[Paper delivered at the Risk, Security, and the Visual conference at the KWI, Essen, April 26. Many thanks to Tom Allen and Jakob Schnetz. Page numbers aren’t given, but can be hunted down (or up) easily enough through the references below. Minor edits for clarity]
The Continuous Trading of Thought
Peter Hallward’s criticism of Quentin Meillassoux’s ground-breaking, provocative, and elegantly written book of philosophy, After Finitude (first published nearly twenty years ago), is both carefully self-contained and tantalisingly suggestive. Hallward summarises the central tenet of Meillassoux’s essay on the ‘necessity of contingency’ thus:
Philosophical speculation can regain determinate knowledge of absolute reality. We can think the nature of things as they are in themselves, independently of the way they appear to us. We can demonstrate that the modality of this nature is radically contingent—that there is no reason for things or ‘laws’ to be or remain as they are. Nothing is necessary, apart from the necessity that nothing be necessary. Anything can happen, any place and at any time, without reason or cause.
The precise reasoning that Meillassoux employs to make this audacious argument, and the particulars of the philosophical tradition which he seeks to overturn, are less consequential to the nature of my brief intervention in this paper than the ramifications of his thesis and what I take to be one of the key motivations for writing it. What I would like to do is to read some of the things that Meillassoux says, led very much by Hallward’s critique, and then to read him in concert with the work of the derivatives trader and pseudo-philosopher Elie Ayache, for whom Meillassoux’s work is extremely important, in order to produce a supplement to Hallward’s set of shortcomings and problems with Meillassoux’s argument. This is risky, and quite possibly tendentious. But I hope in so doing to hold up an Ayacheian mirror to Meillassoux’s work, and thereby to contextualise the latter’s thesis of the necessity of contingency proximate to the specifically financialised aspects of contemporary capitalism with which Ayache is more than familiar. This paper is, then, a document of my own apprehension of the risks immanent in what Hallward calls Meillassoux’s ‘seductively argued book’. Ayache is clearly seduced by it; the results, in Ayache’s work, speak to the value of this seduction and the kind of raptures it engenders.
The reason I think Hallward’s criticism is suggestive has to do with the nature of his reconstruction of Meillassoux’s book. ‘If Meillassoux can be described as a “realist”’, writes Hallward, ‘the reality that concerns him does not involve the way things are so much as the possibility that they might always be otherwise’. Hallward reconstructs Meillassoux’s argument in the following ways. First, he identifies the importance to After Finitude of Hume’s argument that ‘pure reasoning a priori cannot suffice to prove that a given effect must always and necessarily follow from a given cause’. From this, Meillassoux derives his claim that ‘we cannot rationally discover any reason why laws should be so rather than otherwise, that is to say why they should remain in their current state rather than being arbitrarily modified from one moment to the next’. Hallward notes that, ‘in keeping with a tactic he deploys elsewhere in his work, Meillassoux himself quickly turns Hume’s old problem into an opportunity’: ‘Our inability rationally to determine an absolute necessity or sufficient reason underlying things, properly understood, can be affirmed as a demonstration that there in fact is no such necessity or reason.’ Hallward continues:
Conversion of Hume’s problem into Meillassoux’s opportunity requires, then, a neo-Platonic deflation of experience and the senses. It requires not a reversed but an ‘inverted’ Platonism, “a Platonism which would maintain that thought must free itself from the fascination for the phenomenal fixity of laws, so as to accede to a purely intelligible Chaos capable of destroying and of producing, without reason, things and the laws which they obey”.
Famously, Meillassoux calls the ‘vision of the acausal and an-archic universe that results from the affirmation of such contingency’, ‘an extreme form of chaos, a hyper-Chaos, for which nothing is or would seem to be, impossible, not even the unthinkable.’ The seeming problem with this radical argument, that ‘the world we experience does not seem chaotic but stable’, is once more converted by Meillassoux into an opportunity by way of set theory. Because Cantor argued ‘that we have no grounds for maintaining that the conceivable is necessarily totalizable’, he showed ‘that there can be no all-inclusive set of all sets, leaving probabilistic reason with no purchase on an open or ‘detotalized’ set of possibilities.’ Meillassoux argues in turn that ‘[L]aws which are contingent, but stable beyond all probability, thereby become conceivable’. This allows Meillassoux to envisage ‘a time capable of bringing forth, outside of all necessity and probability, situations which are not at all pre-contained in their precedents’. Hallward notes that, outside of After Finitude, Meillassoux develops the mathematical aspect of this argument ‘by insisting on the absolute arbitrary, meaningless, and contingent nature of mathematical signs qua signs […] Perhaps’, Hallward mentions by way of aside, ‘an absolutely arbitrary discourse will be adequate to the absolutely contingent nature of things’.
I will skip some of Hallward’s incisive critiques of Meillassoux’s argumentation, to arrive at his most powerful criticism:
Meillassoux’s acausal ontology […] includes no account of an actual process of transformation or development. There is no account [in After Finitude] of any positive ontological or historical force, no substitute for what other thinkers have conceived as substance, or spirit, or power, or labour […] Once Meillassoux has purged his speculative materialism of any sort of causality he deprives it of any worldly-historical purchase as well […] Rather than any sort of articulation of past, present and future, Meillassoux’s time is a matter of spontaneous and immediate irruption ex nihilo. Time is reduced, here, to a succession of ‘gratuitous sequences’.
For Hallward, the obvious ‘paradigm for such gratuitous irruption […] is the miracle’, and ‘the only event that might qualify as contingent and without reason in [Meillassoux’s] absolute sense of the term is the emergence of the universe itself’. This is a problem because Meillassoux’s entire philosophical edifice is constructed against the philosophical reliance, whether avowed or implied, on a theistic universe, against the realms of belief, faith, and mystery, and against ‘the kind of dogmatism which claims that this God, this world, this history, and ultimately this actually existing political regime necessarily exists, and must be the way it is’. ‘Against dogmatism’, he writes,
it is important that we uphold the refusal of every metaphysical absolute, but against the reasoned violence of various fanaticisms, it is important that we re-discover in thought a modicum of absoluteness—enough of it, in any case, to counter the pretensions of those who would present themselves as its privileged trustees, solely by virtue of some revelation.
Opportunity, it turns out, is as central to Meillassoux’s motivation as much as it is to his methodology. The project of After Finitude is an essentially competitive one: the discovery of the means to think that which is unthinkable should provide us with the means to out-think those whose ‘reasoned violence’ is levied, presumably against us, and presumably with a view to imposing their own idea of what is and therefore can be.
What distinguishes Ayache’s argument from the familiar anthropologies of finance that locate the market in the social activity of the trading floor, rather than in the formulaic algorithms developed to predict and profit from volatility, is Ayache’s startling claim that the market itself is the ‘perfect’ medium of Meillassoux’s contingency, and that, furthermore, the market-maker is the privileged trustee of this medium. To write derivative contracts—or, as Ayache prefers to call them, contingent claims—has nothing to do with probability: it is to produce ‘the pure, material writing of contingency’. This makes of the trader something of a para-ontological oracle whose activity formalises the innate exchangeability of things: ‘In a world that is only made of contingency, it is only natural that we should invent options or derivative contracts. It is only natural that we should circulate, today, things that we know will make a difference in the future. This is why I have always thought of derivatives markets as the technology of the future’. Because, for Ayache, ‘[a]nyone who believes that unreplicable derivatives can durably trade and prosper in a market that endures by its own necessity has no other ground for such a belief than sheer dogmatic faith,’ ‘the market [as Ayache understands it] emerges both as our absolute and as our best guarantee against metaphysics, against necessary beings, and against the dogmatisms looming behind them.’ The market is at once a model world whose dynamics are illuminated by Meillassoux’s thesis, and a world that exceeds the hyper-Chaos of Meillassoux’s universe through the activity of the trader:
Possibilities do not materially exist (they only exist metaphysically). What materially exists is the price […] By travelling across the world with the necessity of contingency in our hand, we may verify no possibility and no necessity; we make the world work (on fait marcher le monde); we make market of the world (on fait marché du monde); we make work, not state, of the world; we exchange its unexchangeability against the unexchangeability of writing; we exceed it; we become at once posterior and original in it. We instate another order of thought in it. We price it.
Ayache’s work is dense, circulatory, tangential, endlessly repetitive, and borderline megalomaniacal. His textual composition is the diametric opposite of Meillassoux’s concise, lucid, analytical unfolding. Anthropologists of the market such as LiPuma treat Ayache as an idiosyncratic insider who confirms their theories about the market in abstract risk as a human socius for which historical events are de-coupled from the valuation of derivative contracts, with catastrophic results. Financial journalists seem to treat Ayache with a mixture of bemusement and frustration. But Ayache is a particularly instructive reader of Meillassoux, because what he says discloses that which in the form, content, and motivation of Meillassoux’s work makes it more descriptive of the financial markets of the early twenty-first century than it is proof of the ‘possible destruction of every order’. Ayache’s answer to Hallward’s question about the deletion of historical change from Meillassoux’s universe is to point out that, ‘[w]hen thought has to speculate on the physical world under the regime of the necessity of contingency […] it must think the price and not the possible […] [p]rice is the material process of history and change’. This answer is not only more convincing than the bare necessity of contingency; it is contingency’s own perfected brand of fanaticism. The opportunity that Ayache seizes in Meillassoux’s work is the opportunity to develop it into a trading technology, a technology that presumably underlies the options pricing software packages sold by ITO33.
Hallward’s ‘absolutely arbitrary discourse […] adequate to the absolutely contingent nature of things’ exists, and it is the work of Elie Ayache. The miraculous which Hallward identifies as paradigmatic of Meillassoux’s temporality of gratuitous irruptions is codified in Ayache’s adoration of the market as the perfected medium of contingency. For all Ayache’s eccentricity, his effort to make price the only real, the trump-card to Meillassoux’s hyper-Chaos, stands in a far more plausible relation to the movement of recent history than Meillassoux’s claim that ‘anything can happen’, because what this speculative triumph of logic describes is not so much the organon of (non)existence as it is the fetish-character of the financial markets, the worldly-historical purchase of which are felt in everything from the price of oil to the price of bread. Ayache’s very distance from the sober financial theories that recover human agency from the algorithmic abstractions of the market renders his work more realist than Meillassoux’s ever was. It is more realist because it expresses, in all its chaotic raptures, the rapaciousness of the market for which After Finitude provides only the disinterested and amoral blueprint. Ayache’s work is a window onto the soul of contemporary financialised capitalism, for which the risk that things can be anything other than they are is immediately convertible into an option to price and trade. It seems to me less than coincidental that this aperture is prised open by the kind of thought that relies for its beauty and coherence on the necessary fungibility of all that exists or could do so.
References
Elie Ayache, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability (Wiley, 2010)
Peter Hallward, ‘Anything is Possible: A Reading of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude’, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (re.press, 2011)
Edward LiPuma, The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk, and Time (Duke, 2017)
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (Continuum, 2008)
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