Visual metaphors of market animals ultimately reinforce finance’s abstraction rather than explain it.
Evidence
Ever since Adam Smith’s mystifying evocation of the “invisible hand,” finance’s “spectral willfulness” (Vogl 2014) has been central to popular visual representations of markets. Marx was not alone when he wrote of capitalism’s specters of horror and blood-sucking vampires. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a rich tapestry of personified and satirical allegories in print media sought to capture something of the markets’ lewd irrationalities, bestial impulses, and trickery. Biblical visual tropes evoked the frenzy of market crashes, and animal fables fueled distorted imagery of bloated speculators morphing into monstrous bears, bulls, and malevolent octopuses. However, all visual attempts to make sense of finance’s unfolding spectacle ultimately surrendered to its abstraction, “reinforcing the overwhelming power of the market by anthropomorphically depicting it as a kind of sentient being, one quite beyond the comprehension of individual human actors” (P. Knight 2016, 103). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 170
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing interest in how financial abstraction defeats comprehension; parallels the Marxist specter vocabulary.