Book Launch | Arjun Appadurai’s "Banking on Words" Wednesday, December 09 6 - 8 PM Institute for Public Knowledge 20 Cooper Sq, Room 503 New York, NY More info and RSVP: https://ipk.nyu.edu/calendar/events/279-book-launch-arjun-appadurai-s-bankin... The Cultures of Finance Group<http://ipk.nyu.edu/working-groups/cultures-of-finance> at the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge<http://ipk.nyu.edu/> and the Department of Media, Culture and Communication<http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/mcc/> invite you to join us for the US launch and panel discussion of Arjun Appadurai’s new book, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo22228827.html> from University of Chicago Press. The panel discussion, moderated by Arvind Rajagopal, will feature Professor Appadurai in conversation with Caitlin Zaloom and Natasha Schüll. In this provocative look at one of the most important events of our time, renowned scholar Arjun Appadurai argues that the economic collapse of 2008—while indeed spurred on by greed, ignorance, weak regulation, and irresponsible risk-taking—was, ultimately, a failure of language. To prove this sophisticated point, he takes us into the world of derivative finance, which has become the core of contemporary trading and the primary target of blame for the collapse and all our subsequent woes. With incisive argumentation, he analyzes this challengingly technical world, drawing on thinkers such as J. L. Austin, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber as theoretical guides to showcase the ways language—and particular failures in it—paved the way for ruin. Appadurai moves in four steps through his analysis. In the first, he highlights the importance of derivatives in contemporary finance, isolating them as the core technical innovation that markets have produced. In the second, he shows that derivatives are essentially written contracts about the future prices of assets—they are, crucially, a promise. Drawing on Mauss’s The Gift and Austin’s theories on linguistic performatives, Appadurai, in his third step, shows how the derivative exploits the linguistic power of the promise through the special form that money takes in finance as the most abstract form of commodity value. Finally, he pinpoints one crucial feature of derivatives (as seen in the housing market especially): that they can make promises that other promises will be broken. He then details how this feature spread contagiously through the market, snowballing into the systemic liquidity crisis that we are all too familiar with now. With his characteristic clarity, Appadurai explains one of the most complicated—and yet absolutely central—aspects of our modern economy. He makes the critical link we have long needed to make: between the numerical force of money and the linguistic force of what we say we will do with it. Dr. Arjun Appadurai<http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/mcc/faculty/Arjun_Appadurai> is Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. A prominent contemporary social-cultural anthropologist, he formerly served as Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School and has held various professorial chairs and visiting appointments in the United States and Europe. In addition, he has served on several scholarly and advisory bodies in the United States, Latin America, Europe and India. Dr. Appadurai is a world renowned expert on the cultural dynamics of globalization, having authored numerous books and scholarly articles. The nature and significance of his contributions throughout his academic career have earned him the reputation as a leading figure in his field. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. <http://sca.as.nyu.edu/object/CaitlinZaloom>Arvind Rajagopal<http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty/Arvind_Rajagopal> is a media scholar and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. Natasha Schüll<http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty/Natasha_Schull> is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. Caitlin Zaloom<http://sca.as.nyu.edu/object/CaitlinZaloom> is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU and Editor-in-Chief of Public Books<http://publicbooks.org>.