world in the present and near future. Muniesa is correct to identify how Farocki’s camera records for viewers scenes of authentic financial transactions that are rarely circulated on film. He is also astute in picking up on the rhythms and key sequences in the negotiations that allow him and colleagues to read this as an important ethnographic case study of how capitalization works. As Muniesa and colleagues note, Farocki and his team to some degree do ‘simply plant’ the camera and record the negotiations. While Nothing Ventured is highly effective in its ability to register scenes of capitalization that are unusual in film, its significance extends beyond this ‘recording’ capacity. Registering the pro-filmic event is just the first layer in what is a deceptively sophisticated film. As Volker Pantenburg has suggested, Farocki’s observational films generally follow a mode of revelation that involves several different documentary modes working at the same time: “[s]imple as they look, Farocki’s observational films are points of intersection in which different documentary agendas coalesce. They are, one could argue, the result of an encounter between at least four different documentary gestures.’43,44 For Pantenburg, these gestures might be described as the act of registering and recording the pro-filmic world, as Muniesa identifies in his assessment, but also as involving here further gestures: locating specific dramatic scenarios that necessitate no addition on the part of the filmmaker, locating scenarios in which the participants already seem to be acting out rehearsed, repeated, or trained roles, and so offer what might be termed ‘found situations’, and finally preserving the kind of ‘strangeness’ in the scenario filmed that might be found in an ethnographic documentary. While Pantenburg does not explore Nothing Ventured in his engagement with the observational documentaries, his analysis is useful in establishing a framework for considering Farocki’s

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financial images. In addition to the recording of the pro-filmic world of investment negotiations, we might also identify how the absence of a voiceover or commentary allows the specific dramatic scenario to come to the fore. Similarly, the participants, particularly the investors, undertake their roles with the benefit of substantial rehearsal and repetition. Farocki commented that ‘[a]ll four were rhetorically skilled and well able to present themselves, and each of them clearly had a different role—in their negotiations it was immediately obvious what the money was for and under which conditions it would be invested’.45 Filming participants who are trained to take on a specific role and who stage a rehearsed scenario is something that engaged Farocki across the observational films, as Pantenburg notes, citing the filmmaker’s statement: ‘We look for events that occur as if they had been staged for a film. At the same time, we have to prove that we have found something and recorded it without writing or staging it.’46 This allows the film to capture a kind of Brechtian distantiation in the performance of a real-life scenario whereby participants draw on a rehearsed dialogue and stand simultaneously within and without the roles they play in significant social and work situations.47 Farocki’s camera in Nothing Ventured, as in his other observational documentaries, discovers the elements of construction and performance that have now become part of a number of sectors of the economy. This mode allows the film to focus on the rituals and routines adopted by the individual participants while also suggesting how they are in turn quoting the lines demanded by larger social bodies, whether that might be finance in the form of venture capital in this case or other social institutions across the other observational films. Finally, Farocki’s distanced framing of these investment negotiations leaves the viewer with the sense of strangeness at encountering a world that has its own specific habits and routines and that can have such powerful effects in constituting the contemporary world. It is valuable to think of the line that runs from Farocki’s long-standing interest in and reworking of the seminal Lumière Brothers’ early short film of Workers Leaving the Factory, first shown in 1895, to Nothing Ventured. The original Lumière Brothers’ film seems straightforward, as a camera ‘simply planted’ in front of a photochemical factory’s gates captures workers exiting in the evening as they go off to their lives outside of work, released from the hours of labour. In his notes on the film, Farocki writes that it is significant not only that ‘the first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory’ but also that the images, that seem so straightforward initially, slowly reveal their significance: ‘[o]nly later, once it had

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been learned how filmic images grasp for ideas and are themselves seized by them, are we able to see in hindsight that the decisiveness of the worker’s motion represents something, that the visible movement of people is standing in for the absent and invisible movement of goods, money, and ideas circulating in the industry’.48 Farocki’s own ‘reframing’ of the original Lumière Brothers’ material as a film essay with voiceover, as a published article, and subsequently as a multiple screen gallery installation draws on the original Lumière footage to illuminate how this short piece has been revisited and reworked throughout cinema’s first hundred years. In the gallery installation, Farocki employs a set of screens to show sequences taken from the history of the cinema, and from a wider history of the moving image including advertising and industrial films, scenes of workers exiting a factory, as part of sci-fi dystopias, colonial histories, occupations, and promotional material advertising gates of particular strength and durability, playing them off against each other, against a voiceover and or captions, and against what is not visible within the frame. In her investigative essay into the relations of industrial image production and exhibition and the changing nature of labour, Hito Steyerl argues that Farocki’s installation is not only ‘on the level of content, a wonderful archaeology of the (non)representation of labour; on the level of form it points to the spilling over of the factory into the art space’.49 Farocki’s essay film shows the viewer how the scene of labourers in front of the workplace becomes what Bert Rebhandl calls a ‘primal scene’ of cinema, revealing the elision, invisibility, and exploitation of human labour that is suppressed by most mainstream narrative films.50 Jacques Rancière picks up on Farocki’s image philosophy, pointing out that Farocki ‘reminds us … that, in spite of everything, the candid eye of the camera only sees what it is ordered to see. … [T]he cinematographic window of the visible is itself, to start with, a frame that excludes. Or rather, it is the threshold between what is, and what is not, interesting to see (Workers Leaving the Factory). The first film ever made, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, all in all may well have determined, in forty-five seconds, the fate of cinema, defining the threshold of what it should or should not see. … Against the backdrop of this original parceling out of the visible and invisible, the heard and the unheard, certain sequences of history stand at the boundary between two spaces and two sets of meaning.’51 D. N. Rodowick has written about how Farocki’s films explore contemporary forces of power that, although not hidden, need to be made fully visible. Visibility does not equate to intelligibility, and we are compelled to

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watch carefully what has been made visible in order to unveil the material and ideological underpinnings of social relations.52 What is visible in the Lumière Brothers film, the general erasure of labour from the screen, is only subsequently intelligible. Similarly, with Nothing Ventured, it is only after the recorded images of the negotiations are reconsidered, that something new comes to the fore. As Farocki notes, ‘[o]nly when the film was finished did I realise that I had never seen extended financial negotiations in a documentary before’.53 The rhetoric that Farocki uses in each case of ‘only later’ thus links Nothing Ventured to Farocki’s project on Workers Leaving the Factory. As in the case of the Lumière Brothers placing the camera in front of the Lyon plant over a century earlier, a complex set of framings, of absences and presences, comes into being in Nothing Ventured, made visible by the recording camera and made intelligible by how the full film is constructed. The camera is planted this time at the heart of the operations of capitalization, capturing the world-framing capacity of finance capital, and the becoming-an-asset processes of valuation. If we reflect more closely on the structure and content of Nothing Ventured, we can see that in its 52 minutes, it includes not just the extensive dialogue of the first half that becomes the focus of Muniesa’s analysis, but it includes repeats of animated graphics, screenshots from a company website, images and instructions from a satnav system, a coda that seems to take place after the negotiations have been completed and which does nothing to change the terms of the agreement and two moments when the frame is broken by protagonists other than the main negotiators, yet who are not edited out of the final version but included. At one point, a new colleague from the venture capital firm enters the room, takes a seat, and looks directly at the camera, something that the other speakers have skillfully managed to avoid as they have delivered their negotiating statements. Towards the end of the film, over lunch, and in an interesting parallel to Farocki’s Lumière Brothers’ film, a restaurant worker enters the frame to take an order and to advise on the menu. If we assume that Farocki’s finished edit of Nothing Ventured is carefully composed, then each frame contributes to the film. What do these apparent minor ruptures, breaks and interruptions, add to the dialogue of negotiations? What does the film in its entirety bring? The post-negotiation five-minute coda to the film is fascinating, as the deal has been agreed, a clear and unanimous set of legally binding decisions have been taken, achieved patiently through hours of precise statements about valuation, the outcome is welcomed as favourable by both parties, and the participants have set aside their roles as negotiators. As

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Sven says in an exchange immediately after the negotiations in the Italian restaurant where they have reserved a lunch table, the actual deal could really have taken only five minutes to set up, and the seven hours in total of discussions have not been essential. However, their positions at the lunch reveal some uncertainty about their relationship with each other. The opening shot of the coda, after another close-up of the ‘Reserved’ card on their table, shows them isolated from the rest of quite a noisy lunchtime restaurant in a corner of the dining room. The three representatives, without suit jackets, of NCTE are first filmed all looking over their right shoulders in unison past the camera as they try to make out what to order from a menu presumably positioned on a wall behind the camera. The two financiers, still in jackets, are shown in the next shot, also peering across the camera’s line. Sven explains from the menu that one item is a pizza with ‘arugula and shaved parmesan’. The younger financier explains out of frame how his company weren’t intent on getting as many shares as possible, just on securing the right equity for their investment. They were pleased to see the conviction on the part of NCTE to go ahead with the deal, as well as reassured that there was a kind of backstop that would allow them to invest more if the company needed further liquidity. Lutz also agrees that the solution proposed was a positive one. It is at this point that Sven raises the question of what happens when you talk for seven hours over two days, and in the end something comes out of it—that might have only taken five minutes. He states that it is amazing how much negotiation is needed to reach a solution that could have been reached in five minutes. Do you have to beat around the bush for an hour? Do you have to play tactics and strategize? Do you have to keep explaining what the other guy knows? At this point the camera pans to the younger financier, with his hands clasped in front of him (and to his female colleague), who are unsure of how to react—is this a criticism? Do you have to listen better to the other people? Sven says that that can’t be it, as they did all that. Lutz says you don’t know either and Sven agrees. Sven says that he has figured out for himself that there are many negotiations where ‘I have to talk for four hours or there’s no agreement, although I’m the type to get to the point in ten minutes and then say, let’s go and eat’. Does Sven believe that a role has been forced on him, against his better nature? The financiers are silent here, listening patiently and eating breadsticks. Farocki’s decision to include the coda in the finished edit suggests that Sven might not be correct here. The long hours of discussing the value of

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NCTE have been necessary after all to setting out how the world of finance capital values an asset and so frames the world from an investor’s perspective. This process of valuation is the heart of Farocki’s film. Sven’s suggestion that all parties might have agreed after ten minutes on the value of NCTE and the terms of the financial deal cut against the point that Farocki’s film makes for us, namely that the process of financial valuation is not self-evident and a given, that it has to be worked through and the entrepreneurs seeking investment have to be shown to see their own project—their skills, stock, potential for profit—through the eyes of venture capital, through the financial gaze. This financial gaze is both embodied and machinic, drawing as it does at various stages of the process on the rehearsed performances of key trained workers and on specific technologies. Unlike other Farocki films however, the relationship between the human and the machinic in Nothing Ventured is weighted to show the importance in finance still of the human. Muniesa’s reading of the film stresses the centrality of the capitalization scenario and the human gaze, an approach that suggests that the calculative behaviour at the heart of finance is embodied and not yet undertaken by disembodied economic agents, as Paul Gilbert has noted.54 Instead, as Gilbert underlines, Muniesa’s approach argues that attention needs to be given to anthropologies of finance that address the material and distributed nature of valuation, consisting of the embodiedness of participants, in their working environments and in their engagements with a variety of calculative technologies, from double-entry bookkeeping to their work at the all-pervasive Bloomberg terminal rather than to the virtual, electronic, algorithmic nature of contemporary financial activity.55 The prioritization of the human can be seen when we consider the nature of the opening animated sequence of the torque sensor. This animation, an explanatory sequence embedded on the NCTE website, provides an albeit basic illustration of what the company claims is innovative torque sensor product. It represents in media form the prototype of the sensor for which investment is sought. Yet if we follow Muniesa’s argument about how the venture capitalist gaze values the world of things and potential things which come under its scrutiny, the torque sensor can be said to not fully exist yet. It needs to become an asset, and to be the object of the desired process of capitalization. In this way, the animated image and the dialogue are both image processes of what the torque sensor might be, might become, if the world is framed in a certain way according to decisions taken on financial investment.

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Perhaps surprisingly given the filmmaker’s enduring interest into technologies of control and of world-imaging, apart from the insets of screen grabs and sequences from the company’s website, Farocki’s film does not engage with the kinds of financial technologies, broadly speaking, that help to constitute the world picture of the venture capitalists. Instead, the director concentrates on recording the processes of negotiation, looking at the spaces used by the protagonists and the order of their statements. The only aspect of ‘technology’ that does feature throughout is the documentation of the deal, the business plan and the calculations and notes made long-hand, without recourse to digital technology, laptops, or phones. This focus on dialogue and paper is broken only once, at the very start of the second half of the film, when Farocki cuts from the discussions to a view through the windscreen of a car as it proceeds to a lunch appointment at the Italian restaurant. The windscreen view affords a glimpse of construction sites and a light industrial zone near the venture capital office, but the focus of the discussion in the car at that point is on the value or not of satnav navigation systems in cars. The camera offers a close-up of the map on the satnav and allows us to hear the instructions to turn, while the driver talks about having lived much of his life in the area and yet that he is still learning new routes by way of the satnav technology. ‘We’ve had to accept that the machines are good, unfortunately’, he exclaims, though ‘it also makes mistakes’. These images, along with the animated graphics of the torque technology and the other screen grabs from the company’s website, are the only points in the film where Farocki allows the viewer a sense that the world being framed for us in the act of valuation is also in part machinic and computational. The financial images he prioritizes in this film are of the human performance of valuation, rather than of the interaction of financiers with financial technologies. As Rodowick, discussing other works by the filmmaker, suggests, ‘Farocki understood that power is a relation of force that is not hidden yet also not visible. Visibility does not equal intelligibility or understanding, and documenting [….] does not alone unveil the material and ideological structures that sustain the process’.56 With Nothing Ventured, he registers images that show the power of the financial gaze to frame a world. The negotiations at the heart of the film are not exactly invisible or hidden from us, but Farocki’s film brings them to a specific visibility, as the Lumière Brothers’ original film brings the workforce and questions of capital, of presence and absence to visibility.

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As Rodowick remarks, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s essay on the painter, Francis Bacon, the artist never begins with an empty space, a blank canvas. This ‘apparently empty space is already clogged with clichés that fog our visual field and determine our modalities of seeing’.57 Turning to Farocki in this regard, Rodowick argues that the ‘question that drives all his work, is how to give form and expression to a critical Image out of the vast flux of reproduced images and images of reproduction that one encounters in daily life. This is a question of style and the organization of forms and, above all, a question of construction. But it is also a matter of presenting the technologies of sighting in which we are all envisioned and produced as images and, in turn, to invent new techniques for the critical interrogation of images’.58 Although Rodowick does not discuss Nothing Ventured in his essay on Farocki, his point can also stand here. What Farocki has done is to step back from the perhaps banal and superficial surface representations in mainstream cinema, advertising, and other screen media that show us a world which is already one in which things, processes, and people seem to have come under a financial gaze, to be capitalized, to be treated as assets, to be commodified. Instead, he has found images that help us to see what came before, the human negotiation, composed of utterances, statements, encounters, gestures, and body positioning, the financial performativity, that enables this capitalized world to come into being. We will return to the relationship between film and financial performativity in Chap. 6. Farocki’s financial images in Nothing Ventured provide an index, a capturing of a negotiation, the process, as Muniesa has praised, of ‘simply’ placing the camera before discussions. But Farocki does something more, something beyond merely archiving a particular negotiation about the level and price of investment. The images in Nothing Ventured show us processes by which things come to be assigned their price. This is risky—‘nicht ohne Risiko (literally, not without risk)—and involves a consideration of both the present situation and future possibilities. The ‘technology of sighting’ deployed by finance that Farocki gives us here is significant and fundamental, and placed in such a way as to allow the audience to look at it critically, rather than to accept it as a given. It is this financialized ‘technology of sighting’ that will be at the heart of Christian Petzold’s incredible film, Yella, discussed in the next chapter, on Film and Financial Time. In this film and following his mentor’s frequent acts of recomposing his prior works, he resituates Farocki’s scenario within a fictional world. Muniesa’s scenario is replayed in Christian Petzold’s financial ghost story, Yella (2007), on which Farocki worked as

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a script advisor. Petzold’s film reshoots in its second half a series of negotiations between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs that borrows the mise-en-scène and much of the dialogue from Farocki’s documentary. Here, though, the eponymous Yella is at the centre of the narrative, someone making their way, initially highly successfully, in the ‘venture capital game’. She quickly masters the repertoire of gestures, bluffs, the recourse to business English, and the ability to read the balance sheet needed to afford her credibility and dominance around the negotiating table to ‘enable’ her version of reality to take precedence. As Petzold’s film shows brilliantly, there is a human cost to this ‘enabling scenario’, and in this encounter the capitalization scenario is made intelligible for us as ‘a vile game’ that really does cost lives. The questions of gender and power that Petzold explores regarding capitalization throw light on what it might mean to consider the financial gaze as almost invariably aligned with masculine power. The challenges of constituting a female financial gaze are the focus of the next section.

Constituting the Female Financial Gaze: Equity (Meera Menon Broad Street Pictures, 2016) The mise-en-scène of Farocki’s Nothing Ventured sets out, for most of its 50 minutes of running time, a bare and almost nondescript space. Five white men, in early middle-age, sit in white shirt sleeves and ties around a bare table on which are papers, biscuits, bottles of Coke. A large window opens out onto a light industrial area and distant roads, an empty landscape from which we occasionally hear a passing train. The financial negotiations are carried out against a background of minimal décor, with a single advertising poster interrupting the white wall space of the office, on which we see the back of a younger person’s head sporting a particularly severe short haircut, around which is set out in a large font the Buchanan company slogan, ‘Investing in Capital Ideas’. These protagonists are to a great degree decontextualized, dehistoricized, and depersonalized. We see very little about their educational and career formation as engineers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and financiers, respectively, or about their habitus beyond the confines of this bare white negotiating cell. For much of the film, Farocki’s camera tracks the looks and verbal arguments of these male protagonists, who manage to carry out their negotiations as if the camera is not present. They are able to carry out their

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discussions about how to value the world without being distracted by the camera’s framing or movement, a notable feat for non-actors in such a confined office space. When they are asked to give interviews directly to camera, they manage to achieve this task in a relaxed and professional way, at ease with the way the camera registers their world-framing activities. The only sound we encounter is diegetic and consists of the voices of the male protagonists, augmented occasionally by the male voiceover that accompanies the computerized animated inserts that explain the torque technology. In the second half of the film, though, a new protagonist can just be made out at the edge of the frame. As the camera pans across the office as the two parties reconvene for the second set of discussions, at the far right hand of the frame, on the side of the table occupied by the Buchanan team, a new, female, colleague comes momentarily into shot, her head fragmented and then immediately left behind out of shot as the camera pans quickly to the left to catch the arrival at the meeting of the main Buchanan negotiator, Herr Olshowy. The main activity for those assembled is now not to reach a valuation, but to pore over the legal contract underpinning their capitalization. The female colleague’s head comes into view, just, a minute later, still only partially, fragmented at the edge of the frame. As the male negotiators on both sides of the table look variously pleased and satisfied, congratulating themselves and each other about the clever and nuanced deal reached, the female colleague, still unspeaking, is caught directly in frame, and unlike her male colleagues, she is captured staring, distracted by the camera, and breaking the frame that separates out those behind the camera from those registered on film, carrying out their daily activities. The breaking of the frame, the staring out at Farocki’s camera, happens in an instant, silently, and then the camera refocuses on the male speakers whose comments are captured for the next six minutes of footage, with the woman neither appearing in the frame nor speaking, but still an unseen, unexplained, and somehow excessive presence in this process of world-framing carried out by her male counterparts. A few minutes later, during a pause in the final negotiations, her male colleague at Buchanan brings her up to speed on the rationale behind the deal. She looks less relaxed on camera than the men, uncomfortable and self-­ conscious. She is not invited to make her views known, but her first words, uttered to confirm the conclusions of her colleague, are about the initial proposed valuation sought by NCTE, ‘es ist nicht realistisch’ (It’s not realistic). She is able to add, in the short time she is the focus of the

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camera’s attention before the resumption of the full meeting, that she finds the agreed deal in order, a fair solution. The unnamed female colleague is not seen again on screen and is not in attendance in the pizza restaurant at the film’s conclusion, when they celebrate the end of the negotiations and the signing of the deal. What are we to make of the breaking of the frame by this unnamed, and mostly silent, female colleague in a room full of confident and powerful men, whose task it is to agree on how to set value? What are we to make of her statement, ‘it’s not realistic’, about the way that the male engineer and lawyer from NCTE have attempted to value their ideas? This fragment of Farocki’s film is puzzling and easy to overlook, but it does invite the viewer into refocusing on what is now, with the additional presence of the near-silent female witness, only visible momentarily and in fragmented form, an inescapedly gendered process of valuation. It opens up, briefly but significantly, a question about how we might explore the gendered nature of the way that finance looks at the world. The image of the silent woman looking out of the frame directly at the viewer has, of course, a long history in visual representation. Farocki’s breaking of the frame here brings to mind the scenario that Foucault outlines in his discussion of the way that Manet’s paintings in the nineteenth century contribute to an overturning of traditional values in modern art, as discussed in Chap. 2. The breaking of the frame that is left in the final edit by Farocki calls into question the possibility that what we are watching is not just the ‘simple’ capture of an encounter between entrepreneur and investor that Muniesa describes in such acute detail. It also brings into play the question of our gaze and so of our role as helping to constitute the systems of world-framing and capitalization that we witness in this specific scenario. What is the beyond-the-frame, the ‘much larger system’, that the capitalization encounter helps to constitute, and what questions does it ask of us? Described in reviews as the ‘She-Wolves of Wolf Street’, Meera Menon’s 2016 Wall Street drama Equity is notable for its refusal of the aesthetic strategies of masculine excess constructed by Martin Scorsese in his mainstream financial hit. Menon’s film works to explore the possibility of a female financial gaze from its opening shots, a layered composition with the central banker Naomi (Anna Gunn) staring at a tv embedded in her bathroom mirror where a female analyst is commenting on a recent successful IPO. Equity works instead by investigating the significance of intimacy, privacy, reputation, and trust in building working relationships in

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the financial sector and refuses the spectacle of excess used in The Wolf of Wall Street. If we look at the film Equity (Menon 2016) from a perspective informed by feminist film philosophy, we may find an attempt to disrupt the financial gaze that Farocki establishes in Nothing Ventured. According to Leslie Felperin, the film had made industry headlines even before its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016 as it was picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classic. It had been pitched as ‘the first female-driven Wall Street movie’, a strapline that accurately describes the narrative and framing, but is also true for its production history.59 The major production driver for the film was Broad Street Pictures, an independent production company set up in 2014 to ‘produce films with strong women’ by actors Alysia Reiner (best known for her role in Orange is the New Black) and Sarah Megan Thomas (Backwards), both of whom took key acting roles in Equity, as the investigative anti-corruption attorney Sam and as the ambitious banker Erin, respectively. The producers commissioned the Nora Ephron Prize-winning Indian-American filmmaker Meera Menon as director, and the playwright and screenplay writer Amy Fox to write the screenplay, which itself drew on substantial interviews and fieldwork research with financial sector workers, who also invested in the project. Anna Gunn, who had recently achieved a major break out success with her double Emmy-winning performance as Skyler White in Breaking Bad was cast as the lead, Naomi Bishop. At the time of writing, little has been written in academic circles about Equity, despite its wide release and generally positive critical reviews. It barely registers a footnote in the otherwise comprehensive collection, Global Finance on Screen (Routledge 2018), edited by Constantin Parvulescu. As Felperin notes, however, in one of the only reviews currently accessible, ‘perhaps the most winning thing about Equity is that it’s not some kind of worthy empowerment drama about sisters doing it for themselves. Instead, although sexism in the workplace is definitely addressed, it plays more like an old-school noir with the sexes casually reversed, featuring a deeply flawed protagonist (Breaking Bad’s Anna Gunn), a seductive but duplicitous homme fatale (James Purefoy) and others navigating their way through a miasma of an ethically shady urban world’.60 The interweaving of questions of ethics, finance, gender and power are certainly to the fore in Equity, but I want to open out on these interwoven strands to propose that through its thematization of the financial sector and the agency of women looking, the film responds to the

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kinds of questions that Farocki initiates about the power to look and frame the world of the financial sector, extending his investigation more precisely into an exploration of gender. Felperin is correct to draw attention to the noir-like elements of the plotting, with repeated reference at the level of dialogue and characterization to issues of trust, deception and to the leverage made by various sides of the capacity of rumour to cause major fluctuations in the pricing of shares, fluctuations that can make or break both investors’ fortunes and workers’ careers in the financial sector. But it is at the level of its framing and construction of its financial images that Equity deserves more critical attention and reflection. In the discussion above about Farocki’s film Nothing Ventured, what is really at stake in his image-making is the way that rhetoric and the capacity to narrate convincing images of the worth of a company come to seal that company’s valuation, a process I refer to above as the way that the financial gaze comes to frame the world and which the moving image as a media form is well-placed to register. Farocki’s film looks at the moment at which an emerging company invites in venture capital in order to grow or in order to itself invest in equipment or production processes that it does not, at that time, have the capacity to finance either from within its own resources or from a conventional bank. The financial gaze, for Farocki, can be identified at the moment of valuation or capitalization (to borrow Muniesa’s reading) as the prospective lenders cast their eyes on the potential of the company to grow successfully and to achieve expected profits. The financial processes that are at the heart of Equity’s narrative take place at a different point in the financial and investment cycle, at the point at which a company undergoes its Initial Public Offering (IPO). This is the point at which a privately held company floats, or launches itself to the investing public, initially made up typically of major institutional investors. A company may have undergone the processes of valuation depicted in Farocki’s film in order to grow—and this is certainly the case for the social media technology company Cachet in Equity, as Anna Gunn’s character Naomi Bishop reminds us that she has helped to raise venture capital for Cachet on a number of occasions in the past to enable it to reach its present size—but the IPO is the point at which the wider financial sector, in the form of a negotiation between the issuing company, its banking underwriters (here led by Gunn), and institutional investors agree on the price per share in the IPO. This process involves a similar set of negotiations and valuations as those depicted by Farocki, but on a larger scale and not behind closed doors. Although the

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IPO price per share may be negotiated by a limited number of parties, its share price is an anticipation of what subsequent exposure to the full view of the market may tell us about the company’s perceived true value. As the company is traded publicly, its share price (and hence overall estimated value) may rise or fall depending on investor confidence. If Nothing Ventured opens our eyes to the way that the gaze of the financial sector operates to frame a world, Equity opens out this framing to a consideration of the agentic gaze of its female protagonists and the way that they frame their understanding both of the world around them and of their subjectivities as female workers in the financial sector. In this consideration, the use of the dynamics of looking and of presentation are of major significance. Equity is a film that is accomplished in establishing ways of looking in its framing devices. That Equity takes the dynamics of the financial gaze seriously can be seen from its arresting opening sequence, which runs for two minutes before the credits information. This opening set of images establishes a very different set of framings, voices, and indeed screens from those accompanying the situation we encountered in Farocki’s documentary. Menon’s film opens with a black screen accompanied by the sound of a babble of male voices clapping and celebrating, talking at and over each other, a kind of barely distinguishable discourse that can be readily linked to a collective and unspecific masculine celebration of business success, and in this way closely related to some of the moments of group self-celebration in Nothing Ventured. This cacophonous acoustic blurring, with accompanying non-diegetic discordant electronic musical notes, remains with the screen still black at the level of sound, never coalescing into a formed visual narrative image. The male group sound is gradually replaced by the calm voice of an individual woman financial analyst, authoritative and measured in comparison to the excited crowd of male investors, who sums up the success of what we now learn is a major Initial Public Offering. Acoustically, then, the voice of the authoritative woman is used by the film to ground our experience of an IPO, to analyse and to explain complex information relating to a financial event to its audience. The woman presenter’s voice is given a strong measure of authority and is linked to the ability to provide an appropriate and accurate analysis of a fast-moving situation. The screen, still black at this point, wipes to the right to reveal a complicated set of framings, as layered in its use of the visual image as the opening seconds have been in their use of sound. The camera is sited over the shoulder of a female character, who we later learn is our main

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protagonist, Naomi Bishop (Anna Gunn), as she looks in at a large bathroom mirror that also has a tv screen embedded in it. Naomi is in the process of dressing for an important meeting, of ensuring a successful transition from the intimate domestic space of her apartment to the location of her subsequent professional meeting. The two screens that face Naomi as she works to present her professional self complicate both the act of looking and the act of framing the world. The mirror gives us back an exact but reversed image of what we set in front of it; the tv screen embedded within its space offers narratives, framings, and perspectives on the wider world. The embedded screen then allows us literally to see Naomi in the act of framing the outside world via the tv screen and how that framing is closely connected to her self-understanding (her reflection) and to her subjectivity as a professional corporate executive. The tv screen, we realize looking over Naomi’s shoulder, features the report to camera by the female analyst that we’ve been listening to on the soundtrack. She is commenting on the successful but possibly undervalued IPO for a company called Dynacorps, giving visual images to the commentary that we’ve been hearing. The reporter is dressed in a striking green dress of a similar colour tone to the one that is being worn by the watching Naomi, and both women sport similar long blonde hairstyles. We learn later in the dialogue that ‘green is the colour of money’, and the use of symbolic green colours on clothes, on objects, as gift-wrapping, in locations, and even directly as a medium in the form of a green ink pen reinforces the way that money and the pursuit of it is at the heart of the way that the film’s various networks are formed and dispersed. Naomi is, to an extent, able with this framing of the embedded screen to both watch herself as herself, in the direct reflection, and also to see herself as other, in the similarly dressed and styled financial reporter, who is able to offer a verdict on the financial world. This is arguably the most complex image construction in the whole film, as Naomi sees her mirrored reflection of dressing to be ready for the day’s meetings, and also is witness to another woman fulfilling a similar role, as a successful woman in the financial world, but also, and crucially, authorized to provide a commentary on the success or otherwise of investment decisions. The analyst is able to provide what the watching world assumes to be an authoritative and truthful perception or framing of financial movements. Still before the credit sequence, these images cut via a sound bridge that utilizes the voice of an unseen and critical male asking ‘So what happened to Dynacorps?’ to what we must assume before seeing it is the

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subsequent meeting, for which Naomi was dressing. This unsettling and, at the moment that we hear it, disembodied question (that acts because of the invisibility of the interlocutor both like an internal self-admonishing voice and the universal sound of the critical male, undermining Naomi’s authority) is rebuffed by Naomi, who points out that this is a single negative IPO after she has led successfully on nine over the past several years. The man, it becomes clear from the ensuing dialogue, is a wealthy and powerful tech entrepreneur who is about to consider a huge IPO for his company, possibly to the value of $1 billion, to be underwritten by Naomi’s bank. Her retort about her competence seems to put him in his place, as the camera cuts to frame her face in medium shot, filling the frame, as she speaks slowly and authoritatively, softly lit against a darkened background. These framings and exchanges all occur before the credits that, in turn, illustrate the extent to which this production is women-led. The difference here from Farocki’s Nothing Ventured is notable in terms of visual framing, time onscreen, and allowing a key female protagonist an authoritative voice, as is the next five minutes of footage, which has women speaking to women about business at a mentoring meeting for ‘Women in the City’, with male faces only intermittently onscreen and in the background, and onscreen not a male voice heard. The opening ten minutes or so of Equity, then, sets out the rules of the game of the main narrative, that as viewers we should perceive the financial world that Farocki begins to chart in his documentary as one that has to be attentive to the power dynamics of authorization—who may speak and how, to whom—who has the power to look at whom and when, and also at the dynamics of feminine intersubjectivity that underpin the narrative and plotting of the film, as to an unusually high degree in a film set on Wall Street, women are seen and heard talking to women, primarily about money, self-determination, and the power to contribute to the financial framing of the world. Equity’s exploration of female agency in the financial sector is explored largely through its images, but also in a key scene at the beginning of the film, in a monologue that, although taking place at a meeting and so embedded in the diegesis, is filmed for a large part straight to camera in medium shot, as if Naomi is breaking the frame to talk to us as viewers just as much as she is addressing the small audience at a celebratory reception for women in the financial and related sectors, on mentoring women in Wall Street. As in the opening sequence with its complex framings of women as subjects and as objects of the look, in this sequence Naomi encounters other already successful women working in related positions

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but is also the object of the gaze of several younger and less established women in the audience who look at her as a possible role model and guide. Naomi’s speech here is foregrounded, as noted above, by framing in on her delivery, as she answers a question about her subjectivity with the words, ‘I like money’. In the context of the films about the financial sector explored in this study, and by extension in our wider culture, this is an arresting and radical statement for a woman to be allowed to say by the director, where women onscreen in finance films who are shown to be motivated by money are generally shown compromising or selling themselves in some way for financial reward. What does it mean for a woman onscreen to be able to say this, in this way, to explain that she is a financier, a banker, or a financial lawyer? Naomi expands on this statement by playing with our expectations of what it might mean for a woman to say, ‘I like money’. She runs through possible ways of interpreting that statement that are either based on the intellectual challenges of dealing with complex mathematical formulae, with the art of negotiation, or that might see liking money as a means to a philanthropic end: ‘I like numbers, I like negotiating, I love a challenge, turning a no into a yes, but I really do like money, I like knowing that I have it, I grew up in a house where there was never enough, I was raised by a single mom with four kids, I took my first job on Wall Street so I could put my little brothers through college, but I’m not going to sit here and tell you I only do what I do to take care of other people because it is ok to do it for ourselves, for how it makes us feel, secure, yeah, powerful, absolutely, I’m so glad that it’s finally acceptable for women to talk about ambition openly, but don’t let money be a dirty word, we can like that too.’ She ends by articulating that what it means for her to say ‘I like money’ is fundamentally about being able to possess a high degree of agentic power in the world and for its affective value in the way that it helps her to feel secure and to be able to participate in the framing of that world in the way shown in Nothing Ventured. That this speech is crucial to the way that the filmmakers intend us to understand the thinking of its key characters is made clear as, at the end of the film when Sam decides that she will move from her less well-remunerated job in the public sector to a role as a banker, she draws on Naomi’s words in her job interview to set out why money is of fundamental importance to her. This ‘I like money’ speech suggests that Naomi’s position might permit an initial reading from the perspective of French social philosopher Frédéric Lordon’s neo-Spinozist position. Lordon reverses chronology to read Marx through Spinoza, particularly by constructing a framework that

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identifies as crucial to the workings of contemporary capital the harnessing of the conatus, a term used by Spinoza that we might understand as the striving to achieve and maintain one’s essence, of the employee. Lordon’s argument focuses on the passions that induce employees to seek out joyful affects in the workplace, proposing that capital posits an alignment between institutional drives to maximize profit, generally undertaken through extracting more effectively value from the workforce, and the desires of workers for the joyous affects that they often come to perceive in entrepreneurial and corporate projects. But of central importance to the achievement of desire, the foundation in the securing of joyful affects, is money, typically in the form of the employee’s wage transferred by the employing company. As Lordon notes, using Spinoza’s own phrasing, money is the ‘“digest of everything” without whose “accompanying idea as cause no joy exists”. Money is the subjective expression, in the form of desire, of the monetary social relation.’61 In Lordon’s argument, capitalism works on desire and its key mechanism in the harnessing of desire is through ‘the gateway of money’, the starting point of the way that we reproduce ourselves as subjects under capitalist economic relations. For Lordon, ‘money accedes to the top of the hierarchy of objects of desire-­ interest; it is the one object on which the pursuit of all other desires depends—including non-material ones’.62 In this way, capital maximizes its potential to grow through aligning itself with the self-realization of the subject, where, as Vishmidt and Gilligan have argued using Lordon, we are produced as subjects who ‘identify with capital immanently, rather than ideologically’.63 As we shall see below, with the way that The Wolf of Wall Street works with desire and affect, even delirium, the alignment between capital and desire is central to understanding the constitution of subjectivity in contemporary finance. If Lordon’s work proposes a way of thinking through the general alignment of subjective desire in the workplace with the relentless demand for financial growth, it is valuable to think about the way that Equity also makes demands on the viewer to consider the specifically gendered inflections of the subject in the financial sector. In attempting to open up the implications of the financial images produced for us by Equity, I want to consider the framework underpinning recent readings by Kate Ince of contemporary films made by independent women directors in European cinema. In her book, The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema (2017), Ince uses a number of philosophers to frame a discussion of (ethical and embodied) female subjectivity

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and the ethics of the visible in recent cinema made by women, drawing prominently on a synthesis of Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking on making visible or disclosing together with what Ince terms ‘Foucault’s critical and anti-universalist ethics’.64 In her important chapter on ‘Look’, a title that embraces ambiguously both the noun and its verbal forms, Ince recaps the significance of theories of the gaze, of the power to look (at), in histories of theorizing the operations of the image. As Ince argues, much discussion of the gaze in relation to women on and off screen was generated by the work of Christian Metz, and particularly by Laura Mulvey, in her canonical and much debated essay on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, originally published in 1975. Mulvey’s essay, which set up a theory of the dynamics of looking based on the psychoanalytic approaches of Freud and Lacan, stressed the voyeuristic nature of cinematic framing across Hollywood cinema, and criticized heavily the ubiquity of a dominant and objectifying masculine act of looking, referred to frequently as the operations of the ‘male gaze’. Ince’s film readings move away from this model as Ince is interested above all in what she identifies as the increasing frequency of ‘active, agentic looking on the part of female characters’.65 For Ince, as for many other feminist, queer, and postcolonial film theorists, Mulvey’s original and deliberately polemical binary divisions in her theory of cinematic looking—active/passive, sadistic/masochistic, gazing subject/object of the gaze—often prove too rigid and unhelpful in explaining the dynamics of looking in cinema, and, in Ince’s account, rest in any case on a misreading of Freud, whose argument uses these binary terms in a more ambiguous way which does not divide them out into attributes and qualities possessed of separate agents, male and female. Ince sums up her distance from Mulvey along these lines: ‘If Freud is read on his own terms, then ocular desire must always function in a more ambivalent manner then this: a “controlling” male gaze is undermined by a passive element that allows its exerciser to be looked at even as he stares lustfully at the object of his desire, and a woman is every bit as capable as a man of looking actively, even if the power relations of her (cinematic or actual) situation hinder rather than assist her self-expression.’66 What Equity stresses in its opening scene and throughout its narrative is the agentic nature of women looking. This takes a number of forms, from Naomi’s contemplation of the value of shares in Cachet and the best way to convince the entrepreneur and his advisers of the appropriateness of her perception of the company’s valuation, to Sam’s dogged appraisal of photographs, files, surveillance recordings, and interviews with

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interested parties as she seeks to identify possible collusion and corruption involving the disclosure of insider information by Michael to his associates in a hedge fund that wants to manipulate the share price of Cachet. Erin, to whom we are introduced as Naomi’s hard-working, ambitious, though exploited and overlooked assistant, becomes a pivotal figure in the dynamics of looking and disclosure, as her decision to reveal crucial inside information to Michael, who hints that he will help her stalled career, about Cachet’s vulnerability to being hacked allows the hedge fund to circulate a rumour that forces Cachet’s share price to drop by a third on the day it is publicly launched. Erin, whose pregnancy is revealed at the start of the film, becomes so driven to succeed in her professional environment that she puts herself in a situation where the predatory tech CEO makes an uninvited and discomforting pass at her. Her increasing inability to look in a fully ethical manner is underlined when, at an ultrasound scanning that produces an image of her healthy foetus, she turns away from the image, to the dismay of her male partner, in order to focus on taking a business call about the Cachet launch. Erin’s internalization of being professionally overlooked leads to her, in turn, overlooking what might be perceived as a key moment in her life as an expectant mother as she turns away from the image of her unborn child. The film seems to support a natalist agenda in this, and this is reinforced through underscoring both Naomi’s childless status and her professional drive and occasional prickliness in meetings, juxtaposed with Sam’s ethical commitments as a comparatively poorly paid public attorney and her loving but occasionally chaotic parenting of six-­ year-­old twins with her same-sex partner. The trope of being able to look, to disclose, and to reveal as linked ways of framing the world predominates across both professional and domestic narrative situations. All three women are given a strong degree of agency and their decisions are framed as ones that have clear ethical consequences. Most, though significantly not all, of the principal male protagonists are shown to be greedy, duplicitous, weak, and manipulative, but the film resists the temptation to suggest that its female characters are powerless to act ethically given these strong patriarchal networks. Naomi is determined not only to act ethically in her professional role, but also and principally to persuade those that she encounters to understand and to share her framing of the world and of her valuations. For her, this framing is based on strong empirical evidence and on her ability to make a persuasive case. Disclosing or revealing the way the world ought to be seen at the right time is crucial to her status as a high-standing financial professional. This

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is underscored several times during the film. On her initial pitch to Cachet for the contract to be the main banking underwriter for the IPO, she begins her presentation with a literal act of unveiling to seize the attention of her, mostly male, audience. She has her assistant paint grape juice across a sheet of paper on a whiteboard on which she has written, in a vinegar-­ based invisible ink, the company’s name, Cachet. This act of disclosure is accompanied by her recounting of her childhood, when she learned such primitive techniques of privacy. Naomi is also dismayed at not being considered for further promotion, based on her immediate boss’s argument that the Dynacorps IPO was turbulent because ‘the perception is that you rubbed some people the wrong way’. In recounting this exchange to her partner, Michael, she picks up on the difficulty that she has with being criticized on the basis of ‘perception’: ‘Use numbers against me, or facts. But perception?’ It is significant that Naomi is wedded to the idea that working in the investment banking sector should be grounded in facts and numbers, and not be subject to competing rumours or perceptions of how the world might be seen. Naomi’s self-understanding is that of someone on a path to being able to shape the world around her, ‘I was supposed to be a motherfucking rainmaker’, she screams at Michael later in the film, after his betrayal of Naomi with his passing of insider information. She confronts Michael with the phrase, ‘It’s all just a big game to you’, to which he replies, ‘What else is there?’. The mise-en-scène of Michael’s apartment reinforces this perspective on the world. Unlike the dominant blue and green hues and soft-lit interiors, Michael’s white walls are embellished with a collection of what appear to African tribal masks, indicative both of his status as an extractive capitalist and his propensity for duplicity. Naomi’s developed sense for looking in the right direction is underscored when her gaze alights on the smallest gestures and eye movement of a worker at Cachet, a disaffected woman coder who is undervalued by the CEO who dismisses her warnings about the company’s vulnerability to hacking. It is this employee who later proves so important in the damaging rumours that are deliberately circulated to create the perception that Cachet’s network is insecure. The dynamics of looking are further carried through at the level of the mise-en-scène. As we see Naomi post-credits in her domestic space, her only companion is a pet fish in an aquarium, something that she also alludes to in a later dialogue. The mise-en-scène of the fish tank in Naomi’s house, the opaque cube that allows all outside to look in and provides no hiding place from a constant gaze, is replicated through

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the repeated use of glass bricks, cubes, and screens in Naomi’s work place and at the bars she visits for meetings, together with the use of soft lighting, and the dominance of marine blues and sea greens, large blue-toned or aquatic-based abstract art pictures on the wall, predominance of windows and glass cubes filmed in ceilings, as well as the containment of characters within glass frames and cubes. Her office space is similar, luxurious, calming, composed. The centrality of the act of looking, or more specifically, what it means for a woman to look, to the film is further underlined in a layered image that is set at Sam’s Brooklyn apartment. As viewers, we see a laptop screen with information on it relating to the hedge fund firm Titanite that Sam is investigating which is juxtaposed with a child’s voice off-screen asking ‘who is watching us tonight?’, a reference to the childminding provision that Sam has to put into place as both she and her partner have commitments that evening that will take them away from their domestic space. This juxtaposition reminds us that so often women in the paid labour force, and not just in the professional sector in which Sam works, have to work with difficult and competing demands for their energy, attention, and care. Moreover, as viewers we are invited to share the perspective, through a point-of-view shot, of Sam as an agentic woman looking at discourse and images pertaining to the financial sector. This alignment with Sam’s point of view is, of course, very different from Farocki’s images of the female employee captured by the camera looking back at us, whom we see as an agentic woman with the power to look, but whose act of looking remains separated from our own. In the contemporary European films that Kate Ince works with in her study referenced above, the act of women looking is foregrounded across a range of narrative types and in different locations, where visibility, surveillance, and perception are key tropes on which the plots turn. Ince proposes that in these recent women-made films, the act of looking is rarely to be understood in a hierarchical, unequal sense of the gaze as a process of objectification and suppression. Instead, Ince unfolds an approach to women looking that follows the existential philosophical conceptualization of looking taken from Simone de Beauvoir in her early book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, first published in 1948. For Ince, Beauvoir’s work here is significant in the way that it makes frequent use of the French term, dévoilement, literally ‘unveiling’, to describe the subject’s relationship to the world. As Ince argues, Beauvoir is here adapting a Heideggerian concept used originally to describe the disclosure of the world by the

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process or condition of Being. Ince is drawn to Beauvoir’s account of dévoilement as it opens up an approach to subjectivity that places the subject as one whose relationship to the world is one characterized by a desire or impulse for disclosure, unveiling, or making visible. This is not necessarily identical with the conscious and voluntary act of looking at something intently, but alludes instead to a sense of looking as the impulse to disclose being, to intervene in the world. In the films that Ince uses to tease out the implications of this concept, the act of disclosure by their key women protagonists often has clear ethical implications, where disclosure or unveiling has a protective or benevolent rather than objectifying or judgemental intent.67 Ince’s use of dévoilement as a critical concept that can help us understand the processes of looking and of the look in contemporary cinema is suggestive for how we might think about the complex set of visibilities and disclosures negotiated by Naomi and, to a lesser degree, Sam and Erin in Equity. In this latter film, a case can be made for considering the central event of the film, the IPO, as itself a significant and unique act of unveiling. The IPO is, of course, the bringing of a company to the public gaze to be valued, a financial unveiling. The success of the IPO depends on the degree to which Naomi can effectively set a value for the share price that will neither underprice (leaving money on the table) nor overprice (with an immediate market pricing adjustment that might shake confidence in the company) the stock issued. Naomi’s professional status rests, then, on an ability to effectively and successfully, using all the market information at her disposal, make a convincing case for a specific valuation, and by extension, a specific framing of the world. Naomi has to persuade the market to align itself with her gaze, with her estimation of value. Naomi’s professional judgement is, at the end of the film, called into question by a combination of (false) perceptions, malicious rumours, and insider trading, all of which help to construct what we might think of as an unsubstantiated and distorted framing. Equity is a cleverly constructed film that, in its own terms, sets out the politics of the gaze in the financial sector from a feminist perspective. This is a politics that goes beyond conventional processes of identifying the everyday sexism and misogyny that we encounter regularly in finance sector films and allows us to see how the capacity to frame the world, to make visible or unveil—in Beauvoir’s terms of dévoilement—the world before us is itself a process that is underpinned by a forceful gendered dynamics of power that Farocki’s treatment in Nothing Ventured only hints at in passing.

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Complicity and Delusion: The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, Red Granite Pictures, 2013) Equity was typically marketed as a female-centred response to Martin Scorsese’s major production from three years earlier, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), with Rolling Stone’s review even suggesting that we might view the Anna Gunn vehicle as articulating the story of ‘the she-wolf of Wall Street’ (Travers 2016). The two films are utterly different in tone and form, but where the relationship between them is apparent is in their surface similarities, as if the latter film has deliberately reworked small details in order to construct a totally different take on money: like Equity, The Wolf of Wall Street pivots on a major IPO, there is a key scene involving a goldfish and a goldfish bowl, Jordan Belfort’s wife has been renamed Naomi in the film and the Belforts’ superyacht The Naomi is the scene of a spectacular sequence that marks out the boundaries of Belfort’s excessive lifestyle and will to shape the world around his vision. Where the films overlap most interestingly, however, is in the nature of the financial gaze that they both offer to film audiences. As we have seen above, Equity raises the question of the extent to which a woman in the financial sector can enframe the world according to her own gaze in the way that Farocki outlines for us from a male perspective in Nothing Ventured. What Scorsese attempts to deliver with The Wolf of Wall Street is a spectacular, desperate rendering of the consequences of reducing the world to its money form, to framing people and events solely from a financialized perspective. In the second half of January 2014, Scorsese’s Oscar hopeful, The Wolf of Wall Street arrived in the UK with huge posters promoting the film on the side of London buses and full-page adverts everywhere, not least in the finance pages of business papers. The enthusiasm for Scorsese’s film amongst bankers in the City of London was harnessed by their employers with reports that major banks in London had booked entire cinemas to show The Wolf of Wall Street to their workers and to invited guests. Despite the film being reviewed as another narrative in a long line depicting the moral failings of the financial sector, it was also received enthusiastically by City workers keen to witness the tale of excess in the rise and fall of Jordan Belfort. This viewing situation echoes a scene in Boiler Room (Younger, 2000), where the traders gather after hours in front of a large TV set in a private house to watch the original Wall Street (Stone), participating in the screening by competing to quote lengthy lines and scenes to each other. The Wolf of Wall Street constructs the stockbroker Jordan Belfort as a

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master of the spectacle, at the centre of numerous scenes of sexual excess, profanity, conspicuous consumption and drug use as he acquires a fortune through fraudulent trading practices. Yet the film also plays with our ingrained viewing habits as, for example, a car changes colour to better suit the unfolding of the narrative or with the staircase changing the number of steps in the Belfort quaalude scene. At times, Scorsese suggests that we see Belfort not just the way that he wants us to, but in the way that we want to. In this way, we are party to the construction of the financial gaze. And yet, towards the end of the film, Scorsese seems to allow a moment where Belfort is caught in the gaze of the Asian FBI agent on the subway, a gesture towards the ending of US dominance in global finance and the rise of Asian countries as economic superpowers. Although The Wolf of Wall Street charts the financial sector in Manhattan after the 1987 crash and into the 1990s, Scorsese intended his biopic adaptation of Jordan Belfort’s best-selling 2007 memoir to be viewed as addressing indirectly the 2008 financial crisis, a response borne out of frustration with the unregulated nature of the financial sector and the intertwining in the United States of American narratives of self-­ transformation with financial malpractice and fraud.68 Towards the end of Equity, as Sam is considering the move that many colleagues in the public attorney’s office have made before her, to the private sector in order to triple their salary, she is urged by her ageing male colleague, one of the very few to have declined to make that career jump, first to go on to a trading floor: ‘you breathe it in, the hunger of it, that pure American desire’. It is this ‘pure American desire’ for money at all costs that Scorsese addresses in his Jordan Belfort biopic. The intertwining of advancement in a financial career with a specific version of the American Dream is underlined by Scorsese when Belfort makes a set piece rallying speech to urge his workforce to increase their sales volumes when he declares: ‘This is Ellis Island here, people. I don’t care who you are or where you’re from, whether your relatives came over on the fucking Mayflower or an inner tube from Haiti, this right here is the land of opportunity. Stratton Oakmont is America’.69 This is another piece of Belfort deception, an inclusivity with regards to people’s origins and status. In his earlier scams, before establishing his methods on a larger and lucrative scale with the branding of his ‘pump-and-dump’ selling scheme as the establishment-­ sounding ‘Stratton Oakmont’, he has already talked about his practice of selling ‘garbage to garbagemen’ and to making a fortune out of exploiting plumbers and postmen. However, and in line with Scorsese’s strategy to

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show us the world as Belfort constructs it for us, the demographic of the exploited working class is kept out of the frame until Belfort is behind bars, as we shall see below. Scorsese’s mode of narration is to construct a version of Belfort’s rise and fall that takes place primarily from Belfort’s perspective, a ‘tunnel-­ vision worldview’, as Cook describes it, outlined by a master salesman and, as we subsequently learn, fraudster and FBI informer. This directorial decision means that the camera rarely gives the audience much in the way of obvious critical perspective or alternative take on Belfort’s career until late in the film, where, on the deck of The Naomi and strategically filmed with a US Stars and Stripes flag behind Agent Denham, Belfort tries to offer financial inducements to the FBI agent. As Cook has argued, ‘[i]n so aggressively mirroring the impenetrably insular worldview of its protagonist, Wolf is not, as some have charged, neglecting the grim reality of Belfort’s depredations so much as illustrating the willful remove from reality that allowed him to perpetrate, and perpetuate, his scams’.70 The opening of the film draws attention to its particular formal strategies. After animated moving image logos for Universal and for Red Granite Pictures, the major production companies behind the film, the images transition into what appears to be another animated logo, in this case for a company called Stratton Oakmont Inc. featuring a lion roaring and so not dissimilar to the Leo the Lion mascot used in Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer productions. This opens out onto what transpires to be a corporate advertisement, not for a production company involved in the making of this film, but as part of the diegesis itself, for a Wall Street brokerage company that, a reassuring voiceover announces, promises calm, sound financial guidance in a dangerous financial environment populated by bulls and bears. The lion reappears as a computer-modelled composite, striding confidently through a busy but disciplined office of financial professionals. ‘Stratton Oakmont: stability, integrity, pride’ intones the voiceover at the end of the corporate commercial, before a sound bridge of cheering and rowdy brokers provides a countdown to a corporate social event at Stratton Oakmont, the infamous ‘dwarf tossing’ episode, wherein we are introduced to Jordan Belfort (Leonardo Di Caprio) as he throws down a financial challenge to those assembled: ‘Twenty-five grand to the first cocksucker to nail a bullseye’. If we accept that the opening sequence of a film tends to set out for the audience its conventions and rules for interpretation, then immediately, with the dramatic juxtaposition between the tone and claims to stability and integrity of the Stratton Oakmont commercial and

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the collective and frenzied ‘dwarf tossing’ activity and the vulgar language and money-oriented exclamation of the chief protagonist, Scorsese has put before us two wildly divergent truth claims about the financial sector. We might immediately assume that the first one is a mediated form, a corporate video aimed at selling a service and therefore a second order of narration within the main diegesis, whereas the second is the main diegesis itself, an unmediated (i.e. not a media form embedded within the diegesis) and raw account of life as a Stratton Oakmont broker. This assumption, then, would ask us to trust fully the images that Scorsese composes to narrate Belfort’s spectacular ascent on Wall Street. Yet the very next set of images, accompanied by Belfort’s voiceover introducing himself, already ask us to place in question the veracity of the film’s diegetic account. After a still showing a young teenaged Belfort with his father at what appears to be the Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park, the camera cuts to Belfort speeding in a red Ferrari down the highway, overtaking numerous slower cars, as his voiceover recounts how much he was earning at the age of twenty-five. The voiceover then corrects the images we’re seeing, pointing out that his Ferrari was white, ‘like Don Johnson’s in Miami Vice, not red’, as the car on screen changes colour to the preferred white. We are barely two minutes into a three-hour film, and already Scorsese has alerted us to the unstable nature of the propositions offered within the diegesis and to the unreliable nature of the mediated, fictional images that we are being shown, and also, and importantly, to the way that the images that we see may be subject to Belfort’s acquiescence and approval. Scorsese’s opening wants to suggest that to a large degree, Belfort is the author of what we will see and hear, rather than the auteur film director, Scorsese, and that as viewers, we must realize that what we are being offered is substantially the Jordan Belfort story the way Jordan Belfort wants us to view it. Once we have comprehended that there may be a gap between a more critically distant take on Belfort’s career and Belfort’s own self-mythologizing, then we are alerted to the way that the financial images we encounter for much of the film correspond to Belfort’s retrospective storytelling about his ascent in the financial sector. We must assume from the beginning that this will be potentially as specious, partial, and instrumentalized as the Stratton Oakmont commercial shown to begin the film. Also outlined at the beginning of the film is the centrality of money to Belfort’s world picture. For Belfort, money becomes the only true believable phenomenon in a world characterized by fraud, deception, betrayal, and fakery. Belfort tells us as much in two early scenes, the first illustrating

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his narcotic habits, and the second at a business lunch on his first day at Wall Street. Where this dynamic of Belfort’s gaze as world-constituting, with no space for an outside, unravels comes in a complex sequence of images towards the very end of the film. This conjoined series of shots is linked together, as is so often the case in Scorsese’s work, by a carefully selected accompanying song on the soundtrack. Here, the sequence is marked out and linked as a coherent whole through the connective use of a particular track, Simon and Garfunkel’s famous exploration of the decline of modest and heroic American values in their track, Mrs Robinson, familiar to cinema audiences as well as to music fans from its use in the soundtrack to The Graduate (Mike Nicholls, 1967). However, Scorsese goes not with Simon and Garfunkel’s canonical original recording, but with the reworking of the song from 1992 by the US indie guitar band, The Lemonheads. The sequence begins with the opening drums on the song synchronized to an image of fingers tapping the ‘delete’ button on a computer keyboard, as the camera pans up to reveal Belfort’s closest associate, Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) determinedly getting rid of incriminating material at the Stratton Oakmont offices, just as the FBI marches in to secure evidence and to make arrests. The use of the song suggests that the film is refocusing, away from Jordan Belfort’s hyperbolic self-mythologizing and wildly materialistic and criminal world view to the restrained belief in the law embodied by the FBI agent, Denham (Kyle Chandler). The mobile and panning camera used in this scene to capture the wide spaces of the main Stratton Oakmont trading floor and the work of FBI-jacketed law enforcers physically restraining and arresting employees comes back to rest frequently on a close up of the face of Denham as he surveys the situation. We are aligned, now, with his gaze, as Belfort’s world splinters. A voiceover is introduced as Belfort explains how he betrayed everyone at the company in order to reduce his own prison sentence, ‘a three-year hell-hole in Nevada’. The voiceover is accompanied by a POV shot presumably from Belfort’s perspective as the camera is walked slowly through the ranks of the crowd of adoring and closely packed Stratton Oakmont staff, all parting in turn to let him through, smiling and nodding their heads in genuflection at his presence. The film cuts, with Mrs Robinson still playing softly in the background, to a court scene as Jordan Belfort hears the terms of his custodial sentence, reduced for his ‘cooperation’, which involves betraying everyone else and returning a proportion of the fraudulently obtained fortune that he has amassed. As he leaves the courtroom there is

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an exchange of gazes with Agent Denham, and then a sharp cut to the newspaper headline confirming Belfort’s prison sentence that, it is revealed, is being read by the FBI agent on his journey home on the New  York subway. As the famous line from the song about ‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio’ plays, the FBI agent’s face is framed frontally in close up, as if to confirm that for Scorsese, he is the centre of an alternative, and now more elusive, tradition of modest American masculinity referred to in the lyric. The camera occupies an unusual position then, directly behind the head of Denham as he regards the other passengers in his shabby public transport carriage, particularly an elderly East Asian heritage couple sitting directly opposite him. The agent stares pensively around him, as the camera cuts to a different form of transport, the bus taking Belfort to his prison sentence. But Belfort’s prison stay, he gives us to understand, is not as terrifying as he had envisaged, because he ‘is rich in a place where everything is for sale’. The camera shows him leisurely playing tennis as the music fades out before a sound bridge connects us to the film’s final sequence, Belfort’s life after prison and post-Wall Street, from which he is now barred, as a motivational speaker selling the art of selling, where we see him introduced onstage in New Zealand by the host, a role played by the real-life Jordan Belfort. It’s clear from the above description that the use of Mrs Robinson helps us to register that Scorsese is linking the work of the uncorruptible and determined FBI agent back to a nostalgia for a different age of American heroism, one not based on fakery, something that the world set out according to Belfort and his peers is celebrated as ‘fugazi’, and the art of selling. But the precise meaning of the gaze constructed when the agent looks around the subway carriage is less obvious. Adam Cook argues that, in a film that largely abandons ‘critical distance for a full-scale immersion in Belfort’s fast-track lifestyle’, the subway sequence shows the delayed breaking through of the ordinary world kept offscreen for much of the film with the passengers constituting ‘tired, real people in a real setting, a sobering contrast with Belfort’s bubble world’.71 This is credible, though Cook’s account fails to mention how Scorsese’s ending points significantly to questions of ethnicity too. Apart from Chester Ming, played by Kenneth Choi, of Korean heritage, and the Belforts’ African-American housekeeper, Belfort’s financial world has been almost exclusively populated by white characters. In the final sequences, as Belfort’s ‘bubble world’ is exploded, so the camera is interested regularly in non-white faces, in the passengers on the subway and, in the final scene, in the ethnically diverse

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audience gathered to hear Belfort speak in a modest hotel conference room in Auckland, in his new role as a sales motivator. Although the final sequence in Auckland opens with the real-life Belfort playing the host hyping up the appearance of the film’s Jordan Belfort for a motivational selling seminar, appearing on a stage and in a spotlight as if to reinforce Belfort’s glamorous status, the camera pulls back to reveal a quite modest audience in an ordinary hotel meeting room thousands of miles away from the urban glamour of Manhattan. Belfort’s appearance is also modest, as he looks tired and ageing in an open neck shirt, and his motivational pitch routine is tired, reviving an earlier challenge to his colleagues to ‘sell me this pen’. The final shot cuts away from Belfort to show his audience, a grouping of perhaps two hundred, all aspiring to learn about selling and diverse in terms of age, gender, and ethnicity. In the final shot of the film, the camera holds a section of the audience in a wide long shot as they look intensely at the figure of Belfort in front of them. This shot matches one we are familiar with from its regular use by Scorsese in meetings at Stratton Oakmont, as Belfort motivates his brokers to make a huge volume of sales. The shot in Auckland is in a much lower key. As Suzanne Ferris argues, this ending, with this familiar shot set-up, is ‘desparing, rather than celebratory’.72 Belfort has not been restored to a position of power and preeminence. He is trying to hustle for much smaller stakes, to sell books and programmes featuring his sales techniques to a diffident and ordinary crowd, rather than to the potential ‘masters of the universe’ in his Stratton Oakmont offices. Should we take from this that the desire to sell has become ingrained in a much more diverse range of people, reaching to the other side of the world now from its centre in this film on Wall Street? Is Scorsese showing us that the American dream of getting rich has been exported? Or perhaps the ending suggests that the financial economy itself has become so globalized that its former centre in Manhattan is no longer of such overriding significance. The rise of Asia and of the Asia Pacific economies in the twenty-first century means that Belfort’s own largely white American financial gaze has been decentred from without. Yet, beyond this, the final shot is of this diverse audience staring back towards, but not directly at, the camera. The film ends by registering the gaze of all of those, regardless of background, who are intent on learning how to become financialized. Although in terms of the diegesis, they are looking at the figure of Jordan Belfort over the viewer’s left shoulder offscreen, they also constitute the combined gaze of the ordinary people, the equivalents of the passengers viewed on the New York subway by Agent Denham,

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who have become part of the financial sector as financialization has, in the argument of Randy Martin, made its inroads into daily life all over the world. Organized in seated rows and staring silently and intently at a narrative unfolding on a stage, Belfort’s listeners also might stand in for the film audience of The Wolf of Wall Street, both from the financial sector who screened the film enthusiastically, as we shall see Chap. 5, and the broader audience beyond, fascinated by the spectacle of selling and by the prospect of accessing enormous wealth. For Ferriss, this is a film that engages its audience ‘in the same processes of looking and judging as their characters’, its ending ‘self-reflexively alert[s] audiences to their complicity—and potential gullibility’.73 If this is so, then we must examine how our often enthusiastic reception of financial images in such films and particularly of the way that the financial sector wants us to view and to value the world helps to perpetuate the kind of exploitation, extraction and fraud that Belfort participates in. In her analysis of Margin Call (J.  C. Chandor, Myriad Pictures, 2011), Miriam Meissner has drawn attention to the way that those involved in the financial sector understand this shared commitment to financialization as ‘a form of commonly accepted delusion’.74 For Meissner, according to this logic, ‘the question of what happens to the supposedly “real” people becomes obsolete, insofar as no one can actually claim the “realness” of not having partaken in the delusion of financialization’.75 The closed-off world that Farocki’s images introduced, of the way that finance values the world around us, has become something much larger, in which our very acts of looking also seem implicated. To conclude, Muniesa argued recently that in order to grasp the parameters of processes of finance, we need to be able to both articulate finance utilizing the vernaculars that finance has produced in its history to date, but we also need to be aware of the Foucauldian potentialities of articulating finance from the standpoint of other discourses. Muniesa finishes his book with the conclusion that our duty could be, instead of committing to capitalization, to ‘imagine a different set up, an alternative gaze in an alternative scenario for an alternative becoming, a possibility for this work to be of value without becoming an asset’.76 Farocki and his successors working with framings of finance, with alternative gazes and imaginary scenarios, may offer us ways of imaging value that shape our world beyond the asset condition.

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Notes 1. Emily Rosamond (2017), ‘It Sees (Notes Towards a Cultural History of Financial Vision’, MoneyLab Reader 2, ‘It Sees (Notes Towards a Cultural History of Financial Vision’, In Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink and Patricia de Vries, eds. Moneylab Reader Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, p. 102. 2. Emily Rosamond (2017), ‘It Sees (Notes Towards a Cultural History of Financial Vision’, MoneyLab Reader 2, ‘It Sees (Notes Towards a Cultural History of Financial Vision’, In Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink and Patricia de Vries, eds. Moneylab Reader Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, p. 102. 3. Emily Rosamond (2017), ‘It Sees (Notes Towards a Cultural History of Financial Vision’, MoneyLab Reader 2, ‘It Sees (Notes Towards a Cultural History of Financial Vision’, In Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink and Patricia de Vries, eds. Moneylab Reader Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, p. 104. 4. Emily Rosamond (2017), ‘It Sees (Notes Towards a Cultural History of Financial Vision’, MoneyLab Reader 2, ‘It Sees (Notes Towards a Cultural History of Financial Vision’, In Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink and Patricia de Vries, eds. Moneylab Reader Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. 5. Emily Rosamond (2017), ‘It Sees (Notes Towards a Cultural History of Financial Vision’, MoneyLab Reader 2, ‘It Sees (Notes Towards a Cultural History of Financial Vision’, In Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink and Patricia de Vries, eds. Moneylab Reader Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, p. 108. 6. Adamson’s essay explores some classic variants of psychoanalytic film theory before moving towards a Deleuze-inspired understanding of the ‘brain as the screen’. The shifting relationship between cinematic perception and money is addressed by aligning film theoretical changes in the 1970s and after with the departure of the dollar from the gold standard, as ‘[t]he human eye that had acted as the gold standard of cinematic structure gives way to an entirely different mode of interaction between cinema and life’. See Morgan M. Adamson (2013), ‘The Closure of the “Gold Window”: From “Camera-Eye to “Brain-Screen”’, Film Philosophy, 17 (1), p. 248. 7. Thomas Elsaesser (2005), ‘Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist’. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry. U Chicago Press Journals. 11, p. 63. 8. Volker Pantenburg (2016), ‘Now that’s Brecht at last!’: Harun Farocki’s Observational Films. In Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (eds) Documentary

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Across Disciplines. Cambridge and Berlin: MIT Press and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, p. 144. 9. D.  N. Rodowick (2017), What Philosophy Wants From Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 84. 10. D.  N. Rodowick (2017), What Philosophy Wants From Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 76-77. 11. Jan Verwoert (2005), ‘Production Pattern Associations: On the Work of Harun Farocki’. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry. U Chicago Press Journals. 11, p. 74. 12. Volker Pantenburg (2015), Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, p. 10. 13. Harun Farocki (2009b), ‘Written Trailers’, in Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (eds) Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? London: Koenig Books, p. 235. Several critics have noted how Nothing Ventured should be regarded as partaking in the tradition of direct cinema. See, for example, Antje Ehemann and Kodwo Eshun who single out the attitudes of ‘agnostic fascination’ and attentiveness in Farocki’s approach to filming the negotiations. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (2009), ‘A to Z of HF or: 26 Introductions to HF’, in Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (eds) Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? London: Koenig Books, pp. 206-207. 14. Harun Farocki (2014) ‘Zweimal Leacock’ in Alexander Horwath (ed.) Das Sichtbare Kino. Fünfzig Jahre Filmmuseum: Texte.Bilder. Dokumente. Vienna: Österreiches Filmmuseum/Synema, pp.  304-306. Cited in Pantenburg (2016), p. 153. 15. See Volker Pantenburg (2016), ‘Now that’s Brecht at last!’: Harun Farocki’s Observational Films. In Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (eds) Documentary Across Disciplines. Cambridge and Berlin: MIT Press and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, p. 153. 16. Erika Balsom (2017), ‘The Reality-Based Community’. E-flux journal, 83, June. Last accessed 20 July 2022. 17. Harun Farocki in Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl (2011), ‘Cahier# 2: A Magical Imitation of Reality’. Kaleidoscope, Milan, p. 8. 18. Harun Farocki in Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl (2011), ‘Cahier# 2: A Magical Imitation of Reality’. Kaleidoscope, Milan, pp. 9–10. 19. Harun Farocki in Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl (2011), ‘Cahier# 2: A Magical Imitation of Reality’. Kaleidoscope, Milan, p. 8. 20. Harun Farocki in Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl (2011), ‘Cahier# 2: A Magical Imitation of Reality’. Kaleidoscope, Milan, pp. 20–21. 21. Harun Farocki (2009), ‘Written Trailers’, in Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (eds) Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?. London: Koenig Books, p. 235.

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22. Harun Farocki (2009), ‘Written Trailers’, in Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (eds) Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, London: Koenig Books, p. 235. 23. At the time of writing, NCTE (motto: test.act.win) is still an ongoing and, it seems, successful company making torque and other stress sensor technology, based in Unterhaching and with a prestigious client base. The company’s website is now available in German, English, and Mandarin. Private Equity records suggest that by 2007, Buchanan had taken a 51% stake in NCTE. 24. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 11. 25. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 129. 26. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p.13. 27. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, cover blurb. 28. Paul Robert Gilbert (2017), ‘The anthropology of financial intent’. Finance and Society, 3(1), p. 91. 29. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 7. Muniesa? 30. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 12. 31. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 11. 32. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 14. 33. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 130. 34. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 128. 35. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, pp. 20-21. 36. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 31. 37. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 32. 38. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines. 39. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 132.

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40. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 32. 41. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 132. 42. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 27. 43. Pantenburg (2016) Volker Pantenburg (2016), ‘Now that’s Brecht at last!’: Harun Farocki’s Observational Films. In Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (eds) Documentary Across Disciplines. Cambridge and Berlin: MIT Press and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, pp. 157–158. 44. Pantenburg (2016) Volker Pantenburg (2016), ‘Now that’s Brecht at last!’: Harun Farocki’s Observational Films. In Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (eds) Documentary Across Disciplines. Cambridge and Berlin: MIT Press and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, p. 156. 45. Harun Farocki (2009), ‘Written Trailers’, in Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (eds) Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, London: Koenig Books, p. 235. 46. Volker Pantenburg (2016), ‘Now that’s Brecht at last!’: Harun Farocki’s Observational Films. In Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (eds) Documentary Across Disciplines. Cambridge and Berlin: MIT Press and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, pp.  153–154. The citation within comes from HF, ‘Über das Dokumentarische’, page number not given. 47. Pantenburg identifies a Brechtian mode of this kind at work in several of Farocki’s observational films, see particularly Volker Pantenburg (2016), ‘Now that’s Brecht at last!’: Harun Farocki’s Observational Films. In Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (eds) Documentary Across Disciplines. Cambridge and Berlin: MIT Press and Haus der Kulturen der Weltpp. 155–158. 48. Quoted in Bert Rebhandl (2009), ‘Enemy at the Gate: Harun Farocki’s Work on the Industrial Disputes of Film History’. In Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (eds) Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, London: Koenig Books, p. 124. 49. Hito Steyerl (2012), The Wretched of the Screen, Berlin: Sternberg Press, p. 66. 50. Bert Rebhandl (2009), ‘Enemy at the Gate: Harun Farocki’s Work on the Industrial Disputes of Film History’. In Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (eds) Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, London: Koenig Books, p. 126. 51. Jacques Rancière (2015), Figures of History. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, pp. 31–32. 52. D.  N. Rodowick (2017), What Philosophy Wants From Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 78.

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53. Harun Farocki (2009), ‘Written Trailers’, in Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (eds) Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, London: Koenig Books, p. 235. 54. Paul Robert Gilbert (2017), ‘The anthropology of financial intent’. Finance and Society, 3:1, p. 91. 55. See Christopher Wood, Alasdair King, Ruth Catlow, Brett Scott (2016), ‘Terminal value: Building the alternative Bloomberg’, Finance and Society, 2016, 2(2), pp. 138–50. 56. D.  N. Rodowick (2017), What Philosophy Wants From Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 78. 57. D.  N. Rodowick (2017), What Philosophy Wants From Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 84. 58. D.  N. Rodowick (2017), What Philosophy Wants From Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 84. 59. Leslie Felperin (2016) ‘Equity – Sundance Review’. Hollywood Reporter 27 January, last accessed 3 July 2019. 60. Leslie Felperin (2016) ‘Equity – Sundance Review’. Hollywood Reporter 27 January, last accessed 3 July 2019. 61. Frédéric Lordon (2014), Willing Slaves of Capital, translated by Gabriel Ash, London and New York: Verso Books, p. 44. 62. Frédéric Lordon (2014), Willing Slaves of Capital, translated by Gabriel Ash, London and New York: Verso Books, p. 47. 63. Melanie Gilligan and Marina Vishmidt (2015), “The Property-less Sensorium”: Following the Subject in Crisis Times’. The South Atlantic Quarterly. 114: 3, July, p. 616, last accessed 12 April 2019. 64. Kate Ince (2017), The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema. Bloomsbury: Thinking Cinema, p. 174 65. Kate Ince (2017), The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema. Bloomsbury: Thinking Cinema, p. 73. 66. Kate Ince (2017), The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema. Bloomsbury: Thinking Cinema, p. 75. 67. Kate Ince (2017), The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema. Bloomsbury: Thinking Cinema, pp. 90-91. 68. Suzanne Ferriss (2018), ‘Refashioning the Modern American Dream: the Great Gatsby, the Wolf of Wall Street, and American Hustle’. The Journal of American Culture 41: 2, p. 161. 69. Suzanne Ferriss (2018), ‘Refashioning the Modern American Dream: the Great Gatsby, the Wolf of Wall Street, and American Hustle’. The Journal of American Culture 41: 2, p.163. 70. Adam Cook, Adam. ND. ‘Fake Empire: Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street’. Cinema Scope, last accessed 10 July 2019.

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71. Adam Cook, Adam. ND. ‘Fake Empire: Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street’. Cinema Scope, last accessed 10 July 2019. 72. Suzanne Ferriss (2018), ‘Refashioning the Modern American Dream: the Great Gatsby, the Wolf of Wall Street, and American Hustle’. The Journal of American Culture 41: 2, p. 165. 73. Suzanne Ferriss (2018), ‘Refashioning the Modern American Dream: the Great Gatsby, the Wolf of Wall Street, and American Hustle’. The Journal of American Culture 41: 2, p. 172. 74. Miriam Meissner (2017), Narrating the Global Financial Crisis: Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth, Palgrave Macmillan: Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, p. 214. 75. Miriam Meissner (2017), Narrating the Global Financial Crisis: Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth, Palgrave Macmillan: Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, p. 214. 76. Fabian Muniesa et  al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 134.

Bibliography Adamson, Morgan M. 2013. The Closure of the “Gold Window”: From “Camera-­ Eye” to “Brain-Screen”. Film Philosophy 17 (1): 245–264. Balsom, Erika. 2017. The Reality-Based Community. E-flux Journal 83, June. Last Accessed July 2022. ———. 2019. Moving Bodies: Captured Life in the Late Works of Harun Farocki. Journal of Visual Culture 18 (3): 358–377. Bauer, Marko. 2014. Pump and Dump: The Wolf of Wall Street. Senses of Cinema 72, October. Last Accessed 3 July 2019. Bourriaud, Nicholas. 2011. Michel Foucault: Manet and the Birth of the Viewer. In Manet and the Object of Painting, ed. Michel Foucault, 7–19. London: Tate Publishing. Burgoyne, Robert. 2018. Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Wall Street Film. In Global Finance On Screen: From Wall Street to Side Street, ed. Constantin Parvulescu, 42–55. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Burnham, Clint. 2016. Fredric Jameson and the Wolf of Wall Street (Film Theory in Practice). Bloomsbury Academic. Cook, Adam. ND. Fake Empire: Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Cinema Scope. Last Accessed 10 July 2019. Ehmann, Antje, and Kodwo Eshun. 2009. A to Z of HF or: 26 Introductions to HF. In Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? ed. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, 204–217. London: Koenig Books.

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Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, U Chicago Press Journals. 11: 55–64. Farocki, Harun. 2009a. How to Live in the FRG. In Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? ed. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, 163–165. London: Koenig Books. (Original, 1990). ———. 2009b. Written Trailers. In Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? ed. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, 220–241. London: Koenig Books. ———. 2015. On the Documentary. Eflux Journal 65, May 12. http:// supercommunity.e-­flux.com/texts/on-­the-­documentary/. Last Accessed 21 July 2019. Farocki, Harun, and Hito Steyerl. 2011. Cahier# 2: A Magical Imitation of Reality, 1–30. Milan: Kaleidoscope Press. Felperin, Leslie. 2016. Equity – Sundance Review. Hollywood Reporter 27 January. Last Accessed 3 July 2019. Ferriss, Suzanne. 2018. Refashioning the Modern American Dream: The Great Gatsby, the Wolf of Wall Street, and American Hustle. The Journal of American Culture 41 (2): 153–175. Foucault, Michel. 2011. Manet and the Object of Painting. London: Tate Publishing. Gilbert, Paul Robert. 2017. The anthropology of financial intent. Finance and Society 3 (1): 91–98. Gilligan, Melanie, and Marina Vishmidt. 2015. “The Property-less Sensorium”: Following the Subject in Crisis Times’. The South Atlantic Quarterly. 114(3), July: 611–628. Last Accessed 12 April 2019. Ince, Kate. 2017. The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema. Bloomsbury: Thinking Cinema. Lordon, Frédéric. 2014. Willing Slaves of Capital. Trans. Gabriel Ash, London and New York: Verso Books. Meissner, Miriam. 2017. Narrating the Global Financial Crisis: Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. Muniesa, Fabian, et  al. 2017. Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines. Pantenburg, Volker. 2015. Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 2016. ‘Now that’s Brecht at last!’: Harun Farocki’s Observational Films. In Documentary Across Disciplines, ed. Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, 142–163. Cambridge and Berlin: MIT Press and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Parvulescu, Constantin, ed. 2018. Global Finance On Screen: From Wall Street to Side Street. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

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Pepe, Michael. 2016. Eating, Sleeping and Watching Movies in the Shadow of What They Do: The Representation of Capitalism in Post 2008 Popular Films. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. Last Accessed 10 July 2019. Rancière, Jacques. 2015. Figures of History. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity. Rebhandl, Bert. 2009. Enemy at the Gate: Harun Farocki’s Work on the Industrial Disputes of Film History. In Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? ed. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, 122–127. London: Koenig Books. Rodowick, D.N. 2017. What Philosophy Wants From Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosamond, Emily. 2017. It Sees (Notes Towards a Cultural History of Financial Vision). In Moneylab Reader Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype, ed. Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink, and Patricia de Vries, 101–114. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Schmidt, Wolfgang. 2009. Learning with Harun. In Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? ed. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, 166–170. London: Koenig Books. Steyerl, Hito. 2012. The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Travers, Peter. 2016. Equity Review: The She-Wolf of Wall Street. Rolling Stone 27 July. Last Accessed 16 July 2019. Verwoert, Jan. 2005. Production Pattern Associations: On the Work of Harun Farocki. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry U Chicago Press Journals 11: 65–78. Wood, Christopher, Alasdair King, Ruth Catlow, and Brett Scott. 2016. Terminal Value: Building the Alternative Bloomberg. Finance and Society, 2016 2 (2): 138–150. Yuran, Noam. 2017. Finance and Prostitution: On the Libidinal Economy of Capitalism. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 28 (3): 136–165.

CHAPTER 4

Film and Financial Time

The opening of the 2013 Hollywood comedy, The Internship (Shawn Levy, Twentieth Century Fox), neatly foregrounds questions of labour, capital, and temporality in the new millennium. The established sales team played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson take a client out to dinner in the hope of making a big sale of the product that they are representing, luxury watches. As they sweet-talk the client, beginning with small talk about the rate at which his children are growing up, they throw casually into the conversation phrases like ‘What’s the one thing no one can get more of? Time!’ and ‘You can’t control time, but you can manage it’. As they move to close the sale, they are shocked when the client declares his surprise at their endeavours, given that their company has actually shut down, something about which the sales team is in the dark. In fact, when they return to confront their boss, they are told that they are dinosaurs, that nobody buys watches anymore, that everyone uses mobile phone technology to track time. Moreover, the out-of-work pair realize that their only path to employment is to embrace the world of algorithmic modelling as they are taken on, as overaged misfits, on an internship programme with Google, where the winning team across a series of challenges will be guaranteed employment. Of course, after a long series of misunderstandings and mishaps, the middle-aged pair manage to adapt to the new world of algorithmic temporality, showing their co-interns more traditional

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values associated with human sociality and interpersonal dealing, and end up on the winning side. The film was well-received at the box office, but resonated only averagely with critics, many of whom felt that it was itself out of time, having appeared nearly a decade after previous Vaughn-Wilson comedic successes. However, The Internship is interesting in the way that mainstream narrative cinema thematizes a move from a known, human-centred temporality based on wearing a watch, to a new world of algorithms and machinic encounters. As is often the case with mainstream film narratives, we are shown a way of adapting and continuing to be familiarly human in what might be a post-human moment as we are confronted by a world of algorithmic labour. More than this, though, the film also registers as an attempt by the medium of cinema to process and to manage a new stage of media technology, the emerging dominance of the mobile phone and the search engine, the app and the post-cinematic. Human labour and human time versus a new world of algorithmic technologies is the heart of the narrative conflict in this film, played out, to comic effect, largely as a generational struggle. Here, the happy ending mitigates the algorithmic paranoia at the film’s centre. As D. N. Rodowick, writing about the emergence of digital filmmaking generally has proposed, we should not be surprised to see mainstream cinema negotiating new and possibly threatening technologies in an allegorical form in its narratives as such a conflict can be seen as one of cinema’s ongoing struggles ‘to reassert or redefine its identity in the face of a new representational technology that threatens to overwhelm it’.1 As Rodowick argues, Hollywood responds to the emergence of new technologies often both at the level of its narrative structure and in its use of techniques of representation to both ‘demonize and deify’ the new arrival. Although The Internship may be a less-than-seminal film in the history of cinematic narrative, its attempt to engage with questions of capital, labour, and temporality at what appears to be a newly emerging historical moment is fascinating. How does mainstream cinema interrogate and address a new temporality, when its essence as a media technology is so closely bound up with the temporalities of modernity? How does it address what might be its future obsolescence? As Mary Ann Doane has argued forcefully, cinematic technologies played a major role in thinking through the representability of time as Western societies moved into a period of capitalist modernity. Doane writes that the new technologies of representation emerging at the end of

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the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century were ‘crucial to modernity’s reconceptualisation of time and its representability. A sea change in thinking about contingency, indexicality, temporality, and chance deeply marked the epistemologies of time at the turn of the last century’.2 In Doane’s account, time becomes perceptible in a distinctly new way. As processes of industrial labour pull in greater numbers of workers than ever, time is no longer experienced or felt internally, as it is externalized and subject to technological consultation. Doane notes the phenomenal proliferation of pocket watches in the 1890s in Germany, as employees adapted themselves to the way that the present moment is made subject to such temporal precision in retail, services, and industry. Drawing on the work of Georg Simmel, she highlights how this trend in externalizing and wearing time so precisely is linked to the absolute precision of the money economy. 3 Crucially, for Doane, ‘Modernity was characterised by the impulse to wear time, to append it to the body so that the watch became a prosthetic device extending the capacity of the body to measure time’.4 Time under modernity appeared to be assuming an external form and, although seemingly continuous and linear, was also fragmented into measurable and verifiable units. Here it correlated to cinema’s reliance on the constitutional unit of the individual projected frame per second. The workings of the cinema as media form allowed time to be understood as a series of discreet units, like frames, that could be perceived as joining together to form a continuous flow, in a similar fashion to the projection of film frames that we perceive as registering movement within the frame. This rationalization and quantification of the temporal was accompanied by an increasing fascination with the unique event, with the ephemeral present moment, and with the contingent. The instant and the chance occurrence, the contingent, could be captured by the cinema, which found its enduring form as a technology that could index the complex fluctuations of real life that could not be subsumed within rational, industrial modernity. Cinema, as Doane argues, brought with it the capacity to capture and to represent any thing and any moment. Cinema, then, seemed not only to create the sense of time experienced under modernity but also to offer an unpredictable sense of the contingent moment that might stand outside modernity’s rationalizing levelling.5 As Jimena Canales has argued, scientists too were strong supporters of early experiments with cinematography because of its capacity to help provide empirical evidence for claims about human perception and reaction

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time. Cinematography enabled access to an understanding of what Canales terms ‘microtime’, periods of time that measure events occurring within a tenth of a second, a temporality that Canales sees as central to understanding the emergence of modernity across sites as diverse as studies of consciousness and physiological optics, astronomical measurement, and early discussions of relativity.6 Doane argues emphatically that for early cinema, coming soon after the experiments of Marey and Muybridge, the key question would be how to represent temporality, ‘to make time visible, representable, to store and, hence, to defeat time as relentless passage’. In cinema narratives themselves, Doane argues that time is ‘yoked to the body, movement, space, and the potential excesses of “real time.” The primary viable articulation of time takes place off-screen, between frames, in darkness. It is in the intervals, invisible aspects, blind spots, the gaps that time becomes accessible to manipulation, narrativization, and ultimately commodification’.7 Overall, as Doane argues forcefully, it is cinema that has found its place as a media form that can offer a rich experience of the present moment, the unique instant that stands out against the rationalization of time into a uniform, measurable resource and commodity, the environment in which human labour gets turned into value and capital. As Doane notes, ‘Cinema has historically worked to make the contingent legible. The actualities of early cinema presented themselves as the potential catalogues of everything—from scenes of daily life to natural catastrophes, executions, parades, and spectacles. They promoted the sense that contingency, and hence the filterable, have no limit’.8 If the rationalizing forms of industrial modernity sought to reduce and even eradicate contingency from the operations of the present, then the financial system has sought to ensure that even future contingencies are constrained within a knowable, manageable, present. The case of cinema shows us how understandings of time are often related to media forms that allow temporalities to be registered, considered, and manipulated. Yet it seems clear that our current understanding of time may have altered from the situation described by Doane at the start of the twentieth century, when the temporalities of a new industrial and retail sector helped to define how human labour might need to be understood and exploited. The financial sector, rather than the industrial, now often seems to be driving new understandings of temporalities within the contemporary world. If the emergence of cinematic time was based on the temporalities of industrial production and transportation under

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modernity, then this is a world that has been transformed in economic terms by the rise of trading in financial derivatives, financial products that are based on speculating future prices for combinations of currencies and other monetary exchanges. In one of the first works on understanding how cultural and creative practices have engaged with the derivative, Calum Watt proposes that for the financial sector the derivative is defined as a legal contract used to exchange something at a fixed future date at a fixed price. Watt identifies that all the many varieties of derivative now in circulation share two attributes, namely the processes of ‘binding’ and ‘blending’: ‘Binding refers to the operations which bind the future to the present and give rise to futures and options, while blending allows for radically disparate phenomena to become commensurate and thus facilitates the creation of swaps and securitized or structured products. Blending makes it possible to isolate attributes of an object and trade these independently of the underlying object’.9 This enormous rise in the trade of transactions based on future-­oriented financial products shows a newly emerging attitude to temporality. Although options on future harvests and the availability of commodities in the future have long been a feature of capitalism, the quantity and quality of the explosive growth in financial derivatives since the 1970s indicates how capital has become obsessed with a future-oriented temporality. As Joseph Vogl notes, financial derivatives trading—which did not exist before 1970—developed into the world’s largest market. From an annual value of a few million dollars in the early 1970s, volume increased to $100 billion in 1990 and to $100 trillion by the turn of the century, three times the global sales volume for consumer goods. [….] the stock market became the model for financial economics, while the financial market became the model for all markets.10

Economists have tried to refine ever more reliable pricing models that are able to cope with future contingency. Whereas Doane’s narrative of temporal understanding under modernity picks up on the way that contingency, in the form of a unique, unexpected event, may stand outside the rationalizing, linear present offered up by mechanization, in our current period of financial speculation and derivatives trading, contingency stands for the way that the unpredictability of future time has to be priced into present transactions. As Vogl explains it,

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One must be able to ensure that time will be controlled, uncertain futures mastered. If the uncertainty of future prices (of foreign currencies, securities, etc.) can be offset by the prices for the uncertainty of these prices, then the equalising force of futures transactions will succeed in taking time and maintain stability in the system. The question that has emerged from this since the middle of the last century concerns which calculation makes the transition between present futures and future presents probable: How can the dissimilarity of the future be transformed into a similar present?.11

Of course, the question of whether time can be ‘tamed’ in this way remains open, especially after the recent series of financial crises. However, it would be true to say that the range of possible uncertainties, the volatility that prices in the future might, in view of the range of actual unpredictabilities in the past, be subject to, has been a key factor of financial modelling, to the extent that ‘future expectations are translated into expected futures’.12 Crucially, according to Vogl, the expansion of the derivatives market is actively encouraged in the thought that more and more speculation will actually stabilize the system ensuring a reduction in unpredictability. In this way, ‘uncertainty can be eliminated if the market includes enough contingency claims or derivative investments’.13 The future is made less subject to contingency the more it is open to speculation; this acts as a self-correcting, self-stabilizing system. The future tense orientation of financial speculation appears to stand in a very different relationship to the past and present, and to the contingent event, than the temporality examined by Doane, that itself seemed tied to the development of cinematography and to the establishment of the cinema as a media form. The cinema, situated substantially in exploring and rendering the experience of the present tense, with its investment in chance, contingency, and the material details of the physical world before it, appears to fetishize the temporality of the present. Current financial time may be of a different order to the capitalist modernity charted by Doane, and previously by Simmel, Benjamin, and others. Financialization forces us to reconceptualize temporality in a number of ways, from the algorithmic time of high frequency trading, where the actual trading is executed in forms so brief as to be beyond the threshold of human perception, to the ways that products of financialization such as derivatives force us to rethink ways in which futures are already part of the present. Financial trading aims at a reduction of the future contingent. Its idea of indexicality is not to register the physical details of everyday life but to allow market movements to be tracked numerically and in abstract patterns, away from

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the physical commodities that are linked to its prices. Financial trading ‘performs an act that culminates not in the re-presentation but in the de-­ presentation of the world’.14 It also changes the way we configure the human within time. If the emergence of cinematic time revealed the human adapting to the precise routines of industrial technology and urban interaction, financial time seems to offer us an increased sense of both the infinitesimal fractions of microtime in algorithmic trading, subhuman, and also a future that grows in centrality until it dominates present time: the ‘raid by the future on the rest of time’, as Vogl famously calls it.15 With this domination of the past and the present by future-oriented speculation, there comes too the human cost, both from the recurring crises of capital and with an increasing use of debt as a product and form of governance, entered into in the present yet with often debilitating effects in the future on the debtor, and on future generations. The space and time of financial trading processes now occupy largely post-human, post-mechanical, electronic realms, beyond human perception and traceable only by means of the triggers of light whereby pricing information is communicated along cables between servers. Although the financial world clearly has its own media forms to help to calculate, store, and disseminate market data, what role in registering financial space and time can be played by media that belong to older versions of modernity? Can the moving image be useful in exploring and in reflecting upon these post-human temporalities?

Film and Financial Time: Zachary Formwalt’s Three Exchanges (2009, 2011, 2014) In 2015, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade (MoCAB) hosted Zachary Formwalt’s video installations, ‘Three Exchanges’, an exploration of the architectural spaces of the financial sector. The installations explored the construction site and construction work of the new OMA-designed Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the materialization of the same site and its relationship to the abstract processes of algorithm-driven high-frequency trading, and the Amsterdam stock and commodities exchange designed at the end of the nineteenth century by the socialist architect, H.  P. Berlage. Formwalt’s video art in these three linked pieces, Unsupported Transit (2011), In Light of the Arc (2013), and An Unknown Quantity 2014) built on a preceding video by the same artist, In Place Of Capital (2009), to reflect upon a key question in the engagements of moving image media with the contemporary financial

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sector, namely how can the processes, effects, and affects of financialization be figured and registered in the moving image? For Formwalt, the stock exchanges do not only house trading activity but also come to form the image of the market itself. As he argues, ‘the market is seen as the only entity capable of calculating at the scale of social relations. So what kind of entity is the market? Is it locatable? Does it exist in space and time, or is it rather the very condition of space and time as we now experience it?’.16 Although these films all focus within their framed images on contemporary and historic locations of the communication and exchange of financial prices for material commodities, options, and derivatives, and refuse to include any archival moving image material, Formwalt’s four pieces together enact a specific kind of media archaeological investigation. Each film either refers in its voiceover, delivered by Formwalt himself, to earlier attempts to visualize finance or uses insets of still images that embody in their attempts to visualize financial transactions a distinct historical moment of exchange. Formwalt’s work, then, adds to the growing research area of media archaeology in its inclusion of the often-ignored sphere of the economic and financial to an understanding of the complex histories of the development of the moving image. As Jussi Parikka has noted, drawing on Thomas Elsaesser’s argument, media archaeology differs from a more linear, positivistic, and teleological media history in its ‘S/M perversions’, understood here as ‘epistemological perversions’ or disruptions of accounts of moving image histories that are centred on mainstream entertainment forms to include instead ‘science and medicine, surveillance and the military, sensory-motor coordination, and GMS and MMS in reference to the mobile communication cultures that expand how cinema and the visual are taking new forms’.17 To this list of S/M archaeological disruptions, Formwalt’s work adds the overlooked area of the financial sector, and his moving image installations work to explore both the partially visible histories of the interweaving of image technologies with the expansion of the exchange and trade in financial products and the current gaps and invisibilities in the ability of our moving image culture to adequately make sense of contemporary finance. In this way, Formwalt’s work is not only significant as a reflection on media archaeology relating image technologies to the histories and processes of financialization but also itself an artistic attempt to create an archaeology of the moving image in the present in its limited ability to render sensible the stock exchanges as hubs of financial practice.18 Crucial for Formwalt is the question of the representation of the financial market place at a point in history where the actual trading is executed in forms beyond the threshold of human perception. The space and time of

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financial trading processes now occupy largely post-human, post-mechanical, electronic realms, beyond human perception and traceable only by means of the triggers of light whereby pricing information is communicated along cables between servers. If we follow this theme of the way that images can represent (or not) processes of financialization, then we can see Formwalt’s recent video installation work as comprising the trilogy on the stock exchanges (2011–2014), together with the earlier In Place of Capital (2009). The central thought running through this tetralogy is articulated in the final sequences of In Light of the Arc (2013), as Formwalt describes the architectural composition of the new Shenzhen Stock Exchange in southeastern China. Formwalt’s voiceover acknowledges that, given the demise of the traditional material trading pit and the replacement of the physicality and noise of actual traders through digital communication, the spaces of the contemporary stock exchange are used to represent, rather than to house, the stock market. He is concerned to pick out a small, though crucial, detail in the architects’ report on their building. The surface of the building is gridded but the ability of this grid to reflect light and other surfaces back is deliberately disrupted through a ‘patterned glass skin’. As Formwalt’s voiceover notes, ‘The simplicity of a grid structuring the reflection of all that surrounds it—of the world in which this stock exchange is placed—is rendered mysterious. A strange lighting effect replaces the structure’. What is significant here, is that, as Formwalt asserts, ‘trading may often take place now in a space and time that we as human beings cannot experience’, and this idea of the inaccessibility to human perception and experience of contemporary finance is maintained in the design of the exterior surface of the building itself. If, in our definitions of cinema, we think of light as one key constituent element in forming the classical notion of the indexical image captured on celluloid, then Formwalt’s focus in on the use of light here in contemporary finance sets up a tension with the ability or not of cinema too to access and register its processes. As Formwalt argues, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange shows us an architecture of anonymous surfaces, where if light is present, it, too, falls beyond the threshold of human perception. At a certain point in their existence, the prices for which these places are build are reduced to this light. Not the light that illuminates the value of whatever is being exchanged. This has as little chance of entering these spaces as we do. The light that prices become is invisible—an infrared signal travelling through cables from one black box to another.

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For, as Formwalt goes on to argue, contemporary financial systems of exchange are conducted through anonymous and indistinct black boxes; their material form and the processes that are conducted within this form are both beyond human perception and inaccessible to meaningful visual representation in moving images. It becomes clear in these concluding lines of voiceover in In the Light of the Arc how Formwalt’s project works. As he declares, ‘This architecture of the stock exchange is located in the gap between two boxes, the one we are permitted to see and the one we are not. The world we inhabit and the prices that project it’. The use here of the vocabulary of ‘light’ and of the verb ‘project’ suggests that, for Formwalt, the stock exchanges act as a kind of primitive cinematic space for us. Whereas the cinema struggles to comprehend, capture, and project moving images of contemporary finance, the architectural spaces of the stock exchanges that are explored across his stock exchange trilogy and in In Place of Capital use light both in their inner processes and in their exterior projections back into the world, that provide us with some, albeit limited, guide to the financial world. As Formwalt argues in In the Light of the Arc, the spaces and processes in the new exchange are allegorical, in that they can both be ‘seen and heard, unlike the actual trading that is executed in this space beyond the threshold of human perception’. Formwalt’s films work to both capture a sense of the role of the stock exchanges themselves and to highlight the struggles that other media forms based on registering an indexical image for human contemplation have had in trying to engage with something that is often less a building and more a rival media form. Formwalt’s interest in the stock exchanges themselves is because they might be best understood now less as spaces that facilitate the purchase and redistribution of goods and options and more because they are themselves elements of the ‘becoming-­ media of finance’, in the way that Joseph Vogl has used the concept. Vogl sees a confluence in the 1970s and 1980s of mathematical modelling, IT, new business operations and policy decisions as configuring a ’special type of media history’, where financial operations are integrated into an emerging media form.19 As Vogl proposes, there are no historically stable media. Neither should we assume that our media forms are reducible to the representative media such as film and theatre or to the techniques of dissemination commonly assumed to constitute media practices, such as printing and telegraphy.20 Instead, Vogl understands media as specific but often insubstantial objects that process, store, or transmit data: ‘media make things readable, audible,

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visible, and perceptible, but they do all this with a tendency to extinguish themselves in these operations—to make themselves imperceptible’.21 Importantly, media forms can become perceptible themselves. I would argue that Formwalt’s series of video installations uses the moving image, voiceover, and references to other visual media forms, to make perceptible how the stock exchange itself operates as a kind of becoming-media of finance, while also drawing attention to the challenges faced by more traditional media forms to register and make perceptible the processes and movements of contemporary finance. For example, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) understands itself as providing the facilities for securities trading and for managing and disseminating market information and data. It is distinctive among other stock exchanges for having set up the ChiNext board, an exchange focused on managing high-­ growth, high-tech start-ups. In this, it forms a larger media system that works across the financial sector in a variety of ways. In all four installations, Formwalt shows that the exchanges have become images of the market. These images are focused on the act of transaction, an act with its own specific temporality. The image of the exchanges thereby constructs a time that is beyond that of human experience. Formwalt’s films explore then human experience and the temporalities at play in the processes of physical construction, which give the exchange a concrete space, rather than in the transactions that are carried out within. If the exchanges are part of the becoming-media of finance, then they support, as Formwalt explains, ‘the construction of an image of the market as something that excludes images of other social processes’.22 Formwalt’s methodology in the Three Exchanges project is anticipated in his 24-minute video installation, In Place of Capital (2009). The installation focuses on the capacity of the newly emerging media form of photography in the mid-nineteenth century to adequately capture objects in movement, using particularly Henry Fox Talbot’s pioneering 1845 photographs of the exterior of the Royal Exchange in London. Formwalt has explained how he wanted to explore these historical images as a counterpoint to the images of banks that were appearing at the time in newspaper reports of the financial crisis of 2008. In his reading, Talbot’s photographs, as we see below, failed to account for the movement of bodies, while the 2009 newspaper images failed similarly to account for the movement of capital.23 Fox Talbot’s Exchange exteriors become the initial formal place of composition for Formwalt’s subsequent Three Exchanges films. However, Formwalt begins with a video footage sequence where the

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camera holds a canted static shot, then moves to a frontal long take, and then pans down, drawing on the resources of the moving image rather than the photograph, to register the outside of the Royal Exchange in London. At the same time, Formwalt’s voiceover reads out an email/letter from an unnamed bank official at an early point of Formwalt’s research: To be honest, from the way you’re describing the documentary to me, it sounds like you’re going to need some talented computer graphic design people. The truth of the matter is, the activity of finance is not particularly visual per se—it’s not like watching a car get made on an assembly line. You could have a lot of charts and graphs to show movements of money and flows and things but I’m not sure you’re ever going to capture the movement of capital markets because there’s not much to see, especially now that everything is electronic. Actually, if anything, the process was far more action and viscerally oriented back in the 20s and 30s when people literally pushed paper around. Nowadays, much of it is electronic.

The opening of In Place of Capital, then, with its juxtaposition of Formwalt’s voiceover against the long static takes of the blank, gridded, reflecting surfaces of contemporary bank buildings, sets out the central problematic of the installation and of the Three Exchanges. How can the movement of contemporary finance be captured visually? How can the resources of the moving image take us further in this quest than the limited results of earlier media technologies? What kind of media form might be needed to register contemporary financialization? In Place of Capital explores Fox Talbot’s four photographs of the Royal Exchange in London, which, for Formwalt, come across as a media form already out of time or not yet fully present. Because of the long exposure time needed, human figures moving across the frame are barely perceptible, spectral blurs against the solid architectural edifice, the Royal Exhange’s famous portico with columns and complex facade. The sculptured figures of commerce on the facade achieve what the photographic form at this point cannot, namely a representation of commerce, here, as Formwalt notes, in allegorical form. Formwalt’s voiceover links directly the failure of this media form to capture bodies in motion with the subsequent increased urgency to develop technologies that would make good this absence; the reanimation of the captured objects and bodies in motion became cinema some 50 years later. In 1845, as Formwalt notes, ‘that relation of capture had not yet been secured’. Formwalt uses long static takes that focus in extreme close-up on fragments of Talbot’s photographs, at times

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superimposing aspects of the four images so that a spectral carriage that appears in one is made visible in another. In this way, Formwalt’s own film enacts a rudimentary kind of transition from the still image to an early cinematic moving image. Formwalt cuts abruptly to a highlighted page that picks out a passage from Marx’s Capital, ‘The movement is past, and M1 is there in its place’, noting that this is Marx’s description of the final phase in the circuit of money capital after money has travelled through the production process, and it has become capital, value that has bred value: ‘Here, for a brief instant, it appears as self-increasing money but the movement that has caused this increase vanishes behind the same facade before which those people had disappeared in the spring of 1845’. Marx saw the lack that Talbot had seen, the lack of capture of the moving body, as an ‘expression of the capital relation, when capital assumes the form of money, its movement, its history, vanishes’. As Marina Vishmidt has noted, in this film ‘[r]eal abstraction is made visible, and it emerges against a background of labour which has been turned into the photographic negative of what is finally rendered visible—the monument to exchange, to the commodity. This links also to how finance embodies a crisis of representation, even as representation augurs a crisis in finance’.24 As Vishmidt suggests, Formwalt’s work raises the question of how to represent financial processes that themselves are already representations and not physical objects in the world. Formwalt argues that the increasing speed of photographic capture couldn’t change this basic phenomenon of the absence of the movement and history of bodies in the processes of capital. His voiceover intones Marx’s definition in the 1844 manuscripts of money as ‘the external common medium for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image’. As Formwalt argues, Marx’s description of money, as a medium of exchange between image and reality and as a form in which the movement of capital vanishes, aligns it with the processes of early photography like Fox Talbot’s, where movement disappears leaving an image in its place, and where images, once photographed, enter a new industrial reality. This investigation into how media technologies might make visible economic exchange is pursued in Unsupported Transit (2011), a 14-minute installation that marks the first film in the Three Exchanges trilogy. The opening minute of the film consists of a camera travelling slowly down the side of a tall building on a construction site, set against white mountains and pale skyscrapers, capturing another lift mechanism moving slowly in the other direction. There is no voiceover, the only sound being the ambient rattle of the two lift mechanisms. The sides of the image are darkened

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as the frames of the ascending lift move upwards. The effect that Formwalt achieves here is to register the mechanical apparatus used to construct the skyscraper, with no humans in the image, yet the sound, motion, and repeated blocks of frames suggest that Formwalt’s images are of a celluloid strip, thus allegorizing cinema’s early traditions at the very point of discussing their limitations for capturing the movement of capital. In this installation, Formwalt clarifies why the stock exchange is at the centre of his reflections, noting that while, for Marx, the factory, given its position in the production process and its hosting of human labour linked to mechanic processes, occupies the key site in the accumulation of capital, for Engels, writing an addendum in 1895, it was no longer the factory but the stock exchange that lies at the heart of capital accumulation. In this installation, Formwalt proceeds with his investigation into a history of media forms and their relationship to the visualization of capital. The title of the piece refers to the experiments initially with single and then sequential photographs undertaken by Eadweard Muybridge in the 1870s in the commissioned attempt to provide a definitive answer to the question of ‘unsupported transit’: Was there a moment, beyond the threshold of human perception, in the gallop of a horse when all four hooves had left the ground? Formwalt discusses the Muybridge experiments, paid for by the Californian entrepreneur Leland Stanford, in voiceover as his video images track in extreme long shot against a pale grey sky the slow ascent of Chinese construction workers on seemingly fragile platforms, held by numerous thin threads of rope. This juxtaposition will be significant, as later Formwalt will note how a different kind of photography, the time lapse process initiated by Chicago bank employee and former Wall Street messenger, John Ott, is often used to chart the seemingly unsupported transit of a large construction site quickly through the stages of building. The construction appears to create itself, as the faster movements of the human workers are erased in time lapse sequences. If we think about the opening of the highly successful Hollywood film, The Big Short (2015), this uses a direct address to camera and a 26-second high-speed montage of pop cultural images accompanied by a time lapse sequence of the emerging Manhattan skyscraper skyline of the 1980s and 1990s to set out how banking became, largely unnoticed, the US’s dominant sector and to explain contemporary financial products to the audience. Although time lapse is one moving image technique that can register hugely accelerated durations, it erases the human from the image, typically showing only the growth of built structures. The use of time lapse, which

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erases the visibility of human participation in Wall Street’s growth, is an aesthetic choice that prioritizes the visualization of infrastructural growth over the registration of the role of capital investment and the contribution of labour. It is an aesthetic choice that illustrates the omission of a deeper critical viewpoint, despite its consideration of the sub-prime crisis and the role of the rating agencies in initiating the financial crisis of 2008. Formwalt suggests that the time lapse is the ‘way of seeing that Marx described in the abbreviated form of capital, where the most basic relation underlying economic growth disappears’.25 The disappearance of labour and the trope of depopulation in photographs and films has been noted in detail by Alberto Toscano recently. Toscano quotes Fredric Jameson’s reading of Marx’s Capital that summarizes how ‘capitalist temporality ruthlessly extinguishes the past of the labor process’.26 The slow ascent of the Chinese workers on platforms at the Shenzhen Stock Exchange construction site reverses this erasure, making visible the work of the human labourer and, in doing so, disrupting the non-human images circulated in time lapse construction scenes. Formwalt’s voiceover describes another media historical moment, when Muybridge was asked by Stanford to create a panoramic photograph from his San Francisco mansion down across the Bay Area, registering in a single image the fullness of regional and global trade and thus the complex movements of capital. Formwalt explains how Muybridge’s still images of the ‘floating’ horse were not considered accurate as they differed from human perception; they needed to be put in motion in a series where the hooves no longer appeared to leave the ground to make sense to his audience and to receive full acclaim. Formwalt links this to the Lumière Brothers’s experiments that led to the first film, The Workers Leaving the Factory in 1895, the same year as Engels’s addendum that highlights the centrality of the stock exchange. As we saw earlier in Chap. 3, the Lumière Brothers’s short film has received critical attention in part for the way that it sets the foundation for mainstream cinema in erasing the processes of labour and the movements of capital. By returning to The Workers Leaving the Factory in his own film, Formwalt uses the moving image and his voiceover to set out the intertwining archaeologies of media forms and of stages of capital accumulation. Essential to both histories is the question of visibility, of causing to take their place, or to disappear from the scene the bodies of the human labourers who participate so fully in the creation of value. One of Formwalt’s unspoken questions here is how we can restore the visibility of the human

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labour involved that appears to have been absented from the media forms that accompany finance capital’s series of exchanges. As Formwalt notes, in Marx’s M-M1 formulation, money appears to have become a self-­ creating form—‘the workers have left the scene’. This is precisely what is achieved with the different temporalities involved in Ott’s time lapse photography, in which images are taken at a slower interval rate than they will be played back. This process privileges movements taking place over a long period of time and erases those of a shorter duration. As Formwalt argues, capital accumulation can be thought of in a way similar to the time lapse sequences of new city quarters, as if skylines built themselves. Formwalt's film functions as a counter to this time lapse process, trying to make visible again what a time lapse sequence, based on slow exposure speeds, might erase: the role of human workers in construction, and, by extension, the material world of humans, labour, and objects obscured by the dematerialized algorithmic trading that is scheduled to take place within the walls of this emerging new stock exchange. For Formwalt, time lapse media forms have become a compositional tool to erase the visibility of labour, and so are similar to the relationship of the past to the present identified by Marx in capital accumulation: what appears as capital now is the accumulation of past labour. When this is detached from the present, future economic growth becomes a fiction, which is sheltered by the Stock Exchange, but ‘unsupported transit only takes place for an instant’. The question concerning temporality and visibility with regard to contemporary trading is broached in Formwalt’s second part of his trilogy, In Light of the Arc (2013), a 30-minute loop film. Formwalt here uses a two-­ screen setup in his installation, the two screens facing each other at a slight angle. Formwalt once again takes the viewer on a journey into media archaeology in order to suggest the challenges that contemporary media forms have in capturing finance capital, This time his main concerns in terms of the visibility of capital are temporality and speed, and these are explored through a consideration of the trope of light. The title draws attention to the arc light, developed from experiments at the beginning of the nineteenth century as an electric charge became visible across two pieces of carbon attached to a battery. The light and heat from the ‘arc’ of electricity thus created emerged as an important source of power to light with great luminosity film sets and outdoor spaces, and as heat in welding processes. Formwalt uses one screen to show a worker using arc welding against a black background, with on the other screen footage of workers installing large window frames on the construction site of the Shenzhen

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Stock Exchange. Formwalt’s voiceover again gives us cause to reflect on intertwining histories of lighting, entertainment, and construction, and on visibility and invisibility. The trading floor familiar from newsreels and Hollywood cinema has disappeared in the new Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Instead, the central space is ceremonial, and a bell is sounded to announce the entry of a new company onto the market, as its current value is registered visibly in numerical and graphic form on a large screen. Formwalt talks about visibility also in terms of trading as his screens cut to what appear to be abstract patterns of tiny white dots in rows against a black background. As Formwalt’s camera slowly zooms in, his voiceover describes how trading large quantities of stock is now a machinic, algorithmic process, as the trader will not want to call attention to the desire to sell large amounts of stock, thus causing a fall in price, and so a computer programme calculates the fluctuating rate at which stock can be sold off without registering attention. This process must remain invisible. This is described accurately in the voiceover, but how can such a phenomenon be screened in Formwalt’s moving images? His camera zooms slowly in to get ever closer to the grids of white dots. His voiceover reveals that what we are looking at is the texture of the large quantity of lights that go to make up a giant LED screen. We are looking at the surface of the material technology that indexes price movements. As the voiceover notes, ‘Speed of communication is key here, as the faster the computer can access the market data—the prices—the more continuously it can take this data into account in determining its own actions’. To what degree is the moving image technology used by Formwalt adequate to capturing this rival media form, the LED screen that provides market information? Formwalt suggests that the LED texture that he is displaying is, in relation to the meaning communicated by the LED screen, ‘just noise [….] But it’s noise that actually holds the image together, here, in this place’. As Eric de Bruyn has argued here, the problem, as Formwalt poses it, is how to distinguish signal from noise: The media system begins to run into its own limitations: the greater the resolution of the image, the more distraction or disinformation occurs. [….] Time and again, Formwalt draws such analogies between the material substratum of medium technology and the representational surfaces of the “media system” of financial capitalism, demonstrating how both are linked in a sticking of the seams, a smoothing over of gaps, a suppression of the noise which is nothing but the groundless potentiality that may hold this particular image together, make it seem possible, but is also the threshold of its dissipation.27

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As if to confirm this observation, Formwalt’s film holds for almost a minute a frontal static shot from inside the empty ceremonial spaces of the new Shenzhen Stock Exchange through a grid of windows outside at a distant skyline of skyscrapers. At the top of one of these financial buildings, there is a giant TV screen projecting moving images of messages and adverts. Here, the financial skyscraper has become a complex kind of broadcast media form itself. Formwalt’s final film in the trilogy, An Unknown Quantity (2014), a longer 39-minute installation, explores the interior architecture of H. P. Berlage’s stock exchange in Amsterdam, opened in 1903. Formwalt’s static camera fills the entire frame with an expanse of brick wall in medium shot that is held for over two minutes before panning down. Its symbolism becomes clear as Formwalt’s voiceover talks about Berlage’s building project at the same time as for the ironworkers’ union, which also incorporated similar brickwork, and where each brick came to be associated with an individual worker, together forming an impressive collective body. The suggestion here is the question of how is the collectivity of human labour made visible in the operations of the stock exchange? In this film, Formwalt pays more attention than in the other films to the visibility of workers and of the role of organized labour. The film begins with a description of a major logistics strike in Amsterdam in 1903 over the use of non-union labour to move goods in the harbour area, which involved both the dockworkers and the rail workers’ unions. Although the strike was eventually defeated and heralded the introduction of anti-union legislation, Formwalt is interested in the way that the disruption during the strike of normal processes, the disruption of normal logistical speeds and temporalities, made the movement of goods and the path taken in the logistical operations suddenly visible. In a key sequence at the heart of the film, Formwalt fills the frame with a pale, off-white image, almost flat but slightly grainy. Over the next ten minutes, and almost imperceptibly slowly, the camera pulls back from this surface, revealing it in time to be an extreme close-up of one of the bricks in the construction. At the same time, on the voiceover, Formwalt describes the visual processes of Charles and Ray Eames’s celebrated film for IBM, Powers of Ten (1977), which begins with a scene that could belong to any mainstream entertainment film of a couple having a picnic on a lake shore, before beginning an incredible, measured, overhead cosmic zoom until five minutes from the start of the film, the camera appears

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to have zoomed out 100 million light years, before returning, using accelerated images this time, to the couple, before plunging into the very molecular structure of the human bodies. The Eames’s film turns its mainstream cinematic opening into an almost-abstract meditation on what lies beyond human experience, the vast macro spaces of galaxies and the smallest possible units of micro space composed of subatomic particles. Formwalt’s narration, which in part echoes the voiceover narrative of the Eames’s film, places the Eames’s project in Chicago alongside the establishment in that city in 1973 of the new options exchange, trading in futures. In 1978, Berlage’s Amsterdam stock exchange became host to the European Options Exchange: the solidity of the bricks in focus in Formwalt’s film would now encase trades in the infinite resale of options contracts. For Formwalt, ‘if the option was the atom, the stocks were the subatomic particles. The relation of either to a plate of food, a picnic blanket, or a social encounter was anything but visible’. The world of the indefinite exchange of options correlated in time to the other, beyond-­ human, spatial world opened up by Eames’s film and IBM. How can the moving image make sense of this new world? Formwalt’s voiceover discusses the basic cinematic mechanism, how a number of still, minutely differentiated, photographs are projected to ensure that we see movement: ‘space is fixed so that time can pass through it’, where time is registered as movement. Yet, as Formwalt goes on to suggest, the movements of capital are tracked by different media forms. He describes the invention of ticker tape to track stock prices, and its passage from a mechanical operation with its distinctive sound and physical paper spool, to the ticker tape on screens everywhere. This may indicate a smooth movement of prices, but the speed at which market activity occurs is not registered clearly. As Formwalt notes, ‘Even before the cinema, the stock index had made moving images of the market possible by reducing a given market to a simple series of numbers over time. It wasn’t a very detailed image, but it moved’. Crucially, this image provided by the index is incomplete: ‘It always points beyond itself, to the thing that caused it, but doesn’t show this cause’. For Formwalt, this is not dissimilar to the moving images of cinema in that we see an image of movement, but we don’t see the technology that causes that movement. Formwalt’s film ends with a sequence that suggests that the labour time that is erased by these media technologies might, at any given point in the future, become visible again. He returns to the Amsterdam logistics strike to describe how the strikers gained access to the main hall of the original

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Zocher Stock Exchange. They had photographs taken of themselves occupying this space, the workers suddenly visible again and recorded by a media form. Yet this would only be temporary. A more lasting image of human activity in the new Berlage stock exchange was subsequently created, a composite picture of over 300 portraits of traders, made into a collage inside the trading hall. As Formwalt discusses this, his images of the brickwork change, pulling out and becoming curved. He is suddenly able to provide an overview of the interior architecture of Berlage’s exchange, images made using Gigapan technology. The moving image here at the conclusion to Formwalt’s trilogy is created by a high-definition computerized spatial system that can provide images beyond human perception. As these images are shown, Formwalt’s voiceover talks about the mathematical modelling that now dominates finance, and about the way that the detail of the world is bracketed out so that contingency is managed and ‘a tiny space of predictability and calculation’ is created. Yet, as Formwalt ends, citing a Dutch poem, it is still impossible to determine the exact moment at which lightning, in the form of the return of the human labour erased, will strike from the clouds. What place, then, for media forms that rely on the moving image, on registering (primarily human) experience, on using mechanic technologies to open up a space for contingency within otherwise overpoweringly rational systems? Formwalt’s pieces concentrate on the erasure of labour time within the market, while also exploring the changes in temporality induced by high-frequency trading and algorithmic modelling. As he notes, ‘you need an adequate theory of capital, not a state-of-the-art imaging technology, to be able to see labour there’.28 If cinema once, as a new technology of vision, allowed us to see ‘a record of time’,29 then how can it allow us now, a century or so on, to understand the complex temporalities of financial time? What place might cinema occupy in our world of financial modernity, under which possible futures are already priced into the present, and the present is weighed down by debt to the future? How might the moving image open up time, when finance has sought to tame it in the way that Vogl describes? As Vogl argues in his discussion of the becoming-­ media of finance, time is at the heart of the operations of these media forms. Vogl proposes that we understand financial crises as specific eruptions of historical time within a market system that ‘dreams the dreams of its timelessness’.30 In this way, the crises of the last decades may be explained not only as situations in which the models of financial economics missed the facts of the real economic

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world. They must also be seen as endogenous crises of a media system: the processing of temporal problems creates the temporal problems that the system tries to process. The system amplifies noise by suppressing noise. One can describe this—technologically—as the effect of positive feedback. In historical terms, however, this means that the epoché of the financial economy is the crisis; that is, it is the return of specific historical time periods within the system.31

This is the condition that the moving image needs to register. Formwalt’s video installation series opens up a discussion of how moving image forms can relate to the past and present of financial times. Capturing the complexities of temporality here, of the management of risk, of the relationship of the present to the future, of a speed and quantity of exchange of immaterial processes that far exceeds human perception, and of the return to the real at a time of crisis: these are some of the challenges that a future cinema faces.

Carnival of Financial Souls: Yella (Christian Petzold, Schramm Körner, and Weber, 2007) In Steven Shaviro’s Post Cinematic Affect, he proposes that ‘the bewildering new world space of late or multinational capitalism cannot be represented, it cannot be contained within the framework of a conventional narrative’.32 In this second case study of film and financial time, I want to look at Yella (Christian Petzold, 2007) to see how a recent fictional narrative film addresses the ‘bewildering’ nature of contemporary capital. I want to do so by exploring at this point not the problems of spatiality that Shaviro highlights, which will be explored more fully in the next chapter, but the complexities of temporality. While I agree with Shaviro that narrative cinema does struggle generally to address adequately the challenges of financial thinking, Yella is an absorbing film that rises to the representational challenges that finance capital offers and is notable for both the effectiveness of its narrative form and its provision of images of the practices and consequences of finance in action. It is in its consideration of financial time that Yella is most innovative, and it explores at the level of narrative cinema some of the issues that political economists and economic sociologists have been negotiating recently in terms of capital, time, and futurity. This is not to argue that Petzold’s film is informed by these studies in finance and temporality, that for the most part appeared in print in the decade after the release of Yella. Instead, Petzold’s film, while

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exploring at the level of narrative issues of anticipation and forward thinking, itself in its themes exhibits a rare anticipatory quality concerning the lived experience of finance and its effect on subjectivity that are subsequently explored theoretically in the works cited. As Klöckner and Müller have argued recently, although ‘capitalism’s logic of recurrence, repetitive cycles, and successive ruptures has long been with us, [….] recent decades of intensified financialization have restructured temporal experience’.33 As the very nomenclature of parts of the financial sector indicates, with the futures market and forward contracts, the financial sector has become a sophisticated theorist and beneficiary of a deeper temporal understanding. Time is exploited in the search for profits, yet these transformations in our comprehension of time also have cultural and social effects beyond the markets, as we increasingly invest in our personal futures, speculate on future events, and negotiate credit and take on debts that will extend present commitments far into the future. If our broader social and cultural understanding of temporality is now thoroughly intertwined with the way that financial markets think through time as cyclical and characterized by a logic of recurrence, and as they conceive and construct possible futures, then how well-placed is cinema to visualize and register the forces of present time, as well as the flows of the past and of possible futures, on our brains and bodies? If our experience of time has been restructured recently with finance’s intensified future orientation, then moving image narratives may be one place to look for the working through of this changed situation. Klöckner and Müller argue that financial activity is centred on ‘managing the uncertainty of the future by turning it into tradable risk categories’.34 Although phenomena like risk, speed, and uncertainty are neither new nor unique to contemporary finance, the apparently clear task of making present profits through calculating future market movements is made hugely complex and precarious through the increasingly sophisticated mathematical trading models used, the complexity of financial products like derivatives, and because of the immense advances that have been made in areas like automatic high-frequency trading using the power of contemporary computing, where the speed of assimilating information and of authorizing transactions has dramatically increased in recent years. The temporality of contemporary finance has been the subject of several studies by economic sociologists and cultural theorists since the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Of crucial significance for several such studies is finance’s relationship to futurity given that its logic for making profit is

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based so centrally on the way that the present can bet on the future. For Elena Esposito, the financial sector essentially offers complex and innovative ways of performing the task that money always has, of trading in future uncertainty. As Esposito summarizes this, ‘[i]t is because the possible needs of the future have no limit that we need money, and why that money is never enough. Financial markets “play” with these future possibilities, in that they intertwine and compensate, imagine and deny, and produce present profits out of the unpredictability of the future’.35 Derivatives, for example, should be seen as financial tools for reacting to the uncertainty and instability of events in the future: they ‘turn to the future, a future that they know they don’t know, and promise to protect against risks’.36 As Esposito argues, ‘[d]erivative instruments are used to manage the difference between the present future and the future presents in the present, between what one can expect to happen tomorrow, as a result of what one does today, and what will actually be achieved tomorrow, as a result of what one does today in order to prepare for it’.37 Financial markets, then, deal primarily with the management of time, and, as Esposito argues, ‘in studying the time of money, one studies the time of a society that defines itself with reference to a future that depends on it, both in the economy and in other spheres’.38 Esposito sees in countries whose economies are dominated by the financial sector a model of society that is ‘no longer defined by its past or its traditions but turned to the future’.39 Esposito’s analysis of the relationship between the present and the future, the future seen specifically from our current present, is helpful in conceptualizing temporality and the way that finance works to build profit through setting wagers on the outcome of certain events. However, and importantly for understanding Yella, we must take into account that even though Esposito describes well the sophistication of the financial instruments constructed to maximize profit from the uncertainties that come from looking at the future from the position of the present, this turn to speculation and to an anticipatory way of framing the world is not just constrained to the instruments used in the financial sector itself but reaches down into the constructions of contemporary subjectivity. As I will argue when looking at Yella, much of its effectiveness as a narrative of contemporary finance capital involves the way that as it constructs an imaginary world of emotional and economic transactions and investments, its narrative structure is one that is turned to the future in the form of an extended cinematic flash forward. The eponymous character, Yella, is involved directly in the world of finance,

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as we shall see, as a bookkeeper and novice venture capitalist, but not as someone developing complex derivatives or other financial instruments, in the way that Esposito’s formulations describe. Instead, she embodies a kind of speculative subjectivity, one that is oriented to the future and that allows her to inhabit a possible future world for much of the film. Yella’s specific mode of subjectivity might be characterized by its ‘anticipatory way of life’ or ‘state of anticipation’, as Lisa Adkins has described current social practices that involve ‘an excessive trade in and orientation to the future’.40 For Adkins and other economic sociologists and theorists working on this field, what Esposito sees as characteristic of the operations of financial sector in terms of its orientation towards futurity has become widespread: the ‘generalized state of anticipation’ and a ‘living towards events that have not yet taken place and might never do so’ has become a condition more pervasive generally throughout contemporary social life.41 But this anticipatory mode of living, where speculation becomes the most productive form of capital accumulation, should be seen also as a kind of labour, even though for the most part it does not involve the strenuous physicality that, as we saw in the preceding section on film and financial time, Zachary Formwalt aims to make visible again and to capture in his installations. The processes and practices of a more immaterial labour in a neoliberal economy are at the heart of Petzold’s film. Labour is still an important category, for Petzold as for Formwalt, despite the very different tone and generic form of these films. Petzold’s turn to the spectral with Yella relates too to the disappearance of the working body from general visibility under finance capital. As Petzold has argued, What worries me is the outsourcing of work. Outsourced from the hearts of industrial nations because we are dominated by finance capitalism. But work is what keeps us from becoming phantoms. [….] But for us, work has disappeared. For that reason, the number of phantoms has increased. [….] But work is identity, and if there’s no longer identity, the number of phantoms increases. And I feel that the history of film is filled with people on the verge of becoming phantoms. Who try to define themselves in terms of money (which is a mistake), or the search for happiness, or criminality, or love. And to trace this search for meaning in cinema is political.42

The challenge for Petzold, as for other filmmakers in this study, will be to find moving images appropriate to these processes, not least because of the very immateriality of both labour here and of the ways of accounting

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for and measuring that weightless, spectral labour. As Martin Konings explains in surveying of theories of immaterial labour, [i]n the era of immaterial labor, the assumption of an externality of reality and its representation becomes less and less tenable; the measure of value becomes more fully immanent [….] it is the decline of Fordism and its standardized methods of factory production that is taken to have undermined abstract labor time as the organizing principle of capitalist production by giving rise to immaterial forms of labor that are increasingly difficult to represent or symbolize.43

The transition between the focus on restoring the body and the value of physical labour at the heart of Formwalt’s gallery films and the more speculative (in both senses of the word), spectral, and immaterial forms of creation explored by Petzold in Yella echo the move from forms of industrial capitalism to what Franco ‘Bifi’ Berardi calls ‘semiocapitalism’. As Berardi writes, since the 1970s the relation between capital and labor has been reframed, thanks to the new digital technology and to the deregulation of the labor market. [….] The financialization of the global economy has eroded the bourgeois identification of wealth with physical property and territorial labor. When labor loses its mechanical form and becomes immaterial [….] value enters in a phase of indetermination and uncertainty.44

The conditions of uncertainty generate the need for a form of labour where ‘everyone must become a speculator in order participate in a society where speculation has become not just normatively affirmed, but structurally enforced’, as Marina Vishmidt has written of the broad changes in labour practices under financialization.45 Yella aligns with Formwalt’s gallery films, then, not just in the way it undertakes to address the relationship between the moving image and financial time but also in underlining the significance of changes in labour forms to that relationship. To sharpen our attention into how Petzold imagines Yella’s labour, it is helpful to look more closely at the processes of speculation she undertakes and at how her wagers on the future are linked to her practice of leverage. Of considerable help here is Martijn Konings’s recent work, Capital and Time, a study that identifies leverage as a central weapon in the struggle to respond to the uncertainties of the future set out by Esposito. Konings unfolds an anti-foundational argument that proposes that economic value

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is speculative by nature and is not grounded in a distinction between a supposed ‘real’ value and a fictitious, erroneous, speculative evaluation. Konings explains that in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, many commentators had argued that the crisis should be viewed as exacerbated by wild speculation on unregulated financial markets that had become dangerously separated from more fundamental economic values that were grounded in production and manufacturing particularly. What would result from the crisis, it followed, was a swing back to a better-­ regulated and less-speculative financial sector and hence a more stable overall economy. Konings identifies a moralizing aspect to this kind of critique and sees it as part of a tradition in economic theory that can be traced back to the critique of chrematistics in antiquity, that is, of making money from money. ‘In this tradition’, according to Konings, ‘speculation is depicted as an investment in promises that lack foundation, as the irrational attribution of value to fictions devoid of substance’.46 In place of an ‘elastic’ understanding of value, where speculation can stretch or ‘inflate’ the true value of an object or process, Konings proposes a ‘plastic’ view of value, whereby an identity lacks any fixed and essential ‘real’ features but is constituted through ‘continuous changes in relational form’.47 Contemporary money, in Konings’s argument, is ‘highly plastic’, and responds to the networks within which it is produced and circulated, rather than having any ‘real’, grounded value. Konings proposes that the financial system is self-referential, based on circulating promissory relations, and lacks an external, grounded, standard of value. Leverage is essential to theorizing how finance works if we assume its—that is, finance’s—non-foundational status. As Konings argues, ‘[l]everage, then, is the way we aim to give our fictitious projections a self-fulfilling, performative quality, how we seek to provoke the world into affirmatively responding to our speculative claims, to recruit the labor that will ensure their validation’.48 In this sense, investment always involves speculation: finance is always speculative, always risky. Finance and temporality are therefore intrinsically linked, in the sense that, as Matthias Thiemann has commented on Konings’s work, ‘investment is always speculative, you engage in uncertain investments; those investments bind subjects to particular wagers on the future, and those so bound will seek to generate the conditions for the fulfilment of these wagers’.49 It is precisely in seeking to generate the conditions for the fulfilment of certain financial wagers that the central character, Yella, becomes a significant case study for understanding how the contemporary moving image comments on the increasing financialization of subjectivity.

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II: Yella (2007) is a film by one of Germany’s most significant living directors, Christian Petzold. His haunting thriller has been critically acclaimed for its enigmatic depiction of the journey of a young East German migrant to the affluent west and to a job in the arcane sector of venture capitalism. As I argue below, it is a rich exercise in how we might image finance capital, labour, the body, and time. Yella opens with its eponymous heroine alone in a railway compartment as the train crosses the River Elbe, arriving back in her depopulated East German hometown after a job interview in the rich western city of Hanover. After changing out of her interview outfit in the carriage, she leaves the station, where she is watched from a vehicle by her volatile ex-husband Ben, against whom she has a restraining order. Ben walks down the empty street some paces away from her, correctly ascertaining from her confident walk that she has succeeded in finding a new job, as Yella later confirms to her father with whom she now lives. The next morning, as Yella prepares to get a taxi to catch the train west to Hanover, Ben turns up on her doorstep and offers her a lift. On the short trip to the station, he becomes increasingly hostile, trying to force her to read his new business plan and to come back to him, both romantically and as a business partner. After she refuses, Ben drives off the road as they are crossing the bridge, plunging the car into the river below. Yella reaches the bank, collects her bags, and, despite the trauma of the crash and her exhaustion, manages to reach the station on foot and to get the train. In Hanover, she books into a hotel and encounters businessman Philipp, who seems to know more than she does about the parlous financial state of the company, Alpha Wings, that has offered her the job. On arriving at Alpha Wings the next morning, she realizes that the company has gone bankrupt, and the manager who had appointed her makes a pass at her as they travel together in a taxi away from the business park. Back in her hotel, Yella meets Philipp again, who hires her to accompany him to meetings where, as a representative of a venture capitalist film, he negotiates investments in return for company shares. They rehearse various negotiating strategies that they then perform in meetings to induce companies to accept Philipp’s valuation of their businesses and terms of investment. Increasingly, Yella is disturbed by inexplicable phenomena, the amplified sound of the wind in the trees, of crows, of water, and abruptly by the sight of Ben, who has tracked her down to the hotel in Hanover. Yella attends several business meetings with Philipp, growing increasingly confident in her ability to participate actively in financial negotiations, and, in parallel, increasingly intimate with Philipp. He divulges that he is skimming money to his own account from these deals

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in order to invest in a business opportunity that he has come across that is independent of the venture capitalists employing him. Yella receives Philipp’s proposal to join forces in this project enthusiastically, but Philipp’s scam is exposed, and he loses his job. Yella tries to leverage the large sum needed for Philipp’s scheme out of her final client, Dr Gunthen, who drowns himself under the pressure of her blackmail. Distressed, Yella abruptly finds herself in a taxi and then back in Ben’s car as it approaches the bridge, in a replay of events at the start of the film. This time, weeping, she doesn’t attempt to prevent Ben driving off the bridge, and the film ends as Yella and Ben’s bodies are placed side by side by the emergency services on the riverbank. Yella can be seen as a political film that tries to find images to critically examine the accelerated financialization of life in Germany in the 1990s and early 2000s. As Petzold emphasized in interviews at the time of the film’s release, he aimed to construct a world that ‘has existed alongside us for years, but which still doesn’t have a narrative form’.50 This search for appropriate images and for a narrative form adequate to the changing social and economic situation clearly preoccupied the director. Discussing Farocki’s documentary on venture capital, Nothing Ventured (2004), from which he borrows extensively scenes of negotiation and valuation, Petzold argued that we do not even have any new images of capitalism yet. Sure, we have these airport loading zones, where we see modern people with laptops, reading high-gloss magazines, wearing Rolexes and Burberry clothes. All this is only a surface, but we do not have images for how this new form of capitalism operates. We have books about it, but we do not find those images in films. In cinema, capitalism is still being imaged as Charles Chaplin did in Modern Times (1936).51

He added ‘modern capitalism has to have something sexy about it. [….] However, we still represent this world in old images and caricatures. We don’t have any images for it or narrative forms’.52 With Yella, he reworks the valuation scenarios at the centre of Farocki’s Nothing Ventured to construct a financial ghost story. The eponymous Yella, the quiet auditor whose understanding of finance and speculation allows her increasingly to take centre stage in business deals, occupies an interesting place in the narrative as a fictional characterization of the marginal female colleague in Farocki’s Nothing Ventured who observes the deals, makes brief comments, and breaks the frame to look at the camera.

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Petzold utilizes a narrative trajectory that allows the film to be viewed as a psychological thriller that, in its use of sound and visual framings, also nods to the horror genre.53 In terms of the images that Petzold draws on, he has repeated recourse to a narrative mode that relies on doubling, repetition, and ‘hauntings’ from other films, such as Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962), and Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), as well as to Farocki’s Nothing Ventured, that was considered in detail in Chap. 3 on the financial gaze. Farocki was Petzold’s principal teacher and mentor at the Deutsche Akademie für Film und Fernsehen (dffb) in Berlin, where Petzold studied filmmaking, remaining a life-long friend until his premature death in 2014, and is credited as a key adviser on the screenplays of all Petzold’s films up to that point. Whereas Nothing Ventured is a world-framing exercise, Farocki’s mode of imaging showing how finance comes to create a sense of what is valued in the world through gesture, speech acts, and performance, Yella is an exploration of the process of remaking the individual self as financialized. Farocki’s film deals with the financialized framing of the world, whereas Petzold’s operates as the financialized self-framing, or the ‘becoming economic’, in Petzold’s own words of its eponymous heroine.54 Yella’s debt to the cinematic forerunners named above is notable, from its recurrent use of the colour red and its focus on the linking of changing identity with a financially motivated drive that is also seen in the actions of the eponymous bookkeeper in Hitchcock’s Marnie, to the initial crash in the river and the subsequent spectral road trips of Mary Henry in the cult horror film, Carnival of Souls. Nothing Ventured is the overriding influence on the staging of the business meetings in the second half of the film, where dialogues and set-ups match closely the scenarios that the documentary explores. The films from which Petzold borrows freely also ‘haunt’ Yella and act as another doubling and estranging layer. The way that Yella replays in its river crash scenes the opening sequences of Carnival of Souls, or its restaging of the negotiations at the heart of Nothing Ventured participate in what fellow director Christoph Hochhäusler has described as a prominent trend in contemporary German art cinema. Hochhäusler identifies at work here a ‘meta cinema [….] cinematographic palimpsests, deliberately overwriting “sacred” film texts’.55 Considering cultural texts as palimpsests, as complex layers of hauntings and echoes, ‘accreted rather than authored’ as Mark Fisher has written about the mode of hauntology in early twenty-first-century electronica, allows them to trace possible pasts and futures and to break with temporal linearity.56 More than this,

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though, Yella’s construction out of other images adds to the sense of anti-­ foundationalism that is central to the ideas of leverage introduced above. This multiplication and doubling of images suggest that, for Petzold, we are surrounded by an image-world, rather than a world indexed by a (truthful) representational image. This would suggest that Petzold’s images work relationally, indexed to other prior images and narratives, as much as they ‘represent’ a pro-filmic world. Critics have pointed out previously that Petzold’s cinema is one that generally steers away from attempting to directly represent the world around us in favour of an imaging strategy that involves constituting an alternative but still recognizable counter-world.57 We might understand this general technique of composition in Petzold’s filmmaking as producing particular effects when addressing the themes of finance, as Yella does. Not only is Petzold’s revisiting of past narratives undertaken in the attempt to find ‘new visibilities within what seems familiar and strange’.58 It also allows the viewer to consider that the film operates on the principle of fiat image akin to the economic idea of fiat money, with images acting relationally to each other, rather than to a gold standard index that is an authentic representation of a pro-­ filmic world. Yella’s critique of financialization is not grounded in the first instance on representing faithfully the world of financial deals and attempting to stand outside, offering an ideological critique or a moralizing invective. Instead, Petzold’s film draws on and plays with the world-forming gaze of the venture capitalists that Farocki explores in Nothing Ventured, and folds this into a ghost story, where we see the destruction of Yella, first as a spiteful revenge play by her rejected ex-husband Ben, and second, as a self-induced exposure, in both senses of the word, financial and metaphorical, to the forces and affects of finance capital. Yella explores ways of visualizing the encounter between the self and the processes of finance capital that might have a wide and potentially global resonance, but it is also appropriate first to examine its specific location and its German inflection on imaging finance. Its initial location in the town of Wittenberge, on the border between the former East German Democratic Republic, with its failed attempt to organize a state-controlled planned economy, and the west Federal Republic of Germany, with its market-oriented social market system, allows Yella’s passage between geographical places to also stand in for a cartographic mapping of the passage between two opposing ways to understand and to organize the economy prior to German unification in 1990. The river Elbe, which Yella crosses at the beginning of the film and which will be the site of her death, marked

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for a number of miles the physical border between the two Germanies, until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the internal German border in 1989. The Elbe marks a liminal site historically between two different financial systems, the state-controlled planned economy of the east and the west’s long-­standing social market-oriented system. In unified Germany, it marks off the still unequal economic regions that correspond to the former political divisions and that have experienced uneven development since 1990. The river also marks the boundary between Yella’s present (and the largely erased past of the East German collective system) and her imagined future, the boundary between temporalities of reality and speculation. The east and the west are shown to exist in different temporalities from the start, and Yella’s increasingly desperate attempts at leverage are designed to bridge this gap, to allow her to become future-oriented, but they also place her in a destructive temporal loop. For Petzold, finding images appropriate to Yella’s journey west, to the venture capital world in Hanover, also means to visualize the operations of contemporary finance capital tout court. As outlined in Chap. 2, Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics lectures in 1978–1979 speak pertinently to the centrality of the West German model to the establishment of first ordoliberalism and then neoliberalism throughout the global North. Foucault identifies how the creation of the state of West Germany in 1949 heralded a new way of thinking about the relationship between the political realm and the economic, a new relationship that would become influential for many governments over the course of the next 50 years and more. For Foucault, the Federal Republic of Germany, the western, liberal capitalist part, was established on the understanding that economic freedom would be the foundation upon which the new political state would be grounded, as we saw in Chap. 2. In this way, economic considerations preceded the establishment of a political entity and provided the framework out of which it would grow and develop. The economic, for Foucault, gave birth to a political order, a reversal of the traditional situation whereby a political order decides upon its economic model. Foucault identified in the establishment of the post-war Federal Republic of Germany (i.e. West Germany) a new relationship to time itself, a new temporality based on the primacy of the economic over the political. In a startling passage, Foucault argues that the West German state now grounds its very existence on the ‘practice of economic freedom. [….] [A] new dimension of temporality will be established in Germany that will no longer be a temporality of history, but one of

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economic growth. A reversal of the axis of time, permission to forget, and economic growth are all, I think, at the very heart of the way in which the German economic-political system functions’.59 This system only intensified its commitment to the deregulated market after unification in 1990. The expanded Federal Republic introduced neoliberal measures that opened investment spaces to private finance capital and to controversial reforms of its welfare system, forcing many citizens to relocate to unfamiliar regions in search of more secure employment possibilities.60 This is the route taken by Yella: as Petzold describes it, ‘her destination is simply neoliberalism’.61 As Marco Abel has suggested, the neoliberal measures undertaken by the Federal Republic ‘created fundamentally new conditions of subjectivity from German citizens, not least the conditions that set in motion without allowing them to know why they are in motion, let alone where such motion is supposed to lead them in a country that stubbornly remains foreign to them’.62 Petzold’s mode of depicting this motion across these resonant spaces is to stress Yella’s constant mobility as she seeks to become an effective immaterial worker and subsequently venture capitalist, on empty trains and then in cars driven by Ben and Philipp, where she can never be certain that their goals are fully shared, and across landscapes that are recognizable yet made visually eerie, with the river landscape verdant yet visually empty, marked initially only by a use of sound that is designed to emphasize the unreality of what we see. The heightened sound of the crows, an acoustic trope taken from the horror genre, the wind in the trees, the loud crack in the sky that happens twice in the film, and that could either come from the sonic boom emanating from an unseen jet or from some kind of distant explosion but that is left unexplained, all act as sonic phenomena that mark out the unreality of the events that we encounter. The depopulated railway station and central streets of Wittenberge already suggest a ghost town, and the office spaces and trade fair parks used for the negotiations in Hanover are bereft of any organic community. Despite the seeming unreality of this new economic order, Petzold is careful to trace its impact both on subjectivity and on the bodies of its workforce. The body, according to Deleuze, carries the markers of time and of history. The body registers the past experience of the protagonist, even when the brain might be focused on the present: ‘The body is never in the present, it contains the before and after, tiredness and waiting. Tiredness and waiting, even despair are the attitudes of the body’.63 Of the three East German characters that Yella introduces in Wittenberge, only

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Yella’s father’s body seems to bear some relationship to the past. His muscular frame suggests a lifetime of manual labour, yet he is seen only in the domestic environment, in his role as the caring parent of Yella, and briefly at his work, where he is packing down cardboard for recycling, his physique underused in this contemporary task. Ben is a would-be businessman, whom we see mostly in a suit, as he tries unsuccessfully to make the transition to the demands to be entrepreneurial in the post-wall neoliberal economy. Yet Yella’s body does not, as we might assume, index fatigue or weariness from the breakdown of East Germany, the depopulation of its poorer regions, and the collapse of family life, but quite the opposite; as Ben accurately notes, on her return from the Hanover job interview, her confident walk registers the future, the time after the economic collapse of East Germany, her migration towards the future temporality of the financialization in the west. In discussing the making of Yella, Petzold noted how he had worked with Harun Farocki on the latter’s film about retraining programmes for the unemployed and how he had realized that ‘these are just ghosts who have to act as if they are people, having to sell themselves as something else’.64 This is an idea he then claims to have built on in creating the character of Yella, ‘not someone who is a victim, but rather a perpetrator. She takes off from the East and wants to head west; her destination is simply neoliberalism. To get there, she wants and achieves a new body’.65 Yella’s narrative structure draws on sophisticated patterns and repetitions. This structuring involves a temporal splitting: as she lies initially on the riverbank, the present is opened up and she is able to carry on into the future that she imagines from that present moment. If we think of Yella as a kind of financial ghost story, a dream narrative of someone who is dying, then the film can be grouped with a series of films of the afterlife that achieved prominence in the 2000s. These ‘ghost images’, according to Tom Ruffles or more precisely, narratives of ‘spectral incognizance’ in Aviva Briefel’s analysis, are centred on the continuation of the narrative without any awareness or confirmation of the death of the protagonist, until the final moments of the film, when the central character, sometimes, and the viewers, always, realize that he or she ‘has died or has been involved in a prolonged dying process’.66 Briefel cites the Ambrose Bierce short story, ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ as the literary precedent for many afterlife films such as Carnival of Souls (Henk Harvey 1962) and The Sixth Sense (M.  Night Shalayman, 1999), both of which were noted by Petzold as influences on

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the narrative form of Yella.67 In Beirce’s story, the Confederate supporter Peyton Farquhar, at the moment of his hanging by Union soldiers in the American Civil War, hallucinates his escape from the gallows. Bierce’s tale might encourage a reading that in war deaths are inevitable, and it is futile to romanticize alternative outcomes; to use this as the basis for a financial ghost story like Petzold’s might lead to a similar assumption that there can be no romanticization of a commitment to a lifeworld constructed by financial speculation. However, what the director takes from the narrative form of spectral incognizance is the opportunity to allow Yella to ‘become economic’ as a spectral agent, free of the baggage of everyday concerns: ‘lean, streamlined. She has no ballast’, in Petzold’s own words, drawing on Marc Augé’s sociology of late modernity, his extended exploration of ‘non-places’, of the contemporary spaces of transit and of transaction.68 Petzold suggests that Augé’s notion of the traveller without ballast is exactly the kind of identity that Yella finds appealing in her process of becoming-economic in the west. It underlines just why she finds the financial negotiations, balance sheets, and business plans attractive: this is the fascination she feels for the world of finance that she is composing during her time in Hanover.69 But more than this, there seems an inevitability that the search by filmmakers for an appropriate narrative form for our financial times should alight on the ghost story, and specifically on the form of spectral incognizance. Isn’t finance itself a spectral form? As Joseph Vogl opens his account of the contemporary finance economy, The Specter of Capital, ‘[p]olitical economy has always had an affinity with spectrology pointing to invisible hands and other ghostly presences to explain the course of economic events. This may well be because there is something uncanny about how, in economic processes, circulating objects and signs take on a spectral willfulness’.70 Yellas spectral position is overdetermined from the start, yet it is useful to look specifically at how Petzold sets out two parallel lines of development in his film, the turning point by which we can as viewers, albeit belatedly, recognize Yella becoming spectral and the points by which we can chart Yella becoming economic. The process by which the viewer can see Yella ‘becoming economic’ is marked out by three encounters which show her looking at, or refusing to, specific financial images. As David Harvey reminds us of Marx’s argument, that ‘capital is not a thing but a process in which money is perpetually sent in search of more money’, these three encounters are crucial to her decision-­making and point towards a financially successful future if her speculative bets pay off.71 On the first drive across Wittenberge to the

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railway station, Ben passes on inside knowledge that a new regional airport will soon be green lit nearby creating technological and labour demands that will offer opportunities for early investors even in this economically deteriorating and rapidly depopulating landscape. Ben’s business plan, a speculative wager on this present future, would deliver huge profits, yet it is built on what turns out to be incorrect information. Yella refuses to look at the business file that he thrusts at her aggressively while driving, as part of her estrangement from him comes from the fact that she has already lost faith in his ability to speculate successfully, as Ben notes bitterly. This refusal to look at the plan further antagonizes Ben, who drives off the road when they reach the bridge, and into the river. The second financial image is offered as she sits quietly reading in a bland hotel dining room in the western city of Hanover. She looks up as a man leaves his table in front of her, leaving his laptop open on a series of spreadsheets. What catches Yella’s eye here is the image of the balance sheets on the laptop, rather than the man. Abruptly, the images of spreadsheets are replaced by the graphic of a screensaver of an electronically rendered wave pattern. Yella is transfixed by the image of the waves, staring at the laptop’s screen until her gaze is disturbed by the reappearance of the businessman, Philipp, who catches her staring and asks her brusquely if she is interested in balance sheets. This whole sequence is pivotal for the narrative plot, as it is both the prelude to a new love story for Yella and an important milestone in her becoming a financial agent. Worth noting, though, is that her gaze is captured by the images of finance on the screen, and then held by the images of the electronic waves, and that this fascinated gaze, an erotic of looking, actually precedes her noticing the man himself. The screensaver image of crashing electronic waves alludes to the watery visual and acoustic signs that punctuate the film after the initial crash into the river.72 But it is also an attempt to crystallize both the possibility and impossibility of the adequate financial image for Petzold. As a film, Yella stands on its own as a distinctive narrative, but also it works, as Petzold’s films often do, as a reworking and relayering of previous films. In returning to key set-ups, narratives, or image sequences from earlier films, Petzold invites us to reflect on the status of the image and its power for us at different times. As noted, Farocki’s Nothing Ventured is one of the most important source works for Yella, yet it is images from another Farocki film, his highly acclaimed film essay Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges, 1988) that resonate with the waves screensaver. Farocki’s film is a highly challenging

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and ambiguous essay that combines a range of images from diverse source material in exploring its central theme, that of the (wilful) blindness of the Allied forces in World War II to the existence of the National Socialist death camps, despite extensive visual evidence of their existence that had been collected by Allied aircraft returning from bombing raids. Farocki’s film brings together visual material that documents how two CIA analysts retrieved this photographic evidence from US archives, with other photographic documentation of the death camps, and still and moving images from a series of histories of automation, classification (identification photographs of unveiled Algerian women), and representation. As D.  N. Rodowick notes, one repeated motif in this varied collection of image material is the return to a video recording of a specifically constructed laboratory in Hanover (the site of Yella’s hotel and venture capital negotiations), which simulates wave patterns and provides data for modelling their effects. Images of the wave-modelling lab feature at the beginning of Farocki’s film and recur at several points. For Farocki, then, in Rodowick’s reading, the image of the technological production of waves acts in this complex film as a recurring instance of the mechanized simulation of nature, and of the ability of technology to reduce the infinitely varied force of the waves in nature to data and to mathematical and algorithmic models.73 That Petzold should choose the wave screensaver as the image that fascinates and helps to lure Yella further into her encounter with finance then seems to have a palpable logic. The screen images of spreadsheets that cut into the computer graphic of the wave pattern acts as a mise en abyme for the film, as the world of things, people, processes, and labour becomes first abstracted and recoded into a mapping model of the financial spreadsheet, and then subsequently into an even more abstract pattern of electronic lines rising and falling, crashing into the future to rearrange themselves in cyclical fashion. The third moment when Yella looks directly at financial information, comes late on in a sequence which replays her drive with Ben from the start of the film. Philipp discloses to her that his participation in the venture capital negotiations carries a double logic. His overt search for company profits masks a deeper rationale, which is to divert some of the investment into his own accounts, to allow him to invest in a drilling company with a patent that Philipp considers having much wider implementation possibilities. As Philipp describes his plan, the links to the negotiations at the heart of Farocki’s Nothing Ventured are undeniable, in that the engineering company in Farocki’s work also hoped to secure an engineering patent with a wide applicability. The revelation of Philipp’s true

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desire comes in the images and information in the business plan, a set of financial images that are revealed to Yella but hidden from the viewer. She sees here an image of a higher form of finance capitalism that truly inspires her, and which explains her attempts to secure money from Dr Gunthen. For Marco Abel, Philipp’s revelation is the key scene of the film as it shows ‘his desires for the game of venture capitalism itself for the ability to participate in it at a higher, more intense level’.74 Yet this is only one in a series of Yella’s encounters with an imaging of finance which motivate her journey. Petzold’s structuring of the three moments of imaging finance suggests that Yella was always already fascinated by the possibilities of committing fully to the world of leverage. Spectral incognizance, and the split between the present future and the future present, is an appropriate way to think about the narrative form of Yella. The sequences that come after the initial crash into the river can be understood as a Freudian Traumarbeit of life under finance capital: an imagined world, how Yella images herself in a Germany of the future, composed out of many of the elements of the old, except that in her fantasy, these elements are to a noticeable degree upgraded, renewed, and made more luxurious, sexy even, under the sign of an intensified financialization of everyday life in the west. Philipp closely resembles Ben in appearance, yet appears kinder, calmer, less manic and hostile, and certainly more economically successful. Philipp’s car, a new and top-of-the-­range Audi estate, comes in the same shade of dark red as Ben’s ageing Range Rover. There are other reworkings in Yella’s spectral state of conversations and microevents that took place before the first crash. At an early business meeting with Philipp and a company seeking investment, a scenario that borrows greatly from the mise en scène and dialogue of the meetings in Farocki’s Nothing Ventured, she draws on Ben’s account on the fatal drive to the bridge over the Elbe of how his computer hardware and software programmes were hugely downgraded in value. This damaging valuation is largely to blame for his bankruptcy, in Ben’s view, and yet Yella uses her knowledge of how hardware might be downgraded to identify how the company is manipulating its valuations of assets and to exert pressure in the negotiation. At another point, though half-asleep, she watches Philipp peel an orange, just as her father had before she left home. Philipp’s ‘I love you’ echoes Ben’s words before the initial crash. Yella’s bundling of cash notes into an envelope to send back east to her father mirrors her father’s attempts to give her his cash savings to help her in her move westwards. Dr Gunthen’s death by drowning in water near to his family home towards the climax of the film reworks Yella’s own imminent fate.

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The scenario featuring Dr Gunthen deserves note given that the encounter that Yella has with the Gunthen family and home is itself reworked within the structure of the dream, the first time occupying an inexplicable and casual moment in Yella’s journey to the west and the second a moment of intensified distress, as the degree of Yella’s recourse to leverage and blackmail in pursuit of her financial goals becomes clearer. This scenario is first constituted immediately after Yella arrives in Hanover after appearing to survive the crash into the river. As she walks from the station, she looks across the road at what appears to be an affluent family surrounding an expensive green Jaguar outside their large family home. There is a disconcerting and overlong exchange of looks between Yella and the person we can assume is the wife and mother in this family, accompanied by the amplified sound of birds cawing. There is no narrative explanation given at this point for this scene. We might assume in retrospect that the scenario of domestic contentment and affluence represents, for Yella, the image of her aspirations and a visualization of what being successful in her sector might afford her, in contrast to her limited circumstances in the east. But the sense of disquiet that Petzold creates here is noticeable, even before the film returns to the family and house as it reaches its climax in Yella’s extortion attempts. As Roger F. Cook has proposed in a detailed reading of this recurrent spectral scenario, the scene on the driveway with the husband and daughter exiting the green Jaguar and going inside the large house is replicated, although in its second iteration the house seems to have been relocated into a more rural setting.75 Given that Yella’s attempt to blackmail Gunthen into releasing the large amount of money that she needs to support Philipp’s scheme misfires fatally, we can now assume that the earlier constitution of the dream house, family, and car that Yella had constructed initially as part of her anticipatory dying vision of life in the west was always already marked by Yella’s awareness of the necessity of acting monstrously to fully achieve such aspirations. For Briefel, narratives of spectral incognizance utilize the idea that dying is a cognitive as well as a corporeal act, where protagonists can make a cognitive mistake about their ontological status that is later revealed to them over the course of the narrative. Briefel argues that such narratives suspend traditional linearity and temporality by utilizing a narrative structure that ‘prioritises circularity and repetition over linear progress’.76 The present moment in narratives of spectral incognizance is, I would argue, often distorted, elongated, or looped to illustrate a possible future, a future imagined, fantasized, or hallucinated from the dying present perspective of

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the protagonist, or what might be termed a ‘present future’, in Esposito’s terms. But our current anticipation of the future is always different, Esposito maintains, from the future present and all the possibilities of the present that may become actualized. Esposito argues that the future remains meaningful ‘so long as it remains open and unpredictable, so long as it presents a horizon of indeterminate possibilities’.77 Yella’s increasingly driven use of her own leverage for a narrowing, selfish gain reduces the variety of future presents—as Esposito proposes, ‘a future reduced to a single sequence of events would no longer be a proper future’.78 This aligns with the ‘right to the future tense’ outlined, in a different economic context, by Shoshana Zuboff, the ability to ‘imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future’.79. Similarly, in Yella’s engagement with the temporality of finance, it is the future that she encounters that reveals to her how narrow and bleak a life committed to finance capital might be. Yella’s belated realization that she has become the monstrous form in this psychological horror film, owing to her pursuit of success in the financialized world, is what brings her back to the original crash scene and what lies behind her refusal to seize the wheel to prevent Ben’s murderous plan. For Yella to step out of the past and of the present, to fully commit to the future, she has to speculate, she has to become a being who bets on the future. To be properly speculative, she has to leave behind the groundedness that comes with believing that things in her East German childhood world have a fundamental value, and has to become light, mobile, and as fictional and devoid of substance as possible. To speculate fully, as Petzold seems to suggest, she has to become a spectre, a liminal, spectral being, adrift from the past and present. Here we might fall back on the etymological link that always already forges a relationship between speculation and the spectral. The Latin root word, spect, meaning ‘see’, and so a spectre is a being who appears to someone, allowing itself to be seen; to speculate, on the other hand, is to ‘see’ something in a certain way that may or may not be factual, but which, it is anticipated, will be confirmed at a future point. And yet, as a spectral form, Petzold tells us that she cannot escape those other ghosts pursuing her, the ghosts of communism, or the ‘specters of Marx’ that Derrida sees haunting post-Marxist Europe after 1989.80 Petzold’s understanding here with its nods to Marx and Engels and the famous opening of The Communist Manifesto (1848) opens up a reading of Yella that not only alludes to her formative upbringing in the socialist East German Democratic Republic, but also to the wider sense of the haunting of Europe after 1989 by the ghosts of both

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the idea of communism and its failed implementation in the disintegrated Soviet bloc. Here, as Yella attempts to ‘become-economic’ by embracing the increasing financialization of Germany, she also becomes a spectral form that cannot fully escape the hauntings of the Marxist past. For Derrida, ‘the time is out of joint’, so a linear teleological progression towards a post-Marxist, capitalist future will be disturbed by this ‘state of a debt’ as regards Marx and Marxism, a spectral phenomenon ‘that cannot be established on a balance sheet or an exhaustive record in a static or statistical manner’. 81 As Jaimey Fisher has noted, connecting up Petzold’s films with Derrida, ‘ghosts suggest the noncontemporaneity, the non-­ identity, of the present with itself’.82 In this reading of Derridean hauntology, in which the ‘spectres of Marx’ force our gaze backwards in time at a project that has ended, hauntology alludes to a sense of something being over and being mourned from a present perspective, something no longer graspable, the once-possible utopian promises of collectivity, the futures that are now lost to us, the fragments of a yearned-for future that never came to pass or was cancelled before being fully actualized. In this way, Yella’s father is also something of a ‘ghost’ in the first half of the film, a being who exists in the present but seems to be something surplus to it, an overhang from the East German past. In Yella’s decision to leave her father behind, we can see her separation from a former way of living, one that belongs in the past and cannot find its way fully into the present and future. But Yella’s spectrality, her link to a Derridean ‘hauntology’, can be understood also from a different angle. It is not just that the present is non-identical with itself because of its failure to work with and grow from a past that has been erased, leaving it adrift, in this case, from the more collective-oriented security of life in East Germany that was largely lost in unification. Yella as a film constructs a world in its second half that allows the eponymous character to imagine herself, unlike her East German father, as fully post-industrial, free from the failed patriarchal speculation that her husband Ben embodies, a creative free force riding the flows of numbers and business plans, purely ideal and foundationless. Yet the materiality of what financialization involves in terms of labour, investment, leverage and extracting value, pulls her back into seeing that future as a nightmare to be evaded, an enslavement to a similarly grinding loser-­ producing, deal-making oppressive regime that Ben had already offered her in miniature in the East and from which she fled. Yella’s time in Hanover in the second half of the film is a haunting not from a lost past but from an impossible future, a version of a time not over but of a time to come that she anticipates but that she ultimately refuses. Yella is a ghost

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in the western part of Germany whose virtual journey is one of anticipation, not recollection, an engagement with what has not yet happened in the present but which might be realized, the virtual made actual at some later date. In this way, Yella’s spectrality, her mode of haunting, belongs to the ‘not yet’ rather than the ‘no longer’, to employ the modes that Martin Hagglund has identified in his discussion of Derridean hauntology.83 For Mark Fisher, Hagglund’s helpful analysis of the two-way directionality of haunting allows us to ‘think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing. [….] The late capitalist world, governed by the abstractions of finance, is very clearly a world in which virtualities are effective, and perhaps the most ominous “spectre of Marx” is capital itself’.84 For Fisher, the era of what he famously termed ‘capitalist realism’, the two decades that led from the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall to the financial crisis of 2008 and beyond, was haunted not only by the spectres of Marx but by the disappearance of the possibility of an alternative to the march of the markets and finance capital. It is this haunting that feels more pertinent to Yella’s own situation, the double-edged impossibility of both resisting finance capital and at the same time the horror of ultimately giving in to its pull. Yella is, then, fated to speculate, to leverage what she can, in a newly merged country whose past has been largely erased and its industry decommissioned, to try to secure future success. Yella’s way into the future is to relocate to the west and to turn to the financial sector, to speculation, investment, and leverage. As Leigh Claire La Berge has written acutely of Konings’s work on leverage, ‘[t]o be a creature of modernity, one is forced to leverage what one has. One can’t recuse oneself from leveraging. One cannot get outside a leveraged world’.85 This forward-oriented, foundationless subjectivity is personified by Yella, caught up in the instigation of financial transactions that increasingly slip her grasp. As Konings has written in discussions of his theory of leverage as essential to understanding the rationality of neoliberalism, In other words, the strength of neoliberalism has always resided not in the production of a theoretical master plan, but in the ability to do something productive with the awareness that the successful execution of a master plan is inherently impossible. Characterized by a tremendous degree of comfort with the speculative dimension, it has developed the logic of leverage into an economy of provocation and blackmail.86

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It is this ‘economy of blackmail’ that comes to the fore as Yella moves deeper into the world of leverage. With Yella’s journey into a financial heart of darkness, however, and with her misguided attempt at leverage over Dr Gunthen, she has taken on some of the traits that Ben exhibited earlier. In becoming-economic, she has ultimately had to become monstrous and to see the world with the kind of violent and predatory perspective that Ben displayed. Ben had also tried leveraging Yella to return to him, which failed. Petzold’s images suggest that leverage is only a useful force in the financial world up to a point, where it tips over, or runs the danger of tipping over, into coercion and violence. Like the other films of spectral incognizance, the narrative of Yella must end up back where it began, returning in a loop to its starting point. In this, Petzold’s deployment of a particularly financialized spectral incognizance offers us a film that aligns with recent philosophical thinking on finance, history, and time. As Noam Yuran has written recently, the key temporal narrative form of finance might be considered as a form of ‘belated recognition’. He proposes that ‘history in financial times must be conceived as an eventless history, where events, if they indeed occur, cannot but appear as recurrence or revelation, as what has already happened before its time’ (my italics in both instances).87 Once she has realized the suffering she will cause in this present future as a financial agent, Yella abandons her quest to become-­economic and returns to consciousness back in the taxi and then back in Ben’s Range Rover, nearing the bridge. Yella accepts death in preference to a financialized future. Yella is a ghostly reimagining, half a century later, of the entrepreneurial financial agent, Rosemarie, in The Girl Rosemarie, discussed as a case study in Chap. 2. Yella is punished, as Rosemarie is in the end, for becoming economic and for playing her hand too forcefully in a gendered context. However, Yella is a film that speaks to contemporary finance capital, in its engagement with newer dimensions of financial time. It explores a new range of images and a narrative form appropriate to the temporality and seductive qualities of finance capital. Its internal plays with time, with repetitions, doublings, and hauntings culminating in the narrative climax where Yella cannot go on with the speculative existence she has set out upon, and she returns, with a literal jolt in the film, to the same point in space and time that we already know from the beginning, the journey to her imminent destruction. Yella’s journey is one that is out of time, a loop or rupture in the normal linearity that we often expect from narrative cinema. Its very untimeliness in this respect allows it to think through the logic of finance so effectively. Yet it is not just in its internal narrative that it breaks with our expectations of temporality. Petzold, as a filmmaker

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deeply concerned with the emerging inequalities in Germany after unification, with the gross and sustained economic imbalance between parts of the east and the largely booming west to the fore, is sensitive to the very real material inequality that the virtual and post-foundational elements of financialization bring in their wake. Petzold’s film was made in 2007, before the financial crisis. It is not a response to, but somehow anticipates, the destructive and nihilistic endpoint of a financialized logic in its story. Yella is a film about financial speculation that is untimely and yet anticipatory, a film that insists that the encounter between the moving image and financial logic is risky, speculative, yet vitally productive for new ways of thinking through our times.

Notes 1. D.N.  Rodowick (2007), The Virtual Life of Film, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, p. 4. 2. Mary Ann Doane (2002), The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, p. 4. 3. Doane cites Simmel’s ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’,’The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H.  Wolff, London, 1950, 410-413. Doane (2002), The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, p. 4. 4. Mary Ann Doane (2002), The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, p. 4. 5. Mary Ann Doane (2002), The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, p. 10. 6. Jimena Canales (2009), A Tenth of a Second: A History, Chicago IL and London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 14-19. 7. Mary Ann Doane (2002), The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, p.190. 8. Mary Ann Doane (2002), The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, p. 230. 9. Calum Watt (2022), Derivative Images: Financial Derivatives in French Film, Literature and Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp.  59-60. Watt’s succinct definition draws on Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty (2006), Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of

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Financial Derivatives, Capital, and Class, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 12. 10. Joseph Vogl (2012), ’Taming Time: Media of Financialization’, Grey Room, Winter 2012, p. 74. 11. Joseph Vogl (2012), ’Taming Time: Media of Financialization’, Grey Room, Winter, p. 77. See here also Elena Esposito, The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society, Cheltenham, UK-Northampton, MA, 2011. 12. Joseph Vogl (2012), ’Taming Time: Media of Financialization’, Grey Room, Winter, p. 78. 13. Joseph Vogl (2012), ’Taming Time: Media of Financialization’, Grey Room, Winter, p. 78. 14. Joseph Vogl (2012), ’Taming Time: Media of Financialization’, Grey Room, Winter 2012, p. 77. Vogl is alluding here to Samuel Weber’s work in Geld ist Zeit: Gedanken zu Credit und Krise, trans. Marion Picker, Berlin, 2009. 15. Joseph Vogl (2015), The Specter of Capital. Translated by Joachim Redner and Robert Savage. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, p. 3. 16. Zachary Formwalt (2017), ‘Images of Capital: An interview with Zachary Formwalt’, Contours, 8. http://www.sfu.ca/humanities-­institute/contours/issue8/theory/5.html. Accessed 25 July 2017. 17. Jussi Parikka (2014), What is Media Archaeology?, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 14. See also Thomas Elsaesser (2006), ‘Early Film History and MultiMedia: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?’ in New Media, Old Media. A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, New York, p. 17. 18. On using artistic forms to practise media archaeology, see Jussi Parikka (2014), What is Media Archaeology?, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 136-158. 19. Joseph Vogl (2012), ’Taming Time: Media of Financialization’, Grey Room, Winter pp. 73-74. 20. Joseph Vogl (2012), ’Taming Time: Media of Financialization’, Grey Room, Winter, p. 73. 21. Joseph Vogl (2012), ’Taming Time: Media of Financialization’, Grey Room, Winter, p. 73. 22. Zachary Formwalt (2017), ‘Images of Capital: An interview with Zachary Formwalt’, Contours, 8. http://www.sfu.ca/humanities-­institute/contours/issue8/theory/5.html. last accessed 25 July 2017. 23. Zachary Formwalt (2017), ‘Images of Capital: An interview with Zachary Formwalt’, Contours, 8. http://www.sfu.ca/humanities-­institute/contours/issue8/theory/5.html. last accessed 25 July 2017. 24. Marina Vishmidt (2019), Speculation as a Mode of Production, Leiden: Brill, pp. 123-124.

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25. Zachary Formwalt (2015), Three Exchanges, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum/Roma Publications, pp. 52-53. 26. See Alberto Toscano (2016), ‘The World is Already without Us’, Social Text, 127, June, pp. 112-116. 27. Eric de Bruyn (2015), ‘Three Exchanges’, in Zachary Formwalt, Three Exchanges, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum/Roma Publications, p. 77. 28. Zachary Formwalt (2017), ‘Images of Capital: An interview with Zachary Formwalt’, Contours, 8. http://www.sfu.ca/humanities-­institute/contours/issue8/theory/5.html. last accessed 25 July 2017. 29. Mary Ann Doane (2002), The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, p. 3. 30. Joseph Vogl (2012), ’Taming Time: Media of Financialization’, Grey Room, Winter, p. 82. 31. Joseph Vogl (2012), ’Taming Time: Media of Financialization’, Grey Room, Winter, p. 83. 32. Steven Shaviro (2010), Post-Cinematic Affect, Winchester: Zero Books. p. 52. 33. Christian Klöckner and Stefanie Müller (2018), ‘Financial Times: Competing Temporalities in the Age of Finance Capitalism’, Finance and Society, 4(1), p. 1. 34. Christian Klöckner and Stefanie Müller (2018), ‘Financial Times: Competing Temporalities in the Age of Finance Capitalism’, Finance and Society, 4(1), p. 5. 35. Elena Esposito (2011), The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society. Cheltenham and Northampton MA: Edward Elgar, p. 2. 36. Elena Esposito (2011), The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society. Cheltenham and Northampton MA: Edward Elgar, p. 1. 37. Elena Esposito (2011), The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society. Cheltenham and Northampton MA: Edward Elgar, p. 105. 38. Elena Esposito (2011), The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society. Cheltenham and Northampton MA: Edward Elgar, p. 4. 39. Elena Esposito (2011), The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society. Cheltenham and Northampton MA: Edward Elgar, p. 3. 40. Lisa Adkins (2018), The Time of Money, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, p. 29.

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41. Lisa Adkins (2018), The Time of Money, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, p. 30. 42. Christian Petzold quoted in Anke Leweke (2013), ‘French Cancan in the DDR: An Exchange with Christian Petzold’ in Rajendra Roy and Anke Leweke (eds) The Berlin School: Films from the Berliner Schule. New York: MOMA, p. 35. 43. Martijn Konings (2018), Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 10. 44. Franco ‘Bifi’ Berardi (2011), After the Future. Edited by Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thorburn. Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore: AK Press, p. 78. 45. Marina Vishmidt (2018), Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, Leiden: Brill, p.150. 46. Martijn Konings (2018), Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 3. 47. Martijn Konings. 2018. Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 7. 48. Martijn Konings. 2018. Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 14. 49. Matthias Thiemann (2018), ‘On the constitutive effects of contingent associations’, Finance and Society, 4(2), p. 194. 50. Christian Petzold, in Abel, Marco. 2008. The Cinema of Identification Gets on my Nerves: An Interview With Christian Petzold. Cineaste Summer. https://www.cineaste.com/summer2008/the-cinema-of-identification-gets-on-my-nerves. Accessed 28 March 2019. 51. Christian Petzold, quoted in Marco Abel (2013), The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School. Screen Cultures and the Visual. Rochester, NY: Camden House, p. 265. 52. Christian Petzold, in Abel, Marco. 2008. The Cinema of Identification Gets on my Nerves: An Interview With Christian Petzold. Cineaste Summer. https://www.cineaste.com/summer2008/the-cinema-of-identification-gets-on-my-nerves. Accessed 28 March 2019. 53. For a detailed account of how horror tropes are ‘repurposed’ in Petzold’s film, see Jaimey Fisher (2010), ‘German Autoren dialogue with Hollywood? Refunctioning the horror genre in Christian Petzold’s Yella (2007)’ in Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood (eds), New Directions in German Cinema, pp. 186-203. Fisher argues that Petzold draws on genre generally across his films to achieve a ‘political refunctionalisation of generally apolitical genres’, p. 192. 54. Katja Nicodemus and Christof Siemens (2009), ‘Arm filmt gut? Das gefällt mir nicht’. Die Zeit, 8 January. Accessed 1 March 2019. 55. Christoph Hochhäusler (2013), ‘On Whose Shoulders: The Question of Aesthetic Indebtedness’ in Rajendra Roy and Anke Leweke (eds) The Berlin School: Films from the Berliner Schule. New York: MOMA, p. 24.

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56. Mark Fisher (2013), ‘The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology’, Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 5 (2), p. 53. 57. See Marco Abel (2013), The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School. Screen Cultures and the Visual. Rochester, NY: Camden House, pp. and Gözde Naiboglu (2018), Post-unification Turkish German Cinema: Work, Globalization, and Politics Beyond Representation. NY and London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 58. Gözde Naiboglu (2018), Post-unification Turkish German Cinema: Work, Globalization, and Politics Beyond Representation. NY and London: Palgrave Macmillan, p.176 (on ereader). 59. Michel Foucault. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics. Edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell. New  York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 86. 60. Marco Abel argues that it is the intensification of the defining liberal economic condition of Germany that is the ‘truly era-defining event for postwall Germany’, rather than the disappearance of the distinctive polity of the East. See Abel (2013), The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School. Screen Cultures and the Visual. Rochester, NY: Camden House, p. 301. 61. Christian Petzold interviewed in Jaimey Fisher (2013), Christian Petzold. Contemporary Film Directors. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, p. 159. 62. Marco Abel (2013) The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School. Screen Cultures and the Visual. Rochester, NY: Camden House, p. 90. 63. Gilles Deleuze (2005), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London and New York: Continuum, p. 182. 64. Christian Petzold in Jaimey Fisher (2013), Christian Petzold. Contemporary Film Directors. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, p. 159. 65. Christian Petzold in Jaimey Fisher (2013), Christian Petzold. Contemporary Film Directors. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, p. 159 66. Aviva Briefel (2009), ‘What Some Ghosts Don’t Know: Spectral Incognizance and the Horror Film’, Narrative 17, January, p. 96. See also Tom Ruffles. 2004. Ghost Stories: Cinema of the Afterlife, Jefferson, NC: McFarlane. 67. Christian Petzold in Marco Abel (2008) ‘The Cinema of Identification Gets on my Nerves: An Interview With Christian Petzold’. Cineaste Summer. https://www.cineaste.com/summer2008/the-­cinema-­of-­ identification-­gets-­on-­my-­nerves. Accessed 28 March 2019. 68. Christian Petzold in Marco Abel. 2008. ‘The Cinema of Identification Gets on my Nerves: An Interview With Christian Petzold’. Cineaste Summer. https://www.cineaste.com/summer2008/the-­cinema-­of-­ identification-­gets-­on-­my-­nerves. Accessed 28 March 2019.

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69. Christian Petzold quoted in Anke Leweke (2013), ‘French Cancan in the DDR: An Exchange with Christian Petzold’ in Rajendra Roy and Anke Leweke (eds) The Berlin School: Films from the Berliner Schule. New York: MOMA. p.34. 70. Joseph Vogl (2015), The Specter of Capital. Translated by Joachim Redner and Robert Savage. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. ix. 71. David Harvey (2011), The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, London: Profile, p. 40. 72. See also Kurt Buhanan (2016), ‘What’s Wrong with this Picture? Image-­ Ethics in Christian Petzold’s Films’, The German Quarterly, 89 (4), Fall, p. 486. 73. D. N. Rodowick (2017), What Philosophy Wants from Images. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 83. 74. Marco Abel (2009), ‘German Desire in the Age of Venture Capitalism’. Booklet accompanying the US DVD of Yella, p. 6, (italics in original). 75. Roger F. Cook (2015), ‘Embodied simulation, empathy, and social cognition: Berlin School lessons for social theory’, Screen 56:2, Summer, pp. 166-169. 76. Aviva Briefel (2009), ‘What Some Ghosts Don’t Know: Spectral Incognizance and the Horror Film’, Narrative 17, January, p. 96. 77. Elena Esposito (2011), The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society. Cheltenham and Northampton MA: Edward Elgar, p. 179. 78. Elena Esposito (2011), The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society. Cheltenham and Northampton MA: Edward Elgar, p. 179. 79. Shoshana Zuboff (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, London: Profile, p. 20. 80. Christian Petzold in Marco Abel (2008), ‘The Cinema of Identification Gets on my Nerves: An Interview With Christian Petzold’. Cineaste Summer. https://www.cineaste.com/summer2008/the-­cinema-­of-­ identification-­gets-­on-­my-­nerves. Accessed 28 March 2019. 81. Jacques Derrida (2006), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York and London: Routledge Classics, pp. 116-7, italics in original. 82. Jaimey Fisher (2013), Christian Petzold. Contemporary Film Directors. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, p. 16. On Derrida, spectrality, and Petzold’s cinema, see also Alice Bardan (2020), ‘Europe, spectrality and ‘post-mortem cinema’: The haunting of history in Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018) and Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre (2011), Northern Lights 18, pp. 115-129. 83. Martin Hagglund (2008), Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 82.

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84. Mark Fisher (2014), Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. Winchester, UK and Washington, US: Zer0 Books, pp. 18-19. 85. Leigh Claire La Berge (2018), ‘Money is time: On the possibility of critique after neoliberalism’. Finance and Society, 4(2), p. 201. 86. Martin Konings (2018), ‘The logic of leverage: Reflections on post-­ foundational political economy’, Finance and Society 4(2), p. 211. 87. Noam Yuran (2020), ‘The cunning of stupidity’, Finance and Society, 6(2), p. 145. Yuran’s comment comes as a summative response to a much longer argument about the philosophy of financial history made in Amin Samman (2020), History in Financial Times, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Cook, Roger F. 2015. Embodied Simulation, Empathy, and Social Cognition: Berlin School Lessons for Social Theory. Screen 56 (2, Summer): 153–171. Cook, Roger F., Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, and Brad Prager, eds. 2013. Berlin School Glossary: An ABC of the New Wave in German Cinema. Bristol UK and Chicago IL: Intellect. de Bruyn, Eric. 2015. Three Exchanges. In Three Exchanges, ed. Zachary Formwalt. Rome: Amsterdam. Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London and New York: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. 2006. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York and London: Routledge Classics. Doane, Mary Ann. 2002. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2014. Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight Lines. (Film Culture in Transition). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Esposito, Elena. 2011. The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society. Cheltenham and Northampton MA: Edward Elgar. Fisher, Jaimey. 2010. German Autoren dialogue with Hollywood? Refunctioning the horror genre in Christian Petzold’s Yella (2007). In New Directions in German Cinema, ed. Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood, 186–203. London: I. B. Tauris. ———. 2013a. Christian Petzold. Contemporary Film Directors. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Fisher, Mark. 2013b. The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5 (2): 42–55. ———. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. Winchester, UK and Washington, US: Zer0 Books. Formwalt, Zachary. 2015. Three Exchanges. Rome: Amsterdam. ———. 2017. Images of Capital: An Interview with Zachary Formwalt. Contours 8. http://www.sfu.ca/humanities-­institute/contours/issue8/theory/5.html. Accessed 25 July 2017. Foucault, Michel. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics, ed. Michel Senellart, Trans. Graham Burchell. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hagglund, Martin. 2008. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Harvey, David. 2011. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. London: Profile. Hochhäusler, Christoph. 2013. On Whose Shoulders: The Question of Aesthetic Indebtedness. In The Berlin School: Films from the Berliner Schule, ed. Rajendra Roy and Anke Leweke, 20–29. New York: MOMA. Klöckner, Christian, and Stefanie Müller. 2018. Financial Times: Competing Temporalities in the Age of Finance Capitalism. Finance and Society 4 (1): 1–14.

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Konings, Martijn. 2018a. Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2018b. The Logic of Leverage: Reflections on Post-Foundational Political Economy. Finance and Society 4 (2): 205–213. La Berge, Leigh Claire. 2018. Money Is Time: On the Possibility of Critique after Neoliberalism. Finance and Society 4 (2): 199–204. Leweke, Anke. 2013. French Cancan in the DDR: An Exchange with Christian Petzold. In The Berlin School: Films from the Berliner Schule, ed. Rajendra Roy and Anke Leweke, 32–43. New York: MOMA. MacKenzie, Donald. 2019. Just How Fast? On the Increasing Speed of High-­ Frequency Trading. London Review of Books 7 March: 23–24. Miller, Matthew D. 2012. Facts of Migration, Demands on Identity: Christian Petzold’s Yella and Jerichow in Comparison. The German Quarterly 85 (1, Winter): 55–76. Muniesa, Fabian. 2018. Finance Ticking Away. European Journal of Sociology 59(3): 460–463. Accessed 6 March 2019. Naiboglu, Gözde. 2018. Post-unification Turkish German Cinema: Work, Globalization, and Politics Beyond Representation. NY and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nicodemus, Katja, and Christof Siemens. 2009. Arm filmt gut? Das gefällt mir nicht. Die Zeit, 8 January. Accessed 1 March 2019. Parikka, Jussi. 2014. What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press. Rodowick, D.N. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2017. What Philosophy Wants from Images. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Roy, Rajendra. 2013. Women’s Lab: The Female Protagonist in the Berlin School. In The Berlin School: Films from the Berliner Schule, ed. Rajendra Roy and Anke Leweke, 46–57. New York: MOMA. Roy, Rajendra, and Anke Leweke, eds. 2013. The Berlin School: Films from the Berliner Schule. New York: MOMA. Ruffles, Tom. 2004. Ghost Stories: Cinema of the Afterlife. Jefferson, NC: McFarlane. Samman, Amin. 2020. History in Financial Times. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Shaviro, Steven. 2010. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zer0 Books. Thiemann, Matthias. 2018. On the Constitutive Effects of Contingent Associations. Finance and Society 4 (2): 193–198. Toscano, Alberto. 2016. The World is Already without Us. Social Text 127, June: 109–124. Vishmidt, Marina. 2019. Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital. Chicago, IL: Haymarket.

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Vogl, Joseph. 2012. Taming Time: Media of Financialization. Grey Room, 46 (Winter): 72–83. ———. 2015. The Specter of Capital. Translated by Joachim Redner and Robert Savage. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Watt, Calum. 2022. Derivative Images: Financial Derivatives in French Film, Literature and Thought. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Yuran, Noam. 2020. The Cunning of Stupidity. Finance and Society 6 (2): 141–145. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile.

CHAPTER 5

Film and Financial Space

As we saw in the last chapter, the moving image is well placed to explore how finance orders and reorders time and temporality. The financial image of time can crystalize the hauntological operations of finance, the systemic doubling of temporal events, and the way that finance asks us to rethink relationships between past, present, and future, and our place in constituting and being constituted by those temporal modes. In this chapter, we will address how the moving image attempts to navigate financial space, with case studies that allow us to address finance’s turbulent reordering of space and its erasure of the visibility of labour across global financial cities. Where hauntings and spectres might act as the synecdoche form for financial time, as this chapter will argue drawing in detail on two film case studies, it is in the creation and management of turbulence across designated hubs, cities, and regions that finance’s spatializing dimension may perhaps be best explored initially. In the second half of the chapter we will explore how a recent fiction film, The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler, 2010), set in Frankfurt am Main, the financial centre of the Eurozone and Germany’s leading financial hub, reflects on the deliberate unleashing of turbulence in the markets that has repercussions across cities, countries, and continents. In the first half of the chapter, after a theoretical excursion into the relationship of the aesthetics of finance to cultural form, the main case study is Isaac Julien’s installation Playtime (2014), a multiscreen piece

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that loops sequences of interlinked narratives taking place in the City of London, Iceland, and the city state of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. As Julien’s film proposes, like Hochhäusler’s including a pronounced metatheoretical dimension that engages with questions around the aesthetics of finance, the economic turbulence that in 2007 began in the US sub-prime mortgage market spread across the interlinked financial sectors of the world. The house repossessions, job losses, and subsequently even bank collapses that quickly followed in the US occurred in Iceland, as Julien’s sequences trace, and also in places as seemingly distant as Dubai, which also witnessed scenes that circulated on TV globally of Dubai’s wealthy foreign workforce abandoning abruptly luxury villas and expensive cars at the airport, their keys left in the ignition. However, these dramatic scenes in Dubai, as Kay Dickenson has noted, might be seen as responding to the principles of logistics constructed consciously in Dubai to manage the turbulence in various levels of the labour market that the city state’s highly specific internationally facing economy requires, where labour is highly deregulated and can be scaled back instantly when surplus to requirements.1 As Julien’s film addresses, in its long section on a cleaner from the Philippines who has been brought by an agency to work cleaning financial offices, Dubai’s migrant working population lives in a permanent condition of structured chaos with little security and few rights. The narrative of the Filipina cleaner is illustrative of the turbulence of the contemporary financial sector as experienced by the least powerful, whereas the stories of the Frankfurt bankers in Hochhäusler’s film show how turbulence is profitable to those at the top of the financial hierarchy and how the deleterious effects of their decisions are felt across borders. In the introduction to the recent Special Issue on ‘Money: now you see it, now you don’t’ in Studies in French Cinema, editors Diane Gabrysiak and Phil Powrie provide a useful overview of scholarship dedicated to exploring money on screen in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. As they note, apart from rare outliers like the dossiers on ‘Argent au cinéma’ in issues 26 and 27 of Cinématographe back in 1977, there has been scant critical attention paid to detailed studies of how the moving image engages with financial transactions. Recently, scholars working on French cinema particularly have started to engage with the question of money on screen, with the 2014 French and Francophone Studies Conference in New York on the theme of ‘Money/L’Argent’ followed by the Studies in French Cinema volume. These events and publications begin to correct a situation whereby, as Gabrysiak and Powrie argue, the representation of money

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through the moving image has been largely ignored in critical studies of the cinema. As they note, ‘The focus of study to date has been the economic relation between money spent, the production value and money earned, rather than how money is actually shown in its materiality on screen’.2 Welcome though this recent work is, it misses the crucial point that ‘money’ in its material sense is arguably hardly the key term in understanding the relationship between the moving image and the current stage of finance capitalism. Indeed, as numerous economists and sociologists point out, the total amount of physical paper and coin money in the world is vastly exceeded by the amount of global debt existing at present. It is also exceeded astronomically by the amount of value circulating as derivatives and other financial instruments. Moving image studies that focus on the representation of the materiality of money alone cannot hope to comprehend contemporary finance capitalism. To think through how filmmakers and moving image artists are attempting to engage with the very immateriality of finance capital, we need to consider the wider processes of financialization, here referring to the ‘web of interrelated processes – economic, political, social, technological, cultural etc. – through which finance has extended its influence beyond the marketplace and into other realms of social life’.3 Although space does not permit a lengthier introduction to the complex and multilayered processes of financialization, according to van der Zwan,4 scholars working in the history and sociology of finance might set out three broad areas of study as they chart contemporary finance capital: first, financialization as a regime of accumulation; second, the rise and dominance of shareholder value as a guiding principle of corporate behaviour; and third, the financialization of everyday life, whereby financial products have been made available to and, in some cases, pressed upon large parts of the population. In this way, financialization and the management of investment and debt becomes a Foucauldian form of governmentality, or control of the broader population in and across various spaces. In this way, we might want to ask questions of not just how the materiality of money finds its way into (or not) the moving image but also how the cinema is responding to these broader social forces relating to the emerging dominance and power of finance in everyday life. Despite growing interest in the last few years among filmmakers in tackling themes and stories related to the world of global finance, finding aesthetic means to depict the forces of contemporary capital has proven exacting. As Susan

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Buck-Morss argues, the economy is hardly ‘an empirical object among other worldly things’; to make it perceptible, it has to undergo a process of visualization. 5 This representational mapping of the economy takes place in the course of trading in banks and other institutions linked to the financial sector, but also increasingly across a number of cultural forms. This has led to exceptional challenges in finding appropriate aesthetic forms to register its movements and workings. One route to understanding how the moving image makes sense of the current state of finance capital is to look at the way that specific financial hubs are registered on film. If there is a general crisis of representation in attempts to articulate visually contemporary, often ‘virtual’, finance capital, then it is in the depiction of financial hubs—significant banking cities that act as nodal points in the global economy in hosting major financial institutions and in initiating financial transactions, and, more recently, the specific economic zones and freeport areas that augment financial cities that nation states are supporting—that we may look for images that attempt to ground and register our sense of the financialized world. Tracing sites and events that give images to finance capital has become particularly significant in the wake of the major financial turbulence of 2008 and after. According to De Cock, Baker, and Volkmann, the Bank of England Stability Report declared in October 2008 that the global banking system had arguably undergone its biggest episode of instability in almost a century, a financial crisis in which the typical share price dropped in value by 50% across the year and in which governments chose to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars propping up the banking system in order to avoid systemic financial collapse.6 Finding aesthetic strategies to represent this complex and devastating scenario has proven a challenge for filmmakers and visual artists, who have tended to draw on familiar tropes of computer screen data running out of control and images of trading floors engaged in ever more desperate and panicked dealing. Urban spaces of finance have become central to attempts to register the 2008 banking collapse. As Miriam Meissner has suggested in her study of filmic portrayals of what she and many commentators refer to as the global financial crisis (GFC), ‘the city thus acts as a contact point, filling in the gap that has been caused by the intangibility of the GFC. Beyond that, it provides a materiality in relation to which crisis reactions have been articulated’.7 Whereas Meissner focuses primarily on depictions of Wall Street in her study of the urban imaginary of the financial crisis, in this chapter I address the difficulties of constituting a financial aesthetic generally before looking at how the financial city plays a key role

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in allowing European filmmakers working across very different modes to find a material architectural representation for the abstract exchanges of contemporary finance capital. I discuss Emma Charles’s short film about nightcleaning in London’s financial offices based on Canary Wharf, After the Bell (209), Isaac Julian’s gallery film, Playtime (2014), which features the financial hubs of the City of London and Reykjavik and the economic zone and wider metropolitan space of Dubai and, finally, Christoph Hochhäusler’s fiction drama The City Below. Before addressing these films in detail, it makes sense to draw out further the challenges of constructing a financial aesthetic in moving images. Isaac Julien’s Playtime installation raised this question explicitly in the way it was projected in London. In the gallery screening of the finished film, Julien acknowledged the complex relationship between his images and more abstract theories of finance capital. Conscious of the weight of meaning demanded of his urban sequences, and aware of the constraints of relying just on the visual image, Julien had also arranged a dual-screen projection downstairs of another, more contextual and discursive, film that articulated the aesthetic challenges involved in depicting finance capital. Titled Kapital (2013), it built on an extended seminar discussion on ‘Choreographing Capital’ with key Marxist theorist, David Harvey, and invited guests such as theorist Stuart Hall held in London in 2012. Julien asks Harvey why capital is so hard to depict. ‘You can’t grab it, you can’t hold it, you can’t smell it, touch it’, is Harvey’s response, ‘it’s a bit like gravity. In the same way you can only really intuit gravity exists by its effects, you can only really intuit that capital exists by its effects’. This line, key to Julien’s understanding of capital and his attempt to reterritorialize finance, is articulated both downstairs, as part of the documentation of the ‘Choreographing Capital’ seminar, and upstairs in the Playtime installation. Invoking the name of Harvey seems to spin cultural studies back to the heyday of theorizing on postmodernism, and another key participant in that debate, Fredric Jameson, might also reappear in mapping the aesthetic response to the contemporary financial crisis. Jameson’s essay from the late 1990s on culture and finance capital updates his work from a decade earlier on the cultural logic of late capitalism. Capital is rethought to consider changes in the financial sector and the ‘virtualisation’ of capitalism under speculative financial transactions rather than under the forms of production and consumption that marked ‘late’ capitalism, as discussed above in the Introduction: ‘Capital becomes free-floating. It separates from the ‘concrete context’ of its productive geography’, becoming something of a ‘spectre of

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value’ in Jameson’s Derridean terminology.8 Jameson’s analysis of the incredible spread of financialization is borne out when we consider that the convergence of financial deregulation, new information and telecommunications technology, and new trading and international exchange facilities, has led in the past three decades to the massive transformation of global financial markets.9 Financial markets began to exceed global GDP by 1980. By 2006, the financial sectors were valued at 348% of global GDP. 10 There has been a phenomenal growth in new financial instruments linked directly neither to production goods nor to currency exchange but based on future assessments of the value of assets, and hence speculative and virtual by nature. The trade in financial derivatives was non-existent in 1970: by mid-2006, ‘exchange-traded derivatives totaled $84.4 trillion (the equivalent of around $13000 for every human being on earth)’, according to Donald MacKenzie.11 Derivatives, according to financial analysts are ‘money’s new imaginary’.12 As Jameson argues, this stage of capitalism that we might want to call ‘finance capital’ needs to be grasped in its cultural expressions. In Jamesonian terms, what kind of aesthetics emerge under the future-­ oriented virtuality of finance capital, with its ‘unrepresentable symptoms’?13 At the point that capital is to be made from the precise and rigorous trading of objects, where exchange value is paramount, Jameson sees the birth of forms of realism: a concomitant cultural exploration of the surfaces and objects of the everyday world, of new human interrelationships formed by trade, of new kinds of sensory and social perception. In this cultural historical mapping, both modernism, for Jameson ‘a kind of cancelled realism’ where qualities such as colour and shape move free from their former vehicles, and postmodernism, the global movement of dematerialized messages, are read as stages in cultural expression that respond to the increasing abstraction of capital as it moves from its initial form as primitive accumulation through trade, via investment of the excess profits into larger-scale production, towards the stage of freer-floating finance capital.14 What of the cultural logic of finance capital? For Jameson, this can be read in the rise of ‘narrativized image-fragments’ that he sees as able to operate autonomously in projecting meaning without the need to be contextualized back into a main narrative.15 The ‘deterritorialization’ of finance capital, and here Jameson deliberately addresses Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of capital achieving a ‘new ontological and freefloating state’, finds its aesthetic correlation in fragmentary images, in Jameson’s view, but I would argue that it is exactly in films that attempt to

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engage with the financial city that we can trace aesthetic attempts to ‘reterritorialize’ finance capital, to follow quests for its origins, foundations, and exchanges. The films I address in this chapter attempt to map the ways that the immateriality of finance capital can be rematerialized and pinned down, even if only temporarily.

The Spaces of Financial Labour: Nightcleaning in the City of London The way that finance’s temporalizing drive is intertwined with its often barely acknowledged spaces is foregrounded in UK artist and filmmaker Emma Charles’s short film, After the Bell (2009), a study in what might be assumed to be the stasis periods when the trading floors are closed and the profitable turbulence of the markets suspended. Eschewing the maximalism of some financial films, After the Bell, an audio and colour video in 4:3 ratio, registers barely 3 minutes and 48 seconds; despite its brevity, it has been screened at various exhibitions, including the Supermarket of Images exhibition organized by Peter Szendy and colleagues at the Jeu de Paumes, Paris, in 2020. It maintains throughout a steady focus on nightcleaning at a Canary Wharf brokerage after normal trading hours. The importance of clocks to ensuring financial temporal regimes across disparate spaces features prominently, with a direct cut in the trading room from images of two analogue-faced station-type clocks showing the local London time of roughly ten minutes to eight in the evening, one clock with a magnified figure ‘8’ and the other with a magnified ‘5’, to outline trading hours, to a long shot of mostly empty trading desks and associated screens and Bloomberg terminals underneath a series of digital clocks showing the time in major global financial hubs—Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Dubai on one display in shot, and London, New York, and Chicago in another. This cut explores succinctly one of the film’s key themes, that of the relationship between the local and the global in the financial sector. Even if by local time financial trading has finished for the day, the global financial market continues almost unbroken. The film’s title, After the Bell, blends both the temporal and the spatial. Charles’s title is immediately arresting as the phrase, ‘after the bell’ has, after its initial associations with Wall Street trading, long been familiar in the financial sector to refer to any item of new information that may come to light after trading has ended in a particular stock market and which may

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go on to affect market prices. As the stock market has closed and can take no further bids until reopening the next day, information received ‘after the bell’ is factored into pricing when the market subsequently opens. In normal terms, ‘after the bell’ is a temporal qualifier and denotes the downtime in any stock market. Charles reapplies it in her short film to allow the viewer to reflect on the spaces where trading takes place in the downtime after trading, when the market is closed. Instead of supplying us in her images with new information that may directly affect the pricing of specific stocks, here ‘after the bell’ brings in new information by giving visibility to the material operations that underpin the quasi-immateriality of trading in a high-tech era. It encourages a reflection on the kinds of labour, physical movement, and activity rarely associated with visualizations of the financial sector. Charles’s film implicitly takes on the question that Bertolt Brecht sets regarding how to represent the processes of capital. Brecht asks his readers exactly what we can understand of economic modernity through images that offer us a form of surface realism. In his writings on the Threepenny Trial, first published in German in 1930, he writes, ‘[t]he situation has become so complicated that a simple “reproduction of reality” says less than ever something about that reality. A photograph of the Krupp Factory or of the electrical conglomerate AEG yields almost nothing about these institutions. The actual reality has slid into the functional’.16 The photograph from outside of the external structure of these key institutions, the Krupp armaments factory or the AEG, Weimar Germany’s major electrical appliances and transmissions conglomerate, in the advanced productive capacity of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, may have verisimilitudinous properties, that is, properties of resemblance at a surface level, but from the perspective of Brecht’s claim, the photograph gives no information about the realities of the social and working relationships upon which the factories rely to continue the manufacturing process. In this way, the image obscures rather than reveals the nature and context of the movements that its surface exterior contains and often aestheticizes. For Brecht, this surface realism extracts from our ability to know more fully about the operations of the factory in a particular social and historical system. As Carl Gelderloos argues, Brecht’s criticism of social realism is connected to Marx’s criticism of the commodity form, the photograph that offers only a surface realism ‘duplicates the logic of the commodity fetish itself’ in obscuring the complex social relations that underscore production.17 Charles’s short film works to address the

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relationship between the surface and what lies immediately beneath in a major financial hub. After the Bell opens with what has become a staple of films that address the financial sector, namely an extreme long shot of the imposing architecture of the urban financial skyline. In many financial films, this is a daytime shot, and the skyscraper banks often appear translucent and ethereal against the sky or, if they are using forms of mirrored glass, reflect back the world around them here. In both cases, they assume a specific financial sublime quality, framing as they do often the largest and most expensively designed architectural structures in any urban landscape. Miriam Meissner has written in detail on the way that shots across an urban financial district panorama occur frequently in financial films, but generally from inside the offices of traders and bankers. This is certainly a shot that occurs in Isaac Julien’s Playtime, to be discussed below, in his sequences both in the City of London and in Dubai. But Emma Charles’s opening shot is not from another financial skyscraper but from a distance away from Canary Wharf and seemingly from ground level, up at the distant towering architecture. This would imply that the gaze at the financial skyscrapers is from a generally accessible viewpoint and not confined to someone occupying a privatized corporate space within the financial sector. Meissner’s account of the financial skyline across several films draws attention to the so-called ‘Skyscraper Index’, a model that correlates the building of skyscrapers with speculative boom periods in the cyclical moves of financial markets. According to this model, the construction of the most imposing financial skylines occurs historically shortly before a major market crash, as excessive skyscraper construction points to a combination of low interest rates, cheap credit, high land prices, corporate expansion, and investment in technological innovation. For Meissner, the skyscraper skyline used in many financial sector films evokes a degree of ambivalence: on the one hand, this architecture can point to economic success stories of efficiency and innovation in financializing space effectively, but on the other, as the Skyscraper Index might highlight, it points to boom-and-­ bust cycles and irrational overinvestment.18 In Charles’s film, we see Canary Wharf in relative tranquillity at dusk, with lights on across the skyscrapers and various forms of lit coloured signage of banks and trading companies visible and overground trains taking bankers home and other workers to their night shifts. The viewer can read on the horizon the text in white and red that forms the signage of the investment bank, Citi, at Canada Square. This surface image in the

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establishing shot glitters, imposing but impenetrable at this distance. If we think of Brecht’s photograph of Krupps, what can we know of the social relations of manufacturing, or in later modernity, of finance, through encountering the surfaces of its architecture? Unlike the single still photograph, the moving image draws on an expanded repertoire of aesthetic means—on duration, movement, juxtaposition, sound, for example—to explore its subject, and Charles cuts to the outside of one specific set of windows, then to one single window as a muffled voice becomes noticeable on the soundtrack, presumably a trader wrapping up the day’s work on the phone. Charles’s film responds to several binaries. Although the acoustic track appears to be diegetic and to pick up both the low background hum of machinery, such as the various kinds of cleaning appliances and the office technology such as photocopiers, phones, clocks, the transport system running outside in the night-time, there is little attempt to match the sound specifically to diegetically align with the images that may illustrate what we are hearing at a specific time. We hear at the very beginning, as we move from the opening long shot of the Canary Wharf skyline at night to a closer shot through the pale blue-lit office windows of one of its buildings, the sound of a male voice discussing transactions and numbers. During the film, we are never given direct access to this speaker. The voice registers what might be a reflection on the day’s trade and is calmer than it might be if the stock market were open and what was recorded was trading at the height of a typically frenetic day. Charles cuts to long shots—the first in a sequence of four ‘nightcleaner’ compositions in the film—through the single window, of the fragmented body of a man half-hidden by the bins he is emptying and relining. Like his nightcleaner colleagues, we do not see him in close-up and we do not hear his voice. The soundtrack remains constant and unbroken across these visual cuts, registering typically the low indistinctive hum of office and cleaning technologies. The four workers that we see are all dark-haired middle-aged men seemingly from ethnic minorities in the UK’s population, but no further information is given about them or their provenance. In these sequences, they are silenced, reduced to their labouring bodies as they interact with the cleaning technologies. All that the film offers of them is their surface appearance in the form of the fragmentations of their bodies as their heads or limbs are cropped out of various shots or obscured by cleaning equipment or the office furniture they are maintaining. The precise sound of their cleaning actions is also muted: for much of the film the sound of the isolated trader’s voice provides the key track, set against the muted cleaners’

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bodies. The sound of cleaning is largely erased, the cleaners’ voices and actions are muted as their bodies are foregrounded. Here, as Charles takes the camera from outside the surfaces of the financial city and into one of its institutions, two different and mutually dependent forms of labour come together. Just as we came inside the trading environment, so the film ends with a series of cuts taking us again to a distance from these activities. A revolving glass entrance door is framed, then the glass surfaces of the building itself, and then back to the distant skyline shots of the financial buildings and the light railway transit system that connects Canary Wharf to other parts of London. As Marta Ponsa has written of After the Bell, ‘the artist seems to want to explore two kinds of invisibility: that of these night workers and that of monetary exchanges that have no physical existence’.19 Charles’s visual and acoustic framings of forms of labour that take place typically out of sight and outside the main operations of the brokerage brings fully into view the way that the supposedly abstract nature of financial trading is dependent on the capacity of an adjacent workforce to labour physically and at non-standard and often unattractive times. As Ponsa suggests, [a]lthough the presence of these workers is marginal, it is fundamental for the proper functioning of the global economy and it underlines a broader problem: the inextricable relationship between the local and the global. The productivity of one group of workers affects the productivity of others. The artist places herself in a voyeuristic position, looking through the windows of skyscrapers and observing the bodies of workers carrying out almost imperceptible performative actions.20

The ‘voyeuristic position’ adopted here, shooting through external windows and providing an indistinct soundtrack, is often a non-negotiable corollary of shooting in the financial sector, where it is hard to get permission to take any kind of still or moving image. However, as Emma Charles states, she did have access to the interior of the brokers but chose to frame her footage in a specific way: ‘Many of the shots are in hallways or through the glass walls looking into other parts of the building but were in fact, internally shot. The feeling of being distant and observing was intentional and an aesthetic choice’. 21 As After the Bell works to explore visibility and invisibility in finance, the decision to have the filmmaker observing unseen and, if we trust the footage, recording without intervening in the labour of nightcleaning, which is shown as a predominantly non-communicative, isolated, physical form of labour, adds to a sense that the work of the

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nightcleaners and similar workers that underpins the financial sector is itself something that exists in its own space and time and cannot be changed. This is the new information that comes to the viewer after trading has closed in Charles’s After the Bell. With these sequences, and with that conclusion prominent, After the Bell brings into dialogue the spaces of the contemporary financial sector with the questions of the politics of the image raised by one of British cinema’s most significant experimental documentaries, Nightcleaners, the acclaimed film made by the Berwick Street Film Collective in 1975. Described at the time by critics as ‘undoubtedly the most important political film to have been made in this country’,22 Nightcleaners was made as a collective project involving the filmmaking team, socialist feminist activists advocating unionization, and the predominantly immigrated women workers cleaning major central London office complexes, such as the Shell Building near Waterloo, at night. It offers interviews with and observations of a number of these low-paid women who were often holding down menial day jobs alongside their night work cleaning office buildings and on top of managing their own housework. In most cases, the women were compelled to accept night shift work because of economic necessity and because of a lack of childcare facilities available, meaning that their only working option was to take jobs after their children had gone to sleep. The film documents forcefully the sheer exhaustion of the poorly paid cleaners and their overriding physical tiredness and lack of sleep. However, its formal composition, which was the subject of considerable critical discussion on its release, eschews a strictly observational mode and instead utilizes a series of formally innovative techniques—jump cuts, harsh cuts, extreme grainy close ups, frequent uses of black leader, discordant uses of sound and music—to draw attention to its status as a constructed document. Little of this explicit formal innovation—or perhaps ‘interruption’ is a more useful noun here—comes through in the forms chosen by Emma Charles with After the Bell or, as we shall see below, by Isaac Julien in the nightcleaning sequences that are prominent in the ‘Dubai Maid’ section of his experimental financial installation, Playtime, both of which operate at a smoother, artificialized level, where there seems little possibility of ‘interrupting’ the financial sector, even if their modes do open up space for reflection and contemplation. What brings these three films into close dialogue is both their focus on registering the presence of the normally invisible working lives of the exploited nightcleaners in each case and their implicit engagement with

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the Brechtian question of the inadequacy of surface realism as an aesthetic mode and their strategies for working with and through the surface to establish the social and economic relations at stake in these larger corporations. I noted above how Emma Charles does this in After the Bell by recording the financial sublime of the brightly coloured illuminated skyscrapers that constitute the evening skyline at Canary Wharf, before taking the viewer up to and through one of the many glass windows. The centrality of the view of the nightcleaners through the window is also hugely significant in Nightcleaners. The makers of Nightcleaners centre their 16 mm black-and-white film, which has a running duration of 90 minutes, on a specific shot that recurs regularly punctuating other forms of visual and acoustic material. As Marc Karlin, one of the key members of the Berwick Street Film Collective explains, ‘I wanted the film to be the history of that sighting of the image’.23 The image in question is the shot of one of the nightcleaners through the window. However, although this shot itself is foregrounded as of key importance in allowing an audience to understand the working conditions and exploitative practices faced by the women, the possible danger of thinking that the shot itself tells the viewer much of interest, the Brechtian dilemma raised earlier, is addressed by the filmmakers in the way that, although the footage is shot in an observational, non-intrusive way, and so at the point of filming aligns itself with the tradition of cinéma vérité in documentary, at the point of editing, the images themselves are interrogated by way of the use of avant-garde techniques that at the time were rarely seen in documentary films. In this way, the filmmakers hoped to both centre the film on a key shot but to also to allow for an interrogation of both the production of that shot and of the whole array of political relations, possibilities and blockages encountered by the nightcleaners in their coming together to resist wage cuts and poor working conditions. As Marc Karlin continues, Nightcleaners, then, works with and against the seemingly surface realist nature of the shot of the cleaner through the window: ‘the sighting from outside a window of a woman cleaning, how that sight is arrested by a consciousness that informs it, looks at it, interprets it, challenges it and wants to change it, and how the whole political organization can be built around that ‘sighting’ and consciousness’.24 As Dan Kidner has written of Nightcleaners, ‘[b]y slowing down the footage and introducing lengths of black leader, creating pauses or ruptures between edits, the group found they were able to interrogate the image in such a way as to question the very possibility of making images of struggle’.25 For Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen,

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Nightcleaners managed through its disruptive formal strategies to create space for its audiences to think about their own position in the struggles that they were seeing on screen and to reflect also upon how the film required them to participate in making meaning out of the images and sequences that they were watching.26 They picked out specifically the repeated use of the shot from outside the building of women working as nightcleaners in isolation in large empty office blocks that punctuates the running time of the film and which, they argued, showed that although the women were learning about ways to organize collectively, they were still working under harsh conditions. Johnston and Willemen’s perspective on Nightcleaners is useful when addressing films made more recently in the time of finance capital because they specifically place Nightcleaners within the context of a productive reception of Brechtian ideas across the independent political film sector in the UK in the early 1970s. At the ‘Brecht in Britain’ event at which they presented their analysis, it had been suggested that there were two important models for political filmmaking in the UK that derived from both leftist cinema in Weimar Germany, namely a realist route that registered that a force for political change was observable given the bleak conditions faced by the poor, and an anti-realist model famously used by Brecht and Dudow in their film Kuhle Wampe (1931), whose strategies both illustrate the struggle to achieve a degree of class consciousness and challenge the audience to think critically about their own situation. Johnston and Willemen were unenthusiastic about the first route and drew in their analysis on wider critical debates around the positioning of the audience watching a realist film, which argued that the audience was placed in a ‘pseudo-dominant’ position with regard to the events on screen, ‘outside the realm of struggle, ultimately outside the realm of meaningful action altogether’.27 Instead, Johnston and Willemen were more positive about the way that Nightcleaners could be placed in the Brechtian line of filmmaking with the surface realism disrupted through formal strategies. Importantly, they argued that it would be misleading to see Nightcleaners as a film that mechanically reproduced Brechtian techniques, rather that it responded specifically to its own political struggle and adopted a dialectical approach to its own images and reinvented ‘certain techniques, procedures and representational devices pioneered by Brecht’, not least in the way it picked up that each woman shown on screen could be seen not only in her individuality but also as sharing class characteristics with her coworkers.28 Johnston and Willemen do not mention in their detailed analysis

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that in fact the Berwick Street Film Collective makes explicit reference to Brecht by using on the soundtrack of Nightcleaners the Brecht/Weill song, ‘Pirate Jenny’ from The Threepenny Opera (1928), the song sung by the maid, Jenny, as she cleans the hotel where she is despised by the townspeople. Watching Nightcleaners and hearing the song between interviews suggests that the filmmakers intend the audience to see ‘Pirate Jenny’ as an early model of the overlooked ‘nightcleaner’ who is talking about a form of restitution and revenge that she later enacts successfully against the structures of power that exploit and suppress her.

The Spaces of Financial Labour: Nightcleaning in the Financial Zone of Dubai Isaac Julien’s Playtime, opened at the Victoria Miro gallery in the second half of January 2014, just outside the confines of the banks and financial institutions that comprise the City of London, A multiscreen installation depicting lives in several of the major financial hubs most affected in the recent crisis, it is built on several years of research, planning, and seminar discussions in its aim to address the relationship of contemporary finance capital and aesthetics. It was accompanied by an exhibition a few miles west in the Victoria Miro Mayfair gallery of a sale of large-scale, limited edition photographs linked to the film’s locations, and a screening of ENIGMA (2013), a work that borrows its title from David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital: and the Crises of Capitalism (2011), a recent publication that had been important in Julien’s research. ENIGMA involved the screening of a time-lapse cityscape video of Dubai, a central location in Playtime, composed of 2500 still images. Playtime opened in the same week as another narrative of the moral failings of the financial sector, Martin Scorsese’s Oscar hopeful, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), discussed in Chap. 3, which arrived with huge posters promoting the film on the side of London buses and full-page adverts everywhere, not least in the finance pages of business papers. The enthusiasm for Scorsese’s film amongst bankers in the City of London was harnessed by their employers with reports that major banks in London had booked entire cinemas to show The Wolf of Wall Street to their workers and to invited guests. This ambivalent reception of the attractions and repulsions of trading, dealers, and markets is a theme picked up in Julien’s installation in his treatment of the commodification and financialization of

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the art world as he traces the effects and affects of contemporary finance capital. Playtime is fully aware that one of the defining features of the contemporary art environment is the relationship of individual artists and their works to a wider market of dealers, exhibitors, galleries, shows, auction houses, and collectors. In the wake of the financial crash, the contemporary art market became seen rapidly as one of the safest places to invest, pushing the prices of works by the most celebrated artists into astronomical figures. Aware of its complicity within this environment, Playtime refuses an austere approach to the question of capital and operates instead with a deliberately lush aesthetic, consciously eschewing the construction of a critical position fully outside the contemporary art market. Central to Julien’s installation are sequences featuring James Franco playing an art dealer in London and interviews with leading London auctioneer, Simon de Pury, that celebrate the ability of the art market to benefit from increasing inequalities between rich and poor and to command huge prices even for contemporary work. In Julien’s image cartography, and in a reversal of ‘normal’ conditions of operation, financial turbulence meets the relatively stable global trade in art and high-end aesthetic innovation, a profitable commodity at a time of low interest rates for financial savings and therefore a key destination for excess money owing to its limited supply and instant collectability. Julien has long occupied an important interstitial position straddling UK independent cinema and the art sector. Having been lauded as one of the pioneers of 1980s queer cinema, Julien moved across from the independent cinema sector in the UK in the mid-1990s. He had experienced difficulties over editorial control of his film Young Soul Rebels (1991), which went on to win the Critics’ Prize at Cannes. He was invited to make a film for the Johannesburg Biennial and, keen to obtain greater authorial autonomy, perceived that funding was more forthcoming in the art world than in the shrinking independent film sector at the time.29 Julien’s move to the gallery space opens new perspectives on the relationship of his audiences to the images shown across the gallery screens. The linear flow pertinent to the single channel screening used in traditional cinema exhibition is often separated in installation work across a number of monitors, in Julien’s case the seven screens arranged in an approximate figure eight formation, which creates a montage in space and allows visitors to make new connections between images on different screens and also to be conscious of how they are placing themselves across the gallery space in relation to the distribution of moving images.

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Julien’s ultra HD video installation addresses the place of financial hubs in the narratives of six representative figures, all in some way based on people known to him, whose lives in Reykjavik, where the 2008 global financial crisis in Europe began, the City of London, arguably the global hub of deregulated finance, and Dubai, one of the main financial centres of the Middle East, are separate yet are part of a larger linked economic network. The five image sequences constitute an overall installation of just under 70 minutes running time, organized around the circulation of (virtual) finance, around the economy of images, and around the commodification of aesthetics within the art trade. Julien is interested at the same time in the invisibility of contemporary capital and the visible and constitutive role of markets, particularly the art market itself, within which his own works circulate, and which itself has a specific relation to the movement of finance and to the financial crisis. Julien talks of innovation in the shooting of Playtime, working with a digital RED camera and thus shooting all footage on file as data. For Julien, the immateriality of these images in the sense that they exist only as data, as digital files, provides an aesthetic correlation to the contemporary centrality in the global financial system of virtual computerized stores of financial capital with their collapsing of space. Playtime itself is dependent on capital: more than £1 million was raised for the project shoot. Given the difficulty of visualizing capital, Julien’s installation consciously builds on three ideas articulated by Harvey in his discussion in the downstairs film. First, according to Harvey, capital is only perceptible indirectly, through its effects rather than as the thing itself. Secondly, capital strives to be always in motion. Thirdly, Harvey proposes, capital is not itself a thing, but describes a social relation between persons that is mediated through things.30 Julien’s images capture the effects of current financial conditions in his selected locations: the effects of bankruptcy and house repossession in Iceland, for example, through the figure of an ambitious and creative photographer who returns from an overseas commission to find he has lost everything, to the enforced migration and loneliness of a ‘house worker’ from the Philippines, forced by economic conditions to clean the executive offices in a skyscraper in Dubai’s financial sector and now living in conditions of near servitude many hundreds of miles away from her children. Although there is the risk here of a levelling out of very different levels of vulnerability and suffering, Julien’s aim is to show how economic precariousness leaves people vulnerable in many different sectors and across seemingly unconnected geographical locations.

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These initially disconnected stories are layered together as a kind of narrative montage of how disparate lives react and readapt to financial decision-­making and economic settlements taken often in distant continents. Montage is a structuring formal principle for Julien, but of an idiosyncratic kind. The planning of Playtime began in part with a nod to Eisenstein’s celebrated abandoned film plan to visualize Marx’s Das Kapital.31 Julien takes from Eisenstein’s initial notes a belief in montage as a working method for registering how capital works always as a social relation. Instead of thinking of montage in strictly temporal terms shot by shot as the succession of clashing images, Julien refocuses montage in the Playtime project to operate narratively across these stories but also formally: immersively and spatially by means of long takes across a multiscreen set-up where non-simultaneous images are shown often on both sides of the seven large screens arranged in an approximate figure eight configuration in a darkened gallery area. This brings about a possible montage across space, and indeed across spaces, given that the David Harvey discussion was running on a loop simultaneously downstairs. This expanded and partially immersive cinematic practice encourages the mobility of the spectator, free to walk past, behind, and in front of the various screens. Just as the screened images introduce the movement and, in some cases, the migration of their protagonists across the network of financial hubs that constitute the globalized Western economy, so the viewer is also at liberty, and sometimes induced, to change angle, position, point in space. There is no clear viewing or narrative centre spatially to the series of images, just as there is no clear linearity as the sections form a replayed loop, with no apparent set start or endpoint. There is no viewing point from which all the screens, all the images, can be clearly and simultaneously seen, and there is the lack of an aesthetic centre to match the absence of a precise single physical centre in global financial dealing. Julien’s spaces range from an empty office skyscraper looking out over the City of London—110 Bishopsgate (the ‘Heron Tower’), the tallest skyscraper in the City of London, completed in 2011, and owing to the timing of looking for tenants in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, initially severely underoccupied—to the urban spread of nighttime downtown Dubai, to the poor backstreets of that city, to a dream sequence in the desert, and to geysers and an abandoned architect-designed modernist house in the Icelandic countryside. Julien shoots against and out of the floor-to-ceiling windows of 110 Bishopsgate in an empty open-plan office, as a London investment banker talks to colleagues about his latest

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plans.32 Although Julien blends existing film footage from and sound recordings of trading floors into his London section, it is only to juxtapose the current state of finance capital, where trading floors are much less central and transactions are carried out using wildly powerful supercomputers that are placed in the closest physical proximity as possible to the stock exchange so that deals can be ratified in fractions of seconds. What often anchors these dislocated spaces is Julien’s use of rhythm and sound—of bass and sub-bass, ambient electronica, drum patterns, solo trumpet—to propel us through these locations where we have little opportunity to feel grounded in the real physical world.33 For all of his innovative practice, Julien’s images rarely set themselves apart completely from other directors filming financial hubs: there are elevator shots in Dubai, and views through milky glass out of high and empty offices in London, Dubai, and Iceland. Artworks feature prominently on the walls and desks of financial executives. Yet Julien also finds complex visual compositions that correlate to the way that the molecular instances of individual financial transactions build up to constitute an overwhelming whole: the HD-texture of coloured lights he finds in a panoramic shot across and down onto the surfaces of skyscrapers in nighttime Dubai, for example, pulsing like myriad electric gemstones in the darkening sky. Isaac Julien does not use the particular framing of the nightcleaner through the window of the corporate building filmed from outside, the key shot that links After the Bell to Nightcleaners in a history of British experimental political filmmaking. However, Playtime participates in this tradition by having at its centre a long sequence focusing on a nightcleaner in Dubai, a representative of the invisible underclass essential to the workings of global financial flows. While much of this book draws on moving image case studies that interact with the three major Western financial centres—Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt am Main—Julien’s film offers sequences based in the City of London but also takes us out to spaces and locations not immediately used in mainstream imagery of financialization. Of major significance to Julien, alongside the City of London, are two locations that receive far less attention in the archive of financial moving images, namely Iceland, home to a major crash of its banking system and associated economic slump between 2008 and 2010 and Dubai, the city state in the United Arab Emirates that has quite specific spatial organizations for its various sectors and which, through its championing of the ‘free zone’, serves as something of a role model for finance capital in the twenty-first century. Dubai’s specific configuration of

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‘zones’ and ‘hubs’ operates by reconstructing urban space to yield mostly deregulated enclaves to incentivize the profitable movement of finance, goods, services, and people. Julien’s mode of addressing the figure of the migrant nightcleaner within Dubai’s financial hubs is central to his installation, and to understand Julien’s aesthetic decisions in the Dubai sequence it is useful to consider how Dubai itself works as a specific kind of financial space. Keller Easterling notes that Dubai provides the prototype of the contemporary ‘Zone’, a new kind of financial space that we see most prominently in Shenzhen, discussed above in Chap. 4 above, and in Dubai. Easterling argues that [s]ome version of the zone is found in King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, New Songdo City in South Korea, Cyberjaya in Malaysia, HITEC City in Hyderabad, and everywhere in between. Operating under authorities independent from the domestic laws of its host country, the zone typically provides premium utilities and a set of incentives—tax exemptions, foreign ownership of property, streamlined customs, cheap labor, and deregulation of labor or environmental laws—to entice business.34

Dubai’s long history as a port city whose geographical location allows it to be a trading route bridge across Europe, Asia, and Africa has enabled it to reconstruct itself over the course of the last two centuries as an area that has pioneered free zones and an absence of the kind of protectionist measures and regulations, and taxation in play in other competing cities. As Kay Dickinson notes, Dubai’s history of managing ebbs and flows of lawlessness sets this precedent. The free port standing that Dubai established at the beginning of the twentieth century and its heavy traffic means that, like many major ports, only an estimated 5 per cent of cargo is ever inspected. Along with all the above-board movement of goods, a grey economy (advocating, in its own way, for unfettered freedom of trade) prospers through money laundering and the trafficking of everything from drugs and arms to people. Re-exportation of a different order. With interference from the authorities light, legal boundaries become distinctly porous to transnational flows of capital, people and goods.35

Dubai’s status as a free zone has built on this history exponentially and has allowed it to host hubs that address a wide range of profitable sectors. As Easterling relates, Dubai has been incredibly successful at offering a new kind of financialized space, different in kind from the more traditional

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homes of the central banks in nation states, such as Wall Street, the City of London, and Frankfurt: Having swallowed the city whole, the zone is now the germ of a city-building epidemic that reproduces glittering mimics of Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong. While in the 1960s there were a handful of zones in the world, today there are thousands—some measured in hectares, some in square kilometers. No longer in the shadow of the global financial city as financial center (New York, London, Tokyo São Paulo), the zone as corporate enclave is the most popular model for the contemporary global city, offering a “clean slate” and a “one-stop” entry into the economy of a foreign country. Now major cities and even national capitals supposedly the center of law, have created their own zone doppelgängers, like Navi Mumbai; Astana, the newly minted capital of Kazakhstan; or New Songdo City, a Seoul double [….].36

The zone operates with a specific relationship to the wider state (or in Dubai’s case, city state) in which it is nested. It is a space that promotes itself as free from both state bureaucracy and from the obstacles of labour and environmental legislation that comes at a financial cost to businesses and trade. For Easterling, it is usually an isomorphic exurban enclave that, exempt from law, can easily banish the circumstances and protections common in richer forms of urbanity. Labour and environmental abuse can proceed unchecked by political process. Moreover, given its popularity, the zone has become a self-perpetuating agent in the growth of extrastate urban space—space beyond the reach of state jurisdictions. Yet, at the same time, it has also become an essential partner for the state as it attempts to navigate and profit from the very same shadow economies. In this form of extrastatecraft, far from overwhelming state power, the zone is a new partner that strengthens the state by serving as its proxy or camouflage.37

Dubai’s model is to house specific niche hubs within the overall ‘Zone’ that cater to foreign capital and to expat commercial activity. Dubai’s numerous hubs bring together film and finance quite explicitly. They include the Dubai International Film Festival and its assorted moving image post-production and distribution arms, which will be discussed below, and the Dubai International Financial Centre, which has an increasing emphasis on the promotion of fintech and on DFIX and which had aspirations to become ‘the largest stock exchange between Europe and

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East Asia as foreign investors rush to tap the Gulf’s vast reservoir of oil earnings’, according to Mike Davis. It was set up by the UAE to operate under regulatory and legal bubble-domes tailored to the specific needs of foreign capital and expat professionals. [….] The UAE has permitted Dubai to set up “an entirely separate, Western-based commercial system for its financial district that would do business in dollars, and in English.” Although not without ensuing controversy, Dubai even imported British financial regulators and retired judges to bolster confidence that DFIX plays by the same rules as Zurich, London, and New York.38

Dubai’s use of specific labour regulation for its resident population and for imported workers is pertinent to the economic success of the ‘zone’ model and is at the heart of Julien’s critique of the operations of this construction of financial space. As Easterling notes, the UAE organizes its workforce in such a way that Emirati residents aren’t called on as cheap labour but instead benefit financially via legislation on land grants and on compulsory participation in new enterprises from Dubai’s balance of trade. Instead, inexpensive workers are imported from South Asia and the Philippines predominantly as a resource flow like the importation of technology or machinery.39 Mike Davis has written about how Dubai, together with its emirate neighbors, has achieved the state of the art in the disenfranchisement of labor. In a country that only abolished slavery in 1963, trade unions, most strikes, and all agitators are illegal, and 99 percent of the private-sector workforce are immediately deportable noncitizens [….] The great mass of the population are South Asian contract laborers, legally bound to a single employer and subject to totalitarian social controls. Dubai’s luxury lifestyles are attended by vast numbers of Filipina, Sri Lankan, and Indian maids, while the building boom (which employs one-quarter of the workforce) is carried on the shoulders of an army of poorly paid Pakistanis and Indians, the largest contingent from Kerala, working twelvehour shifts, six and a half days a week, in the asphalt-melting desert heat.40

As Davis continues, much of this imported labour operates subject to highly precarious working conditions as Dubai refuses to adopt the international Migrant Workers Convention and holds its workforce in a situation which approximates that of forced labour, as recruitment agents confiscate their passports and visas. As Davis writes,

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Dubai’s police may turn a blind eye to illicit diamond and gold imports, prostitution rings, and shady characters who buy twenty-five villas at a time in cash, but they are diligent in deporting Pakistani workers who complain about being cheated out of their wages by unscrupulous contractors, or jailing Filipina maids for “adultery” when they report being raped by their employers.41

Kay Dickinson supplements this grim scenario by reminding us that Dubai’s economy, like other areas of the Emirates, is indebted to the exploitation of millions of migrant workers, with migrants constituting around 80% of the city state’s population and up to 96% of its labour. The precarity of the migrant worker’s status in Dubai becomes clear when we understand that [r]esidency is only permitted with a job, often without accompanying family, and staying on beyond a contract is next to impossible. An employee is therefore entirely reliant on her job for the right to remain and in an environment where bosses are known to retain their workers’ passports as a guarantee against absconding. [….] Non-nationals wishing to conduct business in the region are obliged to secure a kafil, a guarantor or sponsor. [….] Human rights abuses of this system are well-documented and, most typically, affect those on the lower end of the pay spectrum, particularly construction and domestic workers, who constitute a large quota of the incoming workforce. Complaints include withholding of passports and pay (thus instituting a form of indenture), poor housing, little access to healthcare, exhausting hours of work and sexual and physical abuse.42

As Dickinson concludes in her bleak summary of the status of migrant workers like the Filipina nightcleaner in Julien’s film, migrants are reduced almost solely to economic entities. With no asylum or refugee status granted in the country and little, if any, recourse to state provision, non-nationals hold radically diminished scope to deviate from this social role. Dubai’s migration policies align with a neo-liberal casting of subjecthood in this respect, leaving migrants exposed to the inclinations of private enterprise, the flexibility demanded by fluctuations in the global market and a deliberate lack of social welfare provision, save what might be required for securing economic growth.43

Isaac Julien’s ‘Dubai Maid’ sequence takes up 22 minutes of the total 70 minutes running time and expands on the kinds of shot that we

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encountered in Emma Charles’s After the Bell. There are vast panoramic shots of Dubai’s incredible skyline at night, sparkling with red, pale blue, and yellow lights. The sequence is driven by a considerable number of shots of the nightcleaner next to a window, staring out across the night sky, or looking at her own face reflected back, as if the window separating the external public life from the internal corporate office is no longer transparent but an opaque mirroring surface. Julien’s examination of the surfaces of the unimaginably wealthy corporate world in Dubai seems to suggest that neither a single visual image, not even a series of moving images, can tell the viewer much about the specific flows of finance nor the greater social processes that underpin and interconnect with the financial world in the twenty-first century. While Emma Charles offers a short, focused snapshot of the rarely rendered perceptible material labour that underpins the spatial web of financial transactions, Julien suggests that finance capital is almost impossible to track through a form of visual realism. Instead, his Dubai Maid sequence relies heavily on the juxtaposition between sound and image, and the use of fantasy or dreamed sequences to allow the audience to perceive the social relations brought about by financialization. The Dubai Maid sequence starts in media res in the desert, with the screens of the installation filled by images of undulating sand dunes rippling to the edges of the screen. Into the shot of the desert steps the figure of the maid, in her cleaner’s uniform, walking away from camera and staring at the horizon. There is no attempt to explain this shot within a realist narrative and no diegetic sound to allow the viewer to make sense of these images. Instead, discordant electronic notes attune us to the strangeness, the isolation, and the vulnerability of the Dubai nightcleaner adrift in this desert expanse. Although the maid has a degree of agency here, and the camera shows her actively looking around her, it is hard to understand what the figure of this nightcleaner in the desert is signifying. An answer of sorts won’t be provided, in fact, until towards the end of the sequence, some seventeen minutes later, Julien cuts back to these desert scenes briefly from a series of shots where the Dubai cleaner finds a refuge from her identity as a maid and nightcleaner in a Catholic church in Dubai that offers a brief sanctuary from her working life. The desert scenes might make most sense, then, as the Dubai cleaner’s imaginings as she sits in the church and thinks about her current situation, representing not only a moment of liberty but also her continuing isolation and loneliness in this unfamiliar terrain.

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At the start of the Dubai Maid section, which comprises four main sequences of roughly five minutes each, Julien cuts from the desert to images of power lines and then the highway, showing how it would be remiss to think that even the desert is a space that can stand outside modern capital. Everything here is connected and a part of larger flows of energy and people. The final cut in this opening sequence leads to an immense Dubai skyline at night, with its many futuristic towers lit up and overwhelming in the grandeur of their design, height, and scope. Julien cuts to the windows outside one of the corporate buildings and instead of the camera taking the audience beneath the surface realism that the image is providing, Julien importantly turns to sound as the resource to interrupt these luxurious and opulent surfaces. After the initial three minutes of footage that have relied primarily on discordant electronic music, often either high pitched or with an emphasis on a low percussive rhythm, Julien utilizes the voiceover of the migrant worker as her heavily accented voice narrates her own story about how she became a nightcleaner in Dubai. She talks about how she went to an employment agency in her native Philippines, where she was offered lucrative work as a cleaner and maid in Dubai, the only way for her to feed her children and to send them to school. This voice punctuates our reception of the financial sublime of the breathtaking skyline panorama on screen. Julien’s aesthetic decision to have the Dubai Maid give her voiced account of the conditions by which she came to the city state to work, and the exploitation she feels and the concomitant isolation and poor working conditions, against the backdrop of the promoted images of Dubai’s sublime skyline, offer a political critique of Dubai’s place in global financial flows. Julien uses this juxtaposition regularly during the Dubai Maid section, whereby the voice of the Filipina maid, with its emotional waverings, hesitations, and crackings, signals a kind of authenticity at odds with the opulence of Dubai’s incredible visual surfaces. Here, we can think of the way that Deleuze discusses the separation of the soundtrack from the visual images in modern cinema, which allow us to look at the images presented to us in a distinctive way, conscious of the layers of history and time inscribed there.44 What can appear to be a kind of agency on the part of the maid—becoming a part of a highly paid, globally recruited workforce that is mobile and takes short-term contracts as they occur at a variety of locations—is undermined through the acoustic narrative of the maid’s loneliness and lack of agency given the poverty that she would face back in the Philippines. As Julien’s film addresses through the voiceover, imported

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workers have few rights apart from what is written into their employment contracts and resolving grievances or disputes successfully can be difficult. Imported workers also tend to live in specifically constructed labour compounds apart from yet still within Dubai itself and are bussed into their places of work. This spatial segregation ensures, as Easterling remarks, a degree of invisibility to their daily lives and isolation from wider community groups.45 Migrant workers are, according to Davis, banned from the luxurious shopping malls, new golf courses, and smart restaurants. In an early set of images, Julien cuts to an over-the-shoulder shot as we see the maid at the front of one of Dubai’s driverless trains, as the camera shares her perspective at the exhilarating encounter with Dubai’s urban architecture at night. These shots are halted as other passengers come on and the maid is isolated and hemmed in by a wealthy Emirati family, the mother covered except for the eyes and, unlike the maid, able to occupy the same space as her children. The Filipina maid’s isolation and exploitation link her to the figures of London’s nightcleaners in the Berwick Street Film Collective’s pioneering film. As images of trading figures flash across the screen from the Dubai Stock Exchange, the maid’s voiceover recounts that her journey to Dubai signified the first time that she had left her country. Again, her voice wavers as she narrates how frightening an experience this was for her, with a close­up of her face and then a cut to Dubai’s skyline and a time lapse sequence by night showing movement through the city state speeded up. The percussive music is resumed, and Julien cuts to a close-up of the windows of one corporate skyscraper, its windows forming a blank reflective surface and denying the viewer the chance to look in through the window anymore as we did in both Nightcleaners and After the Bell. Like Nightcleaners, Julien’s film punctuates sequences with the use of black leader, challenging the audience to reflect on the juxtapositions of the overwhelming Dubai architecture by night and the miserable account of the maid. After an opening that features an ascending lift, a staple of financial films, the mid-section of Playtime focuses on sequences showing the maid inside the building, at work in several empty offices after the working day, as she cleans and as her voiceover continues to give more detail about her working and living conditions. The figure of the maid is again isolated—we never see any working colleagues in this stylized performance of her nightcleaning work—and she frequently stops to stare out of the window, the view down of Dubai not given by the camera but instead replaced by the reflection back from the windows of the maid’s

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distressed face. This framing is significant in that often in mainstream financial films executives are able to look out from the higher floors of the financial skyscraper across at the wider city below, allowing them a position of detachment but also of superiority and dominance, as in The City Below, discussed later in this chapter. This superior position is not allocated to the maid who is constrained by the small space that she is in, isolated, lonely, detached from life below, and also highly vulnerable. Whereas the reflective exterior façade of the financial building shot from outside suggests, as Meissner has pointed out, following Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the surfaces of the Bonaventure Hotel, ‘the reflective surfaces strongly avert any attempt to picture what is happening behind the mirror, inside the building, by invariably repelling any attempt to look inside. Reflective building façades thus constitute a strategic investment of unilateral observation and preclusion’.46 The environment in the offices after trading is sterile and isolated: the white walls of the offices, windows that reflect back inside rather than opening out on the city below, and the huge art pieces—oversized sculptures and paintings in each office—give the air of an expensive gallery after opening hours have ended. This is reinforced by a video screen in one office showing details of artworks, a recurring feature of financial offices, as discussed later in this chapter. The soundtrack, carefully composed throughout by Julien, punctuates the maid’s narration with the indistinct sound of office machinery and muffled voices of a kind that featured in After the Bell. The exhaustion of the cleaners’ bodies in Nightcleaners and the fragmentation of the body in After the Bell, which drew attention to the materiality and corporeality of the exploitative social relations of labour in the earlier films, are alluded to by Julien by way of the voiceover. We hear how the Dubai nightcleaner found the climate in her new country so extreme that her skin suffered badly and she had to plead with her employer for some medication to treat it. Her isolation is communicated largely by means of sound as she reports how she had to slowly pick up Arabic words for the basic menial tasks she was carrying out. The third sequence largely utilizes a long monologue by the maid as she talks about how she is compelled to work to feed her family and how she must battle her loneliness. The accompanying images draw on several reflective surfaces that create doublings both of images, often the maid’s looking back at herself rather than through the windows she stands before, and sometimes of scenes in Dubai’s luxurious malls where bodies are

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reflected back in fragmented form and mannequins are captured in close­up with a focus on their unseeing eyes. The reflective panels that throw the maid’s face back at her suggests how imprisoned she is within the global flows of capital and of the impossibility of constructing a clear image of this process of imprisonment. The images in the mall are blurred and multiplied through a clever framing and cutting between shots of mirrors as the maid’s voiceover talks about her overwhelming desire to run away. In the final sequence, the camera at last moves outside the corporate buildings and the malls as Julien uses a handheld camera to shoot scenes of everyday life in the poorer quarters, outside the financial and business sectors, with their crumbling houses with washing hanging outside and bicycles leant against walls. Again, the maid’s narration anchors these images as she recounts being told about a Catholic church whose sympathetic priest offers sanctuary to migrant workers. This space becomes for her a regular respite from her working conditions as Julien frames her against the deeply coloured stained-glass windows of the church. It is from within the church that Julien cuts back to the dunes sequence that opened this section of Playtime, as if the maid can finally here form an image of herself that, although still isolated and vulnerable, has some degree of freedom. Julien ends the Dubai Maid section with a return to the heavily percussive music and images of the famous skyline, here panning across miles of towering urban architecture to rest on a distant point on the horizon, dominated by huge satellite dishes against the night sky, and then black leader. Significantly, in Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle’s detailed review of Playtime, their argument about the overall failure of the installation as a critical exploration of finance capital ends up at the familiar juncture of Brecht and surfaces. As they write, [t]o echo Brecht, as our reality continues to “slip into the domain of the functional”, a tracking shot past a stack of servers running algorithms, or the mere ventriloquising of capital’s ceaseless chatter, is unlikely to reveal any more about the institutions of contemporary finance than a photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG could tell the spectator of the 1930s about those pillars of German militarism.4747

For Toscano and Kinkle, Julien’s installation fails to represent finance capital appropriately and, through its formal timidity, ends up merely ‘re-presenting’ it: in their view, the film is drawn to using the luxurious surface

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aesthetics—‘glossy elegance’, in Toscano and Kinkle’s terminology—used across advertising and finance itself. Toscano and Kinkle argue that all three elements of one possible definition of capital—as a social relation of production are screened out. The de-socialisation of the economy is relayed by the fact that the seven-screen installation is more or less devoid of true montage, relying on juxtaposition, rhythmic alternation of shots, and the continuity of ambient soundtracks but creating no flashes of insight, no clashes of form and content, no unexpected connections, no break with the smooth empty time of financialised capital here “represented” by data banks, flashing stock displays, and empty trading floors.48

For Toscano and Kinkle, Julien has missed an opportunity to represent finance from a critical perspective, in essence because he has not followed a more Brechtian route in composing his aesthetics of the financial field. At this point, it might be asked not only what an effective contemporary Brechtian response to finance capital might look like but also whether a Brechtian montage might no longer in itself be a way to think through our current stage of financialization. Here, we would be revisiting some of the questions set out in the celebrated letter by Gilles Deleuze to the leading French film critic, Serge Daney, in 1986, at a point at which both philosopher and film historian were addressing the status and politics of the cinematic image in an era when, owing to the wide distribution of television sets and to the dominance in the fabric of everyday life of television shows, the world itself was ‘turning to film’, becoming saturated and knowable only in the form of images. The ubiquity of the moving image across everyday life, which the widespread domestic dissemination of television in the 1970s and 1980s was making apparent, has obviously only intensified in subsequent decades. Deleuze picked up on Daney’s historiography of the cinematic image, which Daney had described as having assumed three historical stages. The first period, for Daney, the time of montage, is a point at which cinema asks itself what there is to see behind the image, a way of seeing more than is given in the initial image, achieved through juxtaposition, editing, and, of course, in arguably its most penetrating form, by the kind of montage developed most forcefully by Eisenstein for his revolutionary cinema and taken up by Brecht, developed in Brecht’s 1931 film with Slatan Dudow, Kuhle Wampe, about the growth to political self-consciousness of young proletarian Germans at the time of the rise of the National Socialists. As

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Deleuze’s reading of Daney’s historiography makes clear, the first great period of montage, of finding ways of seeing behind the surface of the image, comes to an end with National Socialism and World War II, in politics as massed gatherings as mobilization and mise en scène and widespread incarceration, ‘where “behind” the image there was nothing to be seen but concentration camps, and the only remaining bodily link was torture’.49 Daney’s historiography, according to Deleuze’s account, runs through a second stage in the period after World War II, when the Brechtian question of seeing behind the image—the critical strategy praised by Toscano and Kinkle above—is replaced by a preoccupation with the act of perception itself, with encountering the surface of the image rather than trying to address what might lie beyond it, and with the immobility of the body in the image. If the political horrors of mid-twentieth-century Europe led away from a conviction in the primacy of montage towards a more reflective cinema of witnessing, then this is only compounded, as Deleuze relates in his summary of Daney’s work, with the third period of the moving image: ‘the question is no longer what there is to see behind the image, nor how we can see the image itself, how we can slip in, because each image now slips across other images [….]’50 Deleuze identifies that cinema now has to contend with the way that television, with its own specific set of images and its social function, creates an overall image environment within which cinema has to make a renewed sense of the moving image as a kind of practice of thinking. The ubiquity of images (and Deleuze’s response to Daney’s ideas is written in the mid-1980s, at a point at which television and video are beginning a general saturation of images in everyday life, which will only be expanded exponentially in subsequent decades with widespread accessibility of the various for capturing and circulating low-­ budget moving images provided by mobile phones, apps, and the internet) means that cinema has to find an appropriate new form itself, and Daney, according to Deleuze, identifies this new form as a kind of mannerist mode, a ‘tense, convulsive form of cinema that leans, as it tries to turn round, on the very system that seeks to control or replace it’. From this, we should not be surprised that the form that a moving image sequence takes, as it tries to address finance and its own system and circulation of images, is no longer specifically Brechtian but exists in an uneasy relation with a whole set of existing images in circulation, in that it re-presents the world in part constituted by these images as much as it represents more directly that world. As Deleuze writes, Daney had already ‘characterized

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the image’s third phase as “mannerism”: when there’s nothing to see behind it, not much to see in it or on the surface, but just an image constantly slipping across pre-existing presupposed images, when “the background in any image is always another image,” and so on endlessly, and that’s what we have to see’.51 In the context of Deleuze’s correspondence with Daney about the impossibility of a Brechtian type of critical image in the era of a saturation of visual forms across multiple media forms, Toscano and Kinkle’s criticism of Julien’s film seems harsh. They argue that Julien is unable to formulate a way of seeing beneath capital’s elegant surfaces, in a Brechtian manner or to utilize a Lukácsian realism to generate ‘cognitively and politically revealing types’ in the way that Julien uses stock characters from the financial and art worlds. For Toscano and Kinkle, [w]hat we encounter instead is a kind of inventory of the impasses which increasingly confront the theory and practice of representing capital. [….] Where Eisenstein’s gambit was to transpose Marx’s method into film, by articulating, through montage, the affective dimension of capital’s effects with its invisible, abstract processes, Julien resorts, in what does not appear an ironic or dialectical gesture, to repeating the representational clichés through which we typify capitalism.52

The lack of an effective interventionist or interruptive form of montage that demands a rethinking or reperception of capital’s shaping of social relations is identified throughout Toscano and Kinkle’s review. However, one thinks of the analysis made by French theorist Dork Zabunyan about the two prime critical strategies that art practices offer in their engagement with what he, following Deleuze and Guattari, calls the ‘two flows of capital’, namely the strategy of ‘interruption’, often occurring when part of the invisible infrastructure supporting the movement of finance malfunctions and becomes perceptible, and the strategy of ‘monitoring’ or bringing to visibility while ‘following in the wake of these flows instead of trying to interrupt them’.53 Julien’s images of the movements and networks employed by the contemporary financial sector, especially in its utilization of the asset value of the art object in Playtime, leans closer to the form of monitoring than it does to that of interruption. Yet, as I have noted above, certainly with the Dubai Maid section, Julien films in parts of Dubai less often seen on screen in advertising and state PR and foregrounds the voiceover of the exploited maid in clear counterpoint to the

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framed skyline and images of Dubai’s financial sector. The voiced narration allows a specific representation, rather than re-presentation, of finance capital by giving the audience access to an alternative testimony, delivered in the voice of someone almost overcome by loneliness and isolation, who has had to take up a manual labouring job in a richer country, away from her children. In the clash of the voiced narrative and the breathtaking financial sublime of the skyscrapers comes moments of critical awareness of the materiality upon which the production of profits in the financial sector rests. The Dubai cleaner gives us a clear account of her social situation and of her relationship to other parts of the Dubai economy. Toscano and Kinkle’s point is, of course, that ‘none of the workers who build Dubai are visible in Julien’s tableaus’ and with this omission, Julien follows, according to Toscano and Kinkle, a pattern familiar from a number of Hollywood films of global crisis, where ‘class and exploitation are metonymically embodied in the maid, a woman of colour [….] it’s as if domestic workers have become the only conduit for a transnational elite to access the lived reality of exploitation’.54 However, as the tradition of political cinema before Playtime shows, from Nightcleaners to After the Bell, by registering on screen specifically manual jobs such as nightcleaning, the act of the material reproduction of the surfaces and processes of finance capital that is so often erased from view in the aesthetics of the financial sector, audiences can understand broader social processes of erasure at work. As noted in this chapter, such work falls often on the most marginalized and vulnerable workers, on working mothers holding down several jobs and on immigrated workers who are denied full labour rights. If we think of how Julien stages the narrative of the Dubai Maid, which is recounted deliberately against the backdrop of the moving images of the Dubai skyline, then we can see how the film’s aesthetic form aligns itself with the discussion of ‘dissensus’ in Keller Easterling’s work on the politics of contemporary space, Extrastatecraft. Borrowing the term ‘dissensus’ from French philosopher of politics and aesthetics, Jacques Rancière, who utilizes it to specify a way of rupturing a consensus and of bringing in destabilizing perspectives or discourses, Easterling notes how, for Rancière, dissensus is generated by what might be thought of as ‘inadmissible evidence’, or new material that completely repositions the poles of what had previously been agreed to constitute the dimensions of any political situation. For Rancière, as Easterling notes, the immigrant worker acts as a personification of ‘inadmissible evidence’ as they can be seen as a figure for

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whom there is often no relevant national or international law. Easterling continues: The immigrant worker returns again and again in the evidence of infrastructural space as the subject of an uneasy or false consensus [….] Dissensus always exposes this inadmissible evidence, forwarding and highlighting it within the consensus that tries to explain it away. Looking beyond the sanctioned plotlines of the proper political story, inadmissible evidence identifies the category leftovers, or the butterflies that are not pinned to the board.55

Dissensus is an important category in rethinking just what might constitute a political actor or statement in any situation as it unsettles the consensus around permissible contributions to any discussion. The status of the immigrant worker in Dubai has resonance here, and because of this, Julien’s decision to focus on the case study of the Filipina maid as a metonymic figure is more compelling than Toscano and Kinkle suggest. The acoustic account that she offers literally provides a voice to those erased and excluded from the standard PR campaigns and advertising for Dubai. The juxtaposition of visual images similar in their glossiness and panoramic scope to those used by Dubai’s various sectors in promotional campaigns with the normally excluded sound of an exploited and marginalized worker repositions how we might view the financial skyline of Dubai, offering a dissensual and incompatible perspective. This is not just re-presenting promotional campaigns for Dubai as much as representing those accounts differently. Although Easterling’s work is a study in contemporary spatial and architectural politics, and so is not engaged with cultural works per se, her analysis of dissensus and extrastatecraft here is fully appropriate for the Dubai Maid sequence: Dissensus is not only about identifying the inadmissible and navigating the ripples and dimples on the water; it is also about creating some of those ripples. Space can embody dissensus when it scripts an interplay for multiply opposing or counterbalancing layers and when it returns to the game of the laws and people that the market has erased or excluded for its convenience.56

The points at which the Filipina cleaner is able to break out of her designated role as a migrant worker with few rights who services the spaces of the financially affluent are few. They comprise her walk through the poorer neighbourhoods to the church and the unexplained dream sequences or

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imaginary wanderings through the desert dunes that bookend the Dubai sequence in Julien’s film. Although these scenes, unlike the images conjured up by her voiceover, do not fit into a realist portrayal of the maid’s experiences in the city, in their use of an imagined mobility through space, they also work as a critique of the modes used by Dubai’s ‘official version’ which itself owes much to fantasy. As Easterling writes, ‘Operating in a frictionless realm of exemption the zone quite naturally adopts the scripts of the resort and theme park, with their ethereal aura of fantasy’.57 If Dubai works to appeal to visitors and investors through a pronounced fantasy mode in its promotional material, then Julien’s mirroring of this affect of fantasy in the cleaner’s sequences of reverie and yearning disrupt rather than simply re-present Dubai’s official image. The maid’s unexplained reveries in the desert register the degree to which she is out of place here amongst Dubai’s own nationals and the rich global investors who frequent its skyscrapers, malls, leisure islands, and hotels. The Filipina cleaner is not allowed to experience Dubai as fantasy in the same way as the richer visitors or to have fantasies about her own preferred places. The use of fantasy in a critical way is notable here and is another step in Julien’s move away from a specifically Brechtian approach to addressing contemporary finance. In Brecht and Dudow’s celebrated film, Kuhle Wampe, fantasy is presented as a reactionary mode that prevents the working class in Berlin from fully grasping their relationship to the wider economy and to the relations of production. In one of its key scenes, focused on a poor family suffering employment and trying to both pay their rent and to put food on the table, Brecht and Dudow juxtapose the mother’s attempts to write an affordable shopping list with the father’s distraction by the lurid details of the trial of the alleged courtesan and spy, Mata Hari. The father’s obsessive near-reverie at the descriptions of Mata Hari’s body are shown to be an obstacle to his ability to grasp the totality of the economic situation, where being out of work is not down to individual failings and lack of drive. Julien’s use of fantasy in a critical capacity suggests something quite different: the Dubai cleaner seems fully aware of the wider economic picture and of how it impacts upon her and her ability to feed her children. The fantasy scenes are not a distraction from her achieving full consciousness of her exploitation but a way of registering her yearning for a way of being that cannot be achieved under her present conditions. It registers the importance of the ability to dream that her lowly position within the hierarchy of contemporary finance capital usually denies. Julien uses the cleaner’s dreams, voiceovers, and reveries as a disruptive mode, not as a

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way of filling in the gaps that finance capitalism promises but cannot deliver but to break the imposing spell of the image of the lit-up Dubai skyline and its promise that here capitalist fantasies can be universally realized, to represent finance rather than to re-present finance’s gaze. Amongst the various hubs that Dubai has set up, it is significant that it has invested heavily in facilitating the creation, editing, and circulation of moving images. This ‘mobile trade’ in moving images, as Kay Dickinson reports, has been centred on the Dubai International Film Festival, but spins out across a variety of sub-sections of cinema production.58 While the global trade in moving images has always been heavily reliant on migrant workforces, the labour conditions for immigrated workers are considerably more precarious than in other hubs of global cinema such as Hong Kong, Hollywood, or Bollywood. Significantly, Dickinson points out that in Dubai ‘it is next to impossible for a migrant to stay on past their contract, let alone to become a permanent resident. This condition renders its film workers more expendable than is the case in comparable agglomeration economies’.59 In terms of Dubai’s literal investment in the global circulation of moving images, and in the representations of Dubai-as-city-space that are promoted widely, we might see Julien’s Dubai Maid section as a kind of counter response, where the voice and gaze of the migrant worker become manifest and are held in counterpoint against the glossy excesses of the images that Dubai might specialize in completing in post-production and that Dubai uses to advertise itself as a travel and business destination. This is significant as the moving images in general circulation of Dubai are either already material with a heavy promotional leaning or using the hub as a spectacular background in mainstream filmmaking. Julien’s Dubai images are a rare counter move: as Kay Dickinson argues, alternative cinematic strategies are important in rebalancing the overwhelmingly positive visual representation of Dubai’s freeport hub status, to which many other countries aspire: As Dickinson writes, ‘this is all the more critical given the movement outwards of the ‘Dubai model’. If we only ‘see’ the Emirate cinematically as occasional flourishes like Tom Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, then we are not doing enough to acknowledge that this is just the tip of the ‘Brand Dubai’ iceberg’.60 In one of the rare commentaries on Dubai-set films, Ashvin Devasundaram has written acutely about the spaces accessed across the city by its migrant and marginalized populations, who are often rendered invisible by the focus on wealth creation and luxurious consumption. The ‘city of

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interconnected spatio-cultural archipelagos’ identified by Devasundaram is recreated in Julien’s installation, even if the potentially disruptive agency that Devasundaram sees in the characters under discussion in his analysis, who can challenge the exclusionary spatial ordering of finance capital in the hub, is absent from Julien’s narrative. The Dubai cleaner’s agency is severely constrained, and she occupies a position aligned to an older paradigm identified by Devasundaram, that of the ‘silenced’ subaltern, depicted largely as the ‘excluded abject destined to dwell apart and dislocated from the epicentre of legitimised social, cultural, economic and political activity’ and unable, unlike Devasundaram’s examples, to transcend her condition of alterity.61 Given Dubai’s own development as a global hub for the post-­production and circulation of moving images, it is significant to ask how Julien’s film, and specifically its major mode of exhibition as a multichannel looped stream within a gallery space, offers a critical alternative to the exploitative practices in Dubai’s iteration of moving image logistics identified above by Dickinson. It is useful to consider the degree to which Julien’s work, given its thematic focus on the assemblage of finance, art, and image, questions the institutional complicity of commercial (and by extension public, state, and national) exhibition and distribution networks and their circulation of images as commodities in both mainstream cinema and in the investor-­ friendly art world. However, Toscano and Kinkle have expressed disappointment and frustration with the lack of political engagement called upon by Julien’s editing and spatialization of the narrative. As they argue, during their visit to the gallery, ‘the sizeable audience all sat dutifully on the perimeter of the carpeted floor, craning heads and scanning eyes quietly labouring to compose a familiar cinematic experience, no one really compelled to move around—fearing to interrupt the others’ enjoyment, perhaps, but also, one imagines, because Playtime doesn’t call for that kind of work, of montage and perambulation from the viewer’.62 At this point, one has to ask whether the perceived fault for any failed montage in space attempted by Julien lies in the images themselves and their composition in the installation, or with the specific ways that the audience feels drawn to using the gallery space. James Harvey has written in this regard about the ‘problematic status of the gallery film’, particularly in terms of its positioning in the formation of publics, where the work itself reflects on screen on networks and assemblages that include numerous participants and actors.63 Julien’s film, with its separate sequences that build up to an overall sense of an

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assemblage that intersects the worlds of finance and of the creation, exhibition and distribution networks of the art sector, might certainly offer an occasion for the visitors to the gallery to also reflect on their own position in such complex dynamics but the film itself does not seem to offer points for a sense of critical self-awareness on the part of the viewer, and neither the site of exhibition nor Julien’s own place in the production and circulation of such images is foregrounded in the overall examination of the workings of the art world shown in the film. This downplaying of his own position within these flows and of the role of the audience within the networks of finance and art shows how Julien diverges from the reinvigorated ‘self-critical engaged observational mode’ utilized by other artist-­ filmmakers working with documentary in the gallery at the same time and highlighted in Harvey’s essay. However, Playtime’s screening situation should be considered, exhibited initially in the UK as it was on the upper floor of the Victoria Miro gallery in London while the linked work on ‘Choreographing Capital’ was screened on the ground floor near the gallery entrance and so is encountered first by the visitor. This contextualization through linked films does urge the viewer to make connections between the theoretical points and observations in the downstairs film about the ability of the moving image to register the workings of capital, and the sections of Playtime upstairs that give an exposition of finance across several scenarios. Unlike the film that Harvey comments on, it is not clear if a new community of viewers is brought into being through an encounter with Julien’s film upstairs. The viewer is not directly asked to consider their own position, and it is hard not to argue that the commodity nature of the images themselves is only reinforced by the accompanying sale, at Victoria Miro in Mayfair, of still images taken on location of the sites of the film that are priced as collectibles at around £30,000. The installation, Playtime itself, was produced in a limited edition of six (with one artist’s proof), according to Sarah Thornton, ‘for viewing in galleries, museums, and private foundations’.64 As Erika Balsom writes of the practice of editioning undertaken by a number of experimental filmmakers who have moved into gallery exhibition as their primary screening mode, the kind of producing limited editions for sale to galleries and individual collectors undertaken by Julien and contemporaries is one of the sole means by which filmmakers can find a sustainable practice that allows them to finance their next projects.65 Despite the economic reality of the need to produce moving images in the gallery as limited collectibles, it is hard to see that the film addresses the social situation of the encounter between

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viewer and film in the gallery space, nor that the gallery’s own role in the financially lucrative art market is fully questioned. Although, as Harvey writes, to demand this would be to charge experimental filmmakers moving into the gallery with ‘biting the hand that feeds’ them,66 Julien’s installation seems not to register the degree of self-criticism needed to make the film’s thematic focus on spaces, financialization, and images cohere into a more politically radical work. Its status as a work made for the gallery rather than the cinema in this way misses the chance to offer a ‘space of intervention’ that Harvey sees, for example, in John Akomfrah’s gallery films and thus struggles to foster the creation of a newly constituted and more critical audience.67

‘There’ll be a Commotion’: Financial Turbulence in The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler, Wdr/ Arte, 2010) Whereas Isaac Julien breaks with narrative linearity with his looped and interconnected image worlds, German director Christoph Hochhaüsler’s film, The City Below (Unter Dir die Stadt), works initially with a linear form that addresses Jameson’s fragmentation through its attention to the affectless body under the turbulence of finance capital. The temporality of the narrative however is also fragmented, with the final section of the film acting as a temporally ambiguous coda to the main section. The City Below explores ways to make the audience rethink and resee, recontextualize, the workings of finance capital in contemporary Germany as the Federal Republic moved in the decade after unification towards an embrace of neo-liberal economics. This making ‘phantasmagoric’ of the everyday world and of ordinary objects and bodies that are spaced within it is a process that, according to Rancière, offers a ‘trace of the true’ and exposes ‘society’s contradictions’.68 Hochhäusler’s crisis indexicality introduces a new cinematic order into contemporary representations of the financial sector. Whereas scholars have argued, as Jameson notes, that the precise realist concern with everyday objects in the paintings of early modernity draws on the mercantile concern with the body of the world, its textures and minute differences crucial to achieving high market prices, the moving images of The City Below display a fascination with the bodies that inhabit the urban landscapes and luxurious spaces of the financial city.69

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Hochhäusler largely eschews a phenomenology of everyday inanimate objects and focuses instead on the (object) world of the body, on how even bodies have become abstract or fragmented under finance capital. Bodies are no longer sure of identity, of space and time. They are made ‘out of sugar’, as protagonist Svenja Steve comments. Identity is unstable, photos and clothes help in the quest to stabilize, to perform, a sense of self. Hochhäusler’s brilliance is to image these phantasmagoric bodies as they return to the world from their godly detachment, as they become real, rather than virtual. He maps the vanishing of affect across Frankfurt’s ghostly white skyscrapers, transparent yet obscuring, and its designer-­ furnished interiors below, almost every shot layered in panes of glass, screens and mirrors, sheets of white material, smoke. Melinda Cooper proposes that contemporary financial relations are spatial in an increasingly ‘topological’ sense, that is, dynamic, adaptable, and pre-tensile, rather than rigid. She writes that ‘[w]hat is at stake in the circulation of capital today is not so much the exchange of equivalents as the universal transmutability of fluctuation’.70 Of central importance here is the category of ‘turbulence’ and the degree to which the globally integrated financial system, whether we like this or not, is one of our most sophisticated facilitators and evaluators of volatility. Since the unpegging of the dollar from the price of gold in 1971, and the creation of free-floating currencies, the contemporary financial sector works less in what we might think of as the mode of the traditional physical market based on storable commodities and more in its ability to use ‘speculative methodologies’ to negotiate uncertain futures where unanticipated events ‘just happen’. Turbulence is at the heart of this thinking, from the ability of an institution to be resilient and even profit from an unforeseen event to the leveraging capacity of major geopolitical players to threaten turbulence in parts of the world economy. Turbulence is central to contemporary considerations of economic value. As markets are now so globally co-dependent, to protect against the damaging effects of future events, whether related to currencies, to the climate, or to politics, complex modes of fluctuation can be combined, extracted, priced up, and sold in the form of derivatives. Finance reconfigures value in an era of turbulence by understanding and pricing volatility. Turbulence becomes tradable, particularly when the fallout is unknowable. Not linked to the fortunes of individual nation states as currencies tend to be, derivatives are increasingly prominent sources of profit in the globally connected financial sector.

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Cooper explains how, given the ‘overarching logistics of turbulence’, major powers draw on ‘scenario planning’ as a futures methodology that allows them to map out multiple possible future worlds that might occur and to exploit uncertainty to extract profit in global markets. Scenarios are ‘alternative images’ that ‘focus on the identification of discontinuities and how these could potentially develop as a set over time’.71 This is a creative, imaginative, and speculative act, distinct from a more rigidly predictive logic that would adhere strictly to the linear development of probability. In this, it is not hard for us working in the arts and humanities to see a kind of parallel imaginative act to the creation of possible futures in speculative modes like sci-fi that might be more critical about the power imbalances involved in such future-oriented turbulence than the mostly conservative planners involved in governmental possible worlds planning. In this section, I look at Christoph Hochhäusler’s drama, The City Below (2010) set in the financial capital of the Eurozone, Frankfurt am Main. If contemporary value asks to be understood in terms of baroque derivative contracts, rather than in the forms of physical labour highlighted by the films earlier in this chapter, or in the asset-like nature of certain physical objects, what challenge is that for cinema, a form that has become so pre-eminent not least because of its ability to register the complex surfaces of people and things? Can we think of a film like The City Below as aligning itself with a derivative logic in its commitment to exploring the rippling out of turbulence across the globally connected financial markets centred in Frankfurt? As the film’s coda suggests, the volatility that the financial city provokes may come back in unanticipated forms. I suggest that one of Cooper’s ‘discontinuities’ that may come back to take on an evental presence concerns the silenced minoritized communities, both in Germany and in its field of operations abroad—in this film, Indonesia. By way of a prologue, I want to think about the parallels between two short films from 2009. Pumzi, a 21-minute short film from Kenya, directed by Wanuri Kahiu, is a dystopian science fiction piece set in a post-­ catastrophic future world; its opening captions tell us that we are some 35 years after World War III, the ‘water war’. The main protagonist, Asha, a curator of the Virtual Natural History Museum, is confined to a spatially conscribed community, sealed off from the wider contaminated environment beyond its walls. After dreaming about a luxuriant tree in the desert, an event that triggers scanning technology that tells her to take dream suppressant medication, Asha receives from an anonymous sender a soil sample that owing to its high moisture content and uncontaminated status

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indicates that the conditions for life have returned outside. On breathing in the moisture from the soil—and ‘Pumzi’ translates as Swahili for breath—Asha begins to have visions of water and of the possibility of a resurgence of uncontaminated plant life. She asks for permission to go beyond the community walls and her body is scanned, a process that reveals images of a green tree and water in her inner dream world. Permission to leave is refused, and the governing body of the community attempts to destroy all evidence of Asha’s visions. She manages to escape the colony, realizes that her visions of a tree outside were a mirage, but manages to plant a seed in the soil, water it with her own gathered sweat, and as Asha dies, the camera pulls back to reveal the tree emerging from her body in a form similar to the dream tree. Christoph Hochhäusler’s nine-minute short Séance, a contribution to the state-of-the-nation portmanteau film, Deutschland 09, is included as an Extra on the The City Below DVD. Séance outlines, using a male voiceover and a camera that pans slowly across a deserted apartment full of photographs, books, and collected objects, a narrative of a post-­catastrophic space colony of the future, on a now inhabited part of the moon; its small population fled the earth, we are told, after its resources had been plundered. This colony is also strictly controlled, inhabitants are prevented from glimpsing the earth, and memories are actively discouraged for fear that they might be destabilizing. This is achieved through a process of communal séances during which recollections are aired, stored, and then erased from the personal memory through a technological scanning process. The title of Hochhäusler’s short film is significant here. The séance generally describes an event that attempts to bridge different temporal modes during which individuals or groups attempt to contact spirits, ghosts, or spectres that belong to a different time but that can sometimes immaterially occupy the shared space, or at least communicate within it. In Hochhäusler’s film, an unnamed female protagonist, however, manages one day to escape the barriers of the colony, writing the word ‘Deutschland’ in the sand of the moon’s surface, an act that leaves her, like Asha, dying of exhaustion. The woman had managed to evade the séances, and her writing both bewilders the colonists and sets in train a process of unfocused yearning. This triggers further turbulence, an uprising which results in the walls coming down. In temporal terms, this future community in an alternative spatial setting yearns to be able to remember a past that we may not have reached yet.

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In both films, the existing post-catastrophic order is threatened by images—dreams, visions, memories—the present traces of intangible pasts and futures experienced as affects, as bodily sensations, and as aesthetic forms. These images are barely understood by the protagonists who experience them in the locations and colonies that they now occupy, but the alternative spatiotemporal worlds that they harbinger are clearly destabilizing for the future presents in both films. The yearning that the images trigger, embodied in both cases by a young female protagonist, for a mode of living elsewhere, beyond the current location and outside the established society of control leads implicitly in Pumzi and explicitly in Séance to an uprising, despite surveillant scanning processes, whether medical or technical, of suppression and erasure. Pumzi is generally discussed under the rubric of Afrofuturism, as it is in Kara Keeling’s recent book, Queer Times, Black Futures. Keeling writes about Pumzi in terms of ‘investment’, ‘futures’, speculation’, and ‘escrow’, a discourse that seems more immediately appropriate to finance economics than to the eco-activist plotline. But importantly, as Keeling argues at length, Afrofuturism should be seen through the lens of finance capital. Its main constitutive elements, imagination, technology, the future, and liberation, are here considered ‘within the context of finance capital’s stances toward (and investments in) the future’.72 Keeling’s argument is that the modern system of speculative finance capital, in terms both of its creation of virtual financial instruments, like derivatives that bridge risk across time, and of its commitment to the global movement and accumulation of capital, was ‘developed with and through the Atlantic slave trade’.73 Keeling traces the way that derivatives are based on a theory of imaginary future-­ oriented values that owe their emergence to the financial instruments developed to account for the vast temporal and spatial gaps between the commitment to purchase slaves and their shipping and delivery by the entrepreneurs who grew the slave trade. For Keeling, Afrofuturist works like Pumzi are specific responses to finance capital’s systems of control, its ‘capitalist realism’, and to its modes of ordering space and time, risk, investment, debt, and a sense of the future; such works explore technology and aesthetics to posit alternative spatiotemporal possibilities where we can glimpse the energies of black and other marginalized communities forming creative resistances. With the parallels between Pumzi and Séance in mind, we may think about Hochhäusler’s work across Séance and The City Below as positing a related engagement with the spaces and times of finance capital. Given its setting in Frankfurt, Germany’s finance capital

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and home of the European Central Bank, The City Below might be seen as an example of a related ‘Eurofuturism’. This is not to appropriate the African in Afrofuturism, but to acknowledge, as Aria Dean argues, the absolute centrality of black radical thought to theorizing speculation and non-capitalist modes of futurity.74 This ‘Eurofuturism’ brings together European cultural forms that address temporal dislocations in a manner akin to Afrofuturism. In his major study of Afrofuturism and contemporary music, Kodwo Eshun had already proposed such alliances, arguing that ‘[f]or Techno, Düsseldorf is the Mississippi Delta’.75 We can see a similar substitution in Hochhäusler’s The City Below, but with the spaces of Germany’s major financial city, Frankfurt in this instance, rather than the studios and clubs of Düsseldorf, as the key terrain for understanding capital’s impact on the ability to imagine futurities. As we shall see below in the analysis of the ending of The City Below, with its unexplained time shift and representation of an anticipatory future mode, Hochhäusler’s work displays marks of the alignment in cultural forms between Afrofuturism and hauntology that Mark Fisher has written about, particularly, following Kodwo Eshun, in relation to recent electronic dance music rather than, as here, to contemporary European cinema. For Fisher, and with a focus on contemporary dance music, [t]he emergence of a twenty-first century sonic hauntology is a sign that “white” culture can no longer escape the temporal disjunctions that have been constitutive of the Afrodiasporic experience since Africans were first abducted by slavers and projected from their own life world into the abstract space-time of Capital. Time was always-already out of joint for the slave, and Afrofuturism and hauntology can now be heard as two versions of the same condition.76

Hochhäusler’s films visualize a meeting point, as Fisher’s essay does, of hauntology and capital that hints at alignments with Afrofuturist explorations of the spatial and temporal dislocations and alienation experienced under finance capital. This alignment builds on those initial echoes and resonances of the Afrofuturist Pumzi that it is possible to see in Hochhäusler’s short film, Séance. The City Below joins a history of visual representations of the biblical tale of David and Bathsheba, whereby the powerful king catches sight of the beautiful wife of Uriah, a soldier, and wants to possess her, so he sends Uriah into battle knowing he will not survive. Famously, Rembrandt’s

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Bathsheba at her Bath reconstitutes the tale through the positioning of Bathsheba away from David’s covetous eyes, thus deliberately excluding David’s body and David’s desire directly from the frame. The viewer is placed in David’s position, able to see the sensual yet non-idealized body of Bathsheba in a most intimate, private location, ‘at her bath’. Rembrandt’s focus on the face and body of Bathsheba in the absence of David allow us to consider questions of aesthetics and politics: we can see both what attracts David to Bathsheba, the trigger for regal desire, and also see in her ambivalent expression as she reads David’s letter, how she recognizes the power of David to constitute political reality. Hochhäusler relocates this tale of power and desire to contemporary Frankfurt, the ethnically diverse ‘Mainhattan’, the Eurozone’s finance capital. Cordes, who has just been declared the ‘Banker of the Year’ and is at the peak of fame and influence, encounters Svenja, wife of Oliver, one of his employees, at an art award ceremony. As the bank’s representative in Indonesia has just been brutally murdered in protest at the bank’s policies, Cordes promotes Oliver to replace him and suppresses the facts of the incident. The film’s opening disorients the viewer, disrupting any sense of coherent space and time. It is unclear whose perspective we are occupying as we move from an airplane to an ascending lift looking out at the Frankfurt skyline, to a busy shopping street, where the seated Svenja follows a woman wearing the same blouse past the glass facades of expensive shops that reflect back fragmented images. This opening registers as a loose montage of key moments in early German film history, from the celestial clouds that mirror the opening of Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the use of the lift and the revolving door that, for German film watchers, signals a new modern cinema in Murnau’s The Last Laugh, through to the mannequin’s pose that points to Marlene Dietrich’s mimicry at the start of The Blue Angel. But it is Rolf Thiele’s less well-known The Girl Rosemarie (1958), considered at length in Chapter 2, that echoes strongest, the echoes ranging from its exploration of the Frankfurt of the Economic Miracle years to its varied and expressive use of sound. In its subtle citations of these earlier films, Hochhäusler’s film seems to be proposing that German cinema in the twentieth century found forms to articulate, respectively, monstrous power, the modern city and its object forms, the performativity of gender, and the becoming-financial of the eponymous Rosemarie, whose ascent and fall, as we saw earlier in Chap. 2, can be read as a visual counterpoint to the historical articulations of ordoliberalism charted by Foucault in his Birth of Biopolitics lectures. With this

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metacinematic introduction, The City Below already seems to be asking the reflexive question concerning whether it can continue this filmic tradition by finding forms appropriate to the derivative mode of contemporary power. As noted above, the financial city tends, in recent cinema, to be the contact point at which the virtual world of finance capital is made concrete and a part of everyday life, the linking node of aesthetics and economics played out against an architectural space. Yet Hochhäusler’s image work in this film is bold and challenging as he moves away from the familiar images of finance in crisis: away from trading screens, skyscraper panoramas, the gridded city below, the personification of systemic catastrophe, the imperiled family as refuge, crisis as morality tale. There are no real-time electronic rows of figures or ticker tape scroll, our familiar indices of financial meltdown. Hochhäusler’s crisis is impending, not yet fully present. If the brutal murder in Indonesia is a sign that the financial order has reached a catastrophic tipping point, the breaking waves of chaos have not reached Cordes’s city fully. Yet Frankfurt is itself here a city not fully present in space or time. As Meissner has proposed of films about Wall Street, the financial urban imaginary often seems haunted by a crisis yet to come.77 The possibility of crisis and future violence connected to financial decision-making haunts the otherwise peaceful and prosperous streets of Frankfurt from the beginning, as we learn about the violent death of the German colleague in Indonesia. A sense of intangibility is established early in The City Below, as both time and space become slippery categories. The spaces of finance capital are homogenous in appearance, if not size: ‘One is always just there’, Svenja comments, whether one is in Frankfurt, Houston, or London, Indonesia or Shanghai: none of them quite like the old-money Hanseatic port city of Hamburg, her hometown. Time too takes on a constructed, floating, spectral quality, as we saw also in Chap. 4 in Petzold’s Yella. The past is unreliable, backstories are invented, and the present is dominated by thoughts of a futurity that is inescapably linked to the nature of speculative investment. The City Below is a film about aesthetics and politics as much as economics. Hochhäusler’s film is very different from Julien’s installation, yet the projects overlap in their desire to make sense of the place of the aesthetic and the political in a world dominated by the economic. The key question they address concerns the philosophy of value. What does it

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mean to place a value on something today—a representation, a performance, an action, a way of living, on a social as well as a financial transaction? Svenja seems knowable as an aesthetic figure. She is a picture editor, though her unreliable narration casts some doubt about her actual experience. Cordes encounters her first at the art prize award, where she flouts the rules about not smoking by leaving a cigarette on an installation, thus constituting an anarchic counter aesthetic. She is rarely encountered without a cigarette, often becoming spectral in the smoke she creates. In the extensive redecoration of the apartment, in her mimicking the behaviour of a passerby who wears the same top as her, and in her commitment to jogging and to making productive her body, she acts as a kind of performance artist, replacing a stable sense of identity with a series of performative acts. Cordes can be aligned with the political sphere, embodying an answer to Hochhaüsler’s key question: ‘What does absolute power look like today?’. He possesses the ability to constitute worldly relations, the contours of the visible and the sayable. He invents a new back story for himself when talking to Svenja, taking over the family history of the murdered colleague in a similar fashion to the way he takes over another employee’s wife. His bank sponsors the major art prize awarded, yet he disavows the possibility of the visual image breaking through the waning of affect in the financial world to which he belongs: the same paintings hang on the walls of his offices in both London and Frankfurt. Yet Cordes is fascinated by the aesthetic. He is disturbed by, and drawn to, Svenja’s performativity rather than, initially, to a physical erotic, her aesthetics of unpredictability, her ability to constitute her own world, affectless and unreal, still becoming. In his search for a sensation of the actual, ‘the desire to become real’, in Cordes’s phrasing, he turns himself into a spectator of affective images, viewing the brutal photographs of the butchered and fragmented murdered banker in Indonesia, and using finance to effect a transaction so that he is able to watch up close a drug user injecting in a disused Frankfurt house. The precondition here is that the drug user makes no eye contact with Cordes, thus allowing Cordes to maintain the classical one-way conditions of art and cinematic spectatorship. Much of the film explores the twists in the emerging affair between Svenja and Cordes, with its numerous deceptions and reconciliations. I want to draw attention to five key moments in the film, and particularly to the gap between the first of these moments and the fifth. The first is a statement made by Cordes right at the beginning of the film: ‘Es wird

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scheppern’—‘there’ll be a commotion’. The fifth is a statement from the end, the final words of the film, as Svenja says ‘Es geht los’—‘it’s starting’. Moment One We first meet Cordes as he is invited to an elite business meeting, in the private dining room at the top of one of Frankfurt’s distinctive financial skyscrapers. He is asked to underwrite a secret and hostile takeover that has huge speculative promise but that will change drastically the industrial landscape, affecting jobs and livelihoods. ‘There’ll be a commotion’, he responds, his dry retort registering his excitement at the magnitude of the proposed deal. He anticipates a future set of events that will be disruptive, but will be containable—in German, the use of ‘ein bißchen’ (‘a bit’) makes this clear. The business meeting, like much of the film, is framed with extensive use of white in the mise en scène, filmed against huge glass windows that make the city below distant and opaque. Immediately there is a cut to a long shot from a neighbouring skyscraper framing the bankers as they raise a toast to the deal, seen in blurred form through the skyscraper window. The commotion that the moves of finance capital triggers appears tightly framed and contained by the lines of the windows, in a pure abstract transaction. Moment Two Cordes and Svenja meet first at a gallery ceremony sponsored by the bank. Nominated for the so-called Future Award is [real-life] photographer Katja Stuke; Stuke’s images, we hear as the talk continues in the background, are concerned with a certain quality of ‘not-yetness’. Her subjects, often transmedia representations utilizing photographs of subjects as they appear on television screens, are ‘agents of the demimonde, seeking to become real in the context of our thoughts’. Stuke, we are told, ‘operates with an aesthetics of latency, one that makes the observer an anticipator. The images thrive on our interpretation, their neutrality has to be violated’. This speech occurs as background noise as Svenja and Cordes pass each other outside the auditorium, separated by a series of glass screens and other barriers. Yet the speech, which is actually taken from Hochhäusler’s own text accompanying a catalogue of Stuke’s photographs, alerts us to the filmmaker’s own intangible framing.78

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We are forced to consider the temporality of the aesthetic, whether its apparent surface presence might, if we work actively enough, open out to a possible future that will only become clear in time. In these introductory scenes, Hochhäusler offers us a way to think through how the speculative nature of finance capital, with its possible commotion-causing ruptures, might find its parallel in an ‘aesthetics of latency’, a future-oriented perspective that demands an anticipatory viewer. These aesthetic choices are central to an engagement with The City Below. The film raises the question of the role of aesthetic images and sounds in the world of the financiers at many points in the unfolding narrative of desire that links Svenja and Cordes. Real paintings and photographs anchor many scenes. The works of contemporary artists such as Stuke, Ulrich Hakel, Sophie Calle, Günter Förg, August Sander are encountered at the gallery event, in the bank offices, and in Cordes’s private collection at home. Hochhäusler has often written for Stuke’s exhibitions. Förg, whose mix of sculpture, painting, and installation particularly draws on the use of panes of glass and fragmentation, has long been bought by leading bankers, such as Rolf Breuer, ex-president of the Deutsche Bank. Svenja meets Cordes for the first time at an art gallery event, where the bank is acting as a key patron and sponsor of an art award. As the prize winners are announced, the host of the event proposes that a particular artist’s work, and by extension for Hochhäusler in the film itself, visual images might operate according to an ‘aesthetic of latency’, an aesthetic that ‘makes the observer an anticipator’. Aesthetic images, following this, operate according to a complex temporality, not fully present or unfolded during an initial encounter, and only clearer subsequently. This seems to hold for the narrative of The City Below, with its great temporal rupture towards the end and the unfolding of a whole new dynamic. Moment Three As Cordes and Svenja first meet, Cordes is talking on the phone in English. His words, ‘Yes, I’ve seen the pictures, terrible, simply terrible’, seem in the spatial context of the gallery to be a comment about the artworks. However, as the next scene makes clear, he is referring to a series of photographs that have been sent to the bank that document the kidnapping, torture, and execution of their employee in Indonesia as the bank enforces major cutbacks before transferring operations to Shanghai. Cordes is fascinated by the graphic quality of these images, the way that the deceased’s

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agonized face is posed in close-up, covered in blood, yet still distant and unknowable and thus reminiscent of Stuke’s enigmatic photographs. The bank’s management, dismayed by the violence but not thrown off course by the murder, agrees on a plan to hush up what they refer to as the ‘event’. We learn later when Svenja’s husband goes to Jakarta that the employee was kidnapped and his hands removed and sent to the bank as a warning not to take capital out of the country. Moment Four Cordes’s fascination with the aesthetic is registered throughout the film. Apart from the collection of paintings that decorate his office and home, and the contemporary classical music evening he hosts with his wife, he scrutinizes photographs, new musical forms, and even pays to watch a heroin user shoot up in order to witness the intensity of the processes related to hard drug use. After letting the employee’s wife know about his death, Cordes ‘borrows’ a photo that shows the small working-class family house that the employee grew up in, in the industrial city of Mannheim, where the employee’s father worked at the huge BASF chemical plant. Cordes takes Svenja to visit the house, claiming the murdered employee’s back story as his own as he shows her around this ‘childhood’ space. To get access, he has to pay off a working-class older Turkish couple, whose house it now is. The couple sits outside on the doorstep talking unsubtitled Turkish, physically displaced so that Cordes can act out this new role. As Cordes leaves the house, he discards the photo, first placing it covering another photo in the house, an image of a young Turkish woman, then finally hiding it in a crack in the doorframe. This narrative displacement of the ethnically othered is also echoed in the American-Asian bank employee getting unfairly overlooked for promotion, despite strong experience and qualifications, in favour of Svenja’s (white) husband. Moment Five The film seems to end with a cut to black, after we’ve witnessed Cordes failing to find reconciliation with Svenja. Cordes smokes a cigarette at dusk on his patio, and Svenja, tearful, jogs into the night as the camera frames her movement away through a large portal. The soundtrack, up to this point largely unobtrusive, builds to a crescendo with an unlocated drawn-out noise like an electronically amplified train arriving. What has

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been a firmly realist soundscape until this point in the film, where each sound registered has its diegetic counterpart in the narrative set out visually for us, is suddenly and inexplicably ruptured by an obtrusive synthetic sound that has no obvious correlate in the visible diegetic world. This sound marks off the main body of the film, which has unfolded up to this point according to a perceptibly linear temporality, with a coda or aftermath that is harder to align with the linearity experienced previously. This acoustic disruption, a recurring trope in Afrofuturist works, signals an alternative world, an anticipation of a future to come that lies ahead for the two main protagonists. For Mark Fisher, sound is crucial to the way that recent cultural forms register the temporal disjunctions that signify a closing down of future possibilities under capital. For Fisher, the ‘metaphysics of crackle’—the sound of the crackles and hisses of old vinyl that have been sampled and used in the layered productions that typify his dance music case studies—are taken as an indication of the importance of sound to registering the ghosts of the past and of the future: the crackle ‘restores the uncanniness of recording by making the recorded surface audible again [….] Crackle unsettles the very distinction between surface and depth, between background and foreground. In sonic hauntology we hear that time is out of joint’. 79 Hochhäusler’s use of sound here operates to present the uncanniness of the image sequence that ends the film. After the black screen we enter an unspecified temporal coda, as, to discordant non-diegetic music and with dawn breaking over an empty Frankfurt cityscape, Cordes and Svenja sleep in the hotel room they’ve met up in previously. Svenja is woken by sounds from far below, as she looks out to see the streets now filled with dozens of white-collar workers running in panic and screaming for help, not the obvious signs of a financial crisis or of a run on the bank, but as if pursued by a genuine physical threat, the turbulent return of the violence that finance capital has instigated in other spaces. The ‘capitalist realism’ of Frankfurt’s financial regime is ruptured here by a new semiotics, as if the film has become the kind of science fiction fantasy narrated in Séance or Pumzi. Svenja turns to Cordes and says blankly ‘Es geht los’—‘it’s starting’, as if in this alternative future such a development had been anticipated. If, like the biblical David, Cordes is able to constitute at the outset the world around him, the terms and conditions of what may be said, seen, and acted upon, then the return, or the ‘new’ real, in political terms, comes right at the end. The city below, up until now largely silent, breaks into Svenja’s consciousness. What was at first barely registered at the

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periphery of perception erupts in the sound and then imagery of an undefined people below running amok in the city streets. The disenfranchised? Fleeing office workers? The ending makes us consider whether this has always been a film about the financial crisis, unfolding in a fractured temporality, an ‘aesthetic of latency’ indeed, and now the screaming bodies of this multitude, a collective reaction, occupy the frame. The screaming multitude replaces the mute and mobile consumers of the film’s opening. They have returned in spectral form: not, as is usually the case where a spectre reminds us of what has gone awry in the past, a debt unpaid, but as the spectre of finance capital, signalling that something in the future will be wrong. This is ‘a memento out of the future’, to use Joseph Vogl’s phrase, a ‘future of mounting debt’ that comes back to reconstitute the present.80 Finance capital’s colonizing violence returns from the peripheries here to its centre under an unclear temporality. The aesthetics of latency, to which we were earlier alerted, has been realized in a turbulent overthrow of finance’s system of control. Kara Keeling suggests that the Black Futures in the works she addresses offer us modes of belonging that lie ‘after the future’, a state of possibility beyond the linearity of capitalist growth. Her argument draws on Franco Bifo Berardi’s idea that even though we cannot see how to move beyond the catastrophe of finance capital, there may be, ‘after the future’, ‘the event, the singularity that might open into the new landscape’.81 Hochhäusler’s ending, with the visualization of the turbulence set in train by finance capital, seems to offer an imaging of just such a singularity. To conclude, Hochhäusler’s film offers us a reflection on aesthetics in the age of financialization, from the expensive paintings that Cordes and his ilk horde as assets to the photographs that propose a kind of authenticity about the presence of the body in time and space, and yet which can be appropriated for inauthentic renarration, to the role-playing performativity of both Svenja and Cordes in their search for intensity. Where the film provokes much thought is in its relation to turbulence and to the spatiality of finance. As Cooper argues, ‘appropriating’ an event is a dangerous business as ‘it relies for its effects on a market-generated turbulence that can materialize in any place at any time and whose unfolding is essentially unpredictable’.82 In exploring turbulence through financial images, Hochhäusler seems to find an answer in an alternative temporality, akin to the Afrofuturist form, that speculates about a resistant world after the future.

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Notes 1. Kay Dickinson (2016), Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury/BFI, p. 158. 2. Diane Gabrysiak and Phil Powrie (2015), Editorial: ’Money: now you see it, now you don’t’. Special Issue. Studies in French Cinema 15:3, p 197. 3. Natascha van der Zwan (2014), ‘Making sense of financialization’. Socio-­ Economic Review. 12, p. 101, fn. 1. 4. Natascha van der Zwan (2014), ‘Making sense of financialization’. Socio-­ Economic Review. 12, pp. 101-102. 5. Susan Buck-Morss (1995), ‘Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display’, Critical Inquiry 21:2, Winter, p. 440. 6. Christian De Cock, Christian, Max Baker, and Christina Volkmann (2011), ‘Financial phantasmagoria: corporate image-work in times of crisis’, Organization 18, pp.  153-172. http://org.sagepub.com/content/18/2/153, last accessed May 10 2013. 7. Miriam Meissner (2012), ‘Portraying the global financial crisis: Myth, aesthetics, and the city’, NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, 1 (1), p. 120. 8. Fredric Jameson (1997), ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, Critical Inquiry, 24, Autumn, p. 251. 9. Peter A. Thompson (2010), ‘Convenient fictions? A critical communicative perspective on financial accumulation, autopoiesis and crisis in the wake of the credit crunch’. http://unitec.researchbank.ac.nz/handle/10652/1557, pp 2-5, last accessed 20 May 2013. 10. Peter A. Thompson (2010), ‘Convenient fictions? A critical communicative perspective on financial accumulation, autopoiesis and crisis in the wake of the credit crunch’. http://unitec.researchbank.ac.nz/handle/10652/1557, pp 2-5, last accessed 20 May 2013., pp. 3-5. 11. Donald MacKenzie (2009), Material Markets: How Economic Agents are Constructed’, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 63. 12. Donald MacKenzie (2009), Material Markets: How Economic Agents are Constructed’, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 65. 13. Fredric Jameson (1997), ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, Critical Inquiry, 24, Autumn, p. 252. 14. Fredric Jameson (1997), ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, Critical Inquiry, 24, Autumn, p. 261. 15. Fredric Jameson (1997), ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, Critical Inquiry, 24, Autumn, p. 261. 16. Marc Silberman (1987), ‘The Politics of Representation: Brecht and the Media’, Theatre Journal 39 (4), p. 450.

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17. Carl Gelderloos (2014), ‘Simply Reproducing Reality – Brecht, Benjamin and Renger-Paztsch on Photography’, German Studies Review, October 37 (3), pp. 549-573, here p. 554. 18. Miriam Meissner (2017) Narrating the Global Financial Crisis: Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth. Palgrave Macmillan: Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, pp. 63-65. 19. Marta Ponsa (2020) in Peter Szendy, with Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa (eds), The Supermarket of Images, Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, Paris, p. 168. 20. Marta Ponsa (2020) in Peter Szendy, with Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa (eds), The Supermarket of Images, Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, Paris, p. 168. 21. Emma Charles in email conversation with the author, 21 April 2021. 22. Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen (1975) ‘Brecht in Britain: The Independent Political Film (on The Nightcleaners)’, Screen, 16 (4) Winter, pp. 101-118, here p. 104. 23. Marc Karlin (1980) ‘Problems of Independent Cinema: A discussion between Claire Johnston, Mark Nash and Paul Willemen, Screen, vol. 21, no. 4, Winter, pp.19-45, here p. 23. 24. Marc Karlin (1980) ‘Problems of Independent Cinema: A discussion between Claire Johnston, Mark Nash and Paul Willemen, Screen, vol. 21, no. 4, Winter, p. 129. 25. Dan Kidner (2018) ‘The Berwick Street Film Collective: Independent Film Culture in the 1970s, in Dan Kidner and Alex Sainsbury (eds), Nightcleaners / ’36 to ’77, London: Raven Row, LUX and Koenig Books, p. 41. 26. Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen (1975), ‘Brecht in Britain: The Independent Political Film (on The Nightcleaners)’, Screen, 16 (4) Winter, pp. 101-118. Dan Kidner argues that Johnston and Willemen’s essay ‘still stands as the most theoretically astute interpretation of Nightcleaners’, Kidner (2018), ‘The Berwick Street Film Collective: Independent Film Culture in the 1970s, in Dan Kidner and Alex Sainsbury (eds), Nightcleaners / ’36 to ’77, London: Raven Row, LUX and Koenig Books p. 54. 27. Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen (1975), ‘Brecht in Britain: The Independent Political Film (on The Nightcleaners)’, Screen, 16 (4) Winter, p. 103. 28. Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen (1975), ‘Brecht in Britain: The Independent Political Film (on The Nightcleaners)’, Screen, 16 (4) Winter, pp. 110-111. 29. Sarah Thornton (2014), 33 Artists in 3 Acts, London: Granta, p. 355. 30. Isaac Julien (2013), ‘Capital’, in Isaac Julien: Riot, ed. David Frankel, New York: Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), p. 219.

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31. Isaac Julien (2013), ‘Capital’, in Isaac Julien: Riot, ed. David Frankel, New York: Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), p. 219. 32. Sarah Thornton (2014), 33 Artists in 3 Acts, London: Granta, p. 353. 33. Adrian Searle (2014) ‘Playtime: James Franco stars in a meditation on the power of money’, The Guardian, Wednesday 29 January. http://www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/29/playtime-­james-­franco-­ power-­money-­isaac-­julien-­capital, p. 14, last accessed 28 February 2014. 34. Adrian Searle (2014), ‘Playtime: James Franco stars in a meditation on the power of money’, The Guardian, Wednesday 29 January. http://www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/29/playtime-­james-­franco-­ power-­money-­isaac-­julien-­capital, p. 15, last accessed 28 February 2014. 35. Kay Dickinson (2016), Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury/BFI, p. 133. 36. Keller Easterling (2016), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London and New York: Verso, p. 26. 37. Keller Easterling (2016), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London and New York: Verso, p. 16. 38. Mike Davis (2007) ‘Sand, Fear, and Money in Dubai’ in Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk (eds) Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. New York and London: The New Press, p. 63. 39. Keller Easterling (2016), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London and New York: Verso, pp. 45-46. 40. Mike Davis (2007), ‘Sand, Fear, and Money in Dubai’ in Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk (eds) Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. New York and London: The New Press, pp. 64-5. 41. Mike Davis (2007), ‘Sand, Fear, and Money in Dubai’ in Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk (eds) Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. New York and London: The New Press, p. 65. 42. Kay Dickinson (2016), Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury/BFI, p. 155. 43. Kay Dickinson (2016), Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury/BFI, p. 156. 44. Gilles Deleuze (2005), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London and New York: Continuum, p. 234. 45. Keller Easterling (2016), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London and New York: Verso, p. 56. 46. Miriam Meissner (2017) Narrating the Global Financial Crisis: Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth. Palgrave Macmillan: Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, p. 73. 47. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle (2015), Cartographies of the Absolute, Winchester: Zero Books, pp.  182-83. Toscano and Kinkle quote from Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Threepenny Trial: A Sociological Experiment’, in German Essays on Film, ed. R McCormick and A Guenther-Pal (New York:

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Continuum, 2004). An earlier version of Toscano and Kinkle’s piece appeared as Albert Toscano (2014), ‘The Maid and the Money-Form’, Mute, 25 April, https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/ maid-­and-­money-­form. 48. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle (2015), Cartographies of the Absolute, Winchester: Zero Books, p. 182. 49. Gilles Deleuze (1995), ‘Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel’, in Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 69. 50. Gilles Deleuze (1995), ‘Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel’, in Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 71. 51. Gilles Deleuze (1995), ‘Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel’, in Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 75. 52. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle (2015), Cartographies of the Absolute, Winchester: Zero Books, p. 179. 53. Dork Zabunyan, ‘Two Capital Flows’, in Peter Szendy with Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa (eds), The Supermarket of Images (2020), Paris: Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, p. 201. 54. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle (2015), Cartographies of the Absolute, Winchester: Zero Books, pp. 180-1 55. Keller Easterling (2016), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London and New York: Verso, p. 234. 56. Keller Easterling (2016), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London and New York: Verso, p. 234. 57. Keller Easterling (2016), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London and New York: Verso, pp. 58-59. 58. Kay Dickinson (2016), Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury/BFI, p. 153. 59. Kay Dickinson (2016), Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury/BFI, p. 154. 60. Kay Dickinson (2016), Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury/BFI, p. 162. 61. Ashvin Devasundaram (2020), ‘Subalterns and the city: Dubai as cross-­ cultural caravanserai in City of Life and Pinky Memsaab’, Transnational Screens, Vol. 11 Issue 3, pp. 248-265. 62. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle (2015), Cartographies of the Absolute, Winchester: Zero Books, p. 182. 63. James Harvey (2019), ‘Engaged Observationalism: forming publics in the gallery film’, Studies in European Cinema, 16: 3, p. 246. 64. Sarah Thornton (2014), 33 Artists in 3 Acts, London: Granta, p. 355.

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65. Erika Balsom (2017), After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 155. 66. James Harvey (2019), ‘Engaged Observationalism: forming publics in the gallery film’, Studies in European Cinema, 16: 3, p. 247. 67. See James Harvey (2021) ‘Spaces of Intervention: Politics, Aesthetics and Archives in the Films of John Akomfrah in (eds) Clive Nwonka and Anamik Saha, Black Film British Cinema II, London: Goldsmiths Press pp. 125-142. 68. Jacques Rancière (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, London: Continuum, p. 34. 69. Fredric Jameson (1997), ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, Critical Inquiry, 24, Autumn, p. 146. 70. Melinda Cooper (2010), ‘Turbulent Worlds: Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis’, Theory, Culture, and Society, 27 (2-3), p. 179. 71. Melinda Cooper (2010), ‘Turbulent Worlds: Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis’, Theory, Culture, and Society, 27 (2-3), p. 173. 72. Kara Keeling (2019), Queer Times, Black Futures. New  York: New  York University Press, p. 4. 73. Kara Keeling (2019), Queer Times, Black Futures. New  York: New  York University Press, p. 23. 74. Aria Dean (2017), ‘Notes on Blacceleration’, e-flux journal, Issue 87, December last accessed 6 September 2019. 75. Kodwo Eshun (1998), More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction, London: Quartet, p. 7. Cited in Fisher (2013), p. 43. 76. Mark Fisher (2013), ‘The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology’, Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 5 (2), p. 42. 77. Miriam Meissner (2012), ‘Portraying the global financial crisis: Myth, aesthetics, and the city’, NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, 1 (1), p. 117. 78. See Katja Stuke (2008) Könnte Sein, Baden: Kodoji Press. 79. Mark Fisher (2013), ‘The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology’, Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 5 (2), p. 48. 80. Joseph Vogl (2011), ‘Capital and Money are Profane Gods’. Interview with Martin Eiermann. The European, 20.11.2011. http://www. theeuropean-­magazine.com/joseph-­vogl%2D%2D2/370-­the-­spectre-­of-­ capital, last accessed 14 March 2014. 81. Franco Bifo Berardi, (2011), After the Future, Chino CA: AK Press, pp. 24-25. 82. Melinda Cooper (2010), ‘Turbulent Worlds: Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis’, Theory, Culture, and Society, 27 (2-3), p. 168.

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Bibliography Abel, Marco. 2013. The Counter Cinema of the Berlin School. Rochester, NY: Camden House. ———. 2015. It’s a Battle of Stories: An Interview with Christoph Hochhäusler about The City Below, The Lies of the Victors, and Political Cinema. Cineaste, XLI (1), Winter. Last Accessed 5 September 2019. Balsom, Erika. 2017. After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation. New York: Columbia UP. Balsom, Erika. 2013. Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP. ———, ed. 2019. Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989. New Haven: Yale University Press. Berardi, Franco Bifo. 2010. Precariousness, Catastrophe and Challenging the Blackmail of the Imagination. Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture and Action. 4 (2, Fall): 1–4. Available Freely Accessible Online, Accessed 1 September 2019. ———. 2011. After the Future. Chino CA: AK Press. ———. 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Buck-Morss, Susan. 1995. Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display. Critical Inquiry 21 (2, Winter): 434–467. Cooper, Melinda. 2010. Turbulent Worlds: Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis. Theory, Culture, and Society 27 (2–3): 167–190. Davis, Mike. 2007. Sand, Fear, and Money in Dubai. In Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, ed. Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, 48–68. New York and London: The New Press. De Cock, Christian, Max Baker, and Christina Volkmann. 2011. Financial Phantasmagoria: Corporate Image-Work in Times of Crisis. Organization 18: 153–172. http://org.sagepub.com/content/18/2/153. Last Accessed 10 May 2013. Dean, Aria. 2017. Notes on Blacceleration. E-Flux Journal, Issue 87, December. Last Accessed 6 September 2019. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel. In Negotiations 1972-1990, 68–79. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2005. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London and New York: Continuum. Devasundaram, Ashvin. 2020. Subalterns and the City: Dubai as Cross-Cultural Caravanserai in City of Life and Pinky Memsaab. Transnational Screens 11 (3): 248–265. Dickinson, Kay. 2016. Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury/BFI.

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Easterling, Keller. 2016. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London and New York: Verso. Fisher, Mark. 2013a. The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5 (2): 42–55. ———. 2013b. The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5 (2): 42–55. Gabrysiak, Diane, and Phil Powrie. 2015. Editorial. Money: Now You See It, Now You Don’t’. Special Issue. Studies in French Cinema 15 (3): 197–206. Gelderloos, Carl. 2014. Simply Reproducing Reality  – Brecht, Benjamin and Renger-Paztsch on Photography. German Studies Review 37 (3, October): 549–573. Harvey, David. 2011. The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism. London: Profile. Harvey, James. 2019. Engaged Observationalism: Forming Publics in the Gallery Film. Studies in European Cinema 16 (3): 232–249. ———. 2021. Spaces of Intervention: Politics Aesthetics and Archives in the Films of John Akomfrah. In Black Film British Cinema II, ed. Clive Nwonka and Anamik Saha, 126–142. London: Goldsmiths Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1997. Culture and Finance Capital. Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn): 246–265. Johnston, Claire, and Paul Willemen. 1975. Brecht in Britain: The Independent Political Film (on The Nightcleaners). Screen 16 (4, Winter): 101–118. Julien, Isaac. 2013. Capital. In Isaac Julien: Riot, ed. David Frankel, 212–221. New York: Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Karlin, Marc. 1980. Problems of Independent Cinema: A Discussion between Claire Johnston, Mark Nash and Paul Willemen. Screen 21 (4, Winter): 19–45. Keeling, Kara. 2019. Queer Times, Black Futures. New  York: New  York University Press. Kidner, Dan. 2018. The Berwick Street Film Collective: Independent Film Culture in the 1970s. In Nightcleaners / ’36 to ’77, ed. Dan Kidner and Alex Sainsbury, 41–57. London: Raven Row, LUX and Koenig Books. King, Alasdair. 2016. Documenting Financial Performativity: Film Aesthetics and Financial Crisis. Journal of Cultural Economy: 555–569. ———. 2017. Film and the Financial City. Studies in European Cinema 14 (1): 7–21. Landry, Olivia. 2018. Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. MacKenzie, Donald. 2009. Derivatives: The Production of Virtuality. In Material Markets: How Economic Agents are Constructed, 63–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meissner, Miriam. 2012. Portraying the Global Financial Crisis: Myth, Aesthetics, and the City. NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies 1 (1): 98–125.

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———. 2017. Narrating the Global Crisis: Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum. Searle, Adrian. 2014. Playtime: James Franco Stars in a Meditation on the Power of Money. The Guardian, Wednesday 29 January. http://www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/2014/jan/29/playtime-­j ames-­f ranco-­p ower-­m oney-­ isaac-­julien-­capital. Last Accessed 28 February 2014. Silberman, Marc. 1987. The Politics of Representation: Brecht and the Media. Theatre Journal 39 (4): 448–460. Stuke, Katja. 2008. Könnte Sein. Baden: Kodoji Press. Thompson, Peter A. 2010. Convenient Fictions? A Critical Communicative Perspective on Financial Accumulation, Autopoiesis and Crisis in the Wake of the Credit Crunch, 1-21 http://unitec.researchbank.ac.nz/handle/10652/1557. Last Accessed 20 May 2013. Thornton, Sarah. 2014. 33 Artists in 3 Acts. London: Granta. Toscano, Alberto and Jeff Kinkle. 2015. Cartographies of the Absolute. van der Zwan, Natascha. 2014. Making Sense of Financialization. Socio-­Economic Review. 12: 99–129. Vogl, Joseph. 2011. ‘Capital and Money are Profane Gods’. Interview with Martin Eiermann. The European, 20.11.2011. http://www.theeuropean-­magazine. com/joseph-­vogl%2D%2D2/370-­the-­spectre-­of-­capital. Last Accessed 14 March 2014. ———. 2015. The Specter of Capital. Trans. J. Redner and R. Savage. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Zabunyan, Dork. 2020. Two Capital Flows. In The Supermarket of Images Peter Szendy with Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa (eds), 195-204. Paris: Gallimard/Jeu de Paume.

CHAPTER 6

Film and Financial Performativity

Introduction As we saw in Chap. 2 on Film and the Financial Gaze, so many of the events and encounters that constitute the financial realm are performative in nature. We remember how Fabian Muniesa had noted, in his use of Harun Farocki’s documentary as a case study in capitalization, that Farocki had turned his camera on a specifically performative encounter in filming the negotiations between potential investors and the engineering firm that needed increased investment. As Muniesa writes, ‘we have quite evidently come across a performative situation, one in which capitalization can be explicitly captured as performance. The very fact that we access it on film comforts [sic] a dramaturgical understanding of the act of capitalization’.1 He argues that the participants in the negotiation ‘play with their functions, positions and conditions, terms that must be enacted and portrayed in order to be realized. And those terms are the terms of valuation: it is within this performance that the capitalization scenario becomes an engine for what the businesspersons in front of the camera call “value”’.2 We can add to this the indirect comments made at various times by the negotiators, their non-verbal contributions in the form of gestures, silences, and poses, and their measured capacity to break into business English phrases when advantageous. In this sense, Nothing Ventured registers two significant aspects of finance capital: the performative processes which form the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. King, The Financial Image, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40654-6_6

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environment for becoming an asset and the performative markers that show that one has become a financial expert. It is these performative processes and markers that will be the focus of this final chapter in examining the financial images that contemporary filmmakers are utilizing to register and to render finance on screen. As the artist and filmmaker, Melanie Gilligan, wrote in 2007 in an essay on post-Fordism, labour and performance, ‘performative imperatives [….] and performative re-orderings of the social field [….] are essential ingredients of contemporary capitalism’.3 Despite a widespread turn in the contemporary art world to the exploration of performative techniques and of performativity generally in the last decade, it remains challenging to turn performance back onto itself as a way to address finance. Yet this is what Gilligan and other filmmakers have done to explore financial performance and performativity, and to use an engagement with performativity to construct a critique of contemporary finance capital. In the films discussed below, the exploration of performativity and performance offers a route through to considering a reconnection of politics and economics in the contemporary moving image. This final chapter analyses two contrasting case studies of the way that financial performance and performativity have been explored in contemporary film, by Gilligan and, in the opening section, by German documentarist, Marc Bauder. Bauder’s award-winning finance film, Master of the Universe (Bauderfilm, 2013), focuses on a series of interviews with a former leading investment banker, Rainer Voss, high up in one of Frankfurt’s deserted bank skyscrapers. Bauder’s film offers an unusual depiction of the self-constitution and self-understanding of a banker-turned-whistle-­ blower, 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 propose below 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. Bauder opens a line of questioning on ways in which the subject can interact with and effect the financial market through their performative acts, while at the same time offering a narration of the processes of self-­ formation that enables those in the financial sector to possess a high degree of individual agency in their capacity to influence the market.

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Gilligan’s films take this exploration of performance and the financial subject further to address the processes of subjectivation under finance and to explore the possibilities of collective responses and resistance to finance capital. Although Gilligan’s work shares with Bauder’s the desire to de-mystify the workings of contemporary financial systems, it eschews a documentary mode and instead uses complex fiction forms to convey information and argument, thus, as Gilligan puts it, ‘attempt[ing] to break down divisions between intellectual work and entertainment, or between discursive modes and the non-discursive modes of cognition activated when we watch a story’.4 Gilligan’s trilogy, Crisis in the Credit System (2008), Popular Unrest (2010), and The Common Sense (2014), uses modes and genres taken from popular narrative cinema—science fiction, crime thriller, financial news parody—to offer one of the most interesting engagements with the processes and effects of financialization. Initially conceived as works made for online distribution and broken down into small chapters, Gilligan’s films have been screened extensively in galleries and at art and film festivals. Although several years in the planning, Crisis in the Credit System was first released on 1 October 2008, as the global financial system was rocked by plummeting share prices and real concern that wholesale financial failure was looming. Gilligan’s 36-minute film is based on financial workers being asked to perform certain roles in trying to imagine their way out of the current crisis. In this way, she explores how financial traders, as is also the case in Bauder’s study of Rainer Voss, have performed a sense of invulnerability through their ability to anticipate market movements and to construct financial instruments that might manage exposure to future risks. In both case studies, the performativity of financiers is highly significant for our understanding of the workings of the financial markets, from the financiers’ own descriptions of the market as ‘complex’, ‘abstract’, and ‘unrepresentable’, to the verbal phrases and bodily gestures employed to underpin statements about the sector. Yet this performativity should also be seen as not in itself a cause of the reshaping dynamic of contemporary capital and thus of the landscape of the financial but as very much also an effect of finance capital and its ability to create a specific financialized subject operating within institutional and infrastructural environments. As Gilligan has co-written with theorist Marina Vishmidt in one of a series of significant essays on financial subjectivities, ‘The system defines the subject, but subjects also define the system’.5 Gilligan’s trilogy explores the interaction of the systemic forces exerted by finance capital and the

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remaining degrees of individual, collective, and community autonomy in the face of an increasingly total social formation composed by these forces.

Documenting Financial Performativity: Master of the Universe (Marc Bauder, Bauderfilm, 2013) Marc Bauder’s finance film, Master of the Universe (2013), won the European Documentary Film Prize in December 2014, building on its award-winning premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in 2013 and subsequent receipt of the German Documentary Prize. Bauder’s film presents a series of interviews with a former leading investment banker, Rainer Voss, high up in an empty skyscraper in Frankfurt am Main’s financial quarter. Voss reflects on his professional practice, providing an insight into how he became an investment banker, into the rituals and practices that constitute working life in contemporary finance, into both the personal price that he has had to pay in his career, and into the wider economic situation where investment bankers have become so powerful that their financial decision-­ making can push large corporations and indeed entire national economies into crisis. Master of the Universe provides a compelling filmic commentary on the banking world from a reformed German financier, now keen to assume a new role as a responsible post-financialized subject and guide. Although Bauder’s work has received little critical attention, my case here is that he makes a significant contribution to the search for moving images and, for an overarching aesthetic, appropriate to registering the financial crisis. His films construct sequences that allow articulation of, and reflection on financial performativity, on the utterances, microprocesses, deals, and decision-making that underpin key areas of financial activity. As I suggest below, to make sense of the nuances of his work, attention must be given not only to understanding how financial performativity operates but also to understanding the scope of the documentary form in contemporary film practice. Master of the Universe offers an original insight into how performatives help to constitute the operations of the financial sector, connecting the film to ongoing debates in cultural economy and in social studies of finance. However, the film does not simply illustrate and re-present existing debates in scholarship on performativity and finance but attempts to use the documentary to address how we might find visual forms to aid our understanding of the politics of financial performativity. Recent scholarship has begun to address the role of financial

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performativity in popular discourses and in performance and installation art, though not yet in documentary film.6 Standing alongside other recent work on financial features and documentaries, this section seeks to address the complex nature of documentary modes in order to show how Bauder’s formal sophistication throws new light on how financial performativity might enter into popular and critical discourses of the financial crisis. As Marsh, Crosthwaite, and Knight have argued in their discussion of the way that the financial sector has taken hold of the popular imagination in recent years, the novel has become the preferred form to ‘address the failure of a social totality’;7 there has been a rise in recent years in the popularity of documentary films on finance and on the recent financial crisis, with films such as Inside Job (2010) and Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) achieving mainstream success.8 In his canonical introduction to theorizing documentary, Bill Nichols argues for the political and ethical ramifications of documentaries by proposing that ‘the documentary tradition relies heavily on being able to convey to us the impression of authenticity. [….] When we believe what we see bears witness to the way the world is, it can form the basis for our orientation to and action within the world’.9 Bauder’s filmed interviews with Rainer Voss foreground issues of authenticity throughout, particularly concerning the authenticity of Voss’s claims to insider knowledge, to the nature of his whistle-blower status, and to his turn away from the banking world. How to find ways of defining the documentary mode generally through its claims to authenticity has been a significant debate among film theorists and philosophers, with Gregory Currie arguing that the documentary can be distinguished owing to its base in the photographic image that allows it to offer direct, causal (i.e. indexical) ‘traces’ of its subject, rather than a discursive ‘testimony’ of it, something that, for Currie, is the case in fictional genres and in other art forms like painting.10 Against this, several theorists have argued that Currie’s ‘trace’ representations do not offer us a sufficient condition for the status of the documentary, with Noel Carroll arguing instead that to classify a film as a documentary, we need to approach it through a consideration of authorship rather than ontology: it is the film of ‘presumptive assertion’, composed with the intention of presenting certain pieces of information, behind which the filmmaker stands and for which she claims a clear degree of truthfulness.11 However, we might choose to define authenticity, for documentary theorists it is still an essential criterion, not least considering the highly diverse formal nature of contemporary factual and non-fiction

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filmmaking, where documentaries can assume complex forms and where many self-consciously play with notions of performance, authenticity, and with seemingly truthful reconstitutions of the non-filmic world. For Nichols, six clear documentary modes have evolved historically, namely the poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, and performative, each with its own set of conventions. Nichols argues that these modes have developed in a roughly chronological way to address deficiencies perceived in the preceding model, and though filmmakers may choose to mix features from different modes, in any documentary film, one mode typically predominates.12 Financial documentaries often choose to base themselves on the expository mode, informing the viewer through advancing an argument or recounting recent historical events, with commentary and explanatory titles that address the viewer directly. Occasionally, the observational mode may be employed, with the camera present ‘on the scene’ of a trading floor or banking office but attempting to appear invisible and non-participatory to construct a visual ethnography of how a specific environment functions. Bauder, however, eschews both the explanatory commentary typical of expository financial documentaries and the ‘fly on the wall’ observational mode. In its intense focus on the performativity and performance of a single participant responding directly to the promptings of the filmmaker, Master of the Universe belongs predominantly to the participatory mode, a form that Bauder has used regularly across his films, making clear that the footage shot is part of an encounter between the filmmaker and the subject, where we sense, see, or hear the presence of the filmmaker. Often in the participatory mode, archival footage is used alongside interviews or encounters to construct a wider sense of the historical world and of the impact of broader social issues. In Master of the Universe, Bauder intercuts Voss’s statements and self-justifications with news footage showing recent financial events and crises across the globe in order to frame the self-­ constitution and self-understanding of this banker-turned-whistle-blower. Across a body of films Bauder has charted the way that workers in the financial sector narrate their own career paths and decision-making processes. His concern for speech acts, their performative effects, and also their affective qualities, means that there are also performative aspects to Master of the Universe, where sound and framing is used to call into question aspects of the self-narration of the respondent.13 Master of the Universe deserves attention, then, because of the way that it addresses what has become one of the key issues in thinking about the operations of financial

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culture, the issue of the performativity of economic agents, bringing this issue into popular discourse and so helping to shape the financial imaginary, the way that finance comes to be broadly understood and constituted.14 Underpinning recent engagements with financial performativity is J. L. Austin’s celebrated proposal that we might divide words and phrases initially into two categories, those that are constative and describe a specific situation or state of affairs or state facts, and those that are performative and seek to initiate action.15 Clarke (2012) argues that the extensive current debate on financial performativity in the field of cultural economy draws on two main understandings of performativity in performative finance.16 The influential work of Donald MacKenzie and others on the self-actualizing statements of economists and economic theorists helps to constitute what has often come to be termed ‘Austinian’ performativity. ‘Austinian’ performativity might claim that economic theories and models contribute, in some way, to the construction of the economy. Alongside this are studies in what has been termed a broader ‘generic’ performativity, whereby, as Marieke de Goede has written, finance can be studied ‘as a discursive domain made possible through performative practices, which have to be articulated and rearticulated on a daily basis’.17 ‘Generic’ financial performativity draws in considerable part on the groundbreaking interdisciplinary work of Judith Butler on the reiterative practices through which a discursive operation produces the effect that it names, thus lending material form to certain repetitive practices and discourses. As Clarke argues, ‘in the generic form, performative finance might be thought of as less linguistic and associated with some combination of repetition, discursive production and social spectacle’.18 Bauder’s films focus on finding images and forms to document this second understanding of performativity, namely how discourses and practices of finance are first encountered by the subjects of his films, how they are rehearsed, learned, articulated, practised, and understood, and how they come to have immaterial and material effects. In her recent essay on economic performativity, Butler seeks to address the relationship between economics and politics by assessing the usefulness of concepts of performative agency to a repoliticization of the field of economics. Like Michel Callon, economic sociologist and pioneer in the field of economic performativity, Butler proposes that economic theory, economic statements, and other related financial speech acts do not simply analyse or describe a pre-given entity, the field of economics, but help to

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bring into being the sphere of economics generally and ‘the market’ more narrowly.19 Butler’s essay seeks to analyse how economics and the market might be best addressed as working in accordance with sets of performatives, rather than as a stable ontological phenomenon described using constatives. This is not to claim that there is no object studied in the discipline of economics, nor that the economy is created ex nihilo with every statement, but to alert us to the way that what we consider to be the field of economics undergoes through performativity ‘an apparently seamless regeneration [that] brings about a naturalized effect’.20 Butler is interested in the enunciation of speech acts themselves, and particularly in what J. L. Austin considers ‘perlocutionary’ performatives: utterances that typically but not always alter an ongoing situation, as opposed to ‘illocutionary’ performatives that rely on codified and ritualized discourses—legal and religious pronouncements are obvious examples—to produce realities. As Butler makes clear, in the case of illocutionary performatives, the speech act in question is always of a reiterated form, and this codification and ritualization of the specific phrase or discourse used precedes and brings into being the subject who enunciates the phrase.21 If performativity is no longer best viewed as the action of an individual, sovereign subject, then, Butler argues, it is important to look more closely at perlocutionary rather than illocutionary utterances, as perlocutionary, unlike illocutionary, utterances depend on the complexities of external reality and on the operations of non-sovereign power. In the field of finance, for example, it would be necessary to look at how economic, social, and political spheres are separated from each other through iterative acts, at the dynamics of institutionalized practices, at human and non-­ human networks, and at the role of technology in enabling certain practices to take place in specific locations and at specific tempos. As Cochoy, Giraudeau, and McFall have argued in this regard, ‘politics and economics are not so much separate as they are made separate’.22 Butler argues that as the economy is reconstituted as autonomous by way of a series of repeated performatives, problems can occur at instances of errancy or failure of perlocution. Crucially, any discussion of iterability requires that we think through the moments when a perlocutionary utterance is unsuccessful in altering reality. Butler uses Derrida’s rereading of Austin, his ‘Signature, Event, Context’ essay of 1998, to argue that we can only think the process of iterability by understanding the rupture or failure that characterizes every interstitial moment within iteration. The possibility of failure or ‘misfire’, of gaps, pauses, or ellipses, is crucial to a notion of

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performativity, the case where a theoretical position or other perlocutionary utterance doesn’t produce an anticipated effect. Although Butler has concerns about the political range of theories of performativity because of these ‘misfires’ or instances of failure, in response to her essay, Michel Callon makes the case that it is exactly in these failures that there is space for a politicization of economics: ‘It is because the economy is performed, because any perlocution produces misfires, and because these misfires spawn issues, matters of concern, that the performation struggle starts, in the form of controversies over the nature of relations between that which is delegated to the economy and that which remains outside it’. 23 As we shall see in the subsequent section, for Melanie Gilligan, such misfires might also be imagined as immanent to the self-­ correcting and recuperative nature of finance capital as a total system and not as offering a starting point for a repoliticization of the economic. However, Callon argues that politics is intimately involved in the misfires that occur around the performative reconstitution of the economy, as we understand it. The distribution of concerns and interests between the separated fields of economics and politics become unsettled through these misfires and are subject to a rethinking, a reconsideration, thus undermining the presumed autonomy of economic activities. Callon argues that there is no single way of understanding what we mean by the economy, given the plurality of economic models and frames of analysis. Furthermore, and importantly in our discussion of Bauder’s film, Callon’s argument on performativity, politics, and misfires shows us how ‘in analysing how the demarcation, or bifurcation, between these questions that need to be treated “politically” and those that can be left to the market, is made, economic performativity is always also political’.24 As I argue below, Bauder’s film uses the engagement between the filmmaker and ex-banker to present sequences that reflect upon the centrality of performativity to financial operations but which also, ultimately, use ruptures in the banker’s narration to open up a space that both allows us distance from his statements and allows us to reflect on the political implications of the crisis in the Eurozone that he predicts. Statements reflecting on economic, financial, and corporate decision-­ making, their spatial contexts, and their wider social consequences have been at the heart of Bauder’s work so far since 2003 across several documentaries, theatre productions, and a feature film. Bauder himself maintains that his films work not precisely as documentary portraits of key individuals, but rather as what he terms ‘sociograms’, filmic

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representations of the wider social links that an individual has in any given location or context and how the broader overall environment functions within which the individual works. Bauder’s sociogram model allows him to interview a specific figure and from the answers and statements to build a representation of a broader network relating to economic and financial activity, allowing the audience an insight into wider social issues and questions of agency. This is the case in both Grow Or Go (2003) and Der Top-­ Manager (2007), as well as Master of the Universe, and also in a work-in-progress on Thomas Middelhoff, disgraced corporate manager and former CEO of Bertelsmann, seen by Bauder as the prototype of an emerging German managerial class and a way of addressing the last 25 years of German economic history and current socioeconomic concerns in the Federal Republic. Bauder’s approach allows his work to be aligned with the financial ‘assemblages’ identified by de Goede in her work on a broad corpus of US-, Dutch-, Swiss-, and Austrian-made documentaries. De Goede explores the ‘distributed responsibility’ at work in explanations of the financial crisis, drawing on Jane Bennett’s notion of conceptualising political agency in terms of an assemblage, rather than single agent, system, or network.25 The assemblage denotes a contingent and partly unpredictable coming together of several different human and non-human (technical, environmental, cultural) forces that produce particular effects and outcomes. For de Goede, like Bennett, assemblages can have agentic capacities, in plural and group form, rather than as a singular agent.26 In rethinking de Goede’s categories for Master of the Universe, a film that offers a specifically German response to recent financial developments, it can be argued that the director attempts to address how the German assemblage works by allowing a key Frankfurt banker to describe that assemblage in operation, taking in his views on entry to the sector, recent technological developments, changes in banking management culture in Germany that adopt what are perceived of as US practices, the pressure to think up and sell new financial products, and also the performative agency of the banker personally. A business studies graduate turned film student, Bauder’s first major film, Grow or Go – Architects of the Global Village (2003), was made in cooperation with the German public TV broadcaster ZDF. It was nominated for the Grimme-Prize, Germany’s most significant television award. Grow or Go rehearses some features that play a significant role in the construction of Master of the Universe a decade later. It focuses on the rituals, transitions, and statements made by four protagonists, two male, two

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female, in their process of becoming young professional management consultants, starting with their graduation from the elite private European Business School (EBS) in Germany and encompassing individual and group interviews as they discuss their childhood backgrounds, routes into management consultancy, and future aspirations. Grow or Go relies heavily on interview responses and dialogue. Bauder is interested not just in placing the protagonists against various appropriate locations and environments but also in how they articulate their own thought processes and reflect on their own decision-making. For Bauder, language is central to understanding how these 20-somethings actually transition from students into management consultants. As is the case across Bauder’s work so far, Grow or Go pays close attention to the way that the discursive practices of corporate institutions shape individual subjects on their journey into becoming consultants or traders. Bauder’s films, including our case study of Master of the Universe below with its exploration of the financial sector, highlight the significant interplay between existing system and emerging subject as new entrants to these corporate sectors undertake the processes of becoming managerial or financial agents. At the same time as these individual personnel can narrate their own identities while undergoing training, they are ‘desubjectivised’ through learning and uttering specific linguistic registers that make them employable within their larger corporate structures. As Melanie Gilligan and Marina Vishmidt have written, drawing on the Italian sociologist and philosopher, Maurizio Lazzarato’s theories of ‘subjectivation’ under finance capital, ‘[u]nder these conditions, subjects maintain individual identities through narrativizations of subjective experience, while the component parts of subjectivity both conscious and unconscious are in practice no longer unified as an “I” but are instead dismantled by the operational logics of the technological and bureaucratic apparatus’.27 Lazzarato’s work explores two modes of contemporary subjection, or the dominance and exploitation of ordinary workers under finance capital: firstly, in processes of subjectivation by which he addresses how humans are produced and understand themselves as subjects, and, secondly, how they form an inextricable part of a greater technical assemblage that labours to produce value, referred to by Lazzarato as a ‘machinic enslavement’. Bauder’s films look closely at the first mode of subjection, how subjects are formed as workers under finance capital, rather than at the second, the question of machinic enslavement. As we shall see later in this chapter when we cut back to consider Lazzarato’s overall philosophical

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ideas in more detail, his writings on the processes of subjection under finance capital and on the counter aesthetics adopted by some artists with their strategic deployment of a ‘mixed semiotics’ or ‘asignifying semiotics’ mode in their work open up a particularly useful framework for studying political responses in contemporary art to processes of financialization. Remaining for the moment with exploring processes of subjectivation, we can see how Bauder’s film tracks the series of training programmes that the trainee consultants undergo, including an outdoor boot camp and problem-solving weekend, designed to challenge them physically, mentally, and emotionally, and explicitly, to encourage team building and trust. This soft quasi-military initiation, which includes physical tests undertaken blindfolded and in allocated cohorts, also acts to encourage them to think of other consultants as a support network, replacing the kind of affective bonds that have been previously supplied by friends and family. Their training includes forms of communicative practice, ranging from governing their facial expressions, controlling and placing precisely their hands and feet, to the arts of small talk and table etiquette, and to role-play interviews where they are coached to anticipate typical discussions with clients. At all times, the protagonists are shown to be in a state of becoming effective consultants, not least through recourse to self-help CDs that underpin training in making effective statements, again linking, for Bauder, specific speech acts with professional performativity. Little attention is paid in this early film to whether or not the four graduates make a success of their chosen careers or in providing an explicit critique of the place of management consultancy in the wider economic system: the focus is fully on processes of subject formation, learning to speak and act appropriately to be an effective consultant, creating new social bonds through the horizontal structures of the wider consultant community and EBS alumnae, and all this accompanied by an increasing degree of self-censure, conformity, and even surveillance within the consultancy company itself. Towards the end of the film, we see the protagonists discussing their early professional engagements against the skyline of Frankfurt’s financial quarter. Their job, we realize, consists primarily of recommending processes that make business more efficient, a euphemism in most cases for downsizing or initiating wide-scale redundancies. The film ends with the protagonists reflecting that they need to bring into balance economic logic with a stronger commitment to personal relationships outside work and to a wider sense of social responsibility, the very attributes that their training seems to have erased.

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The finished film, together with extensive footage cut from the final version, and Bauder’s research notes, were a key source for political dramatist Falk Richter’s acclaimed multimedia theatre cycle, Das System, and short play, Unter Eis, performed at Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre in 2003 and 2004, and staged by Bauder in 2010 at the National Theatre, Brussels. Richter and Bauder’s interest in the performativity of management consultancy emerges from a context where in the early 2000s, many sectors in the German economy had turned to a focus above all else on maximizing efficiency gains as a way of driving up profits and driving down costs and the discourse of management consultants, seen as at the heart of this paradigm shift, came under particular attention. As Falk Richter’s title emphasizes, Bauder and Richter focus on the systemic processes by which the wider corporate environment produces the new managerial subject. Often, Richter’s play and a screening of Bauder’s film would be staged together, prior to audience discussions. Grow Or Go addresses the rules governing the language and performativity of this emerging behavioural and social system characterized by its reliance on Anglicisms (registered in Bauder’s film titles), and epitomized by the management consultancy sector.28 Grow or Go’s focus on speech acts and on performativity in the field of management consultancy as the graduates are trained and formed anticipates the more explicit turn to the financial world in Master of the Universe. Similarly, in another earlier Bauder documentary, Der Top-Manager (2007), made in conjunction with the German broadcaster WDR as part of a series documenting contemporary working practices, the theme of the social and emotional price paid by leading business managers rehearses some of the issues raised in Master of the Universe. Bauder’s Top-Manager television documentary, rather than looking at transitions and processes of becoming, turns instead to constructing an arresting profile of someone already firmly established in their career as a key buyer in the sector-­leading Swedish-based Vattenfall energy corporation, dominant in the supply of European electricity and heat, and since market deregulation in 1998, a major stakeholder in Germany’s energy sector. Bauder’s film begins with close-ups of the hands of his ‘top manager’, Stephan Biesenbach, as he makes a presentation, fragmenting his body, making his spoken analysis almost disembodied as he writes figures of billions of Euros and explanatory diagrams on a whiteboard. The pace of the opening montage is carefully chosen, with quick edits connecting a series of brief sequences showing Biesenbach as both international and mobile: speaking in English on a mobile phone, travelling through airports, on an ICE train. This fast

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opening montage is followed by slower sequences at the family house, where his wife and two children attempt to build a life in his regular absences. Throughout the film, Bauder uses these splits of gendered space and tempo to underscore the emotional price paid in committing to a high-level executive career. It is over halfway through the 45-minute film before Biesenbach and his wife are finally shown properly in two-shot in their home, as they attempt to discuss ways of rebalancing their lives, ultimately unsuccessfully. Bauder chronicles extensively the gendered effect on familial relationships and emotional dynamics caused by Biesenbach’s inability to find a better balance between career and parenting. Although Biesenbach is clearly a successful communicator in his professional life, appearing at one point as an invited television studio speaker in front of a live audience debating private equity, and drawing explanatory diagrams on white boards at numerous business meetings, his ability to reflect on why he chooses to continue his career path is not as developed. He talks to a personal coach and psychologist about recognizing and reconciling his and others’ expectations, yet in vain. At the end of the film, the couple discuss Biesenbach’s recent job offer, a promotion that will mean moving to Stockholm. As the credits confirm, Biesenbach takes the job, and his wife and children refuse to relocate, remaining behind near Hamburg. Bauder’s two documentaries and spin-off theatre production raise questions of the working practices of the corporate world, foreshadowing the specifically financial focus of Master of the Universe. The interest in ‘subjectivation’, to use Lazzarato’s term, in the transitions and processes of subject formation on the one hand and the tensions between corporate life and personal relationships on the other, is raised thematically, and Bauder is interested in his filmic practice particularly in the statements of his protagonists, set against the context of their working locations, the corporate spaces of contemporary capital. Both Grow or Go and Der Top-­ Manager register tensions that anticipate the possibility of a personal crisis; it is in Master of the Universe, with its turn to the world of investment banking, that the fuller repercussions of these personal tensions are felt on a global scale. After Master of the Universe ran successfully at selected cinemas, Germany’s leading weekly newspaper, Die Zeit, claimed that Bauder had delivered ‘perhaps the best film made in recent years about the financial sector’, arguing that the film’s success with audiences rested on its ability to avoid simply describing the financial crisis or descending into moral sentiment, pitfalls noted in other documentaries, and to ‘show reality’,

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unlike recent fictional representations of the financial sector, from Wall Street (1987) and Margin Call (2011) to The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).29 Other newspapers were initially less enthusiastic, with Nino Klingler arguing that Bauder ultimately had not achieved what he had promised, namely through the confessions of the financier to make transparent the often opaque workings of finance and with Bert Rebhandl suggesting that the film failed to find appropriate forms to convey the complexity of finance.30 As I argue below, it is exactly in Bauder’s negotiation of documentary form and issues of performativity that the film finds significant ways to reflect on the complexity and impact of financial decision-making. Whereas the US-oriented documentaries that appeared in the wake of the financial crisis were often supported in terms of funding or distribution by large corporations such as Amazon, Paramount, and Sony,31 Master of the Universe was independently produced by Bauder’s own film company alongside the acclaimed Austrian critical documentarist, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s production firm. The US documentaries focus primarily on the relationships between decision-making in the financial sector, landownership, mortgage lending, housing ownership, foreclosures, and small business bankruptcies, addressing viewers as financial subjects whose job and housing security may be directly affected. Master of the Universe brings a specifically German inflection to its concerns as the film focuses on statements made by Voss that relate largely to the interactions of German banks with local authority, pension company, and corporate investors, rather than with individual minor investors as financial subjects, and has little engagement with issues surrounding mortgages and housing costs. This slant registers the very different housing culture in Germany, where rented accommodation, often comprising social housing, housing association stock, or private stock subject to rent controls and legislation protecting tenants, has traditionally played a highly significant role in accommodating the wider public and where the cultural imperative to ‘get on the housing ladder’ so central to the UK and, prior to the sub-prime crisis, to the US is much less observable. Master of the Universe, then, does not consider the growth in the privatized housing market as central to understanding the role of the German banks. Although Voss outlines how rapid growth in private debt rather than state debt, linked to mortgages and property investment, has been a key factor in crises in the Netherlands and, more recently, Spain, his explications and the expository thrust of the film as a whole are concerned more with the impact of financial decision-making by bankers on the stability of the Euro and, by extension, on the general

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financial health of individual nations within the EU. Here, the film should be seen as a response to the unfolding crisis in the Eurozone, and, specifically, to Germany’s role in demanding specific economic actions in so-­ called debtor countries, most crucially, in this period, Greece. The formal structure of the film is important in conveying meaning. Voss’s statements are regularly intercut with extracts from found footage, much of it from the ARD broadcaster archive or from individual commercial YouTube channels, contextualizing recent financial events through news reportage, features, and bank commercials. These six intercuts, each lasting approximately two minutes, cover footage from the US Senate Committee’s Homeland Security and Government Affairs investigations into the ‘shitty deal’ offered perhaps fraudulently to investors by Goldman Sachs, the court verdict against France’s rogue trader Kerviel in 2010, footage celebrating the boom in new company stocks in the Neuer Markt section of the German stock exchange and of investment experts from the Deutsche Bank talking up the favourability of investing in platinum, footage of the financial crisis in South East Asia in 1997, particularly of the intervention by the IMF and its demands for greater government rigour in Indonesia, footage of the special meeting of the European Council in November 2012, headed in discussions by Angela Merkel, and including commentary about financiers now being able to hold a gun to the head of politicians, and finally footage from a TV commercial for the Commerzbank attempting to restore trust in German banks after the 2008 crisis. These intercuts contextualize, and in part ironize through montage editing, statements made by Voss about the role of individual bankers and the riskiness and complexity of the current financial system, enmeshed in his view in increasingly global interconnections. The opening credits of Master of the Universe run against a black screen. As a counterpoint, we hear the trading floor, itself a familiar trope in finance films even as it disappears in real life, and the (English-language) negotiations of hectic trading. Bauder’s editing immediately separates audible voices from visible bodies and familiar spaces, helping to focus the viewer on the need to pay particular attention to the statements of Voss when he is introduced subsequently. This separation cues us to listen intently to the highly specialized speech acts of leading finance workers within the spaces in which they operate and to reflect on their precedence in the constitution of the financial sector. The separation of voice from body and space foregrounds the need to focus on what Butler calls ‘certain acts of self-constitution’ undertaken by the banker.32 Bauder’s subsequent

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foregrounding of key spaces in the leading financial hub in the Eurozone acts to situate and ground Voss’s utterances in a highly specific topography. This focus on the relationship between utterance and space provide images for us of what Clarke calls ‘financial embodiment’, where ‘financial engineering practices might be said to be embodied in the multiple spaces of modern finance – such as international financial centres, the quotidian geographies of money and the financial media – that ultimately served to create the financial environment, or contingent context, of the crisis’.33 As we saw in Chap. 4 on the significance of financial space, Bauder reiterates how key architectural spaces in our financial cities work to allow the development of the performative financial agent, highlighting the interplay between character and context, location, and circumstances. Bauder breaks with this soundtrack to cut to images of Frankfurt’s financial quarter at night, long and medium shots that pick out grids of white, silver, yellow, and green lights against the black sky. Bauder sets these images against the opening lines of the ex-investment banker who argues that we don’t really understand the world of finance at all. This frames for us the expectation that the ensuing acts of narration that constitute much of the film will make sense of the abstract and opaque visuality of the gridded architecture of the financial city and clarify the operations taking place within. Bauder proposes that to understand contemporary finance we need to consider it anew, not as dominated by untraceable, anonymous global forces that cannot be resisted but as emanating from key financial hubs, specific offices, meeting rooms, and trading spaces in major global cities, and driven by numerous individual actions, decisions, deals, and statements, a series of constitutive actions, taken in accordance with a series of always-already-learned and practised ideological framings of the world. In his opening exchange, Voss draws attention to the process of becoming a full member of this secluded community of investment bankers, a process that illustrates the deliberate separation of the financial world from broader societal and political exchanges. It is not just about performing work in the financial sector, but about a special kind of performance that the aspirant investment banker carries as a mark of distinction. There is a set of quasi-initiation work processes that will allow the banker to become someone set apart from the conventional world of work in non-financial sectors. These socialization practices, as Voss notes, are akin to those of the army and are about showing absolute loyalty to the organization, never offering a critical idea and never offering a political opinion. Voss’s

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narration acutely describes how a financial worker starts to become an investment banker, a master of the universe: ‘Basically you have to be willing to give up your life’. This is not an inevitable, organic process, but a deliberate set of events that help to dislocate the worker both from the ordinary working world and from the broader social environment from which he or she has developed. The process of financial socialization involves, for example, adopting willingly and uncomplainingly severe and exhaustive working practices. This might take the form of ‘one-nighters’ or, even more extremely, ‘two-nighters’ whereby the aspirant banker is asked to stay behind to complete an urgent project that might require working through 24 or even 48 hours. It is not just that the banker shows here how he or she is committed to the working environment; importantly, the banker will also show that ties and commitments beyond the financial workplace are held to be less significant: birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations, and all kinds of social and familial pulls are deliberately devalued in this initiation process. The cultural practice of the extended working day is crucial in several ways to the creation of the figure of the banker, instituting as it does a new mode of thinking through both time and space. As Karen Ho has written in her ethnographic analysis of Wall Street working practices, first, the commitment to extremely long working hours is seen by bankers as evidence of their difference from the more traditional nine-to-five working hours of workers in other sectors.34 There are also various structural inducements used by banks to ensure that there are additional incentives for bankers to want to stay longer at the office, and to recalibrate hours spent on work with hours spent at home. As Ho writes, it is a common Wall Street practice to provide free restaurant quality takeaway meals every day to workers staying beyond 7 pm, and a free taxi ride home to those staying past 9pm.35 Both perks, and the emergence of the Blackberry and other smart phones over the last two decades, ensure that the working practices of high-level bankers involve the construction of a specific relation to both space and time, and the emergence of forms of financial space and financial time, with an internalization of overwork and a commitment to the space of the office over going home in the early evening or at weekends. In a visual echo of the shot through the window discussed extensively in Chap. 4, Bauder keeps the camera focused on the gridded exteriors of the skyscrapers, picking out isolated windows where, late into the night, individual figures can sometimes be seen still at their desks and screens. Bauder attempts to construct a sense of how the assemblage of an evolving

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bank culture, globalization, shifts in technology, and individual career ambition and aspiration play a role in putting at risk the economic stability of individual countries and of the whole Eurozone. The possibility of future devastation is hinted at in the overall mise en scène. Master of the Universe freezes us in the very moment post-crisis, after capital seems to have passed through and moved elsewhere, leaving the ex-banker as much of a ghost drained before us as the abandoned skyscraper in which we are situated after its tenant bank has relocated, echoing the scenes of financial spectrality we saw in Chap. 3. From this vantage point, we look out over the panorama of Frankfurt, a hub of activity and transaction, from a point of stasis and from an excluded present. Bauder’s film attempts to reterritorialize finance capital through its focus on the actual spaces of financial exchange and on the decision-making processes that allow financial products to circulate. The film is deliberately, and perhaps unavoidably, given the reluctance the director reported of banks to give him access to key places and people, capped in its visual scope. It uses a small number of repeated shots and locations, its spatial layering enacted vertically and horizontally across a variety of inhabited and disused spaces: the Frankfurt skyline from a helicopter shot, moving shots out of an ascending glass elevator, the abandoned committee meeting room, storage cupboards, trading floor, empty IT cabinets of the now-untenanted bank building, the view out from the financial tower over the city below, and the car park which allows an edit to several scenes of Voss driving through Frankfurt’s centre. This tension, between the seeable and the sayable, between what we can encounter visually, often rendered in those flat, gridded forms, and what we are told by our narrator, including pauses and ellipses over his own role in dubious practices, is a significant aesthetic feature of Bauder’s film. Architecturally, we are often outside the world of finance, separated by sheets of glass, yet the narrations and explanations of Voss promise to be a guide to the usually hidden interior. This archaeological layering is significantly discursive as Voss’s narrated biography helps to explain and clarify contemporary banking practices while also revealing pauses and ellipses over his own role in dubious practices. As Nino Klingler has noted, transparency is a key element in Bauder’s structuring aesthetic.36 He frames exteriors of the Frankfurt skyscrapers as gridded walls of glass, purportedly transparent and yet at certain angles opaque, impenetrable, and reflective. Voss talks at one point about the impossibility of transparency in banking, as products and deals have

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become increasingly complex and interlinked. Bauder’s aesthetics of transparency can be extended, metaphorically, to Voss’s own performance, as he adopts the persona of willing and transparent guide, promising the viewer a unique insight into banking operations, and yet Bauder’s film allows us to register the degree to which Voss may actually be also acting to screen our ability to fully understand his complicity in constructing and selling risky financial products and in undertaking morally questionable acts in order to meet managerial targets. The film’s creation of layered visual and acoustic images and juxtapositions underlines the ability of documentarists to use the non-factual mode to communicate complex ideas that go beyond an examination of just what is voiced by protagonists or commentators. At key points in the beginning and ending of the film, for example, Bauder makes use of Bach’s interpretation of Pergolesi’s ‘Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden’ (BMV1083) on the acoustic track to accompany aerial panoramic images of the ‘Mainhattan’ skyline initially, and later Voss’s exit from the screen at the end of the film. The lyrical content of this piece, based on Psalm 51, is an extended plea to higher powers to ‘cancel my sins, let them disappear, make my heart and soul anew’. As this lyric is heard even before we first see Voss on screen, we can understand this acoustic composition as a request that can be taken as a literal correlative to Voss’s whistle-blowing statements, and, less generously, as an ironic comment on Voss’s unstated desire for his own financial ‘sins’ to be cancelled and to disappear from records. Bauder’s most extensive use of layered images comes with his focus on financial spaces, however. Certainly, the architecture of the numerous high-rise bank headquarters in Frankfurt creates physical, mental, and also emotional distance from the social world below. As De Certeau has famously written, the view down from the financial skyscraper ‘transforms the bewitching world by which one was “possessed” into a text that lies before one’s eyes. lt allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god’.37 The view down promises a mastery of the visible universe. Not only does it foster a sense of control over the city below, but this vertical separation also operates as an isolated, inward-looking closed working system.38 There is an institutionalized disconnect from wider social processes that helps to bring about occasionally catastrophic crashes. As Butler notes on the broader separation between economy and society, ‘we would be making a mistake if we failed to see that that separation happens repeatedly, that it is part of an iterable structure’.39 However, this closed world, where the families of financiers and bankers only

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socialize together and their children are educated separately, often beginning at bank-run kindergartens, is only part of the system described by Voss. It is the human networks, behaviours, and statements of financial actors that must also be understood to grasp contemporary finance capital. The film allows Voss to propose that the financial market is not itself a ‘natural’, uncontrollable phenomenon, but is ‘performatively produced’.40 Bauder makes repeated use of the elevator shot, filming from an ascending or descending lift out over the city. Not only does this reinforce the sense that the person in the elevator, and hence within the world of finance, is transitioning in each ascent from a concrete interaction with the everyday world to another realm where practices appear more abstract, but elevators themselves are hardly neutral technologies in the inner hierarchy of banking institutions. Just as roles within major investment banks are understood in terms of spatial divisions between the all-important and richly remunerated ‘front office’ and its support networks in the ‘middle office’ and the less prestigious and sometimes located in inexpensive suburbs or even outsourced administration in the ‘back office’, so the elevators themselves in many banks lead only and exclusively to specific vertical spaces. The ‘front office’ has its own elevators, as do the other functions, with the senior management of the bank often having private elevators that only travel to very specific executive floors. This ‘tiered elevator’ system41 both reinforces strict spatial segregation and hierarchies within the banks themselves and underlines the disconnect within the practices of the investment bank. If the process of becoming a banker is of fundamental importance to the current system of financialization and to its remoteness from everyday life below the skyscrapers, then the question of performance in relation to complexity is also raised. Voss narrates that over the last decade in banking deals have become ever more complicated involving detailed and cross-­ referencing contracts and products so that although financial institutions try to act as autonomous agents in decision-making, they are legally and financially often fully interdependent and vulnerable to risk, unable to disentangle the complex legal layers binding them together. In this way, any decisions taken are taken in a state of uncertainty. When things go awry, it is impossible to prevent a systemic precariousness and vulnerability to crisis. Voss proposes that the financial system in Germany is so complex that there is no one who understands the accounts of the major Deutsche Bank. Although they may claim at certain points to be ‘masters of the

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universe’, as Voss does describing his early career, this mastery is fleeting and illusory owing to the complexity that they have helped to create.42 Voss is photographed in long shot from outside the bank skyscraper in daylight as his voiceover describes how the financial products that his and other banks have been selling are always extremely complicated and interlink various institutions so that several are implicated if problems set in as the products mature. Voss describes how they created a product, under extreme pressure from their superiors, in order not to be absent from a growing market for similar products, even though the team knew that the product wouldn’t work, was expensive to create, and extremely risky. Here, financial transactions are not simply anonymous and unlocatable but can be traced back to managers and teams and to the processes of decision-making. In a perceptive piece of filmmaking, Bauder allows Voss to use a board marker on the screens made by the glass windows facing out across the city to set out how so-called bad banks that through mismanagement or dubious selling practices leave an entire sector vulnerable to enormous financial losses. In the end, Voss argues that it is the taxpayers who are largely left with the catastrophic bill. In a sequence that seems to quote the opening of Oliver Stone’s film of the financial crisis, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), where the Manhattan skyline is shot through a windowpane upon which there are written financial equations,43 Bauder frames and holds this image of the glass windows forming a split screen. On the left-hand side, Voss has written the enormous sums owed by each participating financial institution in this particular misadventure; on the right-hand side, we see through the pane the skyline of the banking sector. The left-hand screen, in this spatial montage, illuminates the practices that allow the institutions in the right-hand pane to function. The cognitive tensions that this shot evokes are between what the equations and sums written by Voss seem to be able to tell us of the true situation, of misguided practices, risks, debts, and catastrophic bankruptcies within the financial institutions whose skyline and stable architectural geometry we see gridded through the glass. Voss describes an incredible intensification of financial selling practices as evidence of a temporal and spatial acceleration of finance. His pronouncements about the speed and riskiness of a series of decisions show how the current state of international financial precarity can be traced back to specific statements and actions. It is the key investment bankers, Voss suggests, a role he formerly held, who are responsible for the complexity, precarity, and catastrophic interconnectedness of financial products and

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transactions. Voss declares that although the entire market may, in its vastness, interconnectedness, and complexity, be incomprehensible as a totality, each separate decision and deal upon out of which the market is woven is concrete and visible, comprehensible. As Voss states, the movements of finance capital and the ‘invisible hand’ of the market in financial affairs are not so complex and is actually it’s quite simple: ‘It comes down to people, making decisions. If someone says to them that’s enough, then they’ll stop’. With statements like these, Voss attempts to position himself as a new kind of post-financialized subject. His self-constitution as whistle-­ blower, after being made redundant from his job and developing a critical distance, opens a new performative space as his speech acts establish him as a subject in a new form. In this, his narration aligns itself with Butler’s discussion of performativity and politics, where the formulation of a position that is critical of an established authority can also produce a new subject, ‘defined, in part, by that very critical capacity’.44 Whereas Bauder’s earlier films, including the start of Master of the Universe itself, address the processes of desubjectivation by which the new recruits to the corporate sectors of management and finance become specific actors within a larger system, the ending of Bauder’s financial documentary challenges viewers with its footage of what appears to be Voss’s resubjectivation. By resubjectivation, we mean here what appears to be Voss’s newly found political conscience and his fierce criticism of the huge risks to society posed by the global financial sector. Voss’s subjectivized status of the banker-turned-­ whistle-blower is in itself potentially productive politically in offering to guide viewers in their understanding of the opaque practices and processes that constitute the contemporary financial world. More than this, his speech acts on camera and his self-presentation at screenings constitute the banker-as-subject anew, now as the responsible post-financialized subject and citizen. Yet the film is ambivalent about taking Voss’s narration always at face value. Bauder outlines in press interviews how the film came to be made and the initial rules of the game. The participatory documentary is structured around an explicit or implicit encounter between filmmaker and filmed subject. As Master of the Universe shows in an early sequence, Voss attempted to maintain control in his encounter with Bauder by insisting on specific interviewing conditions that are drawn up into a legal contract. Bauder allows these initial negotiations to be part of the finished film and so to frame how we encounter all of Voss’s statements. We hear Voss recommending to Bauder that it is important that the filmmaker talks to his

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lawyers to comprehend fully the contract. Voss agreed to participate on the basis that he could stop filming at any point, that he would neither allow himself to be seen as the instigator of any financial wrongdoing nor would he name any names. If the film documents a kind of insider whistle-­ blowing on how the small, specific, but iterative acts of individual financiers help to constitute an overall financial system that has such enormous global repercussions, then already by including recordings of Voss’s insistence on these prior caveats, Bauder allows us to reflect on questions of authenticity, and to see how Voss produces a very specific performance of financial performativity. In screenings of the finished film, Voss regularly appears to promote the film, often in the absence of the director, to ‘authenticate’ his own performance in the film and to answer questions, typically about his banking experiences rather than about the way that the film came to be made or about the authenticity or not of its exhibited form. There are three moments in the film where there is a rupture in narration, where the finished film shows Voss pausing or asking for filming to stop. One concerns his role in selling complicated and possibly misleading financial products, another concerns the effects on family life of his dedication to his investment banker role, and a third his feelings on being made redundant. In the breakdown of his performance here, we can identify moments of ‘misfire’, when the performatives of his narration, his attempt to give a smooth and distanced reading of the financial world, crack and allow us to recognize in filming errors in Voss’s performative strategy as he is faced with his own role in constituting that financial universe. These performative tactics call attention to the reliability of the narration and to the documentary film as a constructed form. The documentation of these misfires, leaving them in the finished film, allows the camera to distance itself from Voss’s utterances and to allow a space for critical reflection on the political effects of financial performativity more generally. These misfires perhaps allow us to think more deeply about the performative power of a banker to constitute a world, on screen, and to more devastating effect, off. In this way, there is a layering of degrees of performativity at work in the film.45 It not only documents financial performativity by providing a narrated account of how performativity is a key element in the world of finance but also shows that that account itself is constituted through the banker’s performatives. In this way, Bauder’s film aligns itself with recent developments more generally in documentary film that address aspects of perfomativity. As Susan Scheibler notes in her pioneering essay on performativity and the documentary, ‘in a documentary, the interrogation of the object often takes a form which expresses itself in cognitive

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terms as a constative event’, that is, it posts a claim to authenticity and authority often on the basis of its photographic referentiality.46 Scheibler argues that the constative can be defined by its dependence on a belief in the possibility of a knowledge that is able to guarantee the actuality and presence, the facticity of its observations and remarks. The performative, on the other hand, is unconcerned with its relationship to facticity, to truth or falsity, performing its enunciative function apart from and outside of issues of verifiability and authenticity.47

Bauder’s film might be understood as primarily a constative documentary about the performativity of a financier, where moments of rupture also break through to reveal the continuing performative nature of the self-justifying financier. This has an important ethical and political dimension, because, as Scheibler argues, ‘what is at stake for the constative is the correspondence between the utterance and its promise of a real referent’. 48 By undermining the promise of the real referent through these ruptures, the performative misfires demand that the viewer rethinks the reliability of Voss’s statements throughout the film and flags up the possibility of the banker-turned-whistle-blower as having a specific agenda in participating in the documentary. If we take these moments of misfire as revelatory performatives, then we are faced with having to reassess the way that the film works. As Scheibler proposes, ‘[t]o speak of a cinematic moment as performative is to turn a way of speaking into a way of seeing’.49 Master of the Universe is not a performative documentary per se, in that it doesn’t work constantly to call attention to Voss’s own performance through self-­ conscious displays of body posture or routines and rituals. It documents issues of financial performativity using a largely participatory mode of filmmaking. Yet the misfires in Voss’s utterances suggest also that he is aware of a specific presentation of self that he is putting forward for the film. Voss’s performance obscures itself as performance by giving the viewer a feeling of privileged access yet Bauder allows us to see Voss’s attempts to control this presentation and thus calls into question Voss’s constative reliability.50 The film plays up the way that the banker Voss, former ‘master of the banking universe’, attempts to ‘master’ the universe of the film, the documentary world. Master of the Universe ends with Voss’s pronouncements about the individual, social, and familial costs of the psychotically active and unrestrained dealing mentality, his words counterpointed by images of the ordered grids of windows and stable straight lines of the billion Euro

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skyscrapers, now including the new European Central Bank building, set out before him. He proposes that the amount of finance circulating in virtual transactions and derivatives is enough to allow bankers to exert pressure from towers such as these on to the economies of whole countries. There is now the deliberate targeting of national economic spaces by the unfathomable resources of hedge fund managers. The Euro is unlikely to survive: Greece first, then Portugal, and finally France, we are told, are in the financiers’ sights. If we are fundamentally at war in Europe, at financial war, then the battlefield is over control of economic spaces in the present and over debt in the future. The film’s narrative culminates in a final performative, Voss’s view that the endgame is the deliberate destruction of the Euro and of the European political project by financial speculators. It is here that the implications of these films of the financial city that we saw above in Chap. 4 promise a material form again with Voss’s prediction. Just as the ending of Hochhäusler’s film, The City Below shows the multitude running in chaos through Frankfurt’s city streets, accompanied by Svenja’s words that ‘it has begun’, the present and future nightmares of finance capital out of control are registered in Julien’s scenes of abandoned houses in Iceland and dislocated lives in Dubai. Voss’s warning in Master of the Universe is that the spatial form taken by finance capital, the international bank, has assumed a power to shape lives that exceeds even the abilities of nation states to rein it in. Through Julien’s image-­fragments across his spatial montage, to Hochhäusler’s dematerialization of bodies and hauntings by the future masses, to Bauder’s attempts to reterritorialize banking through the narratives and performance of an insider banner, these moving images of the financial city attempt to create aesthetic forms to make us sense the dangers of the abstractions of finance capital. The embedding of Voss’s final performative statement in the concluding images asks us to reflect on the political implications of financial performativity. Bauder uses Voss’s performativity as a way of rethinking economics and politics in the context of moments of financial crisis. The film implies that performativity is of limited scope in preventing a Eurozone-wide catastrophe and therefore reflects on the need for greater political intervention. A filmmaker using the expository documentary form might end with viewers guided by a voiceover or diagrams to assent to the authenticity of a concluding diagnosis. Bauder’s use of the participatory mode, however, and of the formal strategies—where the intercuts contextualize Voss’s statements and where Voss’s description of the separation of the fields of finance and politics in the socialization of the banker are foregrounded and the ruptures and misfires in Voss’s utterances are

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retained in the finished film—lends an uneasy status to these final images. It is not that the authenticity of Voss’s claims about impending disaster is questioned, just that the stakes of financial performativity have become so high. The film has, however, also attuned us to look more closely at the performatives that help to constitute the financial world, to think through their limits and their risks. Master of the Universe might in this way be seen as a complex exercise in looking not only at the performativity of a financial agent but also at the performativity of the documentary camera, suggesting that it may be able not only to document but also to adopt a critical position regarding financial performativity.

Possibilities for Collective Struggle: Melanie Gilligan and Financial Performativity In her own words, the work of Melanie Gilligan, the Canadian theorist and artist based in New York and London, has consisted of ‘representing economic shifts while contrasting them with their affective impact on people’51 . Gilligan is acutely aware of the evolutions in the financial sector over the last 20 years and of finance’s power to shape and constrain lives on a global scale, as well as of finance’s inherent violent force and its own internal vulnerability. Like Marc Bauder, although using a very different mode of filmmaking, Gilligan explores performance and performativity as a way of addressing the separation of economics and politics under finance capital. Her output since the mid-2000s (predating the global financial crisis itself in 2007) has included four long-form video projects and several significant cultural-political essays that engage in detail with modes of adaptation to, and resistance against, the increasing financialization of everyday life, often involving questions of performance and affect. Gilligan’s work, with its focus on performativity and performance rather than on more obviously realist or mimetic modes of representing finance capital, foregrounds the increasingly dense incursions of finance not just into contemporary work practices but to broader questions of subjectivity. Despite her acknowledgment of finance’s restructuring of social relations, and the difficulties of imagining ways of living beyond finance capital, Gilligan’s film project also offers playful, speculative, and arguably optimistic moments too as she tests out scenarios and encounters with finance. As she has argued, ‘[i]t is a constantly shifting situation and since you, I and everyone around us are part of capital’s reproduction, we know that this process is full of contingency and new events evolve on both larger systemic levels as well as in the particulars of situations’.52

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As she explores the potential of counter-strategies to the force of finance capital, Gilligan’s essays and performance pieces have often engaged explicitly and implicitly with the aesthetic theory of French philosopher, Jacques Rancière. While Rancière may not seem the most immediately useful theoretician of financialization, as we shall see below, his extensive writings on politics and aesthetics do open a space for Gilligan’s explorations of the potential of performance. Using terms that Gilligan has herself addressed in her engagement with Rancière and in her critiques of contemporary art performances, we might see Gilligan’s films as articulating the potential of ‘performative reorderings’ of the social field as a way of exploring resistance to the extensive power of finance. Her films use the moving image as a medium to depict role-playing and performance in our difficult financial times and to outline the potential for performative redistributions of power as a mode of forming a collective or community self-­ understanding that can counter finance’s reach. In thinking through how Gilligan’s moving image works engage politically with contemporary finance, it helps to first set out how she understands the interaction of politics and aesthetics at this current historical juncture. Gilligan’s films and critical essays are illuminating in the way in which they are influenced by ideas on performance and political struggle articulated by theorists including Brecht and Rancière; yet at the same time they are explicit about the constraints and blind spots that, according to Gilligan, are inherent in such aesthetic theories as she seeks alternative ways of seeing in her own work. In the essays preceding the making of Crisis in the Credit System (2008), she addresses arguments by Rancière concerning the space for counter-aesthetic forms in the post-Fordist moment of capitalism that seems to have largely anticipated and recuperated all modes of expressing and enacting political and economic alternatives. The recuperation by capital of forms of resistance to its domination is a significant concern for Gilligan, recurring in several essays and in the way that her films often circle back to reveal how what initially appear to be intuitive and popular strategies of countering capital’s power are actually already part of the systemic way that capital mines the population for feedback in order to adapt itself to possible shifts in popular behaviour. Gilligan returns to Rancière’s political-aesthetic concepts frequently across several essays as she subjects his ideas to a critique that is based on the capitalistic exploitation of the very kinds of political activity that Rancière seems to champion. The circularity and traps she identifies in Rancière’s position help us to see how she attempts to circumvent these areas of

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concern in her own work. In so doing, Gilligan can be seen as a moving image artist who, often borrowing from Brecht, turns Rancière against himself, using the very areas of theatricality, performance, and gesture that Rancière’s writings establish as a means of disrupting the political order. Gilligan’s engagement with Rancière predates the release of her film trilogy as she describes a direct exchange with the philosopher in London in 2006, where she questioned him on his concept of the ‘(re)distribution of the sensible’, that is, on the way that the dominant social order determines what presents itself to sense experience, or, in Gilligan’s description, what can be ‘sensed, thought and felt’.53 For Rancière, politics is a rearrangement of social relations and does not take place constantly, but only when there is a disruption of the previous ordering of the social field, when those previously excluded from participating in and producing what can be seen, thought or felt, suddenly achieve a presence that (temporarily) disintegrates the social order. This is a concept that Rancière has set out across a number of essays and to which he frequently returns. However, for Gilligan (and for a number of other commentators), Rancière’s account of politics as a form of temporary and intermittent creative disruption finds its corollary in the restless search of capital for innovation and for the ‘reordering and subverting [of] existing visual, affective and semiotic codes’.54 As Gilligan points out, ‘[I]n deregulated and decentralized late-­ capitalism, declassifications and re-articulations of the established order are the norm not the exception’.55 Gilligan’s question to Rancière, then, concerns how he might differentiate disruptions that occasion a ‘redistribution of the sensible’ from the relentless drive for social reordering urged by capitalism. This encounter with Rancière brings to light a crucial aspect of his understanding of the aesthetics of the political, something which will be of great weight in Gilligan’s own art practice. She argues that Rancière’s politics is at heart theatrical and spectacular, based on his view of how those excluded from the distribution of the sensible appropriate and inhabit new roles and bring to light a new weighting and allocation of the sensible through their performances. As Gilligan points out, Rancière’s version of politics, in the philosopher’s own words, can be viewed ‘as “a theatrical and artificial sphere” where the part of no part can use appearances and dissimulation to shift and confuse roles’.56 This assumption of new roles and appearances is undertaken in order to become visible, reinforcing the theatricality and performance imminent to Rancière’s aesthetics. She argues that here Rancière distinguishes his thinking from that of the

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seminal philosopher of the spectacle, Guy Debord, by making clear that whereas in Debord’s account the spectacle is a realm of appearances where subjects are separated from their full selves, for Rancière, the ‘subjects/ spectators are never wholly immersed in the spectacle, but retain a critical distance, actively and consciously engaging with what they see’.57 The idea of establishing a critical distance to the role that one has just appropriated or to what is being staged, is, of course, a mode of theatricality pursued by Brecht across much of his dramatic works and critical writings on performance. Gilligan argues, however, that where such a disruptive role-­playing occurs without an accompanying change in economic conditions, those previously excluded from the distribution of the sensible in the social order may be ‘condemned to enact the infinite repetition of these performances’, a feature that would be difficult to distinguish from the constant innovations demanded from, and exploited by, capital.58 Additionally, as Gilligan points out, the performative dimension needed for workers, the excluded and marginalized to temporarily shift their inhabitation of certain allocated roles resembles a more general ‘condition of performativity’ regarded by many critics as a distinguishing feature of the contemporary labour market. Gilligan points out that this has led, for example, Paolo Virno to describe contemporary politics as ‘in a disastrous way, like some superfluous duplication of the experience of labor’.59 In this way, Gilligan’s challenge to Rancière, and as much to herself as an artist, is to find ways of making visible the possibilities of the redistribution of the sensible, while scrutinizing ways that disruptive political performance might be differentiated from the creative performativity demanded by the contemporary workplace and exploited for profit by finance capital. Usefully, in a survey essay of the ways in which contemporary art practitioners have returned to questions of politics and performance, she sets out ways in which this might be addressed. One feature that Gilligan notes as recurring among contemporary performance pieces is the use of the re-enactment of older theatrical pieces, usually restaging iconic historical works from the 1960s and 1970s that had a clear revolutionary intent. These historical revisitings invite the audience to become aware of the disjunctions between the performances across the decades and to raise questions about the radical potential of such reworkings. In Gilligan’s trilogy, she reworks both past narratives and the tropes of familiar genres to find new ways of making finance visible and tangible. She borrows modes from low-budget television and B movie sci-fi and dystopian dramas to construct versions of our contemporary financialized worlds, recognizable scenarios, yet by way of the banal sci-fi compositions,

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we as viewers are set in an almost Brechtian distantiation from events that are hypostatized from our current conditions.60 For Gilligan, the viewer’s reaction is not a built-in aspect of her works as she chooses the mediated form of the video installation and moving image online upload as her avenues of dissemination. Gilligan uploads her pieces to YouTube as well as onto her website, which makes them generally highly accessible, but frames them as just another moving image piece amongst the millions of music videos, home recordings, and citizen journalism. In her review of performance and contemporary art practice, Gilligan highlights the video installations of Catherine Sullivan, whose works bear a superficial resemblance to her own projects, with their interrogation of performance, labour, and politics. Like Gilligan’s films, those made by Sullivan reproduce ‘the formal and stylistic qualities of mainstream cinema and television, aping their tropes, from the look of film stock to conventional editing and camerawork – all of which imbue the work with what Debord referred to as the “general gloss” of spectacle’.61 For Gilligan, the roles, clichés, and citations performed by the stock characters offer a doubling that alerts the viewer to commodification: ‘Each “attitude” is a fleeting fragment of a role that already exists. The personal comes to seem uncannily reified’. 62 Yet Gilligan draws attention to the way that, for her, no clear political dimension is opened up by this caricatured performativity, rather merely a doubling of a post-Fordist demand for transformation. Gilligan concurs, pointing out that semiotic reworkings and innovations in the social field are very much central to contemporary capitalism, particularly in the financial sector, where specific financial products deliver profit based on instability and uncertainty. In conclusion, Gilligan sums up her relationship to Rancière by arguing that ‘[p]erformative redistributions […] are absorbed and instrumentalized not only in the art world but in a wider social field greatly influenced by aesthetic strategies of unsettling and critique. This fact, although it does not negate concepts like Rancière’s certainly makes their formulation trickier’.63 While Gilligan is adamant in her assertion that ‘this is not to say that the political possibilities of assuming appropriated roles are foreclosed, nor does it mean that exceptional political and aesthetic events that qualify as redistributions of the sensible cannot exist’. Her own works attempt to explore role-playing, performance, and community appropriate to the years immediately before and after the financial crisis by constructing dramatic futures that invite the viewers to look for the possibilities of innovative social forms that do not actually reinvigorate capital.

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Gilligan’s criticism of the usefulness under contemporary economic conditions of Rancière’s paradigm for understanding politics as a performative redistribution is shared by Maurizio Lazzarato, whose work on semiotics under finance capital also offers a productive way of understanding the political resonance of Gilligan’s films. Lazzarato’s monograph, Signs and Machines, to which we already referred in the Chap. 1 when discussing the mixed semiotics at play in recent aesthetic engagements with finance capital, offers a reading of Rancière’s work on equality and democracy that is in accord with the queries raised by Gilligan. Lazzarato rejects as ahistorical the political position of Rancière and argues that it is unable to articulate the challenges to the political of changing economic and technological environments. As Lazzarato argues, Rancière’s framework presupposes a certain model of political conflict that emerged over the last 200 years but whose relevance as a way of understanding how politics works has declined, based as it is, in Lazzarato’s view, on larger entities such as the state and the trade unions: The whole trouble with Rancière’s position [….] lies in the difficulty he has in critiquing and seeing beyond this model, a model which surely expanded democracy in the twentieth century but which today represents a genuine obstacle to the emergence of new objects and new subjects of politics. The model is constitutionally incapable of including political subjects other than the State, unions and business associations.64

Not only does Lazzarato read Rancière’s paradigm for political contestation in a way which might make its resonance for production and employment in post-Fordist times unfruitful, he also takes issue with the degree to which Rancière understands political activity as taking the form of written and, especially, spoken intervention. The dependency on language and on discursive formulations of claims to political recognition are problematic, for Lazzarato, in an era dominated as much by gestures, images, screens, and codes as by language and leave Rancière with a model of the theatrical as the key political form. As Lazzarato argues, For Rancière, politics only exists through the constitution of a “theatrical” stage on which actors perform the conceit of political interlocution according to a double logic of discursivity and argumentation that is at once reasonable (since it postulates equality) and unreasonable (since nowhere does this equality exist). [….] This conception of politics is normative. All action in which public space is not conceived as interlocution through speech and reason is not political.65

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Instead, as we saw in Chap. 1, Lazzarato’s philosophical position moves away from viewing the theatrical as the key scenario of political contestation and away from the logocentric bias he sees in Rancière particularly, but also in other contemporary political philosophical approaches. Instead, he draws on political economy, on the circulation of all kinds of non-linguistic signs under finance capital—money, algorithms, codes, equations, pricing formulae, data—and on the processes of subjectivation by which individuals come to view themselves as subjects who can participate in the wider processes of the economy and of political activity. In establishing a model different from that used by Rancière, Lazzarato illustrates his thinking by describing the non-logocentric interventions of the Cynics, but also in passing he refers vaguely to ‘contemporary art performances’ that do not rely on language.66 Lazzarato concludes his examination of Rancière’s framework by proposing an alternative critical model, based not on language alone but on a ‘mixed semiotics’ and on an exploration of the processes of subjectivation under finance capital, a lineage that, for Lazzarato, runs from Foucault through Guattari, as discussed in Chap. 1. He argues that the line running through Guattari and from Foucault’s work on modern-­ day capitalism and subjectivity does not, and here Lazzarato makes a contrast with Rancière’s approach, ‘separate [….] “ethics” from “economics” and “politics”’.67 Lazzarato concludes, in similar fashion to Gilligan, by questioning how the ‘distribution of the sensible’ might be operative in contemporary politics: For Rancière, only democracy as an apparatus of both division and community, can reconfigure the distribution of the sensible [….] Political subjectivation, while dependent on equality, surpasses it. The political question is, therefore: How can we invent and practice equality under these new conditions of subjectivation? [….] How do we invent and practice both equality and “ethical differentiation” (singularization) while breaking with the machinic enslavements and social subjections of modern-­day capitalism that have a dual hold on our subjectivity?68

As we noted in Chap. 1, Lazzarato argues that the cinema offers a privileged ground for political contestation around capitalism and the production of subjectivity under finance. While the figure of ‘the trader’, with which Lazzarato opens his argument, exemplifies a kind of ‘machinic subjectivity’ whereby the human is enmeshed with screens and computers issuing data, numbers, and forms of code, the cinema operates typically both to uphold dominant subjectivations under finance capital while also

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bearing the potential to reveal the machinic at the heart of contemporary subjectivity and at the same time ‘opening up possibilities that were not already inscribed in dominant subjectivations’.69 For Gilligan, as for Lazzarato, contemporary moving image practices can explore individual and collective subjectivities under financialization and to offer, at certain points, the potential for the creation of new forms of subjectivity that are not necessarily recuperated and recaptured by finance capital. Maria Walsh makes a strong case for reading Gilligan’s trilogy through the frameworks that Lazzarato articulates regarding cinema’s political and ethical potential. Walsh argues that Gilligan’s extensive use in her gallery installations and YouTube films of a variety of historic media and cinematic forms and tropes—advertising and corporate video, docudrama, sf, popular and cult TV box-set streaming forms, TV news—might be viewed through the lens of the mixed semiotics conceived by Guattari and which Lazzarato then expands upon.70 Lazzarato argues that the cinema, and by this we can expand his point to include the disparate forms that the contemporary moving image takes, is at the heart of processes of subjectivation: ‘A political battle has unfolded and continues to unfold around cinema for control of the effects of subjectivation and desubjectivation that the “non-human” semiotics of the cinematographic image produce on the individuated subject’.71 Lazzarato’s argument is, in brief, that cinema has developed in such a way as a specific kind of ‘signifying machine’, whereby particularly in mainstream narrative cinema with its focus on the development of the ‘individuated subject’ as protagonist, it has come ‘to neutralize, order, and normalize the action of symbolic and asignifying semiotics which exceed dominant significations’.72 However, for Lazzarato, cinema is multilayered in its recourse to a range of semiotic features, and this means that in its earliest forms cinema ‘represented for a brief moment the possibility of moving beyond signifying semiologies, of bypassing personological individuations, and opening up possibilities that were not already inscribed in dominant subjectivations’. 73 Yet Lazzarato also holds out that this radical subjectivizing potential can still be accessed by contemporary moving image practices that resist what Martin O’Shaughnessy has called mainstream cinema’s ‘machinery of individuation, psychological motivation and a conventional cause-effect narrative chain. It is only by reading around the edges, excentrically, that we can bring cinema’s subordinated elements into view’.74 Gilligan’s trilogy attempts to draw our attention to the overwhelming machinic assemblages that finance capital now has at its disposal while also illustrating the possibilities and limits of the viewer’s capacity to imagine

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any collective formation that might constitute itself to act outside finance’s subjectivation processes. In terms of Gilligan’s formal repertoire, as Walsh proposes, Gilligan draws across the diverse semiologies that Lazzarato and, before him, Guattari have categorized, from data, algorithms, and balance sheets, to TV and film tropes and scenarios. For Walsh, Gilligan’s aesthetic counter-­strategy is one of ‘resisting, while mimicking, dominant forms of signification in cognitive capitalism’.75 The resistance, in the final analysis, is of allowing for ambiguity and for the hope that, and here Walsh draws directly on Lazzarato, ‘something might “slip past”’.76 Gilligan’s video dramas and installations begin with a focus on the financial crisis and performance and then move out to take a wider, more speculative lens on the possibilities for collective agency and community feeling in the age of capital. Her recent output consists of a trilogy of linked films, Crisis in the Credit System (2008), Popular Unrest (2010), and The Common Sense (2014), which develop these ideas, and a fourth piece, Self Control (2010 on), a work in progress at the time of writing in which finance capital itself is personified and then subject to a series of psychotherapeutic conversations. Gilligan’s first film in the trilogy, Crisis in the Credit System, was made and released in October 2008 as a four-part video drama just as stock exchanges around the world were dropping and major global banks were facing bankruptcy. Its release was fortuitously timed, appearing as it did just two weeks after the collapse of Lehmann Brothers. With a total running time of around 36 minutes, Crisis in the Credit System was less an immediate response to the emerging global financial catastrophe and owed more instead to Gilligan’s prescience about the growing possibility of a major crisis after several years of extensive research and interviews carried out with bankers, asset managers, and financial journalists. Nevertheless, the film’s timeliness saw it receive many viewers immediately and resulted in discussion of the work in the mainstream press as well as in art journals.77 Its initial reception, then, was not constrained by being limited to outlets oriented to developments in contemporary art and screen studies, but to news and financial publications, thus widening its public to encompass a more mainstream reception and triggering a broader debate. Working with the public-private funded art commissioning programme, Artangel Interaction, Gilligan argued for an exhibition strategy based on general online distribution via YouTube as well as the Artangel website, with the intention that her film should reach a wider public outside traditional gallery spaces and have a pedagogical function by contributing to debates about the catastrophic economic

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situation and the turn to austerity measures by several governments, which shifted the financial burden for the crisis onto the general population rather than onto the financial sector itself. Crisis in the Credit System interrogates in its narrative some of the temporal aspects of the unfolding crisis and anticipates possible futures for the financial sector. But it is also anticipatory in the way that Gilligan’s use of YouTube is undertaken as the nearest equivalent to a more horizontal and democratic grassroots system of exhibiting moving image works that doesn’t yet exist, ‘a new terrain of video production and distribution yet to come’.78 Gilligan uses a framework that owes debts to Brecht’s Lehrstücke, short pieces with a pedagogical intent, where performers learn about the reality of social processes by taking on specific roles. In this way, there is a pedagogical impulse at the level of the content of a Brechtian Lehrstück, in that an overall social message is imparted, but also at the level of form, as the performers act out, embody, and perform this message, and in the process of doing so also exhibit a change in their own attitude towards the social situation. Gilligan acknowledges the Brechtian nature of Crisis in the Credit System, pointing out that the fictional subject positions picked up by the participants in their role-playing games encourage them to maintain dangerous illusions about both their personal invulnerability to the risks around them and the overall invulnerability of the financial system. As Gilligan notes, ‘[t]he fictions they frantically produce to keep their jobs mirror the fiction that finance has been telling itself and the world. The employees’ fictions fall apart in the same way that finance’s fiction has’. 79 In Gilligan’s piece, a small number of financial workers, including an analyst, a private fund deal manager, and a derivative portfolio analyst, are invited by their employer to an awayday workshop in the extensive gardens and grounds of a bucolic London location, a deliberately ‘delusional vantage point’, according to the artist, from which they can seemingly take on roles in the financial sector without any responsibility for negative consequences that they might cause.80 The role-playing aspect by the invited bank employees is neatly interwoven with current practices on human resource management and team building. They are met by a coordinator who facilitates with prompt cards, videos, and newspaper articles their role-playing and improvisational skills and their speculations on the financial sector’s present and future as in turn they act out specific scenarios that can be seen to be triggered by the recent crisis. The purpose of the brainstorming role-playing sessions is to pursue adaptive strategies for these difficult times, to pool ideas and to work up collective strategies that

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may be useful to the employer to meet the enormous challenges faced by the economy. The facilitator has several assistants, including an artist, present to help with the visualization of any ideas emanating from the discussions. Gilligan’s use of performance here and across the trilogy allows her to foreground the roles that workers in the financial sector assume and to look at the consequences and effects of the decisions taken by those assuming these roles. She separates out the body of the participant from the performed financial role, allowing both the performer and the viewer to see this gap and the consequences that performing such a role might have on the performer. In this way, what can often come across as the abstract and unrepresentable nature of the market takes on a physical form through its mapping across the body of the performer. As Jasper Bernes has noted, ‘[t]his portrayal of the abstract sublimations of the market as embodied activity is perhaps Gilligan’s most powerful achievement, and something she effects in various ways throughout the trilogy, usually by way of improvisatory, theatrical exercise’.81 As each protagonist receives a role-play card and begins to improvise, Gilligan cuts to a specific mise en scène that illustrates that scenario, an office space, a restaurant or a gym. In this way, the performances are given an edge of naturalism, which can be suddenly undercut at any moment by the facilitator shouting ‘cut’ and taking the focus back to the protagonists grouped together in the gardens. The first scenario plays on the way that everything in the financial sector is connected by relating a warning anecdote about an infected sex worker, ‘Lady Luck’, who passes on a physical but also psychological form of contagion that spreads to bring down the wider market. Another scenario riffs on the importance of trust to positive relations in the market, with the participants learning that ‘when finance dies, the World Spirit dies’. This reference to the ‘World Spirit’, a greater ontological financial being and an imaginary form that represents the sum of all financial transactions, is mentioned in passing in Crisis in the Credit System but assumes major significance later in Gilligan’s trilogy. As Gilligan has proposed elsewhere, the Spirit is understood as ‘capital as a totality [….] the totality of human relations co-ordinated within and through capitalist exchange’.82 The improvisations that the participants are invited to perform address increasingly commodities that have no immediate tangible material form, as the group is asked to think about a financial instrument that will work to profit from the mood of anxiety that currently permeates the sector. This is the first point in the trilogy at which we get a

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sense of how important affect is in Gilligan’s conception of possible counter-­strategies to the dominance of the market. Here, like the notion of the ‘World Spirit’ which comes to the fore in later parts, the affective dimension that is calculated into the ‘everyone derivative’ that trades on investor sentiment hints that Gilligan is asking the performers to act as if the market can be constituted as a sentient being, evolving, adaptive, and total in its social reach. Crisis in the Credit System starts to move from its awayday beginnings into adopting the form of the psychological thriller, where the plot is characterized by the dramatic tension and jostling for position between Babel, a venture capital firm, and a rival, Delphi Capital Management. This latter entity benefits from the unique powers of a kind of ‘oracle’ trader figure, so anchored into his trading screens and software that he can pass on market tips unconsciously, issuing predictions about the market in a trance-like state. The oracle trader is so embedded in the market and attuned to its micromovements that he picks up enormous amounts of unfiltered information, including critical references to the operations of the market that have led to the crisis, something that the facilitator wants to shut down as quickly as possible. For Toscano and Kinkle, the figure of the oracle represents in the body of the performer the widespread idea that the financial system is vast and so complex that it is impossible to depict appropriately, it is ‘only capable of processing the sheer complexity of information required for forecasting by entering into an unconscious, hypnotic state, one which itself is thrown into a psychotic crisis of sorts as the abstract financial information comes to implode under the scale of its own magnitude and connectivity, and by the psychic pressure of political events’.83 Increasingly, the improvisations lead the performers to the realization that the financial sector is constituted as one interconnected whole, a total system that encompasses billions of individual thoughts, actions, and exchanges. In an interview, Gilligan returns to Marx as she characterizes this scale as the ‘total social capital’.84 She also proposes that it is not just this vast scale of operations that describes contemporary relations under finance capital but also the systemic adaptability involved and recuperability even of moments of apparent business failure. As one of the performances reveals, even the glitches, flat points, crashes, and crises of the market are part of a system that is intent on garnering huge amounts of feedback in order to maximize its ability to predict future events and thus to achieve the greatest profit: ‘we made mistakes this time but the system wants us to make mistakes’, one participant notes, as misfirings are

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generative of innovation and greater overall performance. These performances, improvisations, and speculations, which seemed initially to be a kind of useful brainstorming session, reveal themselves to be an integral part of the way that the total system of finance has devised to respond to the crisis. Misfires here, it is suggested, work to reinforce the total system, in contrast to the discussion earlier in this chapter initiated by Michel Callon’s work where misfires in performativity opened routes to a reconnection of politics and economics. One of Gilligan’s interests here is in whether this interconnected system can be represented in its totality. The limits of representation are not just in finding appropriate images but also in the very language used to describe and to analyse the market. At one point, the participants, throwing a ball to each other to elicit contributions in a parody of human resource management exercises, decide that, as the financial crisis has devastated trading confidence, the market needs a new form of language where words perform in new and unexpected ways, ‘expanding our word-generation profit margin’. They throw words at each other with new, arbitrary definitions as part of a self-referential linguistic system that only the inner circle of performers knows how to decipher and interpret, thus giving them an edge in controlling transactions. The totality of the financial sector here extends to an attempt to control via a new rigid use of language that is shared by a specific elite but solipsistic in its separation from what is outside capital. The ‘total social capital’ established by Gilligan promises here to extend to constrain the sayable and thinkable.85 In the final episode of Crisis in the Credit System, the facilitator realizes that the participants are learning too much as through the words of the oracular trader and assorted newspaper reports, the full extent of the ongoing financial catastrophe on the global economy emerges, disrupting the seemingly invulnerable role-playing of the corporate participants. Despite the walled-off and protected space of the urban gardens that seal the employees from the outside world, the reality of the financial crash finds its way to them. The facilitator steers them back to a simple role-play, where she asks them to work on definitions of two concepts, money and technology. If we assume, as the participants have over the course of their performances, that the financial sector is one interconnected system, then asking the participants to find ways of narrating these two terms can be seen as a meta-enquiry by the system into how its own nature and history is perceived. The performers, in working through the two terms, are asked to generate a critique of the financial system that is immanent to the

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system itself, the ‘World Spirit’ that is finance, and using which, the system can adapt and progress. The facilitator is eager for the performers not to have access to a position outside the system from which to offer a negative or critical judgment upon it. The episode, and the whole film, ends as the facilitator congratulates the participants on finding some highly useful solutions to current problems such as corporate greed, which the system needs to address to move forward through the crisis. In her debrief, she thanks the attendees of the awayday before handing them all, to their surprise and dismay, redundancy packages as she leaves the garden, followed by the artist who has been there to make visual notes. The creative destruction that is part of the total system of finance has generated new ideas and thoughts that will allow it to innovate and to renew itself through the crisis. As Bernes argues, for Gilligan, capital is represented here through the theatrical role-playing as a ‘system of constant figuration – that is, to say error – reinventing itself through prosopoetic, metonymic and metaphoric transformations’.86 The price that the system exacts here to renew itself from near collapse is on the imaginations and bodies of its labour force: after role-playing and brainstorming creative strategies, making innovative connections, and constructing new financial products to restart the financial market, they are discarded as redundant to the system itself. The expulsion of labour from the market system is, for Gilligan, fully within the logic of the system, a ‘concrete manifestation of the antagonism between the social reproduction of workers (or anyone else) by capital and capital’s own reproduction’.87 Crisis in the Credit System follows a form that shows the traces of Brecht’s influence in its focus on the way that the participants of the financial awayday learn through their role-playing and improvisations about the totality of the financial system, its interconnectedness, and their individual redundancy within that system, despite the usefulness of their creative and analytical labour. The mixed generic form that Gilligan uses here, drawing on a range of modes and styles from citations and parodies of financial news reports, game show sections, stock exchange reportage, a problem page Q&A, and a counselling session with a psychotherapist (a form subsequently expanded in Gilligan’s Self Control), all help to destabilize the initial naturalism of the awayday meeting while also exploring how contemporary media forms and financial and data technologies interact with processes of subjectivation, as I shall address below. Significantly, though, this fragmented style, and the way that these different modes are theatrically quoted, is not just a means of mapping the terrain of current ‘machinic

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assemblages’, to return to Lazzarato, but allows the viewer to observe their specific truth claims and effectiveness diagnostically and from a distance, again a device familiar from Brechtian performance traditions. It would be misleading to see Gilligan’s trilogy too narrowly through a Brechtian lens. Notwithstanding the significance of the performative elements, and the Lehrstück-like model that comes through strongly in the structuring particularly of Crisis in the Credit System, Gilligan’s theoretical writings raise the notion of the limitations of a Brechtian approach owing to what the artist sees as his disregard of non-rational and non-­ representational modes of imagining. In her exploration of what grounds the bonds between newly emerging collectives in the years after the financial crisis, in the form of the Occupy movement, Los Indignados in Spain, and other grassroots initiatives, Gilligan is interested in key aspects of these modes of collective self-organization that lie in shared yet uncommunicable experiences that cannot be explained by recourse to rational decisionmaking. In setting out her ideas, Gilligan explains this by outlining her distance from a Brechtian approach to making art that speaks just to thinking rather than to feeling. In her account, a Brechtian understanding of the way that performances might work to open new political possibilities would be grounded in uncovering the reasons for acts of injustice, and in diagnosing possible alternatives, but crucially through activating thought and reason in the viewers and performers rather than in triggering or exploring intense feeling. On the one hand, Gilligan is drawn to Brecht because of the way his works explore the roles that we play, the social and trans-individual forces that construct what we think of as subjectivity, and the formal means, such as the deliberate distantiation of the audience (or performer) from the staged events in order to make sense of the greater political and social contours of our world. On the other, Gilligan writes about how she finds it difficult to reconcile Brecht’s desire for radical political change in his work with his dismissal of the collective potential located in the inner sensations and feelings of his characters. As she argues in her discussion of Brecht, there is a ‘tendency in left political milieus, and many avant-garde artistic milieus of the last century to consider the interior world of subjects as inherently not collective, in a sense because these aren’t shared, they’re experienced individually and focused on as individual’.88 Gilligan agrees with Brecht’s view that the characters that we see in performances are formed by their social world, which often speaks through them, rather than being fully self-created individuals and voices. However, in contrast to a purely Brechtian approach, Gilligan argues, referencing the French

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philosopher Gilbert Simondon, that just as our ideas are formed socially, so are our sensations and feelings, which are ‘trans-­individual qualities that cut across our separate individual subjective lives and link us in differential relations to one another’.89 In exploring this issue, Gilligan draws on contemporary philosophical work on affect by theorists such as Deleuze and Massumi, themselves indebted to Spinoza’s work on how the body can both affect and be affected, responding to internal and external stimuli, without becoming part of the conscious thought of an individual. What interests Gilligan most about the political potentialities of affect are precisely its collective, shared, and trans-­individual aspects, as well as its universality and materiality, anchored as it is in the physical body.90 Exploring affect is crucial to Gilligan’s cultural politics in that she wants to hold in balance individual needs and desires but also the collective performative reorderings of the social world that she found addressed in Rancière’s work. Affect, given its pre-individual status, allows her a means by which to address the impact of wider political and social forces such as financialization and the meshing of contemporary biopolitics and capital, on the individual without renouncing the possibility of collective responses. For Maria Walsh, Gilligan’s overall ‘therapeutic aesthetic’ offers an important exploration of the possibilities of a collective existence that is not fully recaptured and put to the service of capital despite the increasing, and increasingly immersive, reach of financial flows and technologies. Walsh suggests that Gilligan’s work sets out a mode of existence ‘not outside of [….] but beyond’ speculative capital.91 This distinction is important: Gilligan’s characters seem immersed in a total system, surrounded, addressed, and monitored by media forms, financial technologies, and screen narratives that form subjectivities that will be monetized and exploited by finance capital. To what degree can there be a resistant subjectivity, individual or collective, that stands outside or beyond these processes of subject formation? Walsh returns to the theoretical essay written by Gilligan and Marina Vishmidt, where they address the category of the involuntary: Involuntary actions, reactions and sensations are fed into the social reproduction of capital, yet the experience of the involuntary has no preformed relation to knowledge; there is no image for what is happening. The supposed irrationality of somatic and affective responses often obeys other nondiscursive rationalities, inscribing oppressions, subjugation, and even abstractions on a corporeal level. In this way, capital’s formations are inscribed in social habit. Yet the gestures that result can fall anywhere on the political spectrum, in the service of the radical or the reactionary.92

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For Walsh, Gilligan’s theoretical essay with Vishmidt and her use of a mixed semiotic mode in the form proposed by Guattari and updated by Lazzarato allow for the possibility of a collective radical subjectivity to emerge, to ‘slip past’, from the near-constant barrage of ‘machinic enslavements’ constituted under finance capital. Whatever small moments of possibility emerge are worth holding onto, for Walsh as much as for Gilligan, as gestures towards a point of survival and even resistance in the face of finance capital’s adaptive totality. The role of affect as constitutive of a desire for collectivity and community is a theme pursued by Gilligan over the next two films in her trilogy. The collective affective impact of social changes is the focus of both Popular Unrest and The Common Sense. For Gilligan, ‘[s]ubjectivity is radically open to the world and to the other by way of this preconscious affect’.93 Gilligan uses here particularly the work of theorist Brian Massumi, whose argument that affects are non-individual, preconscious experiences of intensity allow her to posit that affects ‘precede cognitive identification with a constituted subject, stand prior to social contextualization, and cannot be “owned” by a specific individual’.94 Popular Unrest appeared in 2010 as a multi-episode drama divided into five sections with an overall running length of around 66 minutes. It was produced and commissioned by the Chisenhale Gallery in London working with German and Canadian gallery partners and exhibited across the four galleries before being uploaded and accessed via a dedicated website. In its staging at the Chisenhale, it was shown on a series of monitors that were divided off from each other to mimic corporate office spaces and the division between desks.95 In formal terms, the website claims that, like Crisis in the Credit System, it plays with popular and art house film and television forms, citing here David Cronenberg’s ‘body horror’ and US dramas such as CSI, Dexter, and Bones as influences. It also notes that its episodic structure is significant in attempting to work with the TV drama’s delivery of material across separate temporal stages. The crisis of the financial system explored in Gilligan’s earlier film has now spread beyond the strictly economic realm to encompass the greater social totality. The ‘World Spirit’ mentioned in passing in relation to the financial world in Crisis in the Credit System now dominates all social interactions and exchanges, as every part of life is brought into the monitoring and governance of capital, from the individual’s labour to the maintenance of their healthy body and psychological and emotional well-being. As Marina Vishmidt describes it, Gilligan’s world ‘is figured in terms of a light

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extrapolation from the present where the quantified self has merged with the credit system, and consumer credit is pumped up on biopower’.96 The World Spirit links together as a contemporary computing totality, forms of AI, social networks, credit ratings, and acts as employment overseer and biopolitical governance and health manager. However, as Max Haiven proposes, Popular Unrest is still very much a critique of the financialized world and its episodes throw up financial images of great resonance. Haiven argues that the World Spirit is ‘an allegory for financialization’, and that the work is concerned with finance in three overlapping ways: first, Gilligan wants to register the meeting point of financial speculation and digital mining of individual data, as the World Spirit has the capacity to mine every human interaction for information on individual decision-making, patterns, and collective cycles of action and consumption that can be minutely charted and categorized so that its algorithms can exploit and also anticipate market moves and threats. Secondly, the Spirit shows the development of finance into a biopolitical form whose mode of governmentality urges individuals to maximize physical and mental well-being and biophysical productivity. Thirdly, and most abstractly, the World Spirit actually takes on the role of money in knitting all individual interactions and exchanges together.97 This is made clear in an explanation given to a member of the grouping by one of the original developers of the World Spirit, Zhivila Entelechy, a behavioural economist, who explains that ‘the Spirit is money, more than money, money as a highway between every man, woman, and child on the planet’. The first episode opens in media res, as a choral voiceover intones over a black screen the imminent coming together of a collective subject: ‘This is the day we met’. Gilligan borrows ascending and discordant string arrangements familiar from horror films as video clips, adverts, posters, and voiceovers both inform the viewer about the mystery killings and exhort the populace to manage their well-being appropriately or face rating sanctions from the World Spirit. The individual self is here reduced to a means to quantify and asset manage all aspects relating to the physical labouring body to meet the demands of capital. One character, who we later learn is John and who is suffering from the recent loss of his daughter, a victim of the mysterious stabbings, plays a computer game. His avatar encounters an adviser and guide, rendered visually to resemble the actress who played Zhivila Entelechy in Crisis in the Credit System, who answers his question about how to stop the World Spirit: ‘You can’t. It’s everywhere, everyone, everything. No one controls it. It doesn’t control

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you. It’s the sum total of all interactions between everyone on Earth doing exactly what they please every day. All the Spirit does is count. [….] The Spirit – who’s counting?’. Although the individual body is monetized and any value whatever maximized and extracted by the systemic governance of the World Spirit, ostensibly individuals are encouraged into their own paths of self fulfilment. Individual bodies are at the same time highly vulnerable, in the private sphere to constant data monitoring and media surveillance, and in public spaces to a mysterious and deadly slasher, an unseen presence that viscerally and brutally wields a knife to stab and kill its random victims, even when they are seemingly aligned with the demands of the Spirit, working late at the office, commuting, or using the gym. However, it appears that there is an outside to the apparently seamless processes of atomization and individual self-monitoring and quantification exhorted by the Spirit. Without understanding quite why, ‘groupings’ of disparate individuals start to form what we might think of as affective communities, driven by an unaccountable collective feeling to meet up in a random place and to share their innermost feelings, to the point at which they desire to experience and to respond to the feelings of each other. The grouping in Popular Unrest believes itself to be some kind of new and unexplained collective, joined through affective and barely understood emotional bonds, and possibly a harbinger of some new form of social body outside the lifeworld of individual quantification and random killing. Here Gilligan is exploring ideas of trans-individual affect as a possible counterpoint to the totalizing drive of capital to atomize and individualize experience. As the Spirit’s scientific research teams, who are eager to monitor the grouping’s emotional connectedness in order to glean useful data for the Spirit quickly tell them, this affective desire for a non-transactional community is not outside the Spirit but an externalized glitch or frozen moment in the Spirit’s own mode of quantification, yoking together random people whose individual micro-stories have intersected at one point in time or in one single moment of exchange. In this way, their collective energies and their desires for a different form of social order are recuperated back into the totality of the Spirit. Gilligan uses a play on words here: just as we are told that ‘The Spirit is making you meet’, with the stabbings, that are revealed to be another glitch in the system, similarly, ‘the Spirit is making you meat’. The World Spirit, in Gilligan’s horror drama, is evolving in a spiraling way that encourages both destruction and new forms of life as it tries to corral all human thought, feeling, and action within the

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scope of its algorithms. It both brutally kills off surplus labour and allows selected individuals to come together as a collective to monitor and harvest data from their desire for shared experiences. Capital’s extractive mode is thereby extended into the very forms of preconscious affect and feeling that might offer up a form of resistance. The glitch that throws up the grouping is part of the Spirit’s own anticipatory feedback system: although the collective might have the potential to constitute some radical insurgent force, what brings them together and thus what connects them is capital rather than any conscious, preconscious, or affective desire for an alternative to the market. As the scientists carry out tests, they ask the members of the grouping to undertake various activities, testing their affective bonds. The grouping at one point occupies a certain space in their role-play for the scientists that a white chalk outline, familiar to TV viewers as the kind of mark drawn around the place a corpse has occupied, is drawn around the grouping as it has come to occupy the shape of a single giant human-figured body. In another sequence, one of the most memorable scenes in Gilligan’s trilogy, the grouping’s individual participants come together to perform, with bodily movements, gestures, and speech acts, their routine daily labour. This becomes a complex composite dance that aggregates each contributor’s individual labour into an overarching aesthetic form that represents and performs the contemporary extractive economy. However, as the bodies perform their rhythms of labour and utter key quantifying phrases from the neoliberal economy such as ‘per megabyte per tissue per cell per data inch per gigahertz’, accompanied by visual titles that throw up various currencies, the scientists, who have set up this experiment as part of their data mining, find reaffirmation for the Spirit in the jerking, convulsing, robotic collective body before them. For Bernes, this sequence ‘provides a profound and [….] unparalleled filmic treatment of what Marx calls “abstract labor”, the reduction of private, disconnected concrete labors to an abstract social measure through the mediation of money. And yet, what Gilligan gives us is a representation of abstract labor, or rather, a filmic representation of yet another representation (a laboratory model) of abstract labor’.98 We might also see this as the reduction of the complex variety of labour by atomized individuals in the financialized world to a kind of layered gestural performance, or in Brecht’s terms, a gest, a physical encapsulation of the total exploitation of labour under capital. As Bernes also notes, the way that the grouping comes together to perform as a singular body under the Spirit suggests that their labour no longer

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needs to be linked by the mediatory form of money. The Spirit’s next move will be to ensure social linkage with itself as the medium, replacing even the need for monetary exchange and reward, a development that is explored in Gilligan’s third film, The Common Sense. Perhaps most interesting formally about Popular Unrest is the way that the Brechtian elements of role-playing, performance, and the distantiation of the viewer that were prominent in Crisis in the Credit System are not discarded in the subsequent film but are augmented by scenes and sequences that attempt to open ways of representing and dissecting the politics of affect through the collective preconscious desires to be part of the groupings. For Gilligan, the encounter with Zhivila Entelechy is the most overtly pedagogical sequence in the film, and a continuation of the Brechtian Lehrstück form used in Crisis in the Credit System.99 Entelechy provides a detailed exposition about how the Spirit works and how it needs to feed off an understanding of the totality of affective and emotional responses to events and situations to anticipate moves in the market and to maximize profit. Other Brechtian elements are also utilized, such as the use of a collective Brechtian chorus to comment on scenes. Marina Vishmidt draws attention to how Gilligan’s use of a mix of genres—TV soap, reality TV, science fiction, machinima, and ad spots—acts similarly to defamiliarize the reception of the narrative: ‘The address to genre both familiarizes the wild extrapolations of narrative and de-familiarizes it by impinging on the placated viewer with shock effects. Notably, the television crime drama format sublates the indeterminacy of the art film in order to legibly diagram existing tendencies, and to throw them into their full relief as systemic developments rooted in our own day-to-day’.100 But Vishmidt also analyses how the very form of Popular Unrest also de-familiarizes the viewer from the way that the narrative can be understood. Although the piece works with a relatively clear chronology and sense of causality, as the World Spirit grows and becomes dominant in all areas of the life world as a Hegelian haunting, in spatial terms the narrative operates with a recursive dimension. As Vishmidt explains it, recursion is an aesthetic strategy that is self-referential, breaking the self-sufficiency of its fictional world through the use of a device that ‘breaks the fourth wall’, for example as characters enter into what has been a painting on a wall that suddenly assumes the form of their new fictional world. 101 In the final section of Popular Unrest, the grouping finds its way back to the abandoned warehouse where its members had originally met, and there find an obscure portal that allows them access to the previously inaccessible Spirit

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in the hope that they can alter the Spirit’s murderous drive to kill off random workers. For Vishmidt, this radical recursion ‘suggests that an inside and an outside to a problematic social relation, which is not supposed to exist, turns out to have always been there: a fold thrown up in a spatiality deranged by struggle’.102 As in Crisis in the Credit System, the groupings of participants and role-players do come to a sense of the overall brutality and nihilism of the system of which they are part. Where the body was used in Crisis in the Credit System to draw attention to the performed role-playing involved in labour in the financial sector, and to the gap between an individual identity not wholly given over to finance capital and the role embodied, in Popular Unrest this gap has been closed. A voluntaristic performativity in the earlier film has been reduced to a physical productivity in the later piece, where there is no outside for the quantified, monitored, tracked, and assetized physical body. The body is also, in a different way, the target of the glitching Spirit as it reduces, quite literally, the surplus labour force. The fact that the Spirit has been developed by a behavioural economist, a specialist in the ways that words and actions are performed with economic consequences and/or in an economic environment, underscores how important the body is in Gilligan’s film. Overall, Gilligan’s analysis of the financial crisis in Crisis in the Credit System and Popular Unrest appears pessimistic about ways of overcoming the financialized world of her protagonists, where any form of resistance and collectivity seems to be already built into the overall total system of the World Spirit, anticipated, recuperated, and exploited for its feedback data. Instead, the outside to this social totality appears to be the spontaneous, violent, and anarchic uprising of an undefined people. The ending of Popular Unrest, like that of The City Below discussed earlier in Chap. 4, depicts a rioting populace attacking governing forces and buildings, an ill-defined violent mass that might be seen in part as the resistance of the multitude, increasingly exploited economically and excluded from any form of true agency and self-determination, and in part as a populist mob, reacting physically and inchoately to the constraints of financialization. Just as in The City Below, the financier is distanced from the unfolding violence, watching the riots from a vantage point above the streets, so in Popular Unrest Gilligan shows how the Spirit finds a way of profiting even from this major challenge to its dominance, by offering a well-policed haven to those rich enough to pay the entrance fee. Those left on the

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outside are thus placed, as usual, as those most vulnerable to the collapsing system of the financial World Spirit. The final part of Gilligan’s trilogy, The Common Sense (2014), builds on the themes explored in the earlier two films to address the possibility of a reconstitution of the community through the shared experience of affect. Gilligan depicts a world where a pioneering new technology allows people to directly feel the effects and physical intensities experienced by another person. This process, referred to in the film as ‘entrainment’, is permitted using a small implant known colloquially as ‘the Patch’, worn in the mouth. The Patch mediates directly affective intensities and feelings, thus bringing individuals closer into the kind of collective familiar to viewers of Popular Unrest, the ‘grouping’ in that film caused by a glitch in the systemic social ordering of the World Spirit. Although The Common Sense had a temporary online release, it is best understood as a gallery video installation comprising 15 episodes of film, each around six minutes long and presented in a loop on 15 flat screens mounted on a tubular scaffolding structure adapted to each specific gallery space. Visitors to the gallery were invited to wear headphones that connected through radio to the nearest video playing, allowing viewers to move around the installation, playing and replaying sequences as desired. This set-up thus plays with both spatiality and temporality to a greater degree than in Gilligan’s previous online films. The Common Sense eschews linearity in both form and content as its story line is divided into three sections of five episodes each, with the final two sections offering a version of parallel events but from differing perspectives. In this way, the final part of Gilligan’s trilogy works with a rhizomatic, branching narrative structure and viewing experience rather than with a linear causality, to explore in greater detail the possibility of a community brought together by shared affective encounters. There is narrative complexity as Gilligan makes use of the device of a film-within-a-film, as she has a group of students watch a piece of filmmaking that, for them, is quite historical, though for us as viewers set in a recognizable near future. As Bernes notes, this gives the work a future-looking orientation and, at the same time, a retrospective sense as ‘half of its narrative unfolds in the future perfect tense’.103 This future perfect temporality, what will have happened, aligns Gilligan’s work to the kind of hypothetical future projection familiar to viewers from various kinds of science fiction narrative. Like the other two works, Gilligan’s third film draws on a strong generic base in science fiction drama, though it maintains a more consistent visual mode than

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Popular Unrest, with fewer interruptions by advertising spots or by TV sequences that draw on other genres such as crime fiction or reality TV.  There is a significant element of defamiliarization in the way that Gilligan makes frequent use of electronica and bright swirling patterns of colour that attempt to find a visual correlative for the experience of wearing the Patch. Gilligan’s film is resolutely self-reflexive about its own visual strategies, as in an early scene she has one of a group of students watching an old documentary about the breakthrough of the Patch technology comment on the inappropriateness of trying to represent the Patch visually. The relationship of visibility to knowledge is significant here. As Jasper Bernes has written of this exchange, suggesting that the student’s remarks refer not only to the way that the film shoots partially reflective glass surfaces, where the distinction between internal and external worlds is continually disrupted, but also to the difficulty of ‘seeing’ what the future might bring, ‘[o]pacity represents, in this regard, what our present standpoint within capitalism makes it impossible for us to see. As should already be clear, what remains most opaque for The Common Sense and its predecessors is a form of life where the antimony between individual and collective life no longer holds’.104 The first of the three sections introduces various characters and sets up the potential of the Patch technology, which, at the end of this first section, fails, rendering the key protagonists helpless as they try to relate to the wider exterior world rather than to the collectively shared affects via the internal Patch transmission system. In the next two sections, time has been split, so each section shows one possible trajectory along parallel realities. As Elvia Wilk has proposed, this split in narrative streams allows Gilligan to open up the possibility that the new technology will lead to a utopian drive towards a revolutionary collectivity while also showing how the technology cannot necessarily transcend the ideological culture that created it, in this case one rooted in capital.105 As collective groups form in the first narrative branch and establish face-to-face relations rather than Patch-induced collective intensities, Gilligan explores the possibility of collective social and political networks. Yet although a collectivist attitude is shown to be a necessary condition for a radical change towards a less exploitative society, it is not sufficient, as true social empathy remains elusive given the existing capitalist environment out of which some developments have taken place. This is reinforced in the second narrative branch, linked more closely to the overall questions of financialization explored throughout the trilogy,

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as certain Patch users find that they reject physically the Patch technology and develop a new sensory organ for sharing feelings directly with others. The exploration of the social conditions for shared feeling in the first branch is here augmented in the second by a physiological realization of the desire for affective collectivity. However, this emerging biopolitical formation, whereby there is a physical basis for collective feeling is soon undermined as another research collaborator explores ways to monetize this development so that the Patch can become an instrument of exchange, bypassing the need for money. There are obvious similarities with the later stages of Popular Unrest here, where capital can recuperate each and every attempt to mobilize energies that want to counter its atomizing, exploitative social hold. The Common Sense builds on Gilligan’s exploration of the agency of collective responses to an overwhelming and total social system based on capital and the subservience of all fields of human activity to the market. The Patch functions as a money-like entity in the way that, for Gilligan, it is the ‘externalization of a social relationship’.106 However, whereas money mediates the exchange of commodities and services between people and thus avoids a direct barter system, the Patch reframes affective experience so that feelings of needs and wants that regulate how we might spend money are no longer personal interior conditions but become trans-­ individual physical phenomena. For Gilligan, the Patch ‘externalizes and makes manifest otherwise intangible things about human experience. Therefore it opens up a new set of conditions to direct instrumentalization’. 107 This brings with it a number of representational problems as, for Gilligan, ‘you can’t show someone’s interior world in any way beyond the means that our bodies have to represent these things [….] for instance, the expressivity of a face’.108 Taken overall, Gilligan’s trilogy opens the possibilities of counter-­ movements that might enable the emergence of social collectives able to work together without the immediate bonds of financial exchange and the overarching ideology of capital. Yet each time, it seems, viewers must also contemplate how these collective energies become so swiftly recuperated onto the side of capital. This would seem to be, then, a series of films that can only envisage pessimistic developments in the way that capital acts as the means to bond together collectivities in our social totality, from the way that the World Spirit adapts to financial crisis and collapse in Crisis in the Credit System to the recuperation of the mysterious collective feelings explored in Popular Unrest, that are revealed to be a glitch and still part of

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the overall total system of the Spirit. However, we might want to return to the fact that Melanie Gilligan’s work takes place in the aesthetic field, rather than strictly through the form of political and theoretical essays, useful though these are in understanding her project. The ‘performative reorderings’ that she explores across the trilogy allow us to consider the ways that her moving images visualize finance and offer images of collective energies beyond our current system. For Bernes, this may be the real significance of Gilligan’s films. Although, in his view, the films appear to offer a functionalist view of a system of finance capital that is impossible to escape, the questions that they raise, as the students do at the start of The Common Sense, are ones of the impossibility of appropriate representation and visualization of alternatives while we still exist within this total system.109 Gilligan’s films pay attention to the desperation under finance capital for individuals to feel a sense of connection beyond their individuated subjectivities, and yet it is this very desire that, as she illustrates, also appears to have been co-opted and quantified under the total control of finance capital. It seems, in Gilligan’s work, that the optimism for a cinema of salvation that Maurizio Lazzarato proposed shortly after the crises of 2008–2010, a cinema that is able both to draw on the mixed semiotics of our financial times in its content and forms and then to afford glimpses of the alternative worlds that finance both contains in virtual form but constrains from actualization, might have reached its point of exhaustion, with all attempts to refound a collective response to finance capital ending up in some form of exploitation and co-option. As Lazzarato has recently argued, revisiting what he now terms our ‘apocalyptic times’, we are living in a period of ‘political ruptures’ initiated by the financial crises of 2008–2010. As he notes, ‘because for the moment, the revolutionary rupture is just a hypothesis, dictated by the necessity of reintroducing what neoliberalism has succeeded in erasing from the memory, the action, and the theory of the forces combating capitalism. This is even its most important victory’.110 But it is not a conclusive triumph. In our financial times, which have become perhaps even apocalyptic times, there is still the possibility of ‘becoming-revolutionary', as Lazzarato terms it. And it is in this process that the financial images interrogated in this study, and the financial images to come, have a part to play.

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Notes 1. Fabian Muniesa et al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 34. 2. Fabian Muniesa et al. (2017), Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines, p. 34. 3. Melanie Gilligan (2007), ‘The Beggar’s Pantomime: Performance and its Appropriations’. Artforum International. Summer, p. 432. 4. Melanie Gilligan in Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (2015), ‘(Re) making the World: An Interview with Melanie Gilligan on Capitalist Exchange, Subject Formation and “Social Synthesis”’, in Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (eds.), ECONOMY: Art, Production and the Subject in the Twenty-First Century, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 195-196. 5. Melanie Gilligan and Marina Vishmidt (2015) ‘“The Property-Less Sensorium”: Following the Subject in Crisis Times’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 114:3, July, p. 611. 6. See respectively Chris Clarke (2012), ‘Financial Engineering, not Economic Photography: Popular Discourses of Finance and the Layered Performances of the Sub-Prime Crisis’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 5 (3), and in performance and installation art, Leigh Claire La Berge (2016), ‘How to Make Money With Words: Finance, Performativity, Language’. Journal of Cultural Economy. 9 (1), pp. 43-62. 7. Nicky Marsh, Paul Crosthwaite, and Peter Knight (2013), ‘Show Me the Money: The Culture of Neoliberalism’, New Formations 80/81, p. 215. 8. Chris Clarke and James Brassett (2015), ‘Popular documentaries and the global financial crisis’. In Rens van Muster and Casper Sylvest (eds) Documenting World Politics: A critical companion to IR and non-fiction film, London and New York: Routledge, p. 43. 9. Bill Nichols (2001), Introduction to Documentary. Indiana UP: Bloomington. p. xiii 10. Gregory Currie (1999), ‘Documentary and the Contents of Photographs’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 57, 3 (Summer), pp. 285-297. 11. Noel Carroll (1997), ‘Fiction, Non-Fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: A Conceptual Analysis’, in Richard Allen and Murray Smith (eds.) Film Theory and Philosophy, New  York: Oxford University Press, pp. 173-202. 12. Bill Nichols (2001), Introduction to Documentary. Indiana UP: Bloomington. p. 99.

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13. See Bill Nichols (2001), Introduction to Documentary. Indiana UP: Bloomington. pp. 130-137. 14. Chris Clarke (2012), ‘Financial Engineering, not Economic Photography: Popular Discourses of Finance and the Layered Performances of the Sub-­ Prime Crisis’. Journal of Cultural Economy, 5 (3), p. 262. 15. Franck Cochoy, Martin Giraudeau, and Liz Fall (2010), ‘Performativity, Economics, and Politics: An Overview’, Special Issue: Performativity, Economics and Politics, Journal of Cultural Economy, 3:2, p. 139. 16. Chris Clarke (2012), ‘Financial Engineering, not Economic Photography: Popular Discourses of Finance and the Layered Performances of the Sub-­ Prime Crisis’. Journal of Cultural Economy, 5 (3), p. 263. 17. Marieke De Goede, 2003, de Goede, Marieke (2003) ‘Beyond economism in international political economy’. Review of International Studies. 29: 1, p. 95. See also Chris Clarke (2012), ‘Financial Engineering, not Economic Photography: Popular Discourses of Finance and the Layered Performances of the Sub-Prime Crisis’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 5 (3), p. 265. 18. Chris Clarke (2012) ‘Financial Engineering, not Economic Photography: Popular Discourses of Finance and the Layered Performances of the Sub-­ Prime Crisis’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 5 (3), p. 264. 19. Judith Butler (2010), ‘Performative Agency’, Special Issue: Performativity, Economics and Politics, Journal of Cultural Economy, 3:2, p. 148. 20. Judith Butler (2010), ‘Performative Agency’, Special Issue: Performativity, Economics and Politics, Journal of Cultural Economy, 3:2, p. 149. 21. Judith Butler (2010), ‘Performative Agency’, Special Issue: Performativity, Economics and Politics, Journal of Cultural Economy, 3:2, p. 148. 22. Franck Cochoy, Martin Giraudeau, and Liz Fall (2010), ‘Performativity, Economics, and Politics: An Overview’, Special Issue: Performativity, Economics and Politics, Journal of Cultural Economy, 3 (2), p. 141. 23. Michel Callon (2010), ‘Performativity, Misfires, and Politics’, Special Issue: Performativity, Economics and Politics, Journal of Cultural Economy, 3 (2), p. 165. 24. Franck Cochoy, Martin Giraudeau, and Liz Fall (2010) ‘Performativity, Economics, and Politics: An Overview’, Special Issue: Performativity, Economics and Politics, Journal of Cultural Economy, 3:2, p. 140. 25. Marieke de Goede (2015), ‘Documenting financial assemblages and the visualisation of responsibility’, in Rens van Muster and Casper Sylvest (eds) Documenting World Politics: A critical companion to IR and nonfiction film. Routledge: London and New  York. p.  60. See also Jane Bennett (2005), ‘The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout’, Public Culture, 17, p. 447.

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26. Marieke de Goede (2015), ‘Documenting financial assemblages and the visualisation of responsibility’, in Rens van Muster and Casper Sylvest (eds) Documenting World Politics: A critical companion to IR and nonfiction film, Routledge: London and New York. p. 60. 27. Melanie Gilligan and Marina Vishmidt (2015), “The Property-less Sensorium”: Following the Subject in Crisis Times’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 114: 3, July, p.  620. See also Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 97. 28. See Anja Dürrschmidt, Anja (ed.) (2004/2013). Falk Richter: Das System. Materialien, Gespräche, Textfassungen zu “Unter Eis”. Recherchen 22. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, p. 182. 29. Arne Storn (2014), ‘Der Mensch hinter der Macht’. Die Zeit. 18 June, http://www.zeit.de/kultur/film/2014-­0 6/master-­o f-­t he-­u niverse-­ doku-­arte, last accessed 20 April 2016. 30. See Nino Klingler (2013), Master of the Universe. http://www.critic.de/ film/master-­of-­the-­universe-­6052/, 24 October, last accessed 20 April 2016 and Bert Rebhandl, 2013 Rebhandl, Bert (2013) ‘Landschaft der verwaisten Möglichkeiten’. taz: Die Tageszeitung. 7 November. 31. Chris Clarke and James Brassett (2015), ‘Popular documentaries and the global financial crisis’, in Rens van Muster and Casper Sylvest (eds) Documenting World Politics: A critical companion to IR and non-fiction film, London and New York: Routledge, p. 43. 32. Judith Butler (2010), ‘Performative Agency’, Special Issue: Performativity, Economics and Politics, Journal of Cultural Economy, 3:2, p. 147. 33. Chris Clarke (2012), ‘Financial Engineering, not Economic Photography: Popular Discourses of Finance and the Layered Performances of the Sub-­ Prime Crisis’. Journal of Cultural Economy, 5 (3), p. 272. 34. Karen Ho (2009), Liquidated. An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 99-102. 35. Karen Ho (2009), Liquidated. An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, p. 90. 36. Nino Klingler (2013), Master of the Universe. http://www.critic.de/ film/master-­of-­the-­universe-­6052/, 24 October, last accessed 20 April 2016. 37. Michel de Certeau (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, p. 92. 38. See Miriam Meissner (2012), ‘Portraying the global financial crisis: Myth, aesthetics, and the city’, NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, 1 (1), p. 120.

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39. Judith Butler (2010), ‘Performative Agency’, Special Issue: Performativity, Economics and Politics, Journal of Cultural Economy, 3:2, p. 149. 40. Judith Butler (2010), ‘Performative Agency’, Special Issue: Performativity, Economics and Politics, Journal of Cultural Economy, 3:2, p. 149. 41. Karen Ho (2009), Liquidated. An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, p. 77. 42. Jodi Dean (2013) ‘Complexity as Capture – Neoliberalism and the Loop of Drive’, New Formations 80/81, p. 147. 43. See Miriam Meissner (2012) ‘Portraying the global financial crisis: Myth, aesthetics, and the city’, NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, 1 (1), p. 99. 44. Judith Butler (2010), ‘Performative Agency’, Special Issue: Performativity, Economics and Politics, Journal of Cultural Economy, 3:2, p. 155. 45. See Anne Jerslev (2005), ‘Performativity and documentary. Sami Saif’s and Phie Ambo’s Family and performativity’, in Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev (eds), Performative Realism. Interdisciplinary Studies in Art and Media, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, p. 107. 46. Susan Scheibler, Susan (1993), ‘Constantly Performing the Documentary: The Seductive Promise of Lightning Over Water, in Michael Renov (ed) Theorizing Documentary. London and NY: Routledge AFI Readers, p. 139. 47. Susan Scheibler (1993), ‘Constantly Performing the Documentary: The Seductive Promise of Lightning Over Water, in Michael Renov (ed) Theorizing Documentary. London and NY: Routledge AFI Readers, p. 139. 48. Susan Scheibler (1993), ‘Constantly Performing the Documentary: The Seductive Promise of Lightning Over Water, in Michael Renov (ed) Theorizing Documentary. London and NY: Routledge AFI Readers, p. 139. 49. Susan Scheibler (1993), ‘Constantly Performing the Documentary: The Seductive Promise of Lightning Over Water. In Michael Renov (ed) Theorizing Documentary. London and NY: Routledge AFI Readers, p. 146. 50. On privileged access, see Anne Jerslev (2005), ‘Performativity and documentary. Sami Saif’s and Phie Ambo’s Family and performativity’, in Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev (eds), Performative Realism. Interdisciplinary Studies in Art and Media, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, p. 90. 51. Melanie Gilligan (2012), ‘Affect and Exchange’ Fillip 16, Spring. https://fillip.ca/content/affect-­and-­exchange?order=869ada8f059836f bf5b9314b2692485f, last accessed 26 April 2019. 52. Gilligan in Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (2015), ‘(Re)making the World: An Interview with Melanie Gilligan on Capitalist Exchange, Subject Formation and “Social Synthesis”’. In Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (eds.), ECONOMY: Art, Production and the Subject in the Twenty-First Century. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, p. 187. This

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citation is also used by Marina Vishmidt (2019), who sees it as a productive position countering what might be termed the ‘false totalization’ of capital. See Marina Vishmidt, Marina (2019) Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital. Chicago, IL: Haymarket, p. 129. 53. Melanie Gilligan (2006), ‘Re-distributing the Redistribution of the Sensible’. Mute 14 November. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/ articles/re-­distributing-­re-­distribution-­sensible, last accessed 12 April 2019. 54. Melanie Gilligan (2006) ‘Re-distributing the Redistribution of the Sensible’. Mute 14 November. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/ articles/re-­distributing-­re-­distribution-­sensible, last accessed 12 April 2019. 55. Melanie Gilligan (2007), ‘The Beggar’s Pantomime: Performance and its Appropriations’. Artforum International. Summer, p. 433. 56. Gilligan 2006 Gilligan, Melanie (2006) ‘Re-distributing the Redistribution of the Sensible’. Mute 14 November. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/re-­distributing-­re-­distribution-­sensible, last accessed 12 April 2019. 57. Melanie Gilligan (2007) ‘The Beggar’s Pantomime: Performance and its Appropriations’. Artforum International. Summer, p. 432. 58. Melanie Gilligan (2007), ‘The Beggar’s Pantomime: Performance and its Appropriations’. Artforum International. Summer, p. 433. 59. Melanie Gilligan (2007), ‘The Beggar’s Pantomime: Performance and its Appropriations’. Artforum International. Summer, p. 431. 60. Melanie Gilligan (2007), ‘The Beggar’s Pantomime: Performance and its Appropriations’. Artforum International. Summer, p. 430. 61. Melanie Gilligan (2007), ‘The Beggar’s Pantomime: Performance and its Appropriations’. Artforum International. Summer, p. 432. 62. Melanie Gilligan (2007), ‘The Beggar’s Pantomime: Performance and its Appropriations’. Artforum International. Summer, p. 432. 63. Melanie Gilligan (2007), ‘The Beggar’s Pantomime: Performance and its Appropriations’. Artforum International. Summer, p. 433. 64. On Lazzarato’s position against Rancière in detail, see Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Chapter 7 ‘Enunciation and Politics: A Parallel Reading of Democracy: Foucault and Rancière’, pp. 225-249, here p. 239. 65. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 241. 66. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 242-243.

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67. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) p. 245. 68. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 249. 69. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014) Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 109. 70. Maria Walsh (2021), Therapeutic Aesthetics: Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks. London: Bloomsbury. Radical AestheticsRadical Art Series, pp. 67-86. 71. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 108. 72. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p.  108. See also Martin O’Shaughnessy’s reading of Lazzarato, cinema and semiotic pluralism in Martin O‘Shaughnessy (2019), ‘Beyond language and the subject: machinic enslavement in contemporary European cinema’, Studies in European Cinema, 16 (3), pp. 197-217. 73. Maurizio Lazzarato (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 109. 74. Martin O‘Shaughnessy (2019), ‘Beyond language and the subject: machinic enslavement in contemporary European cinema’, Studies in European Cinema, 16:3, p. 204. 75. Maria Walsh (2021), Therapeutic Aesthetics: Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks, London: Bloomsbury. Radical AestheticsRadical Art Series, p. 8. 76. Maria Walsh (2021), Therapeutic Aesthetics: Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks. London: Bloomsbury. Radical AestheticsRadical Art Series, p. 81. 77. Gilligan in Tom Holert (2012), ‘Subjects of Finance: Melanie Gilligan interviewed by Tom Holert’. Grey Room 46, Winter, p. 96. 78. Tom Holert (2012), ‘Subjects of Finance: Melanie Gilligan interviewed by Tom Holert’. Grey Room 46, Winter, p. 94. 79. Gilligan in Tom Holert (2012), ‘Subjects of Finance: Melanie Gilligan interviewed by Tom Holert’. Grey Room 46, Winter, pp.  84-99, last accessed 12 April 2019, p. 92. 80. Gilligan in Tom Holert (2012), ‘Subjects of Finance: Melanie Gilligan interviewed by Tom Holert’. Grey Room 46, Winter, p. 86. 81. Jasper Bernes (2015) ‘Capital and Community: On Melanie Gilligan’s Trilogy’. Mute, 23 June. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/ capital-­and-­community-­melanie-­gilligan’s-­trilogy, last accessed 12 April 2019.

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82. Gilligan in Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (2015), ‘(Re)making the World: An Interview with Melanie Gilligan on Capitalist Exchange, Subject Formation and “Social Synthesis”’, in Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (eds.), ECONOMY: Art, Production and the Subject in the Twenty-First Century. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, p. 188. 83. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle (2015), Cartographies of the Absolute. Alresford: Zero, p. 45. 84. Gilligan in Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (2015), ‘(Re)making the World: An Interview with Melanie Gilligan on Capitalist Exchange, Subject Formation and “Social Synthesis”’, in Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (eds.), ECONOMY: Art, Production and the Subject in the Twenty-First Century. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, p. 188. 85. Gilligan in Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (2015), ‘(Re)making the World: An Interview with Melanie Gilligan on Capitalist Exchange, Subject Formation and “Social Synthesis”’, in Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (eds.), ECONOMY: Art, Production and the Subject in the Twenty-First Century. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, p.  188. Here, Gilligan’s nod to the importance to the financial sector of linguistic performativity aligns her experiments in improvisation with the word performativity carried out by the self-enclosed family unit in Lanthimos’s satire on contemporary Greece, Dogtooth. See Mark Fisher 2011, ‘Dogtooth: The Family Syndrome’, Film Quarterly 64:4, Summer, pp. 22-27. See also Arjun Appadurai 2016, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. 86. Jasper Bernes (2015), ‘Capital and Community: On Melanie Gilligan’s Trilogy’. Mute, 23 June. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/ capital-­and-­community-­melanie-­gilligan’s-­trilogy, last accessed 12 April 2019. 87. Gilligan in Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (2015), ‘(Re)making the World: An Interview with Melanie Gilligan on Capitalist Exchange, Subject Formation and “Social Synthesis”’, in Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (eds.), ECONOMY: Art, Production and the Subject in the Twenty-First Century. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, p. 190. 88. Gilligan in Zachary Formwalt (2015), ‘Zachary Formwalt meets Melanie Gilligan’ MetropolisM, https://www.metropolism.com/en/features/23773_zachary_formwalt_meets_melanie_gilligan, last accessed 26 April 2019. 89. Melanie Gilligan (2012), ‘Affect and Exchange’ Fillip 16, Spring. https://fillip.ca/content/affect-­and-­exchange?order=869ada8f059836f bf5b9314b2692485f, last accessed 26 April 2019.

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90. Melanie Gilligan (2012), ‘Affect and Exchange’ Fillip 16, Spring. https://fillip.ca/content/affect-­and-­exchange?order=869ada8f059836f bf5b9314b2692485f, last accessed 26 April 2019. 91. Maria Walsh (2021), Therapeutic Aesthetics: Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks. London: Bloomsbury. Radical AestheticsRadical Art Series, p. 8. 92. Gilligan and Vishmidt, cited in Maria Walsh (2021), Therapeutic Aesthetics: Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks. London: Bloomsbury. Radical Aesthetics-Radical Art Series, p. 70. 93. Melanie Gilligan (2012), ‘Affect and Exchange’ Fillip 16, Spring. https://fillip.ca/content/affect-­and-­exchange?order=869ada8f059836f bf5b9314b2692485f, last accessed 26 April 2019. 94. Melanie Gilligan (2012) ‘Affect and Exchange’ Fillip 16, Spring. https:// fillip.ca/content/affect-­a nd-­e xchange?order=869ada8f059836fbf5b 9314b2692485f, last accessed 26 April 2019. 95. Maria Walsh (2021), Therapeutic Aesthetics: Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks. London: Bloomsbury. Radical AestheticsRadical Art Series, p. 72. 96. Marina Vishmidt (2017), ‘Popular Unrest: Melanie Gilligan’, in Warren Neidich (ed), The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Pt. 3, Berlin: Archive, p. 490. 97. Max Haiven (2018), Money after Art, Art after Money. Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 187. 98. Jasper Bernes (2015), ‘Capital and Community: On Melanie Gilligan’s Trilogy’. Mute, 23 June. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/ capital-­and-­community-­melanie-­gilligan’s-­trilogy, last accessed 12 April 2019. 99. Gilligan in Tom Holert (2012), ‘Subjects of Finance: Melanie Gilligan interviewed by Tom Holert’. Grey Room 46, Winter, p. 90. 100. Marina Vishmidt (2017), ‘Popular Unrest: Melanie Gilligan’, in Warren Neidich (ed), The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Pt. 3, Berlin: Archive, p. 491. 101. Marina Vishmidt (2017), ‘Popular Unrest: Melanie Gilligan’, in Warren Neidich (ed), The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Pt. 3, Berlin: Archive, p. 495. 102. Marina Vishmidt (2017), ‘Popular Unrest: Melanie Gilligan’, in Warren Neidich (ed), The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Pt. 3, Berlin: Archive, p. 495. 103. Jasper Bernes (2015), ‘Capital and Community: On Melanie Gilligan’s Trilogy’. Mute, 23 June. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/ capital-­and-­community-­melanie-­gilligan’s-­trilogy, last accessed 12 April 2019.

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Index1

A Abel, Marco, vi, 162, 167, 176n50–52, 177n60, 177n62, 177n67, 177n68, 178n74, 178n80 Adamson, Morgan M., 18, 20, 30n45, 31n46, 31n47, 31n52, 78, 122n6 Affect, 3, 17, 23, 58, 65, 66, 108, 138, 160, 190, 193, 198, 205, 216, 221, 224, 228, 269, 280, 284, 285, 287–289, 291, 292 Afrofuturism, 224, 225 After the Bell, 187, 189, 191, 193–195, 201, 206, 208, 209, 214 Agamben, Giorgio, 11 Alterity, 218 Andrew, Dudley, 11, 12, 30n31, 30n32–34 Anticipation, 104, 152, 154, 169, 171, 232

Apter, Emily, 7, 8, 29n20–22 Arrighi, Giovanni, 14–16, 30n36 Assemblage, 57, 218, 219, 252, 253, 260, 276, 283 Asset, 37, 38, 56, 59–61, 82, 86, 87, 89, 91, 94, 96, 98, 121, 167, 188, 213, 222, 233, 244, 277, 286 Augé, Marc, 164 Austin, J. L., 249, 250 Authenticity, 207, 233, 247, 248, 266–269 B Balsom, Erika, 9, 10, 29n24, 29n25, 81, 122n8, 123n15, 123n16, 125n43, 125n44, 125n46, 125n47, 219, 238n65 Bauder, Marc, vii, 26, 244–294

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. King, The Financial Image, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40654-6

321

322 

INDEX

Beauvoir, Simone de, 109, 112, 113 Becoming economic, 159, 164, 172 Belfort, Jordan, 114–121 Beller, Jonathan, vi, 5, 22, 23, 28n14 Bellour, Raymond, 10, 29n25 Benjamin, Walter, 22, 60, 65, 136 Bennett, Jane, 252 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo,’ 155, 176n44, 233 Berlage, H. P., 137, 148–150 Bernes, Jasper, 279, 282, 288, 291, 292, 294, 300n81, 301n86, 302n98, 302n103, 303n104, 303n109 Berwick Street Film Collective, 194, 195, 197, 208 The Big Short, 144 The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel), 226 Bodies, 1, 10, 36, 39–41, 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 58, 59, 61, 66, 79, 80, 92, 98, 133, 134, 141–143, 145, 148, 149, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 162, 163, 192, 193, 209, 212, 216, 220, 221, 223, 226, 228, 232, 233, 248, 255, 258, 267, 268, 279, 280, 282, 284–288, 290, 293 Boiler Room, 114 Brecht, Bertolt, 9, 51, 70n47, 190, 192, 196, 197, 210, 211, 216, 270–272, 278, 282, 283, 288 Bretton Woods, 6, 37 Briefel, Aviva, 163, 168, 177n66, 178n76 Bruyn, Eric de, 147, 175n27 Buck-Morss, Susan, 185–186, 234n5 Butler, Judith, 244, 249–251, 258, 262, 265, 296n19–21, 297n32, 298n39, 298n40, 298n44

C Calle, Sophie, 230 Callon, Michel, 249, 251, 281, 296n23 Canales, Jimena, 133, 134, 173n6 Canary Wharf, 187, 189, 191–193, 195 Capitalism: A Love Story, 247 Capitalist realism, 171, 224, 232 Capitalization, 8, 24, 86–91, 94, 96, 99–101, 103, 121, 243 Carnival of Souls, 159, 163 Carroll, Noel, 247, 295n11 Casetti, Francesco, 10–12, 29n26–29, 30n31 Charles, Emma, vii, 148, 187, 189–195, 206, 235n21 Cinéma vérité, 81, 195 The City Below (Unter Dir die Stadt), 26, 183, 187, 209, 220–233, 268, 290 City of London, 1, 4, 25, 26, 114, 184, 187, 189, 191, 197, 199–201, 203 Control society, 6, 24, 31n59, 35, 39–42, 53, 54, 66, 67 Cooper, Melinda, 221, 222, 233, 238n70, 238n71, 238n82 Crackle, metaphysics of, 232 Crisis, 4–6, 9, 13, 19, 25, 26, 36, 38, 45, 51, 63, 64, 115, 141, 143, 145, 151, 152, 156, 171, 173, 184, 186, 187, 197, 199, 200, 214, 220, 227, 232, 233, 245–247, 251, 252, 256–259, 261, 263, 264, 268–270, 273, 277–283, 285, 290, 293 Crisis in the Credit System, 26, 245, 270, 277–283, 285, 286, 289, 290, 293 Crowley, Martin, 7, 8, 29n20, 29n21–22 Currie, Gregory, 247, 295n10

 INDEX 

D Daney, Serge, 211–213 Das Kapital, 200 Das System, 255 Davies, William, 40, 66, 67n13, 73n89 Davis, Mike, 204, 208, 236n38, 236n40, 236n41 De Certeau, Michel, 262, 297n37 De Goede, Marieke, 249, 252, 296n17, 296n25, 297n26 Dean, Aria, 225, 238n74 Debord, Guy, 272, 273 Debt, 4, 6, 13, 14, 20, 24, 25, 37, 38, 59, 67, 80, 137, 150, 152, 159, 170, 185, 224, 233, 257, 264, 268, 278 Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 6, 16, 18–27, 27n2, 28n15, 31n48, 31n49, 31n59, 32n64, 35–37, 39–42, 46, 53–55, 67, 67n12, 67n14, 68n15, 69n35, 71n54, 71n56, 71n57, 73n90, 98, 122n6, 162, 177n63, 188, 207, 211–213, 236n44, 237n49–51, 284 Demos, T. J., vi, 2, 3, 27n3–6 Derivative image, 17 Dernbach, Rafael, 61 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 73n80, 169, 170, 178n81, 250 Der Top-Manager, 252, 255, 256 Desire, 2, 48, 60–62, 108, 109, 113, 115, 120, 147, 167, 210, 226–228, 230, 245, 262, 283–285, 287–289, 291, 293, 294 Deutsche Bank, 230, 258, 263 Deutschland 09, 223 Devasundaram, Ashvin, vi, 217, 218, 237n61 Dévoilement, 112, 113

323

Dickinson, Kay, 202, 205, 217, 218, 234n1, 236n35, 236n42, 236n43, 237n58–60 Direct cinema, 80, 81, 123n13 Disciplinary society, 35, 40–42, 55 Dissensus, 214, 215 Doane, Mary Ann, 132–136, 173n2–5, 173n7, 173n8, 175n29 Documentary, 1–3, 8, 11, 13, 24, 26, 59, 66, 79, 81, 83, 84, 88, 91, 94, 99, 104, 106, 142, 158, 159, 195, 219, 243–248, 251, 255, 257, 265–269, 292 Dream, 120, 150, 163, 168, 200, 215, 216, 222–224 Dubai, 13, 25, 26, 184, 189, 191, 194, 197–220, 268 Dudow, Slatan, 9, 196, 211, 216 E Easterling, Keller, 202–204, 208, 214–216, 236n36, 236n37, 236n39, 236n45, 237n55–57 Economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder), 43, 46, 49, 51, 52 Economies of existence, 7, 8, 29n20 Eisenstein, Sergei, 200, 211, 213 Elsaesser, Thomas, 79, 122n7, 138, 174n17 Equity, 25, 99–115 Erhard, Ludwig, 47, 70n40 Eshun, Kodwo, 123n13, 123n21, 124n22, 125n45, 125n48, 125n50, 126n53, 225, 238n75 Esposito, Elena, 153–155, 169, 174n11, 175n35–39, 178n77, 178n78 Eurofuturism, 225 European Central Bank, 1, 36, 225, 268

324 

INDEX

Eurozone, 18, 36, 38, 183, 222, 226, 251, 258, 259, 261 Extrastatecraft, 203, 214, 215 F Fantasy, 60, 61, 167, 206, 216, 217, 232 Farocki, Harun, 4, 11, 24, 25, 78–104, 106, 112–114, 121, 123n13, 123n14, 123n15, 123n17–21, 123n22, 125n43–50, 126n53, 158–160, 163, 165–167, 243 Felperin, Leslie, 102, 103, 126n59, 126n60 Female financial gaze, 99–113 Film studies, 3, 8–14 Finance film, 9, 10, 13, 26, 35, 107, 244, 246, 258 Financial city, 25, 26, 53, 183, 186, 189, 193, 203, 220, 222, 225, 227, 259, 268 Financial gaze, 24, 25, 67, 77–121, 159 Financial image, 2–5, 8–14, 17, 23, 25, 27, 35–73, 77, 78, 80, 88, 92, 97, 98, 103, 108, 117, 121, 164, 165, 167, 183, 233, 244, 286, 294 Financialization of daily life, 6, 8 Financial performativity, 26, 67, 98, 243–294 Financial regime, 4, 6–8, 16, 18, 24, 26, 35–73, 232 Financial time, 4, 8, 15, 25, 27, 66, 67, 131–173, 183, 260, 270, 294 Fisher, Jaimey, 170, 176n53, 177n61, 177n64, 177n65, 178n82 Fisher, Mark, 159, 171, 177n56, 179n84, 225, 232, 238n76, 238n79, 301n85

Flaxman, Gregory, 41, 54, 68n16, 68n18–20, 71n55 Förg, Günter, 230 Formwalt, Zachary, 4, 25, 137–151, 154, 155, 174n16, 174n22, 174n23, 175n25, 175n27, 175n28, 301n88, 303n106–108 Foster, Hal, 59, 65, 72n73, 72n74, 73n84 Foucault, Michel, 24, 29n20, 36, 39, 41–53, 68n21, 68n24, 68n25, 69n26, 69n27–34, 69n37, 69n39, 70n41, 101, 109, 161, 177n59, 226, 275 Frankfurt am Main, 1, 4, 13, 25, 26, 43–45, 53, 183, 201, 222, 246 Future, 7, 22, 25, 42, 59, 66, 80, 87–91, 98, 132, 134–137, 146, 149–156, 159, 161, 163–172, 183, 188, 221–225, 227, 229, 230, 232, 233, 245, 253, 261, 268, 273, 278, 280, 291, 292 G Gabrysiak, Diane, 184, 234n2 Gallery, 3, 10, 11, 25, 80, 93, 155, 187, 197, 198, 200, 209, 218–220, 229, 230, 245, 276, 277, 285, 291 Gender, 99, 102, 103, 120, 226 Geyrhalter, Nikolaus, 257 Gilbert, Paul Robert, 28n11, 86, 96, 124n28, 126n54 Gilligan, Melanie, 3, 4, 26, 108, 126n63, 244, 245, 251, 253, 269–294, 295n3–5, 297n27, 298n51, 298n52, 299n53–63, 300n77–80, 301n82, 301n84, 301n85, 301n87, 301n88, 301n89, 302n90, 302n92–94, 302n99, 303n106–108

 INDEX 

The Girl Rosemarie (Das Mädchen Rosemarie), 24, 35, 43–53, 172, 226 Goede, Marieke de, 249, 252, 296n17, 296n25, 297n26 Gold standard, 6, 18, 37, 39, 41, 122n6, 160 Governance, 36, 37, 39, 41, 53 Grow Or Go, 252, 253, 255, 256 Guattari, Félix, 16, 56, 57, 188, 213, 275–277, 285 H Haiven, Max, 28n11, 286, 302n97 Hakel, Ulrich, 230 Hall, Stuart, 187 Harbord, Janet, 11, 29n30 Harvey, David, 164, 178n71, 187, 197, 199, 200 Harvey, James, 218–220, 237n63, 238n66, 238n67 Hauntology, 159, 170, 171, 225, 232 High frequency trading, 60, 136, 137, 150, 152 Hitchcock, Alfred, 18, 52, 159 Ho, Karen, 260, 297n34, 297n35, 298n41 Hochhäusler, Christoph, 26, 159, 176n55, 183, 184, 187, 220–233, 268 Homo oeconomicus, 42, 45, 47, 56 I Iconomy, 21, 22 Image, 1–5, 8–13, 17–27, 35–73, 77–85, 88, 90, 92–94, 96–98, 101, 103–106, 108, 112, 116–118, 121, 137–152, 154–161, 163–168, 172, 173, 183–201, 203, 206–224,

325

226–233, 244, 246, 247, 249, 259, 262, 264, 267–271, 273, 274, 276, 278, 281, 284, 286, 294 Ince, Kate, 108, 109, 112, 113, 126n64–67 In Light of the Arc, 137, 139, 146 In Place of Capital, 137, 139–142 Inside Job, 247 Installation, 1, 3, 10, 24–26, 53, 58, 59, 61–66, 80, 93, 137–139, 141–144, 146, 148, 151, 154, 183, 187, 194, 197–199, 202, 206, 210, 211, 218–220, 227, 228, 230, 247, 273, 276, 277, 291 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 37, 258 The Internship, 131, 132 J Jameson, Fredric, 14–17, 30n37–43, 53, 66, 71n52, 73n88, 145, 187, 188, 209, 220, 234n8, 234n13–15, 238n69 Julien, Isaac, 4, 26, 183, 184, 187, 191, 194, 197–202, 204–211, 213–220, 227, 235n30, 236n31, 268 K Kahiu, Wanuri, 222 Kapital (film), 187, 200 Keeling, Kara, 224, 233, 238n72, 238n73 Kim, Jihoon, 4, 28n9 Kinkle, Jeff, 17, 30n44, 210–215, 218, 236n47, 237n48, 237n52, 237n54, 237n62, 280, 301n83 Kinsey, Cadence, 63, 64, 66, 73n82, 73n83

326 

INDEX

Kish, Zenia, 5, 28n12, 28n13 Konings, Martijn, 155, 156, 171, 176n43, 176n46, 176n47, 176n48, 179n86 Kuhle Wampe, 9, 196, 211, 216 L Labour, 36, 37, 40, 79, 80, 88, 92–94, 112, 131–134, 143–146, 148–150, 154, 155, 157, 163, 165, 166, 170, 183, 184, 189–220, 222, 244, 253, 272, 273, 282, 285, 288, 290 The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann), 51, 226 Latency, aesthetics of, 229, 230, 233 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 24, 53, 55–59, 63–66, 71n57, 71n58, 71n59, 72n60–63, 72n65–71, 73n76, 73n86, 73n87, 253, 256, 274–277, 283, 285, 294, 297n27, 299n64, 299n65, 299n66, 300n67–69, 300n71–73, 303n110 Lehman Brothers, 38, 60, 61 Leroy, Justin, 5, 28n12, 28n13 Leverage, 103, 155, 156, 158, 160, 161, 167–172 Liquidity, 20, 38, 40, 60–63, 65, 84, 95 Liquidity Inc., 17, 24, 35, 53, 59–67 Logistics, 149, 184, 218, 222 Lordon, Frédéric, 60–62, 73n77–79, 107, 108, 126n61, 126n62 M Machinic enslavement, 253, 275, 285 MacKenzie, Donald, 188, 234n11, 234n12, 249

Malabou, Catherine, 21, 22, 31n56–58 Manet, Édouard, 43, 44, 49, 50, 68n23, 70n45, 101 Margin Call, 121, 257 Marnie, 159 Martin, Randy, 6–8, 28n17, 121 Marx, Karl, 19, 23, 87, 107, 143–146, 164, 169–171, 190, 200, 213, 280, 288 Massumi, Brian, 284, 285 Master of the Universe, 26, 244, 246–294 Media archaeology, 138, 146 Meissner, Miriam, 13, 30n35, 121, 127n74, 127n75, 186, 191, 209, 227, 234n7, 235n18, 236n46, 238n77, 297n38, 298n43 Melitopoulos, Angela, 58 Menon, Meera, 25, 101, 102, 104 Metz, Christian, 109 Mixed semiotics, 24, 53–59, 254, 274–276, 285, 294 Mondzain, Marie-José, 21, 31n53 Money, 7, 16, 18–23, 25, 38, 49, 54–56, 60, 62, 64, 78, 83, 86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 105–108, 113–115, 117, 122n6, 133, 142, 143, 146, 153, 154, 156, 157, 160, 164, 167, 168, 184, 185, 188, 198, 202, 259, 275, 281, 286, 288, 289, 293 Montage, 9, 49, 144, 198, 200, 211–213, 218, 226, 255, 256, 258, 264, 268 Movement-image, 2 Moving image, 1–4, 8–11, 13, 18, 20, 21, 25, 56, 58, 59, 63, 67, 78, 79, 93, 103, 116, 137, 138, 140–143, 145, 147–152, 154–156, 166, 173, 183–186, 192, 193, 198, 201, 203, 206,

 INDEX 

211, 212, 214, 217–220, 244, 246, 268, 270, 271, 273, 276, 278, 294 Mulvey, Laura, 109 Muniesa, Fabian, 24, 25, 86–91, 94, 96, 98, 101, 103, 121, 124n24–27, 124n29–39, 125n40–42, 127n76, 243, 295n1, 295n2 Mutation of capitalism, 16, 24, 35–42, 54, 55 Muybridge, Eadweard, 134, 144, 145 N Negri, Antonio (Toni), 26, 32n64 Nichols, Bill, 247, 248, 295n9, 295n12, 296n13 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 32n62 Nightcleaners, 192, 194–197, 201, 202, 205–209, 214 Nitribitt, Rosemarie, 44, 45, 49 Nixon, Richard, 37 Nothing Ventured (Nicht Ohne Risiko), 24, 78–99, 102–104, 106, 107, 113, 114, 123n13, 158–160, 165–167, 243 Not-yetness, 229 O O’Shaughnessy, Martin, 276, 300n72 P Painting, 43, 44, 49, 50, 78, 101, 209, 220, 228, 230, 231, 233, 247, 289 Pantenburg, Volker, 79, 80, 91, 92, 122n8, 123n12, 123n15, 125n43, 125n44, 125n46, 125n47

327

Parikka, Jussi, 138, 174n17, 174n18 Parvulescu, Constantin, 9, 13, 29n23, 30n35, 102 Petzold, Christian, 18, 20, 25, 98, 99, 151–173, 176n42, 176n50–53, 177n61, 177n64, 177n65, 177n67, 177n68, 178n69, 178n72, 178n80, 178n82, 227 Philippines, The, 184, 199, 204, 207 Photograph, 85, 109, 141, 142, 144, 145, 149, 150, 166, 190, 192, 197, 210, 223, 228–231, 233 Playtime, 26, 183, 187, 191, 194, 197–201, 208, 210, 213, 214, 218, 219 Ponsa, Marta, 31n56–58, 193, 235n19, 235n20, 237n53 Popular Unrest, 26, 245, 277, 285–287, 289–293 Powrie, Phil, 184, 234n2 Present future, 25, 136, 146, 153, 165, 167, 169, 172 Psycho, 18 Pumzi, 222–225, 232 R Rancière, Jacques, 3, 27n4, 28n7, 93, 125n51, 214, 220, 238n68, 270–275, 284, 299n64 Reagan, Ronald, 37, 44 Realism, 7, 171, 188, 190, 195, 196, 206, 207, 213, 224, 232 Rebhandl, Bert, 93, 125n48, 125n50, 257, 297n30 Reykjavik, 187, 199 Richter, Falk, 255 Risk, 3, 6–8, 38, 49, 80, 82, 84, 87, 89, 90, 98, 151–153, 156, 173, 199, 224, 245, 261, 263–265, 269, 278

328 

INDEX

Rodowick, D. N., 4, 28n8, 71n53, 79, 80, 93, 97, 98, 123n9, 123n10, 125n52, 126n56–58, 132, 166, 173n1, 178n73 Rosamond, Emily, 5, 28n12, 77, 78, 122n1–5 S Sander, August, 230 Scheibler, Susan, 266, 267, 298n46–49 Scorsese, Martin, 25, 101, 114–121, 197 Séance, 223–225, 232 Self-Capital, 26 Semiocapitalism, 155 Shaviro, Steven, 41, 42, 68n16, 68n17, 68n21, 68n22, 151, 175n32 Shenzhen Stock Exchange, 137, 139, 141, 145–148 Simmel, Georg, 133, 136, 173n3 Simondon, Gilbert, 284 Skyscraper index, 191 Sound, 43, 49, 51, 52, 63, 70n46, 71n51, 84, 100, 104–106, 116, 119, 142–144, 147, 149, 157, 159, 162, 168, 192–194, 201, 206, 207, 209, 215, 226, 230, 232, 233, 248 Spectral, 142, 143, 154, 155, 159, 164, 167–170, 172, 227, 228, 233 Spectral incognizance, 163, 164, 167, 168, 172 Spectrality, 25, 170, 171, 261 Speculation, 6, 13, 15, 16, 66, 135–137, 153–156, 158, 161, 164, 169–171, 173, 224, 225, 278, 281, 286 Spinoza, Baruch, 107, 108, 284

The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge), 19 Steyerl, Hito, 4, 11, 17, 24, 35, 53, 58, 59, 61–66, 72n72, 72n75, 73n76, 73n80, 81, 93, 123n17–20, 125n49 Stuke, Katja, 229–231, 238n78 Subjectivation, 7, 55, 57, 58, 245, 253, 254, 256, 275–277, 282 Subjectivity, 2, 18, 23, 39, 40, 43, 56–62, 65, 66, 77, 104–108, 113, 152–154, 156, 162, 171, 245, 253, 269, 275, 276, 283–285, 294 Sub-prime mortgage, 184 Surveillance capitalism, 77, 78 Szendy, Peter, 20–23, 31n53–59, 189, 235n19, 235n20, 237n53 T Temporality, 13, 18, 25, 45, 89, 90, 131–137, 141, 145, 146, 148, 150–153, 156, 161, 163, 168, 169, 172, 183, 220, 230, 232, 233, 291 Thatcher, Margaret, 37, 44 Thiele, Rolf, 24, 35, 43, 226 Thiemann, Matthias, 156, 176n49 Thornton, Sarah, 219, 235n29, 236n32, 237n64 Three Exchanges, 25, 137–151 Time-image, 2 Tooze, Adam, 12, 27n1, 38, 67n10 Toscano, Alberto, 17, 30n44, 145, 175n26, 210–215, 218, 236n47, 237n48, 237n52, 237n54, 237n62, 280, 301n83 Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), 226 Turbulence, 6, 60–63, 65, 183, 184, 186, 189, 198, 220–233

 INDEX 

U An Unknown Quantity, 137, 148 Unsupported Transit, 137, 143 Unter Eis, 255 V Valuation, 24, 25, 39, 55, 78, 82, 86–90, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101, 103, 109, 110, 113, 157, 158, 167, 243 Van der Zwan, Natascha, 185, 234n3, 234n4 Verwoert, Jan, 80, 123n11 Video, 3, 4, 10, 24, 53, 58–60, 63, 78, 80, 90, 117, 137, 139, 141, 144, 151, 166, 189, 197, 199, 209, 212, 269, 273, 276–278, 286, 291 Virno, Paolo, 272 Vishmidt, Marina, 28n14, 108, 126n63, 143, 155, 174n24, 176n45, 245, 253, 284, 285, 289, 290, 295n5, 297n27, 299n52, 302n92, 302n96, 302n100–102 Vogl, Joseph, 4–7, 24, 28n10, 28n16, 28n18, 29n19, 35–39, 54, 67n1–9, 67n11, 135–137, 140, 150, 164, 174n10–15, 174n19–21, 175n30, 175n31, 178n70, 233, 238n80 Voss, Rainer, 244–248, 257–259, 261–269

329

W Wall Street, 1, 4, 13, 25, 101, 106, 107, 116–118, 120, 144, 145, 186, 189, 201, 203, 227, 260 Money Never Sleeps, 264 Walsh, Maria, 276, 277, 284, 285, 300n70, 300n75, 300n76, 302n91, 302n92, 302n95 Watt, Calum, 17, 18, 22, 23, 32n61–63, 135, 173n9 Wenders, Wim, 19 Wolf of Wall Street, The, 25, 102, 108, 114–121, 197, 257 Workers Leaving the Factory, 92–94, 145 Y Yella, 18, 25, 98, 151–173, 176n53, 227 YouTube, 3, 10, 258, 273, 276–278 Yuran, Noam, 172, 179n87 Z Zabunyan, Dork, 213, 237n53 Zone, 97, 158, 186, 187, 197–220 Zuboff, Shoshana, 77, 169, 178n79