My Offer to Those That Would Burn

I sense the winds of change. Two things, apparently unrelated but part of the same movement.

In these past few days my tips have gone up at work. My colleagues have noticed the same thing. You get more tips if you deliver to certain areas. It's not necessarily related to wealth. Essex is the best county, the London SW's the best area. But this increase has been across the board. It's a temporal variation rather than a spatial one. It's like it's Christmas. In fact, I've taken more in tips these last two days than I did over the whole of Christmas and New Year 2013.

The other thing, perhaps a bit more certain that my reading of the tipping runes, is that online some beautiful children of the future - reaching out as forward tastes begin to enter them - have been talking to me about money burning.

Anyway, ever the optimist, I take these events to mean that a time of waste and sacrifice is approaching. We might be picking up a wave of resonance from the Big Burn back on 23/08/1994. It's unconsciously directing us toward offering up our currency for no reward. This, my friends, is a crack in the logic of capitalism.

My offer to you then, is that I'll help you burn your money.

What this help consists of is tricky to specify. I can talk beforehand with you about how you're going to perform your burning, and about when to burn. If you want me present (and I really hope you do), I'll travel to you at my own expense. If you feel comfortable to do so, I can recite a mantra with you and suggest words that you might say yourself at the moment of burning. You might be surprised how compelled you feel to say something meaningful when you burn. If you like, I can bring with me some items that will help set the scene - a burning bowl, a beeswax candle, the Staff for the casting of a circle. I can't guarantee that I can also burn. That will depend. The right time for your burning, might not coincide with the right time for my burning. So much depends upon one's situation - not only in the literal sense of whether one has money to burn, but also in how the world and its events fits around each individual's burning. I give you my solemn word that I will respect your right to privacy. I'm an advocate for money burning, but I promise not to say anything about your burning without your permission. I won't pester you for your permission either.

I'm not for a second saying that you need me at your money burning. You don't. But what I have learned from my own burnings is that if you pay attention to the circumstances of the ritual and the ritual itself, the intensity of the experience is amplified. This amplification also occurs when others are involved as both witnesses and/or participants. I really want to develop these ideas with you, so that together we can find a form of ritual that helps us understand - and fully experience - what it means to burn money. An intellectual understanding of destroying currency is just the visible light in a wide spectrum of money burning radiation.

When the founder of Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers, was found dead in February 2013, there was a note beside his bed. Its thought to have been a title idea for a song, or part of a lyric. It said;

"You can't shine if you don't burn."

Email me. Don't leave it. Do it now.

(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.

Rear Cover of Museum Of Money I Dusseldorf 1978 & my translation

Vom Opferritual bis zur Tauschwirtschaft

Vom Labyrinth bis zur Börse

vom Altar bis zum Bankschalter

Von der Grabkammer bis zum Safe

Von der Kaurischnecke bis zur Scheckkarte

Vom Schlachtfest bis zum Sparschwein

Von der Großen Mutter bis zur Emanzipation der Frau

Von der Höhle bis zum Museum

Vom fetisch bis zum Kunstwerk

From Sacrificial Ritual to the Exchange Economy
From Labyrinth to Stock Market
From the Altar to the Bank Counter
From the Tomb to the Safe
From Cowrie Shell to Bank Card
From Ceremonial Slaughter to Piggy Bank
From the Great Mother to the Emancipation of Women
From the Cave to the Museum
From Fetish to Artwork

Rear Cover of Museum Des Geldes I Dusseldorf 1978

Money Wisdom #372

"The most praiseworthy way of acquiring books is by writing them, Benjamin remarks in 'Unpacking My Library'. And the best way to understand them is also to enter their space: one never really understands a book unless one copies it, he says in One-Way Street, as one never understands a landscape from an airplane but only by walking through it."

 from Susan Sontag's Introduction to the Verso edition of

Walter Benjamin One-Way Street (1979) p.21

Measure for Measure at the Globe and my problem with Shakespeare sorted

This is not a review proper.

In part, I'm writing simply because I haven't posted for a while. I've been trying to write a piece. Saying 'I think it's nearly there' or, 'I'll post it soon' seems to be the kiss of death for my writing, so I won't say anything more.

But also I just want to tell you how wonderful and brilliant my evening at the Globe was last night. My first time there, and my first time seeing Measure for Measure. In fact, a little secret - I had no real idea about the story line in Measure for Measure at all. Obviously, I knew a few of the themes. And I've mentioned on twitter that I've bought Marc Shell's The End of Kinship: 'Measure for Measure,' Incest and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood. I wanted to see the play, then read the book. It maybe a month or two before I can do that, but I so enjoyed the play - I got lost in it so deeply, as many of the audience seemed to - that I'm not too worried that my memory of it will fade. Mark Shell's book will keep while I do other things.

Honestly though, the Globe. If you haven't, then do.

At school I had a couple of English teachers for English A level. One was a wonderful, rather effette and posh chap who was in love with William Blake. I have a vivid memory of him reading Chaucer and saying the word cunte in front of a shocked class. He manage to bring the words to life. No mean feat when teaching a group of disinterested and hormonally exuberant seventeen year olds.

My other English teacher was a cunt. Mr Heft was a nasty old nonce who ended up in prison for his abusive ways. He sent a letter home to my parents on my last day of school ever - just before my exams - saying that he wasn't responsible for my result because I hadn't turned up for his lessons in the final term. I think what had hacked him off most was that I turned up for everyone of the other teacher's lessons. Unfortunately, Heft did Shakespeare with us. Consequently, I've found it difficult to connect with the Bard ever since.

His modus operandi was to spend the term dissecting the text of a play word by word. He didn't believe you could understand what the play was about unless you knew precisely what every word meant. So we never got to appreciate any play as a whole - from memory I think we did Othello & The Winter's Tale. We didn't get to discuss the themes and ideas that the play explored. We just had to know what was said and by whom. It was Shakespeare by rote. We did actually go to see Othello at the Old Vic, but the possibility of me enjoying the play was already destroyed by then.

Well, I think last night finally exorcised that ghost. I have enjoyed a little bit of Shakespeare - last year I watched the 2004 film of the Merchant of Venice - but that doesn't really compare to the immersive and magical experience that the Globe gave me. And I'm so glad I didn't read up on Measure for Measure before seeing it. Going in cold really gave the two fingers to Heft. I didn't understand every word - I didn't hear every word come to that (there's no amplification) - but it didn't matter. The play was written to be seen rather than read and dissected in a classroom. And so my mind is alight with it and consequently I'm looking forward to reading Marc Shell's critical analysis of even more.

Shakespeare won in the end.

[I don't really need to forgive Heft. To me he was just a nasty teacher who scared the shit out of me as a 12 year old. When I was a bit older - 17 & 18 - I just thought him a bitter man for whom life had been hard. He was of the generation for whom the harsh realities of WWII had been formative and resonated with him in his teaching career. But that doesn't excuse the fact that he was a terrible bully at times. I witnessed both verbal and physical abuse for which today, he would have lost his job in an instant. And obviously, he was far far worse to some poor kids who attended his boxing club. There was a bit of me that wanted to provoke him when I was older. I wanted him to try and hit me so that I could retaliate. But he didn't. After one particular row I had with him where he described my entire cohort as 'pigs living in filth' I decided the best thing I could do was just not turn up to his classes. He died in 2010.]

Money Wisdom #371

"...every human being must be an artist...

If we want to achieve a different society where the principle of money operates equitably, if we want to abolish the power money has developed over people historically, and position money in relationship to freedom, equality and fraternity - in other words develop a functional view of the three great strata or spheres of social forces: the spiritual life, the rights life, and the economic life - then we must elaborate a concept of culture and a concept of art where every person must be a artist in this realm of social sculpture or social art or social architecture - never mind what terms you use. Once people have developed these imaginative concepts... ...having drawn them from their own thinking forces, their recognition and knowledge, but also their feelings and willpower - from the moment they have them, people will also understand that they really are the sovereigns of a state-like whole, and that it is they who formulate the economic laws which will allow money to be freed from its present characteristics, from the power it exerts because - and by saying this I'm already making a statement about money - it has evolved in the economic context as part of economic life and is now a commodity. They will recognize then that they can free money from being a commodity and that it must become a regulating factor in the rights domain. People will increasingly see that money today is a commodity, in other words an economic value - I'm trying to say something tangible about money here - that it is an economic value and that we have to reach a stage where it must become a necessary potential, must act as a rights document for all the creative processes of human work..."

Joseph Beuys What is Money (Meyer & Rappman) (2009 trans 2010) p.16-17

Money Wisdom #370

"...the notion of sex brought about a fundamental reversal; it made it possible to invert the representation of the relationships of power to sexuality, causing the later to appear, not in its essential and positive relation to power, but as being rooted in a specific and irreducible urgency which power tries as best it can to dominate; thus the idea of 'sex' makes it possible to evade what gives 'power' its power; it enables one to conceive power solely as law and taboo. Sex - that agency which appears to dominate us and that secret which seems to underlie all that we are, that point which enthralls us through the the [sic] power it manifests and the meaning it conceals, and which we ask to reveal what we are and to free us from what defines us - is doubtless but an ideal point made necessary by the deployment of sexuality and its operation. We must not make the mistake of thinking that sex is an autonomous agency which secondarily produces manifold effects of sexuality over the entire length of its surface of contact with power. On the contrary, sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations and pleasures."

Michael Foucault The Will to Knowledge - The History of Sexuality: 1 (1976 [tr 1978, ed 1998]) p.155

Money Wisdom #369

"Is 'sex' really the anchorage point that supports the manifestations of sexuality, or is it not rather a complex idea that was formed inside the deployment of sexuality?"

Michael Foucault The Will to Knowledge - The History of Sexuality: 1 (1976 [tr 1978, ed 1998]) p.152

Money Wisdom #368

"The history of the deployment of sexuality, as it has evolved since the classical age, can serve as an archaeology of psychoanalysis. We have seen in fact that psychoanalysis plays several roles at once in this deployment: it is a mechanism for attaching sexuality to the system of alliance; it assumes an adversary position with respect to the theory of degenerescence; it functions as a differentiating factor in the general technology of sex. Around it the great requirement of confession that had taken form so long ago assumed the new meaning of an injunction to lift psychical repression. The task of truth was now linked to the challenging of taboos."

Michael Foucault The Will to Knowledge - The History of Sexuality: 1 (1976 [tr 1978, ed 1998]) p.130

A Note on Foucault

Disclaimer: I've read 123 pages into The History of Sexuality Vol 1. That's about it for my reading of original Foucault. Obviously, I've read what other folks have to say about Foucault's thought. For example, specifically on money he features in Nigel Dodd's work, over on Lord Keynes' blog Foucault has recently been subject to a character assassination. I also read Elly Tams' Scribbling On Foucault's Walls in 2013 which imagines what would have happen if Foucault had a daughter (its available as a pdf). Elly's work delves more deeply into sex.

Mention philosophy and sex this always pops into my head - perhaps indicating that Elly was on track with her emphasis on the sexual - the sex lives of philosophers and its importance by a cheeky Derrida

So, anyway I'm about as far from an authority on Foucault as you can get. It's taken me a while to get to him. Basically my path to him (and Derrida) has been Freud>Norman O Brown>Bataille>. 

In this note, I just want to mention something that's been bugging me as I read. 

I picked up the three volume set of The History of Sexuality in the LSE Waterstones back in 1999. My head was full of Freud at the time. When pursuing the books, I noticed Foucault was questioning notions of repression, so I returned the books to the bookshelf and kept my credit card in my wallet. I take it as significant that I can so clearly remember doing so. When Sally did her Gender Studies degree she ended up studying a bit of Foucault so the three volume set appeared on the bookshelves at home, popping up like a bad penny. So the actual set of books has, in its physical form, acted out the return of the repressed ! (Jung would not be surprised). And this leads me to my criticism (misunderstanding?) of Foucault.

Perhaps because I was taught about Freud by Chris Badcock for whom the return of the repressed was a hugely important feature - in his book The Psychoanalysis of Culture he tried to construct a broad history of civilization based this principle - I'm quite sensitive about how 'repression' is presented. I've been a little obsessed by Hayek's complete misunderstanding of Freud and repression. I can also remember having a twitter conversation with Elly & someone else (name escapes me) - the suggestion was that repression buries things deeply in our unconscious and our task is to uncover that which is repressed. Both Elly and myself said that this isn't quite right. I've tried to think about a better metaphor for repression over the years - rather than the common 'burying' one.

It's not great - but I prefer to think of repression as like pushing down a ball under water. You have to expend energy all the time to stop it rising to the surface. When finally your mind wonders or when you get an itch you must scratch, the ball slips from your hands and pops up in a different place to where it started. My feeling is that Foucault sometimes slips into a more static idea of repression. He is rightly critical that casting history as a gradual lessening of repression (which is the general theme of The History of Sexuality) is a misguided way to view the past - but I'm not sure that this was really the way that Freud saw it. Even Norman O Brown - whose whole project is about achieving 'psychoanalytical consciousness' - doesn't really frame repression in this way. I think the key is thinking about the relationship between time and mind..... and the possibility that repression is constitutive of our experience of time passing (or I'd say, of time itself).

I completely accept that I simply might not have read enough Foucault (or maybe I'm getting him wrong). And I am enjoying him. Although, I really want him to tell me what power is..... I want him to explain where it is in the metaphysical landscape. 

[I'm also very glad that I read Bataille first. Foucault tends to throw in reference to the economy and the general economy without giving much away in the text. Having a bit of Bataille in my head has definitely helped give those references some context]