Uneven City: Brightness Falls and the Ethnography of Fictitious Finance

Abstract

The FIRE industry is driven primarily by an unquestioned belief in the system of speculative finance with its mediated and opportunistic transactions in fictitious capital.¹ Real estate speculation, and consequently, urban development itself, of the kind debated in Kill the Poor, draws its sap from the principles and practices of the finance economy. By the 1980s, FIRE’s overt interests in culture, cultural spaces, and cultural capital, have made it amenable to rich, ethnographic insights that can unravel the social, spatial, cultural, economic, and political formations resulting from its increasing hegemony over New York’s late twentieth-century urbanism.² Literary formations themselves have changed their guise and substance, which is to say their generic features and their subject matter. If DeLillo’s writer in Great Jones Street proposed “financial writing” as the new genre that can meet the demands of the new regime of speculative accumulation, Jay McInerney’s Brightness Falls (1992) urbanizes financial writing and makes it a most suitable imaginative translation of the newfound frontier of ethnographic research.

The magic of opportunity—unreserved, unfailing, unrestrained— isn’t this the calling that unites us?

—Ronald Reagan, “State of the Union Address,” 1986