When the financial crisis hit the fictional town of South Park on TV in 2008 and people started losing their jobs, citizens quite naturally started looking for explanations. Some claimed that the government was to blame for having “kept interest rates too low for too long” and “[taken] the economy for granted.” Others pointed the finger at “Wall Street brokers,” “fat cats with corporate greed,” while the young Cartman predictably accused “covetous Jews” of having hidden all the cash in some “secret Jew cave” that they had built, “probably back in the early 60s.”
Among the competing narratives that developed, there was one that resonated more than others: It was people’s unbridled love of pleasure that had caught the crisis by angering the economy. As one preacher put it, “there are those who will say that the Economy has forsaken us! Nay! You have forsaken the Economy!” The solution was simple: “We must let the Economy know that we are capable of respecting it! No more needless spending!”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the austerity measures adopted by the “economic recovery movement council” did little to restore growth to South Park, and when “a young Jew” by the name of Kyle Broflofski came along with a different account of the economy, he found a receptive audience.
In one memorable scene, Kyle is shown standing atop a hill, addressing a crowd: “Listen, this is all you need to know: the economy is not a supernatural all-knowing entity. The economy is just an idea, made up by people, thousands of years ago. The economy is not real. And yet, it is real. Nowadays they’ll give credit to practically anyone who applies for them.” At this point, Kyle pulls out an envelope: “I applied for this yesterday to prove a point. It is an American Express Platinum card. It has no spending limit.” As the crowd shudders with horror, Kyle tries to reassure them: “Do not be afraid! This is only plastic. It’s just something made up by people. Truly meaningless until we put our faith in it. Faith is what makes an economy exist. Without faith, it is only plastic cards and paper money.”
Though in a different idiom, the two books under review develop many of the same insights as the Margaritaville episode just evoked, whether regarding the emotional underpinnings of capitalism or its undertheorized dependence on imagined futures and fictional expectations. In The Emotional Logic of Capitalism, first, Martijn Konings sets out to explain the affective attachment that many of us feel toward an otherwise oppressive system—which is “what progressives have missed” (a timely topic if ever there was one). Much as with Kyle’s sermon on the mount, Konings’s analysis fully makes sense only against the backdrop of competing analyses. In this case, the argument is framed as a quarrel with what the author calls a “ready-made narrative template” used in the social sciences “for expressing critical concerns with the role of markets and money in modern life.” It is a narrative wherein markets are depicted as cold and powerful, as damaging to the social fabric, and as generally not very nice. It is a familiar story, and as one who has told it on more than one occasion, I could not help but get a bit defensive as I began the book. Thankfully, however, it quickly turned out that Konings’s quarrel was not with Karl Marx but with Karl Polanyi—or, more precisely, with a type of “Polanyian thought” that “has little eye for the social and moral content of the economy itself.” (About Polanyi himself, Konings judiciously declares himself to be “agnostic.” About the merits of leaving Marx mostly out of the picture, I will remain similarly noncommittal.)
Simply put, Konings’s worry is that a critique of “the economy” that treats it as autonomous or somehow disembedded from society leaves us blind to the way that markets and money actually function by enlisting us in their everyday operations. This is an eminently reasonable argument, which Konings elaborates in the most detail in his early chapters on money. As he points out, it is a mystery to no one that money is but a “convention,” one that operates “through contingent rules and an endless series of commensurations.” When all goes well, we have no problem with the fact that, as Kyle put it, “the economy is not real. And yet, it is real.” But when a crisis hits or when for some reason we start thinking as “critics” of the economy, we seem to lose sight of this basic understanding. Much like the crowds in South Park, we imbue markets with magical powers, we shudder in horror at the mere thought of a credit card, and most of all, we treat money as an idol to be destroyed—when, according to Konings, we would be better-off thinking of it as an icon. More than Ferdinand de Saussure, it is Charles Sanders Peirce who can help us understand how money works.
Though couched in academic prose (exceedingly so, in fact, for the analysis can be hard to follow), Konings’s argument is also political. As per the book’s subtitle, it is a pointed critique of (American) progressivism, to which the second part of Emotional Logic is thus devoted. There, too, Konings’s analysis is provocative and largely persuasive, but the prose can be arid. Which is a shame, for if the author is right that neoliberal capitalism has a way of pulling us in, surely its critics will want to do the same.
As for Jens Beckert's Imagined Futures, it is exceedingly clear—if at times a bit repetitive. But I am being petty: This is perhaps inevitable in such a wide-ranging book, the ambition of which is both to theorize and document the “temporal orientation toward the future” so crucial to the proper functioning of capitalism.
As Beckert puts it on more than one occasion, social scientists are quick to agree that “history matters,” but the fact is that “the future matters,” too. More pointedly, what matters to the story of capitalism are the expectations that people have about the future—expectations that may be fictional but that serve as the “interpretative frames” through which they act in the present. On some level, this is a trivial point. Rather like Kyle’s observation about the social constructedness of money, it is something we all “know” intuitively, whether we are planning our retirement, asking for a loan, or squandering our money on a fancy new car. But it is also something that is exceedingly difficult to fully acknowledge or to theorize, which is why this book is necessary.
Although Beckert’s central claim—whereby capitalism is critically dependent on people’s fictional expectations of the future—is not entirely original (if it were, the book would not have such an impressive bibliography), few have pursued it as consistently and across so many registers. In the first section of Imagined Futures, the author stakes out his position against the dominant narratives of political science, sociology, and economics. Economists, admittedly, do acknowledge the future-oriented nature of human activity, but they tend to posit a distinctly calculating individual and mysteriously knowable future. Against these assumptions, Beckert’s salutary corrective is to point out that in the face of an uncertain future, we have no choice but to depend on “imaginaries” that are both “contingent” and shaped by “collective beliefs.” This he empirically demonstrates in the second section, which discusses what he (somewhat arbitrarily) identifies as the four pillars of capitalism: money and credit, investment, innovation, and consumption. While I happened to find Beckert’s discussion of credit and money especially engaging, readers with different interests will surely glean much from the other chapters, or from the book’s final section on forecasting and economic theories and models, that is, two of the “instruments” by which our fictional expectations are generated.
Readers of this journal will be gratified to note, at the end of several chapters, a discussion of what Beckert calls “the politics of expectation”—even if, by the same token, they may wish the topic had received more sustained and systematic attention. Similarly, readers with a background in literary theory may find some of Beckert’s allusions frustratingly vague, even if they will hopefully appreciate his willingness to reach across disciplines in the pursuit of understanding. Lastly, it may be that the various dichotomies seemingly structuring Beckert’s narrative (such as the implicit opposition between expectations and actual knowledge, fiction and reality, past and future, etc.) cannot be sustained, given the weight of the evidence that he himself has accumulated. But they served him well for a few hundred pages, which is all that was needed.
