This article argues that live cattle futures, launched in 1964 in Chicago, were revolutionary for professional economics, the derivatives industry, and the beef cattle industry because cattle were the first successful “non-storable” derivatives. Since the late nineteenth century, the ability of derivatives to provide financial services to risk-averse farmers rested on the assumption that futures were interchangeable with physical commodities in storage. Live cattle futures upset theories and norms, which enabled experiments in increasingly abstract forms of speculation and tremendous growth in the derivatives industry. Economists, exchange leaders, and commodity producers cooperated to make live cattle futures work, but they all understood and felt their impacts differently. The article applies market performativity theory to better understand how financial instruments and markets became first less and later more physically abstract over time. The article reveals that the changing materiality of derivatives also led to changes in the social purpose of speculative finance. Sources include published economics articles, conference proceedings, congressional hearings, historical newspapers, and archival records from the derivatives and cattle industries.

The work of the artist and writer Gerald Nestler explores finance and its social implications since the mid-1990s. Based on his professional experience as a trader as well as on post-disciplinary research, he has developed a unique approach that brings together theory and conversation with installation, video, performance, text, and other art forms. Probing into the narrative structures of contemporary capitalism, Nestler offers a techno-political critique directly from the core of the financial markets. This interview addresses his reading of the derivative as a world-producing apparatus that shapes the experience of the present by preconfiguring the future, and that provokes a shift from representational to performative speech in the actualization of biopower based on the exploitation of volatility and leverage. In conversation with Christian Kloeckner and Stefanie Mueller, he argues for the formation of specific human/non-human alliances that directly attack algorithmic as well as socio-economic black-boxing (schemes that monopolize inherently non-scarce resources), so as to open our imagination to skills and tactics that would allow us to navigate the rich but volatile flows of social, political, and economic abundance.

This essay identifies two approaches to theorizing the relationship between financialization and contemporary art. The first departs from an analysis of how market logics in non-financial spheres are being transformed to facilitate financial circulation; the other considers valuation practices in financial markets (and those related to derivative instruments in particular) from a socio-cultural perspective. According to the first approach, the contemporary art market is in theory a hostile environment for financialization, although new practices are emerging that are increasing its integration with the financial sphere. The second approach identifies socio-cultural similarities between the logics by which value is extracted, amplified, and distributed through derivative instruments and contemporary art. The two approaches present a discrepancy: on the one hand, contemporary art functions as an impediment to outright financialization because of market opacity; on the other, contemporary art represents a socio-cultural analog to derivative instruments. The essay concludes by setting out the terms for a more holistic understanding of contemporary art's relationship to financialization, which would enable an integration of its economic and socio-cultural dimensions.

The term ‘volatility’ applies to changeability: both that which can be measured, such as temperatures and stock prices, and that which cannot be easily measured, such as affects and emotions. Quantitative financial volatility has typically been studied quite separately from art, culture, and everyday life. Randy Martin's work, which addressed the resonances between volatility in dance and finance, was a notable exception. Martin focused on derivatives, which played a critical role in the development of financialized capitalism, especially between 1973-2008. Arguably, however, derivatives are no longer the key drivers of volatility as a social and cultural logic. New assemblages of asset managers, rentiers, and online platforms - along with a pandemic, new banking crises, and ongoing climate emergency - are reshaping how volatility is produced and navigated. How might we rethink volatility in order to better grasp its changing logics? This introduction unpacks existing debates on volatility in finance, art, and culture, suggesting several directions in which new work in this area might depart from existing frameworks - some of which are pursued in this special issue. We focus on three broad lines of exploration: rethinking the intellectual histories of volatility; rethinking volatility across disparate post-2008 contexts; and imagining volatile futures through art practice.

Money is neither a thing nor a concept. Rather, as many writers have rightly suggested, money is a relation. But what kind of relation? This articles refuses the now seemingly common-sense notion that money is an ‘institution’ or a ‘public good’. Instead, it insists on specifying money as a concrete relation between creditor and debtor. To grasp money in both its practical and conceptual complexity, we must see it as an array. The money array is comprised of four elements: (1) a token that symbolizes the money relation; (2) a creditor who holds the token; (3) a debtor on whom the token makes a claim; (4) a denomination, i.e., the named quantity of credit/debt. The money array makes clear that no form of the money stuff - as money, i.e., as part of the money relation - ever possesses any positive, intrinsic value. The raison d’être of the money stuff - of any coin, note, bill, check, or digital token - is not to contain, have, or incarnate value. Money has no value. The value element of the money relation never lies in the money stuff, but rather can only be located across the entire money array.

Recent years have seen greater interest in the theoretical foundations of abstract finance and their intersection with questions of philosophy and sociology. In particular, exchanges between authors such as Donald MacKenzie, Timothy Johnson, Elie Ayache, and others have debated the deterministic or contingent dynamics of markets, as well as their interdependency with the theories that purport to describe them. Working in this tradition, Elena Esposito raises a novel question in her 2011 book, The Future of Futures: could the exchange of derivative securities within financial markets entail not so much the provision of liquidity, but the transaction of time? In this article, I reconstruct Esposito's analysis, arguing that the proper response to this question should be affirmative. Particular emphasis is laid on what I take to be the two fundamental and controversial premises which support this argument: first, the endogeneity of time-relations involved in financial markets; and second, the revisability of these time- relations. The advantage of recasting Esposito's position in this way is the defence it enables against various criticisms articulated in theory and philosophy circles, such as those of Ray Brassier. Finally, I discuss the significance of Esposito's theory, not only for this class of financial transactions, but also for certain issues in the philosophy of time.

In this paper, we give an explicit computable algorithm for the Zelevinsky–Aubert duals of irreducible representations of $p$-adic symplectic and odd special orthogonal groups. To do this, we establish explicit formulas for certain derivatives and socles. We also give a combinatorial criterion for the irreducibility of certain parabolically induced representations.

In recent years, legal scholars have dismantled influential economic accounts of the private nature of money, demonstrating that money is better understood as a ‘governance project’ and a public resource that is created and regulated by the state. Legal theories of money could lend support to the ECB’s recent use of ‘unorthodox’ monetary policy to stabilise the euro, and could further support proposals for the innovative use of monetary policy to combat inequality. However, legal writing on money to date has primarily sought to challenge neoclassical economics – a body of thought that denies the impact that distributions of credit by the state play in shaping processes of value formation in the economy. Two further dimensions of the nature of money have received less attention from legal scholars to date: first, the question of how money comes to have an economic value (an important component of ‘moneyness’), and, second, how the international functions of credit money as currency in international trade and finance may limit the capacities of governments to manage money differently. In this article, I offer a revised account of the legal nature of money that is more attentive to the transnational nature of the legal regimes and institutions that enable the production of sovereign credit monies in the contemporary global political economy. My analysis complicates both the suggestion that the ECB can address inequality in the eurozone by means of unorthodox monetary policy and the widely made counter-argument that the only solution to the constitutional crisis in the European Union (EU) is the creation of a political sovereign imbued with stronger fiscal powers. I find that unless the current transnational legal arrangements that enable the production and governance of money are addressed, no states will be able to act as ‘centralised and legitimate political authorities’ that can control capitalist credit money in accordance with democratic imperatives.