Reading Capitalist Realism

Adultery, Crisis, Contract

a n d r e w h o b e r e k Adultery, Crisis, Contract In an August 2007 Boston Globe column on the burgeoning subprime mortgage crisis, the journalist and economic commentator Robert Kuttner asserted that “irresponsibly speculative lenders should be prohibited from selling mortgages in the secondary market, even if they can find a consenting adult foolish enough to buy them.”1 And in a January 2009 story on the failure of Gemstone, a subprime mortgage operation set up by Deutsche Bank, the New York Times reporter Vikas Bajaj wrote that “the German bank counters that M&T executives entered into the investment as consenting adults, and that they knew, or should have known, the risks they were taking.”2 If the rhetoric of consenting adults participates in the project of ideological damage control that followed the ­ crisis—­ casting it as the product of bad individual decisions, rather than of capitalism as a ­ system—­ it does so via a curiously sexualized metaphor. Although Kuttner questions this individualizing rhetoric by suggesting that regulatory constraints should perhaps be imposed upon lenders’ ability to take advantage even of consenting adults, he joins Deutsche Bank (or at least Bajaj’s characterization of its position) in describing investors as analogous to people who were old enough to consent to, and thus to some degree responsible for, their sexual activities. Far from being coincidental, this metaphorical invocation of responsibility within an illicit and damaging transaction resonates strongly with the way in which adultery installed itself, at around the same time, at the center of the American zeitgeist. In the late nineties, at the height of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, Laura Kipnis could already note that “adultery has become the favored metonym for all broken promises, intimate and national, a transparent sign 4 2 a n d r e w h o b e r e k for tawdriness and bad behavior.”3 But in the late aughts adultery became a metonym for something even more specific: not promise, but contract. Just as the mortgage crisis was flowering into the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, media coverage of extramarital affairs on the part of such figures as John Edwards, Tiger Woods, New York governor Eliot Spitzer, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, and Sandra Bullock’s husband Jesse James became ubiquitous and inescapable. This coverage was not only a media-generated sideshow designed to distract attention from more pressing economic issues (although it certainly was that); it was also a displaced register of these issues. The media’s fascination with this particular wave of adultery by politicians and celebrities, and the intense rage unleashed around their infractions, was in fact related to the ongoing travails of the US economy, insofar as these stories of adultery provided a site for people to express their anger at the violation of the contract form putatively central to capitalism but in fact increasingly outmoded within its current incarnation. As a violation of contract with particularly deleterious effects on the home, adultery served as an apt symbolic stand-in for not only the transformation of capitalism in general but the effects of the mortgage crisis in particular. Politicians like Edwards and Sanford made particularly good subjects of this narrative insofar as they straddled the line between private and public responsibility, and their transgressions thus implied damage not only to the people with whom they had contracted (their wives) but also to a broader public (their constituents, their parties). Crucially, though, commentary on the Tiger Woods scandal also carried this resonance of public guilt and accountability. Marney Rich Keenan’s opinion piece for the Detroit News two weeks into the coverage , for instance, focused not on the scandal itself but on how it had been “missed by [the] public for a long time”: “The irony is how many of us enabled Tiger Woods to get away with the infidelities for as long as he did.” Describing the control exerted over Woods’s media image prior to the scandal, Keenan quotes Steven Ortiz, a sociologist and expert on “professional athletes’ marriages.” Among such athletes, Ortiz claims, a d u l t e r y, c r i s i s , c o n t r a c t 4 3 the adultery is so institutionalized, it becomes a culture of infidelity. . . . They also display a certain level of narcissism. They think the world revolves around them, which minimizes, in their...