Friday, October 25, 2013

Derivitive as creating ontologies

I'm reading the fascinating account of derivatives by Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, in which the authors describe derivatives as a particularly powerful form of fiction, one that allows financial analysts to abstract risk and value from the sociohistorical events that make them up, and so to create the very measurements of risk that they allege to be accurate accounts of the underlying world:

“[F]inancial derivatives also shape a new means of grasping historical events, in that they presuppose that the market can reimagine and reduce sociohistorical processes, no matter how seemingly incommensurable or complex, to terms of abstract, quantifiable, and hence manageable risk.[…] The financial derivative thus has an underlying categorical structure based on its ability to ontologize real-time event structures. The social fiction made real is that aculturally derived technologies of understanding—especially the development of particular differential equations for modeling time-bracketing transactions—permit (post)moderns to parse any event structure into its naturally occurring components, to abstract these components from the event structure and from their temporal flows, and to assign a calculable and quantified value to these components, thereby allowing agents to entertain the expectation that they can predict and manage future events (135).
Derivatives thus act as a kind of critical theory, asserting abstract, disconnected versions of the social world which are nevertheless interconnected in the financial sphere. Like certain kinds of postmodern fiction, they assert misidentified truths about the world that become their own predictions of the future, substituting socially constructed versions of connectedness for actual connections.

I'm not sure how accurate this analogy is. But it certainly seems at work in Cosmopolis.

No comments: