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Finance and SocietyNumber of Followers: 6
 Open Access journal ISSN (Online) 2059-5999
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- Introduction: Volatility in finance, art, and culture
Authors: Benjamin Lee, Emily Rosamond
Pages: 1 - 17
Abstract: The term ‘volatility’ applies to changeability: both that which can be measured, such as temperatures and stock prices, and that which cannot be easily measured, such as affects and emotions. Quantitative financial volatility has typically been studied quite separately from art, culture, and everyday life. Randy Martin’s work, which addressed the resonances between volatility in dance and finance, was a notable exception. Martin focused on derivatives, which played a critical role in the development of financialized capitalism, especially between 1973-2008. Arguably, however, derivatives are no longer the key drivers of volatility as a social and cultural logic. New assemblages of asset managers, rentiers, and online platforms – along with a pandemic, new banking crises, and ongoing climate emergency – are reshaping how volatility is produced and navigated. How might we rethink volatility in order to better grasp its changing logics' This introduction unpacks existing debates on volatility in finance, art, and culture, suggesting several directions in which new work in this area might depart from existing frameworks – some of which are pursued in this special issue. We focus on three broad lines of exploration: rethinking the intellectual histories of volatility; rethinking volatility across disparate post-2008 contexts; and imagining volatile futures through art practice.
PubDate: 2023-08-10
DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8987
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 3 (2023)
- Figuring volatility
Authors: Ackbar Abbas
Pages: 18 - 36
Abstract: This article argues that there are parallels between developments in modern science and in art and culture, including the culture of finance, and that these developments can be tracked by a notion of volatility not just as change, but as how change itself has changed. Describing this paradigm shift requires a language that is precise but indeterminate, a language akin to metaphor, understood as figures of volatility. Three such figures are anamorphosis, anachronism, and catachresis. These figures are major instantiations of volatility, though they do not exhaust all the possibilities. What they indicate is not just that our frames of understanding have shifted, but that we are dealing with problematic, multiple, and overlapping frames: anamorphosis problematizes our experience of space, anachronism of time, and catachresis of language. These figures are not all in play at the same time. In literature, catachresis may be the dominant figure; in dance, anamorphosis; in ‘slow cinema’, anachronism. The aim is less to arrive at a set of defining characteristics than to follow a series of transformations across different cultural fields. Almost every field in our time is volatile each in its own way, and this has consequences for methodology. If figures are tools to think with, not to regulate thought, a necessary method would be to allow these figures to emerge from the material, not from a checklist. The question of volatility is arguably the key intellectual challenge of our time because it allows us to see deviation from a norm not just as an aberration, but as an indication that established norms are losing their normative value.
PubDate: 2023-08-10
DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8988
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 3 (2023)
- Varieties of volatility
Authors: Benjamin Lee
Pages: 37 - 57
Abstract: This article explores the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of volatility and their implications for cultural analysis in a range of fields. From quantitative finance, it takes the notion of ‘delta-hedging’, the suspension or neutralization of directionality to get access to volatility, and applies this to qualitative areas such as surfing, dance, cinema, and language.
PubDate: 2023-08-10
DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8989
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 3 (2023)
- The sickle and the garlic chives: Volatility in the Chinese stock market
Authors: Giulia Dal Maso
Pages: 58 - 68
Abstract: This essay explores the meaning that volatility assumes in the Chinese stock market context. Drawing on discussions from ‘mom and pop’ online forums, it argues investors operate in a relational position with the Chinese state regulators that both sustain and threaten their market activities. Chinese stock markets are known to be the most volatile in the world. To face the state’s arbitrary intervention in the market, investors must constantly juggle the options of either leaning on and trusting the regulators’ capacity to protect and rescue their stocks or engaging in risky margin trading and short-selling activities. This contradictory behavior is reflected in the popular self-mocking meme that keeps circulating in investors online forums, the one of the jiucai (meaning ‘garlic chives’). The investors often use it with irony to describe their own tendency to throw cash into the markets again and again, hoping to regain the money they lost in previous investments, never learning a lesson. Linking the financial with the biopolitical dimension, the essay takes the jiucai meme to show the extent to which volatility points to the production of new subjects whose resilience involves the adoption of practices of speculation to conjure a future for themselves that is reborn multiple times.
