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RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 22 NUMBER 1 (JANUARY 2010)
Agorachronotistics (Speculations
on Market Time)
Paul Stephens and Robert Hardwick Weston
‘‘Agorachronotistics (Speculations on Market Time)’’ explores the specters of time

that haunt conceptions of market exchange. Bringing Marx into contact with a range of
contemporary scholarship, ‘‘Agorachronotistics’’ attempts a Benjamin-inspired ideol-
Downloaded By: [Emory University] At: 18:14 31 December 2009
ogy critique of the movements of speculative capital. ‘‘Agorachronotistics’’ breaks

with direct scholarly exposition and makes its argument concerning the phantom
character of market relations using the principle of montage. The project develops
experimental prose genres introduced by Kracauer, Benjamin and Adorno, such as the
Denkbild (a term used by Adorno to describe Benjamin’s prose fragments), the thesis,
the convolute, and found texts. Although these fragments seek to innovate new forms
of cultural criticism and to challenge conventional modes of academic writing, they
continue to follow conventional scholarly citation procedures. For further details
about the Denkbild form, see Paul Stephens and Robert Hardwick Weston, ‘‘Free Time:
Overwork as Ontological Condition’’ in Social Text no. 94 (Spring 2008).
Key Words: Speculation, Agoraphobia, Walter Benjamin, Market Timing, Time

Management
Wealth . . . is disposable time, and nothing more.

*/Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1
What I’m fighting is economic optimism: the idea that everyone’s profit
necessarily increases with the growing costs to everyone. It seems to me
that the reverse is the case: the costs to everyone add up to an overall loss:
man becomes less*/so that one no longer knows what this tremendous
process was actually for. A ‘What for?’ a new, ‘What for?’*/that is what
mankind needs.
*/Friedrich Nietzsche, Late Notebooks
In capitalism only one thing is universal, the market. There’s no universal
state, precisely because there is a universal market of which states are the
centers, the trading floors. But the market is not universalizing, homogeniz-
ing, it is an extraordinary generator of both wealth and misery. A concern for
human rights should not lead us to extol the ‘‘joys’’ of liberal capitalism of
which they are an integral part. There is no democratic state that is not
compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.
*/Gilles Deleuze, ‘‘Control and Becoming’’
ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/010068-22

– 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis
DOI: 10.1080/08935690903411685
AGORACHRONOTISTICS 69
Society takes some comfort from the mirages that moralists, artists,
artisans, designers of dresses and hats, and the creators of imaginary forms
in general supply it with. But it is not simply in the approval that society
gladly accords it that we must seek the power of sublimation. It is rather in
an imaginary function, and, in particular, that for which we will use the
symbolization of the fantasm ($2a), which is the form on which depends the
subject’s desire. In forms that are historically and socially specific, the a
elements, the imaginary elements of the fantasm come to overlay the
subject, to delude it, at the very point of das Ding.
*/Jacques Lacan, ‘‘Drives and Lures,’’ 13 January 1960
Phantasmagorachronotistics
From Greek 8antasma, phantasma (ghost)!agoroyoin, agoreuein (to speak publicly

[in the market])!neol. xronotistikh, chronotistics (time management).
The flâneur, as amateur cultural historian, haunts the marketplace. In turn, he is
haunted by the marketplace, to which he has only the limited access of the window-
shopper.
The flâneur is the observer of the marketplace. His knowledge is akin to the
occult science of industrial fluctuations. He is a spy for the capitalists, on
assignment in the realm of consumers. (Benjamin 1999a, 427)
The flâneur engages in a kind of outsider trading. The flâneur hopes to see through the
social order, to reenchant the world of mass consumption and speculation. The market
measures time, both accelerating and decelerating production, and the flâneur tracks
those fluctuations. The revolutionary energies of the flâneur are dispersed in a
thousand directions within the city, at the heart of which is exchange*/whether in the
agora, the arcade, the casino, or on the trading floor. Every business, art gallery, and
café is his haunt. A window-shopper, he presses his face against every shop window; he is
witness to every transaction, yet he buys nothing. As outsider trader, perpetually on the
losing end of privileged information, the flâneur cannot know the inner workings of the
market, but instead is caught in a cavelike protocinema of commodified illusion.
The modern agora creates its own aristocracy, replacing the decadence of the
feudal aristocrat, who, by the standards of the stock exchange, is only an amateur at
lesser games of chance.
Trading on the stock exchange displaces the forms of gambling handed down
from feudal society. The phantasmagorias of space to which the flâneur
devotes himself find a counterpart in the phantasmagorias of time to which
the gambler is addicted. Gambling converts time into a narcotic. [Paul]
Lafargue explains gambling as an imitation in miniature of the mysteries of
economic fluctuation. (Benjamin 1999a, 12)
Traditional gambling is a market in miniature, a small-scale trading exchange*/but

the opposite is even more significant: the stock exchange universalizes gambling to
all sectors of production and consumption, and, in so doing, it makes the odds much
70 STEPHENS AND WESTON
better for some and much worse for others. In the theater of the phantasmagoria, the
flâneur is in the standing-room section. Ringside at the agora, there are only reserved
seats. Theoretically a public space, the agora is in fact where space and time, like
everything else, are divvied up and sold to private interests.
The flâneur is a ghost among ghosts, a projected figure within the phantasmagoria
that is post-Revolutionary life. Margaret Cohen notes that the term phantasmagoria
was
coined in Paris to describe a new form of popular magic-lantern show that

called up the dead during the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary years
when French society both awakened to utopian possibility and sought to
exorcise the nightmares of its history in blood. (Cohen 2004, 207)
It is possible to allegorize the entire Arcades Project as a phantasmagoria. In such a

reading, Benjamin would be the flâneur strolling through the phantasmagoric space-
time of nineteenth-century Paris. Cohen links the phantasmagoria to larger questions
of allegory: ‘‘while allegory derives from allos agoreuein, to speak other than in the
public place or marketplace, one plausible etymology for the phantasma agoreuein,
[is] the ghosts of the public place or marketplace’’ (209). Plausible, perhaps, but it
seems more likely that the nineteenth-century French coinage ‘‘Phantasmagorie’’ was
modeled rather arbitrarily on ‘‘allégorie’’ with no intention to build, etymologically,
on ‘‘market speech,’’ or even ‘‘market.’’ And yet both allegory and the agora have
come to haunt the internal structure of the term (Oxford English Dictionary, http://
www.oed.com/).
This spectral nexus linking the market with allegory extends from classical Marxist
formulations to haunt the imagination of consumer society. The phantasmagora of
undead labor lives on, even if the phantasmagoria has been supplanted by fantasies of
technological progress. Animating the phantasm of market relations, the ghoulish
specter of capital assumes myriad discursive forms: ghosts, vampires, zombies,
armies of renegade commodities sprung to life. It is no coincidence that the carnage
in Dawn of the Dead (1978) unfolds in a shopping mall. ‘‘Once escaped from the hand
of the producer and divested of its real particularity, [the commodity] ceases to be a
product and to be ruled over by human beings. It has acquired a ‘ghostly objectivity’
and it leads a life of its own.’’ Performing ‘‘as an actor on a phantom stage,’’
Benjamin writes, ‘‘the commodity has been transformed into an Idol that, although
the product of human hands, disposes over the human’’ (1999a, 181).
The phantasmagoria of the modern marketplace inevitably results in fear and panic
for those caught up in its periodic crises. In the spectacular world of nineteenth-
century speculation, with its extraordinary booms and crashes, it is no wonder that
the market would inspire fear. More wondrous is that agoraphobia, a term first coined
in 1871, would so quickly be disconnected from its etymological reference to the
market, and would instead be taken to refer more innocuously to a fear of open, or
crowded, spaces. One recent commentator, Gillian Brown, suggests the need to
return to the notion of agoraphobia as fear of the market: ‘‘agoraphobia epitomizes
the plight of the individual in a market economy . . . we might say that this disorder
can be considered, to a certain degree, as a rejection of the commodification of
public space made available exclusively for purposes of consumption’’ (in Carter
2002, 96).
Now that the market economy dominates more sectors of mental life than ever
before, why is there no widespread term for ‘‘fear of the market,’’ given the almost
universal concern of citizens of rich nations with the fate of the global stock market?
Could it be because we are all agoraphobes? Could it be because the stock market is
the most effective measure of the historical time of modern societies? Every
computer is now potentially linked to the global agora*/and every screen is
potentially a personal phantasmagora at the moment the curtain goes down, if it
ever does fall completely.
The Sacred and the Profane

The place where one gives gifts to the gods inexorably becomes the place where
humans give and take from one another*/or where humans collectively find the
infinite gift of economic growth. Lewis Mumford describes the agora as ‘‘the dynamic
center of the Greek city,’’ at the heart of Athenian democracy, commerce, and
worship.
The separation of the agora from the temple precinct, the lowly meeting
place for secular transactions from the lofty meeting place dedicated to
sacrifice and prayer to the gods, had been going on almost from the
beginning . . . So far from an early theological state-capitalism’s arising out
of a royal concentration of power, just the opposite happened: the voluntary
contribution of gifts to a shrine like that of Apollo at Delos turned that
barren isle into a thriving banking center, which played an important part in
Hellenistic commercial development. (1961, 148)
The twilight of the gods is requited with the dawn of capital exchange. The market
giveth back what the gods taketh away. One can almost imagine Delos as a kind of
ancient Dubai*/or as an offshore banking hub like the Cayman Islands. The market
requires the foreign; it requires tax-free havens, zones of exception. The market
begins as an outdoor fair and, over time, moves indoors and becomes continuous
rather than periodical. The worshipper in the temple can find it hard to measure his
gains; the worshipper in the market can tabulate his gains and losses at any moment.
Theoretically, the market, like the temple, is open to all. And yet not all give equally or
benefit equally. The gods of the market, like the gods of the temple, are not easily
placated, nor are they rational*/their appetite for human sacrifice being insatiable.
Agorafetishistics (Idols of the Marketplace)
The electronic market is the ultimate fetish zone. Traders never see the production
process. By contrast, the Athenian agora, according to Hannah Arendt,
was not a meeting place of citizens, but a market place where craftsmen
could show and exchange their products . . . What characterized these
market places, and later characterized the medieval cities’ trade and craft
districts, was that the display of goods for sale was accompanied by a display
of their production. ‘‘Conspicuous production’’ (if we may vary Veblen’s
term) is, in fact, no less a trait of a society of producers than ‘‘conspicuous
consumption’’ is a characteristic of a laborers’ society. (1998, 160)
If the nineteenth-century department store began to displace, in the minds of

consumers, the origin of the commodity from production to distribution, the
electronic agora elides the production process altogether in favor of a panoramic
view of goods chosen without regard to how or where they were produced. Only
luxury goods advertise their place and mode of production. In the world of the
electronic stock exchange, nothing retains any trace of the means of production.
From eBay to E*Trade, the electronic agora makes nearly all the world’s goods and
financial services available with the click of a mouse.
On-line retail and on-line finance complete the process inaugurated by the
introduction of the price tag in the mid-nineteenth century. In Wolfgang Schivel-
busch’s account,
The price-tag system introduced by the department stores did not only
silence sales conversation, it also transformed the experience of the goods.
No longer did this appearance speak for itself, as in the traditional retail
store, where the price of goods was determined by their visible and tangible
qualities as evaluated by the customer and shopkeeper in the sales dialogue;
that intrinsic quality, the use value, became obscured by the price tag. (The
price tag interposed itself between goods and customer as the train’s speed
interjected itself between traveler and landscape). (1986, 190)
The electronic stock market allows the speculator to speculate on anything from
anywhere without ever needing to engage with the production process. Like the buyer
in a department store, the speculator typically has no need for a salesperson. A
conversation will only slow down the exchange. If the conveyor belt and assembly line
drove the time of alienated production, the automated teller machine and self-
checkout machine extend alienation into the spheres of distribution and consump-
tion, having eliminated the salesperson and conversation altogether.
Philosophers, or, Men of Speculation
All the improvements in machinery, however, have by no means been the

inventions of those who had occasion to use the machines. Many improve-
ments have been made by the ingenuity of the makers of the machines,
when to make them became the business of a particular trade; and some by
that of those who are called philosophers or men of speculation, whose
trade it is not to do anything, but to observe every thing; and who, upon that
account, are often capable of combining together the powers of the most
distant and dissimilar objects. In the progress of society, philosophy or
speculation becomes, like every other employment, the principal or sole
trade and occupation of a particular class of citizens. Like every other
employment too, it is subdivided into a great number of branches, each of
which affords occupation to a particular tribe or class of philosophers; and

this subdivision of employment in philosophy, as well as in every other
business, improves dexterity, and saves time.
*/Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
The philosopher-speculator’s trade is ‘‘not to do anything, but to observe every
thing’’*/as if the world were a panagoricon and the speculator could see only from
the periphery. The speculator recognizes that her vision is partial and that many of
her hypotheses about the market will be wrong. The speculator factors the limitations
of her knowledge into her speculative activities. Risk is the absence of information.
Risk management is the advantageous allocation of information.
In a world of perfect arbitrage, the speculator only needs to be right 50.1 percent
of the time to come out ahead.1 These metaspeculations will similarly be wrong or
reductive.
The professors spoke of opportunities as inefficiencies; in a perfectly

efficient market, in which all prices were correct, no one would have
anything to trade. (Loewenstein 2000, 12)
Speculation is the negative expression of the irrationality of capitalistic

reason. (Theodor Adorno to Walter Benjamin, 2 August 1935, in Jameson
1977, 119)
Theses toward a General Economy of Information/Time/Capital
(1) Chronotistic, gift-economic definition of the bourgeoisie: The class that receives
time*/that is, the class that is paid to lend the dead labor of others; the class that
oversees (and overspeculates on) labor.2 Definition of the nonbourgeoisie: The class
that gives time*/that is, the class that pays to borrow back its own dead labor; the
class that pays to have its labor overseen. The haute bourgeois is paid to invest
through brokerage accounts; the petit bourgeois pays credit card interest. ‘‘What the
speculating trader risks is social property, not his own. Equally absurd now is the
saying that the origin of capital is saving, since what the speculator demands is
precisely that others should save for him’’ (Marx 1981, 570).
(2) The stock market is a cooperative exclusion machine, not a place of competitive
anarchy. The stock market is a self-expansive system loosely premised on an
unpredictably expanding (and periodically contracting) production system. Interest is
a temporal measure of expansion. The greater one’s knowledge of the system, the
more one can be paid for the circulation of one’s capital. One’s knowledge of the
system is dependent on one’s resources: primarily access to networks where players
1. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘‘arbitrage’’ as the ‘‘traffic in Stocks, so as to take
advantage of the difference of price at which the same stock may be quoted at the same time in
the exchange markets of distant places’’ (http://www.oed.com/).
2. ‘‘The difference between a gift and every other operation of pure and simple exchange is that
the gift gives time’’ (Derrida 1992, 40).
employ information asymmetry to beat or at least equal the market’s rate of return.
Information is the primary form of capital. Gecko in Wall Street (1987): ‘‘The most
valuable commodity I know is information.’’
(3) Similarities between large financial organizations and gangs: goal of proprietary
return for individuals based on advantages derived from restricted collectivity. Goal
of maximization of profit without regard to externalities. Gangsters and financial
professionals are highly regulated by their organizations. They are expected to work
long hours and never to disclose information about the organization. Trust is
paramount. The year-end bonus is a primary form of compensation within the
financial world because it ensures loyalty. Likewise, gangsters receive most of their
income from sporadic but lucrative returns received by the gang and divided among
its members, with leaders and elders paid best.
(4) The financial markets (stocks, bonds, currencies, derivatives, futures, etc.) are
the ultimate bearer of nonproductive expenditure. Most commentators agree that far
more trading takes place than is necessary to allocate capital efficiently. ‘‘The
American economy is in fact the greatest explosive mass the world has ever known’’
(Bataille 1989, 171). The stock market has acted for centuries as the nervous system
of the economy, the world remade in its image.
(5) The ideal time of the market is continuous. The market is imminent and
immanent. It has no off switch. The market is the most radical and extensive form of
global connectivity. The market aims at the elimination of duration.
In sharp contrast to investors in the production cycle, who attempt to

mitigate risk by elongating the investment period, the speculators who drive
the global flows of capital seek to minimize risk by compressing time and
distance. (LiPuma and Lee 2004, 124)
Unlike in production, the temporal horizon or dimension of financial

circulation centers on the short term, indeed the shortest term possible.
The short-term horizon is realized and exemplified in speculative capital’s
quest for arbitrage, a situation in which counterbalancing positions
neutralize the risks created by duration. (127)
Time is a summation of the length of exposure to abstract risk and thus to

the possibility of greater volatility. Accordingly, for speculative capital the
mitigation of circulatory risk depends on the compression or neutralization
of time. (129)
(6) Circulation’s life of its own. Circulation is a fetish. Circulation is a bioenergetic
process: the market is a leviathan disguised as a state of nature. Not long after
Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood, Hobbes calls money ‘‘the bloud of a
commonwealth’’ (Hobbes 1909, 193).
The body of the market does everything in its power to speed the process of
production*/to counteract the Second Law of Thermodynamics, to become immortal
(Beniger 1986). The market continually expands its control over production by
constantly out-accelerating the production process. The market becomes increasingly

self-expansive over time.
The risk-bearing derivative, which on the surface is simply an attempt to

offset the uncertainties created by globalizing processes such as out-
sourcing, gives circulation a life of its own, making it appear as though it
were independent of the agents and institutions that it interconnects. It
follows from this that circulation is evolving into a framing or metasystem
that defines the contexts and the goals and means of financial practice.
(LiPuma and Lee 2004, 145)
(7) The gift that keeps on giving. Every theory of long-term investment (including
virtually all American retirement plans) is premised on the idea that, over the long
run, stocks and bonds will outperform the overall interest rate. Dividends ensure that
investors will receive tax advantages for keeping their capital in stable securities.
Everyone is tied into the system. Everyone has a stake, but the stakes are vastly
unequal and persist over long spans of time. This is simultaneously deeply collective
and deeply exclusionary. The magic of compounding ensures the perfect gift*/the one
that gives and gives, on the condition that the recipient keeps deferring its use or
transformation. Or, on the condition that one has a surplus to sacrifice.
(8) The win/win situation. As every first-year student knows, economics is not a zero-
sum game. The market is an infinite-sum game. According to Stephen Covey:
Whether you are president of a company or the janitor, the moment you step
from independence into interdependence in any capacity, you step into a
leadership role. You are in a position of influencing other people. And the
habit of effective interpersonal communication is Think Win/Win . . . Win/
Win is not a technique; it’s a total philosophy of human interaction . . . Win/
Win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all
human interactions. Win/Win means that agreements or solutions are
mutually beneficial, mutually satisfying. With a Win/Win solution, all parties
feel good about the decision and feel committed to the action plan. Win/Win
sees life as cooperative, not a competitive arena. Most people tend to think
in terms of dichotomies: strong or weak, hardball or softball, win or lose. But
that kind of thinking is fundamentally flawed. It’s based on power and
position rather than on principle. Win/Win is based on the paradigm that
there is plenty for everybody, that one person’s success is not achieved at
the expense or exclusion of others. (1989, 206"/7)
The fetish of the electronic trading world is that the janitor, too, has a profit-sharing
plan and a 401K. All benefit, all parties feel good; there is plenty for everybody.
The Gambler (Time’s Fool) versus the Speculator (Time’s Timer)

Anyone can spend a life free from boredom by gambling just a little every
day.
*/Blaise Pascal
Edwin Lefèvre’s Reminiscences of a Stock Operator could be described as a self-help

manual as well as a pseudonymous autobiography*/but the main subject of the book is
how to time the stock market. We are told very little about the personal life of the stock
operator. He lives well and spends grandly, but he is also a workaholic. Trading is an
ascetic practice, which requires patience and persistence of method. Attitude is key.
The first change I made in my play was in the matter of time. I couldn’t wait
for the sure thing to come along and then take a point or two out of it . . .
I had to start much earlier if I wanted to catch the move in Fullerton’s office.
In other words, I had to study what was going to happen; to anticipate stock
movements. This sounds asininely commonplace, but you know what I mean.
It was the change in my own attitude toward the game that was of supreme
importance to me. It taught me, little by little, the essential difference
between betting on fluctuations and anticipating inevitable advances and
declines, between gambling and speculating. (1923, 63)
The gambler has no sense of time; the speculator makes time*/in the sense that the
speculator not only understands time but creates his own sense of time. The gambler
depends on luck; the speculator is a conjuror of circumstances. The gambler is
confined to the windowless casino, where it is never day or night. The speculator
operates from an office, or from a trading floor, or even possibly from home. The
gambler is always viewed by unseen camera; the speculator always views but is never
seen. The sucker is so predictable he is not worth viewing unless you’re the one
cheating him. The sucker always loses money; the gambler always breaks even; the
speculator always comes out ahead. The sucker lacks self-control, and does not bet
with the tide of the system: ‘‘suckers always lose money when they gamble in
stocks*/they never really speculate’’ (53). The gambler plays the game for the
pleasure of playing, and typically loses because he plays against the house. The
speculator plays with the house, following the general trends and flows of capital. In
rare cases, such as Lefèvre’s, the speculator even moves the market.
The speculator is a kind of psychologist as well as a truth-teller, who appraises the
appropriate level of confidence to be placed in a given financial instrument. The
speculator is the scourge of the overconfident sucker. The sucker aspires to make a
name for himself, but his name is so common that it’s not worth knowing. The
gambler aspires to erase his name, but his debts are too great to be forgettable. The
speculator aspires to nothing other than total control over time and money, and if his
earnings are great enough he will be remembered, but only by those who would like to
emulate him. The gambler is a decadent aristocrat; the speculator is a less decadent
bourgeois or nouveau riche. According to Benjamin:
The structure of all success is basically the structure of gambling. To reject

one’s own name has always been the most thorough way to rid oneself of
one’s inhibitions and feelings of inferiority. And gambling is precisely a sort
of steeplechase over the hurdles of one’s own ego. The gambler is nameless;
he has no name of his own and requires no one else’s. (1999b, 147)
The gambler cum irrationalist erases the ego; the speculator cum rationalist reifies
the ego. Both recognize no absolute values, although the gambler is ideally an
aesthete and the speculator a positivist. The gambler is on the losing end of
information asymmetry, the speculator on the winning end. The gambler courts the
danger of namelessness, the speculator the security of the name whose significance
can be predicted at least 51 percent of the time. If the capital being wagered is large
enough, and the trading costs are low enough, the 1 percent surplus will always
justify the initial investment and provide ‘‘real returns.’’ Whereas the gambler lives
in the moment, the speculator lives in an infinite movement which (in the majority of
cases) must move forward.
Gambling generates by way of experiment the lightning-quick processes of

stimulation at the moment of danger, the marginal case in which presence of
mind becomes divination*/that is to say, one of the highest, rarest moments
in life. (298)
The winning gambler can experience instants of now-time (Jetztzeit). Everything

depends on timing: ‘‘The particular danger that threatens the gambler lies in the
fateful category of arriving ‘too late,’ of having ‘missed the opportunity’’’ (298). The
speculator, by contrast, cannot afford the rarest moments. The speculator looks for
the most predictable durations, during which the price of a stock will change in favor
of the speculator. Both the gambler and the speculator deal with etherealized forms
of capital: ‘‘Money and property, normally the most massive and cumbersome things,
here come directly from the hands of fate, as if they were the caressing response to a
perfect embrace’’ (298). The market becomes a kind of surrogate wife for the
speculator; it returns the speculator’s fascination with its feminine unpredictability.
The stock operator nonchalantly becomes married to his trade.
He loved this game, the game of speculation. He loved it for its endless
challenge. It was a game that he could never completely win. But he did
not have to win all the time to make a lot of money. If he could win on
average he could have a great life and a lot of fun. He was ready. (Lefèvre
1923, 62)
The speculator enters the game out of a hedonistic impulse to play the field, but soon
finds he cannot opt out of the game. It doesn’t really matter where the money comes
from or even how it is spent. Speculation in itself is a pleasurable activity. ‘‘The more
I made the more I spent,’’ Lefèvre notes, although he tells almost nothing else about
his personal life and nothing at all about his sexual life (62).
Lefèvre summarizes what he has learned from the market.
A successful speculator remains a constant student of three things:

*/Market time. You must learn when to enter and when to exit a market
trade*/when to hold and when to fold, as Ed Bradley used to say.
*/Money management. Don’t lose money, don’t lose your stake. A
speculator without cash is like a storeowner with no inventory. Cash is a
speculator’s inventory, lifeline, and best friend. Without it, you’re out of
business. Don’t lose your line!
*/Emotional control. Before you can successfully play the market, you
must have a clear, concise strategy and stick to it. All speculators must
design intelligent battle plans, customized to suit their emotional makeup,
before speculating in the stock market. The biggest thing speculators have
to control is their emotions. Remember, reason, logic, and pure economics
do not drive the stock market. It is driven by human nature, which never
changes. How can it change? It’s our nature. (302)
Lefèvre’s advice is essentially Stoic. In order to control time, one must first control
oneself. The speculator must be aware of kairos (the opportune moment) at all times.
The casino is a place of pleasure, the trading floor a place of business. The dream of
the stock operator is to have the mistress (the casino) and the wife (the market) at
one and the same time, always and forever in the now.
Body Speculatic (Theses on the Market’s Lively Corpse)

The human gaze has the power of conferring value on things; but it makes
them cost more too.
*/Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
(1) The market is the ultimate desiring machine, an insatiably expanding, amortal body
with its own moods and fears. The economic narrative of the world is immanently
redrawn every instant in trillions of fluctuations. The market is undead labor.
The capitalist devours the labour-power of the worker, or appropriates his

living labor as the life-blood of capitalism. (Marx 1990, 1007)
By incorporating [einverleiben] living labor into the material constituents of

capital [dead labor], the latter becomes an animated monster and it starts
to act as if it is ‘‘consumed by love.’’ (1007)
(2) The first rule of small-time capital is ‘‘don’t bet against the house’’*/to wit, don’t
shit where you sleep. The odds are against one profiting from the weakness of the
body one serves.
(3) The health of the body is measured by indices. It is expected to fluctuate within
certain parameters. The market is a circulatory system. Currencies are its pulse. The
market is ‘‘a process of social metabolism’’ (198).
In the human body, as with Capital, the different elements are not
exchanged at the same rate of reproduction, blood renews itself more
rapidly than muscle, muscle than bone, which in this respect may be
regarded as the fixed capital of the human body. (Marx 1993, 670)
(4) The metabolic pulsions of the market, a lugubrious assemblage of dead and
phantom labor, resemble those of a living corpse.
A corpse on a bed of rocks, feet splayed like a prostitute, dripping and

bubbling poisons. Everything rising and falling like a wave or bubbling out
from the gaps. The body seems to multiply in mutilating gasps. And the
world exhales a haunting air, like the sound of water. (Baudelaire 1985, 212;
translation modified by authors)
(5) In the metabolic intercourse between living and dead labor that circumscribes a
given production cycle, living labor is ‘‘devoured,’’ drained off as the lifeblood
incorporated into undead labor. The market as circulatory system lives off this
vampiric process, which Marx describes in phantasmagoric terms as metempsychosis,
a transmigration of souls.
While productive labor is changing the means of production [dead labor] into
the constituent elements of a new product, their value undergoes a
metempsychosis [Seelenwanderung]. It deserts the consumed body to
occupy the newly created one. (Marx 1990, 221)
(6) The Wall Street trading floor is a symbolic brain, representing the mind of the
nation, simultaneously in communication with hundreds of smaller symbolic (some
sleeping, some awake) brains around the globe.
(7) The bioenergetics of the market do not tolerate nongrowth except during
periods of crisis, which in the short term imperil everyone but in the long
run benefit the rich and the diversified. Bailouts must occasionally be made in
order to maintain the equilibrium of the market: that is, Long Term Capital
Management.
(8) The movements of capital are ‘‘decoded flows.’’ The bourgeoisie should be
redefined as those who partake of infinite lending, the working class as those who
partake of infinite borrowing. Deleuze and Guattari: ‘‘The infinite creditor and
infinite credit have replaced the blocks of mobile and finite debts’’ (1983, 197).
(9) The trading floor is carnivalesque, one of the few places where white-collar
workers shout continuously. Paper flies below a blue heaven of downward-pointed
screens. Only on rare occasions does an individual shout in bargaining in ordinary life.
Haggling is generally taboo in American society, except when buying a house or car.
With their antiquated pens and paper, the traders symbolically channel all the
information given to them by buyers and sellers. The floor traders are yet one more
switching system that relays the ‘‘psychology of the market.’’
(10) The trading floor is broadcast into most American homes continuously through
Internet and television, either directly via business and news channels or indirectly
through advertisement and updates on the stock market. The market ‘‘cannot exist
without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production’’ (Tucker 1978,
476). To remain immortal, the market requires steady perpetual growth.
The immediate reaction on meeting the term [perpetual motion] for the first
time may be to interpret it literally as meaning moving ‘‘forever.’’ But
persons of varying training and intellect may assign different meanings. The
student of physics will say that a perpetual motion machine is one which
does useful work without drawing on an external source. In other words, it is
a machine where the output is greater than the input. The ultimate
definition is that here is a machine which will create energy. (Ord-Hume
1998, 21)
For the bourgeois investor, the stock market gives more than it takes, but it still
requires a sacrifice. The capital is held until retirement, or the money could be used
for housing or education or some other immediate need.
Now an object is not a value so long as it remains a mere emotional stimulus

