COLLAPSE VIII
Editorial Introduction
The conceptualization of uncertain events as a set
of possibilities each assigned a numerical value-a
schema which draws on the circumstances that origi
nally occasioned it, namely the game of chance, the
die and its faces-is an enduring one. Although prob
ability calculus was mathematically formalized in the
1 9 30s, abstracted from this 'occasional cause' , the
spontaneous metaphysics of the gambler continue to
exert an intuitive hold on thinking concerned with
uncertain eventualities, colouring its interpretation
and its application to diverse situations. Stripped of
these semantics, the meaning of probability remains
as enigmatic as ever: an idealized construct that neu
tralizes contingency by integrating infinite 'trials';
or a real property, propensity, or 'random generator'
3
COLLAPSE VIII
inherent in the real but inaccessible to us? A mode of
knowledge, or a limit to knowing?
The asymmetry of the wager is dramatised in the
figures of the naive punter who faces every roll of the
die as a hazardous adventure, and the casino manager
who controls the long game and never loses. On one
hand chance may be figured as subjective epistemologi
cal shortfall, on the other as the object of statistical
knowledge. This tension between knowledge and
contingency is conceptually condensed in the notion
of probability and latterly in that of risk-a concept
belonging to a relatively recent intellectual history,
but one with immense consequences for modernity.
In recent economic history, financial tools con
structed on the basis of probability models in order to
manipulate risk have presided over catastrophic failure,
having generated conditions that surpassed the capaci
ties of those models. Meanwhile, in gambling itself,
an increasingly technically managed and controlled
environment means that any calculation of the 'odds'
must look beyond the confines of the gaming table.
Noting this double obsolescence of the casino model,
the eighth volume of COLI.APSE explores new ways of
thinking risk and contingency outside the space of the
idealized game of chance.
One of the colloquial legacies of the epoch-making
financial crisis of 2008 has been the notion of 'casino
capitalism'. The term implies the squandering of
4
Editorial Introduction
potentially productive resources on a game that is gov
erned merely by chance; at the same time, it connotes
an indictment of the asymmetrical allocation of the
risks and rewards of such 'wagers' . Without dismissing
the indignation neatly conveyed by such a formulation,
we might suggest that the notion of 'casino capitalism'
has served to occlude the complexity of the financial
instruments involved, and the exact nature of the
financial system's intrication with the political. Nev
ertheless, taking the phrase at its word serves usefully
to call into question the actual relationship between
gambling and finance; that is, between the complex
probabilistic calculations employed within the world
of finance and the games of chance from which the
rudiments of this calculus originally emerged.
One of the initial impulses behind this volume of
COLLAPSE was to unpack this righteous denunciation,
to call its bluff by evaluating the extent to which the
model of the casino-the game of chance-really does
invest the field of finance; to investigate the ways in
which chance, risk, contingency, and the wager inte
grally structure the global order. In parallel, however,
the volume also asks whether the model of the game
of chance encapsulated in probability theory obtains
even within the casino, by way of a number of inquir
ies into the modern and contemporary history of the
gambling industry. In this way we hope to interrogate
5
COLLAPSE VII I
and problematize what seems t o be a pervasive image
of thought.
In order to survey those practices in which intel
lectual resources are most acutely concentrated on the
production and exploitation of risk, and to uncover the
conceptual underpinnings of methods developed to
extract value from contingency-in the casino, in the
markets, in life-we have brought together contribu
tors who extend the philosophical thinking of con
tingency beyond the 'casino' model, gamblers whose
experience gives them the authority to considerably
refine our understanding of what it means to master
chance, researchers who analyse the operation and
experience of risk in diverse arenas, and artists whose
work addresses both the desire to confront chance and
the desire to tame it by bringing it to order.
*
Our volume opens withjEAN CAVAILLEs's 1940 survey
of the state of the art in probability theory in the first
half of the twentieth century. Beyond its philosophical
historical interest, the text is invaluable for the way
in which Cavailles, through a technical dissection of
the core concepts of a nascent probability calculus,
extracts some fundamental problematics that act as a
guiding thread throughout the volume.
6
Editorial Introduction
Cavailles begins by observing that the model of prob
ability based on games of chance extends itself, in the
absence of explicit theoretical justification, into all
areas of society ('in the techniques of social economy
as much as in physics' ) . The fundamental grounds
for this widespread application to reality are no less
contentious today than when Cavailles was writing.
Formulating his critique of the first attempts to pro
duce a mathematical formalization of probability to
rival the axiomatisation of geometry, one that would
ostensibly decouple probability from its gaming ori
gins, Cavailles remarks on how the spontaneous meta
physics of the gambler continue to exert an intuitive
hold on statistical thought, colouring its interpretation
and reflecting its intended applications. Inversely, he
shows how, when probability is theorised for itself,
certain elements of our intuitive grasp of the notion are
inevitably lost, and empirical instances are subjected
to certain idealisations. Cavailles's prime example
here is the notion of the collective, which transforms
the game and its repeated trials (dice throws) into
a completed (if infinite) set, in which results occur
with a determinate frequency that converges toward
a limit and is valid for any place-invariant subset of
the collective. In this way probability is effectively
submitted to elementary calculus-and yet of course a
collective is not something that is ever encountered in
any possible field of application. As he discerns, these
7
COLLAPSE VIII
treatments tend despite themselves not so much to
explain the principles of probability as to subtly codify
the assumptions that make them useful.
Cavailles's exposition continues with the observa
tion that every wager presupposes the delimitation of a
game and one's situation within it, and the stability of
that game; a presupposition which constitutes a wager
in itself. Thus 'the judgment of probability is always a
wager, logically anterior to the production of the event
to which it applies' . As he concludes, if 'old notions
of chance' continually creep back into formalizations,
vitiating their coherence, if probability continually
'overflows its definition' , if the attempt to reassuringly
house probability within a 'realist ontology' free of any
abductive leaps fails, and if therefore, when it comes
to probability, mathematical idealisation is involved
in a continual dialectic with its applicability to real
models, this is because the question of probability
is not a regional but ajundamental problem for sci
ence-for prediction. The infinitude of the collective is
a vicarious figure, within mathematical formalization,
for the indeterminacy of a becoming whose future we
seek to fix with laws; it stands in for a hypothesis that
is fundamental for all scientific endeavour, 'where acts
and wagers intersect each other' and where the success
of each wager makes possible new acts. Cavailles's
conclusion grounds this process in the 'vital, extra
intellectual' character of hypothetical reasoning, and
8
Editorial Introduction
calls for a recognition of the hybrid character of the
wager: it 'is situated on the dividing line between pure
lived action and autonomous speculation; at once an
impulse toward the future, a recognition of radical
novelty, risk; and, on the other hand, an attempt at
domination through the imposition of an order, and
the establishment of symmetries'. An obscure situa
tion that invites 'a conceptual renewal in which the
elements issuing from [the] analysis of the wager play
the preponderant role' -a renewal toward which this
volume hopes to contribute some orientating elements.
One of the most intriguing ways to encounter
the disparity between idealised models and actual
instances of games of chance is from the point of view
of those who attempt to pry open the gap between the
two. And there is no better authority to speak on this
subject than STEVE FORTE, who granted COLLAPSE
a very rare interview to discuss his career as a player
and as a consultant in 'game protection' .
As Forte outlines, both the advantage player and the
cheat, who seek to exploit extraneous elements in order
to influence the game in their favour, and the casino
protection operative, who seeks to detect and foil
these exploits, recognise that the milieu of every game
constitutes an 'information environment' . Whether
through systematic knowledge, technology, perceptual
training, or sheer discipline, the notional confines of
the game are expanded by them to encompass a whole
9
COLLAPSE VIII
raft of factors that do not belong, as Forte says, to 'the
theoretical game' -including the physical equipment,
the gaming environment, and the human elements
therein.
Detailing a choice selection of exploits, Forte gives
us an insight both into the skill and dedication neces
sary to beat the house, and that called for on the other
side of the table to detect these scams. Every assump
tion about the 'game of chance' is challenged here:
randomness is approximate, no shuffle is complete,
even a dice throw can be controlled, biases can always
be detected; disciplined observation and analysis has
the potential to transform almost any game of chance
into one of knowledge and skill. The scammer's art
extends to engineering the environment by stage
managing credible narratives, establishing routines
for cover, manipulating expectations, and sometimes
elaborate 'turns' designed to distract attention. While
manufacturers of equipment and casino managers
increasingly seek to establish systems to stabilise the
gaming environment while maintaining an atmosphere
conducive to play, gamblers continue to 'scientifically
dissect every component' of the game. Forte assures us
that, no matter how much protection is in place, new
high-tech updates of the old scams will always appear,
and that, once taken outside the realm of idealised
chance and into the casino environment, the game is
always operating across many overlapping milieus:
10
Editorial Introduction
probabilistic, but also physical, psychological, social,
and perceptual-as exemplified by the 'linework' of
an unknown artist reproduced here from the collec
tion of memorabilia built up by Forte throughout his
career, and which serves as an appropriately subtle
and deceptive figure for the cues, imperceptible to the
average punter, that can tip the game in one's favour.
By way of contrast, NATASHA Dow S C HULL
describes a casino environment where automation
and player control seem to be almost total, and where
the very desire to win has itself morphed into some
thing new and disturbing. Her research into the world
of machine gambling, increasingly central to casino
culture, charts the emergence of an industry which
specialises in the precise targeting of a very particular
set of psychological predilections quite different to
those traditionally associated with the gambler. No
longer either agon or alea, neither a test of skill nor a
heroic submission to chance, the 'game' here seems to
consist in a quest for nothingness, escape, or even self
erasure, in what machine gamblers call 'the zone' -a
state of continuous, immobile narcolepsy that techno
logical solutions are rapidly evolving to deliver ever
more reliably.
Through her dialogues with machine gamblers,
Schull develops a detailed phenomenological account
of the zone. In parallel, her investigation into the
industry shows how the development of aesthetics,
11
COLLAPSE VIII
ergonomics and environmental cues to encourage
'zone' playing are complemented by a series of invisible
adjustments to the probabilistic structure of the game
itself, which have succeeded in normalizing digital
duplicity. These machines have become seductive
skeuomorphs which maintain the aspect of their fore
bears, but whose delivery of a 'gambling experience' is
radically discontinuous with the inner mechanisms by
which they secure a steady profit. Whereas the players
are served up an affective fix of randomness perfectly
calibrated to ensure continued play, behind the screen
any remnant of chance is entirely extirpated not only
through statistical calculation but through a continual
modulation of the human-machine coupling.
The traditional drivers of gambling behaviour seem
to be important here only as a 'gateway': The hope of
winning may bring the player into the zone, but once
there, 'no rational action is possible' -one is 'beyond
reason' . As Schiill's sources reveal, the efficiency with
which the design-loop between players and manufac
turers has enabled the machines to key into behaviour
patterns means that even the designers themselves find
it impossible to 'disenchant' themselves once drawn
into the zone.
Schiill thus quite rightly presents this as a case
study in what Deleuze called the 'control society': a
kind of collusion between the players and an industry
that actively solicits their addiction, its result is a
12
Editorial Introduction
casino in which 'the calculation of probabilities is the
rule, the house has the edge and, as much as possible,
nothing is left to chance' . The zone itself is 'beyond
contingency', affectively suspending and providing an
escape from life under capitalism, while at the same
time constituting a bleeding-edge model of its most
advanced mechanisms of control.
The rise of machine gambling can also be read
in an architectural register. Far removed from what
was once 'learnt from Las Vegas' , the occupation
of erstwhile retail real-estate by machine gambling
establishments has become a familiar feature of our
cities. jASPAR JosEPH-LESTER's photo-essay focuses
on the Wedding district of Berlin, remarkable for its
concentration of these small casinos which come in a
variety of shapes and sizes and yet have begun to form
a recognizable architectural genre, albeit one that is
largely functional-even if their facades continue to
deploy a jaded vocabulary of Vegas imagery, these
sites are as far removed from the palatial excesses of
the golden age of the Strip as Schiill's interviewees are
from Dostoyevsky's gambler. In his examination of the
architectural merits of these spaces Joseph-Lester riffs
on Ed Ruscha's deadpan methodical approach (Some
LosAngeles Apartments, 1965) , documenting the situation
and formal characteristics of these deracinated spaces
for zoned-out gamblers.
13
COLLAPSE VII I
If there was ever someone who conformed t o Steve
Forte's characterization of the shift of the image of the
advantage player from 'stereotypical professional gam
bler [ . . . ] into the science-orientated, geek-like, college
whiz kid', it would be DAVID WALSH, the Australian
gambler whose sports betting syndicate The Bank Roll
is one of the most successful in the world. Although in
his interview with CoLIAPSE he immediately places the
instinct for gambling in an anthropological and evo
lutionary perspective, Walsh numbers himself among
the 'nerds' who have cultivated the ability to counter
the evolutionary artefacts that bias human response
to risk, and thus to maintain the attitude that marks
out a 'professional' gambler.
On a different scale and in a different league-one
is tempted to say a different world-from Wedding's
hypnotised slot-players, Walsh's disciplined approach
has led to a level of success that has allowed him to risk
a bold move in an entirely different sphere, with his
extraordinary Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart,
Tasmania. In our interview, Walsh, echoing Forte's
emphasis on the discipline required of the advantage
player, emphasises the fact that successful systems are
based firstly on insights that enable an edge, however
small, to be established; and subsequently on a correct
estimation of that edge and its disciplined and patient
application. The glimpses Walsh affords us into his
own system paint a picture not of sudden strokes of
14
Editorial Introduction
mathematical genius, but of a system based on the
principle that surpassing the already considerable
'efficiency' of the betting public by even a small margin
can pay great dividends. Reflecting upon his career
and his latter day role as art collector and 'unmuseum'
director, Walsh goes on to emphasise the vicissitudes
of chance in life, and how selection effects colour our
perceptions of fortune, success, and failure.
These forays into the world of the casino proper
only go to reinforce Cavailles's argument that once
concepts of chance and probability are brought to
bear in concrete applications, the tension between
idealisation and experience yields a complex interfer
ence pattern. The same is true of the industrialisation
of risk: contemporary reality continues to be shaped
by the operationalization of probabilistic thinking
through the systematic assessment of risk in all spheres
of society. This is achieved largely through the use of
models whose relation to the real, in Donald MacKen
zie's famous phrase, tends to be that of 'an engine, not
a camera' . Taking up this theme with an overview of
his research into the statistical modelling of flood risk,
ANDERS KRISTIAN MUNK brings us into the heart of
the contemporary manufacture of risk enabled by such
models. Beginning with William James's pragmatist
premise that our understanding of chance, and the
concomitant notion of non-actual events, remains
incomplete without an understanding of how the latter
15
COLLAPSE VIII
are made real by mobilising some kind of galvanizing
force, Munk addresses risk models as a particular form
of science-fiction, wherein the 'fictitious' capacities of
physical modelling are cultivated and activated by the
application of the probability framework.
Exploring 'the difference made by models' and in
particular the exigencies imposed on models whose
aim is to 'enabl[ e] things to express themselves in
monetary values', Munk gives a detailed account of
these hybrids of empirical data, physical modelling,
and general statistical principles abstracted from the
specificities of any particular event. The 'orchestration
of futurity' that will allow 'the future to be thought of
as a game of chance' brings into play a set of assump
tions whose provenance is a bizarre mix of stereotyped
curves, flying bombs, and kicking horses. Here prob
ability figures not as incomplete knowledge, but as a
supplementary construction that requires a 'leap of
faith' -a 'cocktail' of knowledge and generic idealisa
tion that is necessary in order to make indeterminacy
go 'live' as an effective machine-part. M unk thus
lays bare the construction of probability models as
a 'platform for intelligibility' , and reveals how those
tasked with this construction are compelled to give
pragmatic answers to some crucial theoretical prob
lems ( how to make a flood model without any data?
How likely is it for water to go uphill rather than
down? How are individual flood events independent
16
Editorial Introduction
from or correlated to each other?) . Finally he offers
us an analysis of how this process articulates the two
aspects of the 'janus-face' of probability-as epistemic
(incomplete information) and as 'explorable property
of the future' -so that they may complement each other
and yield a monetizable model. He concludes that
the conditions put in place to ensure the 'liveness' of
indeterminacy in fact mutilate the latter, depriving it
of the other vital aspect of Cavailles's understanding
of chance: the emergence of radical novelty. At least,
this is the case for the domain modelled; as for the
actions of models themselves, they may interact with
the world to present unforeseen outcomes. Indeed it
is at this level that they 'make a difference' and, rather
than representing reality, 'bring something hitherto
unavailable [ . . . ] into being' -even if in doing so they
may also 'exacerbate unintelligibility' .
It is this movement and its seismic historical effects
that NICK LAND addresses in a grand synthesis that
seeks to 'transcendentalise' the notion of ' casino capi
talism': according to Land, the inherence of risk to
modernity makes of capitalism the system for which,
at the (immanent) limit, 'the casino has become the
stake'. Risk is a historically specific category: as Munk
shows, it is constructed, rather than (like chance) suf
fered; and Land argues that the construction of risk also
calls for the construction of new, formalised synthetic
agents as their vehicles. At the limit of a planetary-scale
17
COLLAPSE VIII
experiment in which modernity and the calculative
determination of risk are inextricably intertwined,
Land sees artificial intelligence and capitalism con
verging in the construction of synthetic subjects that
'formalise agency and restructure time'. Abandoning
any aspiration to make probability an exact science,
Land here foregrounds the Bayesian approach which
epistemologises risk within a framework of the incre
mental revision of inferences, allowing probability
calculations to mitigate for their incompleteness, bring
ing learning and risking into immanence as 'integral
cognitive hazard' and 'unplanned design' , and fully
unleashing the disruptive capacity of the pursuit of
risk via its effective commodification.
Inevitably, this sovereign role played by risk in
capitalism is accompanied by an inherent opposition
to any supposedly external instance by which such risk
could be judged or to which its imperative could be
subordinated. Hence justice as such is risk's other, for,
as Land insists, whereas a risk society is that for which
society as such must be put at risk, the demand for
justice is a demand to limit vulnerability, to keep the
game inside the casino-a resistance to the escalation
of the stakes to those of Russian roulette. This resist
ance, he argues, consists in the refusal to expand the
weak subcategory of the wager into the full form of
the venture, for which adoption of risk entails risking
the loss of the agent itself.
18
Editorial Introduction
Thus understanding risk�vehicles such as companies
as already-exi(s)ting AIS heralding the complete inte
gration of venture and agency, Land asks how we are
to understand the discourse of 'mankind' from this
perspective: As the pursuit of a continued struggle of
an extra-economic form of agency against its absorp
tion into the 'venture-form'; as reference to a species
whose statistical consideration confidently predicts
its imminent demise; or as a nonspecific concern with
intelligence which, as such, would be indifferent to the
corrosion of traditional subjecthood? The suggestion
here is that, once capitalism is out of the box, our
answer to this question implies at most a minor adjust
ment to the horizon of existential risk looming over
the human subject-for leaving the table is no longer
an option.
