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Coste, Jacques-Henri/Dussol, Vincent (2020)In: Coste, Jacques-Henri/Dussol, Vincent (eds.), The Fictions of American Capitalism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-34.ABSTRACT“This introductory chapter theorizes a “fictional” approach to capitalism. It explicates the development and raison d’être of a study of the representational and performative role of interrelated epistemic, ideological and literary narratives in the American socioeconomic context. It explains why exploring those narratives as a three-pronged discursive configuration helps to define and understand the American variety of capitalism, and its intrinsically Schumpeterian dynamics. Other major points dealt with include the axiological evaluation of the fictions of capitalism, and the resilience in the United States of a realist fictional mode which activates belief in the truth-value of creative fictions. The second part of the chapter consists in a summary of all the contributions that highlights the potential of transdisciplinary conversations at the interface of economics, sociology and literary studies.”EXTRACT“When governments and financial institutions rescued a threatened capitalist system by taking over bad debts and bailing out a number of hand-picked sinking banks, the semiotic and reflexive substance of economic value turned more political. Massive amounts of money were created and injected into the economy through stabilizing plans, quantitative easing and forward guidance. The exposure of “the fictiveness of fictitious capital” that crystallizes into liquidity (the capitalist dematerialized abstraction of value), and in the power of granting credits and canceling debts, was a shock for the mainstream economists believing in the substantive value of money and for the staunch advocates of a self-regulated financial market. This exposure acted as a reminder that fiat money is devoid of intrinsic value, even though it is the fundamental collective institution and social link in market economies (Aglietta 1976/2016; Orléan and Diaz-Bone 2013; Orléan 2014). The crisis also revealed the hidden market/state nexus presiding over its own invisibility, and uncovered its institutional and political stability (Cossu-Beaumont et al. 2016). […] As André Orléan (2014) has shown in The Empire of Value, any financial and monetary system—when analyzed from a conventionalist and regulationist perspective—has to rely on trust and a shared structure of beliefs within a community. Economic value is not bound up with labor, utility or market exchange ties; it is an extrinsic social force that extends to every aspect of economic life and shapes perceptions and behaviors. Lionel Shriver’s 2016 novel The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047, with its ironic “In God We Trusted” epigraph, and which features an economist as a character, has this passage that seems straight out of Orléan’s work: ‘Confidence, shmonfidence. What’s it matter if a few rich investors get edgy?’ ‘Money is emotional,’ Lowell pronounced. ‘Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it’s worth. They accept it in exchange for goods and services because they have faith in it. Economics is closer to religion than science. Without millions of individual citizens believing in a currency, money is colored paper. Likewise, creditors have to believe that if they extend a loan to the US government, they’ll get their money back or they don’t make a loan in the first place. So, confidence isn’t a side issue. It’s the only issue.’ “ (p. 3/11)