Professor Pasi Väliaho (University of Oslo) is visiting UiT Tromsø for a guest lecture on a media history of financial speculation. Through a selection of case studies from the past 350 years, Väliaho’s aim is to trace and outline the layers of mediation, both technological and aesthetic, by means of which “fictitious capital” has reproduced itself and turned itself into a particular regime of truth.
Financial speculation is a matter of colonizing time. It is premised on securing the future in the present. It seeks to control and manage contingencies and hazards just as much as it aims to exploit them to their full potential. To this effect, the development of financial economy has hinged on a range of techniques as its operational and epistemic supports, spanning bonds and promissory notes, stock tickers as well as computer networks and algorithms. But this economy has historically also relied on a range of symbolic figurations that make its operations imaginable, from "projection" as metaphor for futures trading in the late 17th century to contemporary notions of “gaming,” for instance. Through a selection of case studies from the past 350 years, my aim is to trace and outline the layers of mediation, both technological and aesthetic, by means of which “fictitious capital” (as Karl Marx called finance) has reproduced itself and turned itself into a particular regime of truth.
Pasi Väliaho is Professor of History of Art at Oslo University, and the author of Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain (2014) and Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought, and Cinema circa 1900 (2010).
This lecture is made possible by the ENCODE research network http://digitalmedia.wikidot.com/