WHEN FINANCE BECOMES YOU

This from Rob Halpern's brief introduction for Taylor Brady's 10 November 2011 reading at Eastern Michigan University: "If lyric poetry is about the construction of our persons, if lyric implicates our subjectivity in its musical intervals of sense and idea, then what happens when finance becomes you, becomes us all, even those of us who would have nothing whatever to do with financial instruments and trading, who oppose it fundamentally and occupy city centers as a way of resisting it? What must happen to lyric when it begins to register something critical about our contemporary personhood under conditions when daily life itself has been financialized—when we’re all sitting here together on borrowed time, literally: who are we? who are we becoming?—when our debts, both individual and collective defy reason, contradict our very lifespan, as well as our bodies that have been contracted to pay? What happens at the very core of so-called self-expression when the objective, measurable world of calculation, money, and exchange are no longer separable from the subjective fiction we call a self?"

And this from a private 2007 message sent by then-twenty-something Goldman Sachs trader Fabrice Tourre to his girlfriend: "The whole building is about to collapse anytime now … Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab … standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities [sic]!!!"