Money Wisdom #519

 "Trying to root or weed out 'bad' or 'unhealthy' desires only scatters the seeds into darker corners, in which they grow unseen but certainly not unfelt. Conversely, trying to cultivate wholesome desires that we don't organically feel - or which we don't provide a proper context for - is simply a waste of time. In being more conscious of libidinal ecology, I am trying to advocate for a radical reframing of that constellation - desire, lust, love, intimacy - which gets us up in the morning (and at other times keeps us in bed long after we should have gone to work). This is not just a fancy way of promoting 'sex-positivity,' which is trapped in the mirror image of a general cultural 'sex negativity'. Rather, it is a call for us to realize that most of us already, in fact, need and desire an entirely different type of desire: one that does not unfold according to the speeds and rhythms of cybernetic time; one that does not treat people in transactional ways; one that sees outside the shared, fleecy blanket of the dyad; and one that pays homage to the environmental matrix that gave birth to it (the sounds, smells, textures, flavors, and so on). Such a desire - simultaneously centrifugal (in dispersing the ego throughout the world) and centripetal (in bringing the world inside the sensorium) - is not forever smiling, twirling and sighing [...] We will always be bumping our heads and bruising our hearts in the emotional contact sport of libidinal relations. This will never be a safe space. But if we want desire to keep existing in any humanoid form at all, a great reckoning has to take place, at every level; from the self, to the couple, to the family, to the workplace, to the electronic agora, and the international polis, stretched across the globe. We need to relearn desire both for ourselves (rather than be simply instructed what and how to feel, by branding experts) and for others (within a wider conspiracy of compassion, that refuses both narcissism and the bitter jouissance of self-sacrifice). 

Dominic Pettman, Peak Libido - Sex, Ecology and the Collapse of Desire (2021)

Money Wisdom #518

 "Roland Barthes makes at east two crucial points in his lecture series How We Live Together. The first is that while we have thought and written much about the individual qua mass society, and vice versa, we have historically paid scant attention to the important scale of the medium-size group. The school, the office, the monastery, the commune. Perhaps this blind-spot - which, after all, is where most of us spend our quotidian lives - is also an opportunity, when it comes to rethinking sociality as the basis for rethinking society itself. Bathe's other point is that those in power always begin by imposing a rhythm. There is thus a certain tyranny, albeit to different degrees, expressed in our motions and movements, our thoughts and actions, What if - together - we started at the level of the 'idiorhythmy': the singular counter-rhythm tailored to our own will and purpose? What if we consciously sought to recompose social relations according to a far less controlling, less relentless, and more imaginative logic, choreography and time signature?" 

Dominic Pettman, Peak Libido - Sex, Ecology and the Collapse of Desire (2021)

Money Wisdom #517

 "... the orange man's demonstrative ugliness somehow ironically masks the high-fructose aspirations that that global gangster, Capital, animates in all our breasts, albeit to different degrees.
   The temptation of the ethically inclined is thus to rise above this ever-expanding sewer of lust, and nurture what is considered wholesome or 'pure' in us instead. But this would be a negative and puritanical form of reaction, and would, in its way, 'let the terrorists win'. We must not succumb, either personally or publicly, to a pernicious and life-negating desiraphobia (which can, perversely, provide its own inverted simulation of erotic pleasure, without any of the sustenance). We must not retreat into defensive postures and emotional austerities. Old powerful white men do not care about your well-meaning composting drives, your progressive book clubs, your neo-Calvinist sublimations, or your libidinal austerity measures. They are not threatened by your politically nuanced sanctimony, for the simple reason that craven heedless hedonism will always triumph against it, so long as these are the bleak alternatives on offer. Instead, we should fight the corrupt pleasures with compassionate bliss bombs. (Com-passion being a form of collective affective intensity.) We must crash and sabotage the bunga bunga party. We must crash and sabotage the Eyes Wide Shut Orgy, in order to improvise less exclusive (and far more exotic) forms of sensual sociality."

Dominic Pettman, Peak Libido - Sex, Ecology and the Collapse of Desire (2021)

Money Wisdom #516

The strange irony of the concept of ecology in Western history is that while "nature" precedes all human activity by billions of years, the ecological concept is invented many millennia after economic thought.  In other words, we perennial moderns have been thinking about the regulation of wealth vis-a-viz oikos (the household) since we first distorted our tongues to form words. But we only expanded this notion to include the earth and the cosmos, in an explicit and self conscious way, in the nineteenth century, with Haeckel's coining of the term. Of course, this is a very Eurocentric narrative. But it is precisely this narrative that both shapes and limits thinking ecologically today, in the corridors of power (as well as the living rooms of the disenfranchised). It is as if "we" invented the term the moment at which nature "itself" threatened to truly disappear from under our feet. We can only think "ecologically" as a consequence, when we let go of profoundly romantic notions of (mother) nature. Which is to say that the belated coining of the term ecology signals the realization that we in the so-called West were very late to think about the material and vital surrounds as anything other than the picturesque background of culturally foregrounded activity. Nevertheless, this very modern concept - describing the deep temporality of our given milieu - allows us to reorientate ourselves to the very same, hopefully with a less hubristic and narcissistic attitude.   

Dominic Pettman Peak Libido (2021) p.15

Money Wisdom #515

..[N]ow, in our time, the problem of money has to be faced as a problem of consciousness, as a problem of the being of man in the universal world. It is more than just a psychological or social problem which one strives to correct in advance of attending to questions of the spirit. It has become the key to understanding the great purpose of human life and what, precisely, prevents us from participating in that great purpose. 

Because money is a problem that enters into the whole of human life, it cannot be dealt with in a piecemeal fashion on the level at which it presents itself - pragmatically, psychologically, or moralistically - anymore than one can escape from prison by visiting the prison psychologist or social worker and improving the conditions inside the prison walls.

Jacob Needleman Money and the Meaning of Life (1991) p.4

Money Wisdom #514

 "What makes the Roman Law conception of property - the basis of all legal systems today - unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit from a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will."

David Graeber & David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything (2021) p.161

Money Wisdom #513

"The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself. 

As Marx and Engels themselves observed in The Communist Manifesto, 

[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. 

Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics."

Mark Fisher Capitalist Realism - Is There No Alternative? (2009) p.8

Money Wisdom #512

"Capitalist ideology in general, Žižek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief - in the sense of inner subjective attitude - at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Žižek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal - we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads."

Mark Fisher Capitalist Realism - Is There No Alternative? (2009) p.17

Money Wisdom #511

 "Money has value only when immanent in circulation (payment or exchanges), but on the other hand seems to be a stable, value-embodying substance only as a transcendent entity, by being withheld from circulation, possessed. Circulation is necessarily communal, whereas possession is generally by the individual. Our thinkers (whether Greek or Indian) vary in the extent to which their cosmisation of money is of circulation (i.e. from a communal perspective) or of value (i.e. from an individual perspective). [We can] describe theses cosmisations in the descending order of their prioritisation of circulation by Herakleitos and ending with the extreme prioritisation of value by Parmenides. But each of the two essences of money (exchanged and possessed value) produces when projected onto the world an unacceptably one-sided account (Herakleitos excludes stable identity, Parmenides excludes motion and multiplicity). This presents an intellectual problem. But in practice money must both have value and the power to circulate: the two aspects interpenetrate. And so we shall see that in fact comisations of ciculation cannot exclude value and cosmisations of value cannot exclude circulation." 

Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.322

Money Wisdom #510

 "The single, invisible, homogeneous power that inheres in money is uniquely responsive to my will, and so occupies the boundary between internal and external space, closer to my inner self than are the objects I possess."

 Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.309

Money Wisdom #509

 "As for psychology and politics, a crucial part in Plato's account is played by the desire for money, which is - beyond even the unruly desires of the body - unlimited. That is, as recognised earlier by Solon, potentially disruptive of the polis. Plato recognises that it is also potentially disruptive of psuchë. The two superior parts of the psuchë - the rational and the spirited - will, he says, always preside over the third, appetitive part, 'which is most of the psuchë in each person and by nature most insatiable for money'. It must be controlled by the rational philosophic part of the psuchë, just as in the polis the money-making class must be controlled by the class of philosophers. But the appetitive and money-loving element may dominate the inner self. Socrates in the Apology contrasts maximising wealth with perfecting the psuchë.

Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.302

Money Wisdom #508

 "The ideal entities having shed matter through the process of abstraction are not in a direct sense part of the empirical world... the ideal entities of the cultural and religious world are made part of the self, or, with other words, they transform the self in accordance with their nature."

Cavallin (2013) p.96 quoted in Richard Seaford
The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.287 

Money Wisdom #507

 "...the first substance to function simultaneously as a general measure of value, a general means of payment and of exchange and general store of value was the coined money that first became generally used early in sixth-century BCE Ionia, of which the commercial centre was Miletos. And so the revolution in thought marked by presocratic cosmology occurred at exactly the same time and in exactly the same place as the first society in history to be pervasively monetised."

 Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.253 

Money Wisdom #506

 "Herakleitean fire and karma reifying projections (cosmisations) of - or constructed from - (inter alia) money, which is no merely a metaphor, a way of illustrating karma and Herakleitean fire but a component of them; and this is why money and karma (and money and Herakleitean fire) came into being roughly simultaneously and in the same place. It can not emphasised too strongly that I am not proposing the reduction of karma to money... ...I suggest merely that one of the factors in the emergence of the core concept in northern India from the middle of the first millennium was the simultaneous advent there of monetisation."

Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.208 

Money Wisdom #505

"Sometimes confused with poststructuralism, libidinal economy represents an attempt to fuse psychoanalysis with political economy. The phrase derives from Freud’s theory of psychical energy, or 'libido', but is closely linked to the reception of Nietzsche and Freud in France during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Early key texts by George Bataille (1991) and Pierre Klossowski (2017) were followed by a wave of further works during the 1970s, chief among them being Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) and Libidinal Economy (Lyotard 1993). Inspired by the political events of 1968, the thrust of such works was to break down the artificial walls between psychoanalysis and political economy, to reveal inner psychic life and capitalist history as two sides of the same coin, and in so doing, to reveal how capital organises libidinal flows and produces a particular historical configuration of desire.''

Amin Samman & Ronen Palan Systemic Unreason: A Psychic History of States and Corporations in Global Society Vol 37 2023 Issue 3

Footnote

Money Wisdom #504

 "What the dreamer values about being a god or king is aloneness in the world: 'I am alone in this world! I am all!' The endpoint of monetised individualism is the individual ownership of everything, reflected in the Indian texts as the absorption of everything into the self. But this imagined aloneness is most easily achieved by severing all ties, as a wandering renouncer. The renouncer follows the logic attributed to Alexander the Great, who remarked that - were he not Alexander - he would be Diogenes (the Cynic renouncer)."

Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.135 

Determinacy, GPT4, Declarations of Dependence, Money, Death and the Meaning of Life

 

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.

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