enmeshed in the subjective process*/a natural part of our sensibility, as it
were. It must first be separated from this subjective sensibility for it to
attain the peculiar significance which we call value. For not only is it certain
that desire in and of itself could not establish any value if it did not
encounter obstacles*/trade in economic values would never have arisen if
every desire was satisfied without struggle or exertion*/but even desire
itself would never have ascended to such a considerable height if it could be
satisfied without further ado. It is only for the postponement of satisfaction
through impediment, the anxiety that the object may escape, the tension of
struggle for it, that brings about the cumulation of desires to a point of
intensified volition and continuous striving. (Simmel 1972, 64)
The market is the ultimate agent of libidinal economics, involving everyone in the
collectivity of unlimited desire. ‘‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above
all, is its own grave-diggers’’ (in Tucker 1978, 483).
Marx Played the Stock Market
But then again, socialists are notorious for doing very well at investing,
maybe because we’ve learned to distrust the system. An older comrade
whom we consulted put $25,000 into a middle-of-the-road ‘‘no-load’’ (no
broker commissions) mutual fund in 1982, and left it alone to accumulate,
and by 2000 it exceeded $600,000 and is still growing, and permits him to be
a major contributor to the cause.3
Marx as Speculator (1864)

I have, which will surprise you not a little, been speculating*/partly in
American funds, but more especially in English stocks, which are springing up
like mushrooms this year (in furtherance of every imaginable and unimagin-
able joint stock enterprise), are forced up to a quite unreasonable level and
then, for the most part, collapse. In this way, I have made over £400 and,
now that that the complexity of the political situation affords greater scope,
I shall begin over again. It’s a type of operation that makes small demands on
one’s time, and it’s worthwhile, running some risk in order to relieve the
enemy of his money. (Karl Marx to Leon Philips, 25 June 1864, in Wheen
1999, 268)
3. http://www.shaunrichman.org/?m=200512 (accessed 19 September 2009).

Dennis Hopper for Ameriprise

(Playing in the background is the 1967 hit song ‘‘Gimme Some Lovin’’’ by the
Spencer Davis group.)
Hopper: Some people say that dreams are like delicate little flowers.
Wrong!!! Dreams are powerful. Dreams are what make you say: When I’m 64
I want to start a new business. I want to make my own movie. But powerful
dreams need more than just a little weekend gardening.
Voiceover (male): Start with your dreams, and your Ameriprise financial
advisor. Through a unique approach to financial planning called
‘‘Dream !Plan !Track’’ we’ll work with you to help make your dreams
realities.
Hopper: Flower power was then.

Voiceover (male, in a softer voice): Your dreams are now.4
The Big Money

Even [Thorstein] Veblen made a killing on the stockmarket. (Dos Passos 1996,
854)
Forex
Currencies are now-time, metaorganic flows, pulsing and jostling with the leading
indicators of their respective nations. Currency measures production and consump-
tion, comparative rates of growth, the competing values and valuations of classes,
nations, professions. Currencies are the hypothetical histories of governments,
immanently revised at every instant, eternally interderivable. The currency is always
top-heavy; it flows to the head. It is the founding fiction, continually on the body of
every solvent person.
Currencies are non-neutral, partial, caressing, humiliating, annihilating, sustain-
ing, perpetually micromisvaluing. They must float. Probabilities of interest rate
hikes and cuts are ‘‘priced in’’ before the actual change. Fluctuation is proof
of life.
The Forex market is the largest in the world, with more than 3 trillion dollars of
currency traded on average each day (Bank of International Settlements 2007).
Figuring the world’s population at seven billion, this would mean that $428.17 of
currency is traded daily for each human being on the planet. This must be one
of the greatest energy migrations on earth, a sublime event of stored human
power distributed to millions of nodes within a global trading network of
4. This is the complete text of a thirty-second Ameriprise advertisement, which has been
transcribed from YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UEp3tLLZ6A&feature=related,
Accessed 22 January 2008).
extraordinary complexity. Forex.com, the online trading branch of GAIN Capital

Group (a privately held company), makes the network available to anyone with
$1,000 to invest. Twenty-four hours a day, the enterprising speculator can buy
virtually any currency at a margin of 100:1. Traders are charged based on the bid/ask
spread between the currencies traded. This usually amounts to 0.03 to 0.05 percent
of the total value of each transaction. Compared to virtually any other speculative
transaction, with the possible exception of the buying and selling of equities in large
amounts, the costs of currency trading are extraordinarily low. Transactions are, in
principle, subject to capital gains taxes, but otherwise currency trading is arguably
the most efficient form of gambling available to individuals*/and it is available
everywhere at all times. At least in theory, the stock market is open only from 9:30 to
4:00 on weekdays, and many (if not most) foreign stocks cannot be purchased by
individuals. The currency markets, by contrast, are available everywhere to everyone
at all times, so long as they have the capital*/and the knowledge, which individuals
are always only able to access through institutions.
Insomnia
Every night you sleep, but your dreams are wide awake*/because ambitions
never sleep, aspirations never sleep, goals never sleep, hopes never sleep,
opportunities never sleep, the world never sleeps. That’s why we work
around the world. That’s why we work around the clock to turn dreams into
realities. That’s why Citi never sleeps.5
Have More Money Now

Time in the market is much more important than timing the market.
*/John Bradshaw Layfield
John Bradshaw Layfield’s character on World Wrestling Entertainment is a vain

