Monday, February 1, 2016

Money Wisdom #395

Just as 'the value of a commodity is the measure of the attraction it exerts upon all the other elements of material wealth' and, given the position gold occupies and the corresponding valorization it enjoys, just as commodities 'aspire to gold as their hereafter,' likewise the whole world, heaven and earth, is suspended and attracted as if magnetically by an external, indestructible desire toward absolute divine perfection, which, itself immobile, sets in motion each individual being. 'All commodities are perishable money; money is the imperishable commodity' (Marx, Capital 114; Marx, Contribution 115; Marx, Grundrisse 149)

Thus the oppositions between divine and terrestrial, universal and particular, sacred and profane, the one and the many, transcendence and immanence are summed up (formally and operationally, if we reconstruct the coherent system of these metaphors) in the opposition between money and commodities. This isomorphism affords a glimpse of the all-important impact of the monetary system upon the ideological formations, or rather, of what real or ideological oppositions are constituted or affirmed in the historical period to which the monetary economy belongs.

Jean-Joseph Goux Symbolic Economies (1990) p.36


Note: I almost agree with Goux, here. First, I'd replace the word/concept 'commodity' with 'currency'. And second I'd cut off the end of the final line; it requires a narrower metaphysical conceptualization of money (as product of psychical energies and process) than I have. Thirdly, although I can read the whole thing with my own conceptualiztion of 'VALUE' intact, I think Goux himself tends towards a more Nietzschean conception of 'us as the valuers' or, 'creators of value' rather than VALUE existing as the ultimate metaphysical category. But yeah, I'm reading him very slowly but am liking Goux a lot. Very similar territory.