Money Wisdom #503

 "...the semiotic engine of capital - of wealth, of money, of value - produces a delirious regime of signs, obsessed, at once, both with the fences that need to be raised in order to protect the treasure from the enemies of value and with the spiralling void that value, ultimately, refers to."

Fabian Muniesa Paranoid Finance in Social Research: A International Quarterly (2022) (link) 

A Personal Tribute to Nigel Dodd 1965-2022

I've just been at the Finance and Society Conference at City University in London for the past couple of days. It was the first 'in person' conference I've attended since 2019 because of the pandemic. I'm not 'in' academia. I'm not doctoral student, researcher, lecturer, or professor. In my day-to-day life I've little contact with anything that resembles university or academic life. Currently, I drive a van to earn my living. When I am lucky enough to attend a conference focusing on my area of interest I find it wholly invigorating. I guess if you're in academia you might get used to being able to chat about the weird, wonderful and esoteric stuff you're reading or thinking about. I don't have that in my day to day life. So it's brilliant to be able to be a pretend-academic for a couple of days every now and then.

Money Wisdom #502

"There are two basic models of the libidinal economy of revolutionary movements, which we might characterise as the Freudian and the Reichian, or the petit-bourgeois and the utopian-socialist, or the Calvinist and the Keynesian models - the former based on a vision of (libidinal) spending as depletion or loss, the latter on a vision of spending as generating (Libidinal) wealth."

David Bennett The Currency of Desire (2016) p.157

Money Wisdom #501

 "Neoliberalism recasts the moral/immoral distinction as a rational/irrational one, reinforcing the bonds between economic and psychiatric rationality. As national economies continue to lurch between inflation and recession in the twenty-first century, the question of how much credit-fuelled spending is rational or irrational, healthy or unhealthy, for any nation at any given moment continues to divide economists, just as the question of how much shopping might be rational or irrational, healthy or pathological, for any individual divides psychiatrists."

David Bennett The Currency of Desire (2016) p.121 

Ritual and Administration

Happy New Year!

I really miss reading books on money and writing about them here. 2021 was a year more devoted to 'doing' rather than 'thinking' for me. I expect 2022 will be similar. 

The highpoint of 2021 was, of course, the three Church of Burn events at The Cockpit, Marylebone over the first weekend out of lockdown in July. The performances were a significant step up in terms of their production values. An expanded cast and crew meant 30 of us were involved in creating Church of Burn in 2021. 

It was utterly thrilling to see something that had existed in my imagination since 2019 finally be brought into reality. I am profoundly grateful to all involved. We have images, audio and video of the performances but we've been a little coy about sharing them. A few exciting things have happened since July 2021 and we want to keep our powder dry for the next time.