Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1. Belonging
2. Charisma and Credit
3. Enthralment and Ritual
4. Earlier Globalism – The Empire and its Cult
5. The Modern Economy as Empire and cult
6. Reconciliation and Unity
7. Anticipating Another Economy
1. Belonging
Belonging is the first purpose of all the action that we call ‘economic’. The
point of the transaction is not simply to possess or use this commodity,
but so that others see us in its light. It reveals our identify to them in
such a way that they wish to be with us. The modern economic account
that concentrates on goods without reference to the social context which
determines what things are desirable, and are therefore commodities, it is
solipsistic.
The Club
Let us start with the simplest form of belonging. You join a club. You
become a member of the golf club, say, or of the union, trade association
1
Modern Palgrave
1
or rotary club. You become a member in order come into relationship with
other members, who you hope will be pleased to give you a welcome.
They give their affirmation and so they help to secure your public identity.
You become a member so that you can be with your pals. Belonging is
everything.
The club gives its members social standing. If the club is small enough, no
explicit record of who owes whom is necessary. It is a is a primitive
economy in which everybody knows Every voluntary association may be
said to be a form of credit union in that it members extend social credit to
one another. This takes time and requires face-to-face encounters, which
are provided by all those drinks, receptions, competitions and away days.
2
Mohammad Grameen Banker to the Poor: Creating a world Without Poverty (Public
Affairs 2003), Beatriz Armendáriz, Jonathan Morduch The Economics of Microfinance (MIT
Press 2007).
2
Keeping records has its own cost. Groups evolve ways to avoid these
costs by avoiding the keeping of explicit records, dealing not in money
(the formal system) but in credit, the informal system, because it is
cheaper, faster and more exclusive. We use money because it saves on
the effort of paying honour specifically and fully, but we use the informal
system of favours, that works on an implicit understanding of credit and
honour, because it saves on the cost of explicit accounting represented by
money. ‘There are purely cognitive costs of organising and monitoring
transaction, such as the calculation of bill.’3 No calculation is made within
the family, the association or firm. ‘The function of the firm is not simply
to maximise transaction costs, but to provide an institutional framework
within which the very calculus of costs is superseded.’4 The informal and
formal systems are not necessarily rivals. Without simultaneous use of
both systems, and tactical decision-making about when to resort to
explicit record-making and when not, both systems would grind to a halt.5
The firm
There are two reasons why we have to go to work. We go because we
have to and we go of work because we want to. Let us think over the
second since it is the neglected reason. We go to work because we want
to be with other people. Being a member of this company is the reward
we seek. The firm bestows your identity on you and so your identity is
secured. Belonging is everything. Being united to your fellowman is the
fundamental union towards which every transaction gestures.
We get a job, become an employee and come into relationship with these
other employees, our fellow members in this household. We join them, so
there is an unmediated form of reconciliation and united between us here.
We go to work to be with our mates; a bond, of honour, of humour, holds
us together. We perform for their praise, and bound to one another by a
common distrust of some other group, our managers or customers. This is
the ‘economy of regard’.
3
Geoffrey Hodgson Economics and Institutions (Polity 1991) p. 203
4
Hodgson Economics and Institutions p. 207
5
Landa Trust, Ethnicity and Identity: Beyond the New Institutional Economics of Ethnic
Trading Networks, Contract Law, and Gift-Exchange (Michigan 1995) p. 49 ‘It is implicitly
assumed in the standard theories of exchange that there are no costs in the making of
transactions. In such a world of zero transaction costs, institutions such as money,
middlemen, and the legally-binding contract would be redundant. Recent contributions
have emphasised the costliness of the barter exchange process and the positive role
played by money and middlemen in reducing costs.’
6
Avner Offer The Challenge of Affluence (Oxford University Press) p. 89
3
We intend to survive by reinforcing our own position. We work in order to
grow the business, bringing more customers, and as it becomes necessary
to deal with them, we will have to employ more people. We work to build
our department by recruiting those who will promote our vision and
perhaps even be personally loyal. Each employee can hope to rise as new
employees arrive at the bottom.
Our work is never merely the work of our bodies but always of our
persons, mind and body. Yet the firm is the person of which the employee
is the body, so the logic of their relationship separates the product of the
work of the individual employee, reducing him from person to body. The
firm is like the household of the ancient world made up slaves and
masters, in which the work may always got from the slaves by a beating,
so that they remain mere bodies.7 During office hours we work for our
slave-master; in the evening, in our own household we go spending, and
as consumer over service providers, we exercise this same status of
slave-master over a myriad unseen slaves. We take it in turns to be the
slaves and then the tyrants of one another.
7
WJ Booth Households: On the Moral Architecture of the Economy (New York 1993).
4
own celebrity to our brand, and whom be recognise as worthy bearers of
the firm’s image. Some we identify as wholesale customers, franchisees or
as sales force, or as designers and suppliers and market researchers who
sniff the wind and tell us what tweak to give the product in order to give it
more cachet next year.8 Our marketing people want to allow our products
to drift slowly down the market, and into ever bigger markets. In the
short-term at least, this will make us more money, but only in the short-
term. Our designers tell us to place the product further up the market and
they tell us how to do this. We must make ourselves more exclusive in
order to maintain our desirability, and the level of aspiration, for over the
long-term, this is money in the bank.
8
Jeremy Rifkin The Age of Access (Tarcher 2001) p. 46 ‘Some of the biggest names in the
manufacturing sector have successful metamorphosed into design studios and distribution
houses, leaving plant and property behind and handing over manufacturing to outside
contractors.’
9
Arjun Appudurai (ed) The Social Life of Things: Commodities In Cultural Perspective
(Cambridge University Press 1986).
10
Jeremy Rifkin The Age of Access p. 47 ‘In the new network economy what is really
being bought and sold are ideas and images. The physically embodiment of these ideas
and image becomes increasingly secondary to the economic process.’
11
George Ainslie Picoeconomics: The interaction of successive motivational states within
the person (CUP 1992) p. 368-69 ‘tastes often have realised diminishing returns of reward.
From what may have been the optimum returns as determined by evolution, competitive
goods like power and fame reward fewer people, because they become winner-takes-all
markets, and consumer goods reward less effectively because the goods’ (369) ready
availability keeps people near their saturation points. Political science, like economics,
needs to adjust to a world where people have enormously cheapened familiar rewards by
the same mass production that cheapened bread and nails. We have only begun to
understand the consequent loss of rewarding effect.’
12
Pierre Bourdieu Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Routledge)
5
its doormen in the hope that the firm will admit us, but bar the crowd
behind us. Life in the modern economy is lived as a perpetual search for
the shelter represented by each of the households of the divinities. We go
from gate to gate, begging admission, gathering charisma as though it
were nectar, and so accumulating our identity. Consumer culture is an
elective tribalism, our form of the pagan life.
Money is the primary idiom by which we give one another this recognition
and approval, and all the material goods and commodities by which each
of us lives and is sustained in the recognition of our peers as a person.
Each of us hopes for more recognition, and more the material means by
which our public visibility can rise, and so we attempt to direct our effort
towards those from whom most recognition and material support will
return.
Persons not only seek recognition but hope to gain more than they are
obliged to concede. What we buy and sell is first ourselves, and we do so
by buying into one another, and selling out again. We take ourselves to
market and place ourselves before our peers in order to receive their
recognition and approval. We offer them our stock and we buy theirs.
Inasmuch as we do so, we acknowledge that we are worth what the
market says we are. Thomas Hobbes puts it this way:
‘The value or worth of a man, as of all other things, is his price;
tis to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power:
and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependent on the
need and judgment of another…and as in other things, so in
men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the price. For let
a man (as most men do) rate themselves as the highest value
they can; yet their true value is no more than it is esteemed by
others.’ 14
The worth of everyone in the market is in constant revision. Even if your
own stock is being bought steadily, it may still be falling if the stock of
others is being bought faster. The flux of the market, and with it the
measure of your being, is a function of the countless untraceable revisions
created by every movement of the market.
13
Robert W. Jenson Essays in Theology of Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995) p.
221 ‘What bodies really are, is availabilities that enable freedom’.
14
Thomas Hobbes Leviathan
6
We are the product we have to sell. Others will buy into us if they believe
that we will bring them greater recognition. We promise to bring to the
relationship our own audience and supporters, that others can be
persuaded to unite their households to ours, to create a more powerful
alliance. We bring the possibility of introductions to other persons: we
point to the extent and quality of our network, our mailing lists and
customer details. We must demonstrate our reach, the run of our writ. We
enforce it and defend it against our competitors who try to reach their
hand into our nest, or seek to entice our support away from us. Some we
can fend off, others we will have concede some share to in return for
some share in them.15 Our credibility is our asset. But our credit is never
stable; it leaches away from us and as we haemorrhage, we have to be
shored up by supplies we procure from others.
Putting on a Show
Each of us exerts a force of attraction which works on those around us.
We set out to convince and hold enthralled as many others as we can.
Business, and life itself, involves convincing a public that the state of
affairs is what you say it. We set out to win publics and audiences and
winning them over to our view of the world. The game is market share.
We want to persuade people to follow us, and so to collect people, so they
become our followers. We do this by telling them a convincing story about
the way things are, in which we reveal that their true identity are ours are
united. We throw our cloak over them to create a pact of mutual
affirmation. We flatter them, but we do so best when it does not occur us
that flattery is what this is. Others want to enter this warm circle, and yet
we cannot admit everybody, for we can only stay ahead by looking
beyond our immediate circle for new sources of affirmation from those
who will bring in new energy.
Each of us is at the centre of our own little circle, and on the periphery of
other stronger attractants. We all orbit around those who are stronger
than ourselves, and acquire momentum by swinging by the gravity of
rivals, in order to get ourselves into the orbit of stronger stars.
A Big Man has to meet the expectations of his people. They are his
audience. He must create a drama in which both sides are involved and
lead them in this drama. He must create an aura and keep us watching
and fascinated. He must make us afraid. We hope to bask in his favour
and avoid the basilisk stare that puts us in peril. We must want to please
him and fear of his disapproval. We will want to woo and placate him with
gifts, chief of which is introductions to those who will increase his power.
Life in his household consists of trying to catch your patron's eye for this
makes all things possible for you, most especially the possibility that you
will become a patron in our own right.16
The game is about winning people. You have to shore up your support
faster than it can dwindle, and poach supporters from other big men
faster than they can poach them from you. The Big Man must watch his
crowd constantly for signs of boredom. When they start to drift away, he
15
Aristotle Nic Ethics
16
Castiglioni The Courtier
7
must do something new that will delight them, or shock and appal them,
in order to keep them watching. The literature of social anthropology
reminds us that in the world of honour and patronage there are no settled
hierarchies, orderly queues or limits to violence, and none of the security
offered by the flattish and even hierarchy established by the modern
division of labour, in which everyone is good at something. Instead there
is the constant business of challenge and riposte, and pushing our way to
the front. The marketplace is a big playground with no adults to police it:
some of the bigger children inevitably assume a vague control in order
make the violence more predictable and thus reasonable.
Big Men honour their supporters and are honoured by them. They have to
return honour more slowly than they are paid that honour by others. They
acquire power and wealth ‘by paying off those supporters whose aid is
essential to them but also by retaining for themselves whatever resources
they can abstract at the expense of weaker and poorer members of the
group, whose claims they can safely ignore for a time.’ 17 You have to pay
your supporters less and more slowly than they pay you, while
maintaining the impression that you pay them more, and more frequently,
than they pay you. It is all about timing your payments to ensure that
more credit is flowing in that flowing out. Alfred Gell reports an
observation by one New Guinean respondent:
‘The wealth and power of a big man are built upon a series of
contradictory practices that ultimately undermine the basis of
his power. For he builds his power through application of the
principle of reciprocity. A big man must give back what he has
received if he wants to go gathering into his hands an ever-
greater quantity of wealth for redistribution. But in order to
maintain and expand his power, the big man must gradually
resort to opposing methods, delaying the moment of paying
back to members of his faction what they have given him to
help him make his name … his social base finally collapses
beneath him, at which point his followers scatter and rally to
one or another of his rivals who thus profit from his fall’.19
17
Mervyn J. Megitt ‘Studies in Enga History’, Oceania Monographs (Issue 20, 1974) p. 82
quoted in Alfred Gell The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps
and Images (Berg 1992) p.282
18
Alfred Gell ‘Practice and the Timing of Exchanges’ in The Anthropology of Time p. 282.
19
Maurice Godelier The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and power among the New
Guinea Baruya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982) p.163
8
Every Big man gives his own public account of himself and issues the
currency which broadcasts his reputation. This currency consists in images
of himself which make his reputation tangible. His name opens doors
when you utter it. His image opens people’s fists. You must wear that
image in order to pass the lobby and into the building. His name and
image are symbolic capital, ‘the most durable form of wealth’.20
The market is that large group of people who remember, know and
incessantly discuss who is up, who down, and who owes whom. Money is
the stylised idiom of this ongoing chatter. The market is nothing but this
chatter. The value of each member of that market, and the value of
whatever is bought and sold, and the value of money itself, are different
modes of the same market chatter.
20
Richard Gordon ‘From Republic to Principate’ in Mary Beard and John North (ed.) Pagan
Priests: Religion and Power in the Ancient World (Michigan: Cornell, 1990) p. 194.
21
Michel Aglietta ‘Whence and Wither Money’ in The Future of Money
9
3. Enthralment
The grateful dupes
Neoclassical economics tells us that we all act as independent agents. We
know our own best interests, we have perfect knowledge, of ourselves,
and of the market. We act in our own interests and so rationally, without
reference to what others are doing.22 We are entirely our own masters:
there is no moment in which we lay aside or forfeit our individual agency.
The charismatic man draws other men with him. He collects them and can
hang on to them so that they remain his flock. How does he do this? He
issues goods. Goods extend his reach and strengthen his hold. His goods
amplify his face and win him looks; we purchase these goods in order to
amplify our face and win us looks. Goods are designed so that our eyes
alight on them; they win eye-time for their holder.
Each of us wants to identify ourselves with the model that the Big Man
displays before us, and so we buy in. We move within a continuous flow of
images, a torrent of simulacra and specie. We cover our goods with the
attractants that will draw you to buy and do business with us. These
images show us to be happy, powerful, beautiful and charismatic, and
they communicate that we can share these qualities with those who come
to us. The glamour models who lends her face to our product and
marketing campaign shows you that you can also be beautiful – with us.
The face of the company president is inside the company annual report.
His image, sleek and assured, shows you that you can receive that same
assurance through this good, which is a token of him, and much more
through your purchase of shares in his company. This good is his presence
with you. The torrent of images – sometimes arousing desire, sometimes
grave and reassuring – point us to the single figure of the self we desire,
the figure whom all desire and revere, but who is himself unmoved. This
image leads us regularly back into the shop to re-purchase this assurance
through possession of the cultic image, and it leads us back to work to
earn the means to do so. All images are short-hand versions of the full
account which tells us that we belong in this household, in the presence of
this figure.
We want to keep up, and want to show our peers that we are powerful,
youthful, attractive, spontaneous. We clothe ourselves with the images
and personae we gather from the image-torrent of the media. We
regularly re-paper ourselves with whatever combination of cultural
wrapping seems to position us best for their approval. We buy in. We dive
in after those we consider cool and wish to emulate.23 We buy into the
22
Palgrave Economics
23
Donald MacKenzie An Engine, not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets
(Cambridge MA: MIT 2006) p. 272 ‘Another potentially crucial issue in respect to the limits
10
stock of whichever version of the Big Man seems most persuasive in this
moment. If we get in to that market early and get out again earlier than
the rest of the mob, we will survive. Those who come late, who buy high
and then have to sell low, will not survive. If others pour after us and buy
that stock our stock will rise and we will be able to put more into the next
stock that then appears to be his next most convincing representative.
The rational economic agent is engaged in guessing what the rest of the
market is going to do next, and doing so before them. He is – rationally –
making calculations on the roller-coaster. The market is healthy to the
degree that its members maintain a degree of specialisation, and do not
all follow each other. But when the market merges to become a single
pack or herd, its movements become more volatile and the market as a
whole more unstable.24
We make our way from bubble to bubble, from one big man to another,
each of whom moves us closer to the Big Man himself – until our ride is
over. Of course each such figure requires massive investment from us for
purposes of display, in order to persuade others to take the decision that
we have to opt into the household and bubble that we are riding. This is
the idea of conspicuous consumption, the Veblen effect, that an increase
the price of something to attach prestige to it and increases demand. Each
is a pyramid scheme, and eventually we are caught in a collapse too big
for us to recover from. The market is a form of mass compulsion. We all
complicit in this all-consuming theatre and in the fabrication of desire, and
which inflict it on one another, compelling the other to participate in it
with us.
Make-believe world
The Christian account of man gives a full account of our readiness to
deceive one another and to be deceived. The Christian doctrine of sin, and
the economic explanation in terms of fear, greed and other lapses in
virtue, are always appropriate. But Christianity is not alone here. Classical
Greek and Roman authors also offer robust accounts of our ability to be
fools and knaves, and those champions of modernity, such as Hume and
Smith, who stand at the start of modern economics were very familiar
with this literature. At beginning of is Plato’s account of Socrates, whose
encounters with the Sophists appear in the dialogues.
11
wisdom, but management science might be as good a description of what
Socrates’ interlocutors are offering.
The Sophist is offering to turn their student to acquire the most desirable
human form, and so to become a big man. Socrates is sceptical. He sees
these teachers competing to present the most attractive account of their
wisdom in order to win the custom of their students., get the young men
to buy their wisdom, and their program to – win friends and influence
people. But education is not simply a matter of gathering the best
techniques of self-promotion. They have to flatter those they want to
attract, by appealing to what is already attractive to them, which is
pleasure. They dare not suggest that learning requires more discipline
than those people are ready to accept. As children think that confectioners
are better than doctors, so young men will think flatterers (sophists) are
superior to philosophers.25 Socrates regards these not-so-hidden
persuaders, as counterfeiters. Like a confectioner or painter tricking
children, they conjure up a make-believe world for us inhabit.26 But these
are all cheap, untrustworthy words. Where do these sophists get their
wisdom? Socrates sees that they source their wisdom as they source this
flow of youth and beauty from the young men they gather. They take the
beauty and spontaneity from one group of young people in order to sell it
to the next. The false teacher holds his students captive, taking from
them the beauty they have by virtue of their youth, and selling it back to
them. He appears to give them what they don't have, but is only able to
do by creating new desires for these young men and so creating needs
that they didn't have. The teacher is by living off the very people he is
professing to serve. The good teacher prepares his students for the
moment when they must leave him to go to another teacher who can take
them a little further on their quest. The Sophists are false teachers,
Socrates suggests, because they do not tell them, that they, the young
men that they teach are judged by impartial criteria external to
themselves. Young people can never grow if their teachers hide from them
that they, both teacher and student, are under the discipline of the truth.
The truth is out there, beyond the group and its control. A good teacher is
one who communicates the objective and elusive nature of the truth to his
students.
We have seen Socrates and Thucydides making the same point, about the
complicity of people in their own deception, two thousand four hundred
years ago. Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville made the same point in the
early modern era. We are ready to be fooled. We have indicated how we
provoke people to engage with us by making a deep and therefore
emotional appeal at a deeper and more emotional sense of their identity.
But analysis of the ‘sub-rational’ nation of our motivations did not begin
with Thorsten Veblen, Theodore Adorno or the twentieth critics of
consumer culture. There is nothing particular to the twentieth century or
to ‘post-modernity’ about criticism of consumption or of knowledge as a
form of consumption. Effective criticism of the concept of the rational
economic agent, this basic tenet modern economics, has always been
available. It is simply that not everyone thinks that this more mature view
25
Plato Gorgias 464b-466a
26
Plato Sophist – Statesman??224
12
is worth having. This deeper and more complex view of man is as
unpopular as the ‘economic’ view of man is popular, which is itself a point
made by Socrates. As his own student Plato taught, the truth is there for
the self-selecting elite who are willing to cash in everything else in order
to pursue it.
4. Money as Ritual
Coin – History as Code
27
Donald MacKenzie An Engine, not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets
(Cambridge MA: MIT 2006) p. 265-6 ‘In order better to understand economic behaviour,
even in financial markets, it is also necessary to enrich standard models of the rational
actor to encompass ways in which we affect each other that are not reducible to
calculation in the ordinary sense of the word. We are often profoundly influenced by
anticipation of how our behaviour will appear to others, even if their approval or
disapproval has no direct material consequences.’
13
Money is a social relation, given deliberate and public expression.
Deliberate public expression is what ritual achieves. ‘Money is only an
extreme and specialised type of ritual’.28 The functioning of depends of our
‘forgetting of the controversial and contestable nature of its value.’29
Where has the modern economy come from? It comes from our history
and that history is present at every point within it. In the economy we
give and receive our identity by exchanging accounts of who we are,
which we do by exchanging accounts of our history, both our individual
histories and our shared history. Each economic transaction represents
28
Mary Douglas Purity and Danger (London: Routledge 1991) p. 70.
29
Marieke de Goede Virtue, Fortune and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (Minneapolis:
Minnesota Press 2005) p. xv.
30
Foley D. ‘Money in Economic Activity’ in Eatwell, John, Murray Milgate & Peter Newman
Money: The New Palgrave (London: Macmillan 1987) p. 248.)
14
this shared history in a particular code. Money is the code in which we re-
iterate the basic event in which our society is constituted. In every
transaction is a repetition of the history through which this society came
into existence; each event travels round the circuit established by our
common history. Money is our shared past become the code by which that
history creates our shared present.
We will now examine this figure through the ideology of an earlier empire.
The champions of modern autonomy were enthusiasts of the Greek and
particularly the Roman conception of man, and understood themselves to
be recovering those earlier traditions of human dignity. The modern
conception of man derives from the Greek conception of man as the
master who acknowledges no master, or in its more Roman conception,
for whom all others are simply to be commanded. Since this conception of
man drives the Western economy and re-appears in every economic
event, we will examine this Roman conception.
A banknote has a portrait of some national figure on it; the credit card has
the logo of the issuing bank and security seals of credit agencies. In what
follows I will refer to all means of payment simply as the ‘coin’. Each is
the token of its issuer, the bank and national government . This figure is
another appearance of the ‘Big Man’. To be in possession of his coin is to
be in his household and economy. As long as you hold the coin that he
has issued, or seek that coin, you are in the continuing hold of the Big
Man. We handle his token and so are members of his economy, his
subjects. We disguise his rule until it has become universal, the global
15
empire that we simply call ‘the economy’; since there is nowhere that
holds out against him, we have ceased to be conscious that we are
functions of him.31
Ancient coins make politics visible. Histories of coinage start with the seal,
impressed into clay on the outside of some packaged commodity, or some
record of some commodity, handed by each holder of these commodities
to the next and so travelling with them.32 The seal is then the mark of
ownership not just of the commodities but shows that these traders trade
under the aegis of the ruler whose mark this is. He is guarantor of their
freedom to trade, for he provides the peace which allows that trade to
take place. The holders of a coin are licensed by him whose mark it is;
they are his men. The value of his mark is that it identifies them all as
members of his household, who may therefore trade and deal with one
another.
The elites of the ancient world were bound by personal alliances. The
aristocracies of the ancient Mediterranean were joined by brotherhoods,
alliances, ambassadors and customs of hospitality. Each alliance was
cemented and ritualised by libations and sacrifices, pledges and the
exchange of mementos of this encounter that would keep their alliance
visible to both parties. Chiefs met to forge these alliances through the
exchange of gifts. As Moses Finley put it ‘every quality or state had to be
translated into some specific symbol, honour into trophy, friendship into
treasure, marriage into gifts of cattle.’33 Trust is embodied in ritual
objects, of ‘little intrinsic value, but of immense symbolic significance’,
Gabriel Herman tells us. 34 Symbols were often created by breaking a
single token and giving each party a half that would function as the record
of an event of the cementing of some relationship. The handshake was
deemed so characteristic of the process that artists used it as a visual
symbol for the alliance. Some tokens took the form of model hands, that
portrayed the handshake given.
31
Michel Aglietta ‘Whence and Wither Money’ in The Future of Money
32
History of Coinage
33
Moses I. Finley The World of Odysseus (Viking 1978) p. 123
34
Gabriel Herman Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 2002) p. 50
16
By a series of gestures of self-abasement a Greek offered himself as
servant or ally. Offered by both parties, such gestures constituted the
forms of politeness and agreement that made the polis. Herman
discusses the naming and paternity ceremonies of ritualised friendship
‘stronger than kinship’ cemented by the exchange of young men from
other families as guests or hostages. Sitta von Reden shows that the
language of civility and citizenship of the polis relies on both parties
performing homage owed by a man of lower status to a man of higher
status. ‘The guise of momentary self-abasement made by both partners
makes the city a place of equals.’ 36
The coin is an instrument of the imperial cult. Coins portray a king, and
many portray the king offering homage to the god from whom he receives
his kingdom or for whom he acts as regent. The passing on of the coin in
payment is an enactment of the king’s reception of the world from the
god, of our reception of the world from the king who is his regent. Ancient
coins portray gods, or their temple or altar. The architecture displayed on
coins represented actual temples and civic monuments.37 We could see
the coin as a small shrine; or alternatively see the shrine as a larger
version of the coin. The presence of the emperor extends out from the
throne room in which he is bodily present as this individual, to every
public square where his statue stands and wherever his coins carry his
image, and so throughout the polity in which it is tendered.
A glance at ancient Rome may help us here. A Roman coin portrays the
imperial cult that promoted the supreme authority of Augustus that held
that empire together. Pictures and likenesses of the emperor were
everywhere, on coins, statues and public buildings. The coin was an image
and microcosm of the whole economy of power of the empire. Each coin
portrays the altar or temple of the god, or the god's gift of the empire to
the emperor, and the further gifts of peace and prosperity. Some coins
suggest that the emperor is of divine status: all wealth flowing from his
throne room, around his economy and back to him again.38
35
Mark Anspach ‘From Vengeance to Gift-Exchange’ in Caroline Gerschlager, Expanding
the Economic Concept of Exchange p. 213
36
Sitta Von Reden Exchange in Ancient Greece; ‘The Commodification of Symbols in
Seaford & Gill Reciprocity in the Ancient World; Richard Seaford Reciprocity and Ritual
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995).
37
SRF Price Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 1985) p. 180
38
Richard de Ste Croix The Class Struggle in the Ancient World (p. 397)
17
‘What contemporaries saw on their coins was a reservoir of
simple clearly-intelligible images of ‘good happenings’
connected with the empire... that could be held in the palm of
the hand.’39
Coins kept the empire up to date with the latest imperial architectural
achievements and of approved portraiture of statuary. The imperial cult
regularly issued stylised portraits of leaders and then as these leaders fell
from power, recycled these portraits in a process which Price likens to a
‘brutal Soviet-style propaganda machine’. Paul Zanker shows that the
imperial cult disseminated his account of his own divine genealogy;
Augustus encouraged others to construct their account of their
relationship to the divinities to whom he was related. The architecture of
his cities indicated that the world itself was brought into existence by
Augustus. Statues of a veiled emperor show him as priest. ‘The
apotheosis (deification) of Roman emperors offers a key to understanding
the power of the emperors in their capital.’41 Images show ‘the father of
the gods stretching out his right hand to give to Trajan the symbol of
power.. an act repeated on many coin-issues.’42 Each coin is a small
shrine; each shrine a large coin.
The formal speeches held at the great city festivals and the Panhellenic
games were also part of these rituals of remembrance, elements of an all-
encompassing discourse in both the public and the private spheres that
provided the Romans with a communal assurance of the continuity and
loving presence of the past.43 According to Zanker, ‘the Roman aristocracy
traced their family lineage back to Greek gods or heroes and identification
with mythological figures, originally a kind of genteel game, began more
and more to inform the noble Roman's view of himself in the late
Republic.44
Roman city understood the emperor himself as integral to the cult that
united all others, and for which the observance was not sacrifice at
39
Sabine McCormack Art and Ceremonial in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of
California Press 1981) p. 11
40
McCormack Art and Ceremonial in Late Antiquity p. 12
41
Price ‘From Noble Funeral to Divine Cult’ p. 56
42
Richard de Ste Croix The Class Struggle in the Ancient World (p. 397)
43
Paul Zanker The Mask of Socrates (University of California Press 1995) p. 250
44
Paul Zanker The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (University Michigan Press
1990) p. 44.
18
ancient altars, but the conspicuous exercise of generosity in the form of
the games. The city needed the emperor's presence at the games, as the
games were the functional heart of city and empire.45 The political display
in the circus, rather than the religious display of the temple, provided the
most explicit performance of the imperial cult as the source of imperial
cohesion. By staging games cities competed to demonstrate themselves
as the most favoured sons of this god. The games, military prowess and
the business of government as a form of conspicuous consumption that
depended on the sacrifice of a proportion of those involved in it. It was
obvious to Tertullian and Augustine that the circus was not just about
horse-racing and athletics, but was a participation in the story spun about
the fascination of the imperial family and its ancestors; to watch is to give
approval and be possessed by the daemon of the imperial cult.46 The
imperial cult was a cult of flamboyant display that enthralled the whole
world, and it did so by consuming elements of it, holding all in the fear
that they might be the next victim. The cult held together an empire by
regularly identifying some section of its population who were then turned
upon and consumed.
We need not believe that the emperor wielded the colossal power his
propaganda claimed. His cult made this giddily high claim for him because
it was what the empire wanted to hear; this fiction was concocted by his
court and people together. The cult spread with the image of Augustus on
his coinage. By the propaganda of on his coins and other images the
emperor steered the empire, but the glorification of him in the eulogies,
the circus and public building programme steered the emperor. The
empire held together to the degree that this cult was well-performed by
all parties. . The empire demanded this of the emperor and he had to
oblige, for maintenance of the mythology of unity was his job. According
to Paul Veyne, ‘The monarchic regime, which has truly existed only in
exceptional reigns, has succeeded for thousands of years in making
people believe in its existence. Its chief merit, which has enabled it to last
so long, is that it is not monarchical, but serves as a cover for informal
team governments.’47 The emperor has power to the extent that he
gathers supporters while staying far enough ahead of them to preserve
his own freedom of manoeuvre.48 The logic is the same for a Roman
emperor as for the ‘Big Men’ in the literature of social anthropology we
met in section 2 above).
The big man is the sovereign whose will must be obeyed. He is the
autarch and tyrant who exists, according to his own ideology, before and
above all others. The imperial cult is the basis of the Western political
ideology, when the Christian Gospel is absent. This cult receives a
development, an expansion rather than fundamental change of character,
in the period of expansion in which Europe grasped the world. In this
second imperial moment that started in the seventeenth century.
45
J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz Antioch: City and Imperial Administration in the Later Roman
Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1972)
46
Tertullian On the Games and Augustine The City of God
47
Paul Veyne Bread and Circuses p. 303
48
Jon E. Lendon Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press 1997)
19
Rome provided the image to which the champions of modernity found
compelling and made universal. As a result we have inherited the
assumption of the unassailable will of the individual, whose choices are
above question, and no individual is obliged to hear the challenge of any
other, and our peers cease to be our judges. Roman conception of the
solitary individual is universalised so everyone may act as this autarchic
individual. As a result of this expansion the world becomes a single global
economy in which, through the medium of money, each may command
the service of all.
We have stripped the person down into a unit of pure will. We declare that
no one knows anything about us other than what we reveal to be our will.
This will must be feared and flattered. It cannot be argued with, and it
will join no conversation. How can two such wills meet? They can only do
so in the return, the point at which contact of two autarchic wills is
controlled by ritual. And they do so briefly and episodically. The world of
the modern economy is a world of brief events of contact.
20
development and growth, the human economy undergoes only a
repetition. This means that the modern economy is not substantially new.
Moderns have not escaped the logic of human mortality and continuity
generation by generation through time. The modern economy is only a
particular way of seeing the human economy, and is thus an economical
and minimal way of seeing it, motivated by the hope of controlling it. This
conception is indeed so minimal that as we have seen it gives us little
motivation to continue this history and so seems to hinder rather than
help the continuity of the open economy and indeed of the human
economy as a whole.
We have seen that sacrifice was the ancient idiom of the making and
recording of contracts, and that this institution evolved through other
means of recording, involving tokens and written texts, that are more
familiar to us. The context for this was the forms of social ordering and
consensus-making, embodied in the vocabulary of patron and client,
honour and service that subsequently took financial forms. Payment is the
attribution of status and equivalence that allows communication to take
place. The Big man has to get you to take his coin, which is both his
imaging of his own action in reception of his lease on his kingdom from
the god and his own bodily substance - and to pass it on, and only ever to
deal in it and in him. The whole task is to get the other man to take the
coin you give him.
We have said that the coin or commodity held between the two persons
represents everything that has brought them together. Each member of
the economy grips a coin, and as they are gripped by the Big man who is
the personification of that household and economy. To handle this money
is to accept this economy, notionally issued by him, by which we accept
that we are his subjects and creatures. We all work to disguise that this is
the case by attempting to erase any part of the world that resists
identification with this universal household and so are not conscious of
our status as functions of him. Our autonomy is a myth of his invention
and the currency in which he disposes us. The emperors and gods of
modernity have drifted so high up the ladder of being, becoming so
universal, that we are seldom aware of them. Yet they are still here, and
from their concealment, they continue to exercise their power over us.
‘Economic’ man
The modern economy produces a certain sort of man. He has been
referred to as ‘economic Man’, who considers himself only over the short-
term, and so is man without a long-term. We have suggested Modern Man
is the outcome of the intellectual tradition we sketched out in the contrast
between the private and public man made in Chapter 3. We must discover
that this intellectual tradition is not only a set of ideas, but the complex of
21
practices which make up the modern economy. The modern economy
envisions economic actors in a certain way, and the result is that we see
ourselves in this way. We become what we understand ourselves to be. As
we buy and sell we impose these practices on one another, and so impose
this conceptuality on one another, and confine one another to the realm,
the economy, defined by this conceptuality. We have seen the early
modern champions of autonomy were unwilling to acknowledge love and
gift and so were unable to concede that we not only exchange goods,
driven by necessity, but also distribute goods, in freedom, motivated by
love. They were unable to concede that what we give must ultimately be
ourselves, and that what we receive is ultimately one another, and that
how much goods and services feature in this traffic, they all amount to a
gift of ourselves. We may give ourselves willingly and freely. But if we do
not do so, we are given and spent nonetheless.
The man of modern economics does not concede that he has any history,
that he is mortal and must give way to others who will be his successors.
He knows no obligation to reproduce, to acknowledge the claim of the
future on him or pass on what he has received.
Here again we can learn from earlier generations. Xenophon tells us that
no one dare contradict a dictator. If he keeps everyone afraid of him and
so puts himself beyond challenge, he will never hear the truth, and never
learn how to modify his own desires. The man who is only under his own
control is a menace to himself as much as to others. Tyrannised by his
own passions, he is to be pitied.49 His apparent absolute freedom is a form
of captivity. By regarding ourselves primarily as consumers and so putting
ourselves beyond challenge, have we become pitiful tyrants who cannot
be gainsaid and who never acquire self-mastery?
Yet we are public beings. We watch one another and seek one another’s
respect and are driven by our desire to be loved and admired. We do
things because we hope that they will get us noticed and admired, make it
easier for us to be loved by those whose love we want most. We have
seen that every change and transaction in the market affects the whole
market and all the individual prices in it. We are gesturing towards
49
Xenophon Hiero: On Tyranny
22
something given and impersonal. We are gesturing to it as and thereby
turning it into something inert, that cannot speak back to us.
6. Going shopping
Money as ritual
We have said that payment is a form of bilateral homage. Money is an
idiom by which two persons perform this reciprocal homage by which they
position themselves in the world of relationships.
We have seen that money starts from the exchange of a handshake, and
thus is a form of body-language. It employs the sort of complex motions
of hand and body by which subjects once paid court to their rulers and
clients to their patrons. These gestures are reproduced in the tokens that
commemorated the occasion on which fundamental acts of homage were
made. When a king is portrayed receiving his kingdom from a god, the
two of them clasp hands. The passing of the coin in each payment is the
enactment of the handshake by which the world is given by the one and
received by the other.
Together we perform these hand signals via the algorithm of the cash
register. At the end of each day’s trading the cashier exchanges with his
line manager another set of signatures and signals that sum up the day's
trading; this signal is agreed and transmitted in signals that both move up
the hierarchy of the firm, and which over the long-term create that
50
Donald Mackenzie describes some of these in the ‘open outcry’ trading of the ‘bear pit’ of
the Chicago stock market
51
David F. Armstrong, William C. Stokoe, Sherman E. Wilcox Gesture and the Nature of
Language (CUP 1995).
23
hierarchy, and move from one firm to another, creating new orders and
trades. Such streams of complexly conventionalised hand-signals –
alphanumeric figures – flow across the market. Each signal joins the
stream that runs around the world, gathering the world into a single
flickering luminescence.
We go to the shop and select an item from the display. We give the item
we have selected with our credit card to the assistant who shows the item
to the light pen and swipes the card through the till. He gives us a slip of
paper, on which we put that scribble unique us, return it to him, and he
returns card, purchase and receipt. The movements involving card, pen
and keypad are an evolution of the handshake. Where once the
handshake, accompanied by other ritual acts of conviviality, was watched
by an approving audience, now this set of movements involving card and
pen, those it appears to us many times more sophisticated than a
handshake, perform this same function. Its approval is still required,
although the audience is not present in that place at the moment that
transaction occurs.
Imagine you have a side view as shopper and shop assistant complete this
exchange across a counter. Our side view resembles the images on
ancient coins, in which we see a vassal pays homage to his sovereign,
subjects of the empire to their emperor, and an emperor to his god.
Imagine we are not able to distinguish the commodity from the record of
the transaction. We could then perceive no difference between the money
that changes hands, the receipt that is given, and the good that is
purchased and taken home. We distinguish the good purchased from
money and receipt because we have been enabled to by a tradition of
commerce. But what if there was no difference, that is, between the
object of the transaction, the (financial) means of the transaction and the
record of the transaction? We could see all three as equally object, means
and record of the event. Then we could say that each transaction is an
exercise in recreating and enforcing the distinction between the object,
the means and record of the transaction, respectively the purchase,
money and receipt, and dividing the world in this way into object, life and
history.
For the seller the object sold represents the past of the world, the money
received represents life, opportunity and future, while the receipt we issue
and other accounting entries we make represent a statement of the
approval of the necessary audience, their confirmation that the ritual has
been performed adequately. For the buyer, the money paid represents
the past of the world, the object bought represents new opportunity, while
the receipt confirms the approval of the audience. Every transaction
distinguishes and separate the world into three elements. Each event of
shopping is the ritual by which two parties make a particular claim on the
recognition of the market that is their audience, and they use three
elements, that represent the past, present and future of that audience, to
do so.
By these stylised hand movements over the cash desk shopper and shop
assistant perform an act of mutual homage. Their act has immediate
24
consequences that travel in all directions. At the end of the day’s trading
the till is inspected and the till receipts approved by the store manager.
The week’s trading is examined by regional and national managers. It is
examined again by the Accounts department. The chief financial officer
then presents summarises all these trades in his report to the Board, then
stockmarket at with the announcement of quarterly results. The reports
that summarises these trades are examined by the auditors before these
results presented to representatives of shareholders at the annual general
meeting. The news from the till results in new orders being despatched to
suppliers and distributors, and these orders issued to packers and delivery
people, and the news received through price signals by growers and
manufacturers.
But surely if we put things this way there no exchange of anything real
and substantial? There is, but in order to show what it is we must consider
again how we make things unalterable.
When the shop assistant insists on receiving this coin, they are insisting
that this financial instrument, and the whole convention of money, is
necessary, normative and real. The shop assistant and I are signalling to
each other that we hold the convention-world of the coin as real as the
commodity, and so we makes these two worlds of (soft) conventions and
(hard) objects correspond. We insist on the hardness of human
achievement. We check the fit between the two halves of the human
world, the soft and the hard, and confirm that the world of human
convention is as hard as the material world. In each transaction we insist
on a demonstration of this solidity, and each transaction is the
demonstration of this correspondence and this solidity.
25
conventions that have brought humankind this far. We insist that the
ritual is performed punctiliously. We check what we are being offered. We
weigh the coin in our hand, test it between our teeth, hold this note to the
light to check that this is a real rather than a counterfeit ten pound note.
We check that the goods are what they claim to be, that authenticating
seal is there, that there is a two year guarantee. We check the figures on
pay slips and bank statements. We check that the etiquette has been
satisfactorily performed and we have not been short-changed. As we feel
the goods or tap the coin we are offered for them to reassure ourselves of
their quality or its solidity, and place our hand on it to affirm that we are
its new owner. We are patting the world on the head in a gesture of
ownership, that signals both that we acknowledge this position we have
reached. We confirm it and it confirms us. In every economic transaction
the two parties place their hands on a token of the world, and for a
moment symbolise the economy in which humans share one world.
So far we have said that humanity commands the world, insists that the
world is to be commanded and so stands opposite it. The human being is
distinct from the material world. But the modern economy But there is
one other feature of the logic of the modern economy. Humanity is not
distinct from the world.
Emotion drives the market, or rather, emotion is what the market is. 53
The market is a contest between confidence and caution. Greed and fear
try their strengths against each other every day. As long as our
confidence is stronger we will enter the market and the market will go up
and a bubble will inflate. We stay in with the rising market as long as we
can because we cannot bear to be left behind. The market amplifies the
movements, and feared future movements, of the herd. The moment that
someone expresses, by their decision to sell, the fear that more are
exiting the market than entering, the herd breaks and scatters. Each
shoves their way to the exit. As they get out of that stock or market, they
look for others to enter. Each hopes that the rest of the herd will discover
52
Hyman P. Minsky Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (New Haven: Yale 1985).
53
Akerlof and Shiller Animal Spirits. George Ainslie Breakdown of Will p. 130 ‘In an
intertemporal bargaining model, will is a recursive process… the person herself can't be
absolutely sure of what she’ll do in the future and makes her present choice based on her
best prediction. But this choice also affects her prediction, so that before she has acted on
her choice she may predict again, and may then change her previous prediction and thus
her choice.’
26
the same opening a moment later and come thundering on a short
distance behind them.54
When our public account of how things are becomes massively out of
kilter with how things are there is a correction. People may be content
with what the market offers them, but it cannot prevent them from
deciding one day that they no longer like it, and won't buy it any more.
Man judges man and find him wanting. When that correction has been a
long time coming, we experience it as a traumatic event. When the public
snaps out of one mood, and into another, moving suddenly from
assurance to doubt and self-disgust, the market is convulsed as its own
previous assertions are repudiated. This is what a financial crisis is.
It is the interface through which we are connected. The cash till that sits
on the counter between the shop assistant and me embodies the
algorithms and pathways that sustain this electronic one-world system.
Every keystroke on this till rings changes that occur at all points round the
world. 56 The total interface, made up of all the keyboards, keypads, light-
pens, card-swipes, monitors and displays, holds us in a single global
network. 57This global traffic of buyers and sellers circulate, the whole
54
George Ainslie argues that each individual person operates as a crowd, in which our
potential acts jostle to become our actual acts and determine the path we take.
Breakdown of Will p. 131. ‘Participation in the acts of this crowd of successive choice-
makers is an extremely self-referential process, hidden from the outside observer and
even from the person herself facing it in advance. She can never be sure how she herself
will choose as she tries to follow this crowd and also lead it from within; she may read a
small sign of faltering as her cue to bail out – that is, to stop cooperating with later selves
on a given plan – just as investors may see a small hike in interest rates as a signal to
start a massive sell-off. Or she may not. She won't know until it happens.’ Thus as
individuals, we do not have very complete knowledge of our own mind, much less of the
future movements of the market.
55
Ansell Pearson; Horst Henriks-Jansen Cathing Ourselves in the Act (1996). Jean Petitot,
Francisco Varela Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology
and Cognitive Science
56
Mark C. Taylor Confidence Games
57
Philip Mirowski Machine Dreams: Economics becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge
University Press 2001)
27
human entity processes about the vortex indicated by any artefact or
piece of architecture, each a variation on the cube of black stone. Each
human is a single data packet in this procession, each emitting a constant
call to hold its location within the procession, as a flock of birds wheels
around in the sky above its roost. The whole network, and the movement
of the flock around it, comprise a single vast artwork.
58
Donald MacKenzie An Engine, not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets
(Cambridge MA: MIT 2006) p. 268 ‘markets can indeed be seen as machines’ and ‘with
the increasing implementation of market mechanisms in software those are not simply
metaphors.’
59
Herbert Dreyfus
28
and sustained by a global circuitry. We all live at this interface. We key
into keyboards and keypads and on the screen watch the movement of
figures that represent the movements of the vast human flock. The
cabling conducts this traffic; the flow of information extends the cables
and nodes, so that the whole becomes an ever-more luxuriant growth.
The circuitry extends itself to every facet of life, forming routes, patterns
and all the architecture in which we live. The electronic circuitry in each
cash register is itself – a maze and a coin – an artwork that sustains this
fascination and self-absorption.60 Each contains the algorithms and
pathways that both replicate and drive the electronic one-world system,
so every keystroke on this cash register rings changes that occur at all
points round the world, and make humanity a single meta-human
organism. The algorithms of the cash register represents an abbreviated
form of the history of the West. The pathways formed in that history,
around which we propel each other.
The flow of signals that unceasing carries our acts of mutual recognition
creates the patterns, algorithms and architecture of our physical
environment. Our signals communicate the inevitability of these
conventions of encounter which make up this financial system.
Materiality, solidity and irreversibility is the convention that we are
engaged in creating together. Money makes up a single network with a
universally-present interface that gives us our position within the single
human household, and even make us aspects of a single human
organism. 61
One gives the present world, represented by the commodity, while the
other gives the past world, represented by the coin, records that
represent its history and title. One holds the present and the other holds
the past which is the title to the present. Together they distinguish
present from past, making the part alive and discarding the rest as dead.
This history licences this present, that this ‘is’ allows that ‘ought’ or ‘may
be’.
29
We offer one another accounts in which we set out the relationship and
identity that we intend to share. These many accounts are united and
reconciled by the fundamental account-reconciling medium that is money.
In giving and taking the coin which represents all our financial
instruments, we oblige one another to put our hands on the particular
past that is canonical for the economy of modernity. We oblige the other
party to situate themselves within this history and so acknowledge it as
binding.
We have said that that we belong to our fellows, that we share a single
language, with many local dialects, and a single, always evolving, ritual of
homage. We compel one another to act within this language and ritual. It
is not merely a language that we may speak or not as we wish, but which
we are obligated to reproduce in every encounter in which we move
others to re-attribute the materiality of the world – every economic
transaction.
Money is this idiom because we demand it from one another. Only this
idiom is acceptable from strangers who want services from us. We do not
allow the other person to approach us as a friend asking a favour, or a
lord demanding a service of a vassal, but only as an economic agent. If a
public utility asked whether we will allow it to lay a pipe through our
garden simply as a favour, we would reply that it must pay, for this is the
only idiom proper to the first encounter of institutions to individual
persons. We insist on it and so we oblige others to employ it when they
approach us, and thus we impose it on one another. It is only money
because we all say it is, and refuse to take anything its place. So we have
said that money exists because we use it, and thus because we believe we
may and must use it so.
Yet money also pre-exists us. We were born into the formal economy that
is denominated by money it just as we were born into a French- or
English-speaking society. Money pre-exists us, for it is simply
representation of all that was in existence between us, our national
history. It is the token of the myriad successful encounters and
transaction that make up the long history of the money-using cultures.
Since in the British Isles we could not always get enough pounds, shillings
30
and pennies, we made occasional use of the guinea, crown, ducat and
other denominations from further afield. And when we are not confident of
our pound we resort to dollars or ounces of gold. When we could not
finally produce any metal coinage, we traded on IOUs, which promised
delivery of the metal, and these promises turned out to be as good as
metal, or, since it was easier to produce and more portable, even better.
If these IOUs cease to be acceptable, we will return to a gold-backed
currency, yet we will still denominate it as the dollar or pound. These are
the units on which we reckon one another good for the money and are
prepared to do business with one another.
Unity enforced
The economic transaction is the event in which two persons are
reconciled. They come into communion and are, for a single moment, one.
Their reconciliation and unity are expressed, on this occasion, by these
goods and this price. The price on which they agree is as incidental as the
day’s date. Each transaction represents a unity and communion, yet only
for that instant and so without duration or public consequence. Money is
the medium that makes all things immediately explicit, so that nothing is
outstanding and no future settlement required.
In each transaction, one sells goods, the other pays for the goods bought:
goods and services travel one way, money the other. Ultimately we pay
for these goods and services with other goods and services. But what
makes them services and goods is that someone other than us regard
them as such. Each judges the goodness of this service or this sum
proffered, and does so by comparing it with previous and future services
and sums. We measure this present offer against a past and future. Each
31
is able to desire this service, and accept and agree on the adequacy of
this service only on the basis of a history. Each transaction is an
encounter between persons within the ritual built up by such a history of
such encounters. We have nothing to offer one another or to exchange
beyond our histories, but this history is all we need.
What is this ‘one’? ‘One’ is our unit of account. It is ‘one’, whether it is one
bag of salt or one dollar, and it is ‘one’ even when it is four dollars, or four
trillion dollars, or the same number of cowry shells. It is ‘one’ when it is
‘enough’, when price is agreed, deal closed and the union of two parties
brought about. What is the origin of this ‘one’, the number to which all
numbers and settlements refer? What is the true name of all the numbers
which all represent this unity? What is that oneness which is the basis of
every unit, and of every reconciliation and settlement? The union to which
each ‘unit’ and each number refers is the unity of God with man. For God
has joined man to himself, and made man one with himself. Every unit
refers to the union in which man is one with God, and which with God has
reconciled and united the world in man, making creation one, and for
creation’s sake, making man the ‘other’ of God.
Modernity has its own parody of this unity of persons. Indeed Modernity is
an imitation of the Christian account of the communion of persons but
which, since it is not sustained by the communion of God, is a very
communion of individuals, a very paradoxical communion of monads.
Modernity avers that there may be no ultimate unity of persons; two
persons may only ever be two, never two who are also one.
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others to address us in this medium, for we insist on being paid, and in
this single hard currency. The economy in which this banknote is sole
legal tender is the imperial cult of the old pagan empires made universal.
By demanding money, this specific and hard currency, we tell one another
that this scrip is universally valid, its writ runs through the world, and that
we will accept no account of our worth in any other medium. We must be
paid in this currency only, for with this currency our command can set
anybody, anywhere else in the world to work. This money enforces on all
others the universality and singleness of this economy. As such it is not
only an economy, but a rule, and a cult that makes that rule appear as a
given of nature. It is we who enforce this sole currency on one another,
yet this form of money appears natural and our need for it inevitable. It is
the triumph of universality over all particularities. The cost of our
determination to enforce this freedom over all others is that this
universality triumphs over our own particularity too. This universality is
permanent, while we are its merest epiphenomena. In money we are
contained in a single economy with all men by a God that will not give us
his name, and so does not allow our relationship with him to be free.
There are many big men, and there is a unity to them all, big men, and
indeed to all men. There is ONE big man, and we are all indistinguishable
from him. The effect of insisting that money is the only form of
recognition that we are willing to receive, is to acknowledgement only one
form of man – the monad individual. Each of us is up against him. To each
one of us, all other human beings appear part of that implacable figure.
Others face us as fate. Though there are many human beings in the
world, inasmuch as they through the global economy, each of us is part of
this unyielding entity. All our living and being is a participation in this
individual. Though there are many human beings, within the modern
economy none of them is fundamental or ultimate. All of them will pass
away and be re-dissolved into this monad. There is in effect one human
being, and each one of us exists as we participate in it. He is the truth of
us and we are merely instantiations of him.
We saw in the ancient Roman imperial cult that homage to the figure of
the emperor gave unity to an entire economy. All appeared to emanate
from this figure and to him, the focus of mass enthralment. There is no
such single figure in the modern economy. Since no world-emperor sits at
its summit, our economy seems to be prior to and more fundamental than
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any particular figure. This human monad is too high to have any actual
existence in our contemporary world. We cannot get any distance on him
because nothing stands outside him. We do not see him – because each of
us is him.
The reach of the global economy represents the effulgence of the Big Man.
This bloom is the whole history of the West that has given rise to the
economy that relates to this man-without-relation. As long as we refuse to
name our own determinative ancestors as our sources, are deliberately
ignorant of our own history, we are complicit in the anonymity which gives
the modern economy its natural, or fate-like, character. We must name
the champions of autonomy who created the forms of life which we all
now inhabit and subscribe to. Through the outworking of that history, this
figure has become invisible. Because he is not identifiable as one person
among others, we are unable to challenge the Big man of the modern
economy and make him answerable to us. The Big Man of the modern
economy does not give us his name and has put himself above
description. Because we cannot say what particular identity he has it is
difficult to distinguish ourselves from him and shake him off. Yet we are
him. Each of us is trapped in the autistic form of life made normal by the
modern economic worldview. In every encounter which features a
payment each of us is vocal subject faced by an object without speech,
-to-face with an object. Each of us is alternately the giver and then
recipient of a monologue. Someone inflicts their view on us, and later do
so on someone else. Each can only consent if he wants the sale. We have
normalised two non-reciprocal, non-equal relations. It normalises non-
equal relations.
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This single global economy exists because we all insist that each human
being pay us now in hard currency for every service we offer them. No
one may ask anything of us except when they offer us this single and
universal currency which represents the ultimate equivalence of all
persons and things. The world is always made up of many local and
regional economies. But because we insist that there is one form of
money, rather than many different negotiable forms of money, we enforce
a reductive and homogenising form of life on one another. We insist that
all economies and all ends and purposes can be reduced to the unity that
this monad represents, and that all things are made present to us, here
and now in this present, without loss.
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Eric Alliez Capital Times
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the transfer of the cultic token, by which the other man affirms that there
is no economy but this one, no time but now, that all his claims on me are
satisfied. As that dollar bill is passed over he concedes that I am now free
of him, and that we are now once again individuals without connection,
units alone in the world. Each transaction is a public avowal in which we
affirm that our encounter is a constrained and short-lived event, even an
impermanent and reversible affair. Each effaces the previous encounter.
In each such transaction we enforce on each other the asseveration that
man is solitary and all his relationships fleeting.
We enforce this unity on one another. By insisting that we are paid in this
formal currency we convey that all ends and purposes must be expressed
in the monadic idiom of this economy, and so made immediately present,
in this time. Our version of the global economy attempts to drag the
future into our present, while each of us simultaneously attempts to leave
our present embodiment and move into the future. We demand their total
commitment to this present, immanent, economy. This pull creates this
monism.
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As man is made in the image of God each can hope to see that image in
those around him and hope to receive some aspect of it through each
encounter.
The modern economy represents our life in the ‘household’ of the Big Man.
Together we sustain his ‘household’, imposing it on all relationships
beyond our own immediate family, and defending it from the challenge
from whatever it does not contain or control. By the conventions and
rituals which we understand as money, we communicate that everything
is already comprehended and foreseen. Money is the idiom by which we
enforce on one another the conviction that there is nothing outside this
present economy, that everything is owed to the present and nothing to
future or past.
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The champions of autonomy conceived our ontological debt to one another
in terms of that unilateral debt that circulates in the economy as money.
They created the cult which we know as the modern economy and
persuaded us to find our place within it, coming to one another, two-by-
two, as seller to buyer. In this interchange we divide the given world into
the good that is sold, the money paid for it, and everything else. In the
instant of the transaction, the particular good has a brief life, but
thereafter dead, while the money paid is in is dead and the alive, thing,
and the life that is universal and unconstrained. In each transaction we
divide the world into the dead and the living, from all things, this one
thing is selected to operate in this moment as the token of this present
transaction, so that the life, which is in the money, should be transmitted,
and so make its way through the world. We divide the world into the
material world of fate, and the freedom which we have to take for
ourselves, against the world, to act in freedom for a moment. This is the
pagan world, well expressed for us in the worldview of the Stoics, and it is
the worldview (and thus is scarcely felt as worldview, since, without the
Gospel, we have no other means of experiencing the world). Inheritors of
their worldview , we are also its captives. We have to think our way out of
them in order to see beyond economic concepts of modernity.
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worldview, or refuse it, we have to be able name some of these thinkers
and describe, and so gain some distance on, the economy that is their
legacy. If we simply observe the limits given us by some particular canon,
we are captive to it and we impose it on others. Only the gospel keeps us
from making any particular history canonical and so becoming captive to
any particular ideology. We do not see money as a cult because it is our
cult.
Summary
1. Economic activity is not solely about exchange but also about belonging
and membership of a household. The economy as a whole is a single
household, made up of many individual households.
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8. An economy is a circulation of signals that serve to the continuation of
that economy. All material goods and records serve to form these signals.
9. We insist that others may enter relationship with us only through the
differentiation-removing medium of money.
10. We are not solely rational agents. Our individual agency emerges out
of a collective agency and dissolves back into it again.
12. The ‘good’, the ‘payment’ and the record of the transaction are
equivalents; all are required to complete one signal, a transaction. None is
sufficient without the others.
14. Nature (and necessity) drives human transacting, yet the only deep
unstoppable mechanism is beneath the economy is human. There is
obeisance to a mechanism (a dark god) which is enforced on all others.
17. Each transaction is the event in which these two parties screen out the
many watching audiences and reduce all complexity to one.
19. Money both strips all particular relationship and homogenises all with
all. It intends to reconcile, unite and be the universal mediator and make
the many, one.
20. Everything in the world can be recognised and paid through his
means, money, so everything can be paid off. Then there is no reason to
wait for or look forward to any other world, or any future.
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22. Each new transaction circulates around the one-world circuitry that
has been built up by all previous events of transaction.
Humankind becomes a single organism.
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