Crisis is governance: Sub-prime, the traumatic event, and bare life

Global Society

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 19-42

  Brassett, James ^a   Vaughan Williams, Nick ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ECONOMIC THEORY; FINANCIAL CRISIS; GOVERNANCE APPROACH; THEORETICAL STUDY; WELFARE ECONOMICS;

EID: 84857077508     PISSN: 13600826     EISSN: 1469798X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13600826.2011.629988     Document Type: Article

References (113)

1. James Brassett and Chris Clarke, "Performing the Sub-prime Crisis: Trauma and the Financial Event", in International Political Sociology, forthcoming (2012).
2. As an indication of the kinds of timespans that were involved in the emergence of what was called the sub-prime crisis
3. see (accessed 25 April 2011).
4. Gordon Brown, "Speech to the Lord Mayor's Banquet", 10 November 2008, transcript available: (accessed 31 May 2010).
5. Grahame Thompson "What's in the Frame? How the Financial Crisis is Being Packaged for Consumption", Economy and Society, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2009), pp. 520-524
6. Matthew Watson, "Headlong into the Polanyian Dilemma: The Impact of Middle-class Moral Panic on the British Government's Response to the Sub-prime Crisis", British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2009), pp. 422-437.
7. Peter Preston, "The Other Side of the Coin: Reading the Politics of the 2008 Financial Tsunami", British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2009), pp. 504-517
8. Ngaire Woods, "Analysis: Financial Tsunami", BBC Radio Documentary, 19 March 2009, transcript available: (accessed 31 May 2010).
9. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
10. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino (Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000)
11. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
12. Jon Bisson, "Post-traumatic Stress Disorder", British Medical Journal, Vol. 334 (2007), pp. 789-793
13. Royal College of Psychiatrists, "Health Leaflet: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder", 2010, available: (accessed 7 April 2010).
14. Vanessa Pupavac, "Therapeutic Governance: Psycho-social Intervention and Trauma Risk Management", Disasters, Vol. 25, No. 4 (2001), pp. 358-372.
15. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 6.
16. Wesley Widmaier, "Emotions before Paradigms: Elite Anxiety and Populist Resentment from the Asian Crisis to the Subprime Crisis", Millennium, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2010), pp. 127-144.
17. Johnna Montgomerie, "Spectre of the Subprime Borrower: Beyond a Credit Score Perspective", CRESC Working Paper Series, No. 58 (2008)
18. Len Seabrooke, "What Do I Get? The Everyday Politics of Expectations and the Subprime Crisis", New Political Economy, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2010), pp. 51-70.
19. James Brassett, Lena Rethel and Matthew Watson, "The Political Economy of the Sub-prime Crisis: The Economics, Politics and Ethics of Response", New Political Economy, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2010), pp. 1-8.
20. Michael Dillon, "Virtual Security: A Life Science of (Dis)order", Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 32 (2003), pp. 531-558.
21. Jenny Edkins, Michael J. Shapiro and Véronique Pin-Fat (eds), Sovereign Lives: Power in World Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2004)
22. Jacqueline Best, "Why the Economy is Often the Exception to Politics as Usual", 2007, available: (accessed 10 November 2011).
23. Paul Langley, "Sub-prime Mortgage Lending: A Cultural Economy", Economy and Society, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2008), pp. 469-494.
24. Best, op. cit., p. 21.
25. Montgomerie, op. cit.
26. Watson, op. cit.
27. Extending this line of thought, an implication of our argument is that while the moral and critical attraction of debates about global governance is clearly apparent-indeed we have elsewhere contributed to them
28. (see William Smith and James Brassett, "Deliberation and Global Governance: Liberal Cosmopolitan and Critical Perspectives", Ethics and International Affairs, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2008), pp. 69-92)
