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Financial affect
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Martijn Konings
a

Department of Political Economy, The University of Sydney,

Sydney, Australia
Published online: 04 Dec 2013.

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To cite this article: Martijn Konings (2014) Financial affect, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of
Social Theory, 15:1, 37-53, DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2013.864689
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Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 2014

Vol. 15, No. 1, 3753, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2013.864689

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Financial affect
Martijn Konings*

Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 03:01 27 December 2014

Department of Political Economy, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Critical theory has often remained unduly beholden to accounts of capitalist
development that emphasize its homogenizing effects and the tendency of its nancial
logic to destroy the complexity and organic connectedness of human life. This paper
suggests that we may move beyond the impasse of this style of critique by analyzing
money, capitalisms quintessential sign, as an icon a sign that represents a
paradoxical coincidence of potentiality and contingency and so organizes a particular
logic of affective investments. Whereas critical theory tends to associate capitalist
development with the decline of affect, this essay suggests that a more paradoxical
logic is at work, one whereby economic rationalization generates an affective logic
that is distinctly secular and performative but no less powerful than traditional modes
of rule and in fact commands a paradoxical binding force. The paper situates the
notion of iconicity vis--vis some key notions in modern social theory and proceeds
to examine its emotional and psychological modalities through an engagement with
theorizations of narcissism, a paradoxical affective structure that deploys its reexive
powers to elaborate its attachment to a sign that it experiences as problematic. It then
explores the logic of nancial affect through a selective analysis of neoliberalisms
public culture of self-help, moving beyond a focus on disciplinary individualization
to emphasize the associative production of emotional investments. The paper
concludes with some considerations on the political implications of the analysis.
Keywords: affect; nance; icon; narcissism; neoliberalism

Introduction
Present-day money is a highly paradoxical entity. It is fully dematerialized and only exists
through myriad symbolic forms; yet this imaginary multiplicity composes a quality of
moneyness that has an undeniable objective power. A curious combination of ction and
fact, it is the ultimate virtual sign, lacking any inherent substance yet exerting a strong
organizational effect on the patterns of economic life. The paradoxical character of
money epitomizes a duality that is at the heart of the experience of contemporary capitalism.
On the one hand, the rate at which signs are produced and differentiated increases continuously, and the resulting networks are characterized by an unprecedented degree of contingency and complexity. On the other hand, the degree to which human action has become
consolidated around core capitalist institutions is unprecedented: few aspects of our lives
remain unaffected by their commensurating logic. The growing plasticity of modern sociality has been accompanied by an extraordinary concentration of authority in key signiers
and institutions. Contemporary social theory has hardly failed to register the co-existence of

*Email: martijn.konings@sydney.edu.au
2013 Taylor & Francis

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M. Konings

these opposed movements, and in many critical quarters the interest in opposing the textualism of poststructuralist theory and cultural studies to the materialism of political
economy has largely waned. But it is nonetheless not always clear how we should envisage
the relation between these different images of neoliberal life and how we might critically
articulate their interaction. It often seems that, insofar as we remain committed to the formulation of a distinctly critical perspective, we have little choice but to revert to an
approach that depicts the logic of capital as precisely destructive of such relational complexity. In a move that is not always fully accounted for, the pluralism of capitalist life is
downplayed or its reality questioned for instance, by drawing a distinction between
real [ ] as opposed to commodied cultural divergence and emphasizing the reductionism
of all beings and all cultural differences to a common commodied form (Harvey 2000,
83). In this sense, the critique of capitalism has remained beholden to what we might
term a capitalism-as-leveller narrative, an account of capitalist development that emphasizes its tendency to undermine the organic diversity and connectedness of social life and to
replace it with the disenchanting, homogenizing rationality of the cash nexus. In such a
perspective, modern capitalisms core institutions feature as particular kinds of signs: as
idols, fetishes that acquire authority only through the absorption of our vital, differencegenerating powers, removing personality and meaning from the public sphere while
dumbing down our emotional lives. This specically modern kind of idolatry generates
reications, abstract and lifeless forces that play havoc with our humanity.
The capitalism-as-leveller critique is usually carefully qualied. After all, we are well
aware that the practical experience of capitalist life involves much more than the irrational
attachment to lifeless signs or the listless interaction of anomic characters. Moreover, it can
be a politically uncomfortable narrative, easily shading over into communitarian lamentations of the erosion of communal ties (Putnam 2001) or even a more neoconservative critique of hedonistic individualism (Bork 1997). But it has proved very hard to break fully
with the image of capitalism as a levelling force: it often seems that, to the extent that
we acknowledge that the multiplicity of capitalist life is real, we would seem to lose
ground or rationale for critique. With intellectual efforts oriented by this concern, we
often pay insufcient attention to the paradoxical simultaneity of unity and multiplicity:
the capitalism-as-leveller narrative does not allow us to grasp the logic that permits these
movements to exist not at each others expense but precisely as dynamics that sustain
and fuel each other. This dynamic is akin to a pivoting movement, whereby a centrifugal
logic of growing complexity is tethered to a central point of anchorage that ensures the operation of a centripetal force. Life under neoliberal capitalism is somewhat of a strange loop
(Hofstadter 2007): an outward movement of variegation that revolves around a stable point.
The latter may be seen as a strange attractor (J. Dean 2009, 68), which attracts not in a
straight, parsimoniously organized fashion but permits for a tremendous degree of complexity and contingency.
This paper suggests that we can shed some light on this paradoxical aspect of modern
capitalism by considering its key sign not as an idol but as an icon. An icon is a sign that
incorporates and bears out its meaning, even though this meaning remains complex and
diffuse. It embodies a quality that we readily recognize as being at the core of our experience of contemporary life, a spirit that we readily intuit but may have considerable difculty
verbalizing or conceptually delineating. Modern-day money is like that. When asked to
dene what money is, we typically do not have a good answer and tend to associate it
with various seemingly heterogeneous things and experiences. But in practice we have
no difculty working with it as a highly effective standard, easily grasping its unity
across myriad manifestations (Konings 2011). As Alexander puts it, To be iconically

