We are happy to welcome Ray Brass here for yesterday. We are going to lecture in the morning on the topic of Christ and Time and also our Marxism and College of Finance. Most of you probably saw my own work. He is coming from the American University of Peru. Before that, he did his PhD at the board in UK, where he wrote the dissertation, alien theory, which was one of the very things that he helped circulate, as well as his own work, helped circulate the work of the Pansola well,
and contemporary philosophy, probably if you know, some of you might not know, he was one of the, for people who were in the history, identified with what used to be called years ago, spectrophobic realism, and most of those representative polling creators here are no longer spectrophobic theorists, so he had denounced the term, but nevertheless he was part of this term of events, contemporary contemporary philosophy. He is also the author of Romythi Lamba, The Lightning Extension, and as far as I understand, working on the manuscript and the bar of Singapore.
And they can be able to play. Right, so what I'm going to present today, this isn't really a paper, this is a work in progress. And what I'm going to present is an exegesis of a text by Suhail Malik called The Ontology of Finance, published in 2014 in the journal Collapse, Philosophical Research and Development, which was an issue devoted to the issue of chance. And Malik's paper is, I think, a very important text. It's important not only because, well, significant not only because of its length, it's about 130 pages long.
It makes up almost a third of that entire journalism. But because of its theoretical ambitions, what he does in this text is try to elaborate a speculative theory of finance, using four disparate theoretical resources. I'll go through those resources one by one. My goal here is to, in a way, to reconstruct Malik's argument, which is very long and intricate and complex.
The aim of the point of reconstructing it is to develop a critique of the conclusion that he dropped, because it's a text that has really drastic consequences. It makes a radical claim about the possibility of politics or how to conceive of political intervention in a condition of what he calls capitalization as subordinated to the logic of financialization. So I think it's important to understand what he's doing, what he's arguing for, in order to both appreciate the subtlety of his argument,
I mean it's one of the first systematic philosophical attempts to take stock of the implications of financialization for politics, but also to query the political consequences that he draws from his account of financialization. So most of what I'm going to say is straightforward, an exegetical reconstruction of his argument, and then I'll try to point out what I think are the fundamental problems that his argument faces. So, the first thing is there are two reasons for confronting the financialization.
The two lessons of the 2008 crash are that derivatives markets present a systemic risk to the national world economies And secondly, that the relative size of these markets presents a fundamental risk to geopolitical as well as economic securities. In other words, the financial sums now being traded on derivative markets are equal if not greater than the sums of national economies. So this is why what is happening, as we all know, what is happening on the market's note is the power to directly affect the gold economy.
And in order to understand how these markets are able to exert this power, achieve these effects, we have to try to understand how they operate. There are four considerations, Malik identifies four considerations which he wants to explicate, or the four motivating factors for his argument. One, finance power. All the passages with numbers are simply in quotations from Malik, but there's no number, that's my loss of his argument.
What is finance power distinct from modern state sovereignty? Since finance here is a euphemism for a systemic market-led dynamic organization of capital accumulations, these questions cannot be taken up in terms of the motivation gains and losses of individuals who affect financial power in this institute. What is required is instead what Mallet calls a power theory of finance that must take its lead from the operational complexity of financial markets. So what he developed is what he calls a non-standard general theory of price and of the political economy of finance.
So that financialization is now a political power. The second aspect is futurity. What is most significant about what is happening in the derivative markets is the reorganization of the relation to the future via price in general. not just within the circumscribed arena of derivatives markets, but across the entire social order. And as he will go on to argue, derivatives are shown to systemically operationalize an unprecedented modality of the wager that is intrinsic to the standard notion of betting, but is theoretically and practically unavailable on the basis of that standard notion.
So what is going on in derivatives markets is a kind of wagering on the future, but a kind of wagering which cannot be conditioned according to a standard or familiar notion of the bet. Thirdly, yes, this is actually the third point because the first quotation was about the two licenses of the Crouch. What is called left accelerationism, here Malik is referring to the work of Nick Snarnicek and Alex Williams in their book, Conventing the Future.
Left accelerationism must abandon its admittedly amittal attachment to Marxian and labour-based determinations of capitalism and the political economy, because these are not the prerequisites of capital power in general, but tendentious misapprehensions of it. The proposition that Matt's here is that the roots of political capitalism and what that condition and its political economy can be, need to be instead determined in relation to the most advanced theoretical tools available today, he's quoting Snurdy-Shekowitz. In practical terms, this means financing in general, and derivatives in particular, not Marxism. And finally, a critique of what Lee calls neorationalism. The extirpation of social norms by capital power, an orativity that does not entail the destruction of social order, but the chronic re-institutionalization of a risk order.
