Reading: pp. 281-343

Time prevents me from expanding too much on my thoughts about this week’s reading. Hopefully, though, the ensuing conversation will give me occasion to do so later tonight and over the weekend.

First things first: The writing on pages 281-93 just blew me away. Even if you’re not a part of the discussion group, you should do yourself a favor and read those pages alone. In fact, if I have time today I’m going to scan and upload them. Just some ridiculously good moments there.

An example:

Over and under the ground he hurried toward the place where he lived. No fragment of time nor space anywhere was wasted, every instant and every cubic centimeter crowded crushing outward upon the next with the concentrated activity of a continent spending itself upon a rock island, made a world to itself where no present existed. Each minute and each cubic inch was hurled against that which would follow, measured in terms of it, dictating a future as inevitable as the past, coined upon eight million counterfeits who moved with the plumbing weight of lead coated with the frenzied hope of quicksilver, protecting at every pass the cherished falsity of their milled edges against the threat of hardness in their neighbors as they were rung together, fallen from the Hand they feared but could no longer name, upon the pitiless table stretching all about them, tumbling there in all the desperate variety of which counterfeit is capable, from the perfect alloy recast under weight to the thudding heaviness of lead, and the thinly coated brittle terror of glass. (pp. 282-83)

Good God, that’s breathtakingly good.

Coming back again and again in this chapter, it seems to me, is the ambivalent status of originality. We see this in the opening section, where Otto’s father goes through the banalities of his later-afternoon/early-evening routine. He is enveloped by the city in such a way as to become absolutely anonymous, even (as we see later in the chapter) to his own son). The city itself has a certain cadence that drowns out any expression of individuality. Even the act of suicide is expected to follow a prearranged script—hence the disappointment of the onlookers when they realize the man on the ledge isn’t going to follow through on the arrangement. Mr. Pivner’s reflections on “progress,” as reflected in the sciences, economics, and journalism, are especially appropriate here as well.

Originality,  however, isn’t merely some ideal state. It isn’t an unequivocal Good to which one aspires. As we see in Esme and Stanley, and certainly in Wyatt (though I think he is a more difficult case, because at this stage he still wants to claim his originality, which is rather problematic), there is a certain price to be paid for originality. Arguably, the alienation felt by one who strives for originality is even more acute than that of Mr. Pivner, for whom originality is of the cliched self-help variety, wherein “success” entails your individuality looking identical to those surrounding you. Originality entails a certain ambivalent fracturing of time and self, does it not?  For “you” are always striving “now” to somehow move past “the now” that constitutes “you”. It’s enough to reach for the needle (Esme) or bend one’s knee (Stanley), finding momentary solace in the repetition.

I will cut my reflections short here, in hopes that they are vague enough to elicit conversation.  And, to be honest, because my boss is hovering close behind me, wondering why my Excel spreadsheet looks curiously like a blog post.

Scu over at Critical Animal has written a well thought out response to the “kill the bill” movement on the left. For those interested in the US’s health care debates it is an interesting read and one that appears to be formed more by policy analysis than anything else I’ve read. Some of what he writes there gave me some comfort, thinking that there might be some logic in passing this bill rather than scrapping it and trying again later. Obviously the Democrats have messed this up by refusing to go in united, but when your choice is the party of failure or the party of sociopathic nihilistic rage you go with the party of failure.

I have been putting off mentioning this for fear of outrunning the big Other and getting burned, but T&T Clark has offered me a book contract for a revised version of my dissertation, under the title Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation.

I am breaking my silence because my editor has asked me about a potential cover image, and I need help. Everyone agrees that something featuring the devil is absolutely essential, and I’m thinking there must be some medieval painting that would capture the spirit of my project in some oblique way. Anthony suggested the image above, which he got from this post, but I think it might be a little “much.”

I’m not sure I necessarily want something with the cross on it, though I’m not 100% sold on its absence — perhaps something like a “temptation in the desert” scene? Or maybe — and this is actually a good idea that I just suddenly thought of — something that juxtaposes the temptation of Adam and Eve with the temptation of Christ? Basically, anything that could include Adam, Christ, and the Devil would be totally perfect.

The Examined Life, directed by Astra Taylor, is now available on DVD. I saw it in the theater with The Girlfriend, and we both enjoyed it. Click here to watch the trailer (automatically starts).

Dearest readers, I still have considerable work left to do on my translation of Agamben’s The Sacrament of Language, but I am getting to the point where I can faintly detect the end of the tunnel. One thing that would help me confirm that the light is not the proverbial train would be if any of you had access to any of the following articles, for which either my research skills or my institutional affiliation has proven inadequate, in an electronically-transmissable form:

1. Benveniste, É., “L’expression du serment dans la Grèce ancienne,” in Revue de l’histoire des religions (1948): 81-94.
   
2. Bollack, J., “Styx et serments,” in Revue des études grecques 71 (1958): 1-35. [I only need pages 30 and 31.]
   
3. Faraone, C.A., “Curses and Blessings in Ancient Greek Oaths,” in Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 5 (2006): 140-158.

4. Thomas, Y., “Corpus aut ossa aut cineres. La chose religieuse et le commerce,” in Micrologus 7 (1999). [I only need page 74.]
   
5. Ziebarth, E., “Der Fluch im griechischen Recht,” in Hermes 30 (1895): 57-70.

The Benveniste article is the most important. If you know of any translations of any of these articles (if applicable), electronically transmissable to me or not, that would also be a godsend.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who’s helped with the three articles crossed off. Since it’s looking as though some type of physical scan may be necessary for the remaining two, I’ve added the page numbers I need, if anyone is feeling so led.

UPDATE 2: Thanks again to everyone — I’ve got all the articles I need at this point. The response has really been amazing. I’m very grateful.

“All errors that remain are, of course, my own, and they have in fact been introduced consciously in order to provide industrious readers with the satisfaction of feeling smarter than me.”

The summary aspect of our book event ended over the weekend and I feel it was overall a success. I want to thank all those who participated in the book event. There were some interesting thoughts put forward for future work in the comments and I hope that we see some work that builds off of Goodchild’s coming from folks like Clayton and Lissa. I hope that those readers throughout the blogosophere that linked to us over the book event will feel free to use this post to continue any discussion as they digest the method and concepts in Theology of Money. Below you’ll find an index to the individual summaries and Goodchild’s response. Thanks, finally, to Adam, Brad, Lissa, Michael, Alex, Clayton, and Dan for the outstanding job on the summaries.

An index to the posts is provided here:

• Preface to the US Edition and Introduction
• 1. Power
• 2. The End of Modernity
• 3. Ecology of Money
• 4. Politics of Money
• 5. Theology of Money
• 6. Metaphysics & Credit
• 7. The Price of Credit
• 8. A Modest Proposal: Evaluative Credit
• Conclusion: On Redemption
• Response from Philip Goodchild

Again, for those who were unable to keep up with the pace of reading, please feel free to use this post for further discussion.

Philip Goodchild, Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, has been kind enough to write a short response to the book event which you will find below. In the coming days I’ll put together an index of all the posts for future use and perhaps more discussion is to follow. – APS

I want to express my gratitude to all those who have committed so much time to reading, thinking through, and writing about Theology of Money on this blog. I was especially impressed by the work of those who did the chapter summaries. The standard of explication and understanding has uniformly been truly outstanding. One rarely deserves such attentive readers.

Such efforts demand something by way of response, but I felt it important not to comment on the discussion while it was underway, lest my presence should entirely skew the discussion. Even so, I suspect that some of you have felt my presence looking over your shoulder.

The questions and objections raised have been thoughtful, and I now have much to reflect on, but sadly I do not have time to address them all. As for the mischievous pseudonyms, I shall confine myself to one remark: “That’s the disingenuous thing about Goodchild – his pluralism. He wants others’ evaluations to count.” That comment, in and of itself, is truly disingenuous. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

The book is, of course, about money, and the way in which it structures thought, desire, action, environment and trust. It is not about the authorial subject Philip Goodchild, who is himself perhaps something of a pseudonym. After all, those of you who know me will know that I do not normally declaim in a stentorian voice (except when I’m reading from Deuteronomy). The writing of an author is simply a sedimentation of those thoughts that achieve a certain metastable equilibrium, and so become for a while necessary and resilient to questioning. The person who writes, by contrast, has to be continually questioning, looking over one’s shoulder, listening out for what has not yet properly been thought. It is a task that never ends.

Perhaps the most significant matter that my work can pass on to others is not a fresh worldview, but the capacity to pose problems, to hear the voice of alternative perspectives. Perhaps those closest to me are those who will question the most, both myself and themselves. I am grateful for all those who have been attentive to other possibilities of thinking in this discussion. And I do believe that the Conclusion is lacking a parable . . .

Have you not heard of that madman who took a bar of gold into an electronic exchange, ran onto the trading floor, and cried incessantly, “I seek Mammon! I seek Mammon!” – As many of those who did not believe in Mammon were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. “Has he been sold?” asked one. “Has he gone bankrupt?” asked another. Is he in the bar? Is he in the gentleman’s club? Has he gone to China? An offshore tax haven? – Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into his midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is Mammon?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the great sea of wealth? Who gave us the sponge to wipe clean all the ledgers? What were we doing when we unchained these liabilities from their assets? Whither are we seeking now? Away from all assets? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any profit and loss? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of poverty? Have we not become poorer? Is not depression continually closing in on us? Do we not need to trade with gold? Do we hear nothing as yet of the gravediggers who are burying Mammon? Do we smell nothing as yet of the decomposition of money? Money, too, decomposes. Mammon is dead. Mammon remains dead. And we have killed him.

“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was wealthiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has perished under our knives: who will pay this debt for us? What wealth is there for us to balance our books? What new accounting, what new desires shall we have to invent? Is not the cost of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become banks simply to appear to have the credit to guarantee it? There has never been a richer deed; and whoever is born after us – for the sake of this deed he will belong to a richer economy than any economy hitherto.

Here the madman feel silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw the bar of gold at the screen, and it broke into pieces and he went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Evaluation of assets requires time; the payment of debts requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most extended futures contract – and yet they have done it themselves.”

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several banks and there made a plea for bankruptcy. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these banks now if they are not the receivers and bankruptcy administrators of Mammon?”

Goodchild concludes with a short meditation on how the theology of money affects the task of theology going forward. The result, he affirms, is nothing short of calling for a revolution (258). I appreciated his summation, and think it presents us with a nice schematic:

• “Does money promise value in such a way that value may be advanced? If so, then any effective theology must do likewise.”

By this, he means the job of theology is not to replace illusion with fantasy. “True meaning” or “final realization of truth,” glory now or glory later, are not its promises. Theology must, rather, be attuned to the immanence of its “situation,” the ecology in which it participates, and from there realize its potential from a fully embodied mode of evaluation.

• “Is money the supreme value againt which all other values may be measured? If so, then any effective theology must do likewise: it must become capable of measuring all other values.”

Notably, this means identifying the “intrinsic value of all things” — i.e., without the definitive substitution of a single form of valuation. Such a substitution can only appropriate potential to itself, and in the process can never realize (or allow to be realized) the innovative power of potential.

• “Is money a speculative value whose intrinsic worth awaits demonstration? If so, then any effective theology must be  likewise.”

I tried to address this last week in two comments. Goodchild seems to be saying such a theology must move beyond illusion, through fantasy, and immerse itself in its own radically fictive possibilities. He writes: “Theology belongs within the realm of the possible, the realm of ‘what if?’ One cannot know in advance what the outcome of any particular theology will be.” Such a theology must experiment, and not know fully where it it will lead. (I’m thinking at the moment of a kind of Benjaminian theology, in which a theological reflection is carried beyond itself into “speculative” interpretation, whereupon its isolated specificity is less important than the evolutionarily complex fluidity of its transmission and the resulting wealth of possibilities it discloses.) Perhaps it is time to move beyond even “constructive theology,” and revivify “speculative theology.”

• “Is money a social obligation demanding that all interaction be ordered in accordance with the repayment of debt? If so, then all effective theology must do likewise.”

Theology has its own set of demands, and it should not shy from them. As Goodchild has repeated throughout Theology of Money, “Theology consists in the ordering of time, attention, and devotion.” What distinguishes the theology’s demand is that it does not seek possession, but rather “coordination and orientation of other powers so that the same time may be used to attend to a range of demands.” Theology recognizes its place in the ecological scheme of things — not to be confused with a hierarchy or chain — and recognizes that the demands of life are both multiple and connected. The goal, as such, is not so much to be “well-balanced,” as it is efficiently coordinated.

The aim, ultimately, is the creation or discovering a new basis for a coordination and cooperation that does not prioritize the individual sovereign and/or the promise of finality (i.e., when all things will be “made right”). This, Goodchild concludes, is the true nature of redemption, whereupon our existing powers and configurations of debt are recognized as the failures that they are. Perhaps in so doing we see them truly for the first time; and in so seeing, we finally see; and in so finally seeing, we begin, for the first time, creating.

Thoughts for reflection: What is the way forward for such a theology? Is it possible to institutionalize it? If so, which institution? If not, from where does its “authority” come to facilitate the re-ordering of time and attention and devotion? Are there perhaps preliminary “re-orderings” necessary before Goodchild’s vision for theology is fully translatable? Or has the state of theology decayed so much, or perhaps on the verge of such rapid deterioration, that a radical alternative, whether it be this or something else, is  not only necessary, but in some way inevitable?

Reading: pp. 222-277

My original intention was to do an Open Thread for today, but after finishing the reading I couldn’t contain myself from tapping out a short post instead.

The thing that jumps out at me repeatedly in this chapter is the power of representative recognition. Notice the heavy emphasis placed on Recktall Brown’s portrait, with its over-sized hands:

It had been painted from a photograph (the sitter too busy to sit more than that instant of the camera’s eye) in which his hands, found in the foreground by the undiscriminating lens, were marvelously enlarged. The portrait painter, directed to copy that photograph faithfully and neither talented, nor paid enough, to do otherwise, had with attentive care copied the hands as they were in the picture. And pausing, passing it hundreds of times in the years since, often catching up one  hand in the other before him, his hands came to resemble these in the portrait, filling out large and heavy, so apparently flaccid that they had been referred to once, and repeated by other voices in other rooms, as prehensile udders. (228)

It is as though, in other words, that Brown had fallen under the gaze of the painting and had himself become its representation. The painting’s consciousness of being looked at (p. 251) only partially explains this.  More importantly, it stems from the ignorance of God’s overwhelming attention.  He says:  “–Like everything today is conscious of being looked at, looked at by something else but not by God, and that’s the only way anything can have its own form and its own character, and . . . and shape and smell, being looked at by God” (251). Brown’s flattening into a caricature of reality (“He does not understand reality. . .  Recktall Brown is reality. . . a very different thing” [244]) is only the most obvious in his lack of consciousness of God’s attention. Don’t we see a similar thing in Wyatt’s anxiety regarding his depiction in Valentine’s hypothetical novel (pp. 262-63), where he concludes, “Yes, I don’t live, I . . . I am lived”?  This leads, I would suggest, to Wyatt’s wonderful explication of his own place as the hero in The Recognitions:  “Listen, he’s there all the time. None of them moves, but it reflects him, none of them . . . reacts, but to react with , none of them hates but to hate with him, to hate him, and loving . . . none of them loves, but loving . . .” (p. 263).

In all this, Esme seems the counterpart to Brown. Hers is a kind of emptiness of character, too. And yet, where Brown’s is a devouring emptiness, Esme’s is creative. She cannot help but represent the visions and desires of others–be they those of Otto in the previous chapter, or those of Wyatt here (i.e. of St. Catherine de Ricci and his mother). We might pause and consider that this is not merely the effect of hers being a Christ-like kenosis as it is reflective of her ignorance of what Wyatt regards as divine attention. She is just as absent of form and character as Reckall and the reality he embodies. The difference is her knowledge of this, and the dread this portends. Consider her reaction to yet another representation of her:

Her face, more and more forgotten as effort worked through her, took a sulking look: one of fear, remembering now a sculpture of her head and bust made once by a student who did  not know that, when the plaster dried, it would shrink one-tenth the size he had modeled it, so that he  made the cord tight which supported the neck, and when it dried they found death’s excellent likeness of her head pendant, swinging gently with the door they had opened upon it. (p. 277)

Esme may be more self-aware than Brown, but the effect of this knowledge supplements his greed with her fear–fear always being the underside of greed, the fear of loss. The lines she cribs from Rilke would then seem to suggest that for her the divine attention carries as much the threat to one’s self as its creation. Hence, it would seem, her preference for heroin, where she can be both neither here nor there.

* * * *

Next Week

Before issuing a declaration of next week’s reading, I thought I’d check in on how everybody’s reading is coming along. I realize it is a busy time for a lot of you–some with finals, or sundry preparatory exams,  others with holiday preparations and travel, etc.  So, in addition to your always insightful comments and discussion, let me know how you’re progressing, and we can decide together on the upcoming weeks’ readings.