Money Wisdom #507

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

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

Money Wisdom #506

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

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

Money Wisdom #505

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

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

Footnote

Money Wisdom #504

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

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

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

 

As ever on this blog, it's been a while. 

I miss posting here. There's a sense of freedom that comes with accepting that very few people will read this post. Embracing this fact and still writing is liberating.

My recent Why Joe Lycett Might Kill Us All wasn't meant to be a 'liberated' piece. I wrote it with the intention of it being read. Unfortunately, it's had very few readers. Which is a pity because I'm rather proud of it. People whose opinion I hold dear have been complimentary about it - even without prompting! It would have been especially nice to get a response from Joe Lycett, himself. In the end, I content myself with the fact that it needed to be written and I wrote it.

Money Wisdom #503

 "...the semiotic engine of capital - of wealth, of money, of value - produces a delirious regime of signs, obsessed, at once, both with the fences that need to be raised in order to protect the treasure from the enemies of value and with the spiralling void that value, ultimately, refers to."

Fabian Muniesa Paranoid Finance in Social Research: A International Quarterly (2022) (link) 

A Personal Tribute to Nigel Dodd 1965-2022

I've just been at the Finance and Society Conference at City University in London for the past couple of days. It was the first 'in person' conference I've attended since 2019 because of the pandemic. I'm not 'in' academia. I'm not doctoral student, researcher, lecturer, or professor. In my day-to-day life I've little contact with anything that resembles university or academic life. Currently, I drive a van to earn my living. When I am lucky enough to attend a conference focusing on my area of interest I find it wholly invigorating. I guess if you're in academia you might get used to being able to chat about the weird, wonderful and esoteric stuff you're reading or thinking about. I don't have that in my day to day life. So it's brilliant to be able to be a pretend-academic for a couple of days every now and then.

Money Wisdom #502

"There are two basic models of the libidinal economy of revolutionary movements, which we might characterise as the Freudian and the Reichian, or the petit-bourgeois and the utopian-socialist, or the Calvinist and the Keynesian models - the former based on a vision of (libidinal) spending as depletion or loss, the latter on a vision of spending as generating (Libidinal) wealth."

David Bennett The Currency of Desire (2016) p.157

Money Wisdom #501

 "Neoliberalism recasts the moral/immoral distinction as a rational/irrational one, reinforcing the bonds between economic and psychiatric rationality. As national economies continue to lurch between inflation and recession in the twenty-first century, the question of how much credit-fuelled spending is rational or irrational, healthy or unhealthy, for any nation at any given moment continues to divide economists, just as the question of how much shopping might be rational or irrational, healthy or pathological, for any individual divides psychiatrists."

David Bennett The Currency of Desire (2016) p.121 

Ritual and Administration

Happy New Year!

I really miss reading books on money and writing about them here. 2021 was a year more devoted to 'doing' rather than 'thinking' for me. I expect 2022 will be similar. 

The highpoint of 2021 was, of course, the three Church of Burn events at The Cockpit, Marylebone over the first weekend out of lockdown in July. The performances were a significant step up in terms of their production values. An expanded cast and crew meant 30 of us were involved in creating Church of Burn in 2021. 

It was utterly thrilling to see something that had existed in my imagination since 2019 finally be brought into reality. I am profoundly grateful to all involved. We have images, audio and video of the performances but we've been a little coy about sharing them. A few exciting things have happened since July 2021 and we want to keep our powder dry for the next time.