Bankers 'caused credit crisis for kicks' - Telegraph
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With a theory that will alarm Business Secretary Vince Cable, Dr Paul Crosthwaite of Cardiff University has argued that bankers and other investors took on excessive risks not just to make money but for the "desire" and "exhilaration" of destruction.
"For its participants and speculators alike, the crash is not simply an object of fear or anxiety, or even of mere fascination, but also of an inchoate but urgent desire," Dr Crosthwaite wrote in an article published in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
In Blood on the Trading Floor: Waste, Sacrifice and Death in Financial Crises, Dr Crosthwaite claims his anthropological study of investors and traders found evidence of an element of masochistic satisfaction in running up losses.
He maintains that the crisis was the modern equivalent to the traditional Native American practice of "potlatch", a ritual ceremony in which the chiefs of rival tribes competed to destroy ever greater quantities of their own possessions as an expression of power and importance.
But in one fillip for the Business Secretary, Dr Crosthwaite says his research strengthens the case for tighter City regulation. It's human nature: the bankers could do it again.
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Apparently I've got access to the full version of this. Notes:
1. I'm bored of Freud at the moment. I expect that in a few months'/years' time I'll run across something that'll make me think that he had something after all, but honestly, "the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion", wtf is that even supposed to mean? Where's your proof?! MY NUTS!!!1!! Sorry, little carried away there.
2. Marcel Mauss: underrated, including by me. I've never actually read one of his books, but I think they sound really interesting. On the other hand, I think that the potlatch thing is an over-used trope in the social sciences (see also under: the Milgram experiments, anything ever written by Pierre Bordieu). So a wierdo does something wierd. You don't need to try and make something deep and abiding out of it. I dunno, it must have been novel at some point, but now it just comes across as trite and smug.
3. Baudrillard: "Extermination and death, is the form of the symbolic itself". And the horse you rode in on, bitch. Seriously, either prove some of this load of old cobblers or STFU.
4. Lyotard: "Death is not an alternative [to this way of life], it is a part of it, it attests to the fact that there is jouissance in it, the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed [ils ont joui de] the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening." I'd like to set this guy down in, say, the slaughterhouse district in Manchester around 1870 and have him say exactly that. No doubt he would derive a sense of hysterical, masochistic enjoyment from the result. Which is nice.
5. "More fanciful and contentious, no doubt, is the affinity suggested by the eerie resemblance of traders in the midst of a bear market – heads flung back or cast forward, faces contorted, hands lifted as if in prayer, eyes transfixed on the vast screens that preside overthe trading floor – to photographs of a young man undergoing the Chinese ritual execution known as lingchi, or the ‘‘death by a thousand cuts,’’ photographs which became fetishes for Georges Bataille, who detected in the transfigured expression of the man the indivisible blend of suffering and ecstasy that is the essence of expenditure."
Yeah, well I've seen those photos too and you people are all fucking nuts.
Has to be said, a great deal of the time the social sciences bring out the worst in academia.
Bankers 'caused credit crisis for kicks'
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