The recent financial crisis has shattered lives and spread misery far and wide. The magnitude of damage has produced the desire for the economic equivalent of a truth and reconciliation commission. Yet the efforts to get the story right have pointed as much to a crisis of narrative, of theory, even of facticity among the standard-bearers of monied matters, public punditry and policy self-justification. If the underlying parables by which the larger trinity of economics, politics, and culture remains undisturbed by cataclysmic events, we should wonder whether systemic shock is sufficient to re-order habits of mind. We could also worry that what is presented as an exceptional circumstance of suffering for some is the business-as-usual experience for so many who are forced to live by the market's vagaries through what are considered to be by its chief beneficiaries, both good times and bad. If there is an opportunity for cultural studies in all of this, it may lie most of all in a refusal of the neat partitions, the intellectual division of labor by which both normal times and aberrant patches are understood. Cultural studies may benefit from a supple rapprochement with the critique of political economy that yields a different account of valuation and exchange. What follows is an effort to think the condition of cultural studies in the aftermath of financial attention beyond parabolic convention.
