CAPITALIST REALISM, FINANCE AND DON DELILLO

The author begins his paper by recalling his qualms about the fact that the Split conference subsumed capitalist realism under the overall conference topic of Words and Images. His first step is to engage with Fisher’s notion of capitalist realism. After a brief overview of what Fisher understands by this notion, the author argues that any discussion of capitalist realism has to take into consideration the changes that have taken place in the nature of money. It is only when these changes are taken into account, changes that have to do with the fact that we recognize money as a system if not the system of representation, that one recognizes how relevant words and images are to discussions of capital. After a discussion of the ascendancy of finance during the latest mutation of capitalism, the author proceeds to give a reading of Don DeLillo’s short story “Hammer and Sickle” in which he shows how the text deals with finance, how DeLillo thematizes the difficulty of understanding finance and how all of this has a bearing on the lack of an alternative to capitalism announced in Fisher’s explanation of capitalist realism