Hard cash: A post-disciplinary digest

Cameron, Angus; Dunne, Stephen Article Hard cash: A post-disciplinary digest Finance and Society Provided in Cooperation with: Finance and Society Network (FSN) Suggested Citation: Cameron, Angus; Dunne, Stephen (2015) : Hard cash: A post-disciplinary digest, Finance and Society, ISSN 2059-5999, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Vol. 1, Iss. 1, pp. 6-, https://doi.org/10.2218/finsoc.v1i1.1367 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/309307 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Hard cash: A post-disciplinary digest Corresponding author: Angus Cameron, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK. Email: [email protected] Angus Cameron University of Leicester, UK Stephen Dunne University of Leicester, UK May 6th 2010, 2.45pm. The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls by nearly 1000 points, trillions of dollars were ‘wiped’ from the value of major US stocks and, for a few long minutes, the global economy was on the brink of a new catastrophe. Then ‘it’ all came back. It remains unclear what, exactly, caused the ‘Flash Crash’. More worryingly, it has always been unclear what, exactly, was ‘lost’ and ‘regained’ in those apocalyptic moments. This is as much a philosophical, anthropological, and aesthetic concern as it is also an economic or financial one – trillions of what, exactly? Money has always been a profoundly ambiguous and highly volatile object. Events such as the flash crash and the global financial crisis before it, however, have brought this ambiguity and volatility into the arena of popular deliberation. Non-specialists like us may not know what Hard Cash really is but in this we are, as J.P. von Bethmann once pointed out, in precisely the same predicament as the specialists. This special issue – or what we like to think of a post-disciplinary digest – offers examples of what the fields of economic geography (Angus Cameron), political economy (Bob Jessop), art criticism (Max Haiven), literary history (Joyce Goggin) and political philosophy (Ole Bjerg) can offer us within such a predicament. Happy eating! Figure 1. Cesare Pietroiusti and Paul Griffiths, Eating money: An auction, 2005-2007. Performance at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK. Photo by Caters News. Courtesy of the Ikon Gallery. Finance and Society 2015, 1(1): 6 © The Author(s) 10.2218/finsoc.v1i1.1367 Editorial