29. it is also important to reflect upon how discourses of crisis act as a form of governance themselves, within which resistance can also be effectively thought/practised. By this we mean to suggest that, in line with Foucault, governance/resistance is an enduring dilemma in and across social contexts, as important in the relations of power embodied in popular culture as it is in the relations between institutions and financial markets. Indeed, the two areas readily overlap, as authors such as
30. Rob Aitken (Performing Capital: Towards a Cultural Economy of Popular and Global Finance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007))
31. Marieke De Goede ("Mastering Lady Credit", International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2000), pp. 58-81)
32. have demonstrated. While some may be tempted to draw a line between such perspectives, seeing them as fundamentally irreconcilable, an "either-or", we are not persuaded by such dichotomies and see them as a barrier to fruitful and productive dialogue and critical engagement, thus more of a "both-and" (for a sustained discussion of this question
33. see James Brassett and Eleni Tsingou, "The Politics of Legitimate Global Governance", Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2011), pp. 1-16).
34. Tim Sinclair, "Round up the Usual Suspects: Blame and the Subprime Crisis", New Political Economy, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2010), p. 100.
35. Gordon Clark, "Money Flows Like Mercury: The Geography of Global Finance", Geografiska Annaler, Vol. 87, No. 2 (2005), pp. 99-112
36. P. Kelly, "Metaphors of Meltdown: Political Representations of Economic Space in the Asian Financial Crisis", Environment and Planning D, Vol. 19, No. 6 (2001), pp. 719-742.
37. De Goede, op. cit.
38. "Live cut away", Radio Four, PM, 17 September 2008.
39. De Goed, op. cit, p. 72.
40. See, for example, M. Goldstein, Safeguarding Prosperity in a Global Financial System: The Future International Financial Architecture (A Report of an Independent Task Force Sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations) (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1999), p. 6.
41. Woods, op. cit.
42. Andrew Rawnsley, "TheWeekend Gordon Brown Saved the Banks fromthe Abyss", The Observer, 21 February 2010, available: (accessed 31 May 2010).
43. Paul Mason, "This is an Economic Krakatoa", Idle Scrawl, 15 October 2008, available: (accessed 1 June 2010).
44. More broadly, then, we echo Widmaier, op. cit., p. 129
45. when he argues: "Even as emotional influences have driven market and policy trends, International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE) frameworks have neglected their import. To the extent that the recent IPE literature has overlooked emotional influences, it has led scholars to underrate the emotional context of agency, the weight of emotional influences on elites and possibilities for a more pragmatic IR theory that 'speaks the language' of policy and market agents."
46. Lena Rethel, "Each Time is Different! The Shifting Boundaries of Emerging Market Debt", Global Society, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2012), p.127.
47. Langley, op. cit.
48. Aitken, op. cit.
49. Tom Lundborg and Nick Vaughan-Williams, "Resilience, Critical Infrastructure, and Molecular Security: The Excess of 'Life' in Biopolitics", International Political Sociology, Vol. 5, No. 4 (2011), pp. 367-383.
50. Gordon Clark, Nigel Thrift and Adam Tickell "Performing Finance: The Industry, the Media and its Image", Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2004), pp. 289-310.
51. Watson, op. cit.
52. Widmaier, op. cit.
53. BBC News, "Northern Rock Customers Air their Views", BBC News website, 17 September 2007, available: (accessed 4 June 2010).
54. Sinclair, op. cit.
55. Brassett and Clarke, op. cit.
56. Watson, op. cit.
57. Ibid., p. 427.
58. Angharad Closs-Stephens and Nick Vaughan-Williams, "Introduction: London, Terror, Time", in Angharad Closs Stephens and Nick Vaughan-Williams (eds.), Terrorism and the Politics of Response (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 1-15.
59. Fassin and Rechtman, op. cit.
60. Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
61. Christina Zarowsky, "Writing Trauma: Emotion, Ethnography, and the Politics of Suffering among Somali Returnees in Ethiopia", Culture, Medicine and Society, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2004), pp. 189-209.
62. Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 50
63. cf. Alison Howell, "Victims or Madmen? The Diagnostic Competition over 'Terrorist' Detainees at Guantanamo Bay", International Political Sociology, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2007), pp. 29-47.
64. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. D. Kishik and S. Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 3.
65. Ibid., p. 14.
66. Ibid., p. 15.
67. Agamben, Homo Sacer, op. cit
68. Agamben, Means Without Ends, op. cit.
69. Agamben, State of Exception, op. cit.
70. Agamben, Homo Sacer, op. cit., p. 6.
71. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, 3rd ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
72. Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History", in H. Eiland and M. Jennings (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA and London: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 392.
73. Agamben, State of Exception, op. cit.
74. Giorgio Agamben, "Interview with Giorgio Agamben-A Life, aWork of Art without an Author: The State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private Life", German Law Review, Vol. 5, No. 5 (2004), p. 612.
75. Pupavac, op. cit., p. 358.
76. Ibid., p. 360.
77. Edkins, op. cit., p. xv.
78. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76 (London: Penguin, 2003).
79. Ibid., p. 65.
80. Watson, op. cit., p. 433.
81. Best, op. cit.
82. Emphasis added
83. cf. Rawnsley, op. cit.
84. Watson, op. cit., p. 433.
85. BBC News, op. cit.
86. Stephen Webb, "Playing the Financial Crisis Blame Game: Foreign LeadersWere Quick at First to Attack the U.S. for Subprime Woes", ABC News International, 9 October 2008, available:
87. Barry Buzan, Jaap de Wilde and Ole Wæver, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (London and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
88. Bloomberg, "UK Freezes Icelandic Bank Assets", available: (accessed 10 November 2011).
89. See, inter alia, Bagehot, "Reykjavik-on-Thames", The Economist, 29 January 2009, available: (accessed 10 November 2011)
90. D. Smith, "Gordon Brown Says: London is Not 'Reykjavik on the Thames'", The Times, 1 February 2009, available: (accessed 9 May 2011).
91. See Mark Goulston, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for Dummies (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2007).
92. Indeed a semi-satirical blog called "brokers with hands on their faces" was set up to chart this particular aesthetic of the crisis: .
93. The collapse of Lehman Brothers was typified by such images. At this stage the dominant narrative was sympathy and Lehman Brothers and its employees were portrayed as victims.
94. As the BBC coverage suggested, "Having survived two World Wars, one Wall Street crash, and 9-11 it now looks like the sub-prime crisis will prove the undoing of Lehman Brothers", available: (accessed 9 May 2011).
95. BBC website, "Why Does Everyone Hate Fred the Shred?", available: (accessed 10 November 2011).
96. Agamben, Homo Sacer, op. cit.
97. Montgomerie, op. cit., p. 2.
98. Watson, op. cit.
99. Langley, op. cit.
100. Seabrooke, op. cit.
101. Randall Dodd, "Subprime: Tentacles of a Crisis", Finance and Development: A Quarterly Magazine of the IMF, Vol. 44, No. 4 (2007), pp. 15-19.
102. Hay, "The 2010 Leonard Schapiro Lecture: Pathology without Crisis? The Strange Demise of the Anglo-Liberal Growth Model", 60th Anniversary Political Studies Association (PSA) Conference, Edinburgh, 29 March-1 April 2010
103. Langley, op. cit.
104. Elvin Wyly, Markus Moos, Daniel Hammel and Emanuel Kabahiz, "Cartographies of Race and Class: Mapping the Class-monopoly Rents of American Sub-prime Mortgage Capital", International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 33, No. 2 (2009), pp. 332-354.
105. Ibid., p. 346.
106. Ibid., p. 349.
107. Langley, op. cit., p. 490.
108. See, inter alia, James Brassett, Cosmopolitanism and Global Financial Reform: A Pragmatic Approach to the Tobin Tax (London: Routledge, 2010)
109. Montgomerie, op. cit.
110. Sinclair, op. cit.
111. Watson, op. cit.
112. The authors thank Nigel Thrift for helpful advice on this point.
113. Chris Clarke, "The Ethico-political Space of Financial Crisis: Individual Subject Positions in Light of Subprime Regulatory Responses", Paper presented at the International Studies Association Conference, Montreal, 16-19 March 2011.