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conscious is to understand without knowing (2008, 782). At the limit we may even be
unable to identify any particular material carrier for the sign. An icon then becomes a vanishing point, lacking a specic substance but serving as a virtual point around which patterns of connections are organized. The icon organizes a paradoxical logic of unity and
multiplicity, commanding a power that is both centripetal and centrifugal (Mondzain
2005, 146). It is a specically secular source of authority: its symbolic force does not
derive from any claim to transcendent status, but it operates immanently, through chains
of connections situated in the here-and-now. It has no existence independent of the contingent performances through which it is produced, yet nonetheless exerts a strong organizing
effect and serves as the condition of possibility of those very performances.
The icon, then, is an affective sign (cf. Pentcheva 2006, 651). The notion of affect has
become a focal point for much recent social theorizing, as a non-essentialist way to think the
process whereby a sign gathers force and becomes generative, not merely epistemic and
representational but practically efcacious (e.g. Ahmed 2004; Clough 2008; Massumi
2002; Venn 2010). Affective force is virtual (Grossberg 2010, 250), never inherent in the
object itself but always deriving from the way in which it punctualizes complex patterns
of relations. This hints at a dynamic that is more paradoxical than suggested by a
money-as-leveller narrative, which associates the process of capitalist rationalization and
secularization with the decline of affect. That is, it suggests a logic whereby, as the sign
abandons claims to transcendent status and becomes a mere product of secular relations,
its capacity for affecting is not attenuated but transformed and possibly enhanced. The
culture of nancialized capitalism does not entail a attening of the public sphere and a
growing one-dimensionality of the human character, but produces its own, distinctly
secular, forms of enchantment and spirituality (Bennett 2001; McCarraher 2005) and a particular kind of public sentimentality (Berlant 1997).1 As a curious combination of mere
symbol and pure potentiality, money elicits emotional responses not through any claim
to magic, but by serving as a privileged point of entry into the contingent multiplicity of
modern life, by embodying a capacity to access difference. The icon plays on the hope
that accessing its powers may enable us not to leave behind our earthly existence but to
access a perfected version of the self that we already have; on the prospect of perfected
immanence rather than transcendence. But if the icon elicits hopeful anticipation, this
exists in a relation of ongoing interaction with the anxiety and resentment it provokes.
Our efforts to realize the promise of the icon invariably fall short, but such failures have
a curious way of intensifying our attachment to it. The public sentimentality organized
by moneys iconicity is one of cruel optimism, a relation of attachment to compromised
conditions of possibility (Berlant 2006, 21), a strange loop whereby capitalist subjectivity
is thrown back and forth between the anxiety and promise of power (McManus 2011).
This paper, then, is emphatically not motivated by an aim to offer a formal semiotic
analysis: simply to classify money as a particular kind of sign would be to obscure precisely
the paradoxical process of signication associated with it, the fact that the icon so readily
points beyond itself, metonymically expressing the character of a complex constellation of
associations. More precisely formulated, the issue is not the role of the icon itself but the
paradoxical logic of an affectively charged structure of iconicity. The icon itself remains
invisible, has no inherent authority, and is fully dependent for its powers on the relational
networks in which it is embedded; but in this way it nonetheless serves as the pivot of a
logic that becomes more deeply and organically embedded in the basic structure of our personality and character. It is not external or transcendent, but organic and connected (Ghosh
2011). It is this connectivity and its modalities that a capitalism-as-leveller narrative is not
sufciently attuned to, as it sets too much store by the claims of the dismal science, the idea

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of an autonomization of utilitarian principles and the consequent fragmentation of social

and public life. This paper analyzes select aspects of capitalisms affective economy
through an exploration of the structure of iconicity. The next section situates the notion
of iconicity vis--vis some key notions in modern social theory. In particular, it aims to
show how we might pursue the insights of Foucaultian theory regarding the immanence
of power without reproducing, as it has been prone to, key aspects of a capitalism-as-leveller narrative. The following section analyzes the emotional and psychological modalities of
our investment in the icon through an engagement with theorizations of narcissism, a paradoxical subjective structure that deploys its reexive powers to elaborate its attachments to
a sign that it experiences as problematic. The third section examines the modalities of narcissisms cruel optimism through an analysis of the conceptual and affective structure of the
neoliberal culture of self-help and advice. The conclusion offers some thoughts on the
implications of the analysis presented here for political criticism.
Situating iconicity
The immanent character of modern power has been one of the central concerns of Foucaultian theory (M. Dean 1999; Miller and Rose 2008; Nadesan 2008). It views power not as
externally imposed but as operating through numerous decentralized practices: order and
authority work not on the basis of an original, sovereign meaning but through more
diffuse networks of connections situated at the level of everyday life. Modern power is
bio-power: it has little use for anomic individuals overwhelmed by the forces of modernity
but produces specic forms of life. The Foucaultian analysis of neoliberal capitalism has
accordingly stressed that recent decades have seen the emergence of regimes of conduct
that serve to sustain a thickening web of disciplinary governmentality, permitting the thoroughgoing penetration of power into the routines and habits of our conduct. Modern power
is more permissive and institutionally limited than traditional forms of sovereign authority,
but at the same time it is more deeply and organically rooted in the structure of our subjectivity. Such Foucaultian insights push us towards a way of thinking hegemonic signs as
iconic in nature, as productively implicated in the constitution of subjectively meaningful
identities and practices.
However, Foucaultian theory has often elaborated this key insight in a way that continues to associate capitalist development with the rationalization of conduct and the emergence of more homogenized practices (Martin 2007, 134; Vrasti 2011). The subjects that
neoliberal hegemony produces are seen as entrepreneurial and responsible, regulating
their conduct through calculative techniques that render it predictable and governable.
The constructive effects of neoliberal discourses are conceived as being relatively
clean: if normalization is seen to operate through the production and exclusion of dysfunctional elements, this negative moment is seen to remain somewhat at the margins, something that can be othered with relative ease (Isin 2004). In that sense, bio-power as
conceived by Foucaultian accounts is still a little lifeless, overly premised on peoples faithful enactment of liberalisms formal rationality (Tie 2004; Watson 1999), reecting a
residual type of Kantianism (Braidotti 2007, 19) that prevents a fuller break with conventional sociological understandings of social constitution. The emphasis on the predictable
effects of authority downplays what is specic about capitalist institutions i.e. the fact
that, compared to more traditional forms of power, they make available many more positions and performances that permit for the construction of differentiated forms of subjectivity. Jodi Dean (2009, 63), drawing on Zizek, captures this in terms of the decline of
symbolic efciency: modern subjects have considerable distance from ofcial discursive

