Giving Form to Finance Culture: Neoliberal Denizens in Wall Street (1987), Boiler Room (2000), and Margin Call (2011)

Abstract

A GREAT MARKET EUPHORIA SWEPT THROUGH United States by 1990s, with two deregulatory bills signposting a neoliberal triumphalism. President Bill Clinton's advocacy to repeal Glass-Steagall Act (1936) and replace it with Gramm-Leach Bliley Act in 1995 was greeted with near unanimous support by both Washington political establishment and Wall Street, each seeking further deregulation after Reagan era. In close succession was 1996 Telecommunications Act, which dissolved legal barriers that once had separated media industries and ushered in right for multinational conglomerates to own and vertically integrate television, news, and film companies. It is no coincidence that this unprecedented expansion of financial and media industries marked a new logic in development of capitalist life in 1990s. Yet something else in this decade needs further reflection-that is, financialization of daily life, a far more ephemeral thing to couch within these two congressional bills.For many, this neoliberal triumphalism is directly tied not just to deregulation of markets in media and finance but also to deregulation of human capacity to resist or comprehend these market forces on culture. In words of David Held and Anthony McGrew, neoliberalism includesthe extension of market to more and more areas of life; creation of a state unburdened by excessive intervention in economy and social life; and curtailment of power of certain groups (for instance, trade unions) to press their aims and goals. A free order, in this view, is incompatible with enactment of rules which specify how people should use means at their disposal. (186)Along with incursion of market into cultural sphere (Kapur and Wagner), there is also a psychological aspect to neoliberalism. As Walkerdine and Bansel's pioneering chapter has demonstrated, identity produced in relation to work has yielded subjects that self-actualize through their own labor. The terms of this selfactualization are tautly strung between discourses of freedom and enterprise on one hand, and regulatory and punitive practices of government on other, with work positioned and promoted as best way to improve one's situation (3). In other words, identity politics takes on a decidedly market formation and rationale for conducting tasks, evaluating productivity, viewing colleagues and coworkers as competition, and seeing every decision as economical and as a social determinant to success.What I see as specific to Walkerdine and Bansel's notion of government work is also specific to private-sector employment, in particular type of work being done on and off Wall Street that self-actualizes: financialization. Conceived along lines of money markets, banking institutions, brokers' houses, and deregulation in 1990s, financialization came to erode regulatory measures in order to replace them with far more abstract capitalextracting processes, and these processes motivated those working in finance industry to believe they could attain fantastical levels of profit as well as positions of prominence. Such financialization rides on crest of corporate culture, in what Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker call the vaporization of public resources, rupturing of social contract, and disappearance of forms of health and safety protection long understood to be intrinsic to working lives of citizens in Western democracies; these developments accompanied emergence of extraordinary new protocols of preference for corporations (10).Through financialization and corporate culture, labor force has increasingly sought riskier modes of doing work that can be attributed to behavior brought on by an inexhaustible set of financial instruments and money-making schemes endorsed under neoliberalism. Rey Chow has recently pondered what she and others have called data capitalism, where algorithms, altogether bypassing more traditional agencies that are bound to human sensorium, human perception, and human subjectivity, overwhelm many working with these finite formulas and exchanges of capital. …