The nearly total financialization of the U.S. economy leads one to wonder whether limits to growth owe more to “banker’s arithmetic” than to ecological pressures.

Nothing brings a breezy read to a halt quicker than a gesture to leftist political theory. Beyond a tiny coterie of (mostly tenured academic) partisans, whose livelihood depends on occupying the extreme margin of political discussion, leftist theorists win precious few readers. And with good reason. Their writings are formidably inaccessible, freighted with abstractions and often presuming detailed familiarity with the finer points of some past internecine debate. At a moment (one is tempted to write conjuncture) when time and its corollary, attention, are the scarcest resources of all, leftist political theorists can seem downright profligate, scoffing at economies of expression or communicative action. Tweets their works most definitely are not.

Yet among the rococo elaborations of abstract concepts, among the arabesques of jargon, the occasional lapidary phrase — remarkable in its own right, but thoroughly miraculous when compared to the rest of the text in which it’s discovered — presents itself. At any rate, this has been my experience engaging the work of Ernesto Laclau, an Argentine “post-Marxist” theorist. Not particularly known for the crystalline clarity of his prose, whether writing alone or with French political theorist Chantal Mouffe (as they did in their seminal Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, published in 1985; a case where double the authorial effort meant double the impenetrability), Laclau presents a formidable challenge.* Yet there it was, in the midst of a dense thicket of theorization — this wonderful formulation: “The future is indeterminate and certainly not guaranteed for us; but that is precisely why it is not lost either.” I felt a thrill as I read this, a rare experience when dealing with writing of this sort.

Laclau holds out for no messianic intervention of the sort Walter Benjamin invokes in his famous (and utterly remarkable) “Theses on the Concept of History.” Events constantly open on to the future no matter what occurs in the present, so each moment presents not a doorway through which some savior may enter, as Benjamin would have it, but presents a fighting chance for those who would upend the status quo in order to establish a more just and equitable polity. Each moment, in other words, affords people of goodwill the opportunity to become their own messiahs.

Time remorselessly, ceaselessly marching represents the one intransigent condition of social, cultural, political and economic life — a condition felt all the more acutely today, as modern technology appears to increase its tempo. Vying for attention has become as fierce a competition as “keeping up with the Joneses” used to be. Each moment fractures into ever proliferating communiques, data packets, alerts, tweets and dispatches, the sheer volume of which one doubts even the all-seeing eye of providence can adequately con. And along with this burgeoning quantity of information comes its ever quickening velocity. Humanity — the internet enabled portion of it anyway — is only years, perhaps only months, away from real-time communication of just about every conceivable kind.

What happens, though, when this real-time-all-the-time global synchronization actually comes into being? Will humans have finally, once and for all, reached the absolute limit of communication? After all, the only possibility for further acceleration will then be communication before the fact: receiving an e-mail before it’s sent, re-tweeting a tweet before the original tweeter tweets it. You say good-bye, and I say hello.

No longer predicated on making stuff that people need to survive in life, the U.S. economy has become simply a welter of scrip, of notes of all sorts and shades.

Of course, humans have devised ingenious methods of hedging against this at once both wasting and inexhaustible asset called time. Phrases like “time savers,” “saving time,” “wasting time” are of course misleading; one can no more save time than waste it. One can, however, arrange things so as to maximize the opportunities of the present moment. Time, for instance, lies at the heart of Karl Marx’s analysis in the first volume of Capital. And, in one of Marx’s few gothic touches in Capital, capital itself Marx regards as dead labor re-animated and restlessly wandering the earth in search of exchange value, for which this undead capital has an insatiable appetite. In law, one speaks of mortmain (“dead hand”), in banking, of a mortgage (“dead pledge”) — the latter perhaps suffering unfortunate tic(k)s of an upward sort as an additional grotesque flourish.

Death underwrites capital, death is capital, if Marx is to be believed. And, like all restless (un)dead in story or fable, capital refuses to be bound to its particular temporal ambit. The most annoying thing about the restless (un)dead is that they demand more time than their time, more than the time alotted them, more than their own lifetimes.

Grateful dead: capital's abiding interest in the living.

