134

7 Temporality

Present – Past – Future – Four orders of discourse

Present

1. The present is the temporality proper to the social. Following Deleuze’s remarkable analysis of time in Difference and Repetition , this claim may be read in two different ways, each implying a vision of society itself. On the one hand, in keeping with mainstream economics, psychology and what we could call ‘ego sociology’, the social solely consists of human agents, each confronting the range of options for every given choice in cognitive solitude, and acting to attain their rationally deter-mined preferences. From this point of view, there is only the present, because all there is to the social is this perennial act of choice. The past, as former presents, has no bearing or grip on the present present because the passage of time makes no difference to the rational agent itself. The future, as the next choice, does not yet exist – but it comes to the same thing to say that the future is already present in the present, embodied in the rational agent itself; for, if time makes no difference to the one who chooses, then this formal function remains invariant. This can also be put in a third way: that, from this point of view, time makes no diffe-rence at all to agency in the social – which is to say that there is no time . That infamous Thatcherite emblem of neo-conservative and libertarian discourse, that there is no society, follows from this. The first way of interpreting the statement that the present is the temporality proper to the social is thus that the present qua agency is all that the social is.

2. But a second way of articulating the present and the social also exists, one that also allows for an account of the genesis of the first. Here, the present is the temporality of the social because it is the social

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1349781137511744_09_c07.indd 134 7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM

PROOF

Temporality 135

as a patchwork of habituated evaluations that produces the present in the social. The present therefore does not describe a neutral instant, a formal container that is moment to moment filled with content, but elastic social reality itself. The present is the name for the dynamisms of the capacities borne by a society themselves . The present itself varies: not just in content, but essentially and as such (famous analyses by Bergson and Husserl demonstrate the nature and significance of this variation).

The variations in question are variations in capacity – ‘[a]ll our rhythms, our reserves, our reaction times, the thousand intertwinings, the presents and fatigues of which we are composed’ (DR 77). Whose capacities? The answer to this question itself varies, depending on the social context in question, but includes the human being and subse-quently every kind of organizational concatenation of human beings. But the relationship between agent and capacity must be the inverse of what we are often led to expect: it is not as agents that we possess capacities, but rather that capacities possess agents. Or better, it is the structuring of capacities that constitute them as the agents that they are. Capacities are engendered first, and only then are formed into certain statistically distributed clusters – including social selves.

The primary goal of social organization is therefore not to restrict the activity of existing agents from without (extrinsic regulation) but to constitute agency as a set of tendencies: that is, in accordance with a probabilistically differentiated field (intrinsic genesis). Social organiza-tion is what ceaselessly effects the passage from process to tendency , process to habit . 1 It is through this organization that certain forms of more or less stable agency emerge, including the ratiocinating human being at the centre of the psychological and economic accounts mentioned above. Such agential formations are, however, nothing other than a certain loci of modulation of the space of the social. The analysis of this social space is to be found in any genuine work of the social sciences (the term itself is found in the work of Bourdieu), but we already have ample resources on hand to elaborate this point. 2

3. Let’s consider again the Foucault of the Archeaology of Knowledge . There he argues that institutions (his term there for the loci of social organization) function by regulating the means for the deployment of statements. As he always does, Foucault will insist that this regulation does not primarily take the form of foreclosure or repression. Institutions function instead by producing a positive but differentiated field for the possibility of making use of statements and structuring the discourse that arises on their basis: ‘The rule of materiality that statements neces-sarily obey is therefore of the order of the institution rather than of

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1359781137511744_09_c07.indd 135 7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM

PROOF

136 Abstract Market Theory

spatio-temporal location; it defines possibilities of reinscription and tran-scription (but also thresholds and limits), rather than limited and perish-able individualities’ (AK 116, translation modified).

The same framework is also present in his later, so-called middle period work. In ‘The Subject and Power,’ for instance, Foucault writes that power:

operates on the field of possibilities in which the behavior of active subjects is able to inscribe itself. It is a set of actions on possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more diffi-cult; it releases or contrives, makes more probable or less; in the extreme, it constrains or forbids absolutely, but it is always a way of acting upon one or more acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. 3

Social organization takes place through the application of power rela-tions, which function by the modulation of capacities. This modula-tion only rarely functions, as Foucault says here, to absolutely foreclose possible deployments of capacity, but instead weights or emphasizes some courses of activity more or less heavily. Thus, ‘[t]o govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others’. 4 What we have throughout been calling predispositionality functions through the distribution of probabilities. Habitual agency is statistical agency, agency constituted in relation to what Deleuze and Guattari call in a related context ‘zones of frequency or probability’ (TP 168).

The case of disciplinary power is particularly revealing here – or Foucault has made it revealing – because the mechanisms of social organ-ization can be so precisely catalogued. A famous paragraph in Discipline and Punish notes that:

A meticulous observation of detail, and at the same time a polit-ical awareness of these small things, for the control and use of men, emerge through the classical age bearing with them a whole set of techniques, a whole corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans and data. And from such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was born. 5

4. The three key theses here are thus the following:

The present is characterized by dynamisms of capacity. a.

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1369781137511744_09_c07.indd 136 7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM

PROOF

Temporality 137

The function of social organization is to filter these capacities, not b. in a binary fashion but probabilistically, thereby habituating certain activities. Social agency, including human agency, is one way in which capaci-c. ties are organized through this probabilistic clotting.

Or again: The present is the being of capacity; the social is a regime of likelihood; the agent is a product of the social organization of capacity. We should note in particular the identity of habit and probabilistic structuration in this way of accounting for things. Habits presuppose capacities. Conversely, capacities always take a certain more or less fixed form (this was already Ruyer’s point about what we now call neural plas-ticity). This form is not any kind of ideality or ipseity, though, but an order of variable plastic densities of probabilities. In turn, what Bourdieu calls social spaces can also be known by a term found in statistics: spaces of probability measures.

5. But, now we find ourselves in a position to explain the (relative) success of probabilistic analyses, like those produced by BSM. Let’s begin by noting the fact (one we touched on in passing) that nothing we find in Meillassoux, Deleuze, Bergson or Ayache himself rules out the probabilistic organization of social reality. The various critiques insist on something different: the rejection of any ontological sense to the categories of possibility and probability.

Indeed, the force of Bergson’s analysis, and Deleuze’s after him, turns around its ability to account for the genesis of probability’s prima facie plausibility in experience. He argues, in Matter and Memory and else-where, that the living being is constituted according to a habitual structure he calls the sensori-motor schema (SMS). The SMS functions by filtering the images encountered by the perceiver in accordance with its practical needs, and forming in turn various courses of future action as projections of this habituated self out into the world.

That which I call my present is my attitude with regard to the imme-diate future; it is my impending action. My present is, then, sensori-motor. Of my past, that alone becomes image, and, consequently, sensation, at least nascent, which can collaborate in that action, insert itself in that attitude, in a word make itself useful. 6

Correlatively, the objects we perceive are ‘pregnant with possible actions’, 7 not in themselves, but in the way that they appear to the living being through the lens of the SMS. An object only appears to me

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1379781137511744_09_c07.indd 137 7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM

PROOF

138 Abstract Market Theory

in the form of an object for me, as a relatively useful means to already established ends. The objects as I perceive them, in other words, appear as probabilistically differentiated means to ends ; that the determination of utility is correct or incorrect matters less here than the fact that such determinations ineluctably make use of the category of probability and its parent, possibility. Objects-for-us: spectra of possibilities.

All of this is already what Hume teaches us in the Treatise : that it is within the space of human thought that probability emerges and takes root, and that, correlatively, it has no purchase on the order of events themselves. To think so is a category error, even if it is one that we cannot avoid making – the worldwide spectre of prediction is thus a transcendental illusion.

Now, social formations are effectively higher-order sensori-motor-schemata. They modulate the flow of capacities, weighting some and downplaying others, in order to continually produce a certain ensemble of tendencies of various kinds (limited and local, polarized around a transcendent instance, polarized around plural quasi-transcendent instances, etc.). The future only exists in social formations as a projec-tion of present actions (themselves drawn from positively valued tenden-cies); the past exists only in the form of these tendencies themselves.

In sum, even the most elaborately formalized and heuristically sensi-tive predictive calculations play out on the inside of the social, grounded in the probabilistic framework of social organization itself. All prediction is therefore prediction-for-us. But it remains prediction, and succeeds only because it ranges across this intimate territory.

Past

6. Described in this way, we can see that the habitual character of the present constitutes a certain kind of memory. It gives us the past in the form of tendencies: that is, capacities modulated in the past. However, this by itself does not take us onto the terrain of the past properly speaking, since socialized capacities are the past for the present – we have been speaking of a kind of preconscious memory, memory as a subordinate tool – and not the past as such. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, we have yet to pass from a first memory of effects to a second memory of signs (AO 144).

7. Here, psychoanalysis constitutes an indispensable point of refer-ence. It is psychoanalysis that makes the essential point that the panoply of seemingly parasitic phenomena involving memory (from misrecol-lection to amnesia) are not the exception but the rule; to remember is

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1389781137511744_09_c07.indd 138 7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM

PROOF

Temporality 139

always to misremember, not occasionally but necessarily. The concept of misrecognition is at the core of the psychoanalytic legacy.

Very early in his work, Freud tentatively considers this thesis in his discussion of childhood memory, ‘Screen Memories’. 8 The ostensible aim of the piece is to make sense of two facts about the recollection of certain childhood memories: the fact that the most significant events of childhood cannot be remembered (‘leave no mnemic images behind’ 9 ), and the fact that our recollection of other childhood events are routinely falsified in the present. In other words, some childhood memories are and always will be unconscious, and recollections of childhood expe-riences are often mistranslated when they become conscious. Putting Freud’s theses in these terms shows them to be one and the same point: certain childhood memories are rarely made conscious on their own terms. Freud emphasizes not just the falsity of these recollections, but also the complicated creative element of the mistranslations involved, for their reproductions are actually compositions, guided by the hand of the present and its investments.

The name Freud gives to these new confected images of the past is screen memories, so-called because they ‘screen off’ the memory hidden behind them. He defines a screen memory as ‘one which owes its value as a memory not to its own content but to the relation between that content and some other, that has been suppressed’. 10

This is the first criterion of distinction: that screen memories are char-acterized not by what they present, but by the relationship that what they present holds with what we might call the memory in-itself, the untranslated unconscious memory. It is important to see here that screen memories therefore pose an insoluble problem for the conscious mind. We are not, Freud emphasizes, dealing with anything like a ‘[s]imple inaccuracy of recollection’, 11 and nor is it a case of these memories simply ‘being unconscious’. The relational element of screen memories – which, writ large, characterizes the relationship between conscious and unconscious in general – cannot be cancelled out.

At the conclusion of the piece, Freud turns to a more general case of recollection, resisting the idea that we should treat the phenomenon of screen memories as exclusively distinct from other memories of child-hood. He does so because the restricted and general cases very often share an important feature:

In the majority of significant and otherwise unimpeachable child-hood scenes the subject sees himself in the recollection as a child, with the knowledge that the child is himself; he sees the child,

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1399781137511744_09_c07.indd 139 7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM

PROOF

140 Abstract Market Theory

however, as an observer from outside the scene would see him ... Now it is evident that such a picture cannot be an exact repetition of the impression that was originally received. For the subject was then in the middle of the situation and was attending not to himself but to the external world. 12

Consequently, we would be right to question ‘whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess’. 13 This is the second criterion: in screen memories (taken in this more general sense), the subject who recollects is doubled within the image itself, among the other elements that populate it.

This analysis meets up with our earlier discussion of The Interpretation of Dreams, which demonstrated why the meaning of a dream must be created retrospectively, for the dream itself is an ensemble of signs without meaning. But now, placing these analyses next to each other allows us to see the more profound and general thesis that Freud’s work presents: that all memories are screen memories . Freud’s reason for singling out childhood memories is not just that the screening phenomenon is prevalent in these situations. More profoundly, it is the reason for this prevalence: not the length of time that has passed, which is for Freud completely irrelevant, but the powerful libidinal charge of these signifi-cant childhood events. But this cannot constitute a third criterion that would allow us to completely distinguish childhood memories from others, because as we know – this is, of course, Freud’s most well-known thesis – there is no experience that is not inflected by the drives: no point at which the libidinal and the rational completely part ways. We do not need to endorse the whole of Deleuze and Guattari’s programme of schizoanalysis to see what is already at play in Freud.

We can therefore take the final words of ‘Screen memories’ in a completely general sense:

Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge ; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves. 14

8. It is worth noting in passing that the question of the relative stability of memory, in light of this mechanism, receives the same explanation

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1409781137511744_09_c07.indd 140 7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM

PROOF

Temporality 141

as the relative reliability of probabilistic inference. It too relies upon the mesh of habituated – that is, modulated, regulated, organized – capaci-ties to stabilize the ‘recollection’ of memories. But in light of Freud’s first criterion, this amounts to saying that a certain relation to memory must be sustained in a stable form. The subordinate question concerning the particular images which correspond to particular social determinations will function as their screen is resolved in this way too. At the most general level, then, we can say that the stability and specificity of the creation of new social elements in relation to the inscribed surface is nothing other than social organization itself.

9. But this is to get ahead of the argument. We must first say that all memories are surface memories, inscriptions on the social surface. To do this we need to modify what Freud means by ‘screen’. Lacan’s famous ‘return to Freud’ comes at the cost of breaking with Freud’s life-long commitment to seeing the unconscious as something hidden in the depths that supports this metaphorical topology. It is true that the earlier analyses in The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life map out the beginning of a trajectory that Lacan makes revolutionary use of; but, nevertheless, Freud’s unconscious is throughout occult .

The unconscious is not an inner darkness populated by furious and frustrated drives, but a surface occupied by meaningless signs that only gain meaning through an act of translation that is also a mistransla-tion or misrecognition. This is what leads Deleuze and Guattari, in a passage too often overlooked by their more zealous partisans, to write that:

We owe to Jacques Lacan the discovery of this fertile domain of a code of the unconscious, incorporating the entire chain – or several chains – of meaning: a discovery that totally transforms analysis ... The chains are called ‘signifying chains’ because they are made up of signs, but these signs are not themselves signifying. The code resembles not so much a language as gibberish [ un jargon ], an open-ended polyvocal formation. (AO 38tm)

Unconscious memories are not hidden , they are meaningless : meaning-less signs inscribed in the unconscious. In place of ‘screening-off’, and even in place of a conception of the screen as a surface of projection, we should see the screen as a surface of inscription . The unconscious is not hidden behind a screen, but is this screen itself, the screen and the inte-gral inscribed modulations proper to it.

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1419781137511744_09_c07.indd 141 7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM7/21/2015 3:03:51 PM

PROOF

142 Abstract Market Theory

10. This conclusion is supported by the way that Lacan locates the unconscious in speech. According to a veritable generalization of para-praxis, the unconscious for Lacan is present wherever the integrity of meaningful experience is interrupted; consequently, it can only ‘be apprehended in its experience of rupture’. 15 This rupture is a rupture in sense, at the hands of the meaningless signs that constitute the uncon-scious itself: ‘Starting with Freud, the unconscious becomes a chain of signifiers that insists somewhere (in another stage or in a different scene, as he wrote), interfering in the cuts offered it by actual discourse’. 16 These unconscious traits engender symptomatic gaps not by acting on conscious experience, but simply by insisting as such. And we know this different scene under another name: the social surface.

What we earlier called the quasi-causal nature of price in the social order can be accounted for in precisely these terms. The presence of price within social praxis functions as an exception that can only be managed by taking it as value: that is, as something that it is not. Foreign bodies in the circulatory system of social values, prices trouble it from within by being from that place without that nevertheless clings to the social order as its non-coincident double.

11. The second correlate of the rejection of Freud’s depth-psycholog-ical approach is the rejection of the personological conception of the unconscious itself. This view, certainly in Freud, is radicalized by Lacan, and then by Deleuze and Guattari and others in Lacan’s wake. In place of the hidden place of the occult unconscious is the social unconscious; the displacement of one’s proper place in the context of meaningful discourse and the evaluative contexts that they presuppose follow from it. To call the unconscious ‘social’ neither excludes the means to specify individuals nor sinks us into the crepuscular warmth of Jung’s collective unconscious – and nor could it. The strictly meaningless nature of the unconscious in Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari has nothing in common with the positing of deep meaning. It is social because it does not pertain to each individual, even if each individual encounters the unconscious in their own way, one by one. But at the same time, the structural position of the unconscious in the social field is invariant. Thus, in a related context, Deleuze will write of the ‘object’ of the unconscious that ‘it is where it is only on the condition that we search for it where it is not. It is at once possessed by those who have it and had by those who do not’ (DR 102). The unconscious is shared in the social not by presenting the same content to all, but by placing all subjects in the same decentred position with respect to the social. The differences between kinds of society, on this point, comes down to the particular and partial means

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1429781137511744_09_c07.indd 142 7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM

PROOF

Temporality 143

they deploy for the regulation of the displacements that the uncon-scious gives rise to.

12. We have moved from the past to memory, and then to the uncon-scious and the social. But in fact, the past and the unconscious are one and the same. And memory, on the one hand, and to the degree that it is conceived as recollection, is an activity belonging to social organization. On the other, and to the degree that it is conceived as the registered state of memory as such, memory is the unconscious once more. The past is the unconscious registry of memory.

To assert that the unconscious is the past is to assert that it constitutes a real facet of the social that nevertheless cannot be absorbed in the present (it instead adsorbs the present). 17 This is what ‘past’ signifies. Just as the present cannot be conceived as the static, empty instant, filled at each moment by the actions of sovereign agents, the past cannot be conceived as a simple ‘having been present’. Famous works by Bergson give this argument its full range, but for us here it is enough to observe that to conceive of the past as a junkyard of past presents cannot explain how the past continues to act in the present, let alone how this causal mode (our quasi-causality) consists in insistence rather than direct effect.

The passage from Deleuze we have just seen continues with the state-ment: ‘ It is always a “was”’ (DR 102). Borrowing from Bergson once more, we can say that the unconscious is the past, but a past that has never been present. It is not a copy of a past present, but those inscrip-tions of these presents that linger and insist, guaranteeing the disparity of every copy from the alleged original from which it arises.

And we can go further, for there is no other unconscious content than ‘past content’ taken in this sense. That is, there is no atemporal content, whether structural or libidinal, which could be designated unconscious.

This is the very feature of price that we have already noted, that it rules out the absolute co-incidence of value with itself. The meaningless grit that bears no meaning and does not act, it jams the attempt of the social order to close in upon itself in accordance with its proper modes of evaluation.

To assert that the unconscious is memory as such is to once and for all reject the idea that it is the reservoir of obscure bio-psychic forces. What it consists of is integrally social, its meaningless signs the by-product of social organization that later come to haunt it. There is nothing natural about the unconscious – or rather, it appears as the unnatural in nature, but only as a consequence of the social ordering that populates it.

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1439781137511744_09_c07.indd 143 7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM

PROOF

144 Abstract Market Theory

13. The unconscious is therefore the memorial surface that necessarily accompanies the social order while remaining entirely to it. That is, finally, the unconscious is by definition social. It is past time to make the thesis explicit: the market is the unconscious of the capitalist social formation . The market is the place of the past that intrudes into social process as something that was never present, the immemorial and unrecollectable, what can only be misrecognized and what is misrecognized only at the cost of a derangement of present ordering. Unconscious price deranges social value. Our unconscious is not a hidden depth, it is the market surface, the surface of the contemporary social: what Karl Polanyi unfor-gettably calls our ‘stark utopia’. 18

Future

14. But this brings us, not to the present, but the future – the question of our equally stark uchronia . Here, we return to the very first links in this argumentative chain, concerning the thesis of radical contingency advanced by Meillassoux. 19

Meillassoux’s argument for contingency functions by revealing an ineradicable crack in every attempt to close the circle of thought upon itself. To argue that there is no direct access in thought to what lies beyond thought always involves the implication of the capacity for this beyond to be what it is for no reason at all, and to change just as ground-lessly. This principle of unreason is meant to be not only a winnowing scythe, though, but also and more importantly a new ground for philo-sophical argumentation.

The assertion of radical contingency is, according to Meillassoux, the assertion of an ‘absolute ontological truth’ (AF 71). But there is cause to doubt its absolute character. In a powerful moment of After Finitude , Meillassoux brings his major line of argumentation to the following conclusion:

If we look through the aperture which we have opened ... what we see there is a rather menacing power – something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realising every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformation, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fier-cest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm. We see an omnipotence equal to the Cartesian God,

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1449781137511744_09_c07.indd 144 7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM

PROOF

Temporality 145

and capable of anything, even the inconceivable; but an omnipo-tence that has become autonomous, without norms, blind, devoid of the other divine perfections, a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought of the veracity of its distinct ideas. We see something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceiv-able for physics, since it is capable of destroying, without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even God. (AF 64; translation modified)

Deleuze writes that atheism is ‘the philosopher’s serenity and phil-osophy’s achievement’ (WP 92), but in this remarkable passage we see something like its fierce conceptual joy. Unfortunately, this apex of argu-ment and rhetoric includes the element that allows for its overcoming. Radical contingency – this power like time but capable of destroying it – is taken to be the only consistent rational foundation for science, and one which cannot be exceeded. However, this capacity for the world to become something other for no reason at all, or indeed to remain the same, requires that there be a time in which change or statis unfolds. In sum: contingency itself cannot be an absolute ontological truth, because it presupposes a time that matches and then exceeds the fury of Meillassoux’s with its own proper impassive and neutral implacability. It is time that guarantees contingency, and not the inverse.

15. The means to elaborate this claim that time is the ground for change and statis is found, once again, in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition . Earlier, we rejected the idea that the present could be the empty form of time that accounts of rational human agency make it out to be: an empty instant endlessly filled with the prosecution of calculated activity. Instead, the empty form of time is the future itself.

Deleuze’s account is elaborate, but it suffices us here to extract two related points. The first concerns the future as empty form. Habit and memory are what we can very crudely call the contents of time: tenden-cies (modulated capacities) and meaningless signs (social inscriptions). The future, however, because it is never present, has no content. The future is precisely what makes predicting the future absolutely impos-sible, because in the future nothing happens . The future grounds the past and the present, but in the mode of ruling out their self-identical persistence.

The future, as empty form, is precisely what guarantees change and statis. Moreover – and this is implicit in what we have just said – because it is empty, it is also itself the guarantor of contingency. All necessity is

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1459781137511744_09_c07.indd 145 7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM

PROOF

146 Abstract Market Theory

ruled out by the future, except for the necessity of the passage of time itself. Contrary to at least the letter of Meillassoux’s text, this passage cannot be obliterated by contingency. Or again, time’s passage is the one law that contingency cannot destroy because it is the law that opens up the site in which contingency might operates.

16. The market, for Ayache, ‘is the privileged medium of contingency’ (BSEP 42). 20 He means by this that it is uniquely in the market that we are exposed to the future itself, in the form of the writing of price. Throughout The Blank Swan , he puts this claim in powerfully worded statements like the following:

I think the market is the only site where the question of prediction, that is to say of the future and of history, can properly be posed ... The market is the technology of the future. (BSEP 21)

The market is not an historical process, as if taking place in history; it is the process of history. (BSEP 50)

If anything, the market is quintessential history; it is the very process of history. (BSEP 109)

If the market is the process of history as such , for Ayache, this is because it opens onto the future itself, contingency as such . But we should ask what it is that restricts this insight into contingency to the market itself. Sometimes Ayache presents his argument as restricted to the case of the market (and derivative markets in particular) in order to stay close to his experience as an open outcry trader (BSEP xvii); sometimes the link between the market and contingency is made on the grounds of the performative character of the link between the trader and predictive calculi like BSM, which is quite clearly played out in open outcry market trading (BSEP 172); and sometimes, as he has emphasized more recently, he will argue that what makes the link so decisive is to be found in the concept of price, which only exists on the market. 21

The argument that has been pursued here hinges on the final claim, and its contrast with the category of value. Value is the fabric of the social, the normative (predispositional) and qualitative element that emerges uniquely in the social. Price too emerges in the social, but it does so as something that cannot be grasped on its own terms, and must be (mis-) translated again into value. This weakens, to an extent, Ayache’s claims to the absolute singularity of the market, since inscription on the social surface is necessarily present in all social forms. However, and this is one of the motivations of this argument, it provides his remarkable analysis with an extension beyond the case that inspires his work.

