CCC Public Seminar - Navigating Turbulences Ray Brassier

Wednesday 21 June 2017

HEAD, Boulevard Helvétique 9, 1205 Geneva, seminar room CCC, salle 27, 2nd floor 
7pm

PRICING TIME: REMARKS ON THE ONTOLOGY OF FINANCE

Suhail Malik’s 2014 paper, ‘The Ontology of Finance’, challenges orthodox Marxian accounts of the connection between capitalism, finance, and politics. Drawing on Nitzan and Bichler’s Capital as Power, Malik argues that capital accumulation is not propelled by self-valorizing value but by the differential logic of pricing. In Malik’s words, “administered prices make explicit that price is the medium of capital accumulation qua power-ordering.” In finance capital, price becomes an abstract variable independent of its incarnation in concrete assets: it is no longer a measure of value, only of itself. Thus, Malik argues, financialization is not a species of capitalization; rather, capitalization is a species of financialization. Since the logic of pricing involves a binding of time, it is through pricing as time-binding that capital exerts social power. But capital’s time-binding power cannot be challenged by resorting to extant models of political action: collective human agency does not offer a credible counter-power against the power-ordering exerted by pricing. Since derivatives markets are the medium of pricing, the suggestion seems to be that financial speculation is the proper medium in which to countermand capitalism’s power. This talk will examine the key moves in Malik’s argument and critically appraise its political ramifications. We recommend the reading of ‘The Ontology of Finance’ before the public seminar. 

Ray Brassier obtained his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Warwick in 2001. From 2002 to 2008 he was a Research Fellow at Middlesex University’s Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy. Since 2008, he has been a member of the Philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut. He is the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave 2007) and the English translator of works by Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux. He is currently working on a book entitled Reasons, Patterns, and Processes: Sellars’s Transcendental Naturalism. 

Navigating Turbulences names the Public Seminar 2016/17 that is organized by the Research-Based CCC Master Program, one of three Masters of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD – Genève. More a frame than a theme, Navigating Turbulences proposes to continue to think together about the need for new vocabularies for living in global turbulences by means of contemporary research processes. All sessions emerge from the CCC-Curriculum with its faculty members The Colloquium departs from literally “a speaking together”: from com- “together” + -loquium “speaking”. Such an approach does not propose thinking to be a philosophical method to study a subject matter but departs from a moment under conditions of turbulence when knowledge is in crisis that makes it necessary for us to think, to think differently.

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CCC Public Seminar - Navigating Turbulences Ray Brassier
© Derivative Algorithmic Trading : São Paulo stock exchange, 2014.