A Creative Deviation

Thomas Bay

Stockholm University

Probably few practices have changed our conception of economy as financial

derivation. The concept of derivation originally meant altering the course of a
stream; directing water from a spring or source to another place; or, in more
general terms, changing the direction of something, making it leave or divert from
its natural, proper or intended path and setting it off in another direction. The
concept of derivation includes yet another interpretation: to depart, swerve,
deviate, digress, drive or drift without ever arriving at its designated destination.
Financial derivation concerns diversions and deviations, to divert and deviate; a
deliberate action on the one hand and an unintentional deviation outside the
actors control on the other.

If you want to understand how contemporary financial markets work, this play
between an intentional diversion and the arbitrary deviation from this diversion is
definitely worth studying closer. In more mundane terms this play is called risk, the
danger/possibility that things do not turn out as expected. While the diversionary
manoeuvre, the derivation, is intended to reduce risk exposure on the underlying
markets, the deviation is the prerequisite for there being any risk to reduce. Hence
the deviation is the creative moment of derivation, the deviation which establishes
that which we call financial markets.

Lucretius (c 95-55 B.C.) invented a concept for this creative deviation clinamen
by which he meant the minimal angle by which an atom diverges from its trajectory
and thereby risks colliding with other atoms. It is by these collisions, by the new
relationships between the atoms, that brave new worlds come into existence. The
clinamen, according to Lucretius, is the foundation of all creation: the creative
digression through which all new things become, come into being.

But what happens with our conception of economy when these creative derivatives
escape their conventional financial orbits? We see before us an ever braver, in all
parts financialised world in which an economic understanding no longer has any
bearing. In this museified world populated by mediated (bemittelte in German;
bemedlade in Swedish) financially literate, and action-adverse speculators; a world
consisting of things unintended for use, objects which exist only to be reverentially
regarded, valued and priced, that is to say, speculated, money has lost its original

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economic usefulness as a means of exchange, and has now only value as a measure
of its own financial growth. Finance has but one object: to convert all means
among which money is the foremost into ends, an end in itself. The world as such
is no longer needed, we have no further use of it, other than as an object for
speculation, a by definition unachievable future, the raison dtre of finance.

You think Ive got it all wrong? That Ive misunderstood? That I exaggerate?
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