N. Katherine Hayles, “Speculative Realism and Speculative Finance: Exploring the Connections.” The 2013 Dennis Turner Memorial Lecture, Department of English, Wayne State University, 5 April 2013.
[KH abstract: Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (OOO) bears some startling similarities to contemporary finance capital, including the construction of objects whose content is obscure, increasing levels of abstraction, and the absorption of relations into objects. What can account for these convergences between two fields that are emphatically not engaged in conversation with each other? In exploring the question, this talk will discuss the economic conditions that currently shape academic employment as well as the financial markets.]
[BW disclaimer: the following are notes taken on my iPad during the lecture. No claims are made to adequately represent the structure and continuity of Hayles’s nuanced argument. Rather, these are “points sublimes” formulated in thinking along with her lecture. New arguments may be built out of them. Remarks in brackets are sidebars for responses or threads to pursue later.]
The Trading Pit and the Ivory Tower
[BW: boom and bust capitalism and devel of new media poetics]
global ecology and global finance as two great anxieties
mediation between/as spec realism [question of mediation; what is it?]
“secret alliances with speculative finance” with OOO [object-oriented ontology] as transducer
= “changing the construction of signals/values”
OOO’s ontology permits avoiding “finance” ???
reception of OOO is speculative–is this problematic?
[the value of OOO is up–why? is this grounded in material reality? how is value conferred?]
1. questions of finance
derivatives: CDO: no equity to back up value
several layers of abstraction applied to derivatives to distance them from toxic assets
mortgages were subdivided and assigned to “tranches” with similar risk factors
bottom; mezzanine; senior tranch–income from mortgages went to senior to mezz to lowest
senior is protected and got AAA ratings; lowest got junk ratings
procedures lowered risk according to Greenspan; any defaults would be spread among many investors [covert ontology–relating investment to given value]
derivatives tended to increase risk–impossible to calculate accurately
AIG insurance issued on credit default swaps–CDSs
a futures market market–betting against assets through insuring them
Goldman Sachs peddling CDOs and betting against them with CDSs
collected 2.5 B in insurance from AIG and from TARP
2. environmentalist/speculative realism
Harman has read his Heidegger (17000 pages) is this suspicious? Is this a value claim?
seeks “enfolded forces trapped in the things themselves” (TB 2)
Heidegger : tool broken tool ready to hand present to hand vis a vis “human attention”
“fierce inner reality of objects independently of objects”
humans are objects with no special ontological privilege / deep ecology
parallels speculative finance / Heidegger and Whitehead
“the essence of any object must be incommensurable with all of its relations”
[BW: isn’t this Frege on sense and reference]
a bridge and a bat (animal) / what is an object / no absolute divide w living and nonliving
risky move to object’s “essence” vis a vis knowability
KH: would it not be possible to think an object *is* the sum of all its relations
[BW: poetics of the real]
GH: “tool-beings are utterly not relational”
object is both real and abstract–this is the hinge
GH: if this is materialism, it is the first to deny matter
against relationality in Heidegger and Whitehead: every entity is present at hand
object never enters into relations in its essential being
[this attack on relationality is the attack on the turn to language]
“dark reality of things” / does not explain how object can change
phobia that “relationality” could take up all that can be known of objects / so there are no relations
relationality is like Ice 9
KH: this is nonsense. Systems structures in complex ways > change
“any perturbation no matter how small with spread through system”
this has been known since the 70s
change is assured by structure of systems
fear of change > relations become objects
a counter-ontology / expanding tool being of verbs into nouns
[BW: a nounal state] > a universe stuffed with entities > get rid of perception
effect of “sucking the dynamics of the system”
Finance Capital > abstraction > concrete into abstract labor
Marx / Ian Baucom / insurance contracts *Spectres of the Atlantic*
what kind of object is a derivative? often termed an “instrument”
finance capital: 1) abstracting from real person object to predicted future value
2) assigning a quantified value of money to this abstraction
3) speculating on this future value
high frequency trading = 75% of trades
avg length of holding a stock / 4 years in 1945 / 2000 11 months / 2011 22 seconds
high frequency trading algorithms
[BW: what sets the price? value/price mechanism not developed]
[BW: there is no relation between speculative realism and its privileging of the object and the total relationality of finance capital; ontology of essences has nothing to with the determination of value]
psychological dimensions > volatility
[BW: agree that attack on relationality is nonsense, both in terms of ontology and political economy–this is what draws them together]
Harman’s objects and derivatives have interiors
determined by specialized vocabularies and markets
[BW: is there a parallel here? for stock market to work there has to be liquidity so there is not a distortion of price; the more volatile a market the less liquidity–volatile markets produce conditions where liquidity is zero; market freezes and chaos opens up]
related fear = totally relational world as freezing of liquidity
relationality thus is needed for ontology
[BW: in what way does OOO mediate? it has a foot in both camps–dethrones human-centered; emphasizes finance capital through gap between surface and objects. Undermines relationality in ecology and hypostatizes relations as objects???? How is this mediation?]
OOO is not conscious of mediating factors; thus OOO has more complex relation to finance capital / a cultural transducer where one kind of anxiety turns into another
Mary Poovey–literary and economic writing in 18th c. Rise of math and aestheticization of figures. Value claims for literary production.
Now we are in cultural moment where widely separate spheres–lit/environmental writing coming closer to finance capital. Why? Finance capital is posing systemic risk. It is not necessarily happening on a conscious level–
OOO is working on an unconscious level. What is the nature of this claim? Does this recover OOO as trendy philosopheme for cultural symptomatology?
financial bubbles–tulip mania; South Sea bubble
now we have high frequency trading
bubbles depend on rumor mill that create value > just like OOO > bubble-nomics
Robert Brenner > 1971 US stops gold standard unilaterally
M1 M2 M3 / currency; checks; derivatives / nobody knows how much M3 is in circulation
money supply can grow unchecked without any relation to value
what about popularizing OOO / grad students like it / bubble / facebook OOO not in prof journals
Brasser, Kronos > exists only in the imaginations of a group of bloggers / “actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist metaphysics”
how to succeed in SR/OOO blogosphere / circle jerk / the Gods
reputational value as speculative finance / inflation of academic job market
[BW: claims of OOO are quite similar to those of conceptual writing]
extreme competitiveness > culture of smartness
Karen Ho: “Liquidated” / finance capital is remaking corporate Am in its image
relation to adjunct teaching / “liquid lives”–Ho
direct connection between finance cap and precarious future they face
irony that they valorize OOO which has direct ties to fin capital
fin cap has made market into machine/machine ecology not human/ecology
effects of algorithmic trading have been disastrous / heightening market instability for all
deprivileging human viewpoint and privileging machines/objects
derivatives are proliferating whose inner content is unknowable / risk is incalculable
money, like derivatives, has no intrinsic value / belief is value
Harman lives in a condition of such a belief universe even eating falafel in Cairo
he walks with finance speculators /
not OOO is bankrupt > this would require deeper account
rather, KH points to transductive function it performs
value is made overnight without anything really being made
actions exist in a bubble protected from consequences
environmentalist should realize the OOO relation to fin cap
“a violent act of abstraction” occurs at the heart of OOO
eviscerates relational thinking
KH conclusion: Harman says ideas have efficacy in context
and that contextual thinking should be relegated to dustbin of history
[BW: this is really violent niche marketing]
KH we need relationality more than ever
