MoneyWisdom #465

"...if Knightian uncertainty is real, in the sense that no economic future is genuinely knowable, it may be that in trading derivatives, one is not engaging in a perversion of market practices, but in fact in the purest and most essential form of markets. The speculative, 'casino' economy would then be the true economy, not some perverted vampiric formation on the 'real' economy. Derivatives trading would then represent confidence in the market as such, not in any specific transaction."

Joshua Ramey Politics of Divination (2016) p.136

MoneyWisdom #464

"... [derivative] prices are only 'accidentally numerical'. [They] are not really numerical representations of value (of underlying stocks or likelihoods of credit events), but really binding disagreements about prices. There are only prices for derivatives if there is genuinely quantifiable uncertainty."

Joshua Ramey (talking about Ayache) in Politics of Divination (2016) p.123

MoneyWisdom #463

"...because the rain falls upon the wicked and the good alike, there can't really be a visible distinction in this world between the saved and the damned. And yet... ...the very pointlessness of material comfort, enjoyment, or security could be substituted with the sober drive to accumulation, as such, since the development of such a surplus was in no sense for the enjoyment of 'this world'. As Norman O. Brown analyzed it, capitalist accumulation would become a kind of sacrificial commitment to thrift and rational bookkeeping for its own sake, a kind of perverse enjoyment of non-enjoyment. Commitment to rational administration for its own sake become the mark of a person whose priorities are aligned with those of the absent, invisible, endlessly deferred Kingdom of God that will never come to this earth."

Joshua Ramey Politics of Divination (2016) p.91 

MoneyWisdom #462

"In theological terms, we have abandoned any reference to a providence in any sense external to markets, opting instead for a more immanent and sinister economic theology in which the ultimate purpose of market forces is simple to reproduce market forces, on the model of the inevitable sorting of random traits in a sociobiological quest for an 'equilibrium' within competitive adaptive mutation."

Joshua Ramey Politics of Divination (2016) p.88 

MoneyWisdom #461

"In short, the power of neoliberalism since the economic and social crises of the 1970's has consisted in part in the way that its view of markets embodies and sustains paradoxical relations between chance and order, randomness and design, noise and information, chaos and providence. It is able to do this... ...partly because it no longer presents markets as allocation devices (facilitating the double coincidence of wants), but as a super-human information processor. But... ...the ambiguous status of 'information' is the Achilles heel in the theory. For if markets produce true information about wants and needs in society, then society cannot know what it (or any individual) truly wants or needs outside the interplay of market forces. The society supposedly served by markets disappears into market forces."

Joshua Ramey The Politics of Divination (2016) p. 83 

MoneyWisdom #460

"Here lies the neoliberal card trick. It is by foreclosing all other interpretations of the present other than having been produced by a past in which 'markets were not yet fully operational' that neoliberal divination manages to convince us to keep attempting to remake the future in the image of a past that never was - a past where there might have been and should have been perfectly operative market forces. There is only one oracle, one message, and one chance: for the further and more perfect extension of market forces into more of human reality, rendering it finally subject to the only conceivably meaningful chance we will have had - to render ourselves profitable, or perish in the process."

Joshua Ramey The Politics of Divination (2016) p.64 

MoneyWisdom #459

"Neoliberalism essentially implies that only those who are economically rational, who surrender fully to the will of the market, can count as free and equal citizens - at the limit, this thought implies that only the exceptional are equal."

Joshua Ramey The Politics of Divination (2016) p.29

MoneyWisdom #458

"Vico's [Giambattista Vico 1668-1744] view of human authority as linked to the reality of divine authority, or divine providence, means that, paradoxically, humans are only free insofar as they acknowledge the potential guidance of divine will, figured first in divination practices.

[...]

What Vico is claiming here is that any view of human institutions that is not grounded on something like a paradoxical conjunction of free will and divine providence is incoherent. This position is, of course, contestable but it reflects Vico's commitment to something like divination as the original basis for the paradoxical character of culture as both received and enacted, and also has the advantage of explaining rather than presuming the existence of sovereign power."

Joshua Ramey The Politics of Divination (2016) p.25

MoneyWisdom #457

"Neoliberal ideology has been successful not so much because charismatic individuals function as oracles, but because secular modern cultures of rational deliberation have difficulty acknowledging, (when they are not busy denying) that disenchanted, anti-oracular rationalistic societies must continue to do what, as Evan Heimlich puts it, cultures more sanguine about divination acknowledge the need to do: to 'read chance aloud'. It is the cultural disavowal of the role of divination that allows for the authoritarianism of certain forms of supposed expertise on risk - certain forms of nonknowledge and not others - to govern the genuinely unknown."

Joshua Ramey The Politics of Divination (2016) p.6

MoneyWisdom #456

"...neoliberal authoritarianism dominated the space of divination in contemporary culture. At the heart of neoliberalism is a divinatory practice, a political theology that identifies arbitrary, unforseeable changes in market conditions with divinely ordained order. This ideology justifies austerity, the maintenance of debts, and even ecological devastation, reading them as cosmic inevitabilities it is irrational to question. The reading of markets as destiny is a form of divination, one that trades upon a deep equivocation between knowledge and ignorance, where knowledge of market forces had become identical to effective surrender... ...to the unknowable and unpredictable movements of markets."

Joshua Ramey The Politics of Divination (2016) p.6

Review of 'The Wisdom of Money' by Pascal Bruckner

My first book review in yonks. I have a couple sitting in draft (one on Lisa Adkins' The Time of Money and one on Klossowski's Living Currency) but its been so long - and they are both such important books - that I need to re-read and re-write them, to do them justice. I don't think this book by Bruckner falls into that 'important' category, but it's a good read nonetheless.

Anyway, as always if you like please, PLEASE give it a 'helpful' vote on Amazon. I want to be the number one money book reviewer on Amazon and your button click will make my dream come true. It's an odd ambition I know, but don't judge me. x

Link to Amazon

Flawed but at times insightful essays from a rare perspective in English-language discourse on money

"This is a beautiful-looking, relatively short book that is very well written. Initially it appeared as if it was to be a 'memoir of money' - like James Buchan's Frozen Desire - but, as an earlier reviewer says, it ends up feeling more like a collection of essays around the theme of money. Bruckner does try to tie together his disparate structure through the motif of the Golden Calf, but it feels like decoration. The base material of Bruckner's understanding of money is actually its ambivalence.

I'm unsure as to why Bruckner didn't use this base material to build a bridge between the essays because it's apparent from the opening words on the sleeve note; 'Money is an evil that does good, and a good that does evil'.

The first part of the book - The Worshippers and the Despisers - is where Bruckner is at his best. If you want a primer on the theology of money (an area of profound insight often overlooked by academics and dismissed by economists) then Bruckner's opening 40 pages are worth the price of the book, alone.

You might think that because of money's ambivalence, Bruckner would be justified in his use of aphorisms that simultaneously juxtapose and resolve conflicting dynamics (as in those opening lines). However, this stylistic choice raised a couple of issues for me.

Firstly, and less importantly, his aphoristic writing style became numbing after a while; certainly for a good chunk of the second half of the book I felt a bit bludgeoned by aphorisms. Secondly, and this is the criticism of more moment, aphorism can indicate a certain perversion of one's thought process. It's a delicate balance. An aphorism that neatly summarizes some argument that's preceded it, can be a powerful explanatory tool and its use is thereby wholly justified. But sometimes, with Bruckner, I was left with the feeling that the argument had been constructed for the purpose of justifying the aphorism; in other words, my feeling was that his stylistic choice determined the substance of his argument. This can be a dangerous and ruinous path for any thinker.

Bruckner relies on an exposition of his opinion backed up with examples (from literature, politics, etc) rather than a specification of theory and process. This allows his words to more easily make the journey from page to mind, but it means that when he tries to flesh out some moral judgment, he falls down. Perhaps, because ambivalence is the baseline to his melody, Bruckner ends up in the same spot as Norman O Brown did in Life Against Death (which he mentions in his most explicit reference to psychoanalytical thought) - and, according to Jung at least, it was the problem area for Freud, too. When fleshing out his moral judgement, Bruckner effectively ends up describing a desired outcome as being the result of sublimation (good) and an unwanted outcome as being the result of repression (bad), and yet he fails to distinguish between those two processes in a satisfactory or meaningful way. Because of Bruckner's theme of ambivalence and his metaphysical commitment, which conceives of money as a product of human imagination, I think this sublimation/repression critique is an apt one.

And further to this, the great (and ultimately unforgivable) omission from Bruckner's work is Simmel. Ambivalence completely underscores Simmel's conception of money in The Philosophy of Money. As that's generally regarded as the greatest work on the philosophy of money, it really needed including in Bruckner's book. His analysis would have benefited from an understanding of Simmel's ideas about money. But perhaps even more puzzling for me - given his understandable bent toward French texts - was Bruckner's failure in invoke Bataille. He mentions him only in passing and then not in the context of Bataille's work on economy. He talks more about Keynes than Bataille, and yet Bataille's The Accursed Share was a response to Keynes. Bruckner says things like "...being human always resides in excess and not in simple survival." This cries out for an exposition of Bataille's conceptions of sovereignty, sacrifice and waste.

What I ended up with then, at points, was an irresolvable conflict between Bruckner's prejudices and my own which, in my view, was due to his failure to give a meaningful exposition of his theory of money. I don't think this fatally wounded the book. I think there is much to be thankful for in Bruckner's French (small 'c') conservative perspective. It is a voice not often heard in English language discourse around money, which is perhaps more used to more left leaning intellectuals such as Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Delueze, Goux etc. However, in a stark choice between Buchan's Frozen Desire and Bruckner's The Wisdom of Money - both of which share that small 'c' perspective and the same literary feel - I'd say Buchan's would be the one to pick up first."

Money Wisdom #454

"Inventing a new way of using money, civilizing it as much as it civilizes us without losing the energy of its circulation, regulating it in accord with merit and honesty - those are some of the challenges that confront us."

Pascal Bruckner The Wisdom of Money (2017) p.205

Money Wisdom #453

"Capitalism and communism were like the two twin brothers who supported each other, each challenging and at the same time seeking to eliminate the other. One of them died of exhaustion, and the other needs a new adversary, or lacking that, a tutor who could correct it. It owes its survival to its enemies as much as to its followers, and draws its dynamism from being constantly attacked and thus obliged to reform itself."

Pascal Bruckner The Wisdom of Money (2017) p. 205

Money Wisdom #452

"In reality, we live only for the superfluous: the simple satisfaction of our needs, paying our bills and feeding and housing ourselves, is a curse. We gladly spend on our desires, but we resist paying for our duties. During the Great Depression, American historians note, some of the most modest households preferred to buy cheese and cigarettes rather than essential food supplies, and a woman in New York nearly starved herself to death so that she could use her welfare check to have her hair set and dyed. An aberrant attitude? No doubt, but it remains that being human always resides in excess and not in simple survival."

Pascal Bruckner The Wisdom of Money (2017) p.203

Money Wisdom #451

"Every moralist is in danger of someday falling into the vice that he denounces, caught up by the object of his aversion. There is even a consubstantial link between the virtue that is trumpeted and the virtue that is trampled upon: authentic morality is modest and discreet. American commentary on politics and society is full of do-gooders, pastors, preachers and politicians opposed to pornography, prostitution, adultery, and drugs. Sooner or later many of them are found in the arms of a call girl or a minor, their nostrils full of cocaine. They then have to spend their time repenting and swearing on the Holy Bible that they won't do it again. The Monica Lewinsky affair is emblematic of the sexual neurosis camouflaged behind a disapprobation of lying - even if North American puritanism is perhaps no more than a way of limiting erotic bankruptcy following the sexual revolution and of reviving a libido that is always haunted by exhaustion. When everything is permitted, nothing is desirable anymore."

Pascal Bruckner The Wisdom of Money (2017) p.54-55

Money Wisdom #450

"If money arouses so much anger, it is perhaps because it incarnates the very essence of modernity. It personifies flux versus permanence, the genius of circulation versus the demon of petrification, and it pushes people to want to improve their lot. In addition, it reduces the human condition to the sinister tonalities of calculation. If we believe the critics, a "quantitative ethics" is everywhere replacing the sense of quality, and life will henceforth bend under the gray mass of anonymous numbers. We weigh, we count, instead of savoring. Over time, money, a simple instrument of exchange that makes it possible to acquire goods, becomes the supreme good, "desired in itself and by itself" (John Stuart Mill). It bears man's desire for the infinite as a cloud bears a storm. The means becomes the end, the tool surpasses its use and arouses the desire to earn as much as possible.!

Pascal Bruckner The Wisdom of Money (2017) p.40

Money Wisdom #449

"Scrooge [McDuck] is unique in that he shamelessly romps about in gold, experiencing the ecstasy of saints imbued with transcendence. He does not recognize Seneca's distinction between the brilliance that dazzles and the luminescence that softly radiates. In his view, everything that shines is magical. His grin is that of a voluptuary whose transports cannot be calmed. Scrooge McDuck is orgasmic."

Pascal Bruckner The Wisdom of Money (2017) p.29

Money Wisdom #448

"Aristotle had already condemned lending money at interest, describing the birth of money form money (in Greek, the word for interest, tokoi, also meant offspring) as a monstrous pregnancy, contrary to nature. Saint Augustine used the same metaphor in accusing usury of 'spiritual fornication.' This expression is symptomatic: fornication is the carnal act undertaken without procreative intent, drive only by concupiscence. This copulation, already guilty in itself, is worst when put in the service of a diabolical project: the self-engenderment of money, producing bastards."

Pascal Bruckner The Wisdom of Money (2017) p. 14-15

Money Wisdom #447

"Money features in two kinds of stories; those of the oppressors who crush the forsaken by financial means, and those of the oppressed who free themselves thanks to financial independence. In one case, it is a power that enslaves, in the other, a force that liberates. That is its ambiguity: when it is condemned we want to defend it; when it is defended we want to attack it. Like sex, it is overflowing with meaning, giving rise to countless synonyms that never really designate what it is: bread, lettuce, gravy, jack, loot, moola, scratch, portraits of dead presidents. And this is true in all languages."

Pascal Bruckner The Wisdom of Money (2017) p.2

Money Wisdom #446

"Nothing can be said about money without asserting the contrary: that it is vulgar and noble, fiction and reality. It separates and connects people; it frightens us when there is a lot of it, and frightens us when there is a lack of it. It's a good that does evil, an evil that does good."

Pascal Bruckner The Wisdom of Money (2017) p.1