Contemplating the fate of mankind from a similarly
lofty perspective, M IIAN C1RKOVIC asks whether more,
rather than less, risk might be the order of the day. In
'The Greatest Gamble in History' , C irkovic meditates
on existential risk, however, from the point of view
not of terrestrial singularity but of extraterrestrial
diaspora, examining the prospect of what might seem
like a 'reckless gamble' on the part of a beleaguered
species-namely, a decisive collective investment in
extraplanetary migration. In introducing this possibil
ity he considers the present situation of humanity in
terms of an embedded series of 'games' at which we
19
COLLAPSE VIII
have, so far, been lucky. We are faced with a choice of
several extremely uncertain and risky ventures with
regard to our sedentary terrestrial situation (one of
which-no less hazardous, given the potentially 'nega
tive adaptive value of intelligence'-is to stay put) . The
stakes here are no doubt existential: Can we transform
our situation from that of a game of chance into that
of a game of skill? On a sober analysis of the odds,
he argues, we may stand more chance of surviving
to take another turn if we risk stepping out of the
planetary 'cradle' .
Following this intense multiscalar amplification
of risk, from the theory of probability to modelling
to existential risk, an ascent that brings together the
adventure of human intelligence, risk, capitalism, and
futurality, we might firstly question any apparent con
gruency or continuity between Land's account of the
disruptive force of risk under capitalism and CirkoviC's
call for a collective wager on an extraterrestrial future.
After all, Tsiolokovsky's cosmist call for an escape
from the earthbound casino to a collectively-willed
future, with which C irkovic opens his reflections, was
premised on a notion of collective endeavour that
seems prima fade incompatible with the organisation
of resources and intelligence presented by the risk
order of capitalism. Although the financial crisis has
revealed, in accordance with Land's thesis, that the
major instances of sociopolitical heredity are already
20
Editorial Introduction
effectively subordinated to the risk-vehicles of financial
markets, an obvious response to his transcendental
deduction of the futural essence of capitalist intel
ligence would be to observe that a certain class of
subjects seem in fact to have succeeded very well in
separating their own fate from that of their ventures.
For the net effect of financial crisis has been to transfer
the downside of risk from those who pilot complex
financial vehicles to the citizens of what were once
nations and societies, and indeed to prevail upon the
waning sovereign power of the latter to prop up their
ailing enterprises.
Yet in the absence of any conceptual grasp on the
general nature of the financial instruments involved
and their relation to the dynamics of capitalism, the
satisfaction of such denunciation rings somewhat
hollow. Cavailles's observations hold well for these
sophisticated instruments: at least a part of the cata
strophic nature of the systemic crisis owes to the fact
that they proliferated instrumentally in the absence of
any firm understanding of their inherent logic.
Central to this cognitive deficit is the question of
derivatives. The notion that the increasing sophistica
tion of these financial instruments poses the threat
of systemic failure disaster is nothing new;1 and yet,
although they are generally considered to have 'failed'
1.
See for example Richard Thomson's popular account in the aptly
titled Apocalypse Roulette: The Lethal World ofDerivatives ( London: Pan, 1998) .
21
COLLAPSE VII I
i n some way, the underlying assumptions o f the models
that provide their basic operational logic-specifically,
models for derivatives pricing-do not appear to have
been significantly questioned or revised.
In an attempt to respond to this state of affairs, our
volume presents a set of contributions which seek to
understand the systemic nature of the global market
in risk, which includes human agents, but also and
increasingly the 'synthetic agents' to which Land refers;
to evaluate precisely what sort of intelligence is in play
in the latter; to understand the inherent logic of the
derivatives market and the singular role it plays in
the global economy; and to clarify the relation of this
advance guard of the finance sector to the capitalist
mode of power.
In a famous passage from his 1936 book The Gen
eral Theory efEmployment, Interest, and Money, Keynes
charged, against the notion of the rational economic
actor, that human behaviour is often driven by 'animal
spirits' rather than being 'the outcome of a weighted
average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quan
titative probabilities' . Agreeing with David Walsh's
conviction that risktaking behaviour can be under
stood in terms of our evolutionary inheritance, JOHN
M. COATES, MARK GURNELL AND Z OLTAN SARNYAI
caution against a too stringent separation of reason
and emotion, thus extending this questioning of certain
abiding philosophical and economic prejudices.
22
Editorial Introduction
One of the images conveyed by the notion of casino
capitalism is that of an elite of 'bankers' driven by the
worst excesses of human (or, in fact, masculine) behav
iour. Coates et al. provide a scientific context for this
'irrational exuberance' in which it becomes evident that
the mechanisms that drive these 'violations of rational
choice theory' may be the same ones that, within certain
parameters, are functional and optimizing in risk situa
tions. Their contribution to this volume, documenting
an experiment which tracks correlations between bio
chemical shifts in the bodies of traders and their perfor
mance in the market, delivers some suggestive results.
Endocrinal mechanisms that help the body to adapt
rapidly to changing environmental circumstances, in
an environment of 'uncertainty, novelty and uncon
trollability' , they suggest, may be responsible for the
characteristics that make for a successful trader, able
to respond appropriately to high-frequency signals;
however, in chronic situations these same mechanisms
may lead to behaviours that exacerbate systemic fear,
with risk behaviour and chaotic markets amplifying
each other in a biological-financial feedback loop that
effectively hooks up the accelerated delivery of glu
cose to the brains of individual humans to inceasingly
volatile markets.
This image of world markets wired into the metabo
lisms of bodies and the preconscious circuits of the
brain rather complicates the alternative between
23
COLLAPSE VIII
rational assessment of information and 'masters of
the universe' exuberance. In a network of bodies
whose competencies amplify ' animal spirits' -bio
chemical and sensorimotor reactions to uncertainty and
expected harm, instrumental within certain boundary
conditions, potentially catastrophic beyond them-risk
becomes a question that is as evolutionary and bio
chemical as it is political and financial: in other words,
the figure of the trader is placed in the ramified space
of the 'casino' described by C irkovic, comprising the
contingent factors that produced both the peculiar
animal homo sapiens and its technical milieu. Risktaking
becomes a strange kind of hybrid object that cannot be
addressed from any one disciplinary perspective, a syn
drome that is neither entirely natural nor constructed
or fabricated.
In invoking a 'neuroeconomics' that would provide
the link 'between economic events and brain processes',
Coates et al. suggest in closing that the trading floor
might be a laboratory in which we could attempt the
control, optimisation, and modulation of these bio
chemical aspects of the risk system, harnessing their
positive cognitive role while guarding against their
chronic effects (possibly through a 'feminization' of
the trading floor) .
Yet one might wonder for how long humans will
play any role at all, considering the supercession of
traders by various species of algorithmic 'black boxes' ,
24
Editorial Introduction
and the rise of high frequency trading. Although
the stressed 'hormonal economic agents' of Coates's
experiment were engaged in rapid trading, holding
positions for only a few minutes at a time, automated
computational trading today creates an environment
the speed and intricacy of whose operations are simply
intractable to human cognition. What role is left for
'the remnants of the human trading population' in this
'evolving ecology' whose 'emergent rhythms' are the
expression of ever more densely interconnected rela
tions between processing nodes of densely encoded
knowledge and strategy?
It is this increasingly inhuman ecosystem that NICK
SRNICEK AND ALEX WILLIAMS describe, an environ
ment in which 'technology redefines the risk landscape
itself', with increasingly fine-grained and liquid trans
actions giving advantage to those with sheer speed on
their side. From computational dynamics to hardware
configuration to physical location, firms competing
on this landscape constantly strive for optimisation,
and cyberspace's much-vaunted tendency to 'com
press space' now sees the physical itself becoming the
next frontier for finance as 'the earth itself becomes
an impediment' .
With an eye on Land's future AI, Srnicek and Wil
liams ask in what sense and according to what princi
ples these agents 'think' -what kind of intelligence is
embedded in them? On the basis of this question the
25
COLLAPSE VIII
authors of the ' Manifesto for an Accelerationist Poli
tics'2 expand and further finesse their understanding
of accelerationism by distinguishing between a mode
of acceleration that would operate 'in redefining this
space so as to change the very rules under which the
game itself is played', and a sheer operative increase
in speed that aims 'simply [to] dominat[e] an agreed
space of competition', suggesting that the latter in itself
cannot be a 'game-changer' in any significant sense.
What might be the result of such sheer acceleration
for representation, given both the impossibility of secur
ing any kind of 'cognitive mapping' of these transac
tions which seem to reformat space itself, and the mode
of nonrepresentative subjectivation that corresponds
to the intensification of finance-power? As Srnicek and
Williams observe, there remains a stubborn materiality
to these operations, and indeed the geographical loca
tion of their major processing operations has become
crucial, to the point where they are protected as major
national assets: 'while popular perception portrays Wall
Street as the central location of global finance, it is in
fact New Jersey and Chicago where much of American
finance is corporeally instantiated [ . . . ] and is regarded
as a component of the nation's critical infrastructure'.
For this volume S AM LEWITI undertook the self
consciously vain task of capturing an image of one of
2. On accelerationism, see R. Mackay and A. Avanessian (eds.),
#Accelerate: 'Ihe Accelerationist Reader (Falmouth and Berlin: U rbanomic and
Merve, 2014).
26
Editorial Introduction
these 'constitutively dislocated' locations, as a way
to measure the almost total withdrawal of finance
from representation. In fact, his contribution instead
recounts how this original plan was thwarted by way
of a misadventure that led to the erasure of said image
and a visit from the FB1's Joint Terrorist Task Forces.
What ensues is a reflection on the accelerated
abstraction of the value-form and the forces that are
mustered to defend its remaining physical outposts.
Lewitt's 'Notes from New Jersey' recall how his attempt
to photograph the Mahwah datacentre-an enterprise
whose interest lay in the impossibility of extracting
from its blank facade any insight into the abstractions
facilitated therein-triggered off a startling security
response. The agents (of what power it is not clear)
who forcibly redacted Lewitt's digital images com
pounded the interpellation by suggesting that the
only permissible representation of this 'disappearing
monument' to a globalised automated financial net
work of abstraction would be one made by human
means unsupported by any mode of recording save
for the traditional skills of the artist. This unexpected
turn of events, as Lewitt records, added further dimen
sions-those of guilt, erasure, and subjection-to his
original project to test the conditions of representation
under accelerated capitalism.
Although they may represent the cutting edge,
the high speed operations transacted in M ahwah
27
COLLAPSE VIII
are perhaps more a matter of the next crisis than of
the one whose protracted tail-end we are still living
through. As already indicated, more germane to the
latter would be an understanding of the infamous coos
and, more generally, of derivatives. The mathematical
instruments used to price derivatives-classically, the
Black-Scholes-Merton formula-are underwritten by
a model that ostensibly consists in assigning numeri
cal probabilities to future events. The work of ELIE
AYACHE, who has spent many years dealing first-hand
with the complexities of the speculative options and
futures markets, presents us with a new thinking of
the market, as the primary manifestation in the world
of radical contingency, to be thought entirely outside
the terms of probability and prediction.
Ayache argues that in practice derivatives traders do
not calculate price on the basis of a confined range of
future probabilities, but directly and effectively write
price as the contingent reality of the market, now. The
market is therefore not a set of probabilities, but the
very medium ofcontingency. It is a regime of events whose
vicissitudes we cannot better grasp by addressing our
failure to deal with highly improbable events (N assim
Taleb's ' Black Swans' ) , but whose events are effective
without prevision or reason-according to the title of
Ayache's book, Blank Swans.
At the beginning of The Blank Swan Ayache even
goes so far as to suggest that it indeed this philosophical
28
Editorial Introduction
default played a crucial role in the current financial
crises: The image of the market that circulates amongst
those who daily recreate it is based on a frail philosophy
of probability that fails to capture its most characteristic
operations. He understands the act of writing derivative
contracts or 'contingent claims' instead as a material
inscription of difference directly in the real, creating a
future that is in principle unforeseeable. Derivatives can
thus be considered, in Ayache's words, 'technologies of
the future'.
