London today is constructed in the image of three, ongoing processes: credit, culture and terror. I shall examine each of these, and the connections between them, so as to present a three-dimensional picture of this city in its historically specific and geographically particular conditions. I contend that these conditions have re-built London as a monument to the fetishism of commodity production, and that the credit crunch is one among many examples of this fetishism.
The continuation of capital by means other than production: this is the expanded role of credit in the locally modified version of capitalism which determines the character of London today. Just as the financial sector has expanded beyond the boundaries of the Square Mile, credit has gone much further than its original role in continuing capitalist production beyond what would otherwise have been the limits of the accumulation cycle. As undertaken in locations like London, where the creation of new value is generally absent having been re-located elsewhere, credit and the revenues accrued from providing and processing it have become the financial basis for a whole way of life.
From locations such as New York, London and Hong Kong (New-Lon-Kong, as Time coins it), capital moves around the world, growing larger by its very movement. On closer examination, this expansionary sweep is seen to consist of an apparently endless series of speculative transactions whereby less is typically sold for more (what it is that commands a price now higher, now lower, hardly matters), and purchasers (like those now selling to them) fund their speculative purchases with credit only recently purchased for this very purpose. This means that credit itself is a product of and for speculation, the purchase of which is to be funded by another, previous round of credit; and another, another, all the time moving further and further backwards from production. Thus the lineage of successive rounds of credit has become more layered and convoluted even than the value-chains by which global production is now bound together.
Credit chains are oriented largely (not exclusively) to exchange without production, thought this does not preclude the continuation of the classical role of credit in funding capitalist production. Whereas credit chains are centred on exchange and make only intermittent reference to the realm of production from which they are increasingly distant, value chains only culminate in exchange as the point at which surplus value generated in production is realised as profit.
In the recent period, credit chains would appear to have proliferated faster than the value chains of production; nonetheless the mass of products – the output of the whole world – is greater now than at any other time in human history. While the universe of production has expanded absolutely, in particular places oriented to the credit process, production has declined; and while this decline is not absolute, in locations such as London it has already reached the point where commodity production is no longer the general mode of economic activity from which the metropolis derives its character.
Here in London speculation is a continuous process of relatively long standing which depends for its continuity on the buying and selling of credit. Vice versa: the well-established process of buying and selling credit depends on speculation in London’s international markets. In conditions such as these which are general throughout this place but only approach this level of significance in a restricted number of particular localities (New York and Hong Kong being two others), that there are still some commodities being produced locally is no proof of the continued existence here of the classical mode of commodity production – no more so than the continued existence of farms in the rest of the UK proves that Britain is still an agricultural economy.
In classical Marxist analysis, individual companies within service industries are no less productive of new value than their counterparts in manufacturing; and by this analysis, it would seem that the provision of financial services – London’s core business – is indeed an industry which produces new value. The same could be said of the ancillary services (business and creative) by which the financial services sector is itself served – the three of these now making up the bulk of London’s economy. But to apply this classical analysis to London’s economy today, would be to ignore its original precondition.
In order to develop his critique of political economy, Marx was obliged to reconstruct the conditions in which it arose, which he identified as the origination of capitalism – the original development of commodity production as the general mode of economic activity and social reproduction. In other words, political economy only came into being, and capital only came into its own as and when individual capitalist enterprises came together in the universal social relation which was even then in the historically specific process of formation.
My contention, in keeping with emphasis on historical specificity and on the articulation of particular and general, is that the general role of particular cities like London is not to produce new value in capitalist production, rather to inflate value derived only in the first, often-forgotten instance from production, by moving it around in an almost infinitely complex process of speculative credit provision. Thus inflated, capital is intermittently bought out of the speculative credit process based in networked cities like London, and brought back into the capitalist production of goods and the concomitant production of value which both occur elsewhere.
In this context, while participating companies often make payments to other participating companies for services which thereby enable both of them to participate in the London economy, this is akin to a system of internal accounting within an economic sector which plays a peculiarly non-productive role on behalf of the whole, global economy of capitalist production, and which is paid for by revenues from the historically specific, global economy of production of which it is a geographically specific subdivision.
In this articulation between the London economy and its international guarantor, the circulation of commercial services between individual companies in London, of which the local economy is comprised, is no more akin to general commodity production, and thence the capitalist production of new value, than the kind of economic activity and the sort of national role which has long been undertaken in the public sector. In shorthand, London is something like a new public sector for the newly internationalised economy of capitalist production.
The two spheres of capitalist production and credit-fuelled, speculative exchange continue to be linked; and in view of what is required for the reproduction of society as a universal whole, it is production which is the precondition for credit and speculation, not the other way round. From the perspective of individual investors, however, neither speculative nor productive investment can occur without credit, which thus appears as the font of all economic activity. Furthermore, in those locations delegated to perform the expansionary movement of capital by means of the generation of credit for speculative purposes, the origins of credit in production and the value contained within it have as little bearing on speculative markets as our supposed line of descent from Adam and Eve. Subjectivity – the mood of the market – is here sufficient basis for capital expansion.
Such is the reality of the credit process that where it dominates, the common ancestry of value in production has become myth. At least, this is so in those locations where social relations have been reformed around the ongoing process of credit provision for speculative purposes, thus enabling the continuation of capital by means other than production; and by this means the reconstruction of capital cities such as London, which contribute to the reproduction of capitalism worldwide by orienting themselves toward speculative circulation of credit.
Who would credit it? The answer is that we Londoners have all been able to believe in it – up to a point; and as our belief was sustained, so credit became more believable and more easily available; and its availability was creditable also. But then the reality of the credit process gave way to the sudden appearance of the nightmare of production, to the nightmare that production, not the credit process, might be the real, inescapable foundation of the existence we share across the whole world. Indeed there is one such world, and production is fundamental to it. But in cities such as London which only occasionally appear as upside-down as they really are, even when it is briefly glimpsed as essential, production has already become more rarefied and fantastic than the daily convolutions of credit and speculation; and so the fundamental can only make its appearance in mythical form.
Such appearances are both a continuation and a modification of the commodity fetishism identified by Marx. In conditions of generalised commodity production, he observed, the commodity enjoys social intercourse – exchanging itself with other commodities in the market, while the people that produce the commodity, who are related to each other by dint of being participants in the general process of commodity production, are only able to realise this relation indirectly, through commodities and their reciprocal relations in market exchange. In this context, according to Marx, relations appear as they really are: social relations between things; indirectly social relations between people. This is a distortion of social production, hence he dubbed it ‘commodity fetishism’; but it is also the reality of capitalist commodity production.
For the global scale of capitalist production, this analysis holds good. But in pockets within the mode of generalised commodity production from which commodity production has been locally displaced in favour of the process of circulation, fetishism now takes a modified form. Instead of the commodity as its focus, fetishism is displaced to the new absentee in locally modified social relations, namely, production. London today is characterised not only by its absence but also by the fetishism of commodity production, though as in environmentalism (of which more later), this is often expressed negatively.
The credit crunch is an episode in the fetishism of commodity production. A few months ago, the global reality of production re-appeared as a spectre that is especially haunting to people in locations like London. In its mystified form, production has asserted itself in the assertion that those who live outside it are living beyond the pale. It is as if speculative markets and those who operate in them, or who provide services which allow speculative exchange to occur, are seeking to atone for their neglect of production. Banks and other institutions involved in the speculative provision of credit entered the confessional and have so far refused to come out. Not that while in there they are dedicating themselves to the future of production by investing in research and development. That would be to address production directly rather than fetishising it. Instead like a pervert suffering from remorse the financial sector has continued to act out its fetish while doing some degree of penance and at the same time displacing its worst sins to rogue traders and ‘bad apple’ businesses found to have flouted the protocols of ‘risk avoidance’.
More recently, speculation’s mystical homage to production seems to have become more direct – though still fetishised, as in the newly ascending spiral of commodity prices. In an environment where subjectivity is all (subjectivism), the adoration of production is now expressed in the high values projected on to basic products – the staples of production; this represents the return of the object but in a distorted form (objectivism).
Starting with sub-prime loans that became non-credit worthy overnight, credit chains were rolled back because more and more of their linkages were seen to be incredible. Next, the lack of faith in credit, and in the way of life based on deploying it, prompted market demand for something more tangible. As intangibles became incredible and uncreditable, markets have looked for something fundamental to believe and invest in. But this is an acting out of ‘back to basics’.
The steep rise in commodity prices is not driven by actual take-up of commodities in the production process or even from forecasts of commodity consumption in forthcoming production. Fuelled, once again, by credit, the hike in commodity prices represents the diversion of money from other speculative instruments to the commodity index fund as a device for speculating on that which might otherwise be essential to production except where, as here, its primary function is already speculative – as a cipher of production but for speculative purposes.
Taken together, the run on the institutions of credit provision (the banks) and the turn to commodity prices but chiefly in their speculative capacity, constitute both an interruption to the dual process of credit and speculation, and their continuation. This is not a return to the fundamentals of production so much as the performance of ‘fundamentalism’, where the speculative process which runs (through) London acknowledges that it is not the essence of economic activity worldwide yet can only act out this acknowledgement by referencing production in a manner which confirms its speculative character.
In the recent outbreak of commodity price inflation, reference is being made to the consumption of commodities by production. But here the reference is indirect; it is an address to the idea of production, not a spur to production itself. This is only appropriate since cities like London are related to commodity production only indirectly, in that they are re-location centres from which capital is despatched to the most profitable places for productive investment. London serves the global economy of production in the combined role of sorting office and travel agent. Meanwhile it serves itself in the speculative provision of credit and the revenues accrued from processing it. Commodity production occurs here as an idea; but as human social practice it generally undertaken elsewhere.
Since the continuation of capital is also the extension of its distortions, along with the extension of capital by other means than production, the order of priorities in the London way of life is distended to the extent that the speculative process must take precedence over production. However, capital produces social reality as well as fetishism thereof; and in episodes like the credit crunch there is not only fetishism but also a glimpse of (distorted) reality. As with commodity fetishism, in the fetishism of commodity production, relations appear as they really are in the historically specific conditions of capitalism, which are now doubly distorted in particular locations such as London.
In that the credit crunch amounts to the suspension of belief in the primacy of credit chains over value chains, it is the primacy of production asserting itself – yet only in a mystified form. Reality is glimpsed, but the reality-check is as disproportionate as that which it is checking against. Thus when the markets intone ‘commodity’ like a mantra to exorcise the poltergeists of credit, as in the recent outbreak of commodity price inflation, commodity prices thus inflated bear little relation to the demand for commodities in production. That producers are prompted to rein in production because they cannot afford to pay the prices which commodities now command in international markets, only accentuates the mythical character of production pertaining to international market cities like London, and the local reality of speculative credit as a way of life.
In these circumstances, credit crunch and commodity price-hike are a facsimile of fundamentalism which has ruptured the credit process only to confirm that the continuation of capital by non-productive means, is indeed the role with which London is accredited. Confirmation of this role, however, does not guarantee that London and other such cities will be able to give as smooth a performance of it as has been achieved in the previous period.
Facsimile fundamentalism is fake in that it is made-up; but its effects are no less real than credit itself. If the credibility of credit has been a material force in the recent make-up of London, then lack of faith in it may be equally influential in present and future iterations. However, whether or not we find credit credible, as yet there is no other local reality: credit fuels the London way of life; currently it is in every respect the currency of our culture.
The credit process requires procession, a ritual movement to adorn and sanctify the movement of capital. This is the partly liturgical role of culture in the 21st century, and in the performance of this particular role today’s London culture amounts to a New Ornamentalism.
Besides this it has another function to fulfil. Just as the role of credit is to enable the continuation of capital by means other than production, so the expanded role of culture also constitutes an attempt to continue the social by means other than the political. Here culture is deployed as a tool for conviviality.
In the historically and geographically specific conditions of London today, there are two sets of relations between credit and culture: those that are contingent and those that are essential. Contingent relations are those that have arisen as a consequence of credit and culture emerging in the way that they have. Essential relations are those which must occur for credit and culture to have emerged in this way, without which they could not have done so. Taken together these relations between credit and culture are themselves an essential characteristic of the historically and geographically specific conditions from which London today is continually constructed. This is the social reality behind the managed impression of ‘Creative London’.
Credit finances London culture. In a previous issue of Rising East Online, James Heartfield [link to Heartfield in RE7] documented the role of the City and its ancillaries in funding design, consultancy and design consultancy. This triptych has been the centrepiece of Creative London, and its fortunes have followed those of financial services, rising with the dot.com boom and dipping with the fallout from ‘dot.con’ and, subsequently, 9/11. While other creative industries have failed to grow as predicted, e.g. film and television production, this part of the culture sector has continued to expand but only insofar as its growth has been financed by underlying growth in financial services. With financial services now facing a period of stagnation or decline, the financing of cultural services is likely to follow suit.
In non-productive places like London credit is often drawn towards culture rather than productive investment; and, especially now, it is again attracted to culture in preference to other, suddenly less creditable forms of speculative investment.
Heartfield also identified the recent role of the ‘pig market’ – the market for the most extravagant luxuries upon which only the super-rich can afford to gorge themselves. Gazing upon a Damien Hirst shark, or, more accurately, purchasing the shark at a high price, thereby coming to own the rights to it and thus the right to decide who may and who may not gaze upon it, is the kind of piggery which Heartfield was referring to.
Like any other market (whether its connection to livestock is literal or metaphorical!) in the recent period the art market has been funded by credit and oriented towards speculation. But it does not appear to have been damaged by the credit crunch. To the contrary, by its distance from banking and City-type institutions, i.e. by virtue of being attached to artistic forms which are historically antagonistic to finance for its own sake, the art market seems to be attracting even more funds in the aftermath of the credit crunch.
Here the connection between culture and credit is affirmed even as culture continues to attract finance because of its record of hostility to the mores of the financial world. Now that this latter world is less credible or creditable, even among financiers themselves, their credit flows even faster into a world renowned since The Forsyte Saga for its estrangement from the City: the world of art. Accordingly, art market prices have continued to rise in recent months, and credit to fund purchases of art at these high prices has increased also – despite the drying up of credit elsewhere.
So much for the contingent connections between credit and culture. I now turn to their essential relation. By establishing what is essential about their relation I also hope to arrive at the essence of London today.
Just as art is first the form of interpretation on the part of the artist, and when it enters the public domain it becomes a form for interpretation on the part of the viewer, so the financial markets are the outcome of interpretation on the part of buyers and sellers. But what of the object of their respective interpretations? What thing is it that they are interpreting? Leaving aside, at least for a moment, the traditional counterposition of art against finance, and the historical differences between culture and credit, there are equally important differences between the object of London culture when London was capital of the national economy of capitalist production, and the culture of London today, when London’s economy is chiefly characterised by the exchange of credit.
In the days when national production dominated the capital and constructed London as the nexus of capital, culture was oriented to finished objects (objets d’art), the final outcome of a prior process of artistic production. This latter was taken to be the precondition for an exchange of subjectivity, otherwise known as communication between artist and viewer, assumed to take place through the medium of the art object.
As it occurs in London today, culture is still thought of as an exchange of interpretations; indeed the range of exchange is taken to be more extensive than ever before. Culture in London is now as international as the financial markets, a characteristic that is highly thought of in these markets and also in their cultural counterparts.In credit and culture alike, such opennessattracts an even wider range of participants and thus an expanding reputation for internationalism. Here the movements of credit and culture are mutually reinforcing, complementing each other in the proliferation of their respective exchanges, and in the exchange that increasingly occurs between them.
In today’s London culture, however, there are shrinking expectations of the object to be interpreted, i.e. of the object and the qualities expected of it for it to serve as the precondition for the exchange of interpretation by which culture has customarily distinguished itself. Although at any given moment some objects are more or less fashionable than others, over time any object can now be the centre of cultural attention, a focus of interpretation and interpretive exchange. Whereas the primacy of the object once depended on its specific, aesthetic character, now that it can be anything it is no longer primary – no more so than the items listed in financial markets which are merely the prompt for credit-fuelled rounds of speculative interpretation.
That the object d’art can be almost anything is really to say that it has little objective existence; instead it is reduced to something like a shadow with which to continue the process of interpretive exchange. Even these shadows contain some material, but since what material they contain is largely immaterial to London’s cultural process, their existence is mythical compared to the unavoidable reality of interpretive exchange. While this latter has always been a constituent element of modern culture, just as market exchange has always been essential to capitalism, the cultural process occurring in today’s London is almost entirely composed of interpretive exchange – in the same way that London’s economy is characterised by exchange without prior production, except that which occurs elsewhere.
As in the workings of speculative markets, so in the interpretive marketplace of London culture: in both arenas, prior production is now more rhetorical than substantive. Speculation, as described above, is so much bound up in credit chains that much of it occurs in blatant disregard of production. Meanwhile, art and culture first found the ‘found object’ – the objet d’art requiring no artistic production, before moving beyond it to the found person (often a lost soul): the celebrity, i.e. persons as the camera has found them; and now in social media, simply, the person, any person – the person as presented to other persons for reciprocal interpretation.
In cities like London and in the worldwide projection of London-like conditions by means of the internet, as with persons (in culture) so with the numbers attached to persons (in the speculative deployment of credit), reciprocal interpretation is almost all there is to both sets of practices, culture and credit.
For the practice of culture, this goes beyond the loss of the distinction between high art and popular culture, i.e. a distinction between different types of previously produced objects. Losing this distinction prompted that clichéd question of the 1970s: but is it art? The erosion of these previously distinctive categories was concomitant with the period of economic history in which finance first began to outgrow its categorisation as such according to the needs of production. But far from stopping at this point, since that time these parallel trends have proceeded apace.
From music to journalism and all shades of culture in between, the original object has been losing ground – losing its definition and its capacity to define culture – to subsequent interpretation and elaboration. Thus there is a large (often deathly) corpus of music in which the song has been evacuated to the margins and the mix occupies centre stage – to the point where for the benefit of further rounds of remixing the song is now frequently reduced to one or possibly two chords and a hook, at which level it becomes so insubstantial that there would be no justification for making it central, and thus it can only be peripheral to the continuing process of elaboration and re-interpretation.
Similarly, journalists were characterised until recently by their ambition to get an exclusive story. They were vocal about aiming to originate an item, define it, have it placed on the news agenda, and, if possible, conclude the telling of it so that no other journalist would have anything left to say about it. But the desire to be definitive is now illicit. In today’s context of rolling news, citizen journalism and user-generated content, it is an accepted part of the new orthodoxy for journalists to declare that ‘there is always someone who knows more about the story than I do’. When journalists say this kind of thing, they are saying that there is always another interpretation of the same event to be exchanged for the one previously supplied – even though they are the ones who supplied it. This is also to say: my original version is not so substantial; what surety we have comes from the ongoing process of interpretive exchange. Sounds inclusive (everyone’s interpretation can be included, including the ones we do not yet know about), but from a process so ostentatiously inconclusive it is hard to imagine any specific outcome – except a further round in the ongoing process of interpretation. Appropriately enough, in the new journalism there is increased investment in the interpretive process including platforms for user generated content and tactics for monetarising it, and less of a budget for professional reporting. Indeed there is a tendency for interpretation (comment) to become the only reality because the origination of definitive information (facts) is now relegated to the status of myth. Facts are sacred still, perhaps, but now bracketed out as well nigh unreachable.
These two examples serve to indicate the generally low regard in which today’s culture holds original production, its low status being equally typical of economic activity as it too is non-productively practised in London. Instead, the process of interpretive exchange is what matters most in London’s culture, just as the process of speculative exchange is what counts in London’s financial markets, in almost complete disregard of past, present or future production which generally occurs elsewhere.
In such conditions, culture is mainly composed of chains of credibility; just as the financial world is the paying out of lines of creditability. But then financial speculation is itself a process of interpretation, and cultural credibility depends on who is creditable (whose interpretation would you lend to or borrow from?). For all that London is associated with diversity, there tends to be a uniform preference for the who (who is buying, selling or promoting?) when in culture as in credit there is generally next-to-no what (so what if there is nothing to it? People are talking about it). Here the cultural relativism in which culture is largely separated from the laws of artistic production is cognate with local, financial relativism that is partly unhinged from the law of value in capitalist production. Credit and culture have combined to construct the same, semi-autonomous discourse.
In these historically specific and geographically particular conditions, London produces capital largely without production and culture with typically little reference to the substance of art. In the discourse of culture, however, there are plenty of references to ‘art’. Meanwhile the unhinged character of the discourse does not preclude the production by some artists of work that is both substantial and truly original – but even when this occurs, there are few means available for it to be recognised as such. Ironically, interpretation for its own sake tends to diminish the scope of interpretation.
Contrary to reports of the ‘death of the subject’, there has never been more play of subjectivities than in the credit-culture discourse of cities like London. That the previously essential objects of finance and art have been reduced locally to a shadowy existence suggests something more like the ‘death of the object’.
Here the modified pattern of social relations would seem to suggest that participants in these mutually reinforcing processes of culture and credit are now able to relate to each other directly, without constant recourse to objects – either the commodity or objet d’art. For some, particularly those in government and its ancillary services, the apparently direct character of these local, social relations is a cause for hope. Their hope is that culture will indeed be a continuous process of reciprocal interpretation of persons by other persons, largely without fixed objects or objections which might previously have obstructed this inclusive process. Thus culture could come into its own as the basis for a frictionless society, financed (but never having to be paid for) by a complementary credit process. The problem with this vision (its merit is that at least it is visionary) is that it mistakes for direct social relations what is really the locally indirect experience of the indirect social relations of worldwide capitalist production. The contradictions and limitations of capitalism have not gone away; rather they are further obscured to the point of invisibility.
The latest envisioning of Thames Gateway seems to have been drawn along these optimistic lines. Published at the Thames Gateway Forum in November 2006, the Thames Gateway Interim Plan consists of policy to encourage various forms of cultural participation, and a prospectus to attract £40 billion from a credit-fuelled private sector. As such it has already encountered serious problems: (1) the drying up of credit, which if it continues unabated, could mean the premature end of this brief episode in the liquid history of Thames Gateway; (2) without solid subjects to interpret, it transpires that there is little so sustain reciprocation. Culture-without-objects (more accurately, culture with objects reduced to shadowy status) reduces the scope for objections and thus for conflict. But it can only bring people together momentarily; and while its transitory effects are an advantage in those circuits which thrive on transience, in areas downriver where longevity is looked for, this kind of culture can only show that durability has been found wanting. Thus the attempt to continue society by non-political means, by means of the dual process of credit and cultural policy, may already be close to foundering. This does not bode well for London 2012.