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1469781137511744_09_c07.indd 146 7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM

PROOF

Temporality 147

But, in light of this critique of Meillassoux, we can and must look further, for the contingency that characterizes the writing of price is the future itself. Conversely, from this point of view the market appears as the veritable temporal horizon of capitalist society itself, the point at which what currently exists opens onto the new, not as something whose advent is near, but as the nothing in particular: the ineliminable crack in time that is the form of time as such.

Thus, the following apparent paradox: the market is at once the past of the social and a figure of its future. But this is in fact in no way para-doxical, because the two assertions address different moments in the realization of price. Price as such insists in the social order as meaning-less, problematizing and problematic, and in this regard it belongs to the past. But this insistence, neutral and impassive, confronts social regu-lation with something that it cannot subordinate, neither easily and immediately nor on its own terms. The confrontation with price insti-gates a change in social regulation in order that it may be incorporated. It is in this sense that price constitutes the future in the present of the social, a crack through which the horizon glares. There is in this analysis no exaltation, nor despair. No conclusions in the order of morality follow. This is the structure of the contemporary socius.

17. Except that price, or the market, is not the horizon of the future itself . It is only the aperture onto this horizon, the aperture as it appears in our particular socio-political conjuncture. That the organization of the social – and Deleuze meant nothing else when he speaks of the way in which the ground of time is strangely bent – sutures the unfolding of temporality to itself is a profound metaphysical problem well beyond the scope of this investigation. But a correlative point is as easily stated as it is assented to: form by which contingency is bound to the social in contemporary society, the market cannot guarantee its own existence and, one day, for reasons that we perhaps do not know, it may cease to exist. The being of the market has no warrant; the temporality of the future guarantees the contingency of the market itself.

Early in The Blank Swan , Ayache writes that ‘the Black Swan, the Black Swan of all Black Swans would indeed be the total breakdown of the market’ (BSEP 26), but in fact the total breakdown of the market is implicit in the fact of contingency that the market presupposes. The ultimate Black Swan is time itself.

Four orders of discourse

18. From the start, we have been at pains to insist on the uniqueness, irreducibility and significance of philosophy for any theory of society

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1479781137511744_09_c07.indd 147 7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM

PROOF

148 Abstract Market Theory

and the market. This irreducibility has often been drawn into question, by the social sciences and psychoanalysis in particular. What is required today is an argument for philosophy.

Fragments of such an argument are found throughout this study, and the argument is this: that the social sciences and psychoanalysis, indeed all science, insofar as it is sutured to the experiential and the evidential, is incapable of addressing the question of form . The reduction of the market to the social, and the social to a simple heterogeneity – that is, a heterogeneity of content – is one symptom of this. It is only from the vantage provided by the category of form that the structural invariants of the social emerge, and in particular the process/surface structure. 22

This is philosophy’s irreducible contribution to a thought of the social. The many contemporary attempts to annex philosophy’s terri-tory on the part of the social sciences clearly have serious motivations, and philosophy itself often lends itself to shameful ends in the service of the corporate university and the institution of the bourgeois lifestyle and its own proper mode of ‘thought’. Nevertheless, regardless of the name it is given – the site at which it takes place, and even how well it is pursued – philosophy is the life of form in thought.

19. Philosophical discourse then is neither unique nor is its object ‘everything’. The three temporal orders will allow us to distinguish and briefly characterize three other distinct discourses. The first is the discourse of spontaneous, sovereign subjectivity found in economics, psychology and some mainstream sociology. It is founded, we have repeated, on the fantasy of free agency and the unidimensionality of time.

20. But the social sciences are not reducible to this ensemble. The proper ambit of the social sciences is what we have called variously habit, social formations and evaluative regimes. Sociology is the science of the elastic present. Now, whereas the psycho-econometric discourse goes beyond what agency reveals to us in positing the universality and unimpeachability of free ratiocination, the social sciences transgress their limits whenever they makes claims on the nature of the past as such. The positing of mythic beginnings, invariant social or linguistic structures, or their more sophisticated structuralist deployment of ungrounded parasocial analogies are the result.

21. The discourse of psychoanalysis is the necessary corrective here, and in particular its foundational insistence on the ubiquity and genetic significance of misrecognition. The past appears to us as it does not because it was that way – give or take a few minor misrecollections – but because our capacity to examine the past is produced and socially

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1489781137511744_09_c07.indd 148 7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM

PROOF

Temporality 149

modulated in the present. We have just said it: the past, the unconscious, is not a catalogue of snapshots of the past, but an intricate network of inscriptions that trouble and thereby structure the present. The search for origins is the ne plus ultra of time wasted. The same goes for under-standing the speech of others, and our own speech, and so on.

Psychoanalysis is therefore the science of the past as such, or, to para-phrase Deleuze, the science of the surface. But psychoanalysis too can lose its way, and commit a version of the frequentist fallacy. The preva-lence of a given libidinal-mnemonic organization, like the Oedipus complex, is taken to be evidence of its invariance, leading to the illegit-imate assertion of ‘an ancient mythical present’ (DR 88). This kind of failure is particularly chastening, given that it is double, joining the social sciences in their own misrecognition of the meaningless nature of the past, of the past as the insistence of meaningless traces. This is what leads Deleuze and Guattari, for example, to their explicitly Kantian critique of Oedipus: it is not an invariant form, but the product of very specific social organization.

22. In the wake of this, we must resist conceiving of philosophy along the lines of a super-egoic Kantian judge, which, from its rarefied heights draws up the border between legitimate and illegitimate. The discourse of philosophy is very limited in scope, as we have just noted. Its sole obligation is to engage form with concept. This is the reason for the special role of investigations into the nature of time, for time itself is empty form, the form of forms and itself the ground of the concept. In time, the changeless and change come together, and in the thought of this conjunction we find one of the highest callings of philosophy.

Only philosophy can fall further than psychoanalysis, which it does every time it takes itself as discourse about content, as just this Kantian arbiter. Moreover, philosophy’s failures repeat all of the others, which is why the modern philosopher is so comfortable in a business school, or running commercial ventures that peddle opinions for the bored upper-middle class. The accusation often levelled at philosophy, that it is too abstract – too far from the ‘everyday’, from ‘lived experience’ – follows from the fact that this failure of philosophy has become the norm; or, philosophy and sophistry have once more exchanged places in the ranks of opinion. In the face of these inanities, we must repeat, to ourselves and others, that the abstract is the source of philosophy’s power and its unique and proper object of concern.

9781137511744_09_c07.indd 1499781137511744_09_c07.indd 149 7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM7/21/2015 3:03:52 PM

PROOF

150

8 Propositions of Abstract Market Theory

Axiom of methodological immanence: the market is to be considered from the point of view of the market.

Axiom of inclusion: whatever is of the market is pertinent to the phil-osophy of the market.

The being of the market

Definition 1: The orthodox conception of the market is organized around the probabilistic modelling of the market.

Proposition 1: Probability and its root possibility are incoherent concepts that rely upon incompatible logical and temporal presuppositions.

Definition 2: Values are qualitative predispositions. Proposition 2: The orthodox conception of the market makes the market

itself redundant by attributing to probabilistic modelling the capacity to produce market prices by itself.

Proposition 3: Price is ubiquitously defined in terms of value; or, price is a redundant category in economic theory broadly construed.

Proposition 4: There is price. Proposition 5: Prices are pure quanta. Proposition 6: The market is the unique locus of price, and nothing else;

or, the categories of the market and price form an exclusive concep-tual pair.

Proposition 7: The market is indifferent to the agent of pricing or the object priced.

Proposition 8: Prices are meaningless signs inscribed in the market. Proposition 9: The inscription of price has two moments: the act of

pricing and the recording of that price in the market.

9781137511744_10_c08.indd 1509781137511744_10_c08.indd 150 7/21/2015 3:04:19 PM7/21/2015 3:04:19 PM

PROOF

Propositions of Abstract Market Theory 151

Proposition 10: Prices can take on value and meaning retrospectively, but are thereby no longer grasped as price.

Proposition 11: Prices are intensive quantities, intrinsically heteroge-neous multiplicities.

Proposition 12: The market is the intensive surface of pricing, of which prices are integral modulations.

The realization of the market

Definition 3: The Social functions by organizing dynamism, or coding flows, producing relatively stable entities (social elements), and the means for their organization.

Proposition 14: Social organization is the extremely variable qualita-tive and predispositional modulation of social dynamisms; or, social organization is evaluative.

Proposition 15: Social organization, as a dynamic predispositional struc-turing of social processes, constitutes a habituated social present.

Proposition 16: All social formations involve a hierarchical structure, or a form of social transcendence.

Proposition 17: Capitalist, or para-State, societies possess hierarchy in the form of plural, local, contingent and non-resonating organiza-tional centres.

Proposition 18: Capitalism uniquely deploys axioms, socially engen-dered means for pricing, that is, for exposing objects to the market.

Proposition 19: States of the market are the highly variable, relatively local, temporary social structures that regulate the deployment of one or more axioms, or markets.

Proposition 20: Markets are the socially regulated sites in which axioms are deployed.

