Contingent Claims

Abstract

Technocapitalism acts through micro-performative mechanisms which escape human cognition and sense perception but at the same time influence individual behaviour and social conduct. Automated finance and corporate surveillance are both leveraged by proprietary tools operating in the invisible realm of microseconds. While its immediate agency colonizes the future at present, it escapes our phenomenological scope. In fact, technocapitalism operates on a new level of exercising power by shifting its language from representative to performative speech. Hence, data-driven performativity has very material consequences on our real biological and social lives – we are losing our senses in more than one way. How can we move and see through the maze of finance and other data-driven performativity?

This essay argues that the performative arts are well situated to create participative situations and alliances that allow for embodied awareness to reveal and resist these infrastructures. However, such art needs to translate technocapitalism beyond cognition, speech and rationality. And such counter-performative aesthetics are to be situated in the field of consequences and take performance outside the metaphoric spaces of the (live) arts. The essay therefore proposes a new reading of the term ‘resolution’ and its semantic field – ranging from perception and visualization to knowledge production and (joint) decision making – to counter the non-transparency of black box exploitation. But there is an urgency to go a step further and transgress the realm of critique and representation towards performative engagements in insurrection if we want to claim an agency in which all the senses of resolution come to bear. Activating the potential of resolution as an alternative to the rather passive notion of transparency calls for ‘renegade activism’ as a strategy of resistance that makes the black box speak from inside.

Notes

1 I use the term post-disciplinary in the sense that art is not a discipline but a praxis that to the advantage of difference and multiplicity opens to other research and practice including disciplinary ones; it is about forms and forums of thinking and making in-between artistic, theoretical, scientific and political engagement.

2 Technowledge is a term I coined to distinguish bot-coded and automated acquisition of knowledge. An example is Google’s PageRank algorithm: by exploiting data for profit – a main feature of technocapitalism – it revolutionized online search and leveraged Google’s market share.

3 Instanternity is an artistic research project on automated finance by the author with Haim Bodek (Nestler et al. 2018).

4 Brownian motion was detected by the botanist Robert Brown (1827), first with pollen and later with inorganic particles. Albert Einstein made use of it to prove the existence of molecules and atoms (1905). Already in 1900, Louis Bachelier introduced Brownian motion for the stochastic analysis of stock options. His doctoral thesis, ‘Théorie de la speculation’ (The Theory of Speculation), marks the first application of advanced mathematics on finance.

5 Computers weren’t banned from gambling venues in the early 1960s because no-one had thought of it: computers were room-size, weighed tons and had to be installed by a host of experts over several days.

6 Friedrich Hayek was arguably the most influential figure for the turn to neoliberal policies. Among other things, he argued that the centrally planned economy was less efficient than the spontaneous order in the decentralized market, which he described as an information processing system that competitively coordinates individually limited knowledge with market prices.

7 In contrast to Thorp, the first quant, Black, Scholes and Merton were theorists. The 1997 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Scholes and Merton (Black had died before). Thorp claims he used a model years before BSM but had stopped publishing to protect investor interests.

8 ‘Performativity is not about creating but about making happen’ (Callon 2006: 22).

9 On the level of individual bodies, the ‘quantified self’ exemplifies how plasticity is turned into the ever flexibly recalibrating data-body of neoliberal self-colonization.

10 More on the art series can be found here: https://bit.ly/3l0IrP9

11 Quoted from the project website: https://bit.ly/2Qb21tW

12 C. F. Arnold quotes a whistleblower about his co-workers: ‘I think people must kill a part of themselves to remain part of the system’ (Alford 2002 119).