[p2p-research] [Marketime] The counterpart of the desire to move forward that is becoming, i...

[Michel Bauwens]

Many thanks Tusar, interesting!

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Tusar N. Mohapatra <
tusarnmohapatra at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Tusar N Mohapatra <tusarnmohapatra at gmail.com>
> Date: 11 Sep 2009 14:35
> Subject: [Marketime] The counterpart of the desire to move forward that is
> becoming, i...
> To: tusarnmohapatra at gmail.com
>
> [
> http://thememorybank.co.uk/2009/09/10/mediation-and-memory-in-the-theory-of-money/]
>
>
> Mediation and memory in the theory of money<http://thememorybank.co.uk/2009/09/10/mediation-and-memory-in-the-theory-of-money/>
> via The Memory Bank <http://thememorybank.co.uk/> by *keith* on 9/10/09
> Money as mediation
>
> Anthropologists and sociologists have long rejected the impersonal model of
> money and markets offered by mainstream economics. Viviana Zelizer, for
> example, shows in *The Social Meaning of Money* that people refuse to
> treat the cash in their possession as an undifferentiated thing, choosing
> rather to ‘earmark’ it — reserving some for food bills, some as holiday
> savings and so on. Her examples generally come from areas that remain
> invisible to the economists’ gaze, especially domestic life. People
> everywhere personalize money, bending it to their own purposes through a
> variety of social instruments. This was the message too of Parry and Bloch’s
> *Money and the morality of exchange*. When money and markets are
> understood exclusively through impersonal models, awareness of this
> neglected dimension is surely significant. But the economy exists at more
> inclusive levels than the person, the family or local groups. This is made
> possible by the impersonality of money and markets, where economists remain
> largely unchallenged. Money, much as Durkheim argued for religion, is the
> principal means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal
> experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal.
>
> Money is often portrayed as a lifeless object separated from persons,
> whereas it is a creation of human beings, imbued with the collective spirit
> of the living and the dead. Money, as a token of society, must be impersonal
> in order to connect individuals to the universe of relations to which they
> belong. But people make everything personal, including their relations with
> society. This two-sided relationship is universal, but its incidence is
> highly variable. Money in capitalist societies stands for alienation,
> detachment, impersonal society, the outside; its origins lie beyond our
> control (the market). Relations marked by the absence of money are the model
> of personal integration and free association, of what we take to be
> familiar, the inside (home). This institutional dualism, forcing individuals
> to divide themselves every day, asks too much of us. People want to
> integrate division, to make some meaningful connection between their own
> subjectivity and society as an object. It helps that money, as well as being
> the means of separating public and domestic life, was always the main bridge
> between the two. That is why money must be central to any attempt to
> humanize society. It is both the principal source of our vulnerability in
> society and the main practical symbol allowing each of us to make an
> impersonal world meaningful.
>
> The two great means of communication are language and money.
> Anthropologists have paid much attention to the first, which divides us more
> than it brings us together, but not to money whose potential for universal
> communication is more reliable, in addition to its well-advertised ability
> to symbolize differences between us. As a symbolic medium of communication,
> money informs our subjectivity and gives concrete expression to our desires,
> releasing and fixing our imagination in many ways. It is a store of
> individual and collective memory, the stuff linking persons to their
> communities.
>
> ‘Just as my thoughts must take the form of a universally understood
> language so that I can attain my practical ends in this roundabout way, so
> must my activities and possessions take the form of money value in order to
> serve my more remote purposes. Money is the purest form of the tool (…); it
> is an institution through which the individual concentrates his activity and
> possessions in order to attain goals that he could not attain directly.’
> Simmel *The Philosophy of Money*
>
> Indeed, as Marx argued, money is a means of communication so powerful that
> we often ascribe human or quasi-divine agency to it and what it buys. In
> some ways, Money is the God of capitalism and most of the inmates are
> believers. [...]
>
> Oswald Spengler on money and number
> In *The Decline of the West*, Oswald Spengler emphasized the part played
> by money and number in the history of Western European civilization and its
> North American offshoot. The first idea I draw from him is that money is
> just one of several abstract universals of which number, time and space may
> be more relevant than language. The second is that, for all their apparent
> universality, these should be approached as cultural particulars with their
> own historical patterns of growth and decline. Third, world history in our
> period has been dominated by the West owing to its adoption of a specific
> form of economic life, based on money and machines, that normally goes by
> the name of ‘capitalism’. Fourth, rather than adopt a timeless form of words
> for what interests us today, we should embrace the dialectic of ‘becoming
> and become’, in order to understand both the immanent direction of our
> present circumstances (history) and their finitude as the residue of what
> has already happened, the past (nature). So, finally, the question of
> money’s power is historically and geographically relative: we need to attend
> to the relationship between measurement of money as something perceptible to
> the senses (magnitude) and money as a category of thought expressed
> intangibly as abstract relations (function).
>
> According to Spengler, the West had exhausted the historical impulse given
> by its modern version of economic life (featuring money and machines) and a
> new phase, based on politics, national religion and war, was about to take
> over. This was not a bad prediction, but Spengler’s interest for us lies in
> how he conceived of the relationship between money and other universals.
> Following Goethe, Spengler made a contrast between history (becoming) and
> nature (what has become). The counterpart of longing, of the desire to move
> forward that is becoming, is the dread of having become, of finality or
> death; and this pair together drive cultural creativity.
>
> ‘Life, perpetually fulfilling itself as an element of becoming, is what we
> call ‘the present’, and it possesses that mysterious property of
> ‘direction’, which men have tried to rationalize by means of the enigmatic
> word ‘time’.’
>
>
> --
> Posted By Tusar N Mohapatra to Marketime<http://marketime.blogspot.com/2009/09/counterpart-of-desire-to-move-forward.html>on 9/11/2009 02:21:00 PM
>
> --
> Savitri Era of those who adore, Om Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.
>
> Tusar N. Mohapatra,
> President, Savitri Era Party.
> Director, Savitri Era Learning Forum. [SELF]
> SRA-102-C, Shipra Riviera, Indirapuram,
> Ghaziabad, U.P. - 201014, Ph: 0120 -2605636, 2815130 INDIA
> http://savitriera.blogspot.com/
> http://sites.google.com/site/savitrieraparty/
> http://www.google.com/profiles/tusarnmohapatra




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