Soliciting Risk: Rewriting the Economy of (un)certainty

Thomas Bay and Per Bäckius

Stockholm University

Abstract
1. ‘One of the lessons from the nineties is that the financial markets can be quite
ruthless to those who do not consider the administration of financial risks to be as important as
the company’s core business.’ (Per E. Larsson, CEO, OM Gruppen AB, the Swedish market for
standardised derivatives) Risk itself seems as significant as what is risked; uncertainty appears
to be just as opportunous as certainty is dangerous; or, in short, the clear-cut distinction
between the financial and the underlying economy threatens to collaps. Otherwise put, this is a
point of decision, an economic turning-point, that is to say, the crisis of economy; a condition
of instability within the very concept of economics, indicating that it deals neither with certainty
nor uncertainty but lability. Risk is economic crisis turned operational.
2. Derivatives are financial instruments, originally designed, perhaps, to manage or
control this risk, that is to say, reduce risks in their underlying economies. These financial
devices, however, are also marketable, that is to say, they can, by being traded on a derivatives
market, be used to amplify risk (i.e. price risk). Risk can thus be used on the one hand
instrumentally, in the form of probability, with a view to organising or forestalling the future,
preventing the unexpected from happening, neutralising the event; and on the other—since, as
some suggest, risk is more about the possible than the probable—as a commodity, capitalising
on its own marketable opportunities, welcoming the unforeseeable event, the unexpected
occurrence, the potential happening. Marketable derivation diverts instrumental derivation,
brings it into play.
3. Instrumental derivation hardly ever takes place. The derivatives market is so highly
developed that it provides the possibility to trade a thing without it ever being delivered. The
majority of the traded contracts on the Swedish market for standardised derivatives is never
delivered but offset or closed out in the market. Only around one percent of these traded
contracts are actually converted into the underlying commodity. The rest, ninety-nine percent,
is “realised”, instead, as real-time, that is to say, as interest (from the Latin interesse, to be in-
between). Put otherwise, financial derivation uproots the underlying economy, transforms it
into an ‘underlying interest’ (Chicago Board of Options Exchange), a sort of in-between-being.
It matters little or close to nothing whether the underlying reality is a commodity: pork bellies,
corn, live cattle, pulp, wool or gold; or a financial: shares, indices, currencies, treasury bills, or
bonds; what counts, though, is the risk (from the Greek rhiza, root), or in the words of Deleuze
and Guattari, the rhizome, ‘always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.’ Risk
has no point(s), it is always on the move, a line of flight passing or working through the
dichotomy of certainty and uncertainty.
From this exemplar one can identify three crucial components: (1) the crisis: a collision,
a kind of deadlock situation, a lability, a shortcoming, a limit; (2) the diversion: a turning, a
redirection of thinking to another exteriority, a putting into play; and (3) the escape route: a
line of flight, an attempted exit, a nomadic movement, a becoming-other, an event, a
happening, an opening towards the impossible.
In this paper we will solicit the concept of risk. Through the use of various exemplars,
we will discuss (im)possible ways of dealing with (un)certainty, with complexity; that is to say,
con-fusion, situations in which supposedly different realms fuses into each other, in which
limits tend to de-limit themselves.
Three of these exemplars are: Henri Michaux: trapped within the limits of conciousness
and the conventions of writing and painting; a turning to the animals, to the insects; a seizing
of the insects, becoming insect. Antonin Artaud: the miserable self as a point oscillating
between flesh and sprit; another attention, connecting with the balinese dance and the image
of the plague; stretching out, becoming a dancing body without organs, the point becoming a
line between actor and audience. Zelig: the love-crisis, of not being loved; moving from himself
to the others, the loved ones; transforming, becoming other, becoming chameleon. The seizing
of Michaux, the dancing of Artaud and the transforming of Zelig; three further variations on the
theme of flight. And more nomads are already en route.