This is an important phrase, chronic re-institutionalization of a risk problem. This is what financial speculation does, according to Maren. This casts significant doubt upon the political and theoretical adequacy of a neo-nationalist program to the ambitions of left acceleration. That is, if neo-rationalism contends that social and subjective norms can be progressively transformed by the pragmatic universalism of self-revising rational norms, that contention pre-supposed both the authority of reason not only over conceptual thought, but also over social norms and also the revisability of social norms. But for reasons it used to be loaned in the name of the risk order as capitalization, both of these prerequisites are questionable.
Capital power, though certainly not directly related to the reason, requires its social norms to the point at which social norms lose efficacy altogether. authority of any kind is not a prevalent power modality in the risk order, and risk itself prescribes any tendential organization or universal determination, however rationally determined and advisable, other than that of greater capitalization. The claim being made here is that, and the critique of what he calls, what is called The whole left accelerationism is not a term used by, well, whether it's an adequate term to describe what Snarecic and Williams are doing is, we can discuss later.
The idea that collective self-organization can challenge capital power is precisely what is undermined by this understanding of the risk order, what he calls the risk order as intrinsic to the logic of financialization. So in other words, financialization entails an operationalization of risk, which is to say a wager from the future. And this modality of wagering and this kind of invocation of risk subverts any voluntaristic attempt to determine the future or to collectively organize it in order to construct the future on the basis of an actually existing social state of affairs.
This is the radical kind of political contention of the text, that social norms, existing social norms, do not provide an adequate basis for reorganizing our relationship to the future. We have to understand the financial operationalization of risk in order to be able to effectuate the future. And this means that rationality is not a political resource. This is the basic argument that risk, or gambling so to speak, in the specific sense elaborated by Mallet,
must supplant organisation and planning. So in a way, and I think this is a problematic aspect of the task, it's an even more radical critique of the residues of, say, Leninist voluntarism in so-called left accelerationism. So I will hopefully return to this towards the close of the talk. So there's four stages to the article. So Malik uses the draw from four theoretical words from these words. First of all, most importantly, the work of Nisen and Bittler on capital power.
Here, it's their 2009 book, Capital as Power. And this is a book which provides a cornerstone of my entire argument. It's a challenge to Marxian understandings of capitalism, but also to the dominant neoliberal understandings of the political economy. Secondly, the logic of derivatives pricing is a bit of their game of difference, a remodeling of financialization using resources from the work of Jack Derrida. Thirdly, the work of Eleni Esparito on time binding. Esparito's group is called the future of futures, it's an account of financial markets and the notion of time binding is central to her accounts and married appropriated.
And finally, the work of Eliyayashi on contingency. And the Rinpoche's training is involving an inscription of contingency. So Malik's argument, in a way, draws on all four of these sources. In a way, he draws critically on Derrida, Disposito, and Ayachi, but more or less uncritically on Nitzan and Bittler. And in what follows, I'm not going to... the critical remarks that I will advance in a way won't directly address the work of Nitton and Bittler, because I'm unfamiliar with it, although I intend to read it.
It's obviously been challenged by Marxists because it's a direct, it's a contentious proposal. But it's also, they're both economists and it's a plausible, let's say it's a very plausible and ingenious argument. But it's not one that I will focus on in my critical remarks. Although obviously any systematic critique of Nixon and Bittler in a way would really, I think, seriously undermine all the subsequent stages of Malik's arguments.
So capital power. What is capital power? Nixon and Bitler propose that capital is directly power because it's neither a material entity nor a productive process, but rather the very ability of absentee owners to control, shape and restructure society more broadly. This is why for Ness and Pritzker there's no difference between, capitalism is not a mode of production that has certain kind of political consequences that inaugurates a certain ordering of power. Capitalization is directly an effectuation of power.
The main conflict in power struggle with capitalism is between those accumulating capital, each of whom looks to do better than the other forms of capital. In other words, capitalism is not class struggle. The antagonism is not between social classes, it's between capitalists themselves. As they put it, or as Mali put it, capitalists do not just seek to accumulate capital, nor to maximize profits, but to beat the average represented by the normal rate of return. And that rate is set not just by the standard instruments such as interest rates, but also by the rate of accumulation of every company and absentee owner who are therefore competitors for capital.
And the termism that was termed for this intracapitalist rivalry is differential accumulation. The two primary aspects of differential accumulation are price and sabotage. So first we must consider price. Price tells us how much a capitalist would be prepared to pay now to receive a flow of money later. Price is merely the unit with which capitalism is ordered. And capitalization is the pattern of that order. Bonds, corporate shares, preferred stocks, mortgages, bank accounts, personal loans, or the registered ownership of an apartment log are simply different incarnations of the same thing.
