Money Burning Talk at the Cowley Club

Last Wednesday night, 5th November, I took the sexy Berlingo down to The Cowley Club in Brighton to this event:

It was organised by @econoklast (aka Michael) with whom I've exchanged a fair few emails about some mad money stuff. I was honored to be asked down to say a few words alongside +John Higgs, author of the incredibly brilliant The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds

[I forgot to mention it in my Stick to Staff post, but John's book was a cheeky stowaway on my recent pilgrimage to Snowdon. I knew nothing about it until we were at the end of our trek when I caught a glimpse of the tell-tale yellow spine poking out of my daughter's bag.]

I most hugely grateful to Michael for coming up with the idea of the event and putting it all together. And of course for being foolish enough to ask me along. 

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This is Mouse. I wonder if her use of eggs
was referencing
Bataille's 'Story of the Eye'?

I haven't given a talk in over a decade. The last time was in 2002 at the Sexual Freedom Coalition (SFC) conference at the Round Chapel in Hackney. Sally and I were asked to talk by virtue of Naturalsex winning an Erotic Award. I remember finding the place and taking as a good omen, 'Harris' appearing in big white letters on the corner just opposite the Round Chapel. Egoism and optimism can combine to attribute positive meaning to coincidence. In this case though, egoism and pessimism may have been more appropriate. A good omen, it was not.

The theme of my talk was commerce and sex. It was basically arguing that money and a 'commercial ethic' should be a conscious element in the events and organisations of those committed to the ideals of the SFC. My feeling was that a propagation of the SFC's ethical ideals - which were fundamentally pansexual* - required a greater engagement with the moneyed world. A rejection of the commercial may provide an effective legal buffer against aggressive police action targeting organizers of sex events (something to which the SFC had themselves been victim). A rejection of commerciality may even reflect the political sentiment of the members of the SFC, but it should not become an ethical end in itself. Well, at least not for the SFC as an organisation. Obviously, individually we make our own choices.

It didn't go down too well. The SFC has a very close relationship with Outsiders - a charity which 'helps support disabled people with their lifestyles'. 'Being conscious of a commercial ethic' was the new song at greatest hits gig. In fact, it probably wasn't even that. More like, a prog-rock cover at a punk gig.

Then came Mouse.

The SFC conference is made up of speeches interspersed with performances by erotic artists. Mouse gave a very memorable performance. Initially it involved over-sized wooden spoons and eggs. For the finale her aptly named partner, Cat, administered a milk enema. Mouse received this whilst on her hands and knees, then turned herself round so her bum was pointing at us and then expelled explosively drenching everyone on the front few pews in bottom milk.

I not sure the founding fathers of the United Reformed Church had this sort of thing in mind when they built the Round Chapel in the 1870's for their Clapton Park congregation. Still, I'm sure Mouse's energetic ejaculation served to wash any trace of my commercial ethics speech from people's minds. Even the unshockable Tuppy Owens was lost for words.

So that was the last time I gave a talk.

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Anyway, Michael's 'Ghost Money' talk at the Cowley Club was an enema free event. I didn't count but I'd guess there were 25 or 30 people there, which was a fantastic turn out. Doubly so, given that many Brightonians were heading to neighboring Lewes for the Bonfire Night Celebrations - described as 'the biggest celebrated Fifth November Event in the world', There seemed to be a wonderfully resonant symbolism in having a small event devoted to the burning of money happening simultaneously and next door to a huge event devoted to the burning of effigies. Breaking taboos and controversy seems common to both; in Lewes, kids black up, crosses and effigies of political leaders both historic and current are burned. In 2012 Angela Merkel received the Lewes treatment and this year Alex Salmond was only just saved at the last moment from the flames. The tradition stretches back beyond Guy Fawkes in 1605 to some fifty years earlier when 17 Lewes men were burned at the stake under the reign of Mary Tudor. And like most such rituals and festivals you can look to even earlier origins, as events and our reactions to them are overlaid upon one another, and we struggle to assimilate into our conscious being, the darker psychical undercurrents of our mindscape.

Its also worth noting that Lewes was a very important town for the creation of money a thousand years or so ago. Records of moneyers go back to c.930 during the reign of Æthelstan, and Lewes was made an official mint town in 1006.

All seemed to bode well for a night of talking about Money Burning, then.
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John opened with a reading from his book, and then talked about Money Burning and the KLF. Michael introduced the concept of Ghost Money, And then I chipped in with my bit which was essentially a pitch to persuade people to take up money burning as a ritual.

Here's a bullet point summary of my talk;

I opened with an explanation of why, how, and when I burn money. I claimed that the ritual is a transcendent experience of pure forgiveness. I then talked about some different ways of perceiving it. Namely;

• Literal - by burning a note you are literally forgiving the promise made on it by the BoE. The interesting thing about the promise is that it is perpetual. It's a promise, to keep a promise, to keep a promise, etc, etc. By burning the note you forgive that perpetual chain of promises.
• Visceral - there are a range of reactions to money burning, both within the burner and those around him. Pitch the amount you burn to the edge of painful and you'll be able to assimilate the emotions and feelings it provokes. This is very important and only accessible to those who have done the ritual. 
• Aesthetic - there is a primal beauty in the burning. Everybody has stared at a fire. In burning money the new and the ancient coexist in powerful combination. Similarly juxtaposed are the mundane and the profound. Paper currency is ubiquitous and everyday, setting fire to it is deeply symbolic and uniquely taboo.
• Intellectual - the intellectual response to money burning reveals a relation and differentiation between money and currency. Quickly one is confronted with deep philosophical issues about the nature of reality. Currency is inside time and space, MONEY is outside time and space, and the note you burn seems to straddle these two worlds.
• Spiritual/Magical - rituals are creative of time, marking death and allowing rebirth. Money burning is so powerful in this respect because of its purity. It is an irreversible self-sacrifice that will - literally, on your first burning - reform and give a new meaning to your relationship with money.

Then the good folks who'd blessed us with their time asked questions and discussed with John, Michael and myself everything money burning. And there were some excellent questions, and thoughtful and interesting discussion. I just found it so heart-warming that people seemed genuinely interested in the KLF's million quid, money burning generally and what it all means.

On the drive home, I was thinking about a couple of the questions and wishing I'd said such and such and kicking myself for not mentioning something else. That's inevitable I guess. The joy of writing a blog though is you get to have a second go.

So this is my attempt to do justice to a couple of those questions.

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The first one was about forgiveness. Whom or what was money burning forgiving? Forgiveness, the questioner pointed out, was really about self-forgiveness. 

Gosh. That's a good one. As a matter of fact, Sally always asked the same question of my money burning, albeit more directly; 'Do you feel you need to be forgiven?' I doubt there is a question that cuts any deeper spiritually, emotionally or psychologically. My answer to Sally was, 'Yes. I think we all do.'

The money burning ritual is not about a specific forgiveness. There is no object or action, internal or external, that its target. It's about the impossible idea of pure forgiveness.

Most people are used to the psychoanalytical emphasis on the importance of guilt in culture. But guilt of course, is not just about bad things we've done. It's not even about taboos we may have broken in thought but not in deed. Guilt exists in our psyches and in our cultures for potential acts buried so deeply in our subconscious, we may never be fully aware of them. And yet somehow, we feel guilt for them. Guilt is the cosmic background radiation of the psychical universe. 

These ideas, of course, annoy the hell out of materialists. Their key argument against Freud's work is that there is no material method of transference between the historic feelings that the deeds of our ancestors provoked, and our own psyches today. Genes simply cannot carry that sort of information. 

In my exploration of money I'm very clear about not being bound to materialism. I won't allow ideas born of the exploration of matter to restrict or dictate my imaginings of money's metaphysics. To do so would seem foolish to me. The maxim of my 'general ontology' is Marc Shell's opening sentence to his seminal The Economy of Literature

"Those discourses are ideological that argue or assume that matter is ontologically prior to thought."

So I see forgiveness as fundamental and primal to existence itself. At the Cowley Club I think I said 'its like the ether of the universe' - not the best way to put it, but gives the idea. If guilt is the cosmic background radiation, then forgiveness is what absorbs, transforms and purifies it. Forgiveness is the green-blue earth absorbing the radiation-waste of the guilty sun. Forgiveness is a name we give to one side of primal and universal duality, guilt is the other.

Or, something like that.

If I were to talk about the importance of forgiveness to morality, or in the mindscape, or even in the moral universe, none of this would seem so odd. Forgiveness is - or should be - at the heart of religion. We all understand that its the process through we achieve any truly meaningful and vital form of psychological rebirth.

But even within this 'mindscape' interpretation we still tend to straight-jacket forgiveness. To conceptualize it we have to place it in the realm of subject and object; subjective in the sense that it is an action that takes place within our thoughts, and objective in the sense there must be someone or something toward which the forgiveness is directed (I cover similar ground to this in my Intent and Intentionality essay)

Georg Simmel noted that Value and Money seem to occupy a special place between, or beyond subject and object. I think the same is true for pure forgiveness which is why I think burning money connects to it in a special way. As I say, burning money is as close to pure forgiveness as we can get.

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Another question raised was about the distinction between money and currency. I emphasized this as an important intellectual response to money burning. 

What I said was that 'currency exists inside time and space and money exists outside time and space'. But I didn't think the explanation I gave, of my view or of the wider academic debate, was particularly coherent.

I've threatened on a couple of occasions to write a brief (@1K words) summary of the academic debate**. I'll not do that here, but briefly:.

The two key protagonists are Nigel Dodd and Geoffrey Ingham. It's Cambridge versus the LSE again. But unlike Hayek and Keynes, Nigel and Geoffrey are sociologists not economists***. In fact, these days the interesting stuff on money doesn't come from economists at all. Dodd, Ingham and Zelizer are sociologists, Hart and Graeber are anthropologists, Shell is a literary critic, and Seaford is a classicist. Economics seems still stuck on the question of whether money is neutral, or not (it's not).

In his recent (2014) The Social Life of Money, Nigel describes early on (p.5) the problems we have conceptualizing money in the face of it's changing forms, and our inability to satisfactorily define even the most basic of distinctions, that between money and currency. 

During the past two decades or so there has been a growing interest in the changing nature of money. Researchers have been looking into the emergence of new monetary forms: for example, complementary currencies, and Internet or electronic monies. Scholars have been predicting that the relationship between money and the state is coming under increasing threat from ‘alternative’ monies. But for all the empirical richness that these recent contributions add to our understanding of money, there is no common view of what counts as money in a general sense. There never has been a consensus about this: the extant literature on money is replete with debates over competing definitions. Even our language is confused. Take the distinction between ‘money’ and ‘currency’. While most scholars accept that the second term is narrower than the first, they are divided as to whether it should refer simply to legal tender, or whether currencies are monies that – literally – circulate in the sense of being passed from hand to hand.

In his earlier work The Sociology of Money, Nigel split his conception of money into 'money', and 'monetary networks' which I suggested in my review was akin to the notion of money (outside time and space) and currency (inside time and space). In The Social Life of Money he develops a conception of money as a 'socially powerful' and 'socially necessary' fiction or illusion, albeit one with a huge and diverse empirical richness (the empirical richness bit is where you'll find currency). You can think of Nigel's MONEY as an impossible conceptual perfection and of currency as our bound-to-failure attempts to achieve it.

For Geoffrey Ingham on the other hand, written into the essence of money is authority. In his The Nature of Money (review, ramble) the story is about how 'the very idea of money' (by which I think he means our ability to ascribe abstract value to objects) becomes manifest in currency through authority, institutional rules, and 'collective intentionality'. Collective intentionality, as Ingham means it, is a conception about shared mental states originally suggested by philosopher of language John Searle. Roughly put, it's the idea that we all believe something because we all believe something.

As far as my ideas about money and currency being outside and inside time and space goes....

My thinking about the distinction between money and currency began way before my money burning. It stemmed from wondering why there were two words for, what economists and economic historians were telling me was, the same thing. All those monetarist attempts to define M0, M1, M2 etc seemed arbitrary to me, bolted on after the fact. The two words seemed to point up some essential distinction, one which an economic conceptualization of money couldn't put its finger on. Bluntly, I just knew money and currency meant different things, as I think we all do. That's why we have the two words. (It might not be correct to describe money as a thing but you get my meaning).

What money burning brought home to me was that the twenty quid I burned seemed straddled across two worlds; the inside and outside of time and space. As currency, it seemed to be anchored in the here and now, burning it seemed to be directly connected to the manifest value of people and things. As money though, it seemed connected to the eternal, burning it seemed akin to releasing it from its earthly chains rather than destroying it. The twenty quid contained both the theoretical and the empirical. Burning it forced or facilitated an intellectual appreciation of that duality. I'm not claiming that this is a particularly unique intellectual insight. Far from it. Actually I think you can see it in all sorts of places. Most recently I've come across it in Albert Tauber's description of Freud's work straddling of the two worlds of res cogitans and res extensa, consciousness and matter, subject and object'.

Mervyn King the previous BoE governor used to have a video on the their website where he said that 'money is all just bits of paper'. This understanding of money is built upon a materialist rationalist perception of the world. There is little evidence to suggest that such an ontological conception is sufficient to understand money. Mervyn King might have found that out if he'd burned some of his own bits of paper.
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When I was giving my answer I said that 'it was difficult to express all this in words'.

That does feel like a cop out. I still think its true - I reckon it's impossible to define the nature of money in words - but its also an easy excuse for my inability to find the right words.

Anyhow, to tie up these two themes of money/currency and forgiveness I thought it might be easier to draw a burning map. So here you are. Just remember, (as Robert Anton Wilson, Robert M Pirsig and Alfred Korzybski will all tell you) the map is not the territory!

The left-hand side is outside time and space; it is those things materialists would describe as unreal (although of course paradoxically they are the things that appear as most real to us, our values and the constraints placed upon our actions). The right hand side is inside time and space; we tend, in our day to day life to regard all these things as real (although spiritually of course were are always at pains to remind ourselves of their ephemeral nature, and even in a materialist mechanistic world view all these things disappear into the quantum soup). I tend to think the whole unreal/real thing whilst being in practical teems quite handy for day to day living, is conceptually pretty useless. Especially when it come to money.

In the middle of the picture is the twenty pound note you're going to burn. It's sitting there happily with one foot in the here and now (as currency), and the other in eternity (as money). I find it quite useful to think of the twenty quid as an axis around which a moral universe spins. (Kenelm Burridge said something similar).

Now imagine a circle drawn from currency (on the right hand side) that goes inside the outer circle passing through the sex and money of your twenty pound note. This circle would represent what I call a redemptive cycle - a series of events that creates the experience of time and space. Onto this smaller circle you could attach terms like debt, remorse, guilt, sacrifice and ritual - all the emotions and feeling that seem to arise from exchange (in the very broadest sense of the word). And at some critical point, at some balancing, or turning of psychical energies, you could mark a point of forgiveness.

So you can see that for me, forgiveness is not only a spiritual, emotional and psychological idea - as it is for all of us - but its also a term by which we understand a metaphysical marker as it were; a critical point where things turn back in on themselves. Pure (or perhaps it is better understood in this context as infinite) forgiveness would be represented on the map by a line whose circumference was equal to the outer circle and passes directly through VALUE.

In Life Against Death Norman O Brown speculates on a psychoanalytical theory of time

"In the id there is nothing corresponding to the idea of time.... ...If therefore, we go beyond Freud, and speculate seriously on the possibility of a consciousness not based on repression but conscious of what now is unconscious, then it follows a priori that such a consciousness would not be in time but in eternity" (p.97) 

This escape from time - and I love saying this its my favourite claim for money burning! - can be glimpsed when you burn your money.

If you give your twenty quid to your favourite most deserving charity you may well be helping those less fortunate than yourself, but what you are also doing is closing down the redemptive cycle. You are in effect binding the future to the past - you will experience the eternal re-occurrence of the eversame (as Nietzsche might say). And anytime time you spend your twenty quid, whether on a charity donation or blood diamonds and guns, you are - I think undeniably - supporting the very structures that give rise to injustice, and hence the need for charity, in the first place (we easily forget that charity is a means to justice, not an end in itself - this post has quite bit on this idea).

Burning money - active nihilism - stops the turning of that redemptive cycle, so that maybe, in that moment, you can glimpse new possible futures. It is the only action by which your twenty pound note can be truly subversive of the structures of capitalism.  By virtue of its purity, it is an act of forgiveness that expands the circumference of the redemptive cycle to the largest we can bear. A donation to charity, no matter how large, how deserving, or how kind-hearted will never be able to reveal those futures. Indeed, the true price you pay for the good feeling your donation manifests within you, is the closing off of those new possibilities.

The picture of the world I paint here, linking a moral universe to a material universe through money, comes directly - intellectually speaking - from recognizing that distinction and relation between money and currency.
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Just before the halfway point of the talk John Higgs asked the question 'Has anyone here burned money?' And to my delight and surprise we found that there was another money burner among us. I was not alone ! I had a quick chat with the burner during the break. I'd love to recount the story here but stupidly, I didn't get a name, nor seek permission to tell the tale. The circumstances of the burning may reveal the identity of the burner, so I won't tell it here without permission.

But if my fellow money burner reads this and wants to share, perhaps you can post your story in the comments? Or maybe email me, so I can tell the story? We are a rare breed, but one day we shall be legion.
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There was so much else we could have talked about on the night. Not least, as John Higgs pointed out, was the idea of sacrifice. As well, the themes of debt, guilt, sacredness and time were only really touched upon. There's a lot involved in the simple act of setting fire to twenty quid. And there is too the potential for an entire library of metaphysics and philosophy treatises to be written on the differences and similarites between burning £20 and burning 'ghost money' .

Thanks again, Michael.
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THE END
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* Pansexual is a tricky word by virtue of its inclusiveness. It got the SFC into hot water with the tabloids in the past. But their political vision of pansexuality did not include the most taboo and morally repellent of the philias. It was - in my experience of the organisation - about including those folks (especially the mentally and physically disabled) who have difficulty in expressing and realizing their sexual life.
** I think this may be helpful in several respects. It will expose the deficiencies in my own understanding of what is quite complex debate - and hopefully allow me to rectify them. It will also, I hope, be useful to those coming to the subject afresh. And it might point up the differences and similarities between my inside/outside of time and space distinction and the distinctions drawn in academia.
*** There is a debate to be had about whether you can describe Keynes and Hayek as economists. Hayek thought Keynes a great thinker but not much of an economist. Certainly neither of them were the narrow technical economists that the word conjures up today. 

The Power to Waste

According to Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (from Philip Goodchild's Theology of Money) 'political concepts have a polemical character because they ultimately refer to the real possibility of physical killing'. And 'the decisive political power is the authority to make war and so publicly dispose of the lives of people, whether of the lives of the enemy or of one's own people, in sacrifice'.

Freud was similarly pessimistic (or realistic, depending on your point of view) about the nature of political power being a sublimated primal violence.

The idea of 'waste' though in this context struck me. That word 'dispose'.

Waste is a chapter and organizing theme in Nigel Dodd's 'The Social Life of Money'. In the conclusion he writes about Geraldine Juarez's bitcoin burning. (Geraldine is @submarine on twitter)

Geraldine Juarez, a Mexican artist based in Sweden, launched a performance art show in Berlin during early 2014 called “Hello Bitcoin”. Playing to growing public fascination with the digital currency that was launched in 2009... ...Juarez’s performance involves burning Bitcoins, ‘postdigital style’. On the face of it, this seems to ironicize the question that skeptics often ask about digital currencies, namely, what can they be worth if they are not real? To the question, ‘What makes a currency real?’, Juarez answers: ‘When we are able to burn them for real’. What is surely in question here, however, is not the materiality of Bitcoin, but the possibility that it can be wasted. ‘The real aspect making it into a currency is not when it is spent, but when it is burnt’, Juarez suggests. What defines the ‘reality’ of money, in other words, is not how we spend it, but how we waste it. (p.204)

The central thinker Nigel calls upon in Waste is Georges Bataille. I've ordered his three volume The Accursed Share which I'm looking forward. The most profound summary of his idea of waste, for me, is expressed by the idea that life on earth is created from the Sun's waste.

[Update: The Accursed Share arrived while I was writing this! It looks appropriately luxuriant and exuberant.]

This is from the wiki on The Accursed Share

The notion of "excess" energy is central to Bataille's thinking. Bataille's inquiry takes the superabundance of energy, beginning from the infinite outpouring of solar energy or the surpluses produced by life's basic chemical reactions, as the norm for organisms. In other words, an organism in Bataille's general economy, unlike the rational actors of classical economy who are motivated by scarcity, normally has an "excess" of energy available to it. This extra energy can be used productively for the organism's growth or it can be lavishly expended. Bataille insists that an organism's growth or expansion always runs up against limits and becomes impossible. The wasting of this energy is "luxury". The form and role luxury assumes in a society are characteristic of that society. "The accursed share" refers to this excess, destined for waste.

So to return to Philip Goodchild and Carl Schmitt, it's interesting to think of the idea of sacrifice as waste, and of political power as the ultimate ability to waste (as in the ability to waste what is of most value to us) For a private citizen there really is no true possibility of publicly 'wasting' a life. There are restrictions and punishments imposed by the social body which prevent this possibility - do so and you are cast out of the social body, you are yourself wasted. However, for those few with the ultimate political power such actions are possible.
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There are a couple of other thoughts I have on waste.

First, in terms of its psychoanalytical meaning I'm more interested in the idea of spunk as waste than I am shit or piss. Psychoanalysis tends to view shit and piss as primary, because we shit and piss before we have any idea about spunk. I'm concerned however with depth of meaning rather than chronology. I'm not restricted by a physics ontology and the arrow of time. The relations between spunk, salt and currency are manifest, and may be peeled back in a ontological sense to reveal something about money and waste.

Secondly, I'm interested in the purity of money burning as a form a of waste. There seems to be some meaningful difference between spending on a luxury item you don't need, or even buying a stupidly expensive bottle of wine and pouring it down the sink, and burning your own cash. On a spectrum of waste, burning money would surely represent infinite waste (or as close to it as we can get).
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All of these ideas are wrapped up in sacrifice, the sacred and pure forgiveness too, of course.

And so out of all this I hope to expand my argument for money burning so that says something about politics and waste. It would sound something like this:

Burning your money subverts the political power to waste. By choosing to waste your own power, you reach beyond what you are told is possible.

Just an aphorism of sorts at the moment, but hopefully in a few months when I'm outside Bataille I can put some flesh on the bones.

Money Wisdom #306

"Each time money is used, an epistemology, a metaphysics, a politics, an ethics, and even a theology is evoked."

Philip Goodchild Theology of Money (2009) p.20

Money Wisdom #305

"We return to the problem of the mediation between thought and reality. The truth of money is that which is the same in thought and in reality. If we locate this truth on the side of reality, then the truth of this truth can never be given within thought. If we locate this truth on the side of thought, then the truth of this truth can never be given within reality. In the case of money, if we understand it essentially as a commodity, then we cannot explain its appearance within thought, both as a measure of value and as an object of creation. If, by contrast, we take money to be essentially a standard of measure or comparison, then we cannot explain its real force and value. Money is a promise or sign of value, and as such the truth of money is not self-identically true. The value of a promise is not the same as the promised value."

Philip Goodchild Theology of Money (2009) p.17

Money Wisdom #304

"Immanuel Kant remarked, in regard to the ontological argument for the existence of God, that his financial position was affected very differently by a hundred real dollars than by the mere concept of them."

Philip Goodchild Theology of Money (2009) p.16

Money Wisdom #303

"The value of assets is determined by speculative projections. Moreover, even if these anticipations prove misguided, at every stage the value of assets is determined by the next wave of anticipations about the future. Thus the future never ultimately arrives; it is purely ideal. Financial value is essentially a degree of hope, expectation, trust, or credibility. Just as paper currency is never cashed in, so the value of assets is never realized. It is future or transcendent. Being transcendent to material and social reality, yet also being the pivot around which material and social reality is continually reconstructed, financial value is essentially religious."

Philip Goodchild Theology of Money (2009) p.12

Money Wisdom #302

"Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis. Every teacher or twaddler who denies it or suppresses it, is an enemy of life. Money controls morality"

George Bernard Shaw quoted in 

Philip Goodchild Theology of Money (2009) p.4

The Giro and the Ideal of Economic Organisation

A year or two back on Twitter, I got chatting to @kiffr (Christopher) about the National Giro. He kindly sent me a couple of books, namely National Giro - Modern Money Transfer by Glyn Davies, and Giro Credit Transfer Systems by F.P. Thomson. Hidden in the Davies book was a 1980 reprint of the original 1965 parliamentary white paper A Post Office Giro. Christopher was one of the workers who surveyed the general public to find out their views it.

Now, I must confess, the intricacies of payments systems don't hold much fascination for me. Invariably, I find those involved in payments systems tend to view money as set of problems in need of a technological solution. This doesn't resonate with my view of Money as an aspect of reality (and unreality). Of the two books Christopher sent me F.P. Thomson's was very much in this 'technological' vein. It's a technical manual of Giro payment systems. However, Glyn Davies's was different.

As you may know, Glyn Davies wrote A History of Money - probably the best orthodox history of money around. In his Giro book, Davies gives us not only a detailed account of the Giro in Britain in the 60's and very early 70's, but also the history of the previous failed attempts to establish it. He points out how important the Giro was in other countries and traces its origins back ancient Egypt 3500 years ago. The word Giro, he tells us, comes from the Greek 'Guros' meaning ring or circle. He even gives Gyges - of whom I make much of elsewhere on this blog - a name-check as the inventor of coinage.

Aside from placing the Giro in historical context, what Davies does is to put the more recent attempts to establish it in Britain in a political context. Here, he exposes the political dynamics underlying, what Davies sees as, the frustratingly long gestation and difficult birth of the British Giro. Of course, the successful, efficient and cost-effective administration of a Giro system is dependent on the level of technology that underpins it. And the Giro was finally realized in the white heat of Wilson's technological revolution. But, and this is the central thrust of Davies' book, the key dynamics both preventing and encouraging the Giro's manifestation were political, social and economic. They were about the political will of the left versus the interests of capital and the private banks.

That, in itself, is a fascinating story. Albeit, one that needs to be read with caution. Davies' book was completed just five years after the Giro was launched. It was still a political football at the time. So the arguments must be considered with that in mind. For example, when the Left emphasizes the technological efficiency of the scheme, are they really just seeking to distract from its true political intent and implications? Was the Giro a means to wrestle power from Capital, rather than a technological end. Similarly, the complaints against the Giro need to considered carefully. The vested interests of the Right could easily be buried under talk of the potential deflationary effect of the Giro on the 'money multiplier'.

If you're interested in the political shenanigans, but dubious about the Giro's role as a weapon of class warfare, have a listen to this talk (scroll down to bottom of page for podcast #01) given to the Postal Archive by the late Tony Benn in 2008(?). Tony Benn was postmaster general in the period leading up to the launch and the chief political architect of the Giro. He said it's one of the key achievements of his career.

A look inside the Giro HQ at Bootle (No Sound)

When the Giro was launched a penny was still a large bronze coin about an inch across that sat full-weight in the palm of your hand. We had shillings, and a money amount was declared in the form £/s/d as it had been, in practical terms, forever. But alongside money's solidity, there existed a countervailing trend. For the general population - rather than just bankers and the rich - it had only been fifty odd years since the arrival of the Bradbury note; the first widely used bank note. Across a generation or two - and two world wars - monetary-media were dematerializing. The Giro, in this sense, could be viewed as the next stage in this process.

Yet, really, it failed. It didn't become the dominant system it's architects had hoped and that trend of dematerialization (or the return to a non-material form of money if you're persuaded by David Graeber's account) did not play out. In the late 1960's, Britain wasn't ready to accept the Giro on masse.*

There are several possible narratives to explain this failure. The political narrative might talk about the bankers, their vested interests, and their clout with the political classes putting pay to a socialist project. Or a techno-economic narrative might mention the rise of credit cards and the competing efficiency gains in the private sector. There is also the socio-psychological narrative - one sure to irritate left-wing supporters of the Giro - that ultimately the Giro failed because it became most strongly associated with the unemployed. It was how benefits were paid. With credit card companies spending thousands on creating effective branding that linked 'ways of paying' to identity, having one's payment system linked squarely to society's disadvantaged neutralized any goodwill towards the Giro born of aspiration for modernity and the fetishizing of new technological solutions.

Card card companies meanwhile, were not shy of selling directly on sex.

But interesting as all this is to me, particularly with the importance I place on the relationship between sex and currency in our understanding of money, it was the philosophical rather then the erotic which brought the Giro back to my mind most recently.
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I've just completed my reading of the articles in the Dodd/Ingham Currency/Money debate, with a reading of Nigel Dodd's On Simmel’s Pure Concept of Money: A Response to Ingham. To attempt the dangerous task of summarizing the paper in a sentence; its about how money is not an empirical entity, but a regulative ideal built around an un-achievable perfection.**

What chimed with me in the paper, and set my mind back to thinking about the National Giro, was the following quote. It's from a review, written at the birth of the C20th, by G H Mead of Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money which Nigel quotes in support of the idea of a correspondence 'between the perfect society (as opposed to the perfect society) on the one hand, and a perfect money (as opposed to a perfect money), on the other.'***

Under ideal conditions... there would be no necessity that money should have any inherent value. It would be only an expression of the relation between the values of goods stated in the form of a fraction. Money would be purely symbolic... ...The failure to reach the ideal is the result of the instability of the community to make its equation between its different goods and the sum complete and perfect. In the presence of this uncertainty the individual reverts instinctively, especially in periods of panics, to an equation between the commodity and an intrinsically valuable thing. That money still has, to some degree, independent value is an indication of our failure to reach completely the ideal of economic organisation.

GH Mead Review of Philosophie des Geldes in D.Frisby Georg Simmel: Critical Assessments (1994) p. 144-6 quoted in Nigel Dodd On Simmel’s Pure Concept of Money: A Response to Ingham (2007)

This idea explored in the paper was then further reinforced in my mind at the lecture Nigel gave with Keith Hart at the LSE on Money Burning Day (that's 23rd October for the uninitiated). If you listen from around 34 mins to 36 mins Nigel talks about two trends; utopian and capitalistic. So on the one hand you have social and political reformers with schemes like LETS, timebank, or bitcoin trying to reform money for some Utopian ideal, and on the other you have payments companies like Paypal, Applepay or Square transforming money's infrastructure in their pursuit of profit. 

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So I wondered how the Giro could be seen in the light of this. It was certainly an inclusive rather than an exclusive project. That word 'exclusive' is immediately associated in my mind with adverts for high-end credit cards whose promise was access to a special world of privilege. Giro on the other hand was inclusive. It was about giving the majority of the population access to banking services. It's easy to forget that in the 1960s most people didn't have a bank account.

But what's striking to me is this odd mix between the utopian ideals of the Giro, and perfect money. In the postal archive talk from Tony Benn (above) it seems clear to me that he regards money as essentially the creation of a debt by the treasury. All money requires for its existence is a certain set of beliefs about money and political will. However, at the same time, the accounting certainty of the Giro and the fact that once entering into the system money would become more or less positive meant that as a system it would be non-fragile. In his talk Benn claims that the Giro would have weathered the financial storms of 2008 far better than the banks. So in this sense money is more akin to a commodity (albeit one imagined into existence by a sovereign authority rather than dug up from the ground) that flows intact around a system built originally as a means to an ethical end. 

All this is contradictory. It's true that both left and right have, in the past. built a image of economy around commodity money. But to build a system to maintain money's value and enhance its speed of flow works to increase the monetisation of society. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Certainly it seems more atuned to libertarian ideals than socialist ones. It seems more Maggie Thatcher than Tony Benn. And yet Tony nurtured it, and Maggie killed it. It's all a bit odd.

I suppose, taking a positive view, rather than contradictory and confused, one could equally say the Giro was pragmatic and conceptually-polygamous. 
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After Nigel's lecture last week, I went into the LSE foyer to buy his book. It was £24.95. I pulled out £25 in cash and paid. The girl taking the money look perplexed. She had a hushed and hurried conversation with her colleague after which it became apparent that the five pence change wouldn't be forthcoming. Everyone else had their cards out to pay. The booksellers hadn't thought about people paying in cash. Back when I used to run my market stall the bane of my life was getting to the bank before 4pm on a Friday to get a tenners worth of pennies for change. My workers would hate having to tell the punters 'sorry, no change' and the punters would hate to hear it.

During the lecture a figure was quoted that nowadays only 3% of all transactions are in cash. This no doubt pleased the representatives of the payments industry present and who tend to see cash as a menace. That people who earn their living from forms of electronic payment want an end to cash should be of no surprise. But I want to stand up for cash. Not just because I'm a paranoid cash-dealing dodgy ex-bankrupt ex-market-trader van-driving money-burner. But because cash has been good to me. When the banks give you the cold shoulder because of your bankruptcy and you still have to feed, cloth and keep a roof over the heads of your family - then, cash is your friend.

The undercurrent that the future will be cashless is strong at any gig addressing the 'future-of-money'. Cash gets a bad rap. As if somehow the not being of cash, will in itself manifest the future. But as Nigel was at pains to point out, pluralism is the key to the future of money, not cashlessness. I'd go a little further. I'd say that cash is money's default setting. That the birth of cash from the Gygian tryst (as recounted by Herodotus) marks a critical moment in the manifestation of Money within mind. We can no more rub cash out, than we can escape being sex-mad monkeys. (Although that won't stop people trying)

Cash is a bulwark against a Utopian dream turning into a Dystopian nightmare.

When pursuing his vision of Utopia, Tony Benn had many struggles. His goal of establishing the Giro had to be realized with backing from the Treasury whom, it was stressed to him, really didn't want to upset the Banks. That was difficult enough. But the prospect of bringing in legislation may have forestalled the Giro for good. Benn found a way round this (he talks about it at 44min into the podcast). He presented an argument that went like this. If he said, as postmaster general, he'd instructed the post office's cable-laying ships to cease cable-laying and instead catch fish, would it be legal for the fish they caught to be sold through sub-post offices? The answer was 'Yes'. And so, on this strange legal whimsy, the Giro was born without the need for legislation.

Now imagine a different scenario. Imagine the answer was 'No'. Benn gets Wilson's backing to push through the legislation. The Giro becomes a project on which big reputations rest. Uptake is poor. The banks want it buried. The solution lies in getting rid of bank notes and pushing all transactions of £1 and above through the Giro. The legislation is passed. Cash is banned. The IMF bailout is avoided. The oil crises ridden out. Cash alternatives are outlawed. By 1984, it really is 1984.

There is very little that's perfect about cash. Technologically - certainly these days - its a poor primitive solution to transferring money. And yet it works. It balances freedom and equality in a way that electronic payments have not successfully replicated. So far, anyway. It should never be killed.

We'll be sad if there's nothing to burn.


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* Odd that huge changes were soon to be wrought upon the form and denomination of British currency that came with decimalization in 1971. There was resistance to this among the general public but no free choice about whether to accept it or not. I wonder if anyone was in favor of making the Giro an 'imposed' electronics payments solution.

** For me, there is something almost theological in this conception which resonates with my own metaphysical commitments to Value, Money and Mind. However, I don't want to get distracted by discussing any of that here.

*** I think the italicized emphasis actually works well to get across the meaning of these concepts but if you're unfamiliar with them this quote will help:
"Simmel contrasts the 'perfect society' with the 'perfect society'. The former contains what he calls a conceptual perfection, whereby each member of a society has a unique place within it. The latter consists of ethical perfection, wherein everyone is treated the same (Simmel, 2009: 51). To each form of perfection corresponds a form of equality : the perfect society favours individualism, the perfect society favours socialism."

Nigel Dodd Nietzsche's Money in Journal of Classical Sociology 13(1) p. 51 (2012)

Perfect money and perfect money can be understood along similar lines of conceptual versus ethical perfection. Chapter Eight of 'The Social Life of Money' (Nigel Dodd's new book) deals with these ideas at length.

Money Wisdom #301

"Simmel’s concept of money is not an empirical entity. Rather, it is a regulative ideal which corresponds to the abstract notion of a ‘perfect society’ that Simmel explores in ‘How is society possible?' "

Nigel Dodd On Simmel’s Pure Concept of Money: A Response to Ingham in European Journal of Sociology / Volume 48 / Issue 02 / August 2007 pp. 273

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.