A conversation fellow GenBubchik Rob Horning and I recently had with Mike Konczal who, among his other pursuits, keeps the blog Rortybomb, naturally led to discussion of the present world-economic situation. Konczal expressed his desire to see Generation Bubble address a subject that greatly dismayed him: the financialization of the economy. No longer predicated on making stuff that people need to survive in life, the U.S. economy has become simply a welter of scrip, of notes of all sorts and shades. This development, Konczal firmly believes, can only lead the country down the road to serfdom. Or worse.

When it comes to matters of economy’s financialization and the fine-grained analysis thereof, Konczal far surpasses me (I won’t speak for Rob). When Konczal broached this subject with Rob and me, however, my mind immediately flew to Ezra Pound’s enormously difficult and much derided masterwork, The Cantos. The particular canto I had in mind was Canto XLV, commonly known as “With Usura.” In it Pound, echoing the medieval Catholic church’s prohibition against the practice of usury (lending money at interest), catalogues in learnedly terse and cranky fashion the consequences visiting anything this practice touches. “Usura is a murrain, usura / blunteth the needle in the the maid’s hand / and stoppeth the spinner’s cunning,” Pound writes. It also “rusteth the chisel, “rusteth the craft and the craftsman,” “gnaweth the thread in the loom,” and also “slayeth the child in the womb,” as well as “stayeth the young man’s courting.” Indeed, anything coming under the influence of “usura” is doomed from the get-go — hung fire, an abortion.

The future to me looks as determinate as a payment schedule.

The medieval prohibition against charging interest has its origin in the writings of Aristotle, who claimed that only a living being can beget more living beings. Money, considered a means of exchange, or, as Marx’s characterized it, “the general equivalent,” is a human instrument, in itself inert, non-living. The generation of a greater sum of money from a smaller sum, incubated solely by the passage of time, thus violates this absolute difference between the living and non-living. It is, as Pound so emphatically points out, CONTRA NATURAM (“against nature”). It is the stuff of horror stories par excellence. “Corpses are set to banquet” at usura’s invitation, as Pound writes.

This rather dogmatic notion of interest charging as an indefensible abomination is one I don’t necessarily share, but it does lend itself to a consideration of Laclau’s claim, “The future is indeterminate and certainly not guaranteed for us; but that is precisely why it is not lost either.” Upon the tabula rasa of a future moment, just about any event can certainly inscribe itself. But, I’m led to ask, though this is theoretically true, is it practically true, in light of the dead yet unshakable hand usura places on the future? With the economy financialized to its current extent (I believe that Konczal told Rob and me that financial services counted for something like 80 percent of gross domestic product), there’s a lot of interest to be paid. How does the economy grow, then, and where does it grow? Experts say the United States is headed for a situation where its current debt will soon equal the sum total of its gross domestic product: one dollar owed for every one dollar earned. If this isn’t a murrain on the sheep or rust on the needle, I don’t know what is.

It seems, then, that Laclau’s words might be a bit too optimistic for me to get behind. The future to me looks as determinate as a payment schedule. Mortgages and mortmain. The inexorable living dead, refusing to be exorcised — or amortized.

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*This is of course not surprising, because Laclau has spent a good part of his career in dialogue with Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher who spawned deconstruction, the shock of which academic humanities is only beginning to recover from. Laclau has sought to adapt the central tenets of deconstruction (if, indeed, deconstruction can be said to have tenets) to issues surrounding a radically democratic polity — the conditions of its emergence, as well as the very possibility of its emergence. Laclau’s espousal of deconstruction stems from a desire to get beyond the monolithic totalities which Marxist thought tends to produce if left to its own conceptual categories — something Laclau and his cohort of soixante huitards (whether they were thus in spirit or in actuality), smarting from the failure of the student-worker strikes in France and recoiling from Stalinism’s many horrors, wished to temper. For his part, Laclau looks to Derridean deconstruction as a means of redressing this unfortunate tendency in conventional Marxism. Bringing deconstruction to bear on a radically democratic political program proves a tall order, the former, with its repudiation of all things fixed, immutable and unitary, mingles but uneasily with the former’s macro-scale outlook. Such a difficult balancing act perhaps explains why Laclau, with or without Mouffe, makes for rather tough reading.

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