New Materialisms: reading group.  Wednesday 26th October 7-9pm

 

Author of the Blank Swan with Ami Clarke.

 

We will have read and be discussing: Chapter 4, Writing and the Market, of The Blank Swan by former options trader and writer on the philosophy of contingency and technologies of derivative pricing Elie Ayache.

 

We will be considering, amongst other things, how the Jorge Louis Borges' story of Pierre Menard; Author of the Quixote, central to Ayache’s philosophy, differs from previous ideas of copying and appropriation, to repeat the contingency of the text.   

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The Blank Swan is a book about writing, pricing and contingent claims, and focus’ on Ayache’s understanding of the writing process and the pricing process as two special kinds of processes that don’t take place in time or in probability, like traditional stochastic processes.   By thinking through the derivatives markets, with regards what technology is available to get inside the process of history - and do something that is at once more active than to passively watch history unfold, and altogether different from the conceptual activity consisting in predicting and outguessing history - he claims prediction is not the only room history leaves us.   

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We’ve opted to use the text Ami Clarke, Author of The Blank Swan. Chapter 4: Writing and the Market - developed for the ICA’s Technology Now series: https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/technology-now-elie-ayache-and-ami-clarke 

 

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