This response to Torsten Andreasen’s article “The Day the Music Died” was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier.
Mapping Affective Landscapes within Financialized Capitalism through Speculative Fiction
Ali Rıza Taşkale
Introduction
In ‘The Day the Music Died’, Torsten Andreasen explores the link between Robert Brenner’s theory of a ‘long downturn’ in advanced economies and Fredric Jameson’s concept of the ‘waning of affect’. Brenner argues that capitalist economies have faced low profit rates since the 1970s, while Jameson describes postmodernism as the cultural logic of financialization, leading to a shift in affective responses from deep historical engagement to surface-level intensities. Andreasen expands on Jameson’s notion of affect as a historically specific capacity to perceive and act in a given social context, exploring how the genre of finance fiction both depicts affective reactions to finance and itself constitutes such a reaction.
Andreasen identifies three stages of affective response to financialized capitalism: the euphoric hubris of the 1980s, the schizophrenic horror of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the resignation following the 2007-2008 financial crisis. To Andreasen, these stages mirror broader cultural shifts in responses to financial capitalism, from optimism to crisis-induced alienation and eventual acceptance, as illustrated by films like Wall Street, American Psycho, and Cosmopolis.
I find Andreasen’s periodization helpful, as it reflects shifts in how speculative finance and capitalism are culturally represented. Moreover, his exploration of the evolution of finance fiction is particularly insightful, as it frames a transition from the optimism of the post-war era to a growing recognition of the breakdown of industrial capitalism, ultimately leading to the post-crisis affect of resignation. Thus, the strength of his argument lies in his critique of finance fiction’s focus on individual crises, highlighting how this emphasis often overlooks the systemic violence embedded in financial capitalism. Ultimately, Andreasen calls for a more critical engagement with the structural forces sustaining financial capitalism, rather than perpetuating the individualization of crises within finance fiction.
However, Andreasen’s piece is not without its limitations. These become particularly visible in his references to Raymond Williams’ ‘structures of feeling’. Williams’ concept is closely tied to a political economy of affect, which Andreasen hints at but does not explicitly explore. This is important because some of his analyses illuminate affective logics shaped by the values embedded in specific historical and material processes. This raises an important question: what, exactly, are the prevailing affective states within speculative financial capitalism, and how are we to understand them?
Affective Landscapes through Pattern Recognition
In his piece, Andreasen alludes to affective states, but he does not capture what I refer to as ‘speculative fatigue’, which I argue is the dominant affective state of contemporary financial capitalism. Speculative fatigue, I argue, is the exhaustion caused by continuous market volatility and high-risk investments, leading to disillusionment with financial systems that appear disconnected from real-world stability. To address this, I suggest turning to speculative fiction to gain a deeper understanding of the affective modes within financial capitalism. Speculative fiction brings distinctive powers, pleasures, and textual and visual richness to the issues discussed by Andreasen (Canavan 2017; Chambers and Garforth 2020; Vint 2021). It not only exposes the inherent contradictions of financial speculation but also unveils the predominant affective dynamics associated with it.
Several works of speculative fiction effectively make legible the prevailing affective states of financial capitalism. Examples could include Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017) and Jonas Eika’s After the Sun (2021). I want to focus, however, on one particular novel: William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003, hereafter PR), a work of speculative fiction that explores the intersections of branding, marketing, and finance in a digital age. Although written in 2003, just after the 9/11 attacks and before the 2007–2008 global market crash, the novel’s portrayal of homo-economicus as the affective subjectivity and speculative fatigue as the dominant affect remains strikingly relevant today.
The novel’s protagonist, Cayce Pollard, is a marketing consultant with an exceptional ability to recognize patterns in cultural trends and advertisements. When tasked with tracing the origins of enigmatic film clips known as ‘footage’ circulating online, Cayce becomes entangled in a global conspiracy. As her investigation deepens, she not only confronts her own inner demons but also navigates a reality increasingly shaped by virtual connections and speculative agendas. This journey mirrors the broader thematic concerns in PR, especially the commercialization and commodification of life within late financial capitalism. Cayce’s search for the origins of the footage can be seen as a metaphor for the way financial capitalism shapes our affective valuation of life, reducing personal and emotional experiences to marketable and commodified elements.
In the novel, one of the most potent tools of such market commodification is a strategy called ‘cool-hunting’. Cool-hunting, or trendspotting, as defined by Cayce, involves identifying ‘a group behavior pattern around a particular class of objects’ (Gibson, 2003, p. 86). She further explains that this tactic relies heavily on pattern recognition, with cool-hunters aiming to identify ‘a pattern before anyone else does’ (Gibson, 2003, p. 86). Following this, she describes the next process: ‘I point a commodifier at it […], it gets productized. Turned into units. Marketed’ (Gibson, 2003, p. 86).
Trapped in the Perpetual Present: Homo Economicus in Financial Capitalism
The commodification of everyday life, where even the most intimate moments can be analyzed and monetized by pattern-recognizing experts and cool hunters employed by profit-driven multinational corporations, poses a significant threat as life is reduced to ‘homo economicus’, driven solely by market and corporate interests. Homo economicus is the ideal figure within the financial market. Just as financial capitalism creates markets, it also shapes homo economicus as a form of subjectification and affect. Within financial capitalism, therefore, ‘we are everywhere homo economicus and only homo economicus’ (Brown, 2015, p. 33). In this framework, the subject is left to fend for itself and is addressed affectively. Its wants, desires, passions, and instincts are duly noted and turned into a financial narrative. It is in this space that financial capitalism aligns with its affective subjectivity – the subject of homo economicus, motivated only by self-interest.
Thus, what is distinctive about the figure of homo-economicus, and necessary for the functioning of financial capitalism, is that it legitimizes and ultimately (re)produces individuals based on market-defined self-interest(s). This system has become so pervasive that it has transformed everyday human existence into a vast game, or an endless stream of derivatives and speculative instruments. Individuals are increasingly defined by their ‘speculative value’ (Davis, 2018), a phenomenon that extends beyond consumers to include those working within the system, such as the cool-hunters themselves.
This is further illustrated in PR, which shows how the dominance of techno-financial culture, the surplus of consumer goods, and the illusion of instant gratification collectively transform society’s perception of time. This transformation gives rise to what Fredric Jameson (1991) terms a ‘perpetual present’. This is not just a structural shift but is also deeply affective, reshaping how individuals experience and internalize their place in the world by establishing a regime of ‘indifference’ (Martin, 2007). This affective state of perpetual present manifests in a world where the boundaries between the past, present, and future are increasingly blurred, as technological advancements and financial imperatives accelerate the pace of life. The constant flood of new products, information, and experiences generates a sense of ‘immediacy’ (Kornbluh, 2023), where the future is always deferred, and the past is continually reinterpreted to serve present speculation. In a world dominated by the logic of speculative finance and branding, time becomes a commodity – something to be sold, consumed, and constantly redefined. The notion of inhabiting a perpetual futuristic present also resonates with the statements of the sinister entrepreneur in the novel, Hubertus Bigend:
We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which “now” was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient “now” to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. [. . . ] We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition. (Gibson 2003, p. 57)
Therefore, for Bigend, history has effectively ended, and resistance is deemed futile. To project meaningfully into the future from a ‘perpetual present’ characterized by constant change, has become an impossible task. The novel also suggests that we, as readers, may be vulnerable under such circumstances to ‘apophenia’, a concept defined within the text as ‘the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things… an illusion of meaningfulness, faulty pattern recognition’ (2003, p. 115). While cool-hunters recognize real patterns to be economized, we merely imagine them in a desperate attempt to give meaning to our lives. They are hunting for cool; we are seeing patterns where there are none.
In the novel, people become more and more fixated on the footage, attempting to decipher patterns and significance within it. They engage in speculation about the meaning, function, or nature of the footage within Internet forums and across various digital networks, fostering the creation of new channels through which objects can be circulated and marketed (Nilges, 2019, p. 47). This reflects the relationship between interpretation and object, speculation and value, which forms the system through which the footage circulates.
This obsession with patterns must be understood differently depending on the historical period, allowing us to expand Andreasen’s periodization. In the 1980s, it aligns with Baudrillard’s critique of the simulacrum, where the proliferation of signs detached from reality creates existential uncertainty and a loss of meaning. By 2003, it reflects early Internet culture’s optimism about digital connectivity and the democratization of meaning, generating excitement and a belief in new possibilities, even within an emerging neoliberal landscape. By 2025, the affective response shifts again, shaped by a highly financialized, algorithm-driven digital economy, where engagement with content is driven by monetization and speculation. This fosters anxiety, compulsive interaction, and a sense of precarity, as meaning itself becomes a commodity. This shift does not follow a simple linear progression, nor does one phase completely replace another. Instead, it highlights how the pursuit of meaning moves from existential uncertainty to optimism, and finally to a precarious, commodified engagement with digital networks and financialized attention economies.
PR captures this historical trajectory while dramatizing humanity’s endless quest for meaning in a world dominated by signs and symbols – a pursuit for authenticity (amidst simulacra), continuity (in a culture celebrating fragmentation), and depth (in a society increasingly shaped by surface-level engagement and algorithmic immediacy). In the novel, this is an obsession that Hubert Bigend seeks to capitalize on financially. The objective is not to uncover patterns that might imbue the footage with meaning but, rather, as he sees it, to exploit and commercialize the footage. At this point, Bigend makes an important statement that aptly describes today’s financial market, which has increasingly become a simulacrum or a speculative construct rather than a tangible entity: ‘Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves’ (Gibson, 2003, p. 67). Thus, Bigend serves as a living embodiment of financial capitalism, wherein speculative value and profit supersede all other considerations. To him, life is viewed primarily through the prism of marketing and speculation.
However, the rise of speculative financial instruments does not signal the end of production and labor in today’s economies, nor a decrease in the focus on commodities. Instead, it reflects a shift from traditional consumer- and production-based capitalism to speculative financial practices, which are altering our understanding of value. Under financial capitalism, value increasingly derives from activities like ‘debt trading, financial market activity’ and ‘rentier practices’ (Davis, 2018, p. 5). This reflects a transformation in how economic value is generated: it is no longer grounded in production, but in abstract financial mechanisms that reshape wealth distribution and economic power.
This transformation is portrayed in PR, where Bigend’s pursuit of the footage is driven purely by financial motives. Cayce’s search, by contrast, is motivated by a desire to uncover something of genuine value, revealing a tension between speculative financial practices and the human need for meaning beyond profit and homo-economization. This contrast demonstrates how speculative capitalism not only redefines value but also influences individual desires and perceptions of worth.
Jameson (2003, p. 114) offers a reading of Gibson’s PR in which he observes that the clips’ absence of pattern and style provides ‘an ontological relief’ to Cayce, granting her ‘an epoch of rest, an escape from the noisy commodities themselves, which turn out […] to be living entities preying on the humans who have to coexist with them’. Although Cayce’s abilities develop within an overpowering technological market, she manages to avoid being reduced to homo economicus or having her life fully economized. She possesses what is known as a ‘trademark allergy’, which evolves into a phobia or nausea towards certain trademarks like Tommy Hilfiger and Bibendum, the Michelin Man. This reaction can be described as a side-effect of too much exposure to the world of branding and marketing. To cope, she removes trademark logos from her clothing and avoids contact with fashion brand names. As Gibson describes it, this rejection reflects Cayce’s conscious effort to resist being consumed by the hegemonic power of the techno-financial system and avoid becoming merely a commodified entity.
In her journey to find the creator of the footage, Cayce travels to various cities, including Tokyo. Upon her arrival in that city, she is confronted with what Gibson (2003, p. 125) describes as ‘the manically animated forest of signs’, leading her to seek nature and authenticity in the city. Cayce perceives Tokyo as a place where reality has been exiled, to the extent that even the paved streets seem to conceal no soil beneath them; everything appears artificial. She reflects, ‘she’s never actually seen soil emerge from any incision they might make in the street, here; it’s as though there is nothing beneath the pavement but a clean, uniformly dense substrate of pipes and wiring’ (Gibson, 2003, p. 125).
Tokyo thrives on signs and simulacra; yet, through her individual re-appropriation, Cayce resists the overwhelming dominance of financial instruments and cultural discourses, managing to prevent her life from being economized and commercialized. In other words, she refuses to be consumed by the simulacrum. In this sense, Cayce’s radicality and authenticity do not lie in overthrowing the oppressive systems of capitalism in which she is immersed, but rather in surviving within that system with some degree of agency.
Speculative Fatigue
PR anticipates a technologized future where financialization becomes ingrained in daily life. In this world, the distinction between the actual and the virtual blurs, and speculative finance takes center stage. The result is a subject reduced to a mere number, shaped by the totalizing forces of financial capitalism, where individuality is obscured, and the capacity to engage with or make sense of events is suspended. In this condition, the subject embodies homo economicus – driven by market logic rather than personal agency. Paralyzed by brands, speculative financial instruments, and AI technologies, this subject inhabits the world without truly interacting with it.
But how is the dominant affective state presented in the novel? While there are many affective responses throughout, PR illustrates an affective state in which speculative financial capitalism creates a life of suspended agency, where individuals are trapped in an endless loop of commodification and abstraction, shaped by the banality of corporate logos, technologies, and financial instruments. I call this affective state speculative fatigue, as it frames the affective and psychological toll of living under the constant pressure of financial speculation. If homo economicus is the product of financial speculation, then speculative fatigue could be seen as the affective residue left from being constantly subjected to its logic. In this sense, speculative fatigue isn’t just about an individual’s weariness with financial markets; it’s about how these markets and the perpetual self-calculation they demand leave people exhausted, emotionally drained, and disconnected from anything other than their economic value. It acknowledges the toll that the pervasive logic of financialization takes on people, whether or not they’re actively participating in it.
Speculative fatigue diverges from the affective states of euphoria and resignation, as described by Andreassen, through its distinct tone and lived experience. Euphoria, seen in the early stages of financialization, is driven by optimism and belief in the limitless potential of financial markets. In contrast, speculative fatigue arises from the constant pressure of engaging with financial speculation, leaving individuals mentally and affectively drained rather than energized. Resignation, often following a crisis, involves passive acceptance of the financial system’s dominance. While speculative fatigue shares some emotional distance with resignation, it is more about the ongoing toll of living in a financialized world that limits agency and connection, rather than simply giving up. In short, euphoria is driven by hope, resignation by acceptance, and speculative fatigue by the affective weariness of navigating a financially-driven reality.
Speculative fiction, in this context, provides a lens through which to explore the speculative fatigue produced by financial capitalism, though such explorations are not exclusive to the genre. PR exposes how financial speculation actively shapes cognitive and emotional experiences, leading to an endless state of homo economicus – a condition of perpetual economic calculation and self-optimization. This state is not abstract or universal; it is a direct result of how speculative finance permeates daily life, inducing affective overload and fatigue. Thus, speculative fatigue emerges as the emotional and psychological toll of this constant engagement with the logic of financial speculation, leaving individuals disconnected and mentally drained. The novel not only depicts the speculative fatigue of living in a financialized world, but also critiques the very systems that generate this fatigue. By revealing how homo economicus is both constructed and perpetuated by the very forces it critiques, and how speculative fatigue emerges from this process, PR illustrates how speculative financial capitalism reshapes not only our material world but also our affective landscapes, reducing individuals to economic units within a system that demands constant self-commodification.
In this sense, PR reveals the inherent contradictions of contemporary speculative financial capitalism, showing how speculation functions not only as an ‘immanent critique’ (Nilges, 2019) but also as a mechanism that cultivates homo economicus – a state where the pursuit of financial success, self-optimization, and market-driven choices supplant deeper values and genuine social connections. This homo economicus is not a passive backdrop but a central feature of the narrative, embodying the instability and uncertainty that come with speculative finance, where future outcomes are unpredictable. The affective experience of homo economicus, which manifests as speculative fatigue, is not incidental to financial speculation; rather, it is an intrinsic consequence of the constant cycle of self-assessment and recalculation of worth. This perpetual recalculation, driven by the fluctuating demands of financial markets and speculative mechanisms, exhausts individuals emotionally and psychologically, leaving them trapped in a state of ongoing fatigue.
Conclusion: Speculative Fiction as Critique
Andreasen identifies three stages of affective response to financialized capitalism: the euphoric hubris of the 1980s, the schizophrenic horror of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the resignation following the 2007–2008 financial crisis. In PR, however, speculative fatigue transcends this periodization, presenting a perpetual state of homo economicus, shaped by the pervasive logic of speculative finance.
Yet this is not the entire story. PR is also illuminating in its depiction of Cayce’s resistance to speculative fatigue generated by commodification and financialization, extending beyond Andreasen’s understanding of the affective stages of financial capitalism. The novel concludes with Cayce peacefully falling asleep after achieving her initial goal: finding the maker and revealing the mystery of the footage. However, just before drifting off, Cayce’s trademark allergy is suddenly cured. She no longer fears the Michelin Man or Tommy Hilfiger products. This cure symbolizes her ability to save herself from the ‘logo-maze’ that threatened to erode her, as she has gained a deeper understanding of the system. Her consciousness reaches a new level. From now on, she continually works to expose, challenge, and resist the coercive system attempting to dominate her. Furthermore, of equal significance in the novel’s final scene is Cayce’s weeping ‘for her century, though whether the one past or the one present she doesn’t know’ (Gibson, 2003, p. 356).
Resistance, though not an affect in itself, is fueled by a complex blend of emotions – frustration, anger, hope, and determination – that arise in response to the fatigue caused by speculative finance. This dual perspective, combining the affective state of speculative fatigue with the resistance that follows, highlights the transformative potential of speculative fiction. It does not simply capture the affective landscape of life within financialized systems but also weaves in acts of defiance, fueled by these very emotions. In this way, PR illustrates how resistance is both a reaction to the speculative fatigue of financial capitalism and a catalyst for imagining alternative futures.
Thus, it is crucial to engage with speculative fiction, not merely as a realm of flying cars and futuristic gadgets, but as a toolkit for examining how speculative financial practices shape social and cultural dynamics. Speculative fiction exposes how desires, fears, and imagined futures are engineered by economic systems, while also offering a glimpse of new possibilities and forms of resistance that can disrupt and transform those systems.
Ali Rıza Taşkale is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University. Prior to joining Roskilde University, he held positions at Near East University, Northern Cyprus, and Hacettepe University, Turkey. His research has been published in journals such as Critical Studies on Security, Urban Studies, Utopian Studies, Distinktion, Thesis Eleven, Rethinking Marxism, Northern Lights, New Political Science, Contemporary Political Theory, Third Text, Theory, Culture & Society, and the Journal for Cultural Research. His book, Post-Politics in Context, was published by Routledge in 2016. He serves on the editorial board of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, overseeing special issues and the forum exchange section and is actively engaged in a project exploring the logical and structural relationship between speculative fiction and speculative finance.
References
Andreasen, T. (2024). The day the music died – the waning of affect in finance fiction of the long downturn. Boundary (forthcoming)
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books.
Canavan, G. (2017). Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press.
Chambers, A. C., & Garforth, L. (2020). Reading Science: SF and the Uses of Literature. In N. Ahuja, et al. (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (pp. xx-xx). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_14.
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