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.In his important book on finance Alex Preda has documented the shifting practices of exclusion which ‘frame’ finance and set boundaries around which groups can claim the right to legitimately know the market.He documents how finance has always involved contestation between various ‘status groups’ that seek to control access to information about and control over the market.42 Likewise, Christian Marazzi has identified the way that finance has developed what he calls ‘a rather esoteric neolanguage’.As he writes, ‘It is thus under the shelter of this linguistic opacity that finance prospers, which raises the question of democracy, that is, the possibility of publicly debating strategies, procedures, and decisions concerning the lives of all citizens’.43What must be stressed here is that the cultural and ideational antecedents to this linguistic opacity are central to the operation of the idea of the market.The philosophical presupposition of the prosopopoeia of the market involves more than attributing speech.More often than not it involves a specific form of speech in which a third person singular agent speaks in an enigmatic speech behind which lies a profound will or intentionality that is never apparent to all.Such ideas about personhood and speech lie deep in the cultural and religious history of the West.The idea that speech involves an assumption of a depth and intention is perhaps as old as the identification of speech with intention and reason.It is no doubt because of this depth that such ideas are able to move around so smoothly.The market, like God, is taken to speak, but it does not speak clearly.The prosopopoeia of the market offers not direct veridiction but a subtle, implied and mysterious truth that requires deciphering.If it were to speak clearly then anyone could understand it.Speaking in signs that have to be deciphered requires representatives who will speak for it.This is not just a God, but a quite particular one.If this is a god then even if its will is perfect it is a God with quite human frailties at the level of execution.Such a notion is a perfect lure with which to secure the idea that despite all of the outer signs of weakness there remains a perfect interior.All failings are then only apparent, resting only in the flawed execution of a perfect and benevolent plan.This is the universe of what Žižek identifies as the Kafkaesque defence of God, in which God is taken to be at once perfect yet subject to human failings.Thus it can be argued that ‘There is a God; He is good, and answers our requests – the origin of evil, and of our misfortune, is just that He does not hear very well and often misunderstands our prayers’.44The market that speaks presents much the same situation with a minor but important twist.This God is not hard of hearing but is rather not very articulate.The market can hear us perfectly, it compiles our hopes and dreams and on this basis is in a position to guide our actions.But when it comes to advising us on what to do, this is a divinity that thunders in marvellous ways that somehow escape our limited understanding.This might be due to our incapacity to listen, but given the work on the side of decipherment it might well be said that this is a God who mumbles.So if the market has over the past two or three centuries become a site of truth, this is a truth that remains forever enigmatic.It might seem that this is a rather strange form of speech to attribute to the market.But note that in this version of the prosopopoeia of the market perfection is still retained, not at the level of speech but at the level of intentionality.The market is thereby given something deeper and more profound than speech.Giving the market a pure will makes it possible to excuse it if, in its stumbling, clumsiness and mumbling, it might seem to our meagre and limited consciousness that it might get things wrong every now and then [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]