In that they both have come to bury the object, in this historically specific and geographically particular location, culture and credit are as one: their relations are essential, not merely contingent. To be tired of London today, is to be tired of the second life which credit and culture are living together, a life lived largely without primary production, in a location which can only exist within the globalised economy of capitalist production but which is nonetheless a particular place dedicated to the non-productive circuitry of credit and culture.
Thus London gives sanctuary to a way of life composed of interpretive exchanges. But in cultural life as in the lifelines of credit, there are moments when such exchanges are seen to be insufficient. In culture this realisation has tended not to appear in a single, synchronised moment – there has been no ‘culture crunch’, although some misguided individuals occasionally try to enact this kind of destruction. Typically the fetishism of commodity production occurs in culture as a diffuse but recurring yearning, an itch for a limb which is not there. More accurately, a limb which is not here, since production, its objects and its concomitant subjectivity have not been amputated altogether but relocated to a different part of the global anatomy.
Nonetheless many Londoners have experienced the feeling of being cut off from what matters. Responding to our estrangement from the substance of production, but not normally recognising it in these terms, typically we look again to culture for the original, the definitive and the conclusive. We are searching for something more than the process of interpretive exchange, for something fundamental in a world whose essential character, if only we could see it as such, is the social relation between people participating in the production of that world. But it is much easier to feel that there is something missing than it is to capture it – either in theory or practice.
The realisation of what is absent from the locally dominant circuitry of interpretive exchange occurs in the unreality of London – at least, that’s what London is when seen from the social reality of global production; but in London itself, the lived experience of non-production is as real as the walls of Wandsworth prison. Since there is nothing else here to excavate but the dual process of credit and culture, and since the local conditions are inimical to original cultural production as they are to production in general, the desire for something fundamental is most frequently expressed as an extension of the process of interpretive exchange, as a series of typically transient interpretations of what is essential, as ‘fundamentalism’ where quotation marks cancel out the word in between them except as something which is spoken of – some certain thing which is much spoken of because it is not much in evidence here.
As with the recent outbreak of commodity price inflation, this is the performance of an apparently deeper reality. What ‘fundamentalism’ performs, however, is not reality but ‘reality’. Furthermore, since here we have so little contact with the essence of social reality in production, even as we cannot stop yearning for it, for most of us, most of the time it is difficult to distinguish between the real and the ‘real’.
In the hope of finding the real thing, Londoners frequently aspire to one or other, or sometimes more than one version of ‘fundamentalism’; although, if we stopped to think about this for a moment, the rich mix of fundamentalisms can only mean that all our absolutes are indeed relative and thus only a play at fundamentalism. At the same time some Londoners fear other Londoners’ equally superficial interpretations of the fundamental, and with good reason. Not because any of these relative fundamentalisms are really about to disrupt and destroy the process of interpretive exchange which has become our whole way of local life. They are incapable of such destruction since they themselves are an extended expression of the financial relativism which acts in concert with the London culture of speculative exchange. No, the good reason for apprehension being here the partner of speculation, is that there is no means of verifying the superficiality of ‘fundamentalism’, of that fetishised form which presents itself as fundamental. Verification, for goodness sake, is the good for the sake of which we are trying to dig deep, only to find that there is no depth to dig into.
In this context, where the means of verification – depth and the measure of it – are much in demand but extremely hard to supply, it is very easy to lose all sense of proportion; or rather, our local sense of proportion is based only on yet more circuits of interpretive exchange in which shadowy figures can be easily inflated just like those mythical commodities which are the object of commodity price inflation. On this basis, in these conditions, proportion can only become distortion.
Thus there is not only a disjuncture between the essential and the ‘fundamental’, but also, inasmuch as the discrepancy is typically intangible, there is nothing to prevent its effects from becoming all too real. In these circumstances some individuals may even affect this confusion, i.e. they are prompted to act out ‘fundamentalism’ according to the inflated significance with which many of us have endowed it. In acting thus, their actions are as much in keeping with the times as the activities of those commodity index fund managers acting speculatively in response to the local reality of inflated commodity prices – inflated prices upon which the actual consumption of commodities in production, has no bearing.
Terrorism is a case in point. The cultural logic of terrorism does not begin with individual terrorists; they are secondary elements, at most. Instead the London way of life produces a discomforting sense of distance from what matters, as indeed we are distant from the matter of production. Having originated not commodity production but its absence, the city’s inhabitants then look for something to personify the dislocation which really exists, and which we have already fetishised.
New London is a creature of the credit-culture process, as limitless as it is unhinged, and as a projection of our dislocation we first extrapolated ourselves into the New Economy, a fantasy where nothing would ever go wrong. But more often than not the novel sense of being dislocated from production is expressed in the speculation that we are living in Apocalypse From Now On (to borrow Susan Sontag’s phrase). Next we look around for candidates with which to personify this animus of disaster – as inflated in its hellishness as the New Economy was momentary heaven. That there is a limitless supply of candidates, and no limit to the way in which we impress apocalypse upon them, is connected to the unhinging of our local way of life from the general social reality of production.