In our extensive interview Ayache not only avails us
of his expert knowledge of derivatives pricing technol
ogy, but clarifies and extends his critique ofTaleb, and
gives the most in-depth account yet of his pursuit of a
'philosophy of the market' . The latter is distinguished
by a move from an epistemological point of view-the
idea that there is a 'real' random generator which
models attempt to approximate-to an ontological
one in which pricing as act-as a continual writing in
the gap of discontinuity-is what drives the continual
event of the market, as place rather than in time. For
the market, Ayache argues, is a 'massive event' that
moves in the dimension of writing, not that of time,
and which has no external guarantor or generator for
its processes. In this way, as he describes in detail in
his responses, he develops his own conception of a
'unilateral' speculative materialism without any 'dog
matism of the absolute'. In surpassing Meillassoux's
29
COLLAPSE VII I
thinking of radical contingency b y insisting that he
must understand his own work as a writing (philosophy
as a practice wherein 'writing is faster than thought') ,
the question becomes no longer one of thought acced
ing to an absolute real Uust as it is not a question of the
derivatives pricing model capturing the 'real' random
generator of the underlying) , but one of discovering
the matter of writing 'in which the event is repeated' .
JON ROFFE's review o f the overall movement of
Ayache's thought reiterates this movement 'from depth
to surface, or from thought to writing' . Explicating
the major contribution of Ayache's approach-that
of refusing to subordinate the understanding of the
market either to predefined political categorisations
or to probabilistic frameworks-Roffe asks what are
the axioms of an immanent 'philosophy of the market',
one that thinks the market outside of these imported
constraints, and without arbitrarily expelling those
aspects of the trader's activity that exceed them.
Roffe goes on to confront Ayache's theory directly
with the question of cnos, the privileged instruments
of financial misfortune: Since the pricing of cnos
demands a supplementary level of probability-based
calculation Ayache dismisses them as 'degenerative
fantasy' ; yet Roffe takes issue with this hygienic
expulsion of cnos from his model, arguing that they
cannot be excluded from the 'generalised surface of
the market' it predicates.
30
Editorial Introduction
SuHAIL MAL1K's contribution draws Ayache's thinking
further into the domain of the political by reading price
as the medium of political order, and the market as
the medium of capital-power. Turning from the intrin
sic logic of the market to the shifts in global power
dynamics implied by the sheer volume and financial
magnitude of derivatives trading, Malik sets out from
the fact that these markets demonstrably pose a sys
temic risk to national economies, and that their size and
transnational nature means that they cut across and
where necessary countermand the power of states. Tue
uninhibited and unconstrained uncertainty unleashed
by these risk-bearing instruments thus spells immanent
crisis for a whole legacy of political certainties, since
they constitute the greatest planetary concentrations of
power and pose an 'existential risk' to sovereign power as
traditionally conceived.
In what promises to be a significant contribution
to political economy, M alik seeks to combine the
philosophical understanding of the nature and logic of
the derivatives market with an analysis of the entirely
novel, structurally-specific mode of capitalist power it
expresses. This ambitious 'ontology of finance' supple
ments Ayache's understanding of the fundamental logic
of derivatives with Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon
Bichler's account of capital as power. Such a 'power
theory of finance' answers both to Ayache's claims
as to the singular importance of derivatives for an
31
COLLAPSE VIII
understanding of pricing as such, and to Land's claim
that risk-bearing vehicles and agencies tend to corrode
the inherited social forms from which they historically
emerge. According to Malik, though, this inquiry
requires the adjunction of Nitzan and Bichler's under
standing of capital qua absentee ownership, with its
primary ordering mechanism of differential accumula
tion. Equally, however, it necessitates a supplement to
Nitzan and Bichler's own account: the latter already
agree that ownership of property, stocks, bonds, and
derivatives all pertain ultimately to the same, immanent
market, with all of them being ordered by means of the
universal mechanism of pricing (namely, through the
discounting of anticipated future earnings) . They also
countenance the refusal to subordinate the analysis of
capitalism to any dependency upon conditions exog
enous to finance (diverging from Marxism in insisting
that finance is not an excrescence of 'real production'
or a 'parasitical, supplementary or "fictitious" mode of
capital') . However their analysis must be extended to
take account of the specific operations of derivatives,
in order that it might encompass the new modalities
through which their complex operations multiply and
transform the power axiom of differential accumula
tion, and, crucially, the transformations they bring
about in the inherent dimension of sabotage that Nitzan
and Bichler see as integral to capital-power.
32
Editorial Introduction
For Malik then, the order of futurality involved in
derivatives markets, in discovering price as sole order
ing mechanism, fully unveils a universalising logic that
heralds a comprehensive reordering of the social via
finance-power, one which extends the latter's reshap
ing of 'political futurity in terms of price magnitudes' .
Extending Ayache's understanding o f the market as
writing, he offers an original analysis of the constitution
of derivative pricing through the Derridean concept of
differance, with the 'contingent claim' at once institut
ing price difference and deferring the exchange that
would realise that difference, with the pricing surface as
the 'stage of presence', and with the ultimate valuation
of the derivatives contract featuring as a 'supplement'
that serves only to structure the contingent unfold
ing of its quantitative role in the market. Contrary to
Ayache's expulsion of time in favour of the 'place' of
exchange, however, Malik reads pricing as a temporiza
tion, as a 'becoming-time of price' . Pricing emerges as
a form of 'time-management' and as the basis of a new
political economy, with derivatives trading integrated
into Nitzan and Bichler's general model of price as
the 'single quantitative architecture' of capital-power:
Ultimately finance-power can be determined only by a
'realism' (yet a 'non-correlationist' one ) that integrates
both the power dimension and the risk dimension.
This analysis yields as its final term the arkMderiva
tive as 'a priori of the political economy constituted
33
COLLAPSE VIII
by the ontology of price' . The existential risk faced
by capitalist modernity, the 'absolute volatility and
indefinite plasticity' that constitute the 'risk-order'
of these markets, is then understood as that of an
'ineliminable futurity that splits the present' , a universal
normless order that is 'necessarily contrary to stability'
and constitutes an 'intensive differential sabotage' that
lays waste to sovereignty.
*
As regular readers of Co LI.APSE will know, the thinker
most responsible for initiating a renewed debate
around the concept of contingency ( and whose con
ception of radical contingency converges, in Ayache's
work, with the practice of pricing as technology) is
QUENTIN MEILI.ASSOUX. Meillassoux makes a wel
come return to the pages of COLI.APSE in this volume,
opening a sequence of contributions that relate to the
role of chance in the work of art by contextualising
his recent work on Mallarme, The Number and the Siren,
in terms of his general philosophical orientation. He
positions Mallarme's Coup de des as a materialist gesture
that presents a unique solution to the predicament of
the artist following the crisis of the withdrawal of all
divine warrant, the poet confronted by Chance, that
'dark absolute' recognised by modernity as the only
presiding power. In this confrontation with the sole
34
Editorial Introduction
reign of Chance, according to Meillassoux, Mallarme
succeeds in elevating himself qua writer of the Coup de
des to the level of a material divinity.
