Roffe - Abstract Market Theory

Abstract Market Theory

Abstract Market Theory

Jon Roffe

University of New South Wales, Australia

Jon Roffe 2015

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First published 2015 by

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For V. G. excipe furticas et refer ipsa notas.

Contents

Preface

This book presents a philosophy of the market. Rather than demarcate a whole field of engagement, it presents a single chain of concepts, a single line of thought. The various terrains that it cuts through twentieth- century French philosophy (particularly that of Gilles Deleuze), finance, sociology, and psychoanalysis are all familiar, and what follows in no way pretends to exhaust either these fields or the scholarship that turns around them. Neither is the account given its full extension a theory of money and an analysis of the banking system are both absent. My hope, nonetheless, is that the particular way that this book traverses these fields will expose new points of conjunction, from which future conceptual work on the market might depart. In the final instance, I refer myself to Tomas Transtrmers About History: Every problem cries in its own language.

What follows is broken into two parts, which deal respectively with the being of the market and its realization, or the market and the social. The trajectory is concluded by considering the question of temporality, before being recapitulated as a series of axioms and propositions the axioms and propositions of an elementary abstract market theory.

Acknowledgements

The book was written while I was a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and concluded at the beginning of Vice-Chancellors Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales. I would like to thank my colleagues at both institutions for their support, and in particular those in the Department of Management and Marketing in Melbourne, who were hospitable to a fault, even though the work falls far outside of their regular ambit.

Thanks are due to the great many people that I talked about this work with and in front of; I would like to recall the following interlocutors in particular: A. J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens, Bryan Cooke, Ben Chessell, Eugene Holland, Mark Kelly, Marc Lenglet, Yuval Millo, Joeri Mol, Elizabeth Newman, Davor Obradovic, Dean Pierides, Nick de Weydenthal, James Williams and Jessica Whyte.

I would also like to record my great thanks to Elie Ayache. From the beginning, he has been a curious and steadfast supporter of this work. Despite the fact that the argument here departs in a number of ways from his own position, both critically and due to our divergent ways of approaching the question of the market, it remains throughout indebted to his philosophy and would have been impossible without it. I would not hesitate to predict (if he will forgive me for putting it this way) that the intertwining of philosophy and the market that he has inaugurated will remain an indispensable reference for the foreseeable future.

The argument of the first three chapters of the book appeared in a partial, compressed form in From a Restricted to a General Pricing Surface, Collapse 8. I would like to thank Robin Mackay and Urbanomic for the permission to reuse that material here.

Abbreviations for Commonly Cited Works

Elie Ayache

Gilles Deleuze

Quentin Meillassoux

Raymond Ruyer

Introduction For an Abstract Market Theory

Amidst the curdling mass of our contemporary doubts, one thing at least is certain: the market exists. And yet, despite this despite the markets ubiquity and its unpredictability, its role in the making of billionaires and the destitution of nations there is an almost total absence of philosophical reflection on its nature.

The question what is the market? can invites a mixture of incomprehension, amusement and an obscure disdain. To further propose that the question is pressing and urgently requires an answer tends to transform these prima facie responses into either weak and blind affirmation, outright hostility, or both.

The amused, critical disinterest in the need for an answer to this question is doubled by an oscillation between two affects. Whether one examines academic discourses about the market (in finance, economics, politics, anthropology or sociology) or what passes for discussion of the same themes in the media (from mainstream reportage to the Financial Review by way of current affairs programming), the same situation may be observed. Everywhere, one is met by a cynicism backed by an unrestricted and unreconstructed optimism. The market is a tool of dispossession, but the people are capable of everything nonetheless. Or: The market is freedom realized, while any attempt to modulate its activity is motivated by a pathological paternalism.

Perhaps there is in these responses a kind of implicit rebuke to the exorbitance (real or imagined) of speculation, a pragmatic rebuff to the excesses of theorizing, and to a certain image of the academic humanities. No doubt, it would be hard to imagine a discourse more pragmatic more than ever willing to float over fundamental questions on a raft of unexamined presuppositions than economics. Certain strains of economics after Hayek even seek to replace this kind of theoretical speculation with the information of price itself, trading the philosopher for the market maker and eradicating, not just the question, but the place of the questioner