Amin Samman

Bio: Amin Samman is an academic researcher from City University London. The author has contributed to research in topics: Financial crisis & Capitalism. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 13 publications receiving 99 citations.

Re-imagining the crises of global capital

Abstract: This thesis explores the imaginary dimensions of economic crisis through a study of the interface between practices of historical representation and processes of social construction Its core argument is that a sense of history cannot be disentangled from the phenomena that it strives to apprehend As a result, there can be no fixed and objective relation between the evolution of global capitalism and its long history of crises Instead, the very intelligibility of both ‘crisis’ and ‘history’ is produced through an iterated telescoping of time, whereby more or less distant events and episodes are grasped together in ways that lend meaning to those of the present This argument is taken forward via an in-depth and quasi-historical analysis of the 2008 crisis Focusing on how past crises figure within the pronouncements of international policymaking organisations and the commentary of the global financial press between 2007 and 2009, it develops a typology of different practices of historical representation and the various interpretive functions they are capable of performing In so doing, it makes a theoretical contribution to the constructivist and cultural political economy literatures on the discursive negotiation of crisis

Crisis theory and the historical imagination

Abstract: This article makes a theoretical contribution to the constructivist and cultural political economy literatures on crisis. While these new approaches have highlighted the imaginary dimensions of crisis, they have neglected the specifically historical forms of imagination through which events are construed and constructed as crises. In particular, they have yet to adequately theorise how the recollection of prior crises might interact with efforts to diagnose and resolve a crisis in some later present. I respond to this lacuna by developing a novel set of tools for analysing the meta-historical dimensions of crisis. These include a typology that identifies three distinct ways of recalling past crises, and a concept of ‘history-production’, which captures how different interpretive practices feed into the diagnosis and negotiation of crisis episodes. Taken together these tools help illuminate a complex interaction not only between historical analogies, narratives, and lessons, but also between these ...

THE 1930s AS BLACK MIRROR

Abstract: Media coverage of the recent financial crisis has referred extensively to various past crises, and in particular to the events of the 1930s. This article suggests that the idea of the Great Depression has effectively come to function as a kind of historical ‘black mirror’ – a quasi-object within which conjuncture and historical representation interact to produce an image of capitalist history itself. Focusing on the journalistic output of four key financial publications, I trace how portrayals of the 1930s have evolved over the course of the crisis. I find that while the 1930s are frequently and consistently invoked in ways that purport to reveal the historicity of the crisis, these representations produce an oscillation between different visions of historical repetition, which in turn underpin competing interpretations of the crisis as it unfolds. In so doing, I argue, appeals to the 1930s have simultaneously served to conceal and disclose the constitutive relation of historical imagination to historical...

Making Financial History: The Crisis of 2008 and the Return of the Past

Abstract: The past does not simply provide conditions of possibility for capitalist finance; it also serves as a vital resource for those who might seek to understand or negotiate it in a particular present. However, scholars of finance and crisis have overlooked this point at precisely the same time that they themselves have sought to find clues or lessons in financial history. This article provides a reading of how and why the past has come to acquire such a strange presence within contemporary capitalism. Following Michel de Certeau, it approaches historiography as an operation, focusing on how the past has figured within three distinct but related fields of social science – namely, financial economics, economic history, and constructivist political economy. It demonstrates how each of these fields has been structured around an exclusion of the recollected past as an input into historical process, and argues that this has been revealed by the discursive response to the crisis of 2008, which in turn should be understood as a breakdown in the machinery of capitalist historiography. It concludes by suggesting that in order to grasp the potential productivity of such a breakdown, scholars of the global economy should begin to make a place for ‘the practical past’ within both their visions of history and methods of historical research.

History in Financial Times

Abstract: This chapter develops a critique of linear conceptions of time in political economy, showing how these have produced a vision of historical change at odds with the strange realities of financial capitalism. It then advocates a turn from economics and finance theory to the theory and philosophy of history. To support this, the chapter addresses the seam between history and finance in three ways. First, it emphasizes how historical discourse has produced an enduring mode of subjectivity distinct to the one associated with economic discourse. Second, it shows how contemporary narratives of financialization bespeak a desire more properly belonging to the domain of history than either economy or finance. Finally, it introduces a concept of the ‘strange loop,’ intended to capture a form of feedback between historical discourse and the process of historical change or development, such that every attempt to imagine history becomes a potential input back into it.

Theory of business enterprise

Abstract: Veblen has been claimed and rejected both by sociologists and economists as being one of theirs. He enriched and attacked both disciplines, as he did so many others: philosophy, history, social psychology, politics, and linguistics. Because he took all knowledge as necessary and relevant to adequate understanding, Veblen was a holistic analyst of the social process. First published in 1904, this classic analysis of the U.S. economy has enduring value today. In it, Veblen posited a theory of business fluctuations and economic growth which included chronic depression and inflation. He predicted the socioeconomic changes that would occur as a result: militarism, imperialism, fascism, consumerism, and the development of the mass media as well as the corporate bureaucracy. Douglas Dowd's introduction places the volume within the traditions of both macroeconomics and microeconomics, tracing Veblen's place among social thinkers, and the place of this volume in the body of his work.

The content of the Form: narrative discourse and historical representation

Abstract: Although the chapters that appear in this book have been previously published separately in different places at different times, they have been revised by the author for their publication as a book and are all related to the problem of historical representation. By putting together essays on Droysen, Foucault, Jameson and Ricoeur, Hayden White hasmanaged to give an encompassing account of a problematic issue that has been one of the major concerns of historical studies as well as of many other areas of the human sciences: that of the importance of narrative representation in the description or explanation of the “object” of study of the human sciences. Although the authors mentioned deal with this subject in different ways, White finds in them common characteristics which confirm the point made by him that historical narratives are, from a semiological perspective, concerned with the production of meanings.

Frank Kermode and the Invented World@@@The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

Abstract: A pioneering attempt to relate the theory of literary fiction to a more general theory of fiction, using fictions of apocalypse as a model. This pioneering exploration of the relationship of fiction to age-old conceptions of chaos and crisis offers many new insights into some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of a wide range of writers from Plato to William Burroughs, Kermode demonstrates how writers have persistently imposed their \"fictions\" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit.