Death-Driven Futures, or You Can't Spell Deconstruction without Enron

What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion. . . . Hence arises the paradoxical situation that the living organism struggles most energetically against events (dangers, in fact) which might help it to attain its life's aim rapidly—by a kind of short-circuit. Such behaviour is, however, precisely what characterizes purely instinctual as contrasted with intelligent efforts.

—Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

In 2004, Magnolia Pictures released a "major motion picture" based on Bethany McLean's and Peter Elkind's national bestseller, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (2003).¹ The played-out-behind-the-scenes style of this Oscar-nominated documentary zealously provides images for every referent, even the nearly dead metaphoric ones. The film narrates Mike Muckleroy and company's flight to Valhalla, New York, to investigate the chicanery of Mike Bourget, CEO of Enron Oil, and Thomas Maestroeni, Enron Oil treasurer, who ran sham corporations in Panama and engaged in phony transactions, all while collecting bonuses in the millions.² Muckleroy's flight is dramatized by a shot of a flying plane (not the plane); a reference to "black magic" is duly concretized by a magician pulling a rabbit out of a top hat (in a subsequent shot, the rabbit wriggles its nose at the camera); and "betting" with energy is adjoined to images of a spinning roulette wheel and dice being rolled across a casino table. Notably, the documentary clips from The Simpsons (episode 298) the Enron rollercoaster "Ride of Broken Dreams," which quickly peaks and then just as abruptly plummets into a poorhouse, to evoke Enron's descending stock graph.³

In its fluster to master reference, the Enron documentary attests to the anxiety that surrounds Enron executives' cynical and destructive "poststructuralization" of its profits, assets, and debts as sliding signifiers that defer referential closure. Their "irrationally exuberant" writing of anticipated revenues manipulated a fetishistic faith in the proliferative potential of financial values, which remained fictitious, but not the deepening chasm between rising debts and virtual profits that forced the company to declare bankruptcy in December 2001.⁴ This disaster has spurred analysts after Enron to wrestle with the prospect of reverting to what Jean Baudrillard might see as a "classical" economy of value that prioritizes actual cash flows versus anticipated earnings as the material basis of corporate financial representations.

Enron's inadvertent deconstruction of financial fetishism points beyond the competition between industrial and financial capital to reveal how a circulation of fictitious values exacerbates the anxiety triggered by aphanisis, the ontological fading of the subject between signifiers vis-à-vis the Symbolic's inconsistency. Stuart Hall identifies this instability with the "arbitrariness and necessary incompleteness of even the most assiduous individual risk calculation," and Paul Langley (in his essay in this issue) with the "paradoxically monolithic and disconnected" economic identity summoned by "neoliberal governmentality."⁵ Langley also notes that the "continual representation of investment as a principal means of acquiring material well-being, security, and freedom only serves to heighten this anxiety and, ultimately, to install a sense of perpetual crisis." Baudrillard is prescient in his assessment of hyperrealization as a literal extermination "of the real of production and the real of signification."⁶ The "indeterminacy of every sphere in relation to every other, and to their proper content"⁷ transmutes a dialectical opposition between base and superstructure "into a pure and simple structural alternation" and "produces the characteristic effect of an uncertainty surrounding the reality of the crisis."⁸ The "mythical operation" of the economy obscures this reality by affecting a passage from the determinant sphere of signs to the indeterminacy of the code that subtends a return to the "eternal verities of the monetary base," which David Harvey posits as the last refuge in a crisis.⁹

Drawing on Jacques Derrida's "Différance," I employ the term textual materiality to refer to the agency of signifiers in supplement-ing fictitious values. I then turn to Harvey and Baudrillard as critical counterpoints on the commerce of fictitious...