PubDate: 2023-08-10
DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8990
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 3 (2023)
- Pandemonium (do androids dream of')
Authors: Ami Clarke
Pages: 69 - 71
Abstract: Pandemonium (do androids dream of') VR and sound work, 2021. A 360-degree capture from inside the VR (player POV) is available on YouTube. For the 3D experience to work, please view on the YouTube app downloaded onto a smart phone with the sound on. <https://www.youtube.com/watch'v=l3RbhqOB7HA/>. Ami Clarke works with art and technology, critically engaging with the complex protocols of surveillance and disaster capitalism in everyday assemblages, with a focus on the inter- dependencies between code and language in hyper-networked culture. Clarke utilises various digital media, with aspects of live programming, to produce video and sound, sculpture, and virtual reality works that often come together as installations. Pandemonium was produced during a Beyond Matter residency in 2021 at ZKM Center for Media and Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, and a ‘risk’ related residency at Radar, Loughborough University, in 2020. The work consists of a virtual reality environment with sound work, an online dashboard, and a Twitterbot. For more information on the project, visit: <https://www.amiclarke.com/pandemonium-do-androids-dream-of/>. Credits and acknowledgements are detailed in the PDF file.
PubDate: 2023-08-10
DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8992
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 3 (2023)
- Teslaism: Economics at the end of the end of the future
Authors: Bahar Noorizadeh
Pages: 72 - 72
Abstract: Teslaism: Economics at the end of the end of the future. 4K Video, 27’ 2’’, sound and colour, Germany and UK, 2022. View in full here: <https://vimeo.com/724894515>. Password: Giga. Bahar Noorizadeh looks at the relationship between art and capitalism. In her practice as an artist, writer and filmmaker, she examines the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they suffuse one another. Her research investigates the histories of economics, cybernetic socialism, and activist strategies against the financialization of life and the living space, asking what redistributive historical justice might look like for the present.
PubDate: 2023-08-10
DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8993
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 3 (2023)
- A Modest Proposal (in a Black Box)
Authors: Katleen Vermeir, Ronny Heiremans
Pages: 73 - 74
Abstract: A Modest Proposal (in a Black Box). HD Video, 28’ 7’’, sound and colour, UK and Belgium, 2018. View in full here: <https://vimeo.com/290694804>. Vermeir & Heiremans are an artist duo. Defining their own house as an art work in 2006 became the basis for a long-term artistic practice together. The ‘house as art work’ is a framing device to open up a meta-perspective on their own work, the art world, and daily life in general. In their practice, they explore different scenarios for a redistribution of value and new forms of mutualisation.
PubDate: 2023-08-10
DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8994
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 3 (2023)
- Volatile properties: A Modest Proposal revisited
Authors: Katleen Vermeir, Ronny Heiremans
Pages: 75 - 90
Abstract: In our 2018 film, A Modest Proposal, we proposed to financialize the assets of public museums, their collections, and buildings, and distribute the generated values for the benefit of the producers of those values: the artist community. Reality seems to have caught up with our proposal. In the wake of the pandemic, public museums started to sell NFTs of their master pieces. But this did not inspire any new form of mutualization. In this text, we question whether blockchain infrastructures can be considered a public good. The individualistic logics that pervade the crypto sphere consider human relations in transactional terms and the enforcement of property rights as the only valuable governance principle, defining property as the basis for representation in many of the Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). The trust placed in automated processes might lead to ‘governance by algorithms’, making the ‘Leviathan’, the sovereign machine, a frightening possibility. Other blockchain infrastructures may offer more inclusive alternatives. Distributed Cooperative Organizations (DisCOs) acknowledge the need for the individual to sustain her/himself and yet also create a solidarity economy by the mutual distribution of collectively generated values among all contributors. We focus on the above questions on property, public goods and governance using our home in Brussels, which we have defined as an artwork and framing device. It is the ‘house as artwork’ that helps us evaluate how these concepts play out in an accelerating world in which blockchain and other technologies might equally generate emancipation or new enclosures.
PubDate: 2023-08-10
DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8995
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 3 (2023)
- Who can exercise the option of justice'
Authors: Dick Bryan
Pages: 91 - 94
Abstract: Robert Meister’s book is subtitled ‘A democratic theory of finance for the 21st century’. At first glance, there are odd juxtapositions expressed in the title: justice and democracy on the one hand; finance and options contracts on the other. How can they be integrated' That is the challenge Meister sets. It isn't an easy read – the richness of the analysis requires that it be digested carefully – but it will, for many people, change the way they understand the political meanings, and potentials, of financial analysis.
PubDate: 2023-08-10
DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8996
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 3 (2023)
- Asset managers in the everyday
Authors: Patrick Cleary
Pages: 95 - 97
Abstract: Growing asset manager ownership of housing and infrastructure represents a new way in which the everyday lives of millions of people become bound up in the world of finance. Brett Christophers provides an explanation for this trend and shows why it is likely to continue, in spite of asset managers’ ill-suitedness for stewardship of public goods.
PubDate: 2023-08-10
DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8997
Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 3 (2023)
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