Deleuze/Guattari and the synthetic Asset

By assets we do not mean – as usually assumed – individual assets or realizable income, nor investments in the form of goods or money, but very specific forms of speculative capital. We assume in this section a progressive differentiation of three different classes of financial assets: a) the so-called generic asset (loan, bond, etc.), b) the so-called synthetic asset (CDS), which actualizes a whole new class of assets within financial exchange, also known as “synthetic finance,” and c) the securitized synthetic asset (CDO), a product of the processes of so-called securitization, which imply the transmutation of synthetic assets into securitized collateral. Thus, the category “generic finance” includes credit forms (bonds, loans, mortgages, etc.), equities and so-called vanilla derivatives (options, futures), while under the category “synthetic finance” one subsumes credit derivatives (CDS, TRS, etc.) and various synthetically structured products such as, for example, synthetic CDOs containing only CDS. (Cf. Lozano 2013) One usually analyzes the two synthetic classes of assets in terms of their structure only as insignificantly modified copies of the generic assets that existed before them, but without recognizing that the repetition of the synthetic assets by themselves generates a completely new economic quality, as we were able to trace in our description of the theory of contingent claims in Ayache. Thus, as part of the process, structure, and method of synthetic exchange, the synthetic CDO has the potential to aggregate a heterogeneous set of securities, initially consisting of different money flows and risks, into a single homogeneous pool, which then acts as a single money flow and a singular risk. Thereupon, the homogeneous pool can in turn be split into different classes of risks and money flows, radically changing the quality of both components. The resulting new classes of risks are called tranches, which in turn can be rearranged in various ways to produce a variety of specified risks and the money flows associated with them. (Thus, risks, which with Luhmann can be generally defined as adaptation to opportunity, are identified and dispersed, while at the same time noting the diversification of access to risks, which are not open to every actor in the same way, so that there is a differential and at the same time normalizing regulation of individual risk strategies). With each new tranche added within a CDO, new levels of dependence on other tranches also emerge, which in turn involve series of attachments, gradations, and detachments; new processes of differentiation thus emerge and, at the same time, punctures that record, register, and distribute the respective losses and gains of the various tranches. And whenever tranches are used to re-differentiate risks, new levels of differentiation occur, with which series of so-called “attachment points” and “detachment points” are constituted. (Ibid.) An attachment point is a point that indicates that risks belong to a particular tranche, while reaching a detachment point releases risks that henceforth affect a differentiated tranche that may belong to a higher level in the ranking of risks. “Structured finance” is the term used to describe the processes of differentiation and redifferentiation as a method of tranching risks – processes of bundling and distributing risks that keep money flows not only fungible, plastic, mobile, and interchangeable, but with which potentially infinite capacities are freed to create dynamic systems of order and disorder in financial markets.
Securitization, sometimes called “structured finance,” involves the process of creating collateral for a financial asset. Here, two types of collateral can be distinguished: 1) collateral originating from pre-existing generic financial assets (“cash securities”), 2) collateral created by new synthetic replication qua credit derivative (“synthetic securities”). Accordingly, with regard to synthetic finance, in the process of securitization a radical transformation of assets takes place insofar as the pre-existing generic asset, e.g. a loan, is constantly divided and in the process of division itself changes its economic quality. And the subsequent bundling of any number of generic assets into a single portfolio, trying to homogenize different risks and money flows into a single asset containing only a single risk and a single money flow, allows at the same time a redifferentiation or dispersion of new risks and new money flows, and this as different and flexible as traders want it to be. Thus, one can actually speak of a new hyper-fungibility of the synthetic asset, which the generic financial asset definitely does not possess.
“Synthetic finance” is negotiated in economics under the rubric of derivatives. However, as we have already seen, this should definitely be treated with caution. In the case of so-called credit derivatives, a kind of synthetic financial asset, the difference to traditional derivatives such as options or futures, which by the way have existed for two millennia (e.g. Aristotle wrote to Thales to please buy options on olive oil presses), quickly becomes apparent. Since around 1995, synthetic assets started their triumphant march on the globalized financial markets as hyper-fungible and at the same time highly scaled symmetric classes of economic objects, whereby these assets have some economic similarities with the generic financial assets, but also add completely new economic properties to them, which finally cross the concept of the derivative as such by not only extending it, but inventing completely new qualities. Synthetic securities are not closed entities with exact coordinates in a Euclidean space, but the topologies of curved surfaces defined by their vectors and their transformations, i.e., these virtual economic objects are to be understood at the same time as spatio-temporal events, with which a current entity touches an infinite data stream, and this by a physical and/or conceptual selection, evaluation, inclusion, exclusion of the data and their transformation, in order to be able to intervene and invest in a current field of potentialities of economic objects.
If we started in this section with derivatives whose value refers to underlying assets, this does not apply at all, as we have already seen in the discussion of Ayache’s theory of contingent demand, to synthetic financial assets, which quite causally add new properties to the value of the generic assets and are thus at best to be understood as quasi-referents of the generic assets, but not even that, for conversely, it is precisely the generic assets that are determined in the last instance by the movements of the synthetic assets. (Ibid.) In the subprime crisis of 2007f, among other things, the price movements of CDS insurance related to mortgage loans led to huge declines in the value of those loans, which eventually articulated itself in higher interest rates on adjustable-rate mortgage loans, in falling home prices, and subsequently in mass defaults on the loans themselves. Consequently, precisely because CDS insurance became more expensive, mortgage loan prices rose (a generic asset). If the market value of a physical economic object (classical commodities such as clothing, food, computers, etc.) is directly affected by a credit, and the latter in turn can be massively affected by the value of its synthetic “replicant,” can we really maintain the previous hierarchical order of classes of exactly three economic objects, still speaking of the synthetic securities as purely derivative securities, derivatives? Let us take, for example, the case where a portfolio populated with various assets is synthetically structured, i.e. the assets themselves are formed according to a very specific replication technology and are thus ultimately derived from the ever-changing value of the synthetic portfolio. How is the hierarchy between economic objects to be understood here? Even if the synthetic asset announces itself as a mere replicant of the generic asset, it should not be forgotten, however, that its economic properties differ significantly from those of the generic asset: Namely, the synthetic asset is the production of pure difference articulated as simulation. What is involved here is a real mirage that no longer bears any resemblance to the classical economic object, so that the immanent “copy” of the synthetic model in itself quickly destroys any symmetrical and purely representational relationship between physical object and value-creating imago. (Ibid.) At this point, the synthetic diagram, which has to be considered as a germ of the order and rhythm of the synthetic assets, can be understood at best as a gestalt construction, but precisely not as an imaged one, finally as a topological relation between the economic properties of the synthetic assets themselves, their nomadic distributions, and this in contrast to the conception of purely logistical distributions. In the diagram of a synthetic asset, the discrete elements, which are nothing more than the economic properties of the asset (cash flow, maturity, price, risk, volatility, etc.), are related to each other. (The diagram generally includes elements such as graphematization, text, symbols, and mathematical formulas, but possibly also mimetic images). Theoretically, the production of synthetic derivatives, which can at least potentially be understood as infinite, does not require any transfer of private property, it does not require any significant production by means of exploitable human labor, it does not require the classical physical objects in which value is objectified, although the potentially infinite proliferation of the synthetic asset and its economic properties entails profound material consequences in the entire economy. Furthermore, it can be assumed that in the trading of synthetic derivatives, traders are neither debtors nor creditors of credit transactions; they need not have any relation to the pre-existing generic exchange as the so-called referent of their own exchanges.