They are all income generating entities. This means, this has three kinds of consequences. Prices are uniform across space and time, providing universal trans-historic equivalents. because on this account prices in a way are independent of the value of a currency within a specific economy. So prices can be transplanted or converted across economies and currencies. Secondly, price is a direct index of differential accumulation and hence of social power. It's structured to dynamic re-ordering of power. In other words, price-facing is power-ordering.
And thirdly, price is the medium of what Manning calls a transformative power rationality whose specific historical organization is the result of intra-capitalist conflict. Intra-capitalist conflict is all about price fixing. Sabotage. This is the second aspect. Sabotage, locally it entails diminishing a competing firm's capital accumulation relative to one's own and globally it entails limiting the average rate of growth and profit in order to secure a differentially greater accumulation per firm against the average rate. As a systemic condition, differential sabotage manifests itself in diverse social arrangements including unemployment, inflation, wage restraints, social fragility, education policy, immigration regulation, etc.
etc. Capitalists, this is the moral that now draws from this, capitalists do not accumulate capital by seeking to maximise profits by increasing productivity in a bit of consumption, but rather differential accumulation requires compromising production as such. Business is then not just unproductive but moreover necessarily counterproductive as are capitalist societies overall and in general. This means then that finance necessarily promulgates sabotage in general, meaning that it is an inherently counterproductive power.
The positive determination of price, quite abstract financial magnitude, is that it directly indexes capitals, power ordering and reordering. So that through price fixing, entire social institutions and the organization of society can be ordered and reordered. So capital power is exerted through pricing. Pricing and sabotage are co-eval and mutually determining, directly constituting the organization of power across society at every scale as a necessarily integrated political economy.
This means, so this demonstration of differential accumulation via price setting strategies makes explicit that the administering price, according to the markups, already embodies the power to incapacitate the social order. If price setting advances differential accumulation via both accumulation and concentration of social power, then prices set the market. Or, once again, administered prices make explicit that price is the medium of capital accumulation qua power.
This is what power is in capitalism. So the power to price is the power to create and destroy social order, independently of social constraints. Markets and pricing predicated on finance enable social reshaping and reformatting in innumerable ways that no other ruling class has ever been able to undertake. or under-take. Or again, finance is the condition and means of capital power, and capital is finance, only finance. This means that capitalization is a species of financialization.
As a structural condition of capitalization, finance logically precedes it. Or inversely, economic practice is a restrictive theoretical and practical rendition of capitalization. And capitalism is only a particular order of financialization, meaning that it's not the only possible one. This is crucial for Malik's argument, because his claim that a post-capitalist society can't be a post-financial society. So post-capitalism will simply be an alternative order of financialization. That's the basic claim.
But now this entails a distinction between financialization as a kind of a structural condition, and financial markets as a kind of social or historical instantiation of this logic of financialization. So Malley then distinguishes what he calls the a priori financiality of capital power as a systemic condition for capitalization and finance markets as practical institutional operating mechanisms and facts of capital accumulation.
So what we have here is a very familiar philosophical distinction between financialization as a kind of transcendental a priori and financial markets as the empirical instantiation of this logic of financialization. So his argument is actually depends on articulating and integrating the two dimensions of finance as a priori condition and as a historical fact without directly identifying them. And as we'll see, his argument depends upon distinguishing financialization and financial markets, but it's not clear if he can really, you know, how viable this distinction is, if he can really hold them apart in the way which his argument requires.
Now we move to derivatives. We have to understand what derivatives are. Here, I take Malik's account, it's a straightforward kind of presentation drawing on standard textbook presentations. So I take it to be uncontentious. I'm not in a position to create the details because I simply don't know enough about derivatives. But I take this account to be kind of reasonably reliable and accurate. So what is a derivatives contract? The key distinction is between the forward price, the forward price is the price agreed in the contract and the delivery price, which is the actual price of the asset at maturity, when it will be traded.
So, the derivatives contract is made in view of the likely difference between delivery and forward prices yielding a profit or loss for one of the parties. This means that the contracted derivatives claim is contingent in a double sense. Firstly, it depends upon eventuality independent from and external to the contracted price, which is known as the underlying asset or the underlying. And secondly, the present sense in which the term is understood in derivatives markets, The eventuality on which the shares depends may or may not be occasion, meaning that the contract will lead to a gain or a loss by one party or another.
without certainty as to who will be the gain or losing party. Gains or losses are made dependent on whether the price agreed in the contract, the delivery price, is higher or lower than the market price of the underlying, so called spot price of the curative. So, the derivative contract, and therefore its market, is dependent on the underlying in one regard only. Whether or not the conditions stipulated in the contract are met. This means that the payout of a derivative is determined solely by the terms set up by the contract. This also means that the historical, material, or qualitative particularity of the underlying is irrelevant.
beyond the price conditions set in the contract. Now, the standard way of understanding the relationship between price and pricing is as exogenous. This means that the derivative exogenous relation to that price is that of a traditionally conceived wager. the throw of the dice is not dependent on the bet made upon it, nor does a speed of the range draw a dripping down a window. By this account, in other words, if one has, on this exogenous account, of the price and price relation, derivatives are nothing but wagers on a price differential over time.
An interpersonal and subjectively constituted reckoning on circumstances external to the wager itself, predicated upon the non-knowledge of the future. Now it's this, in a week of exogenous understanding of the wager involved in the Rimsford's dream, that Malick is challenging. So in other words, what he wants to challenge is the idea that what is being wagered in the derivatives contract is the differentiation between prices over time or across time.
And that this reckoning of the differentiation is something that can be, you know, a duty, it's an interpersonal and subjectively constituted reckoning. A reckoning on objectively existing factors, i.e. price movements that are independent of the practice of pricing. In other words, on this account, the uncertainty about the difference between the contracted price and the livery price is epistemic.
It's simply your betting based on your ignorance of the future. So there's an epistemic uncertainty about the outcome of the wager. And what Mallet wants to do is to convert this epistemic uncertainty into an ontological indeterminacy. That's all the radical rule that's being made. And here is why he brings in Zerubov, the notion of temporization. Pricing is temporization. So, he writes, the contract, the derivatives contract, constitutes a price differential between delivery and strike prices at a specified future moment in time.
Strike pricing is the price at which derivative can be exercised. Or, in another formulation, the contract defers the trade of the underlying in order to institute the price differential. And conversely, the price differential specified by the forward contract is simultaneously a deferral of the exchange of the underlying asset. The forward contract defers exchange to constitute a price differential for an underlying asset in time or across markets. Just as it's positing of that differential defers immediate bending of the asset.
This is what Mallick calls a deferred differential or a differentiating deferral. Now, the crucial conceptual point here is that the difference between the forward price and the delivery price is not an actually determined magnitude, at least not on Mallick's account. He's going to argue against those who claim that it can be a bit determined magnitude. Nor is it the difference between two actual differences, i.e. the forward price as the difference between x and delta x, and the delivery price as the difference between y and delta y. The future difference, y delta y, is constitutive of the present difference, x delta y.
Just as the present difference, x delta x, is constitutive of the future difference, y delta y. The differentiation at issue, therefore, is not the determination of a determinable difference between two actually determined differences. But rather, the derivatives contract is the determining inscription of an indetermination. So this is the whole logical, this is why this is, you know, he has to draw on Derek here. Derivatives constitute price differentials precisely according to this differential logic of temporization,
which is no less their operation. The delivery or exercise price is not the price as in one delivery price or the strike price. there could be no derivative but only spontaneous value. And this is why what is interesting or significant about derivatives in Manning's account is that it's not an exchange. It's not a form of exchange, although it appears superficially to be kind of a sophisticated form of exchange.
Temporization becomes a condition for speculative. So what is going on in derivatives trading is speculative accumulation via temporization. And this is how you make more and more money. You make money without exchanging anything, without buying a sound. So, derivative of Malick is counter-autological because they inscribe the indetermination of what he considers to be an un-presentable future, rather than the undeterminability of the un-presentable past. This is where he pars company with Derrida. In Derrida, it's a trace of the other Aboriginal source of ethical responsibility.
For Malik, inscribing the indetermination of the future is a political act. Whereas for Derrida, registering the undeterminability of the past is an ethical responsibility. And this is, I think, significant. That's why he writes, derivatives are not pre-ontological, that interiority is one of Derda's primary claims for Différence. Rather, their ontology consists of a binding and enforceable contract that is constituted by statutes. And this idea of binding enforceable contract, in other words, the derivatives contract binds time, is a temporizing operation.
And because it's this temporizing operation that exerts capital problem, This is why the logic of capitalization, capitalization as an ordering and disordering of a social system, is concentrated on the binding of time in the derivatives contract. The institution of derivatives is the constitution of price differentiation. Now, this is why he argues against the Blacks-Souls-Mertens, the standard account of understanding what is going on in pricing and the pricing of derivatives.
The Black-School Merkin's account is treated as a Wiener process, where the uncertainty of the actual movement of a price in the future is rendered as a probability, a bounded and calculated anticipation. So according to the Black School's American account, the anticipation of a price movement, the measure of changing market forces, is both memoryless and, given its unfair visibility, futurless. It is only the present probability of what the future might be, a calculated perhaps which bears all the information of the system's history. Now, what is being criticised here, and the critique of the Black School's Merton account, is the attempt to, in a way, to model the movement of pricing in terms of probability theory.
And in probability theory, or rather on this philosophical sketching of the theory, there's a segmentation of the moments of time. And a compartmentalization, such as past, present, and future, are mutually exclusive states in a linear series. So one can calculate the probability of a future outcome based on certain information about the current or the actual present state of a system.
This means that, to be very simple, in Malik's argument, the claim is that in a way probability only operates if you can decompose wagering into a series of discrete steps. If one thinks of tossing a coin, when one is tossing a coin, the coin will either land hay or tails. The outcome, the determinant of outcome is entirely independent of the flipping of the coin.
That's a condition, in other words, the moment of wage, understood as the flipping of the coin, is independent of the outcome of the wager. If it's not, you're cheating. And it's only if you've got this complete independence of the act, the flipping of the coin and the landing of the coin, that you can calculate a probability. And we know that over, even though we know, I don't know whether or not the coin will land head or tails, but I know that the longer I continue flipping the coin, the more likely it is that there will be a 50-50 distribution.
Over a long enough series of throws, you know that I can bet 50-50 that it will either land head or tail. But in a finite series of throws, I can never be sure how many times it will land head or tail. The key is that the outcome of the next toss I make can be determined by the outcome of the previous toss. This is why the system must be memorable. Each flip of the coin must be treated as without relation to the previous flip. In other words, what you have to do is to kind of segment the order of time, each presence of time intercedes into an act, an action, which is undetermined by the previous state, the previous outcome.
And only in this way can you start calculating probabilities in a system. The second aspect is that you also need to be able to segment or discreetly identify the possible outcomes. head or tails if you are talking about a contoss or the configurations, the faces of the die if you are throwing dice.
Standard financial practices prescribe a complete account of their own operation as both largely predicated on and operationally constituting the volatility and its pricing that the institution lies. an account of price is more than merely a constitutive of the addition of the fortune acting as well. So the claim, the contract says between a constitutive and a performative relation of price into price. So the claim is this, in the Black Skull Merchant account
you can represent the possible outcomes of the wager because the outcome of the wager is independent of the practice of wager. So in other words, there are these. So you've got an exogenous relationship between pricing and prices. Because the practice of pricing in no way determines the prices. It in no way determines the prices. what determines prices on market movements or forces operating independently of the derivatives contract.
And the claim, Malik's claim, and here he's drawing on Esplen and Esplenito's account, which is that what's peculiar about derivatives pricing, or what Malik would call the infra-waiture, is that here the wagering constitutes that which is wagered upon. The very active wagering constitutes the formative relation between pricing and price, as opposed to merely constitutive relation. And this is why prices can no longer be probabilistically matched or represented. So the volatility of markets on this example is endogenous as opposed to exogenous pricing.
The future stipulated by the derivatives contract is unpredictable because it is produced by the very president that tries to predict it. In short, derivatives markets constitute prices. And here we need to distinguish between present-future and future-presence. Derivatives mobilize the distinction between the present-future, which is our current anticipation of the future, and the future present or the present that will become actual in the future. What is traded on derivative exchanges is not the future given the then unknown strike price of the underlying,
but the present risk of that price against the delivery price. Derivative pricing constantly refers to the present way of seeing the future and not the unknowable future that will come about later. That is, derivative pricing makes explicit in the present the relation to an inactual and necessarily uncertain future present as a present future. So, this means that time is system specific. The difference between present-future and future-present is always internal to a system.
and here it is a social system that is called the Exquisito Sol. The maintenance within the presence of past and future presence depends entirely on the structure, organization and capacities of any game system. This is why derivative pricing and its volatility are in short constructions of time. Now finally, Malik then treats the distinction between what he calls the extra wager and the infrawager. The extra wager is a standard notion of wager.
An extra weight of a gambler is constituted by her or his necessarily limited knowledge of an inactual future occurrence. This is a subjective manifestation of the inallegacy of financial systemology and geontology. In other words, we gamble about what we don't know. No one ever gambles on something that they know. The attempt to mitigate the risk incurred by gambling by probability, in other words, by trying to predict the likelihood of an outcome, is a way of lessening or diminishing the risk incurred by gambling.
And that means, this is prediction, this is all a prediction. If you can find a way of predicting the likelihood of an outcome, you diminish the risk. And Malik's claim is that in the derivisive trading, which is the infra wager, there's no attempt to the absolute uncertainty is itself what is wagered upon. What is being wagered is the absolute indeterminability of the future state. This is why risk is ontological in Malent event.
And this is why in the infra wager, any instance of derivative pricing is a wager placed not just in an indefinite betting process, but also on it. Derivatives market pricing is thereby akin to odds lengthening or shortening on bets according to what other bets are placed. What is priced by derivatives markets then is the pricing process itself. Unlike the extra wager, derivatives pricing is an infra wager for which the terms of expiration are not externally determined conditionalities, but only parametric constraints.
