Nicky Marsh | University of Southampton (original) (raw)

Papers by Nicky Marsh

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics

Money facilitates the rites and rituals we perform in everyday life. More than a mere medium of e... more Money facilitates the rites and rituals we perform in everyday life. More than a mere medium of exchange or a measure of value, it is the primary means by which we manifest a faith unique to our secular age. But what happens when individual belief (credo, ‘I’ believe) and the systems into which it is bound (credit, ‘it’ believes) enter into crisis? Where did the sacredness of money come from, and does it have a future? Why do we talk about debt and repayment in overtly moral terms? How should a theological critique of capitalism proceed today? With the effects of the 2008 economic crises continuing to be felt across the world, this volume brings together some of the most important contemporary voices in philosophy, literature, theology, and critical and cultural theory together in one volume to assert the need to interrogate and broaden the terms of the theological critique of capitalism

This paper offers a comparative examination of the work of Samuel Beckett and Susan Howe. It begi... more This paper offers a comparative examination of the work of Samuel Beckett and Susan Howe. It begins by outlining the current critical orthodoxy that has allowed them to be compared as writers of the "postmodern", an orthodoxy exemplified in the work of Marjorie Perloff, one of the most prominent figures writing on the twentieth century avant-garde. This paper argues that the individual literary aspirations of Beckett and Howe actually resist the assumptions contained within this tradition. I compare the complications of understanding reference and representation in Howe's most recent work, Pierce-Arrow, and in Beckett's post-trilogy prose. I explicate the apparent similarities in this work's explorations of the limitations of the sign, and examine the startling interrogation of the relationship between the linguistic and the phenemonological offered by each writer. I then suggest that this apparently shared concern with the phenomenological actually conceals si...

Textual Practice, 2014

This article examines the way in which credit and debt have been explored since the 2008 crisis: ... more This article examines the way in which credit and debt have been explored since the 2008 crisis: suggesting a formal analogue in which an abstracted financial capital (credit) has been contrasted against its concrete productive counterpart (debt). The first half of the paper traces this contrast through the theoretical vocabularies for credit and debt that have emerged in the wake of the crisis, in which debt has been separated from credit and the possibility that the former can be read as resisting the latter's dependence on financialisation has been explored. In the second half, I explore this dyad as it is made evident in two very recent films, Andrew Niccol's 2011 In Time and Rian Johnson's 2012 Looper, which offer an alternative model of social debt, one that uses the connection between time and work to actively critique the movement from productive to financial capital. These two films, I want to suggest, engage with the difficulties of representing the ‘concrete’ nature of productive capital by both thematically and formally foregrounding its literalism.

New Formations, 2013

This essay explores political and aesthetic ‘failure’ in the work of William Gaddis, specifically... more This essay explores political and aesthetic ‘failure’ in the work of William Gaddis, specifically arguing that failure was his critical response to the triumphalism of an emerging neo-liberalism. In the first half I argue that Gaddis drew on Norbert Wiener’s 1950 The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society as a ‘sourcebook’ for his novel JR because it offered a critical counter-point to an increasingly hegemonic positivism. I specifically explore the parallels and divergences between the work of Wiener and his erstwhile colleague Milton Friedman to suggest that Wiener provided Gaddis with a formal and methodological alternative to the modelling of conservative economics. The second half of the article focuses on JR, drawing out the ways in which the novel draws on Wiener in order to make evident the importance of failure as a site of political and aesthetic critique. In this section I highlight how the ‘difficult’ formal properties of the novel offer their own parodic response to an empirical methodology: as they force us to question what it is that we know we know in an entirely different way.

European Journal of Communication, 2015

A guide to around 100 of the most influential works of financial advice published in the last 300... more A guide to around 100 of the most influential works of financial advice published in the last 300 years in the UK and the US, housed in Edinburgh's 'Library of Mistakes'.

The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2015

This inaugural chapter on 'Economic Criticism' surveys books published (predominantly) in 2013 an... more This inaugural chapter on 'Economic Criticism' surveys books published (predominantly) in 2013 and 2014 that explore the relations between culture and economics. These relations have been growing preoccupations in critical and cultural theory over the past two decades, and especially since the global financial crisis of 2008. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the state of the field as it currently stands, and, in particular, to indicate how recent theoretical approaches have reassessed or moved beyond positions associated with the 'New Economic Criticism', which came to prominence in the 1990s. The chapter is divided into five sections: 1. Realism; 2. Discourse and Media; 3. Money; 4. Capital and Language; 5. Crisis. This is the first appearance of a chapter on 'Economic Criticism' in The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. Sharp-eyed readers will notice that it takes the place of previous chapters on 'Marxism and Cultural Materialism'. This change of title reflects not so much a replacement of one topic by another, however, as an expansion in scope. All of the works under discussion in this chapter are deeply engaged with Marxist theory (and some with the traditions of cultural materialism, too), but to align them only with that banner would be to misrepresent the diversity of approaches that they take to the relations between culture and economics. Those relations have attracted the attentions of growing numbers of critical and cultural theorists over the last two decades-all the more so in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008-and this and future chapters aim to chart this exciting and rapidly developing field.

The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics

Money facilitates the rites and rituals we perform in everyday life. More than a mere medium of e... more Money facilitates the rites and rituals we perform in everyday life. More than a mere medium of exchange or a measure of value, it is the primary means by which we manifest a faith unique to our secular age. But what happens when individual belief (credo, ‘I’ believe) and the systems into which it is bound (credit, ‘it’ believes) enter into crisis? Where did the sacredness of money come from, and does it have a future? Why do we talk about debt and repayment in overtly moral terms? How should a theological critique of capitalism proceed today? With the effects of the 2008 economic crises continuing to be felt across the world, this volume brings together some of the most important contemporary voices in philosophy, literature, theology, and critical and cultural theory together in one volume to assert the need to interrogate and broaden the terms of the theological critique of capitalism

This paper offers a comparative examination of the work of Samuel Beckett and Susan Howe. It begi... more This paper offers a comparative examination of the work of Samuel Beckett and Susan Howe. It begins by outlining the current critical orthodoxy that has allowed them to be compared as writers of the "postmodern", an orthodoxy exemplified in the work of Marjorie Perloff, one of the most prominent figures writing on the twentieth century avant-garde. This paper argues that the individual literary aspirations of Beckett and Howe actually resist the assumptions contained within this tradition. I compare the complications of understanding reference and representation in Howe's most recent work, Pierce-Arrow, and in Beckett's post-trilogy prose. I explicate the apparent similarities in this work's explorations of the limitations of the sign, and examine the startling interrogation of the relationship between the linguistic and the phenemonological offered by each writer. I then suggest that this apparently shared concern with the phenomenological actually conceals si...

Textual Practice, 2014

This article examines the way in which credit and debt have been explored since the 2008 crisis: ... more This article examines the way in which credit and debt have been explored since the 2008 crisis: suggesting a formal analogue in which an abstracted financial capital (credit) has been contrasted against its concrete productive counterpart (debt). The first half of the paper traces this contrast through the theoretical vocabularies for credit and debt that have emerged in the wake of the crisis, in which debt has been separated from credit and the possibility that the former can be read as resisting the latter's dependence on financialisation has been explored. In the second half, I explore this dyad as it is made evident in two very recent films, Andrew Niccol's 2011 In Time and Rian Johnson's 2012 Looper, which offer an alternative model of social debt, one that uses the connection between time and work to actively critique the movement from productive to financial capital. These two films, I want to suggest, engage with the difficulties of representing the ‘concrete’ nature of productive capital by both thematically and formally foregrounding its literalism.

New Formations, 2013

This essay explores political and aesthetic ‘failure’ in the work of William Gaddis, specifically... more This essay explores political and aesthetic ‘failure’ in the work of William Gaddis, specifically arguing that failure was his critical response to the triumphalism of an emerging neo-liberalism. In the first half I argue that Gaddis drew on Norbert Wiener’s 1950 The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society as a ‘sourcebook’ for his novel JR because it offered a critical counter-point to an increasingly hegemonic positivism. I specifically explore the parallels and divergences between the work of Wiener and his erstwhile colleague Milton Friedman to suggest that Wiener provided Gaddis with a formal and methodological alternative to the modelling of conservative economics. The second half of the article focuses on JR, drawing out the ways in which the novel draws on Wiener in order to make evident the importance of failure as a site of political and aesthetic critique. In this section I highlight how the ‘difficult’ formal properties of the novel offer their own parodic response to an empirical methodology: as they force us to question what it is that we know we know in an entirely different way.

