ABSTRACT
Financial markets offer a fascinating place for studying rules and how normativity comes into play in the face of radical uncertainty. Indeed, trying to understand what 'complying with a rule' means in such an environment amounts to reemphasising the paradox of the rule as classically set out by Wittgenstein. Rules should always be considered incapable of producing anything whatsoever as long as we avoid putting them into practice; by way of explanation, as long as they are not deployed, spread, circulated, or inscribed in a consistently specific context. Unravelling the tangle of the implicit within the explicit – such an act could be considered a good characterisation of what those responsible for compliance do, as market events rarely resemble the descriptions written about them in regulatory texts, which preserve a naturally high level of generality.
