Money Wisdom #474

"...the promise of not only film, but also of art and science, resides in their potential to alter and improve how we imagine the 'planetary nexus of capitalist power,' such that new visions of the globe might be put to work in the world. Emancipatory conduct therefore hinges on creative agents like the filmaker, for example, first working to create new cartographies of capital and then insisting that any maps they produce be used to radically transform the territories they represent."

Amin Samman History in Financial Times (2019) p.115

Money Wisdom #473

"Financial economics long ago parted ways with the idea of history, developing instead an increasingly elaborate set of abstract models. Some of these have been a blessing for those attempting to make money in the markets, but they have proved far less useful to those charged with regulating and managing global finance. When it comes to the bigger questions about where we are, how we got here, and what comes next, the age-old arts of rhetoric and narrative remain indispensable. In this sense global finance continues to depend on historical discourse, and especially when things seem to defy neat forms of explanation. The return to prior episodes of crisis is above all a return to history, and it is repeated most vigorously when history itself seems to be falling apart."

Amin Samman History in Financial Times (2019) p.109-110

Money Wisdom #472

"...prior episodes like the Great Depression and the Asian crisis were retroactively transformed into prophetic events, such that ongoing efforts at crisis management appeared as the filling out or fulfillment of a destiny already inscribed into the story of global finance. This is a truly strange and uneasy deliverance from the terror of history. In one sense, the return to the past provides a vital anchor for global projects of crisis management, effectively reestablishing financial history as a terrain on which to act. At the same time though, it lays open how such projects themselves depend on a kind of magic trick. While efforts at crisis management appear to have the truth of history on their side, this truth can emerge only through a ritual practice in which both history and crisis are conjured into being through their self-reference. The return to the past in this way functions as a secular form of revelation, repeated in the face of trauma to sustain history as a mode of power."

Amin Samman History in Financial Times (2019) p.91

Money Wisdom #471

"...the work of rhetoric is not simply to persuade but rather to conjure up a persuasive reality."

Amin Samman History in Financial Times (2019) p.75

Money Wisdom #470

"Rather than simply presenting itself, the subprime crisis appeared through the lens of the Great Depression, and the result was an image of history's process based on the perspectives associated with that earlier episode.

If I use the language of visuality here, it is to emphasize how elements of historical discourse, such as the idea of the Great Depression, actually mediate between appearance and essence in financial history, revealing a quasi-historical process that neither category is able to fully grasp. Art history provides an illuminating metaphor in this regard. During the height of landscape painting, it was common practice to use a convex tinted lens to help bring a view into perspective and reveal, as it were, the essence or truth of nature. In much the same way, droves of financial journalists turned to the 1930s, hoping that this uniquely structured event would enable them to unlock the mystery of the present and reveal the essential truth of history's process. Yet as with the painter's black mirror, the images produced were shaped by the observer's positioning and choice of lens. Building on this metaphor, I argue that while the Great Depression acted as a privileged mediator between the historical present and visions of financial history as such, this mediation took place through different versions of the 1930s, resulting in various, and sometimes contradictory, versions of historical recurrence. During the height of systemic fear in 2008 and 2009, these visions seemed to help save financial capitalism from itself, securing the conditions needed for its ongoing reproduction. But at the same time the contradictions between them opened up a fissure in elite discourse, specifically on the question of the state's proper role regarding the financial industry. In this way, the idea of the Great Depression has functioned as a paradoxical force, holding out a promise of ordering events into cycles and phases reminiscent of nature, while simultaneously unleashing into the world all the patternings of financial history we can imagine."

Amin Samman History in Financial Times (2019) p.68

Money Wisdom #469

Before long, this specific legal meaning [of the early Greek word krisis] was extended to cover 'electoral decisions, government resolutions, decisions of war and peace, death sentences and exile, the acceptance of official reports, and, above all government decisions as such [a legal 'krisis' was a decision by trial and judgement by a sovereign third party].  To the extent that such decisions went on one after the other, the juridico-political idea of krisis entailed a temporality of linear succession. Each present slips into the past to make way for the next. By contrast, the time of religious krisis was non-linear and entangled, designating an experience in the present of an event that had yet to actually occur. Kosselleck traces this back to the first Greek translation of the Old and New Testaments, in which judgement meant the one eventually delivered by God. In Christian theology, the Last Judgement is a prophecy: it will arrive for all but nobody knows when. Salvation therefore demands that one obey God's Word in the present, simultaneously anticipating and experiencing a final crisis for humanity. Kosselleck calls this a 'cosmic foreshortening of time', emphasizing how each present is marked by an eternal return of the future. (p.24)


Buckhardt also engages creatively with the temporality of religious crisis. This is evident in the epochal character he ascribes to "genuine" (as opposed to 'incomplete') crises. The former usher in 'an absolutely new form of life... ...founded on the destruction of what has gone before', whereas the latter begin with a 'deafening clamour' for change but end up yielding none of the 'vital transformations' their onset seems to demand. On this basis, Buckhardt is able to diagnose an ongoing age of crisis, wherein a graveyard of aborted crises bequeaths to the future 'a great general crisis' not unlike the Last Judgement. Crucially, though, because this crisis-to-come is rooted in an enduring human desire for 'great periodical changes' its resolution is not determined in advance but instead posed in the form of an open question to humanity itself. Crisis therefore names an entire epoch whose time is defined by the pressure for a different future - a secular prophecy of change, only robbed of the telos that would guarantee a fate for the world." (p.27)


"Crisis," Koselleck argues, "becomes a structural signature of modernity" because it gives free scope to the historical imagination - "it takes hold of old experiences and transforms them metaphorically in ways that create altogether new expectations." (p.28)


'In every crisis situation,' [Debray] writes, 'there is an interplay of darkness and clarity.
The objective conditions provide a background, a containing framework of propositions, which restricts the spectrum of possible initiatives or responses to events, but that background then seems to fade... ...So much so that the outline, the thing that can be seen by everyone, shifts from the objective to the subjective, the indeterminate, with the initiatives of a few characters suddenly thrust into the forefront of the stage.
In this visual metaphor. 'darkness' is the slipping away of certainty that accompanies the overdetermination of crisis, while 'clarity' is the shape given to such an event by those who speak out on it. Crucially, though, this later process is as much a process of political praxis as it is one of theory. Try as we might to 'untangle' the knot of crisis, what it demands is instead to be 'cut'. He continues 'We must try to untangle it in theory... ...but only so as to be able to make practical decisions... ...[based on] resolutely simple, even simplistic-seeming, formulae for action.' In other words, it is only through the strategic reductionism of social agents that crises can ever be envisioned and resolved in one way or another. (pp37-38)

Amin Samman Crisis Thinking - History in Financial Times (2019) pages 24, 27, 28 and 37-38