So this means what is being wagered in derivatives is wagering itself. You're betting on a bet. You're not betting on some kind of outcome that is external to the action of betting. And this is actually a huge involution going on in derivatives pricing. It's the pricing of the pricing process itself, and nothing that is independent of that process actually enters into it.
And basically, in a way, the author books, you know, the Black Souls Murders Theorem, according to Malik and Ayashi, is an attempt in a way to represent pricing. as if pricing was an activity that was connected to or somehow interacting with processes in the world that are in some kind of objective distinct reality independently of this exhibition. Whereas what is called both Malik and I actually
emphasize is that the reason why the pricing is the inscription of an absolute contingency or the description of an indeterminability as such is because it's a practice which doesn't reflect or represent any independent reality or any data or information from outside the practice of pricing. So this is why...
I'll read this concluding remark about heating contingency. In addition to the contingency of abstraction that is universal fungibility of the underlying of the forward contract, the derivative is also contingent in that it posits as speculative as the economic eventuality. That eventuality does not pre-exist in an contract but is fabricated by it. This is what we've already seen, that you're actually producing the outcome that that you are betting upon. The contract constitutes its inactuality and unknownness. In other words, the unknown that is being wagered in the contract is not, again, is not independent of the institution of the contract.
The two outcomes are the branches of two different realities, only one of which will be actualized at expiration because of the contract. It falls at the root of the contract is, in IACHE's terms, always a contingency. But the contingency identified by an Ashi is one that the derivative constitutes and inaugurates and as such can be designated as aesthetic contingency. In other words, it's a aesthetic contingency precisely because it is instituted by the waitress or by the institution of the contract. What this third contingency of the derivative constitutes is its deracination, not with regard to the underlying from which the derivative is deracinated by the contingency of abstraction,
but rather the deracination of price itself in the pricing process. It podes that the world is actually what it is in reality. The derivative of a particular price in fact, except that it could have been different. Only one of the contingent inactualities is actualized, the other remains inactual. So, I take the claim to be here, is that, in Ayatch's work there's a distinction in a way between, there is an appeal to a very similar distinction between virtuality and possibility. In other words, possibility is always abstracted from actuality.
In Burton's account, possibility is always retrojected as a state of affairs that could have been actualised, in fact, but was not. This involves thinking of time in particular as decomposable into discrete incidents and in a way as the movement of time as being the movement of actualization. The actualization of a possibility, a possible state of affairs that is somehow adjoined to the actual state of affairs.
In other words, what could be is determinable on the basis of what is. And the Bertsonian claim is that in a way futurity or virtuality is precisely never what could be, if what could be is understood as a possibility inscribed in actuality. So, in an ancient country city contingency, the contingent inactuality, the actualized inactuality is not the realization of a possibility.
because what is inactual or virtual, this is why, in a way this is an infra-wager, you're not simply wagering on the basis of your ignorance of what could be, you know, you're in to what could be, you're wagering on something that is not just unknown, but unknown because it's indeterminable. It's indeterminable. And hence, this is, you know, the distinction then between that which is possibility. If the future is understood as a
or a possibility, it is determinable. In other words, you can predict what could be on the basis of what you know about what is. But on this account, what might be or what may be is unforeseeable and unpredictable because nothing that we know about what is provides a reliable index to what may... And here, why? Because representation, the representation of the world, is this kind of discrete segmentation into substances and attributes and combinations
of objects in states of affairs. So it's this whole ontology of representation that's being challenged by Iyachi's his account of the infrawager. Now, this is why there is... So, what is the kind of the radical consequence? It's that we have to...
So the cheaper wager, as exemplified by derivatives trading, is a practice of time-binding, which has the power to generate order, to order and disorder a system without any provision. without any progression. This is why it's a challenge to any kind of model of political agency which is predictive, or which suppose that it's possible to construct the future on the basis of the present.
In a way, so the future is non-constructible on this account. It can only be wagered, but the wager is what will constitute the future. And financialization is a practice that allows you to constitute the future in a way without obligation, without having to rely on anything you know about the present. And that's why this is its radical political valence. Now, just some, a couple of, okay, I think some critical observations here. First of all, so as I said, if we go back to, sorry, right back to the beginning.
the four stages of the argument, Nixon, Bittler, differentiation, time-minded, and easy contingency. So I'm not going to say anything about Bittler, though obviously a systematic critique of their arguments effectively disable all the consequences that Malik wants to draw. But first of all, I think there is a problem about the attentive link between differential
and systemic time-bounded on this account. Now if you remember, Derrida's argument is a critique of a certain kind of phenomenological orientation, a critique of the assertion notion of the living present. So I take Derrida's claim to be that in a certain phenomenology, what is not yes and what has been are some kind of intrinsic to what is, to the experience of the President. because what is cannot be understood in terms of a substantial actuality.
