A sestina is a poem with a fixed verse form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, usually followed by a three-line envoi. The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas; the closing envoi contains all six words, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines. If one were read the final words of each line, the pattern would be as such:

1 2 3 4 5 6 6 1 5 2 4 3 3 6 4 1 2 5 5 3 2 6 1 4 4 5 1 3 6 2 2 4 6 5 3 1 (6 2) (1 4) (5 3)

In this case, the sestina does not use words but images, utilizing this pattern over the course of six stanzas and an envoi. The images present scans of works on paper, drawings made with pen and marker on top of printer paper with various stock images of paper printed on them. Each stock image is provided by Getty Images, a company co-founded by Mark Getty in 1994. The Getty's migrated their wealth in oil to wealth in images, specifically the ownership of images. And while the current dominant image of Getty in the mind of the populus is that of flames encroaching, one can venture into a position into which Getty, Images, and their accompanying wealth have migrated into a position of invisibility or imagelessness.

I want to examine this point of historical change in terms of the fragment and its destiny throughout these various cultural moments. The rhetoric of the fragment has been with us since the dawn of what the Schlegels identified as modernism... It will be understood that I think it is something of a misnomer, since the image contents in question are the result, not of breakage, incompletion, or extreme wear and tear, but rather of analysis. But the word is convenient for want of a better one, and I'll go on using it in this brief final discussion. I want to begin by recalling Ken Russell's seemingly jocular remark that in the twenty-first century all fiction films will last no longer than fifteen minutes apiece; the implication is that in a Late Show culture like our own, the elaborate preparations we used to require in order to apprehend a series of images as a story of some kind will be, for whatever reason, unnecessary. But actually I think this can be documented by our own experience. Everyone who still visits movie theaters has become aware of the way in which intensified competition by the film industry for now-inveterate television viewers has led to a transformation in the very structure of the preview. It has had to be developed and expanded, becoming a far more comprehensive teaser for the film than it formerly was. At length the viewer of these enforced coming attractions is led to make a momentous discovery, namely, that the preview is really all you need. You no longer need to see the "full" two-hour version (unless the object is to kill time, which it so often is).

At that point it would seem that the preview, as a structure and a work in its own right, bears something of the same relationship to its supposed final product, as a novelized film, written after the fact of the movie and published later on as a kind of xeroxed reminder, is to the filmic original it replicates. The difference is that in the case of the feature film and its book version we are dealing with completed narrative structures of a similar type, structures similarly antiquated by these new developments. Whereas the preview is a new form, a new kind of minimalism, whose generic satisfactions are distinct from the older kind.

But that is precisely what finance capital brings into being: a play of monetary entities that need neither production (as capital does) nor consumption (as money does), which supremely, like cyberspace, can live on their own internal metabolisms and circulate without any reference to an older type of content. But so do the narrativized image fragments of a stereotypical postmodern language; they suggest a new cultural realm or dimension that is independent of the former real world, not because as in the modern (or even the romantic) period culture withdrew from that real world into an autonomous space of art, but rather because the real world has already been suffused with culture and colonized by it, so that it has no outside in terms of which it could be found lacking.

What does all this have to do with finance capital? Modernist abstraction, I believe, is less a function of capital accumulation as such than of money itself in a situation of capital accumulation. Money is here both abstract (making everything equivalent) and empty and uninteresting, since its interest lies outside itself. It is thus incomplete like the modernist images I have been evoking; it directs attention elsewhere, beyond itself, towards what is supposed to complete (and also abolish) it.

Authentic language — or image-practice then tries to keep faith with some more fundamental contingency of meaninglessness, a proposition that holds either from an existential or a semiotic perspective.

All of this to return to the stock image, the recirculation and detournment of the stock image, operating within a system of currencies and in which images are stalked, and stocks are images. To conclude, three etymologies:

stock (n2.): early 15c., "supply for future use; collective wealth;" mid-15c., "sum of money set aside for a specific purpose;" Middle English developments of stock (n.1), but the ultimate sense connection is uncertain. Perhaps the notion is of the "trunk" from which gains are an outgrowth, or from stock (n.1) in obsolete sense of "money-box" (c. 1400). Probably several different lines of development are represented here. The meaning "subscribed capital of a corporation" is from 1610s. The figurative phrase take stock in "repose confidence in, regard as important" is from 1870, from the notion of investment.

stalk (n.): "stem or main axis of a plant," early 14c., probably a diminutive (with -k suffix) of Middle English stale "one of the uprights of a ladder, handle, stalk," from Old English stalu "wooden part" (of a tool or instrument), from Proto-Germanic *stalla- (source also of Old English steala "stalk, support," steall "place"). This is reconstructed to be from PIE *stol-no-, suffixed form of *stol-, variant of root *stel- "to put, stand, put in order," with derivatives referring to a standing object or place.

image (n.) c. 1200, "piece of statuary; artificial representation that looks like a person or thing," from Old French image "image, likeness; figure, drawing, portrait; reflection; statue," earlier imagene (11c.), from Latin imaginem (nominative imago) "copy, imitation, likeness; statue, picture," also "phantom, ghost, apparition," figuratively "idea, appearance," from stem of imitari "to copy, imitate" (from PIE root *aim- "to copy").