European Journal of Communication, 2015

A guide to around 100 of the most influential works of financial advice published in the last 300... more A guide to around 100 of the most influential works of financial advice published in the last 300 years in the UK and the US, housed in Edinburgh's 'Library of Mistakes'.

The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2015

This inaugural chapter on 'Economic Criticism' surveys books published (predominantly) in 2013 an... more This inaugural chapter on 'Economic Criticism' surveys books published (predominantly) in 2013 and 2014 that explore the relations between culture and economics. These relations have been growing preoccupations in critical and cultural theory over the past two decades, and especially since the global financial crisis of 2008. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the state of the field as it currently stands, and, in particular, to indicate how recent theoretical approaches have reassessed or moved beyond positions associated with the 'New Economic Criticism', which came to prominence in the 1990s. The chapter is divided into five sections: 1. Realism; 2. Discourse and Media; 3. Money; 4. Capital and Language; 5. Crisis. This is the first appearance of a chapter on 'Economic Criticism' in The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. Sharp-eyed readers will notice that it takes the place of previous chapters on 'Marxism and Cultural Materialism'. This change of title reflects not so much a replacement of one topic by another, however, as an expansion in scope. All of the works under discussion in this chapter are deeply engaged with Marxist theory (and some with the traditions of cultural materialism, too), but to align them only with that banner would be to misrepresent the diversity of approaches that they take to the relations between culture and economics. Those relations have attracted the attentions of growing numbers of critical and cultural theorists over the last two decades-all the more so in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008-and this and future chapters aim to chart this exciting and rapidly developing field.

The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

Money facilitates the rites and rituals we perform in everyday life. More than a mere medium of e... more Money facilitates the rites and rituals we perform in everyday life. More than a mere medium of exchange or a measure of
value, it is the primary means by which we manifest a faith unique to our secular age. But what happens when individual belief (credo, ‘I’ believe) and the systems into which it is bound (credit, ‘it’ believes) enter into crisis? Where did the sacredness of money come from, and does it have a future? Why do we talk about debt and repayment in overtly moral terms? How should a theological critique of capitalism proceed today? With the effects of the 2008 economic crises continuing to be felt across the world, this volume brings some of the most important contemporary voices in philosophy, literature, theology, and critical and cultural theory together in one volume to assert the need to interrogate and broaden the terms of the theological critique of capitalism.

Table of Contents Introduction, Christopher John Müller and Aidan Tynan / Part I: Modernity and the Trajectories of
Sovereignty / 1. The Ascendancy of Finance: Toward a concept of Seigniorial power, Joseph Vogl / 2. Hobbes, Sovereign
Power and Money, Peter Sedgwick / 3. Accelerator despite Itself: Credo, Crisis, Katechon, Arthur Bradley / Part II: The Living Soul of Money / 4. The Bank of England in Ruins: Photography, Money and the Law of Equivalence, Christopher John Müller and Ian Wiblin / 5. Seeing is Believing: Looking at the gold standard, Nicky Marsh / 6. ‘Universal Shylockery: Money and Morality in The Merchant of Venice’, Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy / 7. ‘We are All Prostitutes’: Crisis and Libidinal Economy, Benjamin Noys / 8. The Materiality of Belief: On the Real Death of Mammon, Hollis Phelps / Part III: Speculation and Critique / 9. Impotent Signs: Money, Speculative Subjectivity, and the Ontological Proof, Aidan Tynan / 10. Speculation upon Speculation; or, a Contribution to the Critique of Philosophical Economy, Josh Robinson / 11. Believing in Deconstruction, Laurent Milesi / Part IV: Future Revelations / 12. Credit and Investment: A Matter of Faith, Philip Goodchild / 13. How Do We Know We Have a Future?, Richard Dienst / Acknowledgments / Notes on Contributors / Index