james brassett

The article develops a critical analysis of the politics of financial resilience as an increasingly prevalent discourse of economic policy and practice. Against existing critiques of resilience which focus on the neoliberal rationalities and subjectivities that it (apparently) perpetuates, we argue that resilience per se does not—of necessity—infer any particular form of governance or subjectivity. Instead, resilience can be thought of as a sphere of political engagement. An emphasis on system, structure, and the relations between actors over time gives financial resilience a productive ambiguity: neither structure nor subject is ever fully defined and thus remains open. To this end, we engage the Bank of England's recent turn to complexity modeling and its correlative, somewhat metaphorical, ethos of 'clear thinking' in 'complex times'. This idea of complexity foregrounds the 'unknown' through positing the unpredictability of system-wide events; however, ensuing attempts to 'model complexity' entail a closure, rendering uncertainty 'known' in particular (and limited) ways. Indeed, we identify a general disconnect between the radical rhetoric of resilience agendas that emphasize complexity and the relative banality of resulting policy advice: self-regulation, capital ratios, and so on. We then explore how a focus on the 'unknown' can also give financial resilience an open quality, emphasizing the role of imagination and the diversity of agency. Put simply, if financial governance must be imagined, then it can be imagined differently. We therefore examine a set of everyday attempts to use the openness of resilience/complexity, in order to imagine finance in more democratic or communitarian terms. In particular, market formations such as local banking, peer lending, and wider attempts to politicize financial regulation through documentaries like Bank of Dave play on the productive ambiguities of financial resilience in critical ways. Such agendas do not exhaust or solve the dilemmas identified, but do represent a creative set of attempts to engage the politics of finance in inclusive, participatory, and reciprocal terms.

The article provides a critical analysis of the performative effects of invo-cations of trauma and traumatic imagery during the sub-prime crisis. We develop a pragmatic approach to performativity that foregrounds the ambiguity between the importance of performative utterances, on the one hand, and overlapping performativities that produce subjects capable of ''hearing'' such utterances, on the other. We argue that a performative effect of the traumatic narrative of the sub-prime crisis was to constitute it as ''an event'' with traumatic characteristics. Financial subjects came to anticipate the object of financial salvation through intervention to save the banks; and such a view worked to curtail the range of political possibilities that were thinkable. Lines of pragmatic resistance are suggested, which turn the logic of trauma toward broadly progressive ends. In this way, the political dimension of performativity is brought forward: if finance is performative, then this only invites the question of how we might perform it differently. The subprime crisis that began in the summer of 2007 may rank as one of the most traumatic global developments since World War II. (Sinclair 2010:100) Financial Tsunami: The End of The World As We Knew It. (Engdahl 2008) Recent years have seen a growth of interest in the concept of performativity within IPE and related subject fields (Clark,). 1 Despite variations in approach, the basic proposition of the concept is that the use and extension of certain types of knowledge has a constitutive effect: markets are enacted, and financial subjects are produced through discursive repetition. In this article, we trace a line between ''thinner'' versions of the concept, most closely associated with J. L. Austin's notion of ''self actualizing'' statements, through to thicker versions that draw more directly from Judith Butler (1993:2) and her (related) idea that performativity operates through the ''reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.'' At the heart of the conceptual discussion of performativity, we identify an essential ambiguity between the importance ⁄ centrality of performative utterances, on the one hand, and the role of overlapping performativities that culturally produce subjects capable of ''hearing'' such utterances, on the other. Rather 1 We thank several people for helpful comments at various stages in the development of this article, including

The article develops a critical analysis of gendered narratives of global finance. The post-subprime crisis equation of unfettered global finance with the excessive masculinity of individual bankers is read in line with a wider gender narrative. We discuss how heteronormative relations between men and women underpin financial representations through three historical examples: war bond advertising, Hollywood films about bankers, and contemporary aesthetic representations of female politicians who advocate for austerity. A politics emerges whereby gender is used to encompass a/the spectrum between embedded and disembedded finance, approximate to the divide between oikonomia and chrematistics. The apparently desirable ‘marriage’ between the state and finance that ensues carries several ambiguities – precisely along gender lines – that point to a pervasive limit: the myth of embedded liberalism in the imagination of global finance.

Emerging scholarship on global governance offers ever-more detailed analyses of private regulatory regimes. These regimes aim to regulate some area of social activity without a mandate from, or participation of, states or international organizations. While there are numerous empirical studies of these regimes, the normative theoretical literature has arguably struggled to keep pace with such developments. This is unfortunate, as the proliferation of private regulatory regimes raises important issues about legitimacy in global governance. The aim of this paper is to address some of these issues by elaborating a theoretical framework that can orientate normative investigation of these schemes. It does this through turning to the idea of experimentalist governance. It is argued that experimentalism can provide an important and provocative set of insights about the processes and logics of emerging governance schemes. The critical purchase of this theory is illustrated through an application to the case of primary commodities roundtables, part of ongoing attempts by non-governmental organizations, producers, and buyers to set sustainability criteria for commodity production across a range of sectors. The idea of experimentalist governance, we argue, can lend much needed theoretical structure to debates about the normative legitimacy of private regulatory regimes.