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norms and roles, and they do not simply replicate or fashion themselves after the gures of
authority. The intermediations between our selves and hegemony are more manifold and
uneven, volatile and unpredictable, than the Foucaultian portrayal of the well-administered
governmental subject suggests. Indeed, it is precisely because power works in such differential, exciting, even seemingly chaotic ways that it manages to reach into the furthest
reaches of our personality. But this nevertheless involves a movement of real (rather than
supercial or commodied) differentiation, which we cannot just assume will be neatly
aligned with the requirements of hegemony. That is, we have a strange loop, a paradoxical
combination of centrifugal and centripetal motion.2
We can clarify the operations of this strange loop by exploring how we tend to picture
the difference between modern and traditional forms of authority. Traditional power tended
to be ascriptive, making available certain kinds of roles and requiring that subjects enact
them (J. Mitchell 1998, 323). The efcacy of traditional forms of power was premised
on their ability to enforce compliance with the overt meaning of their norms. We might
say they required idolization: active, positive endorsement of key symbols, with little
room for questioning or deviation. But the ip side of such a regime of strict adherence
was that its ability to constitute the practical rationalities of everyday life was limited:
once the performance of a role was over, the effects of power ceased to operate. Capitalist
power, by contrast, does not demand positive symbolic identication or the literal performance of strictly dened roles. Instead, we get to differentiate, to exibly recombine existing
structures and so produce new meanings. Modern subjects draw on the various roles, connections, and perspectives that the liberal public sphere makes available, and in this way the
construction of self becomes a fully interactive and relational process. Mead (1934)
described this as a specically modern process of role-taking: not the assumption of a
well-dened, pre-given role but a more complex process whereby we assess the congurations of social life from different vantage points, develop capacities for maneuvering social
life, and in the process build our self as a complex constellation of afnities, beliefs,
capacities, and interests.
The modern self becomes a much more thoroughly social self (Mead 1934): it is precisely because social inuences are no longer authoritatively imposed that they tend to
become more deeply embedded in the basic structure of our personality. Modern socialization does not involve the linear internalization of norms but is a more subtle and relational
process whereby we develop subjectively meaningful associations to particular signs, allow
those chains of associations to sink in, and so become sensitized and responsive to these
signs. It is precisely the plasticity of modern power that permits it to reach more deeply
into the core of who we are and its signs to acquire an objectivity that is organic. This
entails a transformation of public signs: less and less idols, dependent on our willingness
to forego our own interests and identity, they become icons, generated through endless
series of pragmatic engagements and organically allied to our differentiated subjectivities.
The emergence of iconic authority, then, is not a process whereby discursive norms come to
obviate or pre-empt the constitutive effects of subjectivation, but involves the operation of
strange loops, movements of variegation, and individuation that pivot on strange attractors
of affective investment (J. Dean 2009, 67). An icon is not an external authority, but a sign
invested with subjective meaning, the public guration of our emotional afliations. It
cannot claim an existence that is independent from the performances through which it is
produced, but it nonetheless comes to gure as the condition of possibility for those very
performances and exerts a curiously strong organizing force on their conguration. Crucially, then, the process whereby the self becomes a more thoroughly social self corresponds
to a process whereby the public sphere becomes more highly personalized, populated by

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M. Konings

signs that subjects are organically connected to. Far from destroying publicness, money
becomes the pivot for an intimate public sphere (Berlant 1997, 1), an intensely interactive
space lled with strangely attractive signs. Contemporary nance offers rich and highly
emotionally charged discourses, a public sphere that organizes a particular social
sentimentality.
The logic of strange attraction has to do with the icons potentiality, its unquestioned
ability to provide access to the diverse connections of capitalist life. Whatever our problems
and objectives, our performances are more likely to work if we can connect them to the icon
and so invoke its unquestioned validity, i.e. if we can link up to intuitively plausible signs
that readily command belief. The icon thus comes to function as an obligatory passage
point (Callon 1986, 205), the condition of possibility for our ability to access the resources,
roles, and competencies that we need to solve our problems. Its universality is the potentiality of nodal points in networks, an ability to trigger chains of connections and generate a
variety of effects. Money is a privileged access point into the multiplicity and complexity of
social life; not a vehicle of alienating disenchantment or dreadful homogeneity, but a source
of universal validity that opens up to subtle shades of meaning. It does not suck the life out
of us but precisely holds out tremendous promise. That is of course not to deny that money
plays a very signicant role in the production of the discontent of the modern subject: it is a
source of anxiety no matter how much we have of it (Hnaff 2010). The point is just that
moneys dark side does not necessarily negate its binding force: the discontents of capitalist
life are interwoven with the more alluring aspects of money. Here we should be alert to iconicitys ideological operation: an iconic sign is composed through an endless series of pragmatically generated senses, afnities, suggestions, and metaphors that involve as many
points of transformation and differentiation. The icon can present itself as the solution to
our anxiety because its mode of signication is not transparent, deploys connections that
have sunk into our sense of self and are not readily available to our conscious cognition.
Although money is a source of tremendous frustration and anxiety, it never fails to
excite and motivate us. The anxiety that it engenders paradoxically only strengthens our
attachment to it. It is such ups and downs of hope and disappointment rather than a disciplined pursuit of indifferent utility that is characteristic of our nancial experience (cf.
Crosthwaite 2010; Lazzarato 2004, 191).
Icon and affect
The exploration of the affective structure of iconicity can take as a useful starting-point the
optimistic vision offered by early progressive thinkers such as Mead and Cooley. They were
very impressed with the plasticity of modern power, where individualization and socialization [ ] proceed[ed] hand in hand, in a wholesome social life, each enriching the other
(Cooley 1899, 221). Modern society was seen to function on the basis of immanently generated principles of organization, mechanisms set up to facilitate and improve the human
interactions of which they were born. Modern power was no longer primarily constraining,
but something more plastic that could be made to adapt itself to the particular circumstances
of our lives. Veblens work provides a useful contrast to these optimistic assessments of
modern institutions. He also discerned the emergence of an interactive form of subjectivity
that related to others and itself through a much wider variety of roles, perspectives, and connections. But he emphasized that this did not automatically translate into a comfortable
pluralism. On the contrary: the ample opportunities for differentiation offered by capitalist
life promoted a logic of invidious comparison (Veblen [1899] 2007, 10). The subject
depicted by Veblen was characterized by a narcissistic character structure (Mestrovic

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2003): intensely concerned with others opinions yet incapable of genuine empathy, and
forever preoccupied with its own identity yet incapable of generating a secure sense of
self. Modern subjects were inexibly stuck on strange attractors that are sources of constant
misery.
Veblen was not really inclined to plumb the depths of these attachments, and in the end
he was harshly judgmental of the subjects fetishistic attachment to irrational signs. Other
twentieth-century theorists of modern narcissism have been more alert to the relational
complexity of the narcissistic character. Riesman (1950, 47) felt that Veblens emphasis
on pride and selshness had prevented him from exploring this peculiar aspect of
modern society in greater depth and from formulating a convincing answer to the question
of why people so stubbornly persisted in the behavior that was responsible for their discontent. Riesman argued that the narcissistic character was driven not by pathological forms of
self-absorption, but by an anxiety immanent in the patterns of modern social life. The social
self as portrayed by Riesman was a complex relational construction and therefore often
quite unaware of what went on in the inner depths of its emotional life, unable to pinpoint
the afnities and routines that were causing it trouble. Incapable of zeroing in on the core
problem, the subject becomes oriented to the alleviation of symptoms, seeking access to
supportive relationships that make its anxiety manageable. At this point, for its own pragmatic reasons, the subject turns back to the source of anxiety for solutions: as it seeks to
access resources, perspectives, and performances that permit it to attenuate the intensity
of its anxiety, it quickly nds that its chances for doing so will be greatly enhanced if it
can associate its self to hegemony and invoke the legitimacy and authority of its icons.
And so the source of its anxiety now comes to gure as a source of solutions. Re-engaging
the very norms, symbols, and institutions that are at the root of its problems, the subject
dampens the intensity of its anxiety by sustaining the mechanisms that produce it. In this
way, its emotional economy comes to be governed by a logic of wounded attachments
(Brown 1995, 52), shaping its identity around and becoming ever more deeply invested
in its anxiety.
Crucially, this return to the icon is not an act of despair or resignation. Lasch (1979),
too, saw anxiety as a signicant driving force but at the same time placed great emphasis
on the positive lure of capitalist signs: modern narcissism is driven precisely by a positive
concern with truth and authenticity. We perceive not a public sphere of inanimate objects or
mere instruments for one-up-manship, but opportunities for the improvement of our self.
The logic of iconicity may not promise, like idols do, to make problems disappear
through sheer magic, but it holds out the prospect of attaining personal completeness: it
extends the promise that we may access mechanisms of differentiation and so assemble
an identity that is more authentic than the one we currently have. If this preoccupation
with authenticity constitutes a distinctly secular imaginary, this does not make it any less
affective or compelling in crucial respects, more so, because the promise it holds out is
not that we might leave our earthly self behind but rather that we may hope to nd an
anxiety-free version of it. The promise of authenticity plays on the promise of an afterlife
in ones own life (Vatter 2009, par. 22, interpreting Cooper 2009), the possibility of having
a perfected version of our existing character, our present attachments and identity without
the problems and anxieties they produce. Paradoxically, then, the role-taking self ends up
being a real believer in the idea of a core self, something inside of her/him that has the
truth about her/him yet has proved elusive (cf. Chidester 2005, 227). And in this way,
the secular affair of self-making becomes imbued with deep spiritual sentiments (Kaag
2009). If our attempts to secure such authenticity invariably fall short, the anxiety that
this produces typically motivates precisely a renewed engagement with the icon. The

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M. Konings

narcissistic character is caught in a strange loop of anxiety and false hope. This logic is epitomized by money, which is always a problem and always itself the solution to the problem,
iconically representing both lack and completeness. The logic of iconicity provides compensations for the authentic experience it forever fails to deliver.
In Riesmans mid-twentieth-century appraisal this logic of anxious attachment was not
altogether a bad thing, as he saw the inarticulate discontent generated by modern socialization as returning primarily in the guise of a renewed yearning for social approval and the cooperative behavior that people adopted in securing this. Riesmans narcissists were much
more agreeable characters than the self-absorbed hedonists described by Veblen: somewhat
supercial and occasionally insincere, but also eager to please, exible and accommodating. The subject was simply too busy warding off insecurity and ingratiating itself to
actively hurt or exploit others. The limitations of this account were illustrated by Erich
Fromms understanding of the narcissistic character structure. Like Riesman, Fromm understood the anxiety of the modern subject not as a pathological deviation but as an immanent
aspect of social order. But, far less convinced that the effects of status anxiety were mostly
benign, he nonetheless identied a pathology of normalcy (Fromm 1955, 11), emphasizing the manipulative insincerity of the marketing character (Fromm [1976] 2007, 122) and
its tendency to stab others in the back when given a chance. If, like Riesman, Fromm understood the operation of modern society in terms of the ongoing compensation for the experience of insecurity and inauthenticity, he saw this compensatory logic in much less
wholesome terms and placed much greater emphasis on the dimension of power and
control. The modern subject holds the effects of anxiety at bay not merely through
smiles and good cheer, but also by meanwhile associating its identity to hegemonic structures and constructing its own base of social control.
Fromm (1941, 1955, 1973) captured this in terms of the sadomasochistic structure of the
narcissistic character. To think of the signs of modern power as relational and interactive
means that they organize a process of empowerment and powerlessness, and that socialization into its operations involves the development of organic afnities to the afiction and
suffering of the effects of control. The modern character emerges not through communal
deliberation but through the logic of strange emotional attractions, the perverse clustering
patterns of its associations. For Fromm, public signs, norms, and institutions were the
symbols around which mechanisms of control are organized: they are not reasons but
rationalizations, idealized representations of our affective investments. The concept of
sadomasochism, as the paradigmatic structure of strange attraction, draws attention to the
fact that social networks can only be stable if subjects enjoy the wielding of and submission
to power effects. Capitalism capitalizes on our inability to locate the sources of our discontent and enjoins us to address our anxiety by passing its effects on to others. Its compensations and therapies are not innocent, neutral, or benevolent: they typically allow us to
solve our own problems by causing trouble for others. This makes the modern character
a paradoxical mixture of masochistic and sadistic impulses, libidinally invested in both
the submission to and active participation in power (Chancer 1992).
Crucially, then, the process whereby performances and identities acquire validity (or
not) is not a purely conceptual affair, a matter of non-committal (dis)approval, but involves
practical judgment and the adoption of an emotional stance: it is a fully affective process
that distributes empathy and modulates social feeling. The role-taking through which we
build our identities prominently involves the judgment of others roles: we identify with
others in highly selective ways. Some positions are deemed illegitimate, not deserving of
our empathy, beyond the range of perspectives that we feel deserve our consideration
(McCarthy 2007, 28). There often is something resentful about this: it does not involve

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an innocent bias stemming from a mere lack of knowledge, but a prejudice that is maintained in a more or less willful manner: at a certain level we know that if we were to
learn more about the subjectivities that we refuse to validate, we might well become
more understanding, more empathetic, more capable of identifying with the position that
we refuse to see as a legitimate one and this is precisely why we suppress such knowledge.
That is, the performative logic of social construction involves disavowal (Butler 2010: 159).
When we experience the problematic aspects of our investments, we do not just simply
deny the existence of a problem, but engage in externalization, locate its sources in
others behavior, imagining a fetishistic irrationality to which we can contrast our own practices. We implicitly, experientially know that there is more than irrationality to our attachments, but accusing others of precisely this can serve as source of discursive traction,
cultural capital, and social control. The politics of anxiety thus involves a paradoxical
back-and-forth between on the one hand an awareness of the contingency of social life,
the complexity that pervades it, and of the ease with which actors get lost in its labyrinthine
networks, and on the other hand a forceful assertion there is no excuse that would render
comprehensible or relatable the predicament in which the traumatized subject nds itself.
The narcissist tends to have a judgmental character, prone to criticizing others for problems that it is not itself free of.
Neoliberal affect
This paradoxical affective structure of iconicity and its generative properties have been
crucial to the making of neoliberal, nancialized capitalism. The crisis of the 1970s and
the widespread disappointment with capitalist order never immunized capitalist subjects
to the affective force of money but precisely charged the logic of its strange attraction
(cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). The era of nancialization that this ushered in has
seen the full unfolding of the iconic character of money, a dematerialized dollar-sign that
punctualizes increasingly complex networks of relations. Of constitutive importance in
this process was the growth of a public culture organized around the rejection of progressive
liberalism, with ascendant neoliberal discourses depicting Americas problems as a result of
the way its permissiveness and paternalism had corrupted the republic. Far from cynically
advocating a calculating possessive individualism, neoliberalism has presented itself as a
means to restore a republican ethos of personal independence and self-help, a redemptive
austerity that repudiates decadent expectations of free lunches and hand-outs. Accessing
an authentic self, these discourses counseled, required embracing the chastening effects
of tough love, the purifying effect of austerity. Neoliberalism not only instructed
people to do more with less but also gave them permission to impose such discipline on
others, holding out the prospect of spiritual improvement through the harsh judgment of
self and other. In this way, the neoliberal imaginary made productive use of the modern
selfs resentments and discontents (Konings 2009; 2012).
The alliance of neoliberal capitalism to a civic sphere of cruel optimism is apparent in
the rise of a public culture of nancial advice and self-help, an industry that has expanded
dramatically since the 1970s. Foucaultian perspectives have tended to depict neoliberal
education and advice as a set of depoliticizing discourses that socialize subjects into privatized risk management and foster an ethos of individual accountability (Rimke 2000), and in
this way they have tended to reproduce a capitalism-as-leveller narrative that does insufcient justice to the complex emotional structure of neoliberal discourses and their ability to
engender a distinctive capitalist spirit. That is to say, the past decades have seen not the
depoliticization of nancial questions but precisely the growing prominence of affectively

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charged public discourses that address our issues with money and shape our personal
relation to it in intricate ways (Martin 2002). This is perhaps especially visible in the
extent to which the nancial self-help ethos has become allied to celebrity culture
(Decker 1997), and a useful point of entry for understanding the affective logic at work
is a recurrent theme on one of neoliberal Americas key cultural institutions, the Oprah
Winfrey show: namely, the optimistic notion that money is within us and that our
ability to command it is merely dependent on our willingness to live authentically. In
this view, our possession of money is a measure of our spiritual worth, a sign that we
have taken responsibility for our life and actualized our true self (Lofton 2006; Peck
2008).3 It is important to appreciate the element of experiential truth that is articulated
here, which is at the basis of the rhetorical force of such statements: whereas in earlier
times the notion that we possess of an immanent connection to money would have been
incomprehensible, the claim that we possess an internal connection to a secularized, dematerialized, and invisible icon is intuitively plausible (even when we are quite critical of such
ideas, they do not seem absurd to us). But if contemporary self-help culture accurately
intuits our connectedness to money, it allies this awareness to a moment of cruelty. After
all, we perfectly well know that even though we may nd ourselves strangely attracted
to money, the causality of this relationship cannot be easily reversed. By insisting that
we can partake of moneys iconic powers through mere intention, neoliberal self-help
turns a blind eye to the complex mediations through which moneys iconicity is constituted.
Oprah insists that we acknowledge our connection to money but simultaneously asks us to
engage in disavowal, suppressing what we intuitively know about the operation of this
connectedness.
This allows self-help to play a highly productive role in the interactive economy of
resentful externalization and narcissistic judgmentality. Increasingly, to question publicly
whether nancial empowerment is available on a universal basis is to show oneself to be
small-minded, dependent and entitled, a subject lacking in spiritual worth (Aldred 2002;
McGee 2005, 523). In this way, neoliberal capitalisms ethos facilitates disavowal of
our complicity in the production of suffering while allowing us to claim responsibility
for our fortune; it urges us to feel responsible for things that we have little inuence on
while letting us off the hook when it comes to things we are responsible for. This is
what the practice of responsibilization involves: not an effective individualization of
risk or a tighter connection between acts and consequences (which is how the Foucaultian
literature sometimes depicts this process (Shamir 2008)), but the development of intuitive
comfort with this logic of empathy redistribution (Martin 2002, 163). The subject assumes
responsibility for its own powerlessness and is assured that it is doing the right thing in exercising power. The narcissistic character always feels that it is doing too much, taking
responsibility for things that are not its own, aiming to live up to an image that is too
demanding. And in a very important sense this is true: it does hold itself to a standard
that it can never live up to. It is just that such complaints serve as a cover for refusal to
take responsibility in areas where it does have agency.
Crucially, the denial of empathy is not the same as a lack of concern: resentfulness
means that we are often intensely concerned with subjectivities that we absolutely refuse
to understand. The disavowal at work is not the result of real ignorance, but a constitutive
component of our performances. It is not that some problematic experiences are not
acknowledged at all, but rather that they implicitly are acknowledged and deemed
unworthy of empathy (cf. Foster 1996). We do not ignore them so much as we actively delegitimate them; we are able to consider others viewpoint but just wont (a kind of perverse
empathetic identication), and tell the sufferers to snap out of their problems. This sadistic

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streak of neoliberal nancial governmentality is richly present in the contemporary self-help

ethos, and especially in programs like the Dr Phil show, a spinoff from the Oprah Winfrey
show that is dedicated to psychological well-being but centrally features nancial issues.
The show is structured on the principle of judgmentality: the emphasis is on getting
guests to narrate their problems and then pass judgment by separating the deserving
from the undeserving. Even when a guest makes no attempt to justify her/his behavior,
Dr Phil will insist that some kind of account be offered; as soon as the guest offers some
thoughts on what might have moved her/him to display that particular behavior, Dr Phil
intervenes with a bullishly delivered comment such as But are you here to justify your behavior or to change it? and proceeds to ll at least one segment of the show with the spectacle of a punitive public put-down. Improper conduct is characterized by a tendency to
resist or question the pressures produced by prevailing power structures (for instance, by
citing such circumstances as unemployment), whereas proper, authentic conduct precisely
involves a willingness to suffer through the effects of authority and to respond with dedicated attempts to build up ones own basis for control.
Participating in performances such as Dr Phils permits us to pass judgment on issues in
others lives that we cannot or will not confront in our own, to judge harshly others choices
even (or especially) when we are not at all sure that we would handle things any better if we
were in their shoes. In this way, neoliberal self-help culture and the spirit it expresses serve
as a platform for externalization, providing access to the kind of ideological harmonizations
that allow us to spin our cruelty to self and others in terms of the building of a mature, spiritually accomplished character. Austerity, toughness to self and others through the judgmental withholding of empathy, is the road to redemption. This ethos is celebrated in the work
of self-help guru Suze Orman, who is a hard-nosed enforcer of the discipline of money but
does not associate this with somber submission but precisely with an upbeat spiritual attitude. In her book The Courage To Be Rich (a title presumably inspired by Paul Tillichs
([1952] 2000) The Courage To Be) she writes:
Whats keeping you from being rich? In most cases it is simply a lack of belief. In order to
become rich, you must believe that you can do it, and you must take the actions necessary
to achieve your goal. There is nothing wrong with wanting more. You do not need to feel
guilty for wanting more. If, however, you deny the possibility that you can have more,
youll be making yourself a victim of todays circumstances, and the cost will be your tomorrow. (Orman 1999, 5)

Ormans severity is redemptive, assuaging any anxiety we might feel about the disagreeable
alliances we have to forge in our pursuit of money and enjoining us to convert any sense of
guilt into the outwardly directed aggression that secures our wealth. Not to do so would
condemn us to idleness and jeopardize our self-realization.
Our affective investment in the Orman character is curious, since it projects a manic attitude that is impossible to miss. The fact that we are so interested in optimistic promises that
we readily perceive as fake and insincere suggests the extent to which we have come to
experience our persistence with the cycle of anxiety and optimism as itself an authenticating
activity. This involves a deployment of the capacity for disavowal, an ability not to let our
practical commitments be affected by things that we know. But it is important to understand
how this works more precisely, since it is not particularly accurate to say that we have
become cynics, i.e. people who stick with practices and to signiers they no longer
believe in, detaching their selves from the experience of discontent. This is the logic followed by Sloterdijks depiction of the atting of public life, a capitalist society populated

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M. Konings

by borderline melancholics, who can keep their symptoms of depression under control
(1987, 5). On this reading, the problem is that our practical behavior and commitments
have become immune to critical awareness: instead of doing something about our discontent, we distance ourselves from it by adopting an ironic stance. But the disavowals at work
here are not best grasped in terms of a decline of affect. The late capitalist subject is not so
much a unipolar melancholic but rather a more bipolar character caught in the dynamic of a
paradoxical strange loop, thrown back and forth between a sense of the problematic nature
of its attachments and optimistic faith in the iconic signs that publicly gure that emotional
structure in idealized form, between the anxious experience of a complex world without
guarantees and the intoxicating promise of pure potentiality.
The mechanism at work here can be claried with reference to a conversation on an
episode of the Oprah Show described by Peck (2008, 98). When an audience member
objects to the conceptualization of welfare dependence in terms of the lack of individual
responsibility, Oprahs expert guest responds with Its within you [ ] If you have a defeatist attitude about yourself, then the battles lost before you even start it. You have to think
positive. When the audience member again objects that this whole issue were talking
about is much more complicated than just nding this thing within yourself [ ].
Theres a lot of other things going on, much larger things, Oprah responds: But where
are you going to nd it, though, if it doesnt start with you? Let me ask you that.
Wheres it going to come from if it doesnt come from you? Oprahs question forces the
audience member to make a choice: to stick to his point and appear as lacking depth of character, as displaying an identity that is dependent and inauthentic; or to backtrack and
pretend that Oprahs one-line argument has convinced him. While the former course of
action would alienate him from Oprahs persona and its central position in the affective
structure of nancial iconicity, the latter could potentially give him access to the menu of
differentiated life solutions that are accessible through it. This logic applies even though
hardly anyone would think that there is real conviction in a sudden change of heart.
In this sense, it is certainly true that the legitimation of neoliberal capitalism often
follows an as if logic (Zizek 1989): it does not require active endorsement, positive identication with key signs. This is quite different from how things worked in more traditional
societies: if authorities gured out that your allegiances were not what you were professing
them to be, it intervened, often with brutal force. Modern power can afford to tolerate
doubts because our socialization into power already operates at a deeper level that typically
prevents such reservations from becoming consequential. That is quite different, however,
from saying that it operates through disaffection and cynicism. For instance, a visibly
tongue-in-cheek attitude is not a viable option: it would not have been acceptable for the
audience member to display an openly sarcastic attitude by saying something like Well,
ne, the amount of social pressure at work here doesnt really leave me with much of a
choice, so Im just going to pretend to agree with you. Such a response would not be acceptable because, by publicly articulating the mechanism of power, it blocks its effect on the
self: a refusal to profess faith in iconic optimism constitutes a refusal to play the game that
socializes us into power. Although neoliberal capitalism does not require true allegiance, we
do need to offer it something to work with: the act of as if is good enough insofar as it
displays a willingness to engage the mechanisms of power and so to become attuned to
its modalities, i.e. insofar as it provides hegemony with an opening, a point of leverage.
After all, when we enter into a particular style for instrumental reasons (e.g. start
wearing suits because that will help us to keep our job), we become socialized into the
cluster of unspoken afnities and associations that such signs iconically express. Our tendency to ironize this is precisely an attempt to cover up this process of subtle socialization:

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the ironic stance does not protect us from the tendency to develop organic afnities to hegemony but precisely allows it to proceed.
At work here is a logic that has recently been identied as nudging (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). In the aftermath of the nancial crisis, numerous stories about people having
entered into contractual arrangements they did not understand meant that the issue of nancial advice for ordinary people rose to the top of the political agenda. Prominent behavioral
economist Robert Shiller (2008, 126) proposed that all citizens be assigned their own Suze
Orman, but this dystopian vision of a disciplinary apparatus of nancial advice was distinctly unfeasible, owing to the obvious logistical difculties and prohibitive costs.
Thaler and Sunstein pointed out that it was not necessary to put people under the personal
tutelage of nancial advisers in order to get them to act in more desirable ways: all that is
required is a nudge in the right direction, a subtle hint, a kind invitation. Nudge theory,
which has gained considerable inuence in the upper regions of the Obama administration,
holds out the promise that all hegemony has to do is to set subjects on the right path, to get
them to engage the loop somewhere. Once they do so, the subtle process of performative
socialization is likely to take care of the rest, with subjects themselves activating afnities
that they may not even be aware of having, tapping into their muscle memory to nd the
appropriate performances. Nudging works because it can leverage off an existing affective
structure. And this provides a useful indication of where the limits to hegemonys acceptance of cynicism and disaffection lie: the rejection of and resistance to neoliberal institutions tend to be considered acceptable as long as we do not turn away altogether and
remain receptive to nudging. After all, the benevolent logic of nudging can be hard to
resist: we quite quickly feel rude rejecting kind gestures offered by people trying to help
us. Most of us reach a point, sooner or later, where we feel that further stonewalling is pointless, even distasteful: we forego opportunities in life, and our tenacity appears not as idealistic commitment but as nihilistic negativity. When we nally subscribe to some variety of
cruel optimism, we may well continue to sense that something is amiss; its just that we
dont know how to do something productive with it.
Conclusion
Progressive political perspectives have traditionally thought of anxiety and discontent as
points of leverage for transformative projects. One reason the capitalism-as-leveller critique
has proved so enduring is that it accounts for such sentiments in a way that is plausible and
accessible and so holds out the prospect of a productive political engagement. This essay
has sought to highlight the central importance of the paradoxical logic of wounded attachments in the way we relate to capitalisms core organizing signs, the fact that modern subjects are often disposed to respond to the deleterious effects of power through the active
elaboration of its strange loops. The way in which neoliberal capitalism has fully leveraged
this narcissistic logic means that progressive critiques of capitalisms corrosive effects are
less and less effective. Neoliberal discourses themselves already offer a much more powerful critique of whatever tendency we display to sink into anomie or disaffection. Whatever
we intend to express when we lament the decline of civic virtue and the rise of individualism, the traction that this critique nds will be on terms already established, and consequently the objective meaning and practical political valences of such narratives will be
quite different. The continuous reversion to a capitalism-as-leveller narrative is like an
attempt to disavow things that we experientially know about our relation to capitalist
nance in order to gain some traction, adopting, on an as if basis, some of the terms of
hegemonic discourse in order to get a hearing. What happens in this way is never what

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M. Konings

the social-democratic mind-set hopes for: the position we pick does not represent a stable
point of compromise but is a point of entry into an affective dynamic that reshapes our
orientation in subtle but highly consequential ways. Discursive traction is gained only by
actually playing the game of power and becoming emotionally attuned to its modalities;
and it is this very dynamic that inects our meanings around hegemonic signs. That the
engagement of hegemony has a way of boomeranging to undermine the very gains we
thought we made is hardly an abstract point: progressive political projects have become
caught up in a game whereby they make ever greater concessions for ever smaller gains.
If the affective structure of iconicity is characterized by a paradoxical suction power, it
also creates particular, distinctly modern opportunities. While the icon is set up to publicly
gure our subjective attachments in idealized form, it can be made to show up its negative
moment, to put on public display its lack of coherence, the anxiety that pervades it
(Delpech-Ramey 2007). It is this possibility that is exploited by the growing fake news
industry (The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Onion, etc.), which specializes in bringing out the absurdities at work in the neoliberal public sphere, highlighting the things we
sense or know but usually cannot or will not articulate (Reilly 2013). This offers no guarantees (Jacobs and Wild 2013), and there is always the possibility that it may become yet
another platform for the kind of ironization that permits our hegemonic socialization to
proceed. But by widening the eld of political possibilities, it opens up the possibility of
a spectacle that engages us not because it plays on our sadomasochistic afnities to
power but because it plays on our unease with it, creating new points of leverage and opportunities to exert transformative effects on the structure of our afnities. This is perhaps
where the signicance of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement lies. Instead of allowing disillusionment and anger to engender a logic of wounded attachments and cruel optimism, it has sought disengagement. The strength of OWS is precisely what so many
commentators (progressives and conservatives alike) have dismissed or condemned as its
weakness: the refusal to articulate a program of positive demands or to appoint leaders
that might do so on its behalf. It purposely resists the invitation of the nudge, denying hegemony the opening that it seeks and needs. It bluntly declares that it is not interested in a seat
at the negotiating table, in participating in public fantasizing about a more civilized form of
capitalism. This disrupts the performative logic on which hegemonic socialization operates
(W.J.T. Mitchell 2012; uncertain commons 2013). OWS simply occupies, demanding space
to stage its own experimental performances, forging new gures and associations. If such
creation of novelty is an inherently fragile affair, it has nonetheless posed a far more serious
challenge to the logic of nance capital than any number of demands for and promises of
institutional reform.

Acknowledgement
For very helpful feedback on various earlier versions of this manuscript I would like to thank Melinda
Cooper, Paul Crosthwaite, Gavin Fridell, Lawrence Grossberg, and Randy Martin. The useful comments of two anonymous reviewers are also gratefully acknowledged.

Notes
1.
2.

I am here following Ahmeds (2010, 230) suggestion that we should not drive a wedge between
the notions of affect and emotion.
In a sense, I am following here the shift from a Foucaultian emphasis on discursive discipline to
a Deleuzian (1992) notion of affective control. Elaborations of the control concept, however,
have tended to reproduce problems associated with the idea of disciplinary power. On such

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3.

51

readings, control appears as an intensied, more effective and thoroughgoing form of discipline,
equipped with feedback mechanisms that permit full interiorization (e.g. Elmer 2003; Hanan
2010). Something similar is at work in the ease with which Foucaultian theorists such as
Rose (1999) have incorporated the control concept into their work on governance through
risk. Such approaches see capitalist subjects as exercising their freedoms by adopting calculative
orientations and techniques that render their behavior statistically predictable and consistent with
capitalist governance (Isin 2004, 222). In this way, they too easily qualify the performative
freedom permitted by (neo)liberalism as freedom, a form of individuation that is not entirely
real because it occurs within and is conditioned by the disciplinary effects of capitalist
governance.
Peck (2008, 195) quotes Oprah as follows: How many of you understand now that your thoughts
create reality? Does everybody get that? You really do get that? That you have the life you have
right now because of everything you thought and then said and then did? You get that? All right.
So that also works with money. You have it or you dont have it based upon the way you think
about it.

Notes on contributor
Martijn Konings is a Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Development of American Finance and is currently working on two studies, one on the semiotics of nancial life and
another on the role of the American central bank in governing contemporary capitalism.

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