Texas oilman, a multimillionaire who arrives at ringside in a white stretch
limousine with steer horns on the hood. JBL also works as a financial commentator
on the Fox Business Channel and is a regular panelist on the show The Cost of
Freedom.
By the standards of contemporary investment guides, JBL’s advice is comparatively
safe and commonsensical. Have More Money Now is as much an autobiography as it is
a financial self-help manual. JBL aims at a broader and folksier audience than the
typical investment guide. He repeatedly warns investors of the dangers of credit card
debt, and he seems to presume his readers will be prone to personal debt (i.e.,
working class).
Structured as a salvation narrative, Have More Money Now takes us from the depths
of JBL’s financial purgatory (with $27 in his pocket) to the heights of financial
5. This is the complete text of a thirty-second advertisement for Citibank, seen on television 26
June 2008 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TebmZXjwRo).
paradise. On the back jacket of the book, JBL is pictured in a pinstriped business suit
with a cowboy hat. He is holding hundred-dollar bills in his hands and is surrounded by
stacks of quarters, as if he had saved his way to his vast fortune. The blurb that
accompanies his image is an eloquent performative summation.
So you’re holding this book in your hand, wondering: Just what does this
WWE Superstar know about the world of finance? Have you ever been down
to your last twenty-seven dollars, out of a job, and wondering what you were
going to do? If anyone needed to learn about finance, it was that
person*/and he was me. I’ve had to learn through my own mistakes, and
now you can learn from me. I break it all down for you in easy-to-understand
language.
Phantasmarxism (Specters of Speculation)

Speculation is always fascinated, bewitched by the specter. (Derrida 1994,
46)
Money in its final, completed character now appears in all directions as a

contradiction, a contradiction which dissolves itself, drives towards
its dissolution. As the general form of wealth, the whole world of real
riches stands opposite it. It is their pure abstraction*/hence, fixated as
such, a mere conceit. Where wealth as such seems to appear in an entirely
material, tangible form, its existence is only in my head, it is a pure mental
phantasm [Hirngespinst]. Midas. (Marx 1993, 160; translation modified
by authors)
What is the time and what is the history of the specter? Is there a present of
the specter? Are its comings and goings ordered according to the linear
succession of a before and an after, between a present-past, a present-
present, and a present-future, between a ‘‘real-time’’ and a ‘‘deferred time?
(Derrida 1994, 39)
Derrida’s Specters of Marx meditates on the ‘‘hauntology’’ of Marx for post-Berlin

Wall Europe, for deconstruction, and for philosophy in general. It also subtly
and importantly injects Marx with Foucault: there is not only the specter
of communism haunting capitalism; there is also the specter as the personification
of capital and of the market. Derrida’s description of the market as specter
is in fact uncannily similar to a description of a day trader in front of her
computer.
The specter is also, among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks
one sees and what one projects*/on an imaginary screen where there is
nothing to see. Not even the screen sometimes, and a screen always has, at
bottom, in the bottom of the background that is, a structure of disappearing
apparition. But now one can no longer get any shut-eye, being so intent to
watch out for the return. Whence the theatricalization of speech itself and
the spectacularizing speculation on time. The perspective has to be
reversed, once again: ghost or revenant, sensuous-non-sensuous, visible-
invisible, the specter first of all sees us. From the other side of the eye, visor
effect, it looks at us and even before we see it or even before we see period.
We feel ourselves observed, sometimes under surveillance by it even before
any apparition. (99"/100)
The phantasmagoria goes beyond an allegorical battle between the specter of

communism and capitalism. Rather the phantasmagoria is the (imaginary and real)
economic structure of the entire society. The ideological project is
To make fear, to make oneself fear. To cause fear in the enemies of the
Manifesto, but perhaps also in Marx and the Marxists themselves. For one
could be tempted to explain the entire totalitarian inheritance of Marxist
thought, but also the other totalitarianisms that were not just by chance or
mechanical juxtaposition its contemporaries, as a reaction of panic-ridden
fear before the ghost in general. (104"/5)
The ‘‘ghost in general’’ comes to encompass not only the specter of communism, but
also the movements of capital. What if the free market is itself totalitarian? The
market in crisis inspires as much, if not more, fear in the bourgeoisie than
revolutionaries at the barricades. Capital moves far more easily than do revolution-
aries. In Derrida’s reading, there is a reciprocal relation between individuals
overseeing capital and capital overseeing individuals. The global market is in effect
a global panopticon; no one is outside its purview. ‘‘The specter first of all sees us.’’
The market constitutes a mechanism of bourgeois ownership; it is the bourgeois
laboratory of capital allocation. The proletariat is haunted by the bourgeoisie; the
bourgeoisie is haunted by itself; nobody is haunted by communism; and yet
everywhere we see occurring measure #6 from The Communist Manifesto’s revolu-
tionary program: ‘‘Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a
national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly’’ (in Tucker 1978, 490).
The ghost is a visitor from a time with fewer interrelationships between nations,
corporations, and individuals. The ghost is the flâneur, the one who lacks the power to
consume, hungry in the midst of plenty. The bourgeois is a sorcerer haunted by a
ghost long held at bay.
Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of

property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and
of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of
the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. (478)
The magnitude of production precludes a comprehensive view of the phantasm-

agora. The bourgeois at least needs to be dragged out in public once in a while. The
ghost is cosmopolitan; the bourgeois is continually renovating his factory or else
outsourcing.
Ghosts also speak different languages, national languages, like the money
from which they are, as we shall see, inseparable. As circulating
currency, money bears local and political character, it uses different
national languages and wears different national uniforms. (Derrida 1994,

104)
Money is instantaneous, politics slow; thus the crisis begins in the credit market, and
the banks suffer first; the banks are also in excellent positions to take advantage of
any rebound in prices, and banks often prosper most in the wake of a crisis.
The bigger the players, the greater their ability to absorb losses*/with the exception
of the over-leveraged. When the over-leveraged are flushed from the system,
the market may (in theory) begin its cycle again, and discussion of the topic will
subside:
as often happens in translation, the ghost drops off into oblivion or, in the
best of cases, it is dissolved into approximate figures, for example
‘‘phantasmagoria,’’ a word that moreover is generally relieved of its literal
sense which links it to speech and public speech. (108)
The Million Dollar Man

[Chorus:]
Money, money, money, money
[DiBiase:]
Everybody’s got a price, everybody’s gonna pay,
’Cause the million dollar man
Always gets his way.
[Chorus:]
Money, money, money, money
[DiBiase:]
Some might cost a little,
Some might cost a lot,
But I’m the million dollar man,
And you will be bought.
[Chorus:]
Money, money, money, money,
Money, money, money, money.6
6. This is the complete transcription of the theme song of Ted DiBiase, ‘‘The Million Dollar Man,’’
World Wrestling Federation, circa 1987 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm4TG56KGZ4).
Verba Volant, scripta manent.7 [Para-Epistolary Parascript]
In fact, to a certain degree, at a certain level, fantasms cannot bear the

revelation of speech.
*/Jacques Lacan, ‘‘The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,’’ 23 December 1959
.
from Robert Hardwick Weston Brw91@columbia.edu

to Paul Stephens Bps249@columbia.edu!
date Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 5:30 PM
subject Fwd: Your Submission to Rethinking Marxism
G
I can get started on final revisions tomorrow, since I don’t teach. Should we
meet to discuss sometime this weekend?
A few preliminary thoughts on Healy’s second round of editorial comments.

