Monetized time-space: derivatives – money's 'new imaginary'?

Abstract

This paper examines some of the ways in which the everyday is becoming connected into the world of finance, a process facilitated through so-called derivatives.The increasing use of derivatives is traced to the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement and the ways in which innovative developments in financial engineering were used to overcome the uncertainties of interest rate, currency and price risks that grew apace from the early 1970s. We argue that these risks are not ‘more of the same’.They are qualitatively different and run deeper through the highly integrated financial markets of today. And, as later parts of the paper argue taking their cue from the works of Paul Virilio and Georg Simmel, notably the latter’s Philosophy of Money , the manner in which these risks interact and the speed of their interaction suggest the emergence of new forms of money, a new monetization of time-space. The paper then moves on to consider how the calculative practices that lie at the heart of derivatives involve a process of socialization of the understanding of the risks that new money forms are made to negotiate successfully. The ‘idea of money’ – of what it is now supposed to be capable of doing with and across time-space – thus stems from a ‘new money imaginary’. The paper concludes by reemphasizing the reasons why, when understood through areading of Virilio and Simmel, derivatives should be viewed as representing new forms of money.