Lessons from "Fearless Girl". Issues of Representation in Globalized Financial Capitalism
Series
Culture & Theory
ISBN
978-3-8376-4527-9
Type
book section
Date Issued
2018-10-17
Author(s)
Abstract (De)
Few places symbolize the financial economy’s sovereignty of interpretation over social events in the atmospherically tangible manner of New York’s Wall Street. Its most iconic figure is Arturo di Modica’s famous Charging Bull. The impressive bronze statue (3.4 meters high, 5 meters long, and weighing 11 tons) appeared in New York’s Financial District in 1989 as a response to the market crash two years earlier. According to its creator, its original purpose was to instill in its beholder a sense of strength and resilience with regard to the American economy. By the time of the Occupy movement it had come to symbolize something else for many: the arrogance, greed and recklessness of neoliberal finance capitalism. As prominently depicted in Capitalism, A Love Story (Michael Moore, 2009), Charging Bull had also taken on the symbolic weight of retroactively visualizing one of the most fatal speech acts uttered in the recent history of US-American economic policy. On March 28, 1985, president Ronald Reagan opened trading at the NYSE with a campaign-style speech to rally confidence in budget reform. Standing at his side was the president’s chief of staff, former Merrill Lynch CEO Don Regan. With seconds to go before ringing in trading, the speech culminated with the now infamous claim, “We’re gonna turn the bull loose.” And that is what happened. It seemed there was nothing left to keep neoliberal finance capitalism from running wild. Since then, the feral demeanor of the Bowling Green Bull increasingly represents uncontrollability in the eyes of many. Its high visibility and taint of arrogance have made it a spectacle in the most problematic sense of the word. Reduced to this limited range of meaning, it has also come to symbolize the system’s lack of reasonable alternatives.
Language
English
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
HSG Profile Area
SHSS - Kulturen, Institutionen, Maerkte (KIM)
Book title
Screening Economies. Money Matters and the Ethics of Representation
Publisher
transcript
Publisher place
Bielefeld
Start page
7
End page
18
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
268843