The 'Master' of the Coup de des, who, in an eternal
moment of hesitation, holds the dice in his hand but
does not yet throw them, recalls Mallarme's earlier
protagonist Igitur; yet while Igitur was constrained
to choose, in the Coup de des Mallarme in.finitizes this
hesitation: if everything is subject to chance, except
for infinite, eternal chance itself, then Mallarme, in
devising a situation where the dice is both thrown and
not thrown, becomes chance-the only modern divinity,
and a thoroughly meaningless one whose celebration,
in a ritual of solitary reading, leads not to a humbling
of the human before jealous gods who demand alle
giance, but rather to what Meillassoux describes as
a neo-epicurean materialism, realized in the poet's
eternal hesitation.
Following from this undecidable fate of the poet
whose performative gesture makes him equal to chance,
Meillassoux's ontological translation of Hume's critique
of causality3 and its evocation of a hyperchaotic uni
verse where the laws of nature could alter at any moment
inspires the tale of another type of performative tribute:
S EAN AsHTON's short story recounts the strange fate
of a man who decides to 'put his body in the service
of a philosophical notion' . This weird tale in which
3.
See Q Meillassoux, 'Potentiality and Virtuality, in COLLAPSE 2.
35
COLLAPSE VIII
Chesterton and Lovecraft meet Meillassoux, brought
to life in suitable style by NIGEL CooKE's illustrations,
describes a more homespun attempt to embody a phi
losophy; a singular experiment that wavers undecidably
between philosophy, art, and performance, and leads
the protagonist who knows where . . . .
Proposing a further study in the activation of chance,
albeit of a more violent sort, GEGENSicHKOLLEKTIV
address the demand that the work of art itself must
involve a risk on the part of its audience. From the
time of the avant-gardes, this expectation of sensory
and/or cognitive jeopardy has been a mainstay of the
self-image of the modern artist, and is still omnipresent
in the claims of contemporary art, but is rarely taken
as literally as in the CAUTION experiment they propose.
They approach the question from within a practice that
feels it most acutely: under the banner of 'noise', various
practices of experimental music have pursued the aim
of a sensory and cognitive disruption of all norms of
musical structure, style, and expectation, only for 'noise'
to degenerate into a series of stereotyped gestures which
have given rise to a marketable genre. Can anything
be salvaged of the claim to provide a locus of real risk
outside the calculative depredations of the consumer
system? Drawing on the work of Ray Brassier, GegenSi
chKollektiv's diagnosis of this predicament leads to an
analysis that suggests that only a dialectical articulation
of the sensory and the cognitive-avoiding the dead
36
Editorial Introduction
ends of subjective abolition and conceptual overcoding
of experience-can draw noise out of its safety zone and
present the possibility of a true risk on the part of the
audience, thus leading the way to a 'game' that would
propel the collective body toward a real encounter with
chance. Although the text itself operates as an invitation
to the game, the reader is indeed advised to use their
'recipe' with the utmost caution.
Continuing this interrogation of the relation between
art and contingency are two artists' works that cut
through the entire volume.JEAN-Luc MouLENE's series
of images relay Cavailles's exposure of the vital-abstract
roots of the problem of probability. This is precisely the
double-register within which Moulene's work operates,
endowing his three-dimensional works with a 'formal
cruelty' through objects which are at once visceral
and conceptually truncated. In Moulene's unsettling
edition for COLLAPSE, the operations of abstraction
involved in thinking and operationalizing chance
seem to be glimpsed at a second remove, as images of
devices of thought. These figures are then interleaved
as 'feuilles volantes' throughout the volume, with
this redistribution offering yet another material image
of chance.
Often an artwork's claim to contingency or chance
is configured in terms of indeterminacy or ambiguity:
by courting the indeterminate or explicitly invoking an
interpretative relativism, artworks seek to be ' open to con
tingency', as if this were a decision the artist could make.
37
COLLAPSE VII I
I n her contribution AMANDA BEECH instead presents us
with the order of coincidence. Her series addresses and
invites the desire to order, to make sense of contingency
and, in particular (as often thematised in her work)
the desire to focalize the contingencies of power into a
decisive image. In a series of images deriving from her
Qo13 collage-decoupage installation work 'The Church
The Bank The Art Gallery' (Banner Repeater, London,
QOIQ), Beech tempts the viewer to formulate their sus
picions as to the entanglement of the artwork in the
three eponymous systems of power. Passing through
the pages of the volume, these three loci are subjected
to slippage, coincidence, and dispersion, yielding no
definitive order. The three series, relating to each of
these authorities suspected of compromising the artistic
endeavour, provide the basis for a faltering, uncertain
moving image, a montage sequence that interrupts the
reader's progress through the volume, or which one can
'fastforward' flipbook-style, maximising the chance of
divining some continuity at the price of turning the
remaining content into an unintelligible blur.
*
Three different viewpoints on contingency and prob
ability, in philosophy, in science, and in the market,
close our volume.
38
Editorial Introduction
FERNANDO ZALAMEA reminds us that the concept of
absolute chance was introduced into philosophy in
the late nineteenth century by Charles Sanders Peirce,
in the form of his 'tychism'. The pertinent difference
between this concept and that of Meillassoux ( and
Ayache ) lies in Peirce's insistence on a paradoxical
integration of the principle of absolute contingency
with that of continuity ( synechism ) . In insisting upon
synechism, Peirce attempts to avoid the potential vitia
tion of any systematic universal philosophy by the
introduction of contingency; at the same time the
dialectic with tychism avoids the impoverishment
of specificity that might issue from the espousal of a
universal 'continuism'. In his recapitulation of the
universal 'forms of evolution' through which his theory
of contingency is developed, Peirce seems to anticipate
C irkoviC's 'universal casino', as he progresses between
different orders of contingency, whose consequences
in the general system of dialectics between tychism
and synechism Zalamea sets out in detail. As Zalamea
describes, with reference to Reza Negarestani's archi
tecture of decay, it is the 'back-and-forth' dialectics
between the two principles- 'a sort of chemical reac
tion' -which makes of Peirce's philosophy an impres
sively complex and subtle instrument that particularly
deserves to be revisited in the context of what Zalamea,
following Rosa Maria Rodriguez Magda, calls 'trans
modernism', a condition that demands-beyond both
39
COLLAPSE VIII
modernism and postmodernism-precisely this mar
riage of the espousal of universal continuity and the
acknowledgement of contingency.
In the opening text of the volume Cavailles declares
that probability remains a 'live paradox within the
system of the sciences' . No more so that in quantum
physics, where probability plays a central role-an event
which seems to go counter to the entire trajectory of
'exact science'. MICHEL BITBOL suggests that we draw
the full consequences of this event by understanding
quantum mechanics as a meta theory which formalizes
the general conditions of possibility for prediction as
such for phenomena whose detection is inseparable
from their production.
Bitbol continues the general trend among our
contributors, by disposing from the outset with an
epistemological reading of probability-one that would
see the operations of probability as pertaining to
subjective ignorance of the phenomena in question,
with those phenomena understood to belong to a real
generator that could in principle be known. As he
observes, the emergence of probability in the sciences
saw it attached to (Lockean) 'secondary qualities'; in
quantum mechanics, however, even what were tradi
tionally understood as 'primary' qualities are demoted
to 'secondary' qualities qua 'indirect manifestations' .
It i s n o surprise then that the association o f the knowl
edge of secondary qualities and of probability with
40
Editorial Introduction
epistemological weakness should have given rise to
resistance when the lineaments of this science began
to emerge. Bitbol suggests that we should not be
afraid to read the central principles of operational
ism, holism, and perspectivism as countering this
trend with a certain return to Pascal's recognition of
anthropological limitations on knowledge and of the
knower's entanglement with what is known.
If we insist on the retention of primary qualities,
we can take up a stance according to which they can
consistently be postulated, but only as inaccessible to
any experimental practice-entirely breaking the cycle
between theory and experiment that constituted the
real value of the determinist hypothesis. The alterna
tive seems to be to project indeterminism 'into the
things themselves' -meaning that we conceive of the
real, equally speculatively, in terms of propensities
or potentialities. Bitbol insists that while either stance
may be fruitful as a standpoint from which to motivate
scientific research, the philosopher, rather than try
ing to obviate the problem, should intensify it, fully
confronting what Q.M has to tell us about our situated
ness, and examining what it is that the structure of the
theory of Q.M owes to the situation of the experimenter.
This 'reorientation' begins with a recognition of the
expanded form of probability employed within Q.M ,
which emerges as a response to the type of phenom
ena it is bound to deal with. The differing contexts of
41
COLLAPSE VII I
experiments are intrinsic t o the results they deliver,
and cannot be unified in such a way as to eliminate
them. Therefore a new apparatus evolves to articulate
these incompatible contexts: a 'metacontextual form of
probability theory' able to reconstruct these fractured
data within a programme of universal applicability.
As Bitbol demonstrates, later developments of
quantum theory do not escape but only deepen this
extension of probabilistic thinking, further developing
the 'metacontextual predictive structure' that confirms
the inseparability of detection instrument, milieu, and
phenomena. Furthermore, once one comprehends the
structure of quantum theory as such-as consisting
of this metacontextual form of probability, twinned,
in each instance, with a specific set of symmetries-it
becomes possible to understand the quantum theory
not as a 'physical theory' in the sense of Newtonian
physics, but as a 'generalised theory of probability'
whose potential applications reach well beyond the
sphere of physics.
In Elie Ayache's closing text, 'A Formal Deduc
tion of the Market', he adds further precision to his
concept of the market by returning full circle to the
questions Cavailles broached in his opening text, and
by delivering on the latter's presentiment that 'it is to
a more profound reform of our ideas about the real
that probability calculus invites us, a reform whose
magnitude we should not underestimate' .
42
Editorial Introduction
However, where Cavailles problematizes the axioma
tisation of probability by pointing out the slippages
that take place with regard to empirical probability
and intuitive concepts of chance, Ayache argues that
it is this utter abstraction of the formal model that
harbours the potential to transform our understanding
of events themselves, by stripping them definitively of
the artefactual trappings of the 'casino' model. The
latter is reduced to being just one possible model for
the probability axiomatic, but one which is no longer
permitted to overcode it.
Utilising the recent work of Glenn Shafer and
Vladimir Vovk, Ayache demonstrates how the for
malism can be stripped of its relation to concepts
of repetition, time, and propensity (the real random
generator) altogether, so as to move toward the notion
of an 'ultimate and global event' that integrates trading
and the category of money into the understanding of
probability at a fundamental level.
Ayache argues that this liberated version of the
axiomatic, dispensing with trials, repetition, outcomes
and statistics, which demands a revision of the concept
of the event and a rethinking of the relation between
reality, matter, and formalism and a 'reshuffling' of
chronology, yields precisely the figure that he calls
the market.
Here we are party to a strange visitation by the ghost
of Mallarme's master, when Ayache declares that if
43
COLLAPSE VIII
' [ t]here is something pressing to say when holding the
die [ . . . ] this won't take place in time' since 'time is
no longer essential to contingency' . For the intensive
understanding of contingency he ultimately proposes
seems precisely to correspond to the eternal hesitation
of the Master's dicethrow.
Finally, in what Ayache speculatively proposes as
a 'revolutionary' conclusion, it is the formalism itself
that would give rise to reality: 'reality in the sense of
genesis and inception' .
*
As will be readily appreciated from this brief introduc
tion, this volume has aimed to assemble a constellation
of work which, as in previous volumes, acts through
a series of partial overlaps and resonances so as to
render vivid and urgent a set of problems that manifest
themselves in diverse disciplines and practices.
Far from claiming to fully resolve the uncertain
ties engendered by such a montage, the aim is to
intensify a set of problematics that are not only still
'live' epistemologically and ontologically, but whose
ramifications continue to unfold at the heart of con
temporary actuality. In presenting this set of resources
with which to begin a renewed thinking of the ques
tions of contingency, probability, and risk, we hope at
least to have encouraged readers to resist surrendering
44
Editorial Introduction
the 'demon of chance' to deterministic idealization,
to our own epistemic shortcomings, or even to the
arrow of time. And in examining the forms of 'game
control' integral to a society that feeds on risk but still
dreams of ulterior certainty ( if only the certainty that
the arena of risk itself will remain secure ) , we hope to
have suggested that, beyond the confines of the casino,
these questions remain the site of a compelling and still
mysterious configuration of the production ( or writ
ing) of the real, formalization, and the contingencies
of human knowledge.
45