Thinking According to Finance: A Critique of Financial Temporality

Abstract

There are assumptions that undergird the discipline and practice of political economy. We address this by focusing on one contracted point of tension within political economy that is of great concern post-GFC. Namely, how are the presuppositions concerning the nature of temporality within the field of political economy determinate of deficient accounts of speculation, value, and even financialization more broadly? Thus, we argue that the temporal assumptions of political economy are abstractions that demand a demystifying critique. In particular, we contest linear notions of time that presume 1) a sequence of moments and 2) the idea that the future – as such – exists. We appeal to the speculative theories of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze to provide both a critique of temporality and also a prescriptive theoretical apparatus for constructive engagement with financial temporality. This takes place, first, through an elaboration of Bergson’s conception of duration and in Deleuze’s Three Syntheses of Time. Once elaborated, we, second, use our theoretical apparatus as a heuristic to critically engage three prominent political economic persuasions: the Marxian, Keynesian, and Critical Finance traditions. Each of these open an aperture on finance that is valuable but limited. These limitations reveal how and in what ways each are formalist projects trapped within their own schematic limitations because of the ways they think about time and finance in extensional terms; which in turn impacts how they understand the logic(s) of finance. Therefore, in order to avoid reproducing these schematic limitations, we, third, close our project by speculatively proposing a novel conception of financial temporality: what we call the ‘techno-temporal logic of finance’. This concept allows us to sidestep the limitations revealed in the Marxian, Keynesian, and Critical Finance approaches, while also constructively indicating novel ways we might be able to think according to finance.