Beyond performativity: Material futures of finance

Abstract

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, temporality and futurity have become key terms in efforts to rethink finance. Thus far, the debate has revolved around the question of how knowledge practices or their functional equivalents–such as trust, hope, imagination and affect–mitigate uncertainty and enact futurity. This paper argues for a complementary perspective. It proposes a notion of material temporality that focuses not on knowledge and uncertainty, but instead on infrastructure and duration. Over and against a one-sided image of volatile financial futures governed by calculative devices, this perspective allows us to address the obligations, guarantees, fixations and centralizations that are equally at work in rendering financial futures actionable. Drawing on the work of Henri Bergson and Norbert Elias, the paper develops the notion of duration in order to enable this conceptual shift. The derivative is used as an illustrative case to demonstrate how the concept of material temporality challenges the current understanding of financial futures.