Still Dancing: drive as a category of political economy

Abstract

One of the most notorious remarks circulating as evidence of bankers’ arrogant disregard for the destructive effects of their high-risk financial strategies came in July 2007 from Charles Prince, the CEO of Citigroup. He said “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.” Then he added: “we’re still dancing.” At the time, the subprime mortgage market was in free fall. Yet over the preceding five months, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had led Wall Street in creating and selling 50 billion dollars in new CDOs (collateralized debt obligations, a kind of derivative backed by mortgage bonds). Prince thought the “pools of liquidity” were deep enough—the amount of available capital big enough—to immunize the big banks from the collapse of subprime. Despite the plummeting subprime mortgage market, Wall Street had kept on issuing CDOs; the total dollar amount for the year 486.8 billion.1 In the words of one investor, “We knew the collateral for the CDOs had collapsed. And yet everything went on, as if nothing had changed.”2 The International Monetary Fund would subsequently estimate losses related to USgenerated subprime mortgage assets at one trillion dollars. The psychoanalytic term for this keeping on, this repetition, is drive. Drive is a keeping on beyond pleasure, beyond use, beyond desire. In the reflexive turn of the drive, drive’s loop back