As ever on this blog, it's been a while.
I miss posting here. There's a sense of freedom that comes with accepting that very few people will read this post. Embracing this fact and still writing is liberating.
My recent Why Joe Lycett Might Kill Us All wasn't meant to be a 'liberated' piece. I wrote it with the intention of it being read. Unfortunately, it's had very few readers. Which is a pity because I'm rather proud of it. People whose opinion I hold dear have been complimentary about it - even without prompting! It would have been especially nice to get a response from Joe Lycett, himself. In the end, I content myself with the fact that it needed to be written and I wrote it.
Whilst I enjoy writing those public-facing, general reader pieces and taking the time to polish my words, there is a trade off. I can't explore and think as I go as much as I can in these 'liberated' blog posts.
Inevitably there are more awkward and difficult moments here. I've talked a lot about Sex and Money over the years - and now, here, I want to introduce Death too. All the taboos! I'm sure I've gone too far sometimes. There'll be plenty to be embarrassed about in what I've written here since 2008.
But fuck it. Someone's got to work at those awkward boundaries. It's where the gold is.
I also tend to assume that my reader is pretty well-versed in theories of money. This isn't an effort to be deliberately esoteric and exclusionary - in fact, I can't stand that tendency. It's really just a matter of shorthand and time saving; not explaining that which is explained elsewhere (either on this blog or outside it).
And it is time, ultimately, that is the real finite resource for me personally and for the human experience, generally. I become more aware of this with every day that passes.
The Ontology of Money
So I nearly titled this section The Metaphysics of Money. That I didn't is a clue to the general direction I'm taking this line of thought about money. I've become fascinated by the idea of money as 'determinacy'. Or, more specifically to say, that what we refer to as money is in fact 'determinacy' acting through mind (I use 'mind' throughout to mean both the conscious and the unconscious).
I'm not claiming to have framed it all coherently. It was a comment made by Phillip in Phillip Goodchild's discussion with Devin Singh that sparked this latest line of thinking.[ 1. ]
As an opener, I want to suggest something non-contentious; the idea of 'determinacy' presupposes 'indeterminacy'. And vice versa because the observation of indeterminacy requires a position that is determinate. I very much like that the word 'determinacy' and the notion of 'determinacy Vs indeterminacy' suggests something that is a fundamental aspect of reality.
So, here's a short and imperfect paragraph expressing my current thinking.
Money's deepest ontological level is determinacy. When determinacy acts on and through mind it produces a psycho-sexual event we call 'currency'. Ambivalence is the process by which determinacy is first 'dissolved' and then 'resolved' into the currency.
If you're familiar with my psychodynamic approach you'll be aware of my insistence of ambivalence and the psychosexual as vital to an understanding of money (or more specifically, currency). The new bit - determinacy - introduces a layer that sits underneath the unit of account (UoA) function of money.
The UoA is the deepest ontological layer of money suggested by conventional economic thinking. [Some like Samuel Chambers argue that functions of money aren't really 'ontological' at all. I've sympathy with this view but let's go with ontological for the sake of this piece.]
Many people agree with the UoA being the essence of money. But many don't. Some argue for the Store of Value (SoV), others for the (tautological, IMO) Means of Exchange (MoE). I explore my reasoning for considering UoA primary, foundational and axiomatic in my long essay. I also strongly critique the notion that money can be defined or understood solely in terms of its functions. I'll discuss the UoA and the 'storey beneath it' (as Simmel might say) momentarily.
But first a word on language. I could have chosen words and a linguistic framing other than determinacy and indeterminacy to describe what I'm envisaging.
For example, instead of determinacy and indeterminacy I could talk about order and chaos. I could say that money creates order from chaos; that it is able to cogently express and measure the desires and demands that flow through the maelstrom of the market; and in turn it is also able to disrupt any order that is created.
Or, I could use the language most often chosen for money/finance/economics - certainty and uncertainty. The economist's favourite money guru Charles Goodhart, starts his Money, Information and Uncertainty with the line '..the need for money as a means of payment is caused by the existence of uncertainty'.
I could even fully immerse myself in the language of physics and talk about Entropy and Negentropy.
But I like the precision of determinacy (ha!). I think its the best choice to corral my thinking and introduce these themes into my work in an intelligible way. The weirdest, most out-of-place chapter (and believe me that's saying something!) in The Money Burner's Manual is Purity, Perfection and Precision. I remember having to resist being wholly seduced by my thoughts on 'precision' as I was writing it. So I guess 'determinacy' has been lurking in my unconscious for a while.
I started out thinking of determinacy as the pre-eminent and most essential quality of money. But that's not quite there. I think what I'm really focusing on here is what Bataille might call 'the movement'. That is the movement toward determinacy from indeterminacy and vice versa. I'm not really worried at this stage whether the movement is in any sense 'knowable' or 'measurable'. What I want to do is create a totalising image of money - what it is and from whence it came. Hopefully, this will provide a lens or 'black mirror' through which I get a new perspective on what's happening in the here and now. Most especially what happens when I destroy money.
So, to get back to what's 'underneath' the UoA.
If you remember and agree with Ingham's contribution - that the UoA function of money is both historically and ontologically prior to its MoE and SoV functions - then, like me, you'll appreciate that developing an idea about how the UoA function arose is important.
Ingham draws on the work of Searle to explain that UoA comes into being through an act of 'collective intentionality'; if money is measure (UoA) then all that is required, is for each of us to believe that circular metal objects are money, for them to then become money.
I think that's a fudge. It's a false end to the story of money. It creates a sort of ontological 'crust'. We have to break through that to get to the sauce underneath. And so for me (as I explained here and elsewhere), that sauce is Simmel's idea that 'the unconscious equivalence of absolutes' is the basis of the UoA function. For me, it seems to offer the most powerful explanation of how a thing that 'measures all things' could have come into being.
However, even 'the unconscious equivalence of absolutes' is still something that takes place within 'mind', within the human milieu, or specifically as Simmel claimed within the unconscious. It doesn't really extend money beyond human (or, at a stretch, mammalian) life into the cosmos.
Or, at least it does so only if you adhere to the more 'cosmic' theories of mind. I thinking here of Jung's work, theories such as Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance, or even McLuhan's idea as 'mediums' being 'extensions of man'.
But its notable that 'cosmic' theories of mind do tend toward a limited view of money. For Analysts money is a symptom. Biologists think its irrelevant. And for McLuhan - and most media theorists - money is just yet another medium.
That's not my instinct about money.
I see money as everywhere and everywhen. I remember a conversation with my daughter when she was doing her Phd in Astronomy - around 2017. I can't recall how we'd arrived at this point but she was quizzing me about my expansive idea of money while we were looking up at the night sky. I was explaining that for me, money was in the cosmos; that somehow it played a role in the formation of the stars and time and space.
So my hope would be that conceptualizing money's essence as 'determinate' might open up some grand possibilities within our knowledge of the universe as it stands. Scientific theories of physical reality predict pretty well. Especially when dealing with things at the human scale. Theories of psychical 'reality' (currency included) have some catching up to do.
Hence, a more pragmatic starting point for an effective theory of money might be not to reconceive of the physical (as cosmic theories of mind tend to), but rather to rethink the psychical. To declare 'determinacy' as the Prima Materia of a psycho-sexual event, offers the prospect of a solid foundation on the matter side as we attempt to build a bridge to mind. Spanning this opposition between thing and process, between commodity and social relation, is after all the Holy Grail of a better understanding - and living experience - of money. [ 2. ]
AI and ChatGPT4
Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll have picked up the excitement about Chat-GPT4 and AI generally. If you've not had a conversation with GPT4 yet, you should. It's quite remarkable. I've not experimented with the newly available visual tools but they too look amazing. Follow @shardcore if you want to keep up with that side of things.
So, of course, I wondered what GPT4 would say about money and whether I could convince it that 'money burning will save the world'.
If you want to see my 'conversations' with GPT4 for yourself in full please feel free to download this pdf. It's 94 pages!
One of the frustrations I had was getting GPT4 to create a decent summary. They're produced instantly, and they read like they're authoritative, but I found them to be an inaccurate recounting of our conversations. Often times, large important sections would be totally disregarded and the ordering of arguments and conclusions was incorrect. I'd get it to redo an incomplete summary but then some other mistake would arise. Here is a six paragraph summary of our 94 page conversation - but, if you read it, please bear in mind what I've said.
One of the reasons I wanted to chat with GPT4 was to try out my ideas about determinacy. I took things slow. At first it was giving out standard ideas about money. It was very committed to the notion 'money is a human construct'. Which is okay as a starting point, but (as with Finance's insistence on MoE as the essence of money) it's annoying when it's presented as the be all and end all of money. But, as you'll see, we broke through it.
I argued on the basis of 'which assumptions about money it is safe to make'. In the end our agreed position was that 'money arose through or from human civilisation'. Which is very different from saying 'money is a human construct'. (And actually GPT4 had started out saying 'money is a human invention' which is even more unsafe.)
GPT4 seemed to like the idea of determinacy and was happy to adopt it as a quality of money. It took its time warming to the idea of money burning. I was surprised that I had to educate it that destroying currency is deflationary (according to mainstream econ theory). But we made some progress, I think.
I introduced the idea of 'vectors' to describe our experiential or visceral relations to money. We agreed that money is - to some degree (or more) - reflexive. In other words the way we spend, earn, save, and risk money all serve in someway to create money (or more accurately currency) as we know it. It was by using this notion of 'vectors' that I managed to get it to better consider the effects of burning money. It said:
"Yes, introducing a fifth vector of "destroy" could have a profound influence on the way we experience money as currency. As you mentioned, it could not only change the form of currency but also have ripple effects on human culture, economics, and civilization as a whole. It is important to consider the potential implications of any changes to the concept and function of currency, as it is so deeply intertwined with our societal and economic systems. Additionally, any changes to currency can also have implications on individual psychology and behavior, as the way we think about and interact with money can have a significant impact on our well-being and decision-making." - GPT4
It was keener to stick to its guns when I tried to link our concept of money to the climate crisis. It seemed very willing at the outset to accept that there is a profound link between climate and money. But it seemed to want to separate out other 'solutions' to climate change from money. GPT4 was keen to tell me that money burning alone would not save the world.
This struck me as a bit odd, given I'd never suggested that so long as we burn a bit of money, we could keep on burning fossil fuels and pumping shit into rivers. GPT4 seemed to get that money and climate are causally linked and that changing money (and/or our relationship to it) is fundamentally important to tackling climate change. But it didn't seem to comprehend that changing money (and/or our relationship to it) will change and expand the choice of actions we have, individually and collectively, in respect of how we tackle actually climate change. More perhaps than anything else. Not to mention the impact of changing money on social injustice.
So anyway, I reckon that's a win for money burners! Yay!
The other point I noted was the trouble GPT4 had with notions of the Absolute and a little logical glitch it had. I won't elaborate here other than to say the problems it had with the Absolute reassured me that having a 'meat suit' is pretty important to how we come to know the world around us. If you want to check the logical glitch search 'Graeber' in the 94 page doc. It was interesting that the glitch happened around the Parmenides/Heraclitus debate. Basically it couldn't get the idea that we had to believe in something false (Parmenides) in order to discover something true (Heraclitus). I think David might have melted a few of its circuits.
I revisited GPT4 a few weeks later for a new conversation. It had complete amnesia about our earlier conversation and the points we'd agreed on. Kind of annoying because I was hoping to recruit it to spread the Word of the Burn.
Scott Ferguson's Declarations of Dependence
I FINALLY read Scott's wonderful book. Basically, it was hard trying to get a copy here in the UK hence its been a long wait. And - according to the law of buses - two copies of it arrived through my letter box on consecutive days (my Son had ordered me a copy as a surprise gift!). UK money nerds please get in touch if you want my spare (no randoms) - or chuck me a few quid for postage and I'll send it to Europe.
Now, Scott's book deserves a proper review which I'm not going to be able to deliver. My apologies. Reviews used to be big part of my work here and I'd love to start doing them again. Sadly time forbids. What follows in this section is mostly me riffing off Scott's work.
Declarations of Dependence is a brave attempt to recast money for the Left. Scott's work on money is influenced by (or maybe even born of?) Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and Scott's book attempts to provide a philosophical, metaphysical or ontological underpinning to MMT's conception of money.
The central claim is that money has a 'boundless public centre'. This is where Scott installs 'the mystery of care'. By care Scott means an 'anxious and inescapable public obligation and form of collective cultivation and uplift'. What he refers to as 'Liberal' money has occluded this centre by persuading us of money's thisness. In other words we've come to see money as a thing arising from exchange and this serves to prevent us from seeing the true nature of money which is fundamentally social. (At least that's a my rough take on Scott's argument).
An academic friend has already suggested to me that there are a lot of similarities between my work and Scott's. I agree, but of course (as Freud suggested with his idea of the narcissism of minor differences) what I mainly see is where our ideas conflict! Before I get into that though let me just see if I can avoid the trap of my narcissism and (try to) align Scott's insights with my own.
I think the most significant thing I've taken away is a better understanding of the concept of 'care' as it relates to money and economy.
When David Graeber was a Bishop at CoB's Synod in 2019, in answer to the question 'How Do we Save the World?' David said that for him the most important thing would be to replace the categories of production and consumption with care and freedom. I wasn't wholly clear on what he meant. Of course, others were. And David's concept has been widely disseminated to the point where its appeared on Extinction Rebellion banners (see above).
I found it easier to assimilate consumption with freedom. I get that. But production and care? That relation was harder for me to grasp. Scott's book - and in particular his conflation of care and obligation - really helped me understand what David meant.
Encouraged by Scott to explore the importance of the idea of care in conceiving of money I found the following interview with David in The Anarchist's Library. It's from 2020. So some time between CoB and his untimely death in September of that year. He says,
I conceive freedom primarily in terms of play, or maybe better to say I conceive play is the highest expression of freedom, since it’s self-directed activity that isn’t aimed towards anything outside it, but is a value to itself. [...]
When you're thinking of a care-giving relationship, usually the first thing you think of is the relation between mother and child. Mothers take care of children so they’ll grow and thrive, obviously, but in a more immediate sense, they take care of children so they can play. That’s what children actually do most of the time. And play is the ultimate expression of freedom for its own sake. So why not make that the paradigm for an economy too, which is after all just the means whereby human beings provide for one another. Not least because care and freedom are infinitely expandable without destroying the planet, while production and consumption are not.
David's conception of 'play' dovetails with the anti-utilitarian ideas I explore through money burning. There is congruence between 'pure play' and 'pure sacrifice'. Linking the repression of these expressions of our humanity to planetary destruction is a profound insight. I'm now fully on board with Care and Freedom as the proper way we should be categorising human action around money!
Back to Declarations. I liked the concept of the 'sacred fisc' which Scott introduces when he offers a narrative of money's historical development.
I'm always a little dubious about historical narratives 'proving' the story of money one way or another. I loved the theory in Graeber's Debt much more than the history. For me, the 'truth' of money lies in our lived experience of it. Money is a mystery. Historical narratives though, inevitably, tend to frame it as a puzzle to be solved. Nevertheless, despite the historical wrapping, I was delighted to see the 'sacred' given centre ground in Scott's work.
I don't really want to get into Colin Drumm's critique of Scott and MMT. I haven't read Colin's PHd dissertation and only have his blog and some experience of his rather abrasive social media interactions to go on. Suffice to say, I think Colin misses the point by a mile. I wonder if this has to do with what I'm hinting at about the inherent weakness of historical narratives of money?
Amin Samman's History in Financial Times is a great exploration the link between historical narrative and finance. What stays with me from Amin's work is the quote from Giambattista Vico about the point of rhetoric; it is not to persuade but rather to create a persuasive reality. I think this speaks to the dangers involved in allowing an historical narrative to wholly inform/reinforce our conception of money. It a similar thing to what Joan Robinson said about ideology.
Anyway, I think Scott's work serves to expose the sacred centre of money whereas Colin's work serves to 'desacralize' it. As Norman O Brown (famously of the department of the History of Human Consciousness at Santa Cruz from whence Colin was awarded his PHd) told us.. we confuse the past "by describing as secularization a process which is rather only a metamorphosis of the sacred." (p.248 Life Against Death)
I very much enjoyed Scott's ongoing discussion about money and the aesthetic, and how, by denying (Scott's notion of) the essential nature of money, the aesthetic works to reproduce a 'Liberal money' metaphysics.
I recently saw Roger Hallam (one of the founders of XR and Just Stop Oil) with a friend of mine, Chris Stone. Roger talked a lot about the politics of organisations. We always tend to strive to create non-hierarchical organisations to effect social reform. Roger argued however that revolutionary action requires some sort of organisational hierarchy to bring it into being. Chris has made the point to me many times that if you ignore politics it'll come get you anyway. So its much better to be aware of politics than to wish it away. I think Scott's point about the Aesthetic is the same sort of thing. An aesthetic that imagines it exists beyond money is just wishing it away. Making it much easier for money and money's ideology to penetrate and infiltrate art in disguise - and so reaffirm itself within art.
To get now to our differences.
I hope Scott won't mind me revealing the essence of a chat we had after his podcast with Rob Hawkes. Scott argued that there was 'no outside to money'. Given my earlier framing of determinacy, it's clear that I'm not averse to this idea. However, I made the point that in CoB we do, in a sense, try to imagine an outside. Somewhere we can at least move toward, even if we can't get to it. I guess its a bit like imagining Heaven. I'm pretty sure Heaven doesn't exist. But existing or not existing, Heaven still exerts a supremely powerful force over Earth. And you know what they say, 'New Heaven, New Earth'.
I guess though, whether money has the possibility of an outside or not is a nuanced point of difference.
More fundamental is the notion of money - no, let's be more precise, 'currency' - as arising from exchange. This is the standard line about it. And I guess working down in the ontological depths as Scott and I like to do, the key name here is George Simmel. For Simmel, exchange really matters. And it's often been the case that Hard Money folks - neoliberals, goldbugs, etc - like to invoke Simmel to support the idea that money is born of Our Lord, The Holy Market.
In turn, the adoption of Simmel by Hard Money folks has lead to the Soft Money folks feeling a little uncomfortable with him. (I was gonna say on the Right and on the Left instead of Hard and Soft Money - neither is too precise a categorisation - but I figure you'll get the gist). David Graeber gave Simmel a bit of a kicking at the beginning of his brilliant Towards an Anthropology of Value.
Here's the thing though. Simmel isn't talking about market exchange! At least, not directly. He uses the term in its broadest possible sense. I wrote about it all here back in 2014. Indeed, in his example Simmel links exchange to flirtation. Given he's writing back in a very coy 1905 he might today (I like to think) instead say that SEX and MONEY are linked at the most essential level. Hence I think this is a key point of difference I have with Scott. I don't think its possible to exclude/down play exchange from the story of money.
The trouble for me is that if we downplay exchange, something fills the gap it leaves. And generally what that is for MMT - and here I'm moving beyond the scope of Scott's book - is a commitment to Law as constitutive of money. And Oh Boy! is that a problem for me! I wrote a fair bit about this in my mega long piece. Suffice to say here, that I think the idea of Law as constitutive of money in an ontological sense is deeply mistaken. Ultimately, I think it's hubris - or, at best, wishful thinking. Sorry. Law and currency exist in a reflexive relationship, but the ontology of money has nothing to do with the rules, regulations and laws that we've established to try to tame it.
Neither Scott's book, nor MMT really deals with the problem of sovereignty, in my view. By sovereignty, I'm thinking of the way Bataille uses the word. More related to the power of being, than the power of Kings, Queens and States. Money sits in some form of direct relation to sovereignty. This is a matter of belief for Hard Money folks. I think Scott is right to focus on the other side of money because this 'obligatory' ('connected' or 'non-sovereign') side of money is, and has been, largely neglected by both Right and Left.
Nevertheless, money (as Simmel said) is profoundly ambivalent. This is its magic. It can at once be the most important expression of and contribution to sovereignty, and its reverse. It can both create and overcome distance - geographical, social and psychological. It can be one thing and its opposite and span the space between them.
So I can certainly forgive Scott for not addressing the issue of sovereignty to my satisfaction in Declarations. His book stands as a single dissenter against an onslaught of 'right-thinking' about money. We experience money as a totem and tool of our individual sovereignty, so the vast majority of work on money (including my own) focuses on this as a quality or function of money. Here in the UK the link between the Sovereign and money cries out from every banknote.
But Scott is right. The opposite of sovereignty also exists in money.
I'm reminded here of how King Charles III (and Queen Elizabeth II) talk about 'service'. About how they exist to 'serve' us, their subjects. We bow and curtsey to them but (somehow) they are also our servants. We can point out how bizarre, illogical and untrue this claim to service is in a material sense, yet (certainly for Queen Elizabeth II) very few doubt that she sincerely held that belief about service herself.
So yes, Money is both a right and an obligation.
[ I mean it's obviously an obligation if you think about money as promises 'the whole way down' as David Freund does to great effect with his 'digging dog' twitter meme, or if you just read what's written a Bank of England note 'I promise to pay the bearer'. But the point is, its not just an obligation! Let the dog keep digging, David! ]
Having said that, I do see sovereignty as the key problem for the wider political project of MMT. And while I can forgive Scott, MMT needs to address this issue. [ 3. ]
Although I must say, the pragmatist in me loves the progress MMT has made in the US in recent years. I mean we do seem to be heading for climate disaster and fascism. So imperfect alternatives are starting to look very appealing.
It's so great to read such challenging, heretical ideas about money. The Left needs them as much (if not more) than the Right. I'm also really grateful for Scott's brief dip into Heidegger's Being and Time. That book is sitting behind my head now as I type. I got it five years ago and marked it as a 'must read'. But each time I open it up I'm like 'Yikes!' and quickly put it back on the shelf.
Anyway, let me leave it there for my thoughts on Scott's brilliant book. Thank you for writing it, Scott!
Jacob Needleman's Money and the Meaning of Life
Unlike Being and Time which sits on my bookshelf demanding to know why it hasn't been read, Money and the Meaning of Life has been quietly biding its time since 2015. In fact, I forgot I had it and ordered a second copy which I've since given away to a friend.
This is a general reader book by an academic. It's got a narrative which takes place around a class taught by Needleman and a couple of his students. Basically, it's easy reading. But wise and thought provoking nonetheless. Again, sadly no time for a review. But heartily recommended for money nerds and normies alike.
It's like a spiritual practice guide to money, in a way. It conceptualizes 'the problem of money' as a problem of consciousness and it uses 'ancient wisdoms' to explore 'the dual nature of man'. So (what I'd call) a notion of ambivalence is ever-present in Needleman's book.
Running CoB I've encountered a few folks interested in (what I'm gonna call) Money Wellness? It'd be too easy to be cynical about this genre of money wisdom - gurus charging a fee for a class to make rich people feel better about being rich. But if pessimism is for lightweights then so is cynicism. I think Money Wellness might be a huge unexplored and very fertile territory for CoB.
Money & Death
At the Finance and Society's 'Intersections Conference' last September 2022, Sandy Hagar presented 'Capital as Death Denial'. Sandy's presentation considered the link between death denial (broadly defined), money and Financial Capitalism and drew on the work of my favourites Norman O Brown and Georges Bataille (among others). It was one of the papers in the session 'Financial Subjectivities' which felt like it was designed especially for me! (Other wonderful papers included Financialising the Eschaton by Amin Samman & Stefano Sgambati, and Finance and Paranoia by Fabian Muniesa).
Recently, Sandy was kind enough to send me a draft of a piece that expanded on the themes in his talk. Obviously, I'm not going to talk about the draft directly. But I do want to briefly mention a couple of general things about money, death and money burning, though.
John Crow and Crossbones have played a significant and magical role in how CoB has come into being. And key to that is the idea of 'bringing death into life'. I've tried at various points to conceptualize money burning as just that. You'll find in my writings many references to the notion of 'conscious or deliberate loss' and its power. I often use the phrase 'to re-establish sacrifice and loss against the dominance of exchange and gain' as an explainer for what CoB is about. For me, perhaps the most important thing is the visceral and experiential aspect of money burning - the feeling of loss. It's not quite death but maybe its a movement toward it!:-)
[There's links here to the 'outside of money' and the notions that union with the Absolute is achieved only through death and that Life - living - is a rupture. This is what Scott taught me about Heidegger's Being and Time!]
Perhaps as a result of getting older and going to funerals more often these days, the connection between Death and Money and our need to explore it, is increasingly dominant in my thought. Or maybe its a result of what Roger Hallam calls 'The Death Project' - his preferred term for the Climate Crisis.
Whichever, we need to find ways in which Death can be assimilated into life. Death denial surely has a role in civilization's refusal to countenance what is facing humanity through the Climate Crisis?
I remember back at the #ArtMoneyCrisis conference at Cambridge University in 2016, there were several papers from younger academics exploring the notion of Zombie Capitalism. Hollywood's prodigious output of this genre of movie had obviously captured their imagination. Although the Crisis of 2008 was still relatively fresh - inspiring some of the best work on money ever IMO (i.e. Graeber, & Dodd) - a sense of despondency was also setting in. (I remember feeling this despondency acutely at the inaugural Intersections Conference that took place later that year). Capitalism wouldn't die even with a stake through its heart. The youngsters seemed to understand this intuitively and so were drawn to artistic representations of these themes.
I wonder what would theme would arise at a similar conference today, seven years on? We seem to be approaching the climax of the movie now where all the evidence suggests civilisation is doomed because we haven't found a way to deal with that which will not die. What's the trick? [ Spoiler: it's money burning! Invest now! ]
The Ontology of Money Part II
One could, I suppose, introduce the idea of 'Finance'. One could argue that the stuff I talk about is all very well and good, but money as it exists today is inseparable from and wholly subsumed to Finance. And Finance is constituted by rules, regulations and laws.
Talking about Finance seems grown-up. It's adulting. It's real world. By contrast, enchantment with money's metaphysics seems like allowing oneself to indulge in child-like wonderment.
But then, just as being confronted by death makes us feel more alive, when crisis hits we all suddenly seem more aware that 'money is both foundation and product of Finance'. During the shock of 2008 people were asking 'What the hell even is money, anyway?'
But then the exhilaration of the crisis subsides and the adult work of feeding our families and paying our rent - or selling our luxury cars and cancelling our winter skiing trip - once more dominates day-to-day life. The transience, indeterminacy and instability of life - and the wonder of it - evident in the moment of crisis are once more absorbed into institutions and arrangements; into the rules, regulations, taboos, and ideologies that surround, 'border-off' and contain money. Money's inevitable return to indeterminacy, its state of flux, can be hidden away and forgotten about (until next time).
I've spoken/written before about the phrase that came to me watching the famous interview between Bill Drummond, Jimmy Cauty and Gay Byrne. The phrase that popped into my head without even wiping its feet was 'a certain moment of uncertainty'. I've struggled for a long time to figure out what this means. It seems to mean a lot.
Ostensibly, it refers to what Bill and Jimmy actually created when they burned a million quid. But like Derrida's notion of pure forgiveness, of 'forgiving the unforgivable', it is - as Derrida says - an impossibility. (I mention Derrida's phrase because money burning can be thought of as an act of pure forgiving - of giving forward without expectation of return).
Leaving aside the reasonable argument that Capitalism is in a permanent state of Crisis, I wonder if moments like 2008 - when, let us say, the boundaries of Crisis were extended to historically exceptional levels - are in a sense the mirror image of Bill and Jimmy's action? Instead of being a 'certain moment of uncertainty', the peaks of Capitalism's crises are 'uncertain moments of certainty'?
In other words, when 'all that is solid melts in air', when the ordered adult world of Finance dissolves, we are reduced once more to a child state of wonderment at the magical power of money and this bare life (as Agamben might say) becomes our new grounding. As the adult world crumbles, our perspective and the potentialities and possibilities of life are reborn.
[ Again, I've talked about this often (eg in The Money Burner's Manual) but a recurrent memory for me is the feeling I had holding a coin (an old penny) in my hand as a child and imagining its adventures. Its life. Animism or insight? The Jury is still out. ]
After CoB in 2021 my friend Charlie Waterhouse - co-founder of the Extinction Rebellion Art Group, responsible for the naming and identity of the movement, and one of the founders of the Brixton Pound - gave us a wonderful review. There's a great interview with Charlie here about his XR work. Here's what Charlie said about CoB;
"Church of Burn is a portal into a glorious world we’re not supposed to see. Where money’s power is revoked, reclaimed and reassigned. A sacrificial rite that rewrites our failing modern world. For once one has burnt money, what else is possible?"
As is his way, I think Charlie has beautifully captured so much of what I'm trying to get at generally with my work and what I've explored specifically in this post.
What frustrates me about so much work on money is the closing down of possibilities, the denial of mystery. There are very human reasons for this. We are faced with huge uncertainties which money represents (or manifests?) and we which want to contain. But this drive toward 'derisking' is precisely what's killing us, too. Everything is channelled through money. It is the nexus point of sex, death, life, war, famine, climate crisis, and everything else.
If I could change one thing about the way everyone thinks and talks about money it'd be to introduce a law which demanded that money be always regarded as a mystery not a puzzle.
If any academic or politician said something to the effect of 'Money is a puzzle to be solved' they'd be charged with heresy. I'm not sure what punishment I'd give them but I'm sure I can think of something - maybe burning 23% of their net worth? It'd be like theology in the middle ages. Say what you like but don't question the existence of God.
Sadly, I realise its an unworkable idea that might not actually fulfil its intention to do good.
I guess its a bit like Finance, when in a quest to do good, they introduce KYC and AML which just don't work to catch the bad guys. Or when they talk about 'sustainable finance' and end up just green washing. Or when they impose some puritan moral agenda under the guise of risk mitigation which just harms sex workers and folks (like me!) on the boundaries. (I have the double honour of having been banned by financial institutions for both my Sex stuff and my Money Burning stuff!).
The fact remains however that humility in face of money - and its immanent power - is both wise and necessary.
Last thought, I wonder if determinacy is what lends money it's thisness? Needleman said that money was a 'psychic reality'. And even though its not true I bet most people on Earth believe in their bones that money is gold. The solar flares of indeterminacy that erupt during Crisis serve to remind us that underneath its thisness, materiality and 'immediate knowability' money is also mystery. It may be that the one opposition that money cannot contain is the balance between puzzle and mystery. A true mystery is eternal. So a puzzle only ever manifests as appearance. Money can never fully be a puzzle, it can only appear wholly as such to those who allow themselves to succumb to hubris.
Some Personal News
Don't spread this around, but I'm facing redundancy from my day job. I'll know for sure in a couple of months, but if things work out it will be an enormous blessing. I've been working 6 day weeks since September 2022 in order to pay for my CoB adventures and it's killing me.
So redundancy would mean I could cut back on my 50 hours of minimum wage slavery each week and focus more on CoB. Basically, as far as CoB goes I'm at a crucial stage. Prior to writing my Joe Lycett essay I'd been having some brilliant conversations around design and branding with my friend Tom; thinking deeply about how to engage people around money burning, what it means and what or who CoB is. And the key thing is to get the ideas and personality clear so CoB can develop our internet and social media presence.
The minute I stop writing this piece I'm getting straight back to that.
However, I'd be lying if I didn't say the thought of doing a Phd hadn't entered my mind. I've thought about it in the past and my kids have pushed me especially hard in this direction, knowing I think that I'd enjoy it. My daughter was fortunate to get very generous funding. I've always been sceptical that they'd be any funding available for a project that is so 'out there' as mine. And comprise is not my greatest skill - especially when its something I care so deeply about.
And I guess its not just the random closure of my workplace... its also that I think maybe with this slightly expanded view of money (i.e. with determinacy) I have something that I might be able to knock into a coherent intellectual argument about the nature of money.
If any academic buddies have any advice about this little fantasy then please do get in touch privately.
I'll be back here to get into some hardcore money-thinking later in the year after I've done my CoB work.
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Notes & things that wouldn't fit in:
1. As stated, I picked up the notion of determinacy from Philip Goodchild. Sadly, because I've have so little time to read, I've not got further than a few pages into his latest work (which consists of three books on money and metaphysics). So I don't know how the notion of 'determinacy' plays out for him - I think he uses it about 'debt' rather than money, per se.
2. Somehow all the stuff in this section is related to subject/object metaphysics (and its creation and undoing). That's of course central to Simmel's work and to the best selling Philosophy book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - both of which (alongside Graeber's Value book) helped me distinguish between money and value, or at least isolate money from value. I guess one way to explore it would be to ask how human consciousness could realise a notion of determinacy in the face of indeterminacy. How could we go from experiencing our environment as a place of spirit to a resource to be exploited? Or how did we move from Animism to Polytheism/Monotheism (a la Freud). Subjectivism to objectivism. Solipsism to realism? How we could come up with the idea of the One and the Many (is Seaford right to suggest that currency played role?). Or basically how we could conceive of things by supposing they have value in themselves.
3. Tangentially related to all this is something going on right now. It's the annual #MintTheCoin debate. If you follow Rohan Grey and/or Nathan Tankus on Twitter you'll get how the coin is becoming totem around competing economic ideas dance. Rohan and Nathan are of course very much in favour of minting a trillion dollar platinum coin. I really want to write/think about this from a 'consciousness of money' perspective. The coin and the debate around it speak to centrality of 'the conception of money' in how we organise human activity. Both sides of #MintTheCoin believe that doing so will change our idea of what money is. MMT guys think that's good, others not. Whenever the debate comes around I'm reminded of this piece by Victoria Coren Mitchell. She's bemoaning the closure of her local Lloyds bank branch. She says: "Sure, the bean counters can save £££££s by locking doors, selling up and firing staff. Sure, most transactions can be done online. Sure, fewer of us are queuing up in person for day-to-day admin. But the existence of a local branch has a vital role, even if we never go in there: it’s key to the illusion that money is a thing. Money is not, of course, a thing; it’s an idea. But the illusion of thing-ness (which so nearly disintegrated when we caught that catastrophic glimpse behind the curtain in 2008) is vital to its desirability. Once we cease to desire it, the acquiescent balance of society is in grave danger. The pleasing physicality of banknotes, coins and cheque books is half gone already. The gold reserve’s been sold. If the bricks-and-mortar banks, counters and partition windows, paper forms and special pens go with them, there’ll be nothing left to money but numbers on a screen." Both #MintTheCoin and Bank Branch closures seem to bring with them the prospect of a 'top-down' reconceptualization of money. As Coren points out (and as Scott's Declarations considers in depth) money's thingyness seems wrapped up in our current relationship with it. The question for me to explore, I guess, would be what difference in affect is there between a top-down and a bottom-up reconceptualization? The idea - often so essential in the arts - that you want your audience to arrive at the conclusion themselves, really matters here. I reckon its much more powerful to have an individual experience the deep metaphysical and ontological issues that inhere to money through the visceral experience of ritual. Initial thoughts are that in terms of our individual and collective consciousness of money, top-down is reformation, bottom-up is revolution. Perhaps both is the best way forward?