REVOLUTION OR DIVERSITY? AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL MANIFESTATIONS OF CLASS IN THREE SWEDISH RADICAL PICTUREBOOKS FROM THE 2000S AND 2010S

This article explores manifestations of class from a combined aesthetical and political point of view, focusing on a selection of Swedish children’s picture books from 2009 to 2018, in which class differences are made prominent. In this sense, they can be regarded as radical. This study examines how political aspects are intertwined with literary, visual, and multimodal means. The main purpose is to examine how the political and aesthetical merge in the manifestations of class. The publishing of radical picture books during the 2000s and 2010s coincided with a rise of norm-criti-cal discourse, including a strong emphasis on diversity rather than on social transformation. The books, I argue, do not depict radical change on a collective level, but uses various aesthetic means in their manifestations of class and inequality. Theoretically, the anal-ysis mainly draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital (1984), and Beverley Skeggs’s (1997) reasoning on class by adding the con-cept of respectability, as well as picturebook theory, and scholarly writing on radical picturebooks.

ANYBODY LIVING A PRIVATE LIFE IS A BELIEVER IN MONEY. GERTRUDE STEIN, THE GREAT DEPRESSION, AND THE ABSTRACTION OF MONEY

The article considers Gertrude Stein’s reflections about the increasing abstraction of economics in response to the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal in a number of explicitly political pieces from the mid-1930s, including “A Political Series” (1935), and her five brief newspaper commentaries on “money”: ”Money”, “More About Money”, “Still More About Money”, “All About Money”, and “My Last About Money” (1936). The article then relates them to Walter Benjamin’s and Giorgio Agamben’s ideas about the religious implications of the money system that resonate with Stein’s salute to the “believer in money” as security against contemporary authoritarian tendencies. Stein’s opinion pieces argue against taxation, unionism, and public spending, yet also demonstrate the slippery passage between her explicit conservatism, her economic liberalism and her still present radicalism and critique of patriarchal authority as they recycle crucial elements from contemporaneous works such The Geographical History of America (1935) and Everybody’s Autobiography (1937).

SENSIBILITY AND SEMIO-CAPITALISM – A BODILY EXPERIENCE OF CRISIS IN URSULA ANDKJÆR OLSEN’S THE CRISIS NOTEBOOKS

In The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (2012), Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi unfolds a political and clinical diagnosis of contemporary society, stating that the crisis we experience today is a permanent state of absent social autonomy and political agency. This crisis is not solely economic but is caused by semio-capitalism impacting all spheres of human life, affecting sensibility in particular—the linguistic and physical-sensuous link between the individual and the world. Taking up the term sensibility as a bodily basis of experience and as an aesthetic notion, in this article I will explore the relation between individual and collective bodies, the crisis as a suspension of change, and literature, focusing on the Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s 2017 lunatic and fragmented novel of love and economy The Crisis Notebooks, but also with reference to some of her other work(s). I argue that the bodily experience of crisis, as expressed in this novel, leads to an inhibited social sensibility but also, paradoxically, to a radical openness towards the world. With reference to the Danish literary scholar Anne Fastrup’s interpretation of French vitalism’s idea of sensibility in The Movement of Sensibility (2007), I suggest that a more ambiguous, material notion of both a constructive and a destructive sensibility is crucial for its understanding, and hence—for an understanding of the relationship between body and crisis as expressed in The Crisis Notebooks. Finally, I suggest that an aesthetic notion of sensibility can provide a prism through which relations between today’s financial mechanisms and a sociocultural experience of crisis are rendered visible—if not sensuous—and it is from here that alternatives to the crisis can be found, felt, formulated or fabulated.

SPECTRAL MEMORIES: AESTHETIC RESPONSES TO THE FINANCIAL CRASH IN ICELAND 2008

In October 2008, one of the largest bank crashes in history struck Iceland, a country of three hundred and thirty five thousand inhab-itants. The aim of the article is to examine two cultural responses to the crash and the crisis that followed. More precisely, the aim is to analyse how the creation of the haunted house in I Remember You, a crash-horror story by crime writer Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, as well as the spectral half-built houses portrayed by visual artist Guðjón Ketilsson refer quite directly, yet spectrally, to the period. The spec-tral themes of the two works give the opportunity to discuss the moment following the crash as a moment of haunting—but who is haunted and by whom?

THE FINANCIAL REGIME

Starting from the premise that the financial regime has become a power in and of itself—a fourth, ‘monetative’ power as it were—this essay gives an account of the ascendancy of finance and the shift from geopolitical to geo-economical order, within which there is no democratic legitimacy and no legal accountability and within which a new class conflict also emerges. It goes on to advance five theses on this new financial sovereignty, concluding that sovereign is he, who can transform his risks into other’s dangers and position him-self as the creditor of last resort.

FULL AUTOMATION IN ITS INFANCY: THE SITUATIONIST AVANT-GARDE BOOK FIN DE COPENHAGUE

This article discusses Fin de Copenhague, a Situationist book experiment from 1957 by Asger Jorn and Guy Debord. By way of a contextualizing archival study with special attention to Jorn’s contemporaneous book project Pour la forme, the article demonstrates that the Russian avant-garde book was a key influence if also a point of critical departure. On this reading, Fin de Copenhague marks a turn away from the unbridled technological optimism of the historical avant-garde. In its material implications and aesthetic choices, Fin de Copenhague draws attention to crucial changes in the capitalist mode of production and challenges the then nascent discourse about “full automation.”

MONEY AS FRAME

This essay responds to “Money as Art: The Form, the Material, and Capital” by the Marxist economist Costas Lapavitsas with refer-ence to the triple manifestation of crisis in the United States dur-ing the spring months of 2020. By triangulating the role of money in the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing mass unemployment, and the historical nationwide revolt in response to the police mur-der of George Floyd predicated on a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, Nicholas Huber makes a three-part claim. First, that acceptance of the Marxist theory of fetishism forecloses the possibility of conceiv-ing of capitalist money as art in the sense developed by Lapavitsas, insofar as the latter tends toward transhistorical concepts of both art and money. Following from this, any aesthetic function of mon-ey in the capitalist mode of production is inseparable from its total social function; that is, capitalist money is at once an economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic mediation unlike any other. Finally, Huber draws on Louis Marin’s typology of the frame in correspond-ence with Erik Olin Wright’s integrated class analytic framework to argue that the question of whether money is art or not leads us to a dead end. Huber suggests that a crisis such as the one unfolding in 2020 raises instead the more challenging question of what social system must come into being, such that a theory of capitalist money as art becomes intelligible.

MARX ET CO REVISITED. REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ECONOMY IN RALF ANDTBACKA’S WUNDERKAMMER (2008)

The present article studies the representation of economy in Wunderkammer (2008), a collection of poetry by Finland-Swedish author Ralf Andtbacka. Going back to the historical form of cabinets of curiosities, Wunderkammer depicts acts of buying, selling, and collecting. By showing the connectivity of objects and their impact on human subjects, Andtbacka actualizes and deconstructs topics originally initiated by Karl Marx, such as value, fetish, commodifica-tion, and alienation. The portrayal of capitalism, both past and pres-ent, in the book is highly ambivalent. On the one hand, collecting functions as a critical, anticapitalistic act. On the other hand, eco-nomic discourse has invaded the text and turned the author into a writing machine powered by the energy of neoliberal labor. Besides an excess of objects, the poems display an overflow of information, a characteristic feature of a postcapitalist economy. As an exam-ple of cognitive mapping, Wunderkammer allegorically portrays humans, objects, and information in the middle of a paradoxical economic transformation.

THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE JOB: THE RIGHT JOB FOR OUR TOOLS

This article ponders the questions of why so many literary scholars want to bring literary and economic issues together now, and why it seems so difficult to establish a genuinely cross-disciplinary con-versation.1 Offering two examples of approaches to the intersec-tion of literary and economic issues that privilege methodology over themes, history, or theory—a very brief genealogy of the concept of a national economy and an equally brief analysis of derivatives—the article calls for an ongoing reflection on whether literary and cultural scholars have the right tools for the job and, conversely, the right job for our tools.