Performing Capital in Caryl Churchill's Serious Money

Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money dramatizes both the difficulty and the necessity of updating a project described in 1929 by Bertolt Brecht—historicizing dramatic form in relation to changes in the mode of production, the imperative of finding the form imposed by modern subject matter. Brecht’s point of reference for modernity was petroleum. As he argued:

[p]etroleum resists the five-act form; today’s catastrophes do not progress in a straight line but in cyclical crises . . . fate is no longer a single coherent power; rather there are fields of force which can be seen radiating in opposite directions . . . Once we have begun to find our way about the subject-matter we can move on to the relationship . . . The form in question can however only be achieved by a complete change of the theatre’s purpose. Only a new purpose can lead to a new art. The new purpose is called pedagogics. ¹

This essay will explore the way in which Serious Money, Caryl Churchill’s play about finance capital, engages in such a pedagogy, but it will also ask questions about the complexity of Brecht’s insistence that political theatre be both critical and entertaining, particularly in an age in which entertainment has become the most valuable commodity of all and critical distance has been displaced by ironic cynicism. This cynicism about politics is established by the play’s designation of its location: all of the machinations of the stock-brokers take place under the banner of Liffe, the London International Futures Exchange, pronounced “Life.” As one character has it: “On the floor of Liffe the commodity is money.” ² Serious Money’s story of insider trading, leveraged buyouts, and ultimately an unsolved murder is made up of a series of scenes juxtaposed to one another with rapid speed; scenes and dialogue often overlap, so that both the form and the content of the play celebrate as they critique the social and economic mechanism of late capitalism.

In analyzing Churchill’s performative pedagogy, which develops a dramatic form that speaks not of petroleum but of the seductive power and performance of financial speculation, this essay will try to assess both the difficulties and potential of this form for a new pedagogy that works through the relation between dramatic representation and economic performance in late or so-called postmodern capitalism. It will do so by unpacking what I will call the jammed symbolic order of this historical moment. ³ Discussing the urban experience of postmodernism, David Harvey points to “transitions in the political economy of advanced capitalism” in which “a new and quite different regime of capital accumulation” came into being—flexible accumulation, the accumulation of capital by way of mobile, fluid, global financial activity. ⁴ The effects of this form of capital accumulation on individual experience has been described by Fredric Jameson as a “new and historically original dilemma,” in which individuals are situated in “a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities.” In this new kind of relativity that differs from the Einsteinian version of modernism, experience cannot be made coherent because of the death not only of the subject, but of figuration itself, as comprehensible experience is replaced by “fragmented and schizophrenic decentering and dispersion.” ⁵

My reading of Serious Money will also bring gender into this discussion, through the concept of a jammed symbolic order; this is my term for the figure that covers over the very impossibility of figuration described by Jameson. I am drawing on Julia Kristeva’s concept of the symbolic order to refer to the cultural positioning from which an individual attempts to establish an identity by making judgments about the distinction between itself and its objects and by its insertion into sign systems; the symbolic order also includes the institutions which produce that cultural positioning. ⁶ The contemporary symbolic order allows for the recognition that the economy is the ground of culture, yet it cannot resolve the contradiction between the critique and the affirmation of this grounding. That is, the recognition seems to originate from two diametrically opposed perspectives, one that critiques, one that affirms it. Serious...