Abstract
If price is written, and if this writing concerns not the communication of meaning but the transmission of intensity, a very particular registry or surface is required as the locus of its recording. There is no doubt that, without such a concept it is impossible to formulate an adequate theory of the market. In its absence we are left with the Scylla of an anthropomorphized specular market-subject (‘what the market wants’) and the Charybdis of a deflationary sociology.1
The concept and the social sciences — Intensive quantity — Intensive price, explicated prices — Remark on two surfaces — Ruyer and the concept of absolute surface — The intensive surface of the market — The being of the market.
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Notes
Karen Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger, ‘Global Microstructures: The Virtual Socieites of Financial Markets,’ The American Journal of Sociology 107:4 (2002): 908
Several texts have addressed this concept in Deleuze and in the history of thought that proceeds his treatment, including Simon Duffy, The Logic of Expression: Quality, Quantity and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel and Deleuze (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), esp. Chapters 4 and 5. The work of Mary-Beth Mader, however, is perhaps the locus of the most important developments on this front. See in particular her Sleights of Reason: Norm, Bisexuality, Development (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 13–41.
See Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone, 1990), 191–3. There has been some critical attention directed at the Spinoza–Scotus connection deployed by Deleuze in his account of Spinoza’s modal essence. See Duffy, The Logic of Expression, 5, and ch. 4., for a discussion of Charles Ramond’s particularly direct criticisms on this point.
Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambrige: Polity, 2008), 228n6.
Carl Boyer’s comparison of Oresme’s diagram with Cartesian geometry is symptomatic in precisely this way. See Boyer, The History of the Calculus and its Conceptual Development (New York: Dover, 1959), 82; on this point, c.f. Mary-Beth Mader, ‘The Difference of Intensity: Deleuze and Nicolas Oresme,’ (unpublished paper presented at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy Annual Meeting 2008), 7–8. Châtelet also notes a later development, which he dubs ‘Romantic’, that ‘no longer allows the separation horizontal/vertical or right/left to be self-evident’ (Figuring Space, 99n4). Clearly, this development is not conceived, from the point of view of the contemporary (analytic) philosophy of mathematics, to have been a point on the line that leads to the present. For a very important corrective to the contemporary analytic-foundational view (one that the Romantic moment certainly attacks),
see Fernando Zalamea, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, trans. Zachary Luke Fraser (London: Urbanomic, 2012).
For an excellent example of the divergence in different social contexts of the meaning and nature of calculation, see Helen Verran, Science and an African Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Here, we must avoid a knee-jerk relativism with respect to mathematics. Even if the human capacity for mathematics can be accounted for genetically — see, for example, Jean Piaget, The principles of genetic epistemology, trans. Wolfe Mays (London: Routledge, 1972),
or the more phenomenologically indebted text by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nafiez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (New York: Basic Books, 2000) — we have no grounds to assert that it remains bound by its social context, neurobiology or anything else. This particular case of the genetic fallacy is a partner to another that will be discussed later in this book, regarding the socio-histor-ical genesis of the market in relation to its subsequent role as a foundation for the unfolding of the history of the social.
Ruyer, La conscience et le corps (Paris: PUF, 1959), 57. The chequerboard table, a staple of the few existing English commentaries on Ruyer, is invoked at NF 95.
Raymond Ruyer, ‘Raymond Ruyer par lui-même’, cited in Jean-Claude Dumoncel, ‘Une archéologie du structuralisme’, Critique 804 (2014): 417–18.
Mandelbrot’s characteristic approach is already to be found in Benoit Mandelbrot, ‘On the Distribution of Stock Price Differences,’ Operations Research 15 (1967): 1057–62.
For a fuller account, see Fractals and Scaling in Finance: Discontinuity, Concentration, Risk (New York: Springer, 1997), and more recently, the seemingly prophetic text with Richard L. Hudson, The Misbehaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
Colonna, ‘L’homme ruyerien’, Les études philosophiques 80(1), 2007: 63–84; 84.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 210.
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© 2015 Jon Roffe
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Roffe, J. (2015). The Intensive Pricing Surface. In: Abstract Market Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137511751_5
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