Schuld/en, or: Renegotiating Debt and Guilt 					in US Culture After the 2007/08 Financial Crisis

Kloeckner, Christian

doi:10.13109/kult.2020.20.1.108

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 7 publications

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“…The resulting melancholic and suspenseful atmosphere stages a looking back into the future as cinematic experience and frames the entire scene in a figurative sense as a shared remembering—if not grieving—of the financial crisis and its bitter consequences. Perhaps, as Kloeckner (2020, p. 120) suggests, the “loss of an open future,” that is in its emergence already met by an intense sense of an ending.…”

Section: The Emergence Of a “Broker Face”: Looking Back (To The Future)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Can't read my broker face?—Tracing a motif and metaphor of expert knowledge through audiovisual images of the financial crisis

Scherer,

Stratil

2024

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Based on the question of the representability of economy and economics in audiovisual media, developments on the financial markets have often been discussed as a depiction problem. The abstractness and complexity of economic interrelations seem to defy classical modes of storytelling and dramatization. Nevertheless, public opinion about economic changes and dependencies crucially relies on audiovisual media. But how can the public communicate in images, sounds, and words about forces that are out of sight and out of reach, and can supposedly only be adequately grasped by experts? In a case study on audiovisual images of the global financial crisis (2007–), this paper tracks and analyzes a recurring motif: the staging of expert knowledge as close‐ups of expressive faces vis‐à‐vis computer screens in television news, documentaries, as well as feature films. It draws on the use of digital tools for corpus exploration (reverse image search) and the visualization of video annotations. By relating and comparing different staging strategies by which these “broker faces” become embodiments of turbulent market dynamics, the paper proposes to not regard them as repeated instantiations of the same metaphor, but as a developing web of cinematic metaphors. Different perspectives (news of market developments or historical accounts of crisis developments) and affective stances toward the global financial crisis are expressed in these variations of the face‐screen constellation. The paper thus presents a selection of different appearances of “broker faces” as a medium for an audiovisual discourse of the global financial crisis. A concluding analysis of a scene from Margin Call focuses on its specific intertwining of expert and screen as an ambivalent movement figuration of staging insight. Between the feeling of discovery (of a potential future threat) and the sense of being haunted (by a menacing force), the film stages the emergence of a “broker face” in an atmospheric tension between suspense and melancholy. We argue that the film thereby reframes the motif and poses questions of agency, temporality, and expert knowledge.

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Section: The Emergence Of a “Broker Face”: Looking Back (To The Future)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Can't read my broker face?—Tracing a motif and metaphor of expert knowledge through audiovisual images of the financial crisis

Scherer,

Stratil

2024

Literature Compass

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Human Capabilities and the Ethics of Debt

Walsh

Lewiston

2020

J Value Inquiry

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To live in human community is, in part, to owe debts to others and to be owed in return. How should we evaluate, normatively, the varied forms, practices, institutions, and relationships of debt? Which should be constrained and which accepted or encouraged? These questions have farreaching implications given the pervasiveness of debt within human experience. This paper brings the resources of the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum to bear on normative assessments of debt. Our thesis is that the theoretical resources provided by this approach can help philosophers to examine the wide range of costs and benefits afforded by actual debts. We examine six contemporary examples of debt, arguing that the capabilities approach offers a nuanced and holistic framework for evaluating each. The framework is nuanced in that it provides resources for conducting fine-grained analyses of different cases and related policy proposals. It is holistic in that it takes into account more than a narrow range of either positive or negative considerations, instead encompassing the wide array of debt's bodily, cognitive, and social impacts upon individuals.Anthropologists have documented the diverse forms, practices, institutions, and relationships of debt in which human beings throughout the world are enmeshed. 1 To live in human community is, in part, to owe debts to others and to be owed in return. How should we evaluate, normatively, the varied forms, practices, institutions, and relationships of debt? Which should be constrained and which accepted or encouraged? These questions have far-reaching implications given the pervasiveness of debt within human experience.The ethics of debt has, however, been neglected by many philosophers. Those who do address it focus primarily on the ethics of lending. Aristotle and Aquinas, for instance, argue that lending money at interest is fundamentally exploitative. Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith, in contrast, argue that it should be encouraged so as to create economic opportunity and growth. Such thinkers identify some of the important normative questions raised by debt. Yet, they also fail to capture much of the ethical complexity of the myriad forms, practices, institutions, and relationships of debt. It is true, for example, that lending can be exploitative, but it is also true that access to credit can create opportunity 1 See especially Graeber 2011 and Mauss 1990.

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Schuld/en, or: Renegotiating Debt and Guilt in US Culture After the 2007/08 Financial Crisis

Cited by 2 publications

References 7 publications

Can't read my broker face?—Tracing a motif and metaphor of expert knowledge through audiovisual images of the financial crisis

Can't read my broker face?—Tracing a motif and metaphor of expert knowledge through audiovisual images of the financial crisis

Human Capabilities and the Ethics of Debt

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