ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen an unprecedented level of popular and critical interest in finance. Finance is a subject of daily news coverage, intense political debate, as well as everyday struggles and resistances like Occupy, Strike Debt, and the Indignados movement. In this chapter, the author argues that part of the reason for the relative lack of change relates to the visual politics of finance. He suggests that finance, per se, does not "exist." One cannot point at finance. Finance is always-already a product of representation. The visual politics of finance is not simply a story about "big" "bad" financiers duping us all once again, but is intimately intertwined with the critical repertoires of engagement and reform. The chapter considers visual representations of normal and abnormal finance. It also unpicks those "critical" visual representations of finance that do exist and asks how they also work to distract from genuine reflection on the contingency and mutability of finance.
