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A few pieces of news to announce here in May: The big news: Shveta and I have decided to open a writers workspace in San Francisco in the Fall of 2009! It'll be called, appropriately enough, Writers Space SF. We're currently shopping around for spaces to lease and working on our business plan. More news on the latest developments to follow. In the meantine, you can peruse the Writers Space SF website.
Also: The paper I presented at the 2008 MLA Convention in San Francisco is now available online. It's called "Hybrids at hand: the problem of representing the heterotic superstring" and is published on the Electronic Book Review, an online peer-reviewed scholarly journal. And: I'll be presenting a paper at this year's SLSA conference, to be held in Atlanta in November. The paper will be part of panel organized by Jim Swan, an English professor at SUNY Buffalo. The panel theme: "A trillion here, a trillion there"
When the capital development of a country becomes the by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done (John Maynard Keynes, 1936).
Possible topics: the scientific status of economics, the mathematics of risk, the nature of "computational finance" (or "financial engineering"), the globalization of capital, the nature and uses of derivatives, hedge funds, etc., the relation between the "real" and the "virtual" economy, the two-way traffic of economists and financiers between Wall Street and Washington DC, the financial crisis as a media effect (computer power, high-speed networks, etc.) . . . .(This is not an exclusive list.) My paper proposal, as it stands now: Random Walks and Lévy Flights: The Black-Scholes-Merton Model of Options Pricing as an Epistemic Imaginary
In 1997 Myron Scholes and Robert Merton won the Nobel Prize in Economics for two related papers entitled ‘The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities’ and ‘Theory of Rational Options Pricing,’ both published in 1973. These papers proposed a new model, now called the Black-Scholes-Merton model, for determining the value of derivatives in a given financial market. Interestingly, the model itself exploits a form of stochastic calculus that Einstein used in 1905 to propose a way of experimentally validating the existence of atoms by measuring their Brownian motion, their ‘random walk’ through a fluid medium. Thus this notion of the ‘random walk’ would seem to substantiate a model for both a natural and a social phenomenon. The sociologist Donald MacKenzie has documented the adoption of the Black-Scholes-Merton model by ‘orthodox’ economics as an integral part of their epistemic culture. He argues that ‘[o]ption pricing theory seems to have been performative in a strong sense: it did not simply describe a pre-existing world, but helped create a world of which the theory was a truer reflection’—a truer reflection, at least, until the stock market crash of 1987, the massive failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, and the recent collapse of the global financial system. In this presentation, I will read closely these two papers in order to explore the implications of the authors’ use of the idea of the ‘random walk’ to legitimize epistemologically their options pricing model. The question at hand will be: how does the Black-Scholes-Merton model, as an epistemic imaginary, engage with, shape, and potentially disrupt the world as both imaginative bricolage and objective reality?
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Sean's Blog 
