Poetry of Banking
ELI5
Victorian writers noticed that banking seemed to work like poetry — it uses language and imagination to make something (future money, imaginary value) feel real right now. The phrase "poetry of banking" captures the idea that financial tricks aren't just numbers but a kind of creative fiction built into how money itself works.
Definition
The "poetry of banking" is a Victorian journalistic synonym for "fictitious capital" — the class of financial instruments (bills of exchange, stocks, credit money) that conjure future value into present existence through a purely figurative, language-like operation. In Kornbluh's argument (source: kornbluh-anna-realizing-capital-financial-and-psychic-economies-in-victorian-for), the phrase is not mere metaphor but a theoretical provocation: it names the irreducibly rhetorical or poetic character of fictitious capital itself. Just as a poem makes something present that is absent — realizes an imagined world through the material vehicle of language — financial instruments mobilize signs to "realize the future in the present," producing value effects through a performative, figurative act rather than through any backing in real, material wealth.
The phrase thus encodes a double claim. First, it insists on the tropological nature of capital: fictitious capital is not capital that is false or illusory (a moralizing judgment) but capital that is structured like a figure of speech — it works through substitution, anticipation, and the mobilization of absent referents. Second, and crucially for Kornbluh's broader argument, the Victorian identification of banking-as-poetry sets the stage for a "metalepsis" — a substitution of cause and effect — whereby this structural, figurative, economic operation gets re-described in psychological terms. The critique of fictitious capital's poetic structure is displaced onto a discourse of psychic "fancy," "imagination," and "credulity," and "psychic economy" is invented as a false foundation to explain what is in fact a structural feature of capital's own language.
Place in the corpus
Within kornbluh-anna-realizing-capital-financial-and-psychic-economies-in-victorian-for, "poetry of banking" anchors the source's central theoretical ambition: to show that what Victorians called "psychic economy" was produced by a metaleptic displacement of fictitious capital's own rhetorical structure. The concept therefore sits at the hinge between the economic and the psychoanalytic registers that the book holds in tension. Among the cross-referenced canonical concepts, its most direct relations are to Fictitious Capital (of which it is a synonym and a theoretical intensification, stressing the figurative mechanism rather than the legal or accounting category), Metalepsis (the rhetorical operation by which the poetic character of banking is subsequently covered over and re-attributed to individual psychology), and Displacement (the psychic/rhetorical mechanism whereby the structural cause — capital's figurative operation — is shifted onto a psychological effect, namely invented "psychic economy").
The concept also resonates with Metaphor and Lack: if fictitious capital works by realizing what is not yet present, it operates structurally on absence — mobilizing a constitutive lack (the future as not-yet-real) in order to generate present value, much as the Lacanian signifier operates on and through the lack in the Other. The relation to Fetishistic Disavowal is also legible: the Victorian move Kornbluh describes — acknowledging capital's fictitious/poetic character while simultaneously psychologizing it away — reproduces the "I know very well, but nevertheless…" structure, where the poetic-structural truth of banking is known and then disavowed by being relocated in individual psychology. Imaginary and Logical Time are more peripheral but resonate insofar as fictitious capital's operation is one of prolepsis — the anticipatory realization of a future that is not yet real — which mirrors the temporal structure of Lacan's logical time (the moment of concluding that pre-empts the not-yet-certain).
Key formulations
Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (page unknown)
Victorian journalists frequently employed a synonym for 'fictitious capital': 'the poetry of banking.'
The theoretical load of the quote lies in the equation of two apparently heterogeneous terms — "fictitious capital" (an economic-structural category) and "poetry" (a rhetorical-aesthetic category) — with the claim that Victorian journalists treated them as synonyms, not analogies. This synonymy performs exactly the argument Kornbluh is making: it shows that the figurative, poetic dimension is not an external description of capital but internal to what fictitious capital is, making the rhetorical and the economic structurally co-constitutive rather than merely comparable.