Review of 'Politics of Divination' by Joshua Ramey

Here's my review of Joshua Ramey's Politics of Divination. It's here on Amazon - as always a 'helpful' vote would be very much appreciated if its not too much trouble. I mean, you're going to be ordering the book, aren't you? Coz you should! Xx



A brilliant and exciting work proposing that neoliberalism is a mutated form of Divination.


"This is a brilliant and exciting book. It proposes that neoliberalism is a vast, unavowed and perverted form of divination.

It's not an easy read. Ramey's writing style reminds me of David Graeber in that he juxtaposes conflicting ideas and then tracks a nuanced path through them to give exposition and support to his thesis - all in one sentence. However, Ramey doesn't yet have as good a feel for his reader as Graeber. It's difficult to get a sense of who Ramey is from this work. Those long sentences can become a little wearing. Anecdotes are sparse - if fact I'm not sure there are any, at all - and the hyper-rationality, obvious concern with complete logical consistency in every statement, and constant referencing have a deleterious effect on the rhythm of the book. It's just feels a little unfriendly and cold. Of course, my criticism of his style will be viewed by many as affirmation of a positive trait; academic writing seeking objectivity tends to read like this - as explicitly rational. This brings me to a wider point.

Ramey's dissection of Hayek is excellent. He exposes the paradoxes at the heart of neoliberal ideas. But all the while he relies on essentially the same methodology as Hayek does in say, The Constitution of Liberty. Ramey defines his terms in detail. He pulls arguments apart. He assesses their consistency and exposes their assumptions and then recasts them within the terms of his central insight - which is that were are living in a social world of 'repressed' (my term) divination. There is no mysticism. There is no explicit revision or clear statement of metaphysics. There is just Ramey's consistent, rational, and logical progression. Rational argument is his methodology - and his methodology then becomes (in a sense and by default) his metaphysical commitment. And yet, the book itself gives the lie to this. As Hayek said 'rationality is wrong'. I think, ultimately, Ramey agrees with Hayek on this key point.

If the lesson from Politics of Divination is that it should not have been written so exclusively within the bounds of the rational, then Ramey is in good company. Bataille famously claimed that his masterwork on economy The Accursed Share should not have written at all, if he'd adhered to its conclusion. Bataille was at the back of my mind reading Ramey. I don't feel Ramey really got under the skin of sovereignty and its connection to ritual and sacrifice. And this was a significant omission given his focus on Divination as being a ritual rite deeply ingrained in what it is to be a human being. Ramey's focus on 'dividuals' in his concluding section - which conceives of individuals as an inherently social formation ('contingently organized bundles of affordances') - would have been more strongly challenged by Bataille's conception of sovereignty, than it was by contrasting 'dividuals' to a  conception of  'homo economicus'. I also think that Ramey could have considered a little more the dangers of writing about rituals in functionalist terms. Bringing Bataille in would have created a bulwark against this 'functional' mode of thinking. It was odd then, in the end, that Ramey chose to close his book by referencing Bataille (through the writing of Randy Martin).

My most precise criticism of, and frustration with, Politics of Divination has to do with money. I find it hard to forgive Ramey for not writing about money more extensively. Firstly, his omission of money places him in the company of mainstream economics and Hayek. Money is seen by both as effectively a product of the market - a just a pure medium for price. Is that what Ramey believes? I don't know. I suspect he thinks differently because he quotes (and then fails to expand upon) Samuel Weber's claim that in capitalism the money form is 'spiritualized' - like an immortal, invisible, omnipresent soul. Ramey also fails to point out - when he conflates Friedman and Hayek's thoughts under the 'neoliberal' banner - that Hayek and Friedman had very different ideas about money. Their conception of money was, perhaps, the thing that most distinguished them from one another. Friedman was a moneterist, Hayek was not. This fissure in neoliberal thinking demanded a exploration within the terms of Ramey's thesis, which it was not given.

It would also have been interesting to develop arguments about money's relation to price-making in the excellent chapter on probability. Probability is a very hard subject to write about with clarity, and Ramey does well. It's a pity that he didn't extend the ideas from Ayache about a derivative price being only 'accidentally numeric' and fundamentally, a narrative statement about belief. Because this has interesting implications about the relationship between narrative - and therefore thought - and money.

But of course, my criticisms (of what Ramey omits) arise only because of the deep insight, that Ramey gives expression to, in his work. I have no hesitation in recommending this book as an important contribution to our understanding of economy. It opens up new areas of thought about money, economy and their relationship to ritual, time and chance. It's a superb original work by a brilliant thinker."

Review of 'The Wisdom of Money' by Pascal Bruckner

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

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

Link to Amazon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of 'Making Money' by Ole Bjerg

Here is my first book review in a long time. Soooo busy last year with shenanigans (good shenanigans, obvs). Still, it's nice to get back into reading, especially with a book like this. Anyway if my review symbolizes your desire in a way that allows your imagination to create a reality out of clicking 'like' on Amazon, do please pop over there commence your actualization within this timespace materiality. Ta, muchly. x

4 stars - A Zizekian analysis of money and the financial system.

This book sat on my bookshelf for a year before I got round to reading it. I was a little worried after an initial skim through, that its focus would be too much on the financial system and not enough on money, itself. I found my fears to be both founded and unfounded.

Bjerg's analysis builds upon Zizek and so money is conceptualized accordingly as a fundamental 'lack'. Bjerg shares Graeber's view that money is 'nothing really'. This being so, Bjerg's engagement with the financial system is necessary for him to begin to explain how we 'make money' (in the sense of how the phenomenon of money arises, emerges or is constructed) as a way of probing money's ontology (or lack of it). Unlike Graeber, who was satisfied with subsuming money to debt, Bjerg doesn't shy away from a philosophical engagement with the idea of 'nothingness' and how it can become constitutive of money. And this is very much to his credit.

By invoking Zizek, Bjerg becomes indebted to Lacan (and this is acknowledged). This means that Bjerg's analysis relies heavily on a notion of 'desire'. And although Bjerg goes some way to philosophically engaging with 'desire', in the way that he does with 'nothingness' and money, his exposition of 'desire' is not as effective.

On one level this is because of a failure to explore the metaphysical commitment to the unconscious that underscores psychoanalysis, itself. Specifically, Bjerg fails to elucidate the proposition of a unconscious life as essentially a metaphysical commitment that can never be proved. This has epistemological implications (that the unconscious cannot be 'proven' makes all knowledge less certain). In Bjerg's defense, although his lack of consideration of the unconscious makes it difficult to work out what he thinks 'desire' really is, he does go much further than most in respect of 'money'. Here he doesn't tackle the unconscious directly, but he does talk in philosophical terms about 'known unknowns' (which is a decent characterization of the unconscious) and he introduces Heidegger's notion of Seinsvergessenheit very early on in the book (this describes 'the forgetfulness of Being' - that our thinking takes place within a distinct landscape which is invisible to us). All this is to be commended.

However on a second level exists an even more fundamental problem which is about Value. I'll take a slightly circuitous route to explain why this problem is so fundamental and how not recognizing it impacts on Bjerg's work.

A book I was surprised to find un-referenced in Making Money was John-Joseph Goux's Symbolic Economies. I was surprised because Goux's work draws directly on Lacan, and so uses the same theoretical framework of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. The critique of Goux's work by Mark C. Taylor is telling and can be applied to Bjerg too. Both Goux and Bjerg seem to rely on a conception of Value that is fundamentally Neitzschean: this says that nature is valueless, and that it is we who bestow Value upon nature. Taylor, conversely, is a theologian. My reading of his critique is that such a conception of Value is necessarily ideological. For the theologian the ultimate Value is extant within God; Value comes from above, not below. Of course, there is no way to know which is true. What is important is to recognize that both opposing notions of Value are ideological. If you choose to make a commitment to one or the other, you should do so explicitly so as to give exposition to your commitment's impact on your conceptualizations and arguments. Bjerg fails to do this.

Ultimately this leads us to a final chapter that seems to assume the author and the reader share a unity of moral outlook. But we arrive there but without any explanation of how this unity - this conception of 'the good' or of some ultimate Value - has arisen. If Value is created a-fresh in each moment by our desires flowing from the imaginary through the symbolic to the real and back again, how does any enduring and universal morality arise? Bjerg provides no answer. If it's not God, then what draws us to this shared sense of morality. What makes morality self-evident?

