Story Telling Debt in Trading: The Topos of Urban Public Space in Financial Crisis Narratives

A major challenge of narratively portraying the 2008 financial crisis consists in representing debt and the multiple ways in which debt – as the underlying asset of divergent financial derivative instruments – is traded today. In particular, the representation of financial securitization, connecting private and public debt with mechanisms of financial market speculation, requires narrative techniques that make it possible to meaningfully interrelate a multiplicity of private and institutional actors, temporal and geographical coordinates, as well as political and technological influencing factors.

In view of this challenge, this paper explores various filmic and literary narratives that deal with the 2008 financial crisis and its far-reaching socio-economic impacts. In particular, the paper explores how urban public space is portrayed in such narratives. I argue that urban public space in popular cultural representations of this crisis features as a narrative instrument – a topos – that points out how both the individual and organizational risks upon which contemporary speculation draws are obscured due to strategies of financial abstraction and digital trading. However, as a critical gesture, the topos of urban public space often only alludes to the inequalities that are produced due to financial speculation, while largely leaving its concrete practices and instruments unquestioned.

My objects of analysis range from filmic and documentary crisis portrayals such as Inside Job (2010, Charles Ferguson), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010, Oliver Stone) and Margin Call (2011, J.C. Chandor) to fictional and non-fictional crisis literature such as A Week in December (2009, Sebastian Faulks) and The Big Short (2010, Michael Lewis).

This paper forms part of a research project that applies anthropological and socio-semiotic conceptualizations of myth to narratives of the 2008 financial crisis. The project explores how certain narratives act as both social and cognitive strategies of dealing with complex phenomena, and as means of ideological communication.