Even for Deleuze, the term “derivative” as a conceptual equivalent for the synthetic security would probably have been only partially correct. Similar to Ayache, with reference to Deleuze’s way of thinking of the non-quantitative differential calculus, it is much more likely to assume a radical break in the relationship between synthetic securities and traditional derivatives, such that the structure, value, and price of the synthetic assets are causally added to those of the generic assets, indeed the synthetic assets are to be understood as quasi-causal with respect to the generic assets and their underlying underlying assets. If the economic existence of a classic asset (clothing, computer, food, etc.) is directly affected by the generic asset (share, loan, etc.) and its value is in turn affected by its synthetic replicant (CDO, CDS), then it indeed seems difficult to speak of derivatives at all in the case of the latter. Rather, the chain of effects runs just the other way round, because already quite generally that object possesses the highest power of effect, i. e. reality, which in its plurality comprises the most, the most variable and thus the most effective properties and components within a specific constellation. It is precisely the third-order real-virtual object that is able to establish differential self-referentiality at high speed, not requiring any externality to mediate its own self-referential movement. Thus, the CDS is a (commodified) asset that possesses an economically autonomous and at the same time diverse structure, in order to simultaneously initiate, as a technology, a process that in turn concerns the synthetic replication of a generic financial asset; finally, it is the constitutive process of synthetic exchange itself that actualizes the synthetic asset as such, without at this point still requiring the exchange of pre-existing economic entities. Different quanta of symmetry are to be assumed within each of the three different classes of exchange – classical, generic and synthetic: We define symmetry as the invariance of the exchange itself, which, measured by the number of transactions, does not significantly alter the object or process, which in turn means that different quanta of symmetry mark different acts of exchange, which can then be classified into different classes of exchange. And insofar as synthetic assets, which form their own class of exchange, impose the least restrictive invariant requirements on an object, they may offer and exhibit a higher scaled symmetry than the other two classes of exchange from which they have historically and logically differentiated themselves. We may first assume an economic symmetry or equivalence between commodities (and money), without which no exchange takes place. However, the economic space of the market actualizes different quantities and textures of symmetries because the market is open to contingencies, but these contingencies are quite different for different economic objects. For example, the classical barter transaction requires a congruent and immediate transfer of the physical object in exchange for money, and this has to be considered an invariant requirement for the economic property of the duration of objects, whereas with the generic asset such as credit, this invariant requirement for an immediate transfer of the object is removed – the monetary imago of the physical object (money) now has the potential to grow within a specific time horizon of the new barter transaction; with the synthetic asset, the invariant requirements to which the generic asset is subject dissolve even further, with which the economic properties of the object or event finally assume the freedom to fold, twist, and bend or devour. i.e., the synthetic assets have an extraordinary, a much more effective reality than the other economic objects or events and this in terms of their reality register, potentiality, actuality and virtuality. The virtual causality of the synthetic assets should be understood as performative and material, i.e., the assets virtually push with their effect for real material consequences, among others, with respect to the past and to the future development of the generic assets: the performative impetus of the synthetic exchange even still redefines the material terms of the underlying assets of the generic asset.
And it is important to keep in mind that even if one were to describe CDS insurance as a mere copy of a generic asset, it is not the same copy, but a radically excessive and variable repetition of “copying” that permanently generates difference in itself, so that the economic properties of the synthetic asset, such as cash flow, maturity, volatility, price and value, also permanently differ from those of its so-called generic referent. If the simulacrum is the “true” form of being, then the hyper-fungible power of synthetic assets consists precisely in setting in motion a clothed repetition, in Deleuze’s sense, that does not lead to, nor presuppose, any identity, but instead, in the course of the repetition of variation, interiorizes the conditions of its own repetition in order to attain a highly fragile identity, i. e. clothed repetition is the interiority of value as difference in itself. And it is precisely for this reason that the properties of synthetic assets cannot be purely intrinsic properties, but are the properties of the exchange processes themselves that initiate the transformation of assets into mirages of value, which occurs in simulation spaces commonly called the market. Factors such as moneyness, divisibility, maturity, risk, and cashflow can be isolated as properties in the synthetic asset. However, it is not the extensive actuality of the asset that constitutes its decisive component, rather it is the fungible virtualization potential of the asset itself that leads us to speak here of an almost limitless, an ad-infinitum creation that, for example, puts risk and cash flow into a potentially synchronous relationship, without, however, ever being able to eliminate the moments of desynchronization. The simulation space in which synthetic securities such as CDS or CDO are traded today should be understood as neither fixed nor flat, neither uniform nor homogeneous, but rather as non-Euclidean or topological and not bounded by any reference classes. While the architecture of stratified space mobilizes discrete entities at the center of its design, which connects points by lines, the topological curves of smooth space generated by algorithmic or parametric architectures mobilize the generative power of the point, its meshing and folding toward the emergence of a new form. This simulation space can be defined economically, it is capable of bending, twisting, curving and folding economic events, it is extremely malleable and pliable. However, it is precisely in this context that the neoliberal techniques of control intervene and intervene, i. e. the reality of the synthetic exchange is and remains part of speculative capital, whose materiality is defined by a cash flow, if it is actualized in the process of exchange.
Thus, the synthetic security may well be understood as a production of pure difference that takes place in a topological space of simulation, the synthetic security, so to speak, as the differential capital event that mostly bears no resemblance to its referent, as an immanent “copy” of a model that constantly produces diffusions, replications and novelties. As usual in a simulation, neither the rule framework nor the regularity of the synthetic process is known from the outset, which means that we are dealing with the construction of a new economic, non-representative reality, and it is precisely the negation of this problem by finance capital itself that really drives so-called financial crises. The meaning of simulation, with its monstrous performativity, lies in an economic reality radically afflicted by contingency (cf. Ayache 2010a), without, however, ever escaping the ultimately determinative regulative of capital. And this virtual performativity can express itself in very different ways, for example as a prognostic power for newly planned or to be planned capital processes, or alternatively as the instance or image of another thinking. By image of thinking, Deleuze understands less a method than a system of coordinates, a system of movements, dynamisms, and orientations. (Cf. Deleuze 1993b: 215f.)
We had already seen that the buyers and sellers of synthetic securities do not have to have anything at all to do with the so-called reference transactions, so that with respect to the synthetic-financial transaction one can speak in a certain sense of a creation ex nihilo. And with every further financial transaction a new asset is created, which has real characteristics (cash flow, price, risk, time etc.), which did not exist before. And these properties are realized only in relation to their transformation in the simulation space of the exchange, which we call the market with Ayache. (Cf. Ayache 2005) In this process, the identity of each individual synthetic economic object appears to be dissolvable, namely into diverse scraps and fragments, which in turn possess differentiated properties; here, the differences reign fulminantly, swallowing the present identity of an asset, so to speak, in order to produce quite rigid disorderings of the new classes of assets. And thus the concatenation of synthetic exchanges leads, at least potentially, to an ad infinitum proliferation of differential money flows and risks. In the course of synthetic asset trading, new economic properties of the synthetic objects are generated, which seem to have lost any structural relation to the respective reference products. In the process, the structuring and structured process itself also produces new economic properties, so that we finally speak of the synthetic asset appearing as an avatar of the generic asset, acting through the so-called disguised or virtual repetition (Deleuze), which, in contrast to the naked or actual repetition, produces pure differences, which, after all, are precisely not related to underlying or “true” facts, but, starting from virtual structures that they imply, permanently produce new concatenations and constellations of syntheses. Such structural processes lead, for example, to new economic properties such as “credit enhancement,” the determination of the rating of an asset-backed security by a rating agency, or “leverage,” the leverage of debt capital on the return on equity. There is a permanent generation of new differences and at the same time of new economic properties, which did not exist before with the referenced asset and its trade, and this through a clothed repetition event. (Cf. Deleuze 1992a: 355ff.) Indeed, one may now assume a new kind of differential quality of synthetic assets, with which we are finally dealing with the cartography of a purely function-analytical mapping, whose representation, however, can never be understood as independent of purposes, which are inherent in a selection of instruments for the enforcement of goals, whether these are individually known or not. As instruments of financialization, synthetic derivatives manage, among other things, the variable attributes of values such as interest rates on loans, expected rates on defaults on mortgage loans, or rates on exchange rates between two currencies. They are able to bundle the variable attributes of different sources with different expected revenues, e.g. loans with expectations of high and low default rates and the expectations drawn from them. The synthetic derivative is considered to be a contract to buy or sell a specified proportion of these variable features at a specified time. Since commodity prices and services fluctuate continuously and even local markets have their volatile idiosyncrasies, synthetic assets are used as insurance to simultaneously hedge against future transactions by which currency rates, interest rates, mortgage loans, etc. may fluctuate between the time the contract is entered into and the time it matures. Different gains or losses can thus be balanced or hedged against each other, for example with CDOs mixing safe mortgage loans with second-rate loans, which eventually failed in the U.S. when interest rates on mortgage loans rose and borrowers’ ability to service the loans declined. In this sense, synthetic assets bring together very different things and make the future actionable right now. And their traffic form takes place in global markets, even though the bundled things, houses, cars, student loans, etc., may each be local assets. And all of this is always in relation to the changes in the modes and operations of capitalization in international capital markets, the governance of financial capital, the growth of the so-called shadow banking system, the ongoing experiments of central banks with the loosening of their monetary policies, the mixing of money and capital markets and sovereign debt crises, the unpredictability of new solvency and/or liquidity crises.
We draw on Deleuze’s paper Difference and Repetition in this chapter, as indicated several times, in which he demonstrates a rigorous method of analytic differential problematization that also allows one to think of the structure and process of synthetic securities as a topologically grounded manifold. In general, the notion of manifold refers to immaterial entities that are intrinsic to material processes. Qualitative manifoldness is a term for Deleuze to indicate the constitutive process of a virtual object. (Cf. Deleuze 1992a: 233ff.) Compared to numerical, discontinuous multiplicity and its extensive and quantifying properties, which are always located in the actual and potential realm (in a homogeneous time), it is based on intensive, continuous properties and is more inclined to the virtual – it shows up for Deleuze in his Bergson studies in pure duration and can only be shared at the price of a change of essence. While the numerical manifold is actual in the full sense and has little virtualizing power, is only gradually divisible and does not change qualitatively or as a unit with division, thus remains a Euclidean object in the broadest sense, the qualitative synthetic manifold is an a-numerical, continuous manifold that cannot be divided without changing its essential quality itself. Deleuze/Guattari find points of contact for this kind of manifold in fuzzy sets (fuzzy logic), fractality in Mandelbrot, and Riemann’s smooth space.
In the Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze/Guattari retained the distinction between two types of multiplicities, but integrated them into the category of space itself. They contrast the (virtual) smooth space, which is structured analogously to Riemann’s model of general space or qualitative manifold, with notched space, which is characterized by an actual, extensive, and metric manifold. The virtual hypercomplexity of smooth space corresponds to a non-order that can be characterized by the heterogeneity of elements and the variability of relations, and this under the dominance of the relations that determine space and number: dissipative structures of differences that permanently generate mediality in their operative mode (media exist only in use, as unused they do not exist). In the context of synthetic finance, economic media (number, volatility, etc.) are characterized above all by fuzziness, an almost infinite plasticity and contingency. A fuzzy set A can be represented by the following function: Ma: X – (0,1) (the range X is determined case by case). Obviously, the fuzzy set defined by the binary membership values 0 and 1 turns out to be only a special type of the fuzzy set and therefore has a lower power of action than the fuzzy set. We now assume that Deleuze’s concept of manifold leads us to methodological and technical terms that can be used to better understand the constitutive processes of an economic relation such as that of synthetic finance. Thus, the synthetic manifold possesses n-dimensional aspects of the creation and assembly of an economic event that is always in a state of becoming because it possesses a superabundance of reality whose parts are not always or only actual, not always or only virtual, not always or only potential, but offer a mixture or confluxion of the three components or registers of reality: Potential, Actual, and Virtual. It is thus a concept that indicates reality, the fullness of a reality whose parts are neither entirely in the virtual nor entirely in the actual. While Deleuze’s notion of dimensionality is aimed at the diverse variables of a coordinate system on which the actualized asset is based, with regard to continuity he refers to the sets of relations that correspond to the changes in the variables; definition in this context means that the elements are defined by these relations, the elements never changing without the multiplicities changing their order and metric.
In this context, we describe synthetic assets as dynamically composed, formless un-orders that inherent various economic properties such as maturity, abstract value, price, risk, cash flow, etc. In any case, these properties can be constantly revealed plastically and injected elsewhere, they are created exogenously and can be suddenly destroyed again, they circulate ad infinitum and non-linearly – swarms, vortices and fractures of differential repetition, a thousand plateaus of their concentration, compression and dissolution. And synthetic exchange signals the birth of hyper-fungible forces that have the capacity to dissolve the respective identity of the assets as well. Thus, the assets each already interiorize their own repetition as value, i. e. they are the value of (clothed) repetition: repetition as the interiority of value in itself. The synthetic assets possess the ability to constantly change the variables of their coordinates with which they are actualized, i.e., they are precisely not to be understood as invariant. And if the variables of the coordinates over which the structure is distributed in the space of possibilities of economic properties curve, rotate, or otherwise change, then this must also be possible with the relations between these variables. (Cf. Lozano 2013) In this context, the elements of the assets are always to be understood as their properties. And if it is then said that these properties do not change unless the respective asset also changes its relational structure and at the same time its rhythmicity, then this also means that the structure, rhythmicity, and material properties of the asset can only change through a structural repetition, namely in the synthetic exchange itself. Thus the generic asset is repeated in a differential way by the synthetic asset and both experience a qualitative change in and with this repetition, and this as a process of differentiation of quite different properties of the two assets. First, the generic asset has repeated the physical object and with the repetition has added new properties (maturity, profit, default risk, etc.) to it and to itself. However, a radically new repetition event takes place in the relation between generic and synthetic asset. Nevertheless, the classical economic objects (coffee, clothes, table, etc.) and the generic financial assets (credit, etc.) appear to us as more “objective” compared to the synthetic assets, and Deleuze’s distinctions of repetition and difference help us to understand why: the classical, the flat object is filled with extensive economic properties, which can also be divided to a certain extent, but in the course of these divisions the quality of the objects does not change. The properties can be written as points on a line and these points are to be understood as uniform, that is, divisions produce only gradual changes. If there is a flat, an atmospheric space, the structure of this economic space is equal to a zero-curve-dimensioned surface on which diverse sets of commodities with all their variable and invariable properties wander around to finally meet in exchange. However, already the complex numbers are to be understood as multidimensional and the imaginary numbers can neither be represented as representing numbers within the Euclidean axiomatics nor derived from them. At this point we treat the transfer of operations to the relation of structures which are geometrically inexistent in the classical sense, i.e., we construct a deterritorialized analytics which abstracts completely from the representational logic of the geometric grid. Thus, there are certainly qualitatively different, indeed virtual, spaces of exchange endowed with one or more curvilinear planes, i. e. markets span simulative spaces of potentialities for economic properties of synthetic objects that populate such spaces. These are multiplicities that populate an entirely different space than the space of a Descartes, namely, a Riemannian space – a mathematical construction taken up by Henri Bergson to shift continuous multiplicities from the spatial in turn to the temporal. (Cf. Deleuze 2007) For Bergson, continuous multiplicities are simply not measurable; rather, they persist, i.e., they divide only when they substantially change their quality, which means that they can be measured only on the condition that the principle of measure also transforms with each further subdivision.
Thus, the property of division always contains the unequal, so that the actualization of the properties in synthetic exchange leads at least to the temporary dissolution of the identical and is completely freed from those invariant instructions to collinearity with which both the classical object and the generic asset are still integrated. Such indetermination means that the synthetic assets have no pre-determined form, they are, so to speak, free from pre-defined variables of their coordinates as well as from pre-defined relations, apart from those that now exist at the moment between their variables. We are dealing here with multiple, non-localizable relations between differential elements, which are constantly translated into real relations and actual terms in trade. Finally, we end up with essentially differential relations between the material properties and the various registers of reality of the synthetic assets themselves: their actual, potential, and virtual shares of reality. Roughly speaking, Deleuze defines the actual as that which is, he defines the potential as that which is and can be anything possible, and the virtual as that which is neither potential nor actual, i.e., that which was possible at a given place and time in the past, is possible now, or will be possible in the future, and thus by definition has comprehensive reality status. (Zechner 2003: 103) The virtual possesses first and foremost a register that records and distributes intensities that structure the topological space of what then seems possible to actualize in the future. And intensity, as intensive quantity, encompasses the unequal in itself, it indicates the difference in quantity, it shows what there is of the inextinguishable in the so-called difference of quantity, i. e. of the inextinguishable in quantity itself. (Cf. Deleuze 1992a: 308ff.) Accordingly, it is considered the essential quality of quantity. If, according to Deleuze, virtual multiplicity possesses neither form nor signification, challenges no antecedent identity and no one, but in its indeterminacy testifies to pure difference, then also in the economic any actualization of the synthetic securities as a result of their trading is not to be understood as the actualization of an antecedent form, rather the actualization always implies processes of differentiation of the structure without the very need of a pre-definition for the synthetic asset, i.e., the structure exists only in and of its effects. Thus, the synthetic asset has a part in the virtual and a part in the actual, it is a hybrid virtual object in Deleuze’s sense: The virtual object is doubly inscribed in reality, on the one hand as a parcial object derived from a generic object in that the latter actualizes the latter; on the other hand, it exists in its own process of becoming, which moves primarily from the virtual to the actual – and thus it is incorporated into reality including its virtual aspect, insofar as the unilateral process from the virtual to the actual points beyond the virtual, in the direction of a global integration into an open whole (actualization), and insofar as it does so, it becomes a parcial object. This hybridized partial actual and at the same time virtual object gives the synthetic a monstrous material violence. Deleuze says that the actual object is subject to the law of being or not being somewhere, while the virtual object has the property of being or not being where it is. Finally, for the hybrid object, what matters is the degree to which it is both a virtual and a current object, insofar as it can be partially incorporated into all possible objects in order to act on them as well. Accordingly, the synthetic asset is generated in the simultaneousness of what it is and what it is not. As speculative capital, it is what it is, a replicated embodiment of the generic asset (e.g., loan or government bond), but at the same time it is more than it is, for it functions in a much more fungible way than the generic asset and possesses a much higher symmetry than the generic asset, it can radically affect, even determine, its trading, and it possesses a set of distinct, ever-changing differential economic properties. (Cf. Lozano 2013) But it is also less than it is, i.e., a fragment of the generic referent (e.g., the CDS does not replicate the entire risk of the reference credit). Thus, one should by no means assume a one-to-one mapping of the full range of economic properties with respect to the replication of the particular reference event by the synthetic security. (Ibid.) What distinguishes mapping here from tracing in general involves a non-representational orientation toward a synthetic experiment that invents its own reality and thus simultaneously infiltrates other realities, although it remains determined in the last instance by the reality of capital. If Deleuze says that mapping does not reproduce an unconscious in itself, but constructs the unconscious, then financial instruments such as CDS or CDOs should certainly be understood as part of the unconscious of capitalist reality.
Synthetic securities, then, always possess a virtual sphere, or at least they are bound to a sphere close to the virtual, a somewhat unfortunate spelling, admittedly, because the virtual, as we have seen above, may not count as a sphere. Rather, it is about virtualization capacities in and of the actual (material properties of synthetic financial assets are marked by a growth in fungibility or virtualization). And if synthetic assets are not only divisible but also include reversibility, then we should understand this as a move towards even easier fungibility and towards even higher symmetry within their virtualization capacity. No physical identity can be found here anymore, no representation in a pre-existent space can be indicated, rather the synthetic assets, which with their virtualization/acutalization capacity are to be understood as part of an accelerating dynamism of speculative capital, flow in non-euclidean spaces, the synthetic markets. The non-Euclidean presence of synthetic assets indicates itself as a progressive differentiation of the financial system itself, which obeys entirely the rule of the inclusive disjunctive synthesis, in and with which there can no longer be any significant distinction between original and copy, no dominance of the referent over the derivative, of the concrete over the simulacrum, instead we are always already dealing with virtual, non-postal concatenations of infinite “copies” that arrive nowhere and that no longer allow any original to survive. The synthetic, with its intense virtualizing capacity, spans all its antecedent registers as well as its own actuality to let us know the universal of a non-foundation. If the synthetic securities can be considered as attractors for the behavior of the generic objects (credits) and meanwhile operationalize even the classical forms of exchange like the one between commodities and just not the other way around, then they define with their peculiar effective power increasingly the economic scope of the generic assets and the classical forms of exchange. We see that there is an inversion here, insofar as, for example, the price, interest and value of a loan or a government bond is now set by a synthetic “derivative” and thus has to be considered as derived. And we observe that the increasing differentiation of “synthetic finance” sets in motion a truly paradoxical quantitative metric of economic properties, while at the same time the synthetic exchanges demonstrate a higher quantitative symmetry that arises, among other things, from the bundling and tranching of risks. (Ibid.) If it can be easily stated that the projective metric is more general than the Euclidean metric, the synthetic properties of synthetic assets are also considered more general than those of classical exchanges and fictitious capital. Synthetic finance thus involves a higher, a more impactful class of exchange, integrating generic finance and classical exchange, and eventually any form of capitalization, but never running the other way around today. And this happens again as integration into the capitalist economy as determination-in-the-last-instance. In the course of the progressive differentiation of financial capitalism, its seemingly infinite movement towards an ever-decreasing similarity of its manifold economic objects among themselves, insofar as they proliferate and ceaselessly create themselves as new objects, to progress from copies to other copies, until they finally mutate into mere simulacra, bringing about a numbing and incremental transformation of capitalization itself – in the course of this we are precisely dealing with a new abstract, hegemonic model of capitalism itself. What is at stake here is the virtual and dynamic consistency of the so-called neoliberal model itself, perhaps at this point also Deleuze/Guattari’s famous abstract machine, which is characterized, among other things, by the immanent dynamics of an ensemble in which the consistency of each object always depends on a certain level of abstraction rather than on the homogeneity of its concrete circumscriptions, so that consistency forms itself as part of a productive and dynamic process. The abstract machine is constituted by a set of vectors, emergent tendencies and potencies that have a greater or lesser chance of actualization. With respect to the neoliberal model, this means that there is a potentialization of the individual/different qua differences immanent to capital, while at the same time blocking the emergence of all forms of potential collectivity and autonomy of the social.
In this context, we can still speak of temporal acceleration processes, while at the same time we are dealing with a quantity increase of financial transactions per unit of time, i.e., with processes of steady productions, with which the technologically-economically based acceleration entails an even faster growth of the quantity of financial transactions, which may well expand into a metastatic growth. (Cf. Rosa 2005: 116) The computerized real-time trading of synthetic derivatives – technologically hardly surpassable processes of acceleration – thus corresponds to increases in the quantity of financial transactions per unit of time, with their growth rates tending to exceed the technologically based acceleration rates, so that we are dealing with further shortages and condensations of time in the economy itself and finally (due to physical limits, among other things) with the tendency toward instantaneous time, which characterizes the economic simulation space. Finally, in this context, Deleuze offers not just another concept of value, but precisely a theory of the concept of value that indicates a self-accelerating-dynamic system of capitalization and its stratagems, institutions, and policies. Quite in contrast, in traditional Marxist theory we are still dealing with concepts of the division and filling of value, in which (finite) space is conceived as a container, which in turn is filled up with essentialistically conceived objects, in which value (as a social relation) is objectified. And money then represents the various objects, with differences always being erased in the name of the identity of the same. In contrast, synthetic finance provides a new mode of division and distribution of economic space, which is the simulative, abstract production of this space itself, and meanwhile has incisive effects on the mode of any productions in the capitalist economy. It is a matter of synthetic securities, which, by the way, do possess a materiality, of an under-determined structure without content, whose radical determination, however, is taken over by the reality of capital itself. And the morphogenesis of the synthetic securities, that of their money flows and their risk productions, their times and their prices, all this appears in the oscillation between virtualization and actualization, which in Deleuze’s context moves above all from the structure of the virtual to actualization, from the conditions and constellations of a problem to the cases of its solution. In this writing, we shift the problem and inscribe the non-structure of the synthetic asset into the virtualization-update interconnections of capitalization that we already know.

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