So as I said, the living presence of consciousness, of the psychological experience, is never a punctual moment because it is constituted by the anticipation of what is not yet, of what is not yet and the retention of what has been. And this anticipation and retention, in a way, are relations, intentional acts in terms of account, which make absence constitutive of the present.
But Deborah wants to ratify this relationship between presence and absence by arguing that what is present can only be present in a way, according to a certain order of absence. So he wants to deconstruct the opposition between presence and absence. And in a way claim that the anticipation of the future and the retention of the past presupposes the relationship to something that is the unpresentable.
Now, whether, I mean, the standard criticism of this movement means to say that all of this, that their spiritual claims actually are already there, probably in Masaru's account, or in Heidegger's account. So the standard version is to say that this kind of subversion of the metaphysics of presence is already understood by phenomenology. But the claim, I think, is that there's a problem about transplanting this logic of temporization to a social system. Because here it seems that the relationship between the present-future and the future-present can be straightforwardly adjudicated by appealing to something like self-consciousness.
In other words, if we go back to the account of the exposito... Yes. So the distinction between the present-future, which is our current anticipation of the future, and the future-present, or the present-and-will-be-commercial of the future,
notes that there is, you know, notes that reference to current anticipation and differences between what we currently anticipate will be and what will be independently of our current anticipation. Now, this seems to be a problem about marking this distinction between present-future and future-present in a social system. And the reason is that the current anticipation of the future is also conditioned by a set of representations, or by representations which unfold in time.
In other words, what I want to say is this, is that there's a distinction between represented time, or the time that is represented, the time experienced by a system, and the time of represented, the time in which the system represents its own relationship to the world and experiences the difference between present-future and future-present. In other words, this is already a straightforward philosophical distinction between the representation of succession is not equivalent to the succession of representation. The representation of succession is conditioned by a succession of representation which may not be actually represented.
So, surely, if we're talking about something as complicated as a social system, then the difference between present-future and future-present is itself conditioned by a difference between the presence of representation, which the system in a way constitutes its own self-representation and the future that will condition its presence.
In other words, I'm saying that you have to, the whole account of a system, any system capable of differentiating between present-future and future-present is embedded in a time order which conditions the time order experienced by the system. So in other words, in other words, there's a time that is internal to the system and a time that is external to the system that conditions the generation of time within the system. And this means that there's something peculiar about using the distinction between present-future and future-presence, and even the cross-contamination of present-future and future-presence,
to yield this inscription of the indeterminability of the first observation. Yes, this then means that... This then, I think, calls into question the distinction between financialization, or the distinction that's necessary to my argument, between financialization as a kind of structure
and financial markets as their historically conditioned social practices. In other words, if... It's one thing to say that the practice of pricing doesn't mirror or reflect price movements in a reality which is somehow independent of the market.
But the performativity of pricing and the fact that you can no longer segment the institution of a contract or the institution of a price Surely it means that what is the determining factor, there is a determining factor operative in pricing, but why not cause, why isn't it this straightforwardly empirical?
In other words, why isn't this the trader's contingent psychological status? In other words, why you need the Derridean Register in a way to kind of enforce the distinction the unpresentable in priori and the merely contingent historical incarnation of this wagering on the unpresentable. But that's only if you're sure that the time binding, that this account of wagering actually affects time binding.
And if the binding of time in the derivatives contract is conditioned by factors which are unavailable to the participants or the practitioners of pricing, then in what way can wagering be taken to the constitutive of time binding at a systemic level? It seems that one school mechanisms is different between the different orders of presented time and the time represented,
then everything that's going on at the level of wagering can be conditioned by factors which may be unavailable to the participants in the wager, but which are perfectly recognizable or identifiable to someone who has sufficient fine-grained empirical analysis. So in other words, I think the transcendentalization of the infra-witcher is dubious. What we're doing is we're taking, so we've got pricing as a kind of peculiar practice, the pricing of pricing as something that seems to be entirely impervious to any external social determination.
And this then becomes the transcendent constitutive moment where it affects the operational planning for the entire system independently of the current conditions of the market traders. But once one questions the transportation of the Derdine account, it seems that the performativity of pricing is purely empirical and non-transmantical.
In other words, it's just like if you are, or the end of the interview, the volatility of pricing, the fact that pricing depends upon what the traders happen to believe, or what they have for breakfast, There is no rationale for transnationalizing that volatility. In other words, the risk inscribed in wagering is empirical and not transnational. And therefore it seems dubious to ontology at it.
Yes, finally, one final observation about the, a more general observation about this this ontologization of risk is that what's decisive in this argument is the claim that temporal indeterminacy or the indetermination of the future is ontological and not merely understanding. So therefore, no rational action or no projection can realize the future. In other words, we can't plan or predict or organize.
But clearly there are two things. One is that this seems a kind of a contentious generalization of an experiential approach. I found, I mean, it's explicit in Ayachi's references to figures like Bergson. The whole critique of representation is saying that nothing about the dynamic movements through which the future realizes itself are unrepresentable and unforeseeable on the basis of any information we have.
Any of those characteristics of aspects of the world that we can represent is based on the primacy of lived experience, the primacy of subjectivity, of an absolute subjectivity over any relationship to objectivity. So it's kind of undialectable in that sense. And this is quite a peculiar consequence, if one reach out Ayyache, is that trading becomes this kind of radical creative act. Okay? Trading becomes an inscription of an absolute indetermination or absolute contingency, and it becomes a creative act. And Mavic, he doesn't talk about creativity, but he talks about time binding.
It also came as if the synthesis of time depends upon this inscription of this radical determinability. But this is a hugely subjectivistic. This whole kind of account which is supposed to be radically anti-humorous has hugely subjectivistic premises. And if one has a more dialectical understanding of the relationship between subjective and objective, and if one refuses to absolutize immediacy, whether phenomenologically or vitalistically,
or a Soviet register, then it's not true to say that the future is not just as radically indeterminable. We can successfully predict outcomes, we can successfully predict outcomes by, in a way by, Because the difference, because the border between stability and instability can always be temporarily circumscribed by a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of dynamic processes.
And I think that here the reason why, in a way, for black schools mermin, the attempt to construct a probabilistic modeling of pricing is perhaps unsatisfactory. is not because pricing inscribes some kind of radical indeterminability of the future, but simply because everything that traders are doing
is a complex, an extremely complex nesting of entirely arbitrary inclinations. Because what they are, how they will wager is determined by the outcome of their previous wager and their anticipation of their next wager. And surely this is simply a series of, it's a determination of one woman by the next, which is entirely empirical and not, or which can be categorized as entirely empirical and doesn't need to be extrapolated into this kind of speculative register.
In other words, the traders own ignorant gambling the way they're gambling. The fact that they rely on hunches and guesses and the fact that these hunches or guesses can only be sociologically described and not probabilistically represented is just trivial. It seems to be just a trivial kind of epistemic fact and not something that should be inflated into ontologization of risk. And I find, obviously, notoriously the risks, it's never the traders themselves that are incurring these risks.
the consequences, the empirical consequences, the gains or losses in social terms will always be incurred by people outside of the market. And this is why, although Malik's account is, you know, it's a kind of, it's an attempt to reappropriate the ontologization of risks for an emancipatory politics as opposed to a kind of reactionary kind of Darwinian,
liberalism. In which, because the claim that the future is radically unforeseeable, that we can't plan or project or organize, is a familiar claim that neoliberalism involves. There's nothing radical about that. And so therefore this whole argument it seems to me relies on a kind of a rejection of Voluntrism and of rationalism as wholly inadequate to the task of effecting an emancipatory transformation or reordering of society on the basis of the well-known catastrophic consequences of revolutionary politics in the 20th century.
But there's no, but it seems insufficient, there's no principle argument as to why we can successfully reorganize the, reorganize society on the basis of, by, Are we trying to construct future institutions on the basis of revising current institutions? No. The problem is that this here focuses on Manning's rejecting this rationalistic account.
Because if transcendental constitution is social institution, means the way in which we understand ourselves, and the way in which we're mentally organized, and the way in which we reason about means and ends, is a reflection of a series of social institutions, which themselves kind of historically determined. But an understanding of the, I guess, what is required, the corrective was by immediately invoking the Desmond-Dettler accounts.
So, that's not very well put. What I'm trying to say is that we need, what drops out of this account is financialization turns out to be a determinant of the last instance for socialization, but surely what I'm saying is that financialization itself presupposes a social practice, which the fact that that social practice is able, has this extraordinary capacity to reorder, to create
and destroy social order, is a consequence of familiar social relations which have to to do with property. And if we understand that, then it seems that we can, I don't see the kind of the need to adverse to this financialization in order to achieve this reordering, this reordering of society. It seems that the only, I mean, again, the key presumption is that reordering predicated on a program, a programmatic reordering, will simply be totalitarian.
That's the basic, I think, the unstated premise here. And although there's, we know that programmatic re-orderings have yielded totalitarian consequences, but unless you make, you know, it seems bizarre to make totalitarianism the inevitable consequence of voluntarism. That's a peculiar, and that's a standard neoliberal trope. If you will to change the world in a certain way, you're going to start shitting people off to good lives. That's just my ideology, it seems to me.
So these are my concluding remarks. remarks, not very well crisply formulated, but perhaps we should stop and then we can continue the discussion. We're going to have a break now. We'll have a break now and we'll have a minute to go together for Q&A. Okay.