Narratives of Money & Crime

A man and a woman sit opposite each other on a veranda. The Mediterranean landscape in the background shines in the sunlight and the silhouettes of the two are shrouded in dark shadows. “Connie, all my life I kept trying to go up in society, where everything higher up was legal, straight, but the higher I go, the crookeder it becomes” (Coppola 1990, from 1:40′:56″). This is said by someone who needs to know: Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) – The Godfather. It is a key scene in the third part of the Mafia movie directed by Francis Ford Coppola (1990), inspired by Mario Puzo’s (1969) novel of the same name. The ageing and diabetic padrino shows frustration and resignation to his sister, as his efforts to retire from organised crime and to clear his family name through a deal with the Vatican fail with the realisation that money and crime form an all too productive alliance in all spheres. “Where the hell does it end?” (Coppola 1990, from 1:41′:08″), asks Michael Corleone. For our part, however, we will deal in this volume with the question: How does it continue? Our focus is on the numerous contemporary cinematic productions, literary works and testimonies of popular culture that now tell of a triangulation: money and crime in times of neoliberalism.

The foil of neoliberalism may not be surprising in its omnipresence. It has hardly escaped anyone’s notice that the principle of the market reigns in Western societies¹ and that its expansion goes so far and is so comprehensive that it functions beyond the monetary acts of exchange of a classical liberal nature in neoliberalism as a “principle of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment of social relationships and individual behavior” (Foucault 2008 [1979], 243). This means first and foremost that in neoliberal discourse and practice we are dealing with a push-back of the state, with a←9 | 10→

This downgrading goes hand in hand with an upgrade of the neoliberal governmentality that is characterised by Michel Foucault as an interlocking of technologies of power and technologies of the self, which form the “homo œconomicus as entrepreneur of himself” (Foucault 2008 [1979], 226). Governance increasingly takes place through individualisation: The economically and rationally calculating individual orients his mode of existence and self-management according to cost-benefit relations and tries to optimise his potential continuously. Following the logic of the bioeconomy, as defined by Christian Marazzi, the market is the dispositive that disciplines both the body of the individual and the body of the population as a whole. In the age of neoliberalism, we are faced with a finanziarizzazione – to use Marazzi’s term – that is, a penetration of all spheres of life by financial mechanism which goes along with a simultaneous reduction of (welfare) state intervention. This penetration of different spheres of life means that the economic variables of the market, competition and entrepreneurship are successively implemented in previously non-economic relationships and processes. Value creation has become the all-encompassing target.²←10 | 11→

The neoliberal technology of government revolves around the central role of the market and its capacity for self-regulation, based on an individual micro-economy in which the values are no longer those ‘cold and abstract’ values of classical political economy, but the ‘warm and concrete’ values of the neoliberal subject. [...] It is the programme of the bio-economic turn of society, the economic subsumption of civil society, the economic appropriation of individual human life and human community by the value-creation process (Marazzi 2013, 43; translated by Y.T./H.B.).³

Accordingly, Vittoria Borsò concludes: “The life of each individual becomes capital. A precarious capital that risks at any time turning into its opposite, into a worthless, ‘naked’ life” (Borsò 2013, 21; translated by Y.T./H.B.).⁴ As a naked life without value, the precarious subject is then segregated from the community: “The persona oeconomica is the entity deemed worthy according to bioeconomic technologies and biopolitical Darwinism imposing itself as the natural logic of living. The torment for those who are ‘unworthy’, because they are precarious, is radical exclusion from the polis oeconomica. Letting die turns into collateral damage” (Borsò 2020, 341; translated by Y.T./H.B.).