Abstract
One has deprived reality of its value, its meaning, its truthfulness, to precisely the extent to which one has mendaciously invented an ideal world (Nietzsche, 1967, p. 218).
Finance, it seems, is no longer merely the life blood of business, but constitutes ‘the circulatory system of contemporary society’ as such (Finansmarknadsrådet, 2009, p. 3). At the heart (if it has one) of this financialized societal body, the advocates of the financial system are indefatigably marketing the monetary needs of the financially predisposed consumers, as well as providing the monetary means through which these financialized lives may be consummated. Georg Simmel (1990, p. 219) very appositely defines those well off consumers, ‘those who own a considerable amount of money bemittelt, that is, equipped with means.’ A financially bemittelt consumer, ‘cleansed of everything that is not merely a means’ (ibid., p. 232), is perchance best conceived of as a Musilean man without qualities, a feature and contentless human being completely dependent on the financial world, or, more precisely, money, to form its character. ‘The fact that money is detached from all specific contents and exists only as a quantity earns for money and for those people who are interested in money the quality of characterlessness’ (Simmel, 1990, p. 216).
This uncanny impersonality, equipped with money, the ‘metaphysical quality […] to extend beyond every particular use,’ provides for the financialized subject an opportunity to ‘realize the possibility of all values as the value of all possibilities’ (ibid., p. 221); that is to say, to separate itself off entirely from the sensual qualities and values of this world as it is, to transcend the carnal boundaries of the experiential world and establish beyond it an existence based exclusively on intellect, a cognitive way of life more in tune with the capital(ized) ideas of contemporary society, of which the idea of finance, we suggest, is the most pervasive. It is on this very boundary, the ontological line of transformation between two territories—the experiential and the intellectual, the present and the future—that we find this financial borderline case, this monetized transject: the bemittelt subject; that is to say, the means and medium in and through which the financial system actualizes itself—as ‘idea’.
The ‘idea of finance’ is an idea about the future, the promise of an unattainable future, a future never supposed to arrive, to present itself, become a presence; but which, on the contrary, will remain an idea of the future, of an immediate, unmediated, capital(ized) future now-here—the no-where or any-where-but-here of the present. Living financially means living in the future, the future present/present future, which is to say, ‘the present moment must be lived pre-emptively’ (Martin, 2006).
In everyday life this idea may be traced through a variety of financial practices; for example the way in which financial illiteracy, the black death of contemporary society, is being feverishly fought by governments, educational systems and interest groups in close alliance; or the manner in which the passive practice of saving has become an active form of risk taking based upon our more or less anxious risk profiles, that is, how much uncertainty and torment we are capable of bearing in relation to the prospect of a return in excess of expectation; or the profound, for the past three decades ongoing consumer oriented transformation of financial practice as such, through which we are all at all times only at arm’s length from the financial markets and the plethora of trading opportunities they facilitate.
The financial system is an apparatus (Foucault, 1980, 1991; Deleuze, 2006; Agamben, 2009), a set of strategic discourses, practices and mechanisms designed to extract purely futuristic ideas—the futurality—from things, actions, thoughts, relations and people; in order to transfer this futurity into a separate, metaphysical, purely voyeuristic sphere where all actual use becomes impossible. It is from this transcendent outside that ‘financial ideas’ are imaged and projected onto the market screens; financial imagery which we then speculate with awe and profound adoration. When working properly, a financial apparatus produces purely ideational realities thriving exclusively on our future expectations; or, again, on the Now-Here of the Future. Not only does a financial apparatus separate the financial sphere off entirely from the experiential world, but divides us all from ourselves, our spirituality, our sensuality, our passions, our experiences—from, in short, our bodies—in order to substitute for them distracted or inattentive spectators, calculative observers, docile risk takers, financial speculators—in short: economic tourists, speculating our own lives. This financial structure of separation becomes absolute when we are no longer capable of perceiving the separateness; when seeing and thinking become one and the same thing: speculative awe and adoration; when experiencing and making use of things become virtually impossible—when, in short, we become bemittelt.
Critical, Finance, Studies: Three concepts which, considered separately, occur frequently, are well-mannered and (therefore) tolerable; but which, when forced together critical finance studies are quite rare, unruly and (therefore) completely intolerable to the Financial community. Doing ‘critical’ finance is passionately combating the workings of financial judgement; a combat against financial apparatuses and their metaphysical tribunals; a risky encounter with the forces of Finance itself. Becoming critical means transforming one’s self in relation to transcendent forces (whether they be higher values, moral codes, authoritarian knowledge, political correctness, academic manners, common sense, good will, opinion, implicit presupposition, material interests, or…) in the course of producing new ways of existing. Critical combat is an ethico-aesthetic practice that in order to be truly creative must do away entirely with judgement. Financial critique, in short, is creating a new idea of what finance is.
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—‘the pure form of exchangeability’ (Simmel, 1990, p. 130)—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 and through the mediation from M to M’ in Marx’s famous Money–More Money formula (M–M’), the hyphen becomes a world of its own, the world of Finance, in which money becomes a specular, exponential reflection of its self, speculating only its own monetary futurality, that is to say, the difference between money and more money.
Studying finance, that is, studiously playing with finance, is a way of deactivating the practice of finance, rendering it inoperative, freeing it from its transcendental values, its predetermined purposes, its obligatory relationship to a specific end, pure ends included and try making it available for a new use. Considering the prominence given to Finance in contemporary society, studying it must indeed be a great task; and ‘I do not know any other way of associating with great tasks than play’ (Nietzsche, 1967, p. 258). To play is to play like Nietzsche’s genuine philosopher: ‘he risks himself constantly, he plays the dangerous game’ (ibid., 1999, p. 132). Play, in other words, is a risky ethico-aesthetic practice in and through which we become (something different from) what we are. Study is play; or more precisely, ‘studious play’ (Agamben, 2005, p. 64). To study finance is playing with Finance, is dwelling in the hyphen between M–M, is studying this purely monetary self-relation as an event, the sense-event of finance. To play is to be drawn into and lose oneself in this event, to become ‘with’ this event.
Furthermore, finance is studied as an assemblage, a collection of heterogeneous elements, including Finance, philosophy, ethics and art; the point being not to study what such an assemblage is, but rather what it can do, what it is capable of producing. Or, more to the point: critical finance studies. Finance, philosophy, ethics and art as creative acts—none of these individual areas being more or less inventive than the other—in order to understand exactly what it means to have an idea in these domains and how the respective fields are actualised. ‘Philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 2). The idea of finance is transforming economic means into Financial ends. ‘Art is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life lines’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, p. 187). Ethics create opportunities ‘that would go to the limit of what life can do […] that would affirm life instead of a knowledge that is opposed to life. […] Thinking would then mean discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life.’ (Deleuze, 1986, p. 101). Critical finance studies is all about ‘making’ connections between these realms, connections that will offer opportunities to invent and express an idea of what finance could become.
What we would like to venture in this short editorial note is the idea of finance as the pure means of economy. A pure means is ‘a means that, though remaining such, is considered independently of the ends that it pursues […] that which does not stand in a relation of means towards an end, but holds itself in relation to its own mediality’ (Agamben, 2005, p. 62). Or, to be more precise, finance understood as a mediality without end, a pure medium, ‘would thus consist in a movement that separates from itself, and yet […] in so doing, establishes a relation to itself as other. In relating (to) itself as other, it stays “with” that from which it simultaneously departs’ (Weber, 2008, p. 197). Creating finance as a pure means implies the exhibition or rendering visible of a financial means as such—whether money or bemittelt subject—mediating nothing but its own mediality, financializing only its own financiality, pure and endless financiality, without any transcendence. Making a means visible as such ‘allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them’ (Agamben, 2000, p. 58).
If through Simmel’s work it is possible to exhibit the financialized or, more precisely, bemittelt consumer as a pure means, signifying thereby a means of constituting a separate and superior sphere, containing its own monetary ends or purposes; then it would be possible to use the works of, for example, Benjamin and Agamben to, first, explore ‘the sphere of means themselves, without regard for the ends they serve’ (Benjamin, 1996, p. 236) and then expose the bemittelt subject as a pure means which not only resists the means–ends logic of financial economy (as a means in view of an end, or as an end without a means), but invents a new relation between financial means and financial ends. This, in turn, would open passages towards novel uses of finance, enabling us to produce new forms and practices of finance that 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. Or, expressed differently, we will attempt to turn finance ‘back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth, a new people’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 99).
Critical finance studies, dealing with the financialization of our everyday lives, must, as we have tried to demonstrate, be an interdisciplinary endeavour; if not the assemblage suggested here, then any other heterogeneous, potentially productive ensemble. ‘“This—is now my way: where is yours?” Thus I answered those who asked me “the way”. For the way—does not exist!’ (Nietzsche, 1969, p. 213).