Specters of Finance: Limits of Knowledge and the Politics of Crisis

Abstract

The recent financial crisis has shaken not only trading markets, but the conviction that the rule of experts reigns in a knowledge society. Instead, the class that was based on a social compact of autonomous control over specialized domains of expertise—the professional managerial class, has seen that capacity come undone. Finance has unleashed an extensive managerialism that has compromised professional autonomy as it has associated professionals under the sign of it’s chief innovative force, the derivative. The derivative logic applies as much to labor as to capital, as much to countermobilization as to dominance, as much to generative interdependence as to expropriating enclosure, how might we begin to recognize and revalue what is otherwise most typically described as a baleful situation for a politics of the social? While arbitrage may seem the apotheosis of anomie, of monadic self-interest, the actions of hedging have manifestly deepened the extent to which what some are able to do is contingent upon what others have done. If knowledge is increasingly required, but unable to master its environment, what might be managed on behalf of one another? The limits to knowledge in this key, pose a challenge to the politics of scarcity that rubrics of performance, profitability, productivity, mastery, and excellence impose.