The Lacan quote he suggests is fantastic: ‘‘reality is the story we tell
ourselves so that we can go on dreaming’’*/maybe we could include it as an
epigraph? Maybe we should revisit the slippage between phantasmagoria and
phantasy, between hauntological and libidinal readings of commodity
fetishism. Uncannily enough, these debates have consistently distanced us
from Lacan and brought us closer to Benjamin. My instinct would be to leave
the psychoanalysis submerged in the interstices between fragments. That is
the work of montage.
I am facing a sea of grading this weekend, but let’s make time for a
coopoieditorial Denkbild session at some point.
R
.
from Paul Stephens Bps249@columbia.edu!

to Robert Hardwick Weston Brw91@columbia.edu
date Monday, April 27, 2009 at 8:26 AM
subject Agora Afterword
I agree with you, the Lacan quote is ‘‘fantastic.’’ But I’m not so sure about
including it, since the cycle is already hyperepigraphical.
One thing that occurred to me while reading Healy’s comments*/especially

his suggestion to consult Karatani’s Transcritique*/is that the bulk of our
reflections antedate the current ‘‘financial crisis.’’ It seems to me that while
7. ‘‘Spoken words fly away, written words stay put’’ (Lacan 1991, 198).
the ‘‘financial-industrial complex’’ has suffered an extraordinary blow to its

cultural prestige in the past six months, fundamentally that same complex
has received everything it could have asked for from the federal govern-
ment’s ‘‘bailout.’’ As Timothy Geithner put it in the Times last week, ‘‘All
financial crises are a fight over how much losses the government ultimately
takes on.’’8
I can’t help but think of Rabelais’ Panurge when he claims ‘‘Nature . . .

created man for no other purpose but to lend and borrow.’’9 Pantagruel can
only respond scholastically: ‘‘with all your fine talk you will never make a
debtor. Owe no man anything, says the Holy Apostle, save love and mutual
delight.’’ In the current state of affairs, there is no choice over whether or
not to be a debtor. The New New Deal is aimed at ‘‘troubled assets,’’ not at
troubled communities. The Left is once again co-opted by another old
specter, this one named ‘‘fiscal responsibility.’’
Let’s definitely meet up this weekend; I could do Sunday. I say we fire up the
grill.
PS
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Paul Stephens and Robert Hardwick Weston

‘‘Agorachronotistics (Speculations on Market Time)’’ explores the specters of time

ogy critique of the movements of speculative capital. ‘‘Agorachronotistics’’ breaks

Key Words: Speculation, Agoraphobia, Walter Benjamin, Market Timing, Time

Wealth . . . is disposable time, and nothing more.

ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/010068-22

From Greek 8antasma, phantasma (ghost)!agoroyoin, agoreuein (to speak publicly

Traditional gambling is a market in miniature, a small-scale trading exchange*/but

coined in Paris to describe a new form of popular magic-lantern show that

It is possible to allegorize the entire Arcades Project as a phantasmagoria. In such a

The Sacred and the Profane

Agorafetishistics (Idols of the Marketplace)

If the nineteenth-century department store began to displace, in the minds of

Philosophers, or, Men of Speculation

All the improvements in machinery, however, have by no means been the

which affords occupation to a particular tribe or class of philosophers; and

The professors spoke of opportunities as inefficiencies; in a perfectly

Speculation is the negative expression of the irrationality of capitalistic

Theses toward a General Economy of Information/Time/Capital

In sharp contrast to investors in the production cycle, who attempt to

Unlike in production, the temporal horizon or dimension of financial

Time is a summation of the length of exposure to abstract risk and thus to

constantly out-accelerating the production process. The market becomes increasingly

The risk-bearing derivative, which on the surface is simply an attempt to

The Gambler (Time’s Fool) versus the Speculator (Time’s Timer)

Edwin Lefèvre’s Reminiscences of a Stock Operator could be described as a self-help

The structure of all success is basically the structure of gambling. To reject

Gambling generates by way of experiment the lightning-quick processes of

The winning gambler can experience instants of now-time (Jetztzeit). Everything

A successful speculator remains a constant student of three things:

Body Speculatic (Theses on the Market’s Lively Corpse)

The capitalist devours the labour-power of the worker, or appropriates his

By incorporating [einverleiben] living labor into the material constituents of

A corpse on a bed of rocks, feet splayed like a prostitute, dripping and

Now an object is not a value so long as it remains a mere emotional stimulus

intensified volition and continuous striving. (Simmel 1972, 64)

Marx Played the Stock Market

Marx as Speculator (1864)

3. http://www.shaunrichman.org/?m=200512 (accessed 19 September 2009).

Dennis Hopper for Ameriprise

Hopper: Flower power was then.

Voiceover (male, in a softer voice): Your dreams are now.4

The Big Money

extraordinary complexity. Forex.com, the online trading branch of GAIN Capital

are always only able to access through institutions.

Have More Money Now

John Bradshaw Layfield’s character on World Wrestling Entertainment is a vain

Phantasmarxism (Specters of Speculation)

Money in its final, completed character now appears in all directions as a

Derrida’s Specters of Marx meditates on the ‘‘hauntology’’ of Marx for post-Berlin

The phantasmagoria goes beyond an allegorical battle between the specter of

fear before the ghost in general. (104"/5)

Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of

The magnitude of production precludes a comprehensive view of the phantasm-

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