Historical Ontologies of Uncertainty and Money: Rethinking the Current Critique of Finance

Abstract

This article examines how the notion of uncertainty is used as a tool of critique in the context of financial crises. It counters the prevalent tendency to understand uncertainty solely in terms of an epistemological limit to knowledge. Uncertainty should rather be seen in the context of different historical ontologies of money and economic subjectivity. The article uses a historical analysis to make its point. It investigates two discourses on uncertainty in the context of financial crisis that are usually not properly distinguished: the role of uncertainty for debating the financial crisis in the 1930s and since 2008. While in the first case the financial future was defined in terms of a potential that needs to be seized and materialized by a subject that is able to posit its will through time, the current appeal to uncertainty depicts the future as a catastrophe that needs to be survived and feared by the subject. Each notion of uncertainty gives rise to very different regulatory responses. The article discusses these historical findings in regard to the critical hopes pinned on the notion of uncertainty.

KEYWORDS:

• uncertainty
• money
• temporality
• governmentality
• materiality
• critique

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ute Tellmann

Ute Tellmann (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Department of Sociology, University of Hamburg, Allende-Platz 1, 21046 Hamburg, Germany.