My review of Joshua's book is
here.
It's nice when you get a feeling about a book before you read it - a feeling that tells you 'this is
really exciting and important'. Inevitably that feeling is accentuated when the book is outside your immediate area of interest. You not only wonder, 'Why this
book?' But also, 'Why this subject?'
I mean, I have no particular interest in Divination.
Lots of my friends are interested in
Tarot or
IChing or
Astrology so I've had many opportunities to be seduced into actually experiencing such rites. But I've never even had a proper Tarot reading, let alone been persuaded to read or learn about Divination rites and techniques. And, if Sci-Fi can be considered as a form of divining the future, I even fall down there. Recently my dear friend Claudia Boulton asked if I'd "
Read any William Gibson?"
"
Don't be silly," I replied, "
I only read books about money!" I was exaggerating for effect, of course, but not much.
Joshua's Divination book is
kind of about money, though.
Like a lot of academic work on 'the economy' or 'neoliberalism' (Joshua's thesis is that neoliberalism is a vast, unavowed, perverted form of Divination) it skirts around money.
Much as academics seem to not to notice, money does
tend to crop up when you talk about 'the economy' or 'neoliberalism'.
__________________
Quick diversion; I regret not getting to review and ramble about Lisa Adkins' brilliant
The Time of Money.
I read it January last year (2019) and then got involved in helping Daisy Campbell with organizing
the Cerne2CERN pilgrimage. So, I didn't get round to finishing the review I started, or writing a ramble. Just to say, like Joshua's book, I'd definitely recommend it with a full 5 stars. It's a brilliant, well written book.
Despite Lisa's title, her book does suffer with the 'not noticing money' thing. It has an extensive analysis of temporality - but there's no really substantive definition of her conception of money or, clear exposition of her wider and deeper metaphysical commitments. [
Lisa does pays greater attention than Joshua, by invoking Simmel, but (for me, at least) not enough attention, and certainly not as much as her book's title demands. ]
One of the things I'd wanted to ramble about (from Lisa's work) was the notion of 'anticipation' she invokes (she introduces the reader to the work of Bourdieu at the same time) - and how the 'quality' of our anticipation changes as our relations with financialization intensify. I thought that 'anticipation' might usefully be a way of linking time, money and
sex! Anticipation seems to inhere within the sexual act, within the money form and references a qualitative aspect of temporarily.
I certainly feel at some point I should re-read Lisa's book, write that review and do my ramble. There is actually a lot of crossover with Joshua's book.
Anyway, talking about
sex....
____________________
Oh God, I mentioned
sex.
I have a fantasy.
It's 1855. I'm a heavily-bearded man in my 50's. Women are still wearing corsets...
I insist that my new and very much-younger wife adhere to the customs of feminine attire. However, when dressed in a comely fashion, she is forbidden from entering my study. Despite animal desires and the reproductive act being the focus of my intellectual curiosity, I insist that my study remain a sanctuary. I am fortunate that I can, through the weekly act of conjugation with my wife, purge myself of the lust provoked in man by the alluring, flirtatious, and bewitching ways of females. I consider it deleterious to a man's intellect and soul, to be provoked into an over-abundance of life-force, without possibility of satisfactory release.
This is why I'm fascinated and appalled in equal measure by the religious movement in the Americas known as the 'Perfectionist Society'. Founded by John Noyes and based in Oneida, New York it preaches that free physical love without shame - among and between all members - is required within a Holy Community. For 'perfectionists' free love is a sign of the liberty that God's Grace confers. However, Noyes counsels continence. He believes that a man's life-force should not be expended except for rare instances of reproduction. Whilst the full sexual satisfaction of the females of the community is given reverence, the men must seek solace solely in the prolonging of their desire.
I have entered into a correspondence with Noyes to set him straight on these matters. I approve of the notion that God's Will is being done by allowing men, such as myself, complete freedom in my choice of sexual partner. I cannot countenance the idea that I must serve the pleasure of a woman. Well, other than I would be willing, in the spirit of enlightenment, to do as Noyes himself does, and induct those young ladies coming of age into the practices of love. One cannot help but be kind-hearted and generous in such matters. It is this educative aspect of Noyes' work that truly endears me to him, despite our intellectual differences.
As the Oneida community has expanded and others have formed, Noyes has required help of a financial nature. I have been only too happy to oblige. The members of my Gentlemen's club believe I have lost my mind. They tell me that since taking on my new bride, I have become 'obsessed' by matters of love. They do not understand the importance of my work. My treatise 'On The Physical Acts of Love in the Development of Mankind' espouses the view that an understanding and recognition of reproductive actions will one day be crucial to our scientific knowledge of man's connection to the animal kingdom and to how our minds function. When it is finished it will provoke the most profound changes in mankind. My social shunning and bankruptcy will be a small price to pay.
There is only one thing that troubles me. A somewhat unsettling dream, for which I fear, I might have to, with regret, afford some not insignificant corporal punishment to my wife. For it seems she has provoked through my nightmares a divination of a bleak future. I have the knowledge that I have died penniless. This I can forebear. But accompanying that is a vision of my young wife warming her hands on a fire - the fuel of which is my precious manuscript!
The vision continues some forty years hence at the beginning of the new century. Again I have knowledge in the dream. Barely in her 60th year, she has remarried and been widowed several times, and now appears to live in opulence; alone but often visited. I see her in the most impressive library. She runs her fingers over the spines of the scientific works collected by her most recently deceased husband. Her eyes flash and she smiles wryly as she lightly touches the spines of two particular books - one old, one new - sitting side by side. I see their titles and authors. The old one is On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin a contemporary of mine. And the new one is The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. The library is of such repute that both books must have been afforded the highest regard and somehow in my dream I'm able to sense that the sexual act is fundamental to both texts. The cruel widow knows that the successes of these fellows would have enraged me with jealously and this gives her an exquisite, almost unbearable, vengeful pleasure.
[ If you want to find out more about Noyes (he was real!) - and consider some sexual stuff that will make you really uncomfortable - then read this paper The Want of Incest in the Human Family by Marc Shell.
In my opinion, its one of the best things he's has ever written, and that's really saying something, because the man's a genius. I like that he expresses some reticence about tackling the subject but does so because he recognizes its importance. A reminder; as I wrote in Cash is King 2, in my view Marc Shell is the greatest living thinker on money. ]
_______________________
A controversial opinion.
Darwin and Freud brought sex and the sexual into science. But the most important legacy of that, is
less the contribution to knowledge (although of course, that is considerable) and
more the psycho-social effects of an
authoritative acknowledgment of sex and the sexual.
It took a hundred plus years, but the grip of monogamous heterosexuality as the only
acceptable and
permitted expression of the sexual, has begun to loosen - in the West, at least. It is a moot point whether the decline of Religion has allowed this change, or whether the change has caused Religion to decline.
Whatever. As far as money goes, we're still living in 1855.
My hunch is, that it'll work the other way to Darwin and Freud.
The change won't begin with a
New Treatise on Money - it didn't begin with Keynes (or Hayek) and it won't begin with MMT
, or any other project of intellect - the ripple that forms the later wave will not be an
authoritative acknowledgment.
Rather, it will be a critical moment that is profoundly visceral, deeply emotive and fundamentally experiential. Only an agglomeration of individual '
mysterium tremndum et fascinan' moments can effect the profound re-evaluation of values that will allow humankind to transcend and transform its relation to money. (The other stuff helps, but
this is the key.)
Whereas the act of sex required intellectual assimilation to effect change, money can only be reconfigured intellectually, if it is first newly -
and wholly (Holy!) - experienced.
____________________________
Another very
very quick diversion.
I read Pierre Klossowski's
Living Currency about 18 months back, and did half a ramble on it which I didn't publish. I feel its a really important book about money AND sex and all sorts of other stuff. But I didn't end up with a clear sense of what he was saying - other than I think the summaries and expositions of his work that I've read elsewhere fail to capture his meaning. The original book is accompanied by a bunch of 'erotic' (I prefer the word 'pornographic') images which are supposed to contribute to the meaning of the work. I think I need to get that original French version and then re-read my translation alongside it. He's saying something profound, but I'm just not sure what.
______________________________
Oh Gosh. I've hardly mentioned Joshua's book and I must be a 1000 words in already!
[
Sorry. Got way off the beaten path there. I'm such a creepy old dude. Can't stop myself once I get started on the sex/money thing. ]
So. Joshua Ramey and
The Politics of Divination.
One thing that really helped me get to grips with Joshua's book was listening to
this podcast. Phil and JF (the hosts) talk to Joshua Ramey about
Politics of Divination and other writings.
[ I really recommend the Weird Studies podcast #66
On Diviner's Time too, which also references Joshua's work. ]
The podcast really helped to get a sense of Joshua that I didn't quite get from the book itself. It turns out that Joshua is a drummer. I'm convinced that this tells me
everything I need to know about him and allows me to
completely understand where he's coming from in his academic work. I'll come back to that in a moment.
First, slightly more seriously, I really think academic writing - in particular Critical Theory - needs to reconsider it's ideas of the value of 'objective analysis'. Who the writer
is, is intrinsic to the argument.
I love it when academics reveal themselves through their writing. David Graeber is
really good at this. He seems to know how to strike a balance between that revelatory aspect and a detailed forensic analysis of the 'evidence' and narratives surrounding his topic.
So, I was interested and enlightened to hear Joshua speak informally about his work - it really added to my understanding. I was able to make my own judgement (or, give expression to my own prejudices) about Joshua merely through hearing him speak off-the-cuff. I could then to reflect that back onto his academic work.
There is surely something within the arguments that Joshua makes, about
certainty Vs uncertainty and
unknowledge Vs knowledge, that would recognize and affirm that within the spontaneous, exists the 'unmeasurable'; that we connect to what is 'unmeasurable'
as humans - and that an important part of this connection (or understanding) is
not reliant on reason or analysis. We actually wrap up (as I have done above) this intuitive aspect of our understanding with the pejorative term 'prejudice'. But ultimately our judgement -
our valuation - of any work (or any
thing, or non-
thing) always exists as a melding of different modes of knowing - prejudice and intuition (entwined with one another as they always are) are part of that melded whole. Having a clearer image of the author then, encourages both prejudice and intuition on the part of the reader. And because of this it places a responsibility self-examination upon the reader, too. In so doing, it makes reading a more active (and reactive) process. It makes reading, more fully,
an action. (I'll come back to this at the end of this ramble.)
In
The Money Burners Manual I talk about a similar idea in relation to Ritual. I use my own version of the term Mauss used in
The Gift. I talk about offering a 'full prestation of being' to the ritual act. This, I argue, alters (and expands) our perception (of any object) - we will no longer regard the object
as an object but instead we will see some greater aspect of its true essence, its sovereignty, its 'subjective self'.
It's important to realize (and remember) that
both objectification
and subjectification are incomplete experiences. What is
of essence appears (in my experience) to be accessible when some magical, undefinable and immanently spontaneous mix of these two modes of perception is employed. There is no one key that unlocks the door to the numinous, because its locking mechanism is being constantly reconfigured. (I'll save you the full diversion into crypto currency, Public/Private keys and all that).
______________________
I don't want to undermine what I've just said. But I'm going to.
When I heard Joshua say in the podcast that he enters an almost a trance like space when he plays the drums, I said out loud, 'Ah that explains everything. He's a drummer!'
All drummers are the same. They are one organism. You will only disagree with this truth, if you've never been in a band!
It's all repressed and unconscious of course, but here's how it works in the standard 4-piece rock band.
The drummer appears to be best mates with the bassist, but is actually in love with the singer.
The bassist appears to be best mates with the drummer, but is actually in love with the guitarist.
The singer and the guitarist hate each other. Always. But they do have a grudging respect for one another.
They flirt with the drummer and bassist respectively but only enough to ensure their devotion. In reality they don't care about the 'rhythm' section.
You know about drummer jokes right? The only reason there aren't bassist jokes is because it's a guitar and the guitarist knows such jokes would ultimately reflect badly on them.
[ Not completely relevant because its actually quite nice, rather than nasty, about drummers - as most drummer jokes are. But this, for me, is The Best Drummer joke, ever;
"A drummer died and went to heaven. He was waiting outside the pearly gates when he heard the most incredible fast and furious drumming coming from within. Immediately he recognized the playing and rushed to ask St. Peter if that was Buddy Rich playing drums inside the gates.
St. Peter responded: "No, that's God. He just thinks he's Buddy Rich." ]
Singers and guitarists love only one person - themselves.
Don't get hung up on gender here. This is just how it works. When you're a band and you're in the groove jamming or playing new tunes for the first time, the energy just naturally flows along these pathways. There ain't nothing you can do about it.
And of course even when members of the band step away from their instruments, the valleys, that have been carved between them, those flows of energy, remain. And as soon as the individuals relax, as naturally as water, the
psychical flows follow these pathways. That's why they always end up litigating. The law is like a JCB that digs new, deeper valleys between them to divert the energy from how it would naturally flow. It's the only way that the drummer and bassist can resist being submissive to the dominance of the singer and guitarist's self love.
Things get really complicated when you add keyboards or a rhythm guitarist.
I was a singer, by the way.
We could now head from this Drummer complex, over to the Oedipus complex, and consider whether either are 100% true or 100% false; whether its possible to really make a judgement about that; and how Freud's reverence of scientific method and the
authoritative acknowledgment it bestows led him to consider the Oedipus complex universal (whereas I just rely on my Singer's narcissism to know that Drummer complex is 100% true).
But let's not go there. Let's get back on track with Joshua's book.
_______________________
I've watched the
Gay Byrne interview with Bill and Jimmy many times.
What follows wasn't a phrase that either of them used, but it mysteriously drilled itself into my psyche while watching the interview as all parties struggle to decide what burning a million quid
means. Bill says the most pertinent thing - that it's 'put new ideas in people's heads'. And that's certainly true for me, at least. Respect due, Bill and Jimmy. But. It's a little weak. I mean 'putting new ideas into people's heads' is a just a cover for saying 'we have no idea what it means'.
The phrase that mysteriously drilled itself into my psyche is [burning money creates]
a certain moment of uncertainty. Joshua's book has helped me to unpack and understand it. A bit. (You can make your own mind up about how much.)
Within all acts of Divination there is a 'chicane' - as Joshua terms it. By definition this is a 'trick' or 'subterfuge'. Let's take Tarot as our example. Tarot has a fixed number of outcomes; only so many spreads are possible. But each 'reading' of the spread is a singular event. It is so, because of the 'chicane' which operates 'objectively' in the sense that it 'is only partly orchestrated by the skilled diviner and partly surrendered to by the inquirer'.
'Diviners often perform a chicane by producing double-thinking, offering advice, or making statements
intended to cause confusion, generate ambivalence, or excite anxiety in the audience. The ways in which the clients respond to suggestions then leads to further refinement of the oracle'.
(p.65
Politics of Divination)
A few things occur to me which seem related. I understand that in Tarot readings there are 'techniques' employed by the reader for assessing the inquirer. This seems to me correspondent in some sense to psychoanalysis. And this is odd.
Because IF we conceive of say, The Oedipus Complex, as universal, then this makes psychoanalysis the equivalent of reading a limited Tarot spread. Readings (analysis) takes place with a finite set of possibilities. But IF we conceive of no such - or at least, much more limited - universal psychologies in the unconscious, then outcomes increase exponentially to the point of infinity. We have the psychoanalytical equivalent of an infinitely variant Tarot deck.
Without methodology and metaphysical commitment (that is without a finite limit on possibilities) both divination and psychoanalysis have no meaning. At the same time, a belief in the efficacy of divination or psychoanalysis requires inquirers to suspend the methodologies and metaphysical commitments which otherwise govern their existence (especially under neoliberalism).
I won't labour the point here, which I've made elsewhere (as have others - see Joel Kaye, Tim Johnson, Richard Seaford and many others) - but our ways of thinking and our deepest conceptions of number, logic, reason and probability, are intimately related to money and the spread of our use of coinage, accounting methods, and gambling. Incidentally, back at the FinSoc conference in Dec (2019) Prof Joyce Goggin told me about her studies on Tarot and Playing Cards and how their arrival and dissemination across Europe 'changed everything'.
It seems, that even when they are wrong (or likely wrong), ideas - like Freud's Oedipus Complex as the universal human psychology, or my belief about drummers - have the effect of limiting the infinite to the finite and thus allowing us to more easily assimilate and make sense of the world.
[
I suppose all this could be thought of as an argument about structuralism/formalism versus postmodernism/substantivism ]
Each £20 note has a stupendously huge -
BUT NOT INFINITE - set of possibilities attached to it.
If you burn £20 you foreclose on all possible future outcomes related that note.
In doing so you create a kind of certainty, from a set of very large set possible outcomes.
The note cannot be used to buy anything - it can no longer circulate - because it's material form no longer exists. [
Of course, in a weird quantum cat way, it does still exist in the Ledger of the issuing Bank, but, because it's lack of materiality means it has 'no bearer', it can no longer act to transfer value. ]
However, ask the question (which Gay Byrne does) "what could that £20
have done?" and suddenly a chasm opens up. [
How can he have that name and be the guy that does the best interview with Bill and Jimmy - I mean what are the FUCKING chances! ]
It could, you say, have done any of those things from that stupendously huge set of possibilities attached to it, BUT we now, have no way of knowing which. The burning of the £20 causes an epistemic crisis.
We are
more certain that we are uncertain (about the possibilities attached to a burned £20)
than we would be if the £20 had not been burned.
[
There is something of this - admittedly, knotty - argument I'm making, within this passage from John Higg's book. It is the new certainty of the possibilities of money, realized after the burning of the million quid, that causes a moral crisis.]
__________________________
Defining (or not) some terms.
Joshua uses the terms 'neoliberalism' and 'profit' (seeking). Lisa generally refers to (the process of) 'financialization' (and this seems to be term most popular in academic critiques, at the moment - Joshua's book was published in 2016, Lisa's in 2018). I tend to use the term 'capital' or 'the logic of capital' - although I've also talked about 'economic thought' or 'economic logic'. Obviously there are differences of meaning and nuance - but, in some underlying sense, all of these words refer to the same thing or process.
Over time, the most oft-used has been, I'd guess, 'capital' and/or 'capitalism'. Joshua's 'neoliberalism' and Lisa's 'financialization' refer to some particular or advanced stage in the development of capitalism. (Or, perhaps for Joshua some extreme perversion of Divination rites?)
I think, for me, the greater task has to be identifying (and effecting change to) those fundamental, ahistoric drivers. It's about understanding the continuity, rather than naming the changes.
____________________________
I've become very interested in the idea of money as both
finite and infinite.
Recently, someone on twitter said 'money is finite' and proceeded from there to argue that austerity was a direct consequence of this. I can't remember who it was (I don't follow them), and I can't be bothered to look for the tweet. If you follow public discussion of #MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) (or any discussion of state spending/austerity) you'll quickly find critics claiming '
money is finite' ('there is no magic money tree')... and advocates arguing the opposite.
To be clear.
Money is obviously infinite.
JUST LIKE NUMBERS!
[
IMPORTANT - Stating this does not make me an advocate of MMT! ]
And yet, as exemplified by our twitter friend, we - as human beings - seem unable to conceive of money, without in some sense believing it to be
finite. This isn't just lazy thinking. It's more pernicious and deep-seated than that.
[
To write that last sentence more precisely: We - as human beings - seem unable to conceive of, or usefully experience, money in its totality. That part of money which currently falls within the bounds of human experience - that part which is able to emerge from our current social forms - can be usefully defined as currency (rather than money). Currency is money's default form within the totality of human social life - currency is money that is sufficiently secular and material (in the broadest sense of the word) to assimilate to the necessities of its use. ]
In saying '
money is finite' we are taking the evidence of our senses and projecting them onto our idea of money.
To
argue that
money is infinite is to make a logical, coherent and ultimately truthful intellectual claim. On an intellectual level we are indoctrinated into its perfect, all encompassing logic and abstractedness. It
is reason, itself. And even deeper. It is forgiveness and revenge. It is the price to be paid. It is the moral order of things. It is God. And it's the Devil, too.
But to
believe that
money is finite is to recognise the truth of our existence (our
lived experience). In our day-to-day life we are ruled by its finite-ness. We cannot to bring to consciousness the vastness of money. It looks out of our eyes and thinks our thoughts, but when it sees itself,
we - it's host - are dumbfounded. We see a
thing. A
thing we'll happily tell people 'means nothing to us'. A thing with limits.
[
'means nothing to us' - those four words deserve a 10K word ramble all of their own. But I'm just going to leave them there, untouched but pregnant with meaning. ]
The paradox of the
finite yet infinite is a magnificent and beautiful act of chicanery. It might be money's ultimate magical action.
Even if we take Simmel at his word and accept that 'an unconscious equivalence of absolutes' stands at the heart of money -
as the fundamental ratio that forms the unit of account function - we are trapped within the paradox (the ambivalence, perhaps?) of
finite yet infinite.
And, the more deeply the logic of capital extends into our lives, the more tightly we are bound within the chains of the paradox. Until we are so firmly held that the chicanery can loose its pretense. By the time we all realize we're being tricked, there'll be nothing we can do about it.
The existential crisis accompanying the complete dematerialization of money [
something likely to be accelerated as a consequence of coronavirus! ] will be correspondent to its real world effects of absolute surveillance and unprecedented levels of control. We will be forced to believe, and live within, that which we know to be a lie.
Every individual will finally understand that money is
in its essence infinite (a truth inevitably exposed by its complete dematerialization) - but there will be nothing we can do about it because our very life will depend upon us espousing the doctrine of
money as finite.
Every transaction will recount the trauma sublimated within the paradox.
Joachim Kalka writing on the dematerialization of money said that '
the tendering of a few coins across a counter opens an abyss which reaches to the heart of the universe'. The exposure of the fundamental ambivalence present within our current relation with currency- perhaps it is the very constitution of ambivalence itself? - is nothing less than a crisis of Faith.
The questions it will ask of us are as grave and consequential as those asked of the relations between man and God during the Reformation.
_________________________
In David Graeber's
Value book he talks a lot about action and its relation to value. And of course this plays out in his own life as both an academic
and an activist. (He concludes that value ultimately resides in our creative potential for action).
I said earlier - when talking about my frustration with objective writing - that when an author brings them-self more fully into a work, it makes reading a more active process. It's more likely to force the reader into self-examination. In a sense, it can be as simple as, if the author is honest with me, it's more likely be honest with them.
I think the notion of 'action as value' is ultimately what's missing from
Politics of Divination.
Leaving aside my critiques of style, Joshua's conclusion - after the devastating and deep insight of his analysis - lacks clear vision. As the oracle, Joshua doesn't give us a reading that allows us to pick our path to the future (if I can put it in divinatory terms!)
He's in good company - a lot of really brilliant books end up failing on the 'what to do next' thing. One of my absolute favorites - Norman O. Brown's
Life Against Death - ended up with a vague wish for more sublimation, less repression. Even the Occupy movement, so reliant on the wisdom of Graeber's
Debt was left floundering when it was asked 'what next, after capitalism?'.
Occupy's comeback was to say 'How should we know?' It's a fair question. We are all embroiled within these vast networks of capital - no one can truly step outside them and look at them from the outside. What we do know, is that we
need to change.
So, its really
very unfair of me to criticize Joshua for not providing a clear set of directions for humankind. I guess, its a compliment to his analysis that I was left wanting that final component. I felt like I'd had a really great dinner, so I wanted my pudding, too!
Nevertheless...
action - or a call to it -
is lacking in Joshua's work. And if value and action are deeply linked - so intrinsic to one another - then that criticism should be made.
The penultimate chapter is
Risking Derivative Politics. Here Joshua examines how our ways of pre-empting the future are melded by the perversity of neoliberal divination. If you've seen Adam Curtis's documentary
The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear you'll be halfway to getting the gist of the argument that Joshua is making. There is something fucked-up about the way we're imagining the future that actually creates the very terrors we fear. Joshua's chapter actually begins with that quote from Tony Blair that 9/11 attacks '
could have killed 30,000'.
Less dramatically, anyone who has ever worked for a large corporation (or any sizable organisation) will have experienced the insane way that large groups respond in the present to perceived future risks. Right now (mid-coronavirius outbreak) I'm sure there are many firms unwilling to take any action (outside of what is legally prescribed) for fear that -
in the future - such actions might be interpreted as making them culpable (if they independently put in place a policy, then they open themselves up to future criticism of [and therefore potential litigation against] their policy). Of course, in the meantime this makes contamination all the more likely.
So in short, yes. We all know that money brings future (and past) into the present -
AND - that how we
are with money in the present is a factor in determining the future (and how we conceive of the past). But what can we do about it?
In his final chapter Joshua argues for a 'decolonization' of divination - a loosening of the neoliberal grip on it. How that's done is a little unclear. Joshua wants to '
enlarge the political consciousness so as to reflect the real dynamics of not only the complex flows of finance capital, but more importantly the complex flows of inter-relationality and dividuated obligations that are the actual subject of generic divination.' Does that mean - as John Kay and Mervyn King suggest in their new jointly authored
Radical Uncertainty occasionally saying '
We don't know'?
I, of course, argue for something else. The reverse in a sense. I argue for a colonization of neoliberalism! Stick the sacred back at its centre, by making a sacrament of its central totem!
___________________________
I could have started this ramble at this point. It would have made for a more chronological walk! But hey! We've come back around to it as we head home so all is good. I first came across Joshua's writing back in 2014. Philip Goodchild (whose
The Price of Piety Joshua references a lot in
Politics of Divination pointed me to this site
Absolute Economics which Joshua ran with Indradeep Ghosh back in early 20-teens. There are some great pieces there, and I recommend you have a read through.
I wrote this 2014 piece
On Demurrage and Money Burning where I talk about Joshua's and Indradeep's site, Phillip Goodchild and a bunch of other stuff.
I seem to remember that I sent an overly-familiar email to Phillip after reading his magnificent
Theology of Money (
my review, my mini-
ramble)
I bemoaned the lack of attention his work was getting (I couldn't find reference to it in any bibliographies). He was very gracious and gently pointed out that, actually, his work was getting quite a bit of attention. Hence he sent me to Joshua and Indradeep.
_______________________
So, nearly home. Well done. That was quite a ramble. Thanks for sticking with me. It's been fun imagining that you've been reading while I've been writing.
In my review, I mention that Joshua doesn't really escape from a 'functionalist' view of ritual. I guess this is a problem inherent to divination itself. There is an expressed and clear purpose to any divination ritual.
As I take great pains to argue (after Bataille) - ritual sacrifice (and money burning, of course) -
ideally - should have no purpose.
Here's the quote (I wrote it - but its basically all Bataille) we used (it was read brilliantly by Daisy Campbell) in the
sermons back in December's
Church of Burn. (I used a lot of Phillip Goodchild's quotes, too, as well of, of course, as David Graeber's quotes. David was one of our special guest speakers for the Synod! He was sparkling, brilliant and very lovely.)
Having a purpose makes one servile to an end.
For Bataille, even employing the present time
for the sake of the future is servile.
And so too is knowledge.
Only unknowing is sovereign and beyond any notion of utility.
For the truly sovereign being, there is only now.
By Divining the future, we are subjugating ourselves to it. Now perhaps you might argue that the future will come regardless of what we divine about it. So in this sense, to say we 'subjugate' ourselves to it, is meaningless.
My experience in Sacrificial Ritual is that a 'radical' non-acknowledgement of the future - to immerse oneself so fully in the
now that it becomes the totality of our temporal experience - is profoundly liberating. (I should add that the sacrificial
now seems, to me, to contain
all time.) The 'viscerality' of Sacrifice - the
feeling of it - is what makes me
believe that Divination make us servile to the future. The arguments are secondary to this. (Secondary, not in the sense that they come after it, obviously in the Sermons we try to invoke such thoughts in the congregation - but secondary in an both an epistemological and ontological sense).
Money burning then, could be thought of as a form of temporal isolation (albeit not from the future or past, but with them in the sacrificial
now). The action breaks the chain of casuality. It creates - as I said earlier - a
certain moment of uncertainty which radically alters the contingency present with currency and therefore it disrupts our (unconscious and conscious) assimilation of neoliberalism/capitalism etc.
Knowledge, and our relation to it, distinguishes Divination from Sacrifice. While both actions effectively subjugate knowing, Divination steals 'what cannot be known' from God, whereas Sacrifice annihilates knowing by placing it in a ratio with God, with 'the absolute', with the limit of sovereignty.
As the famous equation in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy proclaims, any number divided by infinity is zero. Knowledge is by definition limited. Placed in relation to the infinite, it disappears to nothing. As Bataille said 'Sovereignty is NOTHING'.
'Doing nothing, if rightly understood, is the supreme action.' (Nobby Brown)
Anyway. Take your boots off and relax by the fire. I'll get the drinks in.
Xx
