Call for Papers
Special Issue
CRITICAL
FINANCE STUDIES
Tamara Journal for Critical Organizational
Inquiry
Guest Editor: Thomas Bay
The mission of this special issue on Critical Finance Studies is putting
philosophy and art to work on financial ideas, theories and practices, in order
to create concepts that will make it possible to think and use finance
altogether differently.
Critical
Critique as an ethico-aesthetic practice is passionately combating the
workings of judgement; a combat against the judgement of power and its
metaphysical tribunals; a risky encounter with the forces of power itself. ÔBut
more profoundlyÕ, Deleuze writes, Ôit is the combatant himself who is the
combat: the combat is between his own parts, between the forces that either
subjugate or are subjugated, and between the powers that express these
relations of force. É The combat-against tries to destroy or repel a force É
The combat-between is the process through which a force enriches itself by
seizing hold of other forces and joining itself to them in a new ensemble: a
becoming.Õ Becoming-critical means transforming oneÕs self in relation to
transcendent forces (whether they be higher values, moral codes, religious
dogma, authoritarian knowledge, political correctness, academic manners, common
sense, good will, opinion, implicit presupposition, material interests, orÉ) in
the course of producing new ways of thinking, feeling and existing.
Finance
Finance is a sheer monetary activity: the management of money; or, more
to the point, finance is the production and reproduction of monetary means. Simmel describes this means in various yet related ways,
including: the means par excellence; the pure form of exchangeability; the
purest form of the tool; the pure form of value; the ultimate means; the
absolute means. Hence the interesting thing about money, its truly creative
power (Marx), is its hermaphroditic capacity for reproducing itself without
means, to beget its own offspring, that is to say, to produce interest,
unmediated return (Money–MoneyÕ). In this sense, money constitutes both
the means and the end of finance: a means in view of, aiming at, itself as an
end – an end without a means. In short, the practice of finance is about
one thing, and one thing only: turning means into ends, means that have in
themselves their own ends; that is to say, to create or invent ends without
means – pure financial endedness.
Money, in this sense, becomes reflexive, an exponential reflection of
itself, a specular relation
to itself; and is as such capable of speculating only its own monetary values.
ÔThe world of values,Õ writes Simmel, Ôwhich hovers
above the real world apparently unconnected yet without question governing it,
would be represented in its Òpure formÓ by money. And just as Plato interprets
the real world, from the observation and sublimation of which the ideas have
arisen, as a mere reflection of these ideas, so then do the economic relations,
stages and fluctuations of concrete things appear as derivatives from their own
derivative, namely as representatives and shadows of the significance that
their money equivalent possesses.Õ
Speculation, as a financial practice, designates transactions that are
made for the sole purpose of profiting from price fluctuations. As an
order-word – every act, according to Deleuze & Guattari, that is
linked to statements by a Òsocial obligationÓ – speculation thus tells us
what we must think when using the word. Do you see? Implicit presupposition:
Seeing = Understanding – if you understand, or perhaps better,
re-cognize, then you see. Seeing is no longer sensual but intellectual,
cognitive: speculating the world with oneÕs mind, through the mindÕs eye. The
world turned into a museum: Do not touch. Or perhaps better: Touch with your
eyes, not your hands. The Agambean exhibition theme:
the impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing.
Not only does the financial apparatus strive with all its might to
separate the financial sphere off completely from the useful economy, but to
divide us all from ourselves, our spirituality, our sensuality, our passions,
our experiences – from, in short, our bodies – in order to
substitute for them attentive spectators, calculative observers, docile risk
takers, financial speculators. This financial structure of separation becomes
absolute when one no longer perceives the separateness; when seeing and
thinking become one and the same thing: speculation; when making use of things
becomes and remains virtually impossible – when one no longer believes in
the body, the bodyÕs capacities for being affected. And this is accomplished
through the metaphysical quality of money, defined by Simmel
as the capacity to extend beyond every particular use.
Studies
Considering the prominence given to finance – bank crisis
management, financialization, financial literacy /
capability – studying it is a great task indeed and as Nietzsche says, ÔI
do not know any other way of associating with great tasks than play.Õ To play,
as Nietzsche further suggests, is to risk oneself constantly, to play the dangerous game. Play, in other
words, is an unsettling ethico-aesthetic practice in
and through which we become (something different from) what we are. Study is
play; or, in the more accurate words of Agamben,
studious play. Practices no longer applied but studied, played (with), deactivated,
freed from their metaphysical moorings, offer openings toward new uses, novel ways
of thinking, feeling and existing. Financial studies, in this sense, is playing
with and being played by money, is dwelling in the hyphen between M–MÕ,
is studying this purely monetary relation as an event; or, rather, as the pure
event, the sense-event of finance.
Critical Finance Studies
Critical Finance Studies
is a way of combating the financial apparatusesÕ metaphysical claim on our
existence; of resisting the means-ends logic of financial economy; of inventing
a new relation between financial means and financial ends; of creating finance
as a pure means, a means without ends, without finality, a means that serves no
purpose – of exhibiting or rendering visible the financial means as such,
mediating nothing but its own mediality, financialising only its own financiality.
The purpose of Critical Finance Studies is to enable us to produce new forms
and practices of finance that, in DeleuzeÕs words, do
not yet have a people whose world they represent or place they inhabit, and
that will potentially alter completely our way of thinking and living.
Invitation
What we would like to venture in this special issue is the idea of
finance as the pure means of economy. A pure means, Agamben
writes, is Ôa means that, though remaining such, is considered independently of
the ends that it pursues É that which does not stand in a relation of means
toward an end, but holds itself in relation to its own mediality.Õ
Finance understood as mediality without end, pure
medium, would, parasitising on Samuel WeberÕs turns
of phrase, Ôconsist in a movement that separates from itself, and yet É in so
doing, establishes a relation to itself as Other. In relation (to) itself as Other, it stays ÒwithÓ that from which it simultaneously
de-parts.Õ
ÒThis—is now my way: where is yours?Ó Thus I answered those who
asked me Òthe wayÓ. For the way—does not exist! (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Procedure
I.
Please
submit your proposal (no more than 1000 words) to bay@fek.su.se
on or before June 15 2009 (including your name, email address, phone number and
institutional affiliation).
II.
Notification
of expression of interest regarding proposals will be made by July 15, 2009.
III.
First
drafts of completed articles (approximately 8000 words including references
with 1.5 spacing in APA format) are due Jan 10, 2010.
IV.
Notification
of article acceptance for submission will be made by Mar 15, 2010.