Environmentalism is one such animation of the predisposition to doom and disaster. Production and consumption by human beings are assumed to be destroying the planet, and we are encouraged to be fearful of this terrible prospect; more accurately, we are invited to embed the apprehension we already experience into this fearful vision.
In the discursive process of environmentalism, apocalyptic speculation may refer to recent developments in the production of our knowledge about nature, i.e. science, or it may proceed in disregard of these, just as commodity price speculation typically refers to an object before disregarding its objective role in the general social reality of production. But science, as we have been telling ourselves since the 1970s, was only ever one of the stories we told ourselves. In this recent re-telling of our own intellectual development, ‘objectivity’ was never and could not ever be objective, so there are no grounds for strict adherence to it. From this viewpoint, a relativistic approach to science (taking or leaving the paradigm as it suits us) is no less relativistic than science itself.
On the other hand, environmentalism provides just the solid ground(s) we have been searching for – unsurprisingly, since we ourselves have established it for this purpose. As we have lived more and more in the sky-high firmament of credit, so we have looked more and more for the fundament. But instead of finding our essence in the human practice of production, as befits our particularly indirect experience of this general social reality, we Londoners have re-directed our essence to a ‘fundamental’ that is neither human, nor productive, namely ‘nature’. Meanwhile production is demonised; traduced into an evil spirit that is contrary to what ‘really’ matters – the fundamental stuff of the planet.
Here the general reality of production is expressed as a negative ideal, in keeping with a local way of life in which production really is ideal – an idea of that which we have not got because nowadays somebody, somewhere else in the global economy has the role of doing it. In our rendition, ‘nature’ is what is, or what would be if it were not endangered by the doings of humanity in production. This is as fantastic as the New Economy, but it is also in keeping with the geographically particular and historically specific conditions in which what we do – move signs around – is performed at considerable distance from social production – what humanity does in general. In that what we do here in London occurs in its own, non-productive way, it too simply is what it is; hence its compatibility with ‘nature’ as an idea of what would simply be if not for the demonic destruction allegedly wrought by human production – an idea of production which is as estranged from reality as we are really estranged from the practice of it.
Instead of looking to originate reality in social production, environmentalism seeks the ‘original’ in pre-production. This idea we call ‘nature’. As a positive pole of attraction, it is an inversion of the negative idea of production, but it is often called upon to trump the process of interpretive exchange. That it refers to the greater truth of production, even negatively, is the real basis for what then becomes a fetish. ‘Nature’, the distorted idea of the natural world which we have produced, is the negative expression of the fetishism of commodity production. It is prompted by the displacement of production from the city which used to be its capital.
However, precisely because production really has been displaced from here, it is difficult to bring it home even as a negative idea. Thus environmentalism is forced to displace its criticisms of production to those far-flung places where it generally occurs – to China and India which are its prime targets. Meanwhile in the day-to-day life of London, defined as it is by the circular motions of credit and culture, environmentalism is acted out as yet another instance of circulation: re-cycling. Here the process of credit and the procession of culture are joined by a further procedure which not only relegates objects to inferior status but actively seeks to degrade them.
Far from being an effective critique of the London way of life, environmentalism has the effect of confirming it in its procedural character. Furthermore, having replaced the objects of social production (just as social production and its objects have been displaced from around here) with an idealised object of its own making – ‘nature’, environmentalism warns that the dual process of credit and culture is not sufficiently distant from production to ward off Armageddon. In an effort to escape disaster, we must commit ourselves to re-processing, thereby replicating in anti-production consciousness the spontaneous involvement in non-productive process which already defines the life of Londoners.
In this way, the sense of loss and the concomitant loss of proportion arising from the replacement of production and its displacement from the national economy with London at its head, together lead to a disproportionate process which is the mirror-image of transubstantiation. Instead of bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ, as is said to occur in the Catholic Mass, here the spirit of fear itself becomes ‘nature’-under-threat: unhinged idea made (to) matter; just as the credit crunch is an unchained, unpredictable spirit with real, often terrifying consequences.
Like the credit crunch, environmentalism is the cloth of fear itself, tailored to suit existing apprehension about our unhinged existence in a mystified attempt to connect with the greater reality. But it does not suit everyone. While some practise recycling, others try to ground themselves in absurdly conspicuous consumption. After the displacement of production and the diminution of definitive objects, the Bling lifestyle has reintroduced the thing in a deliberately exaggerated way. At the same time, just when it tries to stand down from the single, speculative plane of interpretive exchange, even Bling cannot help but refer itself back to this level, as when it continually exchanges the obvious response to so many luxury objects (gross!) with its own re-interpretation of them (cool).
For those who dare to try it on, the role of the Bling things they wear is to verify and testify to their inflated appetites – appetites for sex and possibly violence as sublimated in their grasp of expensive things and proven ability to obtain them at any cost. Moreover, though Bling-ists partly represent the continuation of interpretive exchange, as for example when they exchanged what had been the brand name for understatement, Burberry, for their deliberately overblown re-interpretation of it, they also represent the end of the interpretive process: wearers dare those they encounter to regard the inflated substance of their pantomime status objects with anything other than the serious face that they are worn with. Here the free play of interpretations is brought to a halt with manufactured menace; that is, until it starts again with the further interpretation of Bling – the word for looming over little people and having it large, now exchanged for ‘Chav’ – the word for getting it largely wrong.
Desire for substance beyond interpretive exchanges combined with loss of proportion inherent in the locally encompassing character of exchange unhinged from production, has once again resulted in a menacing mood and its overtly fetishistic materialisation. Absurdly, and appropriately so, with Bling the fetishism of commodity production occurs in the stuff of….stuff.
Those for whom conservation is too conservative, if they are similarly put off by the caricatured thingy-ness of Bling, may turn to Islamic fundamentalism which in London is another example culture turning to the ‘fundamental’. With beards and hijab in place of platinum rings and gold teeth, ‘Islam’ is Bling for ascetics. Newly minted versions of ‘Islam’, derived from recent rounds of interpretive exchange, constitute a further response to the displacement of substance from London life, and another example of what is really the fetishism of commodity production. They present the recognition that there is something more fundamental than the circular exchanges of London life, but this recognition is displaced to the paraphernalia of religion, just as the social reality of production and the means to conceptualise this reality, have been largely displaced from London.
In its performance of asceticism, ‘Islam’ (coded Asian and Middle Eastern) is more restrained and perhaps more restraining than Bling (coded Black); and more in tune with environmentalism (coded White). But the outer limits of ‘Islam’ are even more crass than Bling. The most laughable plea to ‘Substantiate Me!’, is that of the London suicide bomber.
Suicide bombers and those who attempt suicide bombing, are mining for precious mettle. Appealing to the supposed substance of fundamental religious principles, they present themselves as bearers of a durable line of legitimacy traceable back to the Holy City of Mecca; yet their actions are eccentrically London-centric. They seek to destroy the circuits of London life and terrorise Londoners out of self-enclosed superficiality. But such acts of terrorism only reproduce these patterns.
The beliefs held by suicide bombers are a product of interpretive exchange, in which source material is a mere cipher for new rounds of speculation. Contrary to what they believe about their belief, it is not original, in the sense of being ancient; instead they themselves have originated it. Furthermore, what is meant to be an act of principled self-sacrifice, is really a moment of supreme narcissism, since anyone in today’s context who plants a bomb or plans to, must be so obsessed about realising themselves that they cannot realise what it means to kill and maim other people. Adultescent in its content; brutish and nasty in its consequences, staging terrorism in London today is the most crass affectation of ‘fundamentalism’, and the most misguided attempt to bring culture to a crunch.
Although the thinking behind suicide bombing is connected to a wider process of fetishised interpretation, in this specific action the fetishism of commodity production has produced its lunatic fringe. In seeking something more fundamental than the London life of interpretive exchange, suicide bombers are only human. In taking their search for divine revelation to such morbidly narcissistic conclusions, they reveal only that there was little else in their personal lives to hold them back.
Of greater significance than the lives of these thankfully isolated individuals, is our readiness to endow them with the spirit of the age: they warrant such investment only insofar as the rest of us say they do. We credit them with significance because we ourselves cannot believe that the circuits of credit will continue without rupture. Instead we invite their disruption, just as financial traders brought the credit crunch into their own counting houses. Lo and Behold!, our call to chaos has been answered by various ‘fundamentalisms’ ranging from environmentalism and ‘Islam’, to the credit crunch itself.
All of these are apocalyptic performances, terror-laden scenes which set up the fetishised presentation of the fundamental reality, namely, that the whole world turns not within the locally dominant circuits of credit and culture; but according to the historically specific relations between people producing it.
This is the social reality which has been further fetishised locally. Beyond the circuits of interpretation, the point is to change it.
Andrew Calcutt is editor of Rising East (a.calcutt@uel.ac.uk)
© 2009
Magazine publishers face a very uncertain future as a result of the credit crunch. Their response to changing business patterns will form a significant part of how London tackles the current economic uncertainties.
Richard Sharpe
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