Proposition 21: Market regulation is market realization; or, every market implies the existence of a state of the market.

Proposition 22: Every social formation possesses a social surface, on which organized social processes are recorded.

Proposition 23: The inscriptions on the social surface are a quasi-causal factor in social organization, functioning by insisting in their diffe-rence from social processes and elements alike: that is, by problem-atizing social organization.

Proposition 24: The inscribed social surface is the memory of the social, which cannot be recalled but only reincorporated by mistaking it; or, the social surface is the unconscious of the social.

9781137511744_10_c08.indd 1519781137511744_10_c08.indd 151 7/21/2015 3:04:19 PM7/21/2015 3:04:19 PM

PROOF

152 Abstract Market Theory

Proposition 25: The social surface of capitalism is the market; or, price problematizes value.

Proposition 26: The time of the future is the guarantor of contingency, and what in turn absolutely forecloses all permanence, including the permanence of the market.

9781137511744_10_c08.indd 1529781137511744_10_c08.indd 152 7/21/2015 3:04:20 PM7/21/2015 3:04:20 PM

PROOF

168 Notes

nor precisely what it amounts to. Deleuze, for example, gives a very strong reading of the concept that makes it integral to the Leibnizian system in Le Pli: Leibniz et la baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988), 140–63, drawing in particular on Christiane Frémont’s research on the topic ( L’être et la relation [Paris: Vrin, 1999]). For an excellent survey of extant interpretations, and a critique of Frémont and Deleuze’s approach, see Look, ‘Leibniz and the Substance of the Vinculum Substantiale .’

31 . This is an allusion to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the stratum (see TP 502–3); the connection between debt and this concept will be investigated elsewhere.

7 Temporality

1 . This line of argument clearly follows Deleuze’s reading of Hume in Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature , trans. Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). The relationship between the current argument and Deleuze’s construal of Humean social thought will be the object of future work.

2 . See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Space,’ in Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action , trans. Randall Johnson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–13.

3 . Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power,’ in Power , ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 2000), 341.

4 . Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power,’ 341 5 . Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish , trans. Alan Sheridan (London:

Penguin, 1977), 141. 6 . Bergson, H. 2002. Bergson: Key Writings , ed. K. Ansell-Pearson and J. Mullarkey.

London: Continuum 7 . Bergson, ‘Bergson: Key Writings,’ 147. 8 . Sigmund Freud, ‘Screen memories,’ in Standard Edition of the Complete Works

of Sigmund Freud , Vol. 3, ed. and trans. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (New York: Vintage, 2001), 301–22.

9 . Freud, ‘Screen memories,’ 321. 10 . Freud, ‘Screen memories,’ 321. 11 . Freud, ‘Screen memories,’ 321. 12 . Freud, ‘Screen memories,’ 321. 13 . Freud, ‘Screen memories,’ 322. 14 . Freud, ‘Screen memories,’ 322. 15 . Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis , ed. Jacques-

Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 56. This is what lies behind Roberto Harari’s assertion that parapraxes are acts of successful speech, because what is genuinely at stake in that speech is partially revealed, mi-dire (Roberto Harari, Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis , trans. Judith Filc [New York: The Other Press, 2004], 62).

16 . Jacques Lacan, ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,’ Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English , trans. B. Fink in collaboration with

9781137511744_11_not.indd 1689781137511744_11_not.indd 168 7/21/2015 3:04:00 PM7/21/2015 3:04:00 PM

PROOF

Notes 169

Hélène Fink and Russell Grigg (London: WW Norton and Company, 2002), 676.

17 . See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 153.

18 . Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 3.

19 . The remarks that follow are found in somewhat expanded form in Jon Roffe, ‘Time and Ground: A Critique of Quentin Meillassoux’s Speculative Realism,’ Angelaki , 17:1 (2012), 57–67; and in ‘The Future of An Illusion,’ Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism 4 (2013). The latter text also criti-cizes Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy on the same point, but a much more elaborate and forceful presentation of the point can be found in Peter Wolfendale, Object-Oriented Philosophy (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), 188–99.

20 . This is not only a term that recurs throughout The Blank Swan and its attendant publications, but the name of this book’s nascent sequel ( The Medium of Contingency: The Market from the Inverse View ).

21 . See Elie Ayache, ‘The Writing of the Market,’ Collapse 8 (2014), 572f. 22 . It is all too easy to reply, in the spirit of a crude reading of his work, that

Deleuze himself insists on the heterogeneity of the social, and indeed of being as such. What this claim overlooks is the formal character of the heter-ogeneity that Deleuze asserts. It is not merely that beings are different, but that difference itself is the formal character of being. By remaining at the level of what Difference and Repetition calls diversity, all of the worst charges against Deleuze’s philosophy are vindicated, up to and including its isomor-phism with the capitalist order of opinion and commodification.

9781137511744_11_not.indd 1699781137511744_11_not.indd 169 7/21/2015 3:04:00 PM7/21/2015 3:04:00 PM

PROOF