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