About CFS

Our mission is putting philosophy and art to work on financial ideas, theories and practices, in order to create concepts that will make it possible to think and use finance altogether differently.

Critical

The practice of critique: passionately combating the workings of judgement; a combat against the judgement of power and its metaphysical tribunals; a risky encounter with the forces of power itself. ‘But more profoundly’, Gilles Deleuze writes, ‘it is the combatant himself who is the combat: the combat is between his own parts, between the forces that either subjugate or are subjugated, and between the powers that express these relations of force. … The combat-against tries to destroy or repel a force … The combat-between is the process through which a force enriches itself by seizing hold of other forces and joining itself to them in a new ensemble: a becoming’ (Essays Critical and Clinical). Becoming-critical means transforming one’s self in relation to transcendent forces (whether they be higher values, moral codes, authoritarian knowledge, political correctness, academic manners, common sense, good will, opinion, implicit presupposition, material interests, or…) in the course of producing new ways of existing. Critical combat is an ethico-aesthetic practice that in order to be truly creative must do away entirely with judgement.

Finance

Finance is a sheer monetary activity: the management of money; or, more to the point, finance is the production and reproduction of monetary means. Georg Simmel, in The Philosophy of Money, describes this means in various yet related ways, including: the means par excellence; the pure form of exchangeability; the purest form of the tool; the pure form of value; the ultimate means; the absolute means. The interesting (from the Latin interesse, to be in-between, to differ or make a difference) thing about money, its truly creative power (Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844), is its hermaphroditic capacity for reproducing itself without means, to beget its own offspring, that is to say, to produce interest, unmediated return (M–M’). In this sense, money constitutes both the means and the end of finance: a means in view of, aiming at, itself as an end – an end without a means.

Money, in this sense, becomes reflexive, an exponential reflection of itself, a specular relation to itself; and is as such capable of speculating (from the Latin speculari, to spy out, watch, examine, observe) only its own monetary values. ‘The world of values, which hovers above the real world apparently unconnected yet without question governing it, would be represented in its “pure form” by money. And just as Plato interprets the real world, from the observation and sublimation of which the ideas have arisen, as a mere reflection of these ideas, so then do the economic relations, stages and fluctuations of concrete things appear as derivatives from their own derivative, namely as representatives and shadows of the significance that their money equivalent possesses’ (Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money).

Taken in its financial sense, the word speculation designates transactions that are made for the sole purpose of profiting from price fluctuations. As an order-word – every act (Gilles Deleuze and Felíx Guattari explain in Thousand Plateaus) that is linked to statements by a “social obligation” – speculation thus tells us what we must think when using the word. Do you see? Implicit presupposition: Seeing = Understanding – if you understand, or perhaps better, re-cognize, then you see. Seeing is no longer sensual but intellectual, cognitive: speculating the world with one’s mind, through the mind’s eye. The world turned into a museum (The Museum of American Finance on 48 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, New York, could serve as the model): Do not touch. Or perhaps better: Touch with your eyes, not your hands. Exhibited: the impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing (Giorgio Agamben, Profanations).

Not only does the financial apparatus strive with all its might to separate the financial sphere off completely from the useful economy (exchange-values from use-values), but to divide us all from ourselves, our spirituality, our sensuality, our passions, our experiences – from, in short, our bodies – in order to substitute for them attentive spectators, calculative observers, docile risk takers, financial speculators. This financial structure of separation becomes absolute when one no longer perceives the separateness; when seeing and thinking become one and the same thing: speculation; when making use of things becomes and remains virtually impossible – when one no longer believes in the body. And this is accomplished through the metaphysical quality of money, defined by Simmel as the capacity to extend beyond every particular use.

Studies

Considering the prominence given to finance and financialisation today, studying it is a great task indeed; and as Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo, ‘I do not know any other way of associating with great tasks than play.’ To play, as Nietzsche suggests in Beyond Good and Evil, is to risk oneself constantly, to play the dangerous game. Play, in other words, is a risky ethico-aesthetic practice in and through which we become (something different from) what we are. Study is play; or more precisely, studious play (Agamben).

To study finance is playing with money, is dwelling in the hyphen between M–M’, is studying this purely monetary relation as an event – or, rather, as the (Deleuzean) pure event, the sense-event of finance.

What we would like to venture in this short introductory note is the idea that finance is the pure means of economy. A pure means, Agamben writes in State of Exception, is ‘a means that, though remaining such, is considered independently of the ends that it pursues … that which does not stand in a relation of means toward an end, but holds itself in relation to its own mediality.’ Or, to be more precise, finance understood as a mediality without end, a pure medium, ‘would thus consist in a movement that separates from itself, and yet … in so doing, establishes a relation to itself as Other. In relation (to) itself as Other, it stays “with” that from which it simultaneously de-parts’ (Samuel Weber, ‘Going along for the Ride’).

In line with thinkers such as Nietzsche, Simmel, Benjamin, Deleuze, Agamben, Foucault, Serres, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard, we would hold that practices no longer applied but studied, played (with), deactivated, freed from their reified values, offer openings toward new uses – that is to say, money as a pure means opens a passage toward novel uses of finance.

Friends