Acceso usuarios
Fleur Johns
Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets does for collateral, in legal thought and practice, something like what Marcel Duchamp's Fountain did with and for the urinal in artistic thought and practice. The book takes what Annelise Riles calls a "little sideline item" (at 1) of mundane use in global financial markets � an item of undeniable practical importance, but typically considered unworthy of serious attention � and encourages us to see it anew. As in the case of Fountain, what we may experience afresh is not just the object and the use of it, but also the order of knowledge or, in Riles' terms, "knowledge practice" (at 10) in which it has been repositioned.
Beginning with collateral � secondary assurance or value provided by one or both counterparties to a transaction to offer a means of satisfying a debt in the event of the provider's default upon a primary undertaking � Riles tells a (perhaps surprisingly) compelling story of global financial markets as "a constellation of both theoretical and doctrinal maneuvers and material documents" (at 38). Practices of collateralization, in their very marginality, standardization, or taken-for-grantedness, comprise "a legal technology that is paradigmatic of global private law solutions" (at 41). Prised open under Riles' deft touch, collateral becomes the stuff of "dreams" (at 37�38 and 138�144) and responsibilities (at 119 and 244); a "quiet nexus of tremendous political and economic legitimacy" (at 4, emphasis in original).
The work that Collateral Knowledge performs in this regard is that of legal ethnography, resulting from "seventeen months of fieldwork conducted in Tokyo between summer 1997 and fall 2001" and "frequent research visits in the years that followed", focused on large financial institutions and those who work with and for them (at ix). It is closely engaged �
