Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

materialised and enacted through gameplay, and connects this in-game formation and circulation of
happiness to the homogenisation and relative exclusivity of gaming culture. Relating the analysis of specific
game mechanics to its themes and then wider mainstream gamer culture, this paper argues that the
attachment of positive and negative affect to specific objects, outcomes and characters attempts to
reinscribe specific social norms as social goods that even – and especially – prevail in a post-apocalyptic
world (Ahmed, 2010). Through this analysis I will demonstrate how happiness is manufactured and directed
within the game in order to justify choices and affectively shape the gaming experience.
Mark Steven
Affect | Film | Finance
“Money,” we are told, “has lost its narrative quality.” Such terminal simplicity naturally belongs to a moment
in history when the general formula for capitalist accumulation has entered the autumnal phase of its cycle,
the name for which is finance. Financial capitalism, unlike its merchant and industrial precursors, is lacking in
narrative because its privileged site of profit extraction has shifted from the humanly populated zones of
manufacture into the speculative non-space of exchange markets. While the factories had their epics
narrated by the likes of Balzac, Dickens, and even Marx himself, what of our own speciously “postproductive”
present? This paper argues that affect theory, with its emphasis on fleeting intensities and
inhuman forces, offers a well-fitted critical optic through which to view the typically imperceptible narratives
in and of finance capital. It also argues that if any medium has singular access to the affective narratives of
finance capital then that medium is post-filmic cinema.
4D
Alternative imaginings of finance and markets (Chair, Lisa Adkins)
Carolyn Hardin* & Adam Rottinghaus* The Hinterland of Finance: Information, Representation, and Risk in Financial
Markets
In this paper, we extend our analysis begun in “Introducing a Cultural Approach to Technology in Financial
Markets,” (Journal of Cultural Economy, 2015) to information in financial markets. Scholars often assume
that the aim of financial information is to represent underlying truths about market conditions, leaving
critics to assess only the degree of representational fidelity. We argue that communication technologies and
financial models constitute data as forms of power that reorganize material, temporal, and spatial market
relationships. The continued use of credit default swap (CDS) indexes—derivatives used to evaluate the risk
of mortgage-backed securities—after their ignominious failure to accurately assess market risk leading up to
the crash of 2007, demonstrates that information fidelity was never the indexes’ key function. Instead, our
analysis reveals that the nested networks of financial derivatives underlying CDS indexes produce complex
relationships of power, exclusion, and profit which challenge the representational interpretation of financial
information.
Dick Bryan* & Michael Rafferty Financial foundations of a theory of value
This paper addresses the ways in which political economy needs to move beyond a simple and simplistic
branding of finance as “fictitious” and “unproductive” and move towards a conception of value that includes
finance and in particular the shifting of risk to households. This approach not only presents a distinctive
perspective on the household as a balance sheet of assets and liabilities (and associated risk profiles), but
throws open the need to ground theories of value in units of measure (a numeraire) that is economically,
socially and culturally appropriate to the conjuncture in which value is being defined and measured. The
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