Bjerg's unwillingness to explore these questions of moral philosophy actually shows up quite well in what is otherwise a brilliant and elucidating thought experiment. He creates a story of an imaginary counterfeiter whose loans of fake currency nevertheless create real prosperity within his town. Bjerg uses this as a means to explore relations within the creation of credit money. What he doesn't do is explore the moral questions. This is frustrating because a brief encounter with Derrida's work on Baudelaire (which is about the morality of the counterfeit) may have opened up a vista for exploration which would have given Bjerg a moral or ethical subtext making the statements of his final chapter (about our revolutionary potential) even more powerful.

Moving on from this lack of clear exposition around Value and his avoidance of moral philosophy, I find Bjerg could also - like most other writers on money - have better developed a distinction between money and currency. He does distinguish between various forms of money according to how they are created within the financial system. But the most basic and common of distinctions 'money & currency' isn't mentioned. He instead adopts Zelizer's approach of talking about 'monies' and so misses the opportunity to float money off into the Mind and allow currency to sink down into the material world. Making such a distinction might have enabled a more productive engagement with psychoanalytical ideas, and helped create a watershed between reason and desire.

This brings me onto a point about 'circulation'; I felt that the idea of money flowing around the financial system wasn't really examined sufficiently. Money, as I'm sure Bjerg is aware, does not flow, it is emitted. This has psychoanalytical and temporal implications which were not drawn out, and so we fall back into the same economic metaphor (of money flowing around a system like blood through a body, or water in a Moniac machine.)

As I'm sure you can tell, my criticism of this work focuses on what Making Money could have been, rather than what it was. This is a little unfair of me, although perhaps it shows that Bjerg's book inspired me to think about what he was saying. I would like though to redress the balance a little and end this review by making a few more explicitly positive statements. Bjerg is brilliant at analogies, metaphors and thought experiments. My favorite concerns the earth and moon orbiting around the 'barycentre' and financialization being akin to an increase in the moon's gravitational pull. I should also say that, despite my earlier criticism, I very much enjoyed his final chapter. As always with academics I was pleased that he took the risk of speaking his mind, and showing us a little of how he feels as well as thinks. Making Money is a book that works very well within its own terms. It is clearly written and keeps up a good pace, even when it's talking about the financial system, which is the point where I often glaze over in my reading on money. It's fantastic that scholars such as Ole Bjerg (and Noam Yuran whose 'What Money Wants' is similarly Zizekian and desire-based) are writing books that directly challenge mainstream functionalist accounts of the nature of money. And I have no hesitation in recommending Bjerg's book.

My Review of Mark C Taylor's 'Confidence Games'

This review appears on amazon here so if it immanentizes your eschaton do be a dear, pop over there and hit the like button. This van-driving philosopher-of-money really appreciates those little one-click ego-boosts, they really help get him through the day. Thank you most kindly.

Religion never goes away. It just takes on new forms.

"For a good deal of this book I speculated that a five star review seemed a certain outcome. I've ended up giving it four. If it were possible with Amazon's star system, I'd give it four and a half. The half-star loss relates to the divide between Taylor's exposition of theory and his application of theory.

In his exposition of theory Taylor delves in to the minds of the most exciting and perceptive writers on money in the last hundred years or so; Georg Simmel, Georges Bataille, Norman O Brown, and Marc Shell are my among personal favorites. Taylor also gives as clear an exposition of the philosophy of Hegel as I believe is possible. On his home ground of the philosophy of religion and in explaining the various strands of theology, Taylor in a magnificently clear writer. For me, the general picture of money that he paints in the book - that metaphysical ideas about Being underlie philosophical theories, which in turn underlie a further layer of economic theories, about money - is uncontroversial and irrefutable, although simultaneously largely ignored or forgotten by mainstream thought.

However when he applies those ideas and theories to create a financial and economic history, the book falters just a touch. It's certainly as good as most things I've read, and in many respects (largely because of his grasp of theology) much better. But it just didn't quite chime for me. The financial and economic histories that dominate the middle section of the book seem like a literature review that has too narrow a focus.. To say I was disappointed would be overstating it - this is still a brilliant book of exceptionally clarity given the complexity of its subject - but what I felt was that he didn't quite manage to deliver on what he (implicitly) promises. The beginning of the book situates the reader quite intimately within Taylor's life. It is written as a response to his young son's question to him after the 1987 stock market crash; 'Where did all the money go?' And although Taylor does reference one of his own financial adventures, as a reader I felt a little short changed in terms of an intimacy with Taylor himself. If the book had been a conversation, I'd have stopped him halfway through and said 'Yeah, but what do *you* think? What does money mean to you?'

Perhaps a more grounded criticism than the book's lack of intimacy could be leveled against Taylor's fluid use of the terms money, currency, finance, capital etc. They tended to meld into one another without a proper attempt to delineate, or at least describe each phenomena in terms of their differences to one another, This is a common problem with work on money. It's just a little surprising here, because Taylor seems so interested in the relation between language and money. For example, near the end of the book he gives a brilliant and persuasive dissection of the etymology of 'speculate'. One of Taylor's key notions can be summed up in the psychoanalytical phrase 'the return of the repressed' - or perhaps in philosophical terms the Nietzschean 'eternal return of the eversame'. He is right to highlight these ideas especially in relation to money which has a particularly mysterious relation to time and space.

In relation to these ideas. Taylor makes the key point that religion is not 'replaced' by art or capitalism, but rather merely 'displaced' and that each of them continue to work through one another. However, I'm not sure he manages to escape framing reality in evolutionary perspective - especially when he moves from the exposition of theory to its application. I think that he may have been helped if he could have teased apart money (the idea, outside time and space) and its representations as currency, capital, finance etc (the manifestations of the idea within time and space). A final niggling criticism might be his use of William Gaddis's novel as the theme to link the book together. It felt a little tagged on, rather than organic or intrinsic to the run of the text.

Often in my reviews I tend to criticize rather than praise. So to redress the balance a little I want to end on a more positive note. I was pleased to see him bringing together the work of Freud and Simmel. This is something few academics have done despite, what seem to me, the obvious affinities between their work. Even now, a decade or so after the publication of Confidence Games, and amidst a surge in interest in the brilliant 'Philosophy of Money' by Simmel, there is little written about what is shared in the thought of Freud and Simmel.

'Confidence Games' would be a book I'd put on every Economics 101 course. Making it required reading for economics students would reveal to them what lies underneath the surface of their area of study. Thinkers like Taylor (I could mention here Joel Kaye too) draw out the theological roots of economic analysis. Its to the detriment of the academic understanding of money that thinkers like Taylor and Phillip Goodchild (Theology of Money) are, for the most part, ignored by mainstream economic thought. This is especially true here in the UK where the theological perspective is often treated with some derision even by the broader social sciences (its only really in Literature studies that such works find a home). I have quite a large collection of books on money, and Taylor and Goodchild appear in no more than a couple of bibliographies. In the two best, most recent books on money - Dodd's 'The Social Life of Money' (2014) and Graeber's 'Debt' (2010) - their names and work are entirely absent. This is no criticism of Dodd or Graeber, it merely indicates that there is a gulf between studies of the social, and studies of the divine, that needs to be bridged.

Finally, as proof positive that Taylor has hit a home run with me (despite his mere four stars - he's in the best of company, I gave Norman O Brown's Life Against Death four stars too!!) I've added 'About Religion' to my bookshelf and I'm very much looking forward to reading a book by Taylor where he's writing on home ground. "

Jean-Joseph Goux Versus Mark C. Taylor

I've just read Numismatics an essay which forms the first chapter of Jean-Joseph Goux's Symbolic Economies. It started out life as essay written amidst the turmoil and revolution of Paris in May 1968 which was to be presented as a public lecture for the famous French literary quarterly review Tel Quel. Rather joyfully for me the date of the lecture was 23rd October 1968 (there was another one the following week on the 30th). I'm not going to offer a review of the essay or book here, now. I definitely recommend reading the essay, though (not finished the book, yet). Despite the fact that I found it hard going, I felt an affinity with Goux - it's not that I agree with his conclusions 100%, but his thinking certainly resonates with my own. I remember feeling a kinship with Goux's vision when I read the other of his essays I have on my shelf - Pleasure and Pain: At the Crossroads of Psychoanalysis and the Political Economy from Loaded Subjects (the collection of essays based on contributions to the 2010 conference on Psychoanalysis, Money and the Economy hosted by the Freud Museum at Birkbeck College)

Anyway, I just wanted to briefly offer you three things here. I think they might help give an insight into these psychoanalytical modes of thinking about money (and everything else). It's just two tables and one note.

This is from Numismatics - typically no title or direct reference is offered in the text. In the later essays in Symbolic Economies, Goux does start to bring in something akin to mathematical symbols to give some explicit 'structuration' to his psychoanalytical cosmology. But I think this table is an early attempt to a mapping of his metaphysics or psycho-verse. (The title I gave it when I tweeted it out was 'Goux's Registers of Production & Circulation'

I'm not sure why, but after spending some time trying to make sense out of Goux's map, I picked up one of my 'unread, must-read books'  - Mark C Taylor's Confidence Games. Taylor is someone I've come across through pursuing theological ideas around money. I noticed that whenever I read any theological analysis of money, Taylor's name was in the mix so I picked up his Confidence Games and About Religion. I've dipped in, and they do look excellent. Anyway, it turns out that Taylor has a similar map or 'table of registers'. 

And looking in the notes to Confidence Games (p.357-8) I found the following in which Taylor directly contrasts his own work with Goux's. 

"12. In his influential work, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, Jean-Joseph Goux uses the principles of Lacanian psychoanalysis to frame an interpretation of exchange. He identifies four forms of value: elementary or accidental form, total or extended form, general form, and money form. While these categories bear a certain resemblance to the three types of theology of culture I have described (see the table Monistic, Dualistic, Complex - Jon), the preoccupation with bringing together Marx and Freud, which Goux shares with so many postwar European intellectuals (not to mention the American [!] Norman O Brown - Jon), limits the value of his analysis. There is a significant difference between the trajectory Goux plots and the one I am suggesting. For Goux, there is a movement from duality (reciprocal exchange) through multiplicity (generalized exchange) to unity (general equivalent). In contrast to this, I am proposing a scheme that moves from unity through duality to differential complexity. Goux's misleading argument on this point is at least in part the result of his lack of appreciation for the subtleties of Western religious and theological traditions. Finally, while he suggests the importance of what he describes as 'a nonphallocentric, noncentralized conception, as yet unconceived, of a network, a polynodial, nonrepresentative organization' in the context of his discussion of Bataille's effort to move 'beyond the formation of monocephalous societies,' he does not develop the implications of this potential insight.' "

Taylor's note has me in two minds.

He echoes my own thought about, not just Goux, but so much that is implicit in writing on money; the Value question. I've referred to my conception of value as 'Value Monism' and contrasted this with a Nietzschean idea of values - the idea that value is a creation of the 'price-making' mind of man and that there are many values. Taylor seems here - as does much theological work for obvious reasons - to be in accord with a notion of 'value monism'.

However, I think Taylor over emphasizes the weight Goux gives in his work to the relation between value and exchange. Goux's focus is on production and circulation and on commodity and money. Goux says that philosophical oppositions are summed up in the opposition between money and commodities. He quotes Marx explicitly as saying that 'the value of a commodity is the measure of the attraction it exerts upon all the other elements of material wealth'. I noticed Goux's lack of emphasis on exchange - or perhaps his sublimation of exchange to mean 'all interaction' -  because I was thinking about Simmel whilst reading him, wondering if he was going to be bought into Goux's argument. Two points here. First, no criticism of Goux for not mentioning Simmel - he was only 25 !! when he wrote the first draft of Numismatics. Second, as Simmel himself tries to elucidate, the relation between value and exchange is a not straightforward causal 'exchange creates value' one (see this quote from Simmel) and I don't think Goux really presented it in the way Taylor summarized it. Taylor seems to be imposing a crude Marxian idea of commodity money on Goux (who himself shows us that actually Marx's ideas weren't limited to the crude 'money came from commodity' notion that is most often attributed to him).

But the contrast with Taylor and Goux is very interesting and might be illuminating (hence I thought I best post about it). What I'm very interested in at the moment (and what in part I'm writing about) is how there is an evolutionary structuration (that word is Goux's influence upon me) in writing on money and value (and much else besides). This structuration is rarely made explicit. Both the tables that Goux & Taylor offer seem to be attempts to either uncover or give form to some deep structure that is presently invisible to us. But both seem to rely on a notion that processes unfold within time. This is what I'm interested in and what I'm trying to 'pick apart' in my work.

(In the next essay in Symbolic Economies Goux seems to be heading in a similar direction too - the next yet-to-read chapter is called History and the Unconscious. Noam Yuran also has an interesting take on these historiograhic issues in What Money Wants. Norman O Brown of course has lots to say about this. Lacan marks up REPETITION as a fundamental of psychonalysis and I think maybe conceptualizing in these sorts of terms - within the Nietzschean notion of the eternal return of the eversame - maybe the best bet to escape a temporal structuration of the psychical domain of money.)

Review of Stranger Than We Can Imagine by John Higgs

This review appears here on amazon.co.uk and here (update when it appears) on amazon.com. If it puts the omph in your omphalos, please do pop over there and click the like button.

An Exquisitely Crafted Perspective on the C20th

The scale and scope of what Higgs presents us with in this book is belied by its easy reading.

It reminded me a little of Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' in that Higgs's writing manages to combine breadth and depth without being heavy or obtuse. Key to this, is his choice of motif. As well as the recurrent theme of perspectivism (or what readers of Higgs's brilliant KLF book might prefer to call multiple-model agnosticism), the motif of 'the omphalos' acts for the book as it did in the ancient world, as the 'axis mundi' (or, centre of the world). Higgs's history of the C20th revolves around several often interrelated and seemingly solid and concrete ideas; certainties of science, belief, social order, and culture which bedrocked our conception of the world at particular points in the C20th. As the narrative seamlessly morphs from the destruction of one omphalos to the creation of another, the reader perceives a sense of a movement between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. That perception of movement acts to challenge the polarizing dynamic of dualism so inherent to our Western thought. This appreciation of the meaning of the movement itself, rather than a blinkered and functional view of where the movement takes us, also serves to help Higgs avoid the awful phrase that I most dread seeing in any historical treatment of the currents of thought, science and culture ; 'We now know'.

That Higgs considers his subjects contextually, with an empathy for the contemporary perspectives - and because of his tacit challenge to dualism - any quibbles one has with him, over the details and points of focus of his historical gaze, tend fizzle out. With such a huge landscape to map out, there are bound to be moments where his perspective will not coincide with your own [for me it was his general treatment of Money and the specific chapter on Sex]. But that your own and Higgs's ideas differ, does not make them incompatible within the larger framework. This isn't to say that anything goes. The reader still gets a sense of who Higgs is, what he believes, and a feeling for his moral compass, his sense of humour and his humanity. But rather, it says that our models of the world are always and necessarily limited. Some are better than others, of course. The real danger lies though, in straitjacketing ourselves within one particular set of ideas, rather than in those ideas being right or wrong. Over time, it seems pretty likely that actually they will be regarded as wrong at some point.

Fans of Higgs's KLF book, and those persuaded to the book by Alan Moore's endorsement, might wonder quite how much magical thinking permeates it. The only overt passage that springs to mind is very near the end where Higgs applies a concept from Alchemy to explain some ideas about reductionism and holism, and how it is that the isolating drive to individualism can conclude in its counterpoint - the creation of a network society. I think though, the influences of Chaos Magic and Robert Anton Wilson run throughout the book all the same. By not being laid bare within the body of the text they are perhaps, presented in their best light - that is, hidden in the shadows. I think this is actually helpful for general reader. The exigencies of offering an overt explanation of magical thinking would've created too much dissonance, especially for readers with a bent towards materialism and techno-scientific explanations of reality. And I expect, there will be many such readers. Higgs explanations of relativity, chaos theory and in particular his brilliant metaphor for quantum mechanics (the imagined media reaction to Vladimir Putin punching a kangaroo) will really appeal to this audience. But I also expect those alternative ways of thinking that have influenced Higgs himself, will take seed quietly within the mind of every reader.

In a way, this book is a bit like an Adam Curtis documentary - but whereas Curtis has sounds and pictures to get across more complex ideas than are expressed in his simple narrative, Higgs somehow manages to do that trick with words only and still made it read easy. It's a truly impressive book. And I can't think of anyone I know who wouldn't thoroughly enjoy it.

(Nearly) First View of Museum Des Geldes I & II

These catalogues arrived a month apart. I hadn't realized there were two of them and so initially ordered the wrong one. They're quite expensive costing around £30 each especially when, like me, one can't speak or read German. I made this 'first view' video with the intention of sticking it at the end of an essay I'm writing. But writing-wise things have taken a different turn so I'm not going to use it like that.

I didn't want to waste it, though. I know watching it would have been useful to me before I spent my £60. Plus, I'm keen to make a bit more use of video etc on my blog. And the 'first view' thing has worked for me as a viewer on some of the weird music I like, so this serves a bit of an experiment to see if it works for obscure foreign language art-money catalogues.

My Review of 'Love's Body' by Norman O Brown

I went straight from Bataille to Brown. I finished reading Love's Body a couple of weeks back. So just giving it time to sink in. Everything I read now seems a bit pedestrian after the Dionysian boys. Anyway, if my review makes you drunk with the joy of life do head on over to Amazon and ritually click the 'Was this review helpful to you? YES!' button like a madman.

"A wondrous exploration of the silent language of the unconscious

This is a stunning and unique work. Built around sixteen themes Brown provides no central narrative, but instead through relatively short sections averaging, I'd guess, between 100 and 200 words he creates a transcendental effect. A review on the US site rather aptly describes it as 'Philosophy as a fever dream'. It's philosophy laced with poetry; psychomagic invocation of the intellect.

I'd love to able to say that any reader should jump straight into it, but I'm not sure that'd be great advice. Certainly I'd recommend reading Life Against Death prior to Love's Body if you're not too sure of your psychoanalysis and philosophy. I would love to be wrong about this. There is a mystical element to the work that perhaps some readers might be able to connect to regardless. But generally, if you're approaching it on an intellectual level, work your way up to it. I think if you can approach it with a degree of intellectual confidence - and an open mind - you'll be more likely to enjoy the experience. At it's best I found it simultaneously profound and hypnotic.

Don't confuse this description of my reading experience with Brown's academic credibility, though. He is a very serious scholar (and hugely overlooked in my view). Even though Love's Body has this dream-like quality, I still find more solid ground in it than in much European postmodern writing. The full expression and exploration of psychoanalytical ideas (Freud, Klein, Ferenczi - Jung is not mentioned) would certainly put off anyone grounded in a materialist ontology. They even made me grimace at points. But somehow the totality of the work gets across that these uncomfortable words, about how polymorphous perversity develops into sexual desire directed by familial relations, are an attempt to reach toward a kind of silent language that mediates unconscious processes. And moreover, that its not just the flows of sexual energy but its also the silent language, that's real.

I came to appreciate that, more through reading this work than any other. And I suspect that has less to do with intellectual journey and more to do with what is somehow invoked by it's other more magical qualities of tone and tempo and rhythm and structure. I'm never going to convince any skeptical materialists of this, nor of the value of psychoanalytical thought and existentialist philosophy generally and how it offers a rich and meaningful understanding of what it is to be. But hey, fuck 'em. I loved it."

My Review of What Money Wants by Noam Yuran

Here you go then. As ever if my review does provoke the desire, make sure it doesn't take away the performance and do click the like button here . (I don't remember that many Shakespeare quotes but I can remember one related to booze and erectile dysfunction - its from the Scottish play as my theatrical friends would say).

Putting desire at the heart of some exciting original - but not wholly unique - ideas about money

"When Noam sits at home watching crap TV, I bet he keeps pencil and paper handy and excitedly scribbles down notes about how some beer advert, or an episode of Sex in the City, mirrors the socio-economic circumstances through which we create our history.

It's great that books like this are being published these days. The heady mix of ontology, psychoanalysis, social theory and money doesn't make Yuran's efforts to elucidate his 'economy of desire' all that easy to understand. However, because he occasionally grounds it in mundane examples he manages to take the reader with him as he explores some difficult and contradictory territory. All those hours watching crap TV weren't wasted. I'll come back to waste'. It's an important idea for Yuran.

There are indeed many difficulties in understanding Yuran's thesis. First up is his concept of desire. Bravely, and I think rightly, he chooses not to define the term too tightly. But the effect of this is to make his overall metaphysical picture hard to get hold of. To compensate Yuran subsumes us in talk of subject and object with desire as seemingly able to flit between these two poles. And then - somehow - the poles themselves are able to fold into one another so that an object has a kernel of subjective desire. I'm sure if you're used to talking in these terms - as Yuran plainly is - understanding the nuances of his theory is made easier by his use of subject/object metaphysics. And - as Simmel understood - money and value seem to have a special relationship to the subjective and the objective. Yuran's focus on them, and use of them, is fair enough then. But certainly for me personally, I found those sections the hardest going. He cites Žižek quite a bit.

Another element in Yuran's work is how he thinks about history and 'the truth' of history and facts. This is important not only in and of itself - he contrasts Marx's dialectical history with Veblen's evolutionary history - but because it directly relates to his conceptualization of money as desire. Money as desire is that which has persisted through change. And persistence through change is what constitutes history - when we seek the historical narrative, we are looking for something immovable within the flux of time. In this sense then, Money is outside time.

Yuran is very critical of the notion of utility. There is he says 'something fundamentally wrong with it'. He also ties this in to criticism of behavioral economics and the general way that economics tends to refract everything it observes through its own particular set of cosmological conceptions. I was cheering at this point. There were a few mentions of money's relation to secrecy and invisibility that I found very interesting and I wish he'd expanded on. Often academics cite Marc Shell's brilliant work on this, but although Yuran does cite Shell a few times its not so much in relation to these themes.

I'd give this book 4.5 stars if I could. I settled on four because, although there is some original thought and clear writing, there were points when it was struggling to maintain 3 stars for me. Yuran cites Zelizer (I gave her 'The Social Meaning of Money' an overly harsh review) but he fails to follow through Zelizer's work. Some ten years or so after The Social Meaning of Money was published, Zelizer was an early protagonist in an important debate about how the terms money and currency should be distinguished within academia. Yuran fails to make any distinction between them, nor does he mention the debate. This is a pity because I think doing so might have allowed him to separate out the idea of money from the empirical reality of currency. Alternatively, he might have drawn on Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between payment and finance money. This would been particularly appropriate given that desire is so central to their work. Whichever distinction he'd chosen and however basic it was, applying it would have enabled Yuran to tell his story more easily, I think. It certainly would have helped me.

The other author that I kept expecting to see pop up, but who never did, was James Buchan. He wrote 'Frozen Desire - The Meaning of Money' back in 1997. Oddly Buchan's book was mentioned in the most glowing terms by Keith Hart in Money in an Unequal World; Hart wrote the forward to Yuran's book. But again, Yuran doesn't mention it. I said that not defining 'desire' too tightly was a fair thing to do but it might have helped me understand a little better if Yuran had put Buchan, Deleuze and Guattri in his picture. Yuran seems to have unnecessarily isolated his work. It is original, but not wholly unique.

I'm beginning to sound like one of those annoying types that scrawls in the margins of essays in red ink 'why didn't you consider so and so'. Really though, I just wanted to enjoy the book a little more than I did. It was - at times - a little too much like hard work. Fair enough. It's for an academic audience. But with his crap TV examples, Yuran so nearly nailed it and produced something that was both readable and deep.

As a final word I'll make one more annoying suggestion. I said I'd come back to 'waste'. Yuran must read Bataille. He is merrily skipping along in Bataille's footsteps seemingly completely unaware that he's doing so. There is absolutely no shame in this. In fact, that Yuran seems to have got so far along Bataille's path without being aware of him, is cause to celebrate. Bataille is not that well known. I hadn't heard of him until a year ago, and I've only recently read him. But, for me, Bataille is where many of Yuran's arguments are heading. Bataille's themes are very much aligned with Yuran's work. Not least with the idea of 'waste'; and not to mention utility, the erotic, sacred logic, servility etc, etc. Yuran even plays around with nothing and no-thing which is a motif Bataille uses. But what Bataille does in his work is give us a clear idea about sovereignty. And this was missing from Yuran's work. Some conception of sovereignty - some mention maybe of the Nietzschean Ubermensch - would have helped ground desire in a solid form. As a reader it would have helped me understand the relation between desire, money and being. By focusing on desire I felt caught up a little in its flow around different concepts so I think a clearer idea of 'being' - or an idea of what it is to fully be - would have stopped some of the giddiness I felt when I tried to get inside Yuran's idea of desire. To be fair, he did approach these themes obliquely by mentioning movements towards perfections and pure forms but I didn't get a proper sense of how they relate to desire.

But overall its exciting to read a contemporary book that considers these sorts of ideas. I look forward to his next one very much."

My Review of Bataille's The Accursed Share

A few months since I've read it. Man, this book (these books) is/are brilliant. I've got Georges Bataille and Norman O Brown (Love's Body) coursing through my veins at the moment. It makes other reading seem so pedestrian. Very unfair, of course. But these guys give me such a reading high. Anway, if my review burns a flame under your tinfoil releasing an intoxicating vapor then do pop over to amazon and click the like button before you pass out. Ta, my darlings.

Magnificent. Wonderful. Brilliant. 

"It always feels a little awkward writing a review of a book like this. It's a couple of months since I read it and its still resonating very strongly with me. I expect the feeling to last. I was intending only to read volume 1, but was so impressed and entranced that I read straight through volumes 2 and 3.

If, like me, your intellectual groove runs from Nietzsche through Freud to Norman O Brown then you will love Bataille. I would encourage anyone to read him, though. I found him intensely readable. His style is not dry or overly academic, on the other hand there is no sense of it being simplified or anodyne. And yet, he works on the very edge of how it's possible to think.

I came to Bataille from Nigel Dodd's book The Social Life of Money. Money is my thing. I'm particularly interested in explorations of it that revolve around sex and being. Bataille, through an overarching concept of  'general economy', links together sex (which he characterizes as Eroticism, the subject of volume 2) and being (which he characterizes as 'sovereignty', the subject of volume 3). This is not an idea that is easily grasped through an accessible aphorism - but it is one that you become more aware of through your reading of the three volumes. Bataille's famous quote is that by reading the Accursed Share you'll come to know: 'that the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space'.

I expect that quote has put people off. I urge you, not to let it put you off. The key to the riddle is in understanding - or, perhaps it's better said, by reforming in your own mind - the concept of waste. There are psychoanalytical undertones here, of course. But conceptually waste has a moral stickiness. And it's this moral stickiness that Bataille so effectively washes away allowing 'waste' to be contrasted with 'utility' on a level playing field. At another point in the introduction he says that he is trying to answer the question of Keynes' bottles (Keynes' demand side economics in the form of an thought experiment). However much economists pretend otherwise, this question - which basically stated is 'what is economic growth' - has never really been answered.

I'm not sure I'd say Bataille answers it, of course. I have problems with his distinction between the sexual and the erotic and the way in which this then acts as a sort of delineation between human and animal form. If you look at the negative reviews of Norman O Brown's Life Against Death you'll find similar criticisms. I also worry (generally) about where such purity of thought takes us - well, takes me. Bataille says that if he'd followed his line of thought to its conclusion then he ought not to have written the book at all.

I'm glad he did, though. Very glad. He might not have answered the big question of what is economic growth? (and, maybe there is no answer) but he does paint a metaphysical picture that helps us see things afresh. He's right about his famous phrase. You get a new sense 'that the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space' that wasn't there before your reading. It's tricky to put into words what that glimmer of understanding is - but - you become newly aware of limitations. You become aware, for example, of how language itself is subsumed within Bataille's metaphysical picture. He's trying to step outside of all these constraints and contortions that silently refract our view of the universe and show us how we really are.

It's magnificent. "

My Review of Identity is the New Money by Dave Birch

My review is here on Amazon so if it successfully validates your attributes on the public key infrastructure then please remit by hitting the like button. Ta muchly.
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Engaging but unconvincing due to its technological perspective

This is a short engaging read that explores Dave Birch's ideas about the future of money and identity; the book's central claim is that they are linked. It's non-technical and helped along with anecdotes and case studies. Dave draws upon his experience in the payments industry and also references some academic texts on money, as well as his wider reading from science fiction to Shakespeare.

Dave makes no bones about being a technologist. For him money is a means, not an end. It is, what it does. Dave's reality tunnel is hard-walled by function and utility (as are most techno-reality tunnels). The identity he writes about is similarly bounded. There are, he tells us, three kinds of identity; personal, social, and legal. Social identity is his focus. It's the new paradigm that will disrupt business, commerce and government. Somewhat enigmatically Dave also says that social identity will lead to a 'fundamental shift in our mental models'. And it's precisely this sort of claim that bothers me. Changes to our 'mental models' of identity, to our sense of who we are, provoke profound questions. Yet Dave's adherence to tidy technological definitions of identity (and money) allow only for the most fragile of conceptualizations. It's thin ice covering deep water.

In short, his book lacks ontological depth.

Now, this may seem like a overly harsh criticism of a book that's just over 100 pages. But even though it works well within its own terms (hence, the 4 stars) I feel my criticism is justified because the book is essentially an argument against anonymous cash and for digital currency. It is a book with intent. Dave wonders 'Who would want to live in a society where transactions are anonymous? (his answer is criminals) and ends with an explicit call to action for the UK payments authorities to adopt tactics to reduce cash usage. Some may regard such suggestions as illiberal. Dave rebuffs them by emphasizing the privacy and security solutions that digital money technologies can offer. But the underlying issues remain. Where is the locus of freedom, in the individual or the state?

It seems crass - but it is necessary - to point out that Dave's livelihood depends upon those firms who have most to gain from the death (or murder?) of cash. Dave's book contributes to a positive imaginary of a cashless future; I'm sure it's a vision, of which Visa and Mastercard, would very much approve. It is however difficult to sustain a critique that there's something fundamentally illiberal in Dave's nature that is causal of his disdain for anonymity and cash. He effectively turbocharges the Hayekian ideal of denationalized money by mooting local, or even personal currencies. Rather, my feeling is that Dave's position is not based on illiberalism, but is his genuine moral and intellectual judgement; he believes that digital money will reduce crime, that privacy can be protected by technology, and he thinks that both these things are for the greater good. The problem is that his judgement is flawed due to the narrowness of his 'techo-reality tunnel' perspective.

Dave dedicates the book to the late Glyn Davies who wrote 'A History of Money' and whose work, Dave says, forms the bedrock of his own understanding. Writing about the origins of money Glyn Davies reminds us that money was, in the first instance, 'associated with loving and fighting'. Both of these activities are primal. They are about what it is to be human at a fundamental level. They do not depend on technologies. And their expression was, in the first instance, not subjugated to rational thought. Indeed, there is an alternative historical narrative - one that I find convincing - that places money much more deeply within this primal mindscape.

The other money historian Dave quotes is Jack Weatherford who wrote the much underrated and considerably shorter, 'The History of Money'. It begins with a very vivid account of the relationship between money and human sacrifice among the Aztecs. Here, there is a 'sacred logic' around money inaccessible to technological inquiry; understanding requires an effort of empathy and imagination supported by intellectual commitments to a theory of mind and knowledge of the Aztecs cosmological conceptions. In the same way, identity cannot be understood in isolation from our sense of sovereign being and its psycho-sexual foundations.

Ultimately Dave's conclusions, and his bold statement that 'Identity is the New Money', are at best only a partial reflection of the nature of money and identity, and their relationship. His calls to action maybe a reflection of genuinely held beliefs and moral concern, but they are misguided. Dave's description of money and identity - in line with most similar technological and economic descriptions - is a wholly inadequate basis on which to call for fundamental changes which could irrevocably link money to identity; many will fear that such a link is dangerously prejudicial to our liberty whatever safeguards are put in place.
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Review of Theology of Money by Philip Goodchild

This review is up on Amazon here. As ever, if it immanentizes your eschaton do pop over and click the thumbs up.

NOTE : I edited this review after it was published ! The original is underneath, and the edited version (the one now showing on Amazon) is underneath that. I'll go into the reasons for this in my next post. There isn't a huge difference but the edited version is more positive and less snarky.

An imperfect but unique and important contribution to our understanding of money

What to make of this book?

It's not what I expected. I thought it would be a survey of theological ideas about money. But it's more like the author's own take on money, inspired by and viewed through his own theological and philosophical commitments. The backnotes claim that Goodchild engages with the thought of Schmitt, Simmel, Marx, Smith and many others. I'd say this is an overstatement. They are certainly referred to, but with the possible exception of Schmitt, they are not really 'engaged with' per se.

The book can be hard going at times too. Perhaps because there are few diversions into the expositions of other's work and thought, it can feel a little relentless at times; a constant refrain of 'money is....' Also stylistically it can resemble the delivery of a liturgy. Opposing ideas are counterpoised and resolved into the middle ground sometimes all within a sentence. Sparingly used this can affect a pleasing and reassuring rhythm to the reader. But Goodchild overdoes it. And so, at its worse it can have the bludgeoning effect of a political polemic.

None of that explains though why this book goes unmentioned in the bibliographies of other recent work on money, What I was left with after reading was a sense that theology does has something to offer to our understanding and conceptualizing of money. Specifically, theology has a unique 'theory of value'. Goodchild - in his own way - deals with this quite extensively. I use the term 'value monism' to describe the position, but in Goodchild's theological terms the ultimate evaluation of all values is in the judgement of God. Conceptualizing value in this way brings an important perspective to money because often (for Simmel, Smith, Marx and many others) value arises either in exchange or from human action and mind. Goodchild presents a case that is the opposite of the Nietzschean 'price making mind of man' and the 'valuelessness' of nature. Because obviously, for any theological position, God is not dead.

So given the uniqueness of his perspective in work on money - I've seen value monism alluded to in other works but never as underscoring an entire treatise on money - and despite the book's difficulties and flaws, I'd really recommend this book to students of money. The ultimate criteria I use for my reviews is whether the book works within its own terms. This one does, just about. I reckon Goodchild started out with the intention of writing a different book; the survey on the theology of money I mentioned. But, in writing got caught up in his own arguments.

Fortunately, the pre-penultimate section of the book 'Of Theology' is so good - and obviously where Goodchild feels most at home - that the stylistic issues and other difficulties of the first 200 pages are overcome. His recommendations for a solution to the problems of the moneyed world are naive fantasy. But it's so endearing that he's brave enough to offer his solutions that one immediately forgives him. I read an online interview with Goodchild where he says "So I expect [the book] to be deeply divisive at best, or else regarded with such scandal and outrage that it must be denounced, marginalised or ignored." I'd say its been ignored, mostly. And that's not an appropriate response to a book that gives a unique and valuable insight into money.

There is a disscussion of this book and chapter summaries, along with a letter form the author at https://itself.wordpress.com/category/goodchild/theology-of-money-event/

[update: I'm overstating it by saying 'ignored'. The book was reviewed, for example Carol Johnson in The Review of Politics, Vol. 73, No. 1 (WINTER 2011), pp. 190-192, and of course it had a stateside reprint by the prestigious Duke University Press. I should have taken the positive line and said that I wish it had been even more widely appreciated.]
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And this is the new version:

What to make of this book? (My copy was the 2009 Duke University Press edition, btw)

It's not what I expected. I thought it would be a survey of theological ideas about money. But it's more like the author's own take on money, inspired by and viewed through his own theological and philosophical commitments. The backnotes claim that Goodchild engages with the thought of Schmitt, Simmel, Marx, Smith and many others. I'd say this is an overstatement. They are certainly referred to, but with the possible exception of Schmitt, they are not really 'engaged with' per se.

The book can be hard going at times too. Perhaps because there are few diversions into the expositions of other's work and thought, it can feel a little relentless at times; the refrain of 'money is....' has a numbing effect because of repetition. Also stylistically it can resemble the delivery of a liturgy. Opposing ideas are counterpoised and resolved into the middle ground sometimes all within a sentence. Sparingly used this can affect a pleasing and reassuring rhythm to the reader. But Goodchild overdoes it.

None of that explains though, why this book goes unmentioned in the bibliographies of other recent work on money, What I was left with after reading was a sense that theology does indeed, have something to offer to our understanding and conceptualizing of money. Specifically, theology has a unique 'theory of value'. Goodchild - in his own way - deals with this quite extensively. I use the term 'value monism' to describe the position, but in Goodchild's theological terms the ultimate evaluation of all values is in the judgement of God. Conceptualizing value in this way brings an important perspective to money because often (for Simmel, Smith, Marx and many others) value arises either in exchange or from human action and mind. Goodchild presents a case that is the opposite of the Nietzschean 'price making mind of man' and the 'valuelessness' of nature. Because obviously, for any theological position, God is not dead.

So given the uniqueness of his perspective in work on money - I've seen value monism alluded to in other works but never as underscoring an entire treatise on money - and despite the book's difficulties, I'd really recommend this book to students of money. The ultimate criteria I use for my reviews is whether the book works within its own terms. This one does, just about. The feeling I had while reading was that Goodchild started out with the intention of writing a different book; the survey on the theology of money I mentioned. But, in writing got caught up in his own arguments.

Although he does make his point successfully in the end. The pre-penultimate section of the book 'Of Theology' is excellent. Clearly Goodchild feels at home here and the words flow easily through some very difficult metaphysical territory. I regard final section of Goodchild's recommendations for a solution to the problems of the moneyed world as naive fantasy. But it's endearing that he's brave enough to speculate out loud on solutions. It'd be churlish to mark him down for that.

I read an online interview with Goodchild where he says "So I expect [the book] to be deeply divisive at best, or else regarded with such scandal and outrage that it must be denounced, marginalised or ignored." I'd say its been ignored, mostly. And that's not an appropriate response to a book that gives a unique and valuable insight into money.

There is a disscussion of this book and chapter summaries, along with a letter from the author at https://itself.wordpress.com/category/goodchild/theology-of-money-event/

[update: It turns out I'm overstating it by saying 'ignored'. The book was reviewed, for example Carol Johnson in The Review of Politics, Vol. 73, No. 1 (WINTER 2011), pp. 190-192, and of course it had a stateside reprint by the prestigious Duke University Press. And I've since discovered a whole trail of thought that links Goodchild to projects pursued by the likes of Eisenstein. I should have taken the positive line and said that I wish it had been even more widely appreciated.]

My Review of 'The Social Life of Money' by Nigel Dodd

This review is on Amazon right here. If it truncates your blockchain please do pop over there and give it a thumbs up. Ta.
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I’ve reviewed a lot of books on money.

But I’m not an academic. If you want an academic opinion on ‘The Social Life of Money’ there are plenty of endorsements from the most respected academics on the back cover of this book. And if the academic status of those positively reviewing a book is your criteria for judgement, the decision is an easy one. Keith Hart says its ‘the most comprehensive book on money’ he’s ever encountered.

So in this review, I wanted to find a way to evangelize about ‘The Social Life of Money’ that might appeal to those who either, don’t find the prospect of a treatise on theories and ideas about money that exciting, or perhaps, feel that there is little they could learn about money from an academic sociologist.

I offer you a five point evaluation that I hope will persuade you.

Firstly don’t expect answers. There is no final reveal. Dodd is firmer on what money is not, than what it is.

Secondly, this is a book of theory. It demands an imaginative reader. It brings together ideas on the nature of social reality with money that I’ve never read anywhere else. So at some point, regardless of your intellectual heritage, you will be challenged to imagine something new.

Thirdly, despite the well-deserved high praise for the clarity and skill with which Dodd writes, reading it demands attention. It’s not going to be easy, so be prepared.

Fourthly. This is tricky. I’ve read and reviewed Dodd’s first money book ‘The Sociology of Money’ (1994) and his journal articles on money. And of course this book. What fires me up about his work - and this is very evident in the ‘Social Life of Money’ - is his focus on questions of money and epistemology, and money and ontology. Money is a difficult subject for lots of reasons. But one crucial one is that the very tools we use to examine, measure and build a picture of our universe are born of money. So when we use them on money, we are turning them in on themselves. What we see is a reflection. Dodd understood this really early on. And so, over time he has been able to journey outside this hall of mirrors. The Social Life of Money is his best description of his view from outside. With him, we can see how knowledge and money are intertwined, and glimpse through this something deeper about its nature.

Fifth and finally. Vital to the book is the way Dodd thematically breaks it into chapters. There’s little point in me listing out those themes here. They only really make sense after you’ve read it. Don’t expect a text book - that’s not what this is. Rather what the themes do is create an organic taxonomy for money and perhaps, a new way of ordering our thoughts about it.

I can’t bring myself to say this is the best book on money yet written. That would somehow put it above Marc Shell’s ‘The Economy of Literature’, James Buchan’s ‘Frozen Desire’ as well as Keynes, Marx, etc and of course above Georg Simmel’s classic ‘The Philosophy of Money’. That wouldn’t feel right, of course. But what I can say is that if we were in a library with every book on money that had ever been written and you asked me which one you should read first, I’d say ‘The Social Life of Money’ by Nigel Dodd.

It’s that good.

My review of Albert Tauber's 'Freud - the Reluctant Philosopher'

This review is on amazon here. If it lies on your couch and tells you its secrets then be a sweetie and pop over there and click the like button. 

Tauber exposes the shaky metaphysical underpinnings of psychoanalysis as science but recasts it affirmatively as moral inquiry 

This is a brilliant book.

I learned my Freud from someone who had dedicated most of his academic career to giving psychoanalysis a scientific (genetic) basis. In the end, after twenty five years of trying he gave up and subsequently disavowed himself of his Freudianism. So, the questions Tauber explores in this book go right to the heart of my own understanding of, and relationship with, Freud and psychoanalysis. I was really looking forward to reading it and have not been disappointed.

It's not an easy read. But then, questions of metaphysics and the philosophy of science aren't easy either. Tauber lays things out as clearly as is possible. His writing is assured but gentle. He quietly repeats key points, highlighting their salience without interrupting the rhythm of his narrative or patronizing the reader. He is honest about his own view on Freud's scientific claims without being over-bearing or hostile. The pace and length of the book are also spot on. Tauber uses comprehensive endnotes rather than footnotes thereby avoiding any stalling within the reading experience but without compromising on the background detail of the arguments.

What helps Tauber cut through the knot of philosophical problems is a sharp focus on the notions of reason and freedom. From these two themes, and their inter-relatedness and co-dependency, Tauber constructs a convincing metaphysical argument to which he marries the story of Freud's intellectual history. We are left with the picture of Freud alive in the real world. Someone who on the one hand felt the need to present psychoanalysis as science to ensure rigor, method and authority. But also on the other hand, someone with quiet doubts and uncertainties about his claim to knowledge.

This is no simple biography of Freud's intellectual struggles, though. It does very effectively describe to the reader the intellectual current in which Freud swam. But in maintaining both balance and empathy for his subject, Tauber somehow - paradoxically - manages to ground the metaphysical arguments. He doesn't rely on metaphor or analogy so much, but instead we see the intellectual problems Freud faced and the perspective from which he faced them. The solutions to those problems are subtly suggested through an imagined discourse between Freud and the various philosophical schools.

I've generally found criticism of Freud frustrating, whether that comes from a post-structuralist/post-modern orientation, or from a materialist/positivist orientation. Of course, both ways of viewing reality can work to highlight deficiencies within Freud's thought, but all too often I find that, in developing their arguments, they tend towards an ideological rather a scholarly critique. I think this is in part why I found Tauber's book so appealing. His central thesis - his orientation - is an affirmative one. Tauber recasts psychoanalysis as a form of moral inquiry and so Freud himself, becomes a moral philosopher.

The central reason for my holding of Tauber's book in such high regard though, stems back to those early experiences of my teacher determined, but failing, to give a genetic basis to psychoanalysis. I think both my teacher and Freud held up science as a kind of moral goal; the truth as 'the good'. Whereas the feeling I got from reading Freud, particularly his later works and especially things like his correspondence with Einstein, was of a man concerned primarily with 'the good' who understood how unfaithful truth can be. Tauber references Stuart H Hughes 'Conscious and Society' - there's a few lines in that book that stuck with me and seem prescient to the thrust Tauber's argument. (Hughes quotes Ernest Jones).

"Kindness and integrity he [Freud] regarded as absolutes. In Freud, 'honesty... was more than a simple natural habit. It became an active love of truth and justice... A moral attitude was so deeply implanted as to seem part of his original nature. He never had any doubt about what was the right course of conduct,' and he cited with approval the saying: 'Morality is self-evident.'  (p. 139)

My Review of 'The Sociology of Money' by Nigel Dodd

This review is on Amazon here. If your finger can stand the clicking do please head on over there and click the like button if my review zigs your zag.

Two things first.

Housekeeping. In the interests of full disclosure I've had some contact with the author, Nigel Dodd. I was in two minds whether I should say so here. But, I prefer to err on the side of honesty. The fact that I thought it a brilliant little book seemed to compound the issue. So, whilst I claim this has no effect the review, you can now decide for yourself more fully in the picture. And I can feel like I'm at least trying to keep a virtuous house.

And the other thing. So, literally just as I began to type this review into Blogger, I pull up Nigel's book in amazon in a new window. I notice that there is one 'collectible' hardback edition available. I have a secondhand softback edition which I picked up nice and cheaply. Unfortunately for me the 'collectible' hardback edition is priced at exactly £23.

I buy books on money and value, I don't 'collect' books per se. But it'd be hard not to interpret that as a direct instruction from Eris herself. So I bought it - just to be on the safe side.

I can't afford for that to happen too often, though.

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 Let's get to the review;

Economic reasoning should be the object, not the foundation, of our understanding of money

The book is squarely an academic text. There are no anecdotal asides, no sugary gifts for the accidental or casual reader. Written early in Dodd's academic career the work is endorsed on the backcover by Geoffrey Ingham ('The Nature of Money') and the late David Frisby (editor and translator of Simmel's 'The Philosophy of Money'). Although absent from the bibliographies of some of the more popular recent works on money, Dodd's book does appear in the bibliography to Seaford's 'Money and the Early Greek Mind'. All good omens for the serious student of money. 

One of the criticisms I level against many books on money is that they fail to distinguish between money and currency. All too often the two words are used interchangeably. Dodd's conceptions of 'money' and 'monetary networks' enable him to deal with 'the idea of money' on the one hand, and money as we experience it in time and space (what I call 'currency') on the other. Making this distinction is crucial to achieving a deep and rigorous analysis. 

Dodd also recognizes the problem of knowledge - he says that 'information about money cannot be said to be distinct from money itself but is integral to its features'. The question of how we come to know the things we claim to know about money is very important. Exactly how deeply is money involved in our thought? This is a theme developed elsewhere in an historical context in the work of Joel Kaye and Richard Seaford. Dodd's examination however - akin to Simmel's - is theoretical and analytical; it's about trying to understand the essential nature of money and its relation to thought.

The benefits of Dodd's ambitious but piercing examination are manifold. 

For me, his early assertion (after Cencini) that money is an 'emission' rather than a 'flow' is particularly important. In a sense, this is a metaphysical observation about how we conceptualize money. But it has profound practical implications for both the Quantity Theorems of Classical and Neo-classical economics, and also for the latest attempts - such as that of Steve Keen - to model the economy using the mathematics of fluid dynamics. This analytic truth about money suggests that ideas of 'flow' maybe fundamentally misconceived. 

Dodd's analysis also serves to expose the limitations of the functionalist approaches to money, both in terms of their explanatory power for money's role in the modern economy and of their usefulness as a tool for distinguishing between modern and primitive money, or indeed between different types of modern money. Dodd is right to critique such approaches; 'money is, what money does' is simply not enough. 

Related to this, Dodd asserts that 'any object could in principle be used as money'. Such an assertion, if taken as seriously as it should be, guards against misconceptions about the nature of money gleaned from the observation of objects we use as currency.

Dodd's reading of Simmel is sophisticated. Simmel is cast by some of his detractors (and less well-informed supporters) as a sort of neo-liberal icon who says economic exchange is what makes us who we are. This is a misreading and simplification that Dodd puts right. When Simmel talks of exchange he means all kinds of interactions - he says explicitly that he regards 'even a glance at another person' as an exchange. Simmel also presumed a social totality, rather than individuals bound only by exchange. Most importantly for me though is Dodd recognizes something deeply psychoanalytical in Simmel's approach, asserting that 'ambivalence is at the core of Simmel's analysis'.

Dodd's discussion of Talcott Parsons and Habermas in relation to money was new to me; excepting that I've encountered Habermas's idea of 'communicative action' in the work of Tim Johnson, an academic who writes on the relation of money to maths and the development of scientific thought. Broadly speaking, Dodd suggests that such systems theory approaches, like their economic counterparts, tend to embody their assumptions within their characterization of money itself. We need rather, claims Dodd, to try to understand the essence of money itself. 

Whether Dodd himself communicates a new and deeper understanding of the essence of money in this short book is another question. And an unfair one. My main criteria for reviewing a book, is whether it works in its own terms. This book does. Fundamentally, it's an exploration of the relationship between money and thought. The density of the book's language is challenging, but then so is the terrain it attempts to map out. Ultimately, the claim made by Dodd on behalf of sociology, and against economics, to a greater share in money's soul is justified.

The good news is that later this year (2014), twenty years after The Sociology of Money, Dodd is publishing a second book on money. I'll be getting that, too.

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I did originally stick this next bit in the review, but it was starting to read more like 'Johnny rambling on about Money' than an actual review, so I cut it out. Still think it's interesting though.

Dodd's observation about emissions, quantum time, and monetary flows are prescient of bitcoin's solution to the double spending problem; it is by recognizing - making visible in the form of a decentralized public ledger - the fact of a transaction from payer to payee (an emission) that bitcoin exists; unsuccessful predecessors tended to regard the digital unit as a symbol of value that flowed around a system.

I quickly latched onto the 'emission' idea when I read Nigel's book. I stuck it straight in as Money Wisdom #252. But of course for me, what sparked my interest was not the implications for monetary theory, but that 'emission' is a dirty word. The footnote in the Money Wisdom quote explains. Consequently, I read Ernest Jones' The Symbolic Significance of Salt. I have so much to say about the spunk/money nexus and the spunk/money/salt triune - I hope one day I'll be able to say it with out it appearing completely convoluted (and crazy). I've tried a few times now, but those attempts are abandoned or lost posts.

The title I gave to the review was remix of this quote from Nigel on the final page;

"[Economic reasoning] should be the object, not the foundation, of the project to explain how money works, to understand its nature and account for its existence in society".

Nigel Dodd The Sociology of Money (1994) p.166

I did end up buying a copy of Alvaro Cencini's Money Time and Income (A Quantum-Theoretical Approach) (1988) which is the work Nigel references in relation to this 'emissions' idea. Here is the introduction to chapter five where he introduces the idea;

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I did write a bunch of stuff expanding (tangentially) on the '23' thing. But as is often the way talking about money, the nature of reality, causation, synchronicity, and thought - mixed in with value, language, salt and spunk - things got a little out of hand. Oh, and visibilty/invisibility & the Myth of Gyges - that's something that keeps popping up in my abandoned rambles. I'll try and get something vaguely readable up in due course. No promises though.

A review of 'Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value' by David Graeber

This review is on Amazon here. As always, if my review pings your pong be a dear and pop over there to click the like button.

Given I read the book last December, its taken a long time for this review to appear. The story of why - which will probably be of interest only to me - is below the review. I gave it 5 stars - one more than Debt- the first 5000 years. I'm a sucker for a bit of ethnographic detail - especially the sexy bits. Page 137 the sick old Huron woman dreaming about an orgy in side her longhouse - I liked that. Anyway *serious face*.

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A compelling work on the nature of value as creative potential realised through social action

Graeber wanted to title this book 'The False Coin of Our Own Dreams' but at the publisher's request that became the sub-title under the rather more staid and academic 'Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value'.

Graeber's preference is indicative of his hope for an audience beyond anthropologists. It's clearly written (for the most part), not over-long and balances expositions of theory with some personal insight. I'd say he succeeded in making it accessible to the non-specialist. The book proceeds by considering three common approaches to value and then examines how our experience of value is contextualised by scholars (with a focus on post-structuralist work). Then it gives exposition to Graeber's understanding of value as action and gradually explores this understanding by examining how value is experienced and conceptualised in different cultures. Finally he concludes with the idea that value exists in the potential for creative action; 'the ultimate social reality'.  The social aspect is key because ‘structures of relation with others come to be internalized into the fabric of our being', and so the potential for creative power - and hence value - cannot be (significantly) realized, other than through coordination with others.

In reaching such conclusions about the relation of reality to value, the book deals with some arcane material. For example; it details how the Maori's metaphysical concepts of 'mana' and 'tapu' relate to their exchange, politics and society; it considers the how the ancient quarrel between Heraclitus and Parmenides (are things in flux or are they fixed?) echoes through thought and time; and it pays homage to Marc Shell's seminal discussion of the Ring of Gyges and the problems of visibility and invisiblity as they relate to money and value among the Iroquios. You can see why the publisher would have insisted on the more academic title.

However, ultimately I sympathise with Graeber's wish to call it 'The False Coin of Our Own Dreams'. The phrase is inspired by a passage from Mauss and Hubert's 'Mana and Magic' quoted at the start of Graeber's odyssey. Simply put, ‘Our Own Dreams’ are our creative potential, and the ‘False Coin’ is our misattribution of the value of that creative potential onto objects. A version, if you like, of fetishism. But a version that digs deeply into the ontology of value. Philosophical musing from an armchair is all well and good, but what Graeber tries to do is combine this ontology with real world observations from anthropology. He creates a compelling picture of the political, social and economic manifestations of value across time and culture, even if sometimes the link between the ethnography and his ontology of value isn't that easy to pick out..

I very much enjoyed the book. In particular, I found the discussion of the Iroquoian 'Dream Economy' and the Maori's 'mana and tapu' fascinating and thought-provoking. Towards the end, Graeber says that certain objects can act as 'pivots between the imagination and reality' and, maybe for me, this book might be one such object. Although I disagree with Graeber about some quite fundamental issues - the nature of money in particular - reading this book has really made me consider the relation of value to action and pushed me more deeply into the work of philosopher Roy Bhaskar.

I thoroughly recommend it.

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So I think I've mentioned before that I decided I had to read this book whilst writing a review(ish) piece on a paper by Tim Johnson called ''Reciprocity as the Foundation of Financial Economics'. I ended up abandoning it. I enjoyed Tim's paper - I'm a fan of his Magic-Money-Maths website - but the paper references behavioural economics, which being a devotee of Dr Freud was never going to sit too well with me. So among other things, my review became a plea for economics to open its mind to psychoanalytical theory. That wasn't very fair on Tim whose focus was on blending Pragmatism with Virtue Ethics as a context to the Fundamental Theory of Asset Pricing. 

Anyway, in his paper Tim mentioned David Graeber. He claims that David's 'you don't have to pay yer debts' idea is trangressive of Virtue Ethics. I don't really see it that way. So I was keen to explore those differences and map them (unsuccessfully) onto Tim's Pragmatism Vs David's Critical Realism. The long and the short of it was that I started writing a lot about what David Graeber says about Value. I was speaking with great authority. Albeit an authority gained from my own sense of self-importance rather than actually reading his book. I thought I best remedy that before finishing the piece. 

So I read the book. Meantime, I lost the impetus to finish the piece. One day, who knows. It was of course, valuable to think about all the stuff Tim bought up. In fact I read the paper twice. Must have been habit forming because I ended up reading Towards and Anthropological Theory of Value twice too. What happened was I read it (in December, as I said), then I started a review. Normal sort of quasi-academic thing that I do. It got longer and more anecdotal. I thought, no problem I'll do a long personal anecdotal idiosyncratic review and stick a short version up on amazon. That's when I re-read it and made a some  notes to make sure I was just making stuff up (well, not too much). But it actually made things worse. I started talking about loads and loads of other stuff. All I wanted to do was explain how I think a Monist conception of Value would really help things along. Turns out it wasn't that easy. (The review above is cobbled together from the early academic version.)

In the end I abandoned all idea of a review and decided that what I was writing was going to be 'On Value'. And that's really where I'm at now. Adrift with no structure ! I do have a couple of good anecdotes though. And a more realistic idea of quite what a task it is to write something meaningful about Value. Respect to the Pirsig ! and to the Graeber !

I'm intending to jump back into money in the immediate future. I'm just starting Nigel Dodd's The Sociology of Money (its got good reviews from Ingham & Frisby - he of the Simmel translation- on the back cover) so I'm excited about reading that. I need to track down some papers by Ingham, Dodd & Lapavistas on the ontology of money and Nigel Dodd's paper on Nietzsche, Money and my very favourite 1950's psychoanalytical theorist Norman O Brown.

I've also got half an eye on the ontology of Value, and the value of Ontology. Thinking about getting What is Value ? An Essay in Philosophical Analysis Hall, Everett W. Or maybe, Valor y existencia / Value and Existence (Paperback) Wilbur Marshall Urban, Ricardo Parellada. Recommendations gratefully accepted.

Oh yeah, and most importantly I desperately need to finally get round to doing some 'Burn Your Money' T-shirts. Please hassle me about that. Action. Doing stuff, rather than just thinking about it. It's important you know.