source: https://academy.netadao.zone/

Transcript:

Hey, I am going to be one more minute. Okay, good evening. Welcome to Coining Reason session 2.1 on Economy. This session is several weeks after the first session of Unit 2, which you would think would mean that I would be prepared. But in fact, yeah, my economizing of time and effort remains deficient. So I have a bunch of notes and I’ve organized, you know, maybe like the first third or two and a half, somewhere between there. So the talk today, tonight, will follow those notes up until the point it breaks off, and then I will probably flounder around a little bit. Yeah, so that warning aside… And by the way, if you want to come up and chat, just send a request, I will try to keep an eye on it. But I do, yeah, have stuff I can say. So tonight we are reviewing two texts. One is the economic historian Keith Tribe’s The Word Economy. The other is Sigmund Freud’s The Economic Problem of Masochism. So in provisionally situating economy here between, on the one hand, this disciplinary formation of economics, and specifically of political economy, and the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, we are taking up, we will take up, if not tonight, then over the repeated future sessions, a controversy that has dogged both psychoanalytic theory and political theory for some time. Namely, is desire a product of historical forms and economic forces, or does desire point to a reality beyond these forms and forces, a trans-historical or universal reality, which in some sense organizes or informs historical and economic reality? The scholar, oh, I don’t know how to pronounce his name, Miguel de Baistigui, he frames the question in the following way. Quote, is the subject of desire, qua alienated subject, a product of socioeconomic relations, or is the empirical subject of capital an instance of a deeper trans-historical libidinal structure? So the question before us then is essentially this, does desire have a historicity? And if so, is that historicity the history of something? Does it have an object? Or does desire rather point to a thingness of history itself? And you may recall the discussion of Dosting back in unit one, when we were reading Clint Burnham’s, Is the Internet a Thing? For anyone who may be listening who doesn’t remember that, it’ll suffice to say here that the thing, or Dosting, in both philosophical and psychoanalytic theorizing designates less a specific component of reality, for example, the domain of objects, ideas, or feelings, than it refers to the ordering of reality as such. So the church fathers in the Middle Ages regarded the thing as the most general of all categories, subsuming being and non-being, the one and the many, and all the rest. So without further ado then, let’s go to Tribe, who confesses at the end of some 60-odd pages, and they can be a rather long 60 pages, that his essay may have, quote, taken the form of a scholarly shaggy dog story, but that its sense lies as much in the length of the telling as in the point it reaches. That the history of economic thinking is lengthy, tedious, and filled with disputes will hardly surprise anyone, at least anyone here. But what indeed is the point that Tribe has reached at the end of his account? He begins with an epigraph from Francis Hutcheson, one of Adam Smith’s teachers, who refers to the ancient Greek oikonomics as one of the three essential laws of nature studied by the ancients and situated between private rights and politics. Smith and others will follow Hutcheson in framing oikonomics, or the laws and rights of the several members of the family, as a mediator between individual private rights, especially property rights, and politics, or the law of the state and government rationality. So economy begins its life in this account as a law of the family and develops through the classical economic definition as the administration of scarce resources to the contemporary understanding in which, quote, this is from Tribe on page 22, economics is thought to be the analysis of choices made by agents under conditions of constrained optimization. This transformation of economics from the classical notion of the administration of scarcity to today’s more generalized neoclassical description as the science of choice, or sometimes even the science of behavior, is described at length in the 11th session of Michel Foucault’s 1978 lecture course, The Birth of Biopolitics. This is a long quote. Behind this identification of the object of economic analysis with conducts involving an optimal allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends, we find the possibility of a generalization of the economic object to any conduct which employs limited means to one end among others. And we reach the point at which maybe the object of economic analysis should be identified with any purposeful conducts which involves, broadly speaking, a strategic choice of means, ways, and instruments. In short, the identification of the object of economic analysis with any rational conduct. Foucault is outlining here the emergence of a concept which is unique to European modernity, which is homo economicus, or economic man. Foucault is keen to note that by this generalization of economics, from the administration of scarce resources to the science of choice, economics comes to stand in as what he calls, quote, a site of veridiction, which means a truth-telling device, or in Foucault’s terms, a dispositif, whose purchase or purchasing power extends unimpeded in practically every direction, swallowing up all forms of human activity, including reason itself, so that today we’re apt to view non-optimal or non-economic decisions as proof of someone’s irrationality. Another long quote here from Foucault, is not rational conduct like that which consists in formal reasoning, and economic conduct in the sense we have just defined, that is to say, the optimal allocation of scarce resources. Since formal reasoning consists in deploying certain scarce resources, a symbolic system, a set of axioms, rules of construction, and not just any symbolic system or any rules of construction, but only some, to be used to optimal effect for a determinate and alternative end, in this case a true rather than a false conclusion which we try to reach by the best possible allocation of our scarce resources. So if it comes to it, we do not see why we would not define any rational conduct or behavior whatsoever as the possible object of economic analysis. That’s the end of Foucault. This unconstrained and unperimetered metastasis of economic analysis to all domains of human life and behavior is made possible in part through the neoliberal logic of choice, itself produced and sustained, as Robert McDonald has argued, through the rhetorical work of incentives. The idea of the incentive reduces social and systemic relationships to a series of choices made by individuals. McDonald argues that this rhetoric around incentives has meant that in practice economics has often justified the status quo because any given social or political arrangement of power can be shown to be the result of individuals’ free choices, their following of incentives, to the current outcome. For Tribe’s part, he begins with some comments on the reason for his study of the word economy and the methods he will employ. He regards the changing use of the word economy as identifying conceptual discontinuities between different ages or cultures. This recalls Wittgenstein’s dictum that a word’s meaning is simply its use. However, Tribe does not distinguish between this Wittgensteinian or ordinary language philosophical conviction that, quote, the language which contains a culture changes with the changes of a culture. This is from the ordinary language philosopher Stanley Caffell in his essay, Must We Mean What We Say? and a rawer form of nominalism, which holds that changes in language determine changes in culture and existence. That is, one can understand changes in the meanings of words as symptoms of changes in broader culture, but it is another matter altogether to claim that linguistic changes are responsible for cultural changes. This nominalist position that changes in language result in are responsible for changes in culture is a position probably most prominently advanced today by advocates for political correctness, as well as certain fundamentalists. The subtler position of ordinary language philosophy simply holds that these changes in language can be read as a symptom of possible changes in culture. Each age, Tribe writes, has its economics. If we understand by that some form of organizing ideas about the basic problems of human need and meeting those needs. But we should not assume that what we today think economics is, has much, or indeed any, bearing on the way in which actors in the remote past organized their conceptual worlds. Economic activity as we today generally understand it has certainly existed for much more than two millennia, but its conceptualization as a discrete domain of human activity dedicated to these ends dates at most from the early 19th century, and in its current sense is much less than a century old. Turning back then to the terms emergence in ancient Greece as oikonomics, made up of two parts, oikos and nomos, Tribe translates oikos as dwelling place, household, or household goods, while nomos he divides between nomos, nemos, namos, nemesis, and the verbs nemo and nomizo, covering meanings as various as pasture, blade, law, dealing out what is due, manage, maintain, possess, occupy, have, or adopt as a custom, and later, more simply, he says, think. What matters to Tribe about nomos is that, this is page 24, quote, it involves senses of distribution, of disposition, of commutative justice. Tribe’s emphasis on distribution is worth contrasting to that of the German political theorist Carl Schmitt, for whom the first meaning of nomos is appropriation. That is a quote from Schmitt, and only the second meaning of nomos is the action in the process of division and distribution. On Schmitt’s account, economics is comprised of three parts, appropriation, distribution, and production. The place of appropriation is significantly less important in Tribe’s argument than Schmitt’s. Indeed, European historians have generally preferred to naturalize and obscure the role of appropriation by constructing the history of European nations as the conquest of land without owners or land owned by enemies, this return of the nomos nemeses. At their Greek origin, however, oikos and polis were quite different things. In particular, the polis, or the state, concerned the governance of free men and equals, while the oikos referred to the association of a master with his wife and their children, servants, slaves, and animals, all of which were part of his property. Although Tribe doesn’t dwell upon the point, the concept of property in ancient Greece was unique both to its time and place. The later Romans, for example, who conquered Greece, had no particular term to refer to private property, despite repeated 17th and 18th century European claims to have derived their concepts of absolute or unlimited property rights from the Roman canon. This misconception was so widespread that the 19th century French anarchist Jean-Pierre Proudhon could declare, wrongly and without any contestation from his peers, that Roman law defined property as the right to use and abuse a thing within the limits of the law. Such a definition does not exist in the Roman canon. But this is part of European modernity’s efforts, this idea of renaissance or rebirth. The idea was to construct a kind of continuity between the ancient past and the present. And this is one of these areas, property rights, property laws, one of these areas where this projection is strongest. Nevertheless, within the Greek context, Aristotle could define two types of property acquisition. Those, quote, for the upkeep of the household and those for the pursuit of wealth. The pursuit of wealth, however, lay outside the household and was consequently not the object of economics. Subsequent Greek and Hellenic thinkers would elaborate Aristotle’s definition of oikonomia through a set of related principles. Tribe gives five of them. So there’s one, the household’s internal affairs, which is the province of the wife. Two, the husband’s management of the house and all of its properties. Three, the philosopher’s management of his positions and properties. Four, the ordering of the cosmos and the principles of nature. And five, a technical term in rhetorical arts designating the organization of the parts of a discourse. We find contained in these five principle meanings of oikonomia, the problems of sexual difference, rationality, divine order. And in the Christian tradition, this divine order gets taken over by the shepherding of flock, which again points us to the nomos connotation of pastures, wooded pastures, and so forth. And finally, communication. So within oikonomia, in the Greek context, we have, again, sexual difference, rationality, divine order, and communication. Although the absence of oikonomia from the bulk of the classical corpus, Tribe says, suggests that it was not something thought to require any extended consideration, unlike politics and ethics. Of this ancient Greek arrangement, the concept of oikos survived into medieval Europe only in the relation of the nobility and their houses to their rulers, though the broader semantic field of oikonomia as involving husbandry and agricultural labor was largely retained. We’re suddenly told in Tribe’s account that by the 17th century, commerce was consistently used in the context of exchange, trade, intercourse, and transactions entirely neutral with respect to the moral order implicit in the conception of household or husbandry. Although Tribe notes that there were some neo-Aristotelian, which is code for anyone who doesn’t know, for simply the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church for this period of the Middle Ages, the fathers would often refer to Aristotle simply as the philosopher, the philosopher says. So anytime you see someone referring to neo-Aristotelian thinkers in this sort of span of time between the Roman period and the Renaissance, they are almost always talking about the church. So even though there were these uses of economy, Tribe’s leap from the Greeks to European modernity, he says, is entirely logical. But in our next session, when we read Marie-José Manzain, we will evaluate just how logical this leap really is when we turn to the Byzantine iconoclastic crises and the role of economy in theological debates. For now, though, we’ll let Tribe slide. So in the German tradition, at this time, that is at the 17th, 16th centuries, Tribe notes that commerce was about a particular form of exchange, whereas economy was linked to particular kinds of activity. And it would not be until the later 19th century that economy and exchange would be firmly yoked to each other. The process of detaching economics from the household was a very lengthy one. And the Germans and other thinkers did so by refounding sociability and moral order upon a general conception of human behavior, abandoning the conception of the household structured and ordered through social rank and personal obligation. Adam Smith’s work provides the framework for this new understanding, although Tribe notes that although Smith had that there was a moral order which must underpin economic order, Smith’s readers, say Mill and others, tended to discard or minimize this requirement of a moral order. Instead, they took exchange as the basis and proceeded from there. Since Tribe leaps over several steps between Aristotle and Adam Smith, I want to take a moment to reconstruct one of the more crucial steps that he’s gone past. This is John Locke’s theory of property as delivered in the second chapter, titled On Property, of his second treatise on government. Locke’s influence on both European legal, economic, and political thought is difficult to overestimate. As the progenitor of tabula rasa and other concepts, Locke put forward a view of human nature and human civilization, anchored in property rights and other ideals that can be described as liberal in the classical sense. So, for Locke, the familiar, or more one’s own, the oikos of oikonomia would fatefully, and in some cases fatally, become the institution of private property. The Lockean man begins in a state of nature, rather than a civil or political state. And Locke’s challenge is to explain how the transition from the state of nature to the state of civility takes place. Not all thinkers agreed that such a transition occurred. For example, the Scottish philosopher David Hume would reject the notion of the state of nature altogether as an erroneous premise, while sardonic wits like Voltaire would suggest the civil state was something of an illusion. But for Locke, this transition was keyed to the development of property right, and the right to one’s own. What, though, is one’s own? For Locke, the body is the original form of private property. As you will surely know from Unit 1, however, the sense in which the is a form of property is different from the sense in which my phone is a form of property. This claim about the body may startle those who know that Locke made a significant fortune from his investment in a slave trading company. But Locke did find a loophole in his theory of property rights to justify the practice of chattel slavery. So, in the beginning, Locke says, the earth was given to humanity to share in common. Thomas Jefferson, who echoes this sentiment, would write in a letter to James Madison, the earth belongs in usufruct to the living. Just as a note on usufruct, this is a term from feudal society and generally designated the land which the serfs shared. Usufruct is a right that the serfs had to this land. They could use the land without using it up, without wasting it, without squandering it or excluding others from doing so. As a point of contact with psychoanalysis, Lacan will say that, this is in Seminar 20, that jouissance, his concept of jouissance, derives from usufruct. So, the emergence of private property of one’s own piece of the earth was justified by Locke through the use of one’s body. That is, by laboring in the acquisition or cultivation of things. So, by mixing one’s labor with the things of the world, one earned a title and a right to those things. And this sounds well and good, but an infamous circularity now enters Locke’s argument, since he goes on to define property rights as the right to use things. So, use is supposed to guarantee one’s right to property, but one’s right to property is what licenses one’s use, which then comes first, use or title. Although Martin Heidegger advises us not to reject circularity, as we mentioned before, Europeans, or at least their historians and chroniclers, have in general preferred for use to precede title, so that the history of Europe is precisely this history of claiming land, either without owners or owned by enemies, but in any case, not as an appropriation of land from rightful owners, where rightful owners, according to Locke, mean owners with money. This sleight of hand, this circular sleight of hand, which involves the political distinction between friends and enemies that is so important to Carl Schmidt, would underwrite Locke’s justification for the violent dispossession of Native Americans, who were enemies, and African slaves, who were by alleged defect in their rational powers, not properly using their bodies and resources, and hence subject to slavery and the higher use ordained by the European masters. Another subtle problem, however, is crept into Locke’s argument. So the earth is given to humanity in common, as the Bible says, and this divine gift comes with a divine law, not to waste or spoil that gift. So although initially Locke defines property as what one can and does use, this has the consequence that no man should acquire more than he can meaningfully use. Locke refers to the acquisition of meat beyond one’s means of consumption as just such a form of waste and spoilage, which offends the providential plan for the world by God. How then to justify unlimited acquisition? It is money, a durable and non-perishable commodity, and for Locke, money is always commodity money, money is always gold or silver. So precisely durable and non-perishable. It’s money that licenses non-productive, wasteful claims to property. Because Locke regards money and monetary exchange as hallmarks of cultivated society, he regards money as the fulfillment of God’s divine plan, and the introduction and use of money becomes a divine duty, so that communities or individuals who do not have money can be regarded as of a lower, more primitive form. Daniel Loick argues in The Abuse of Property that by submerging property rights in a money-based economy, Locke’s law of property surreptitiously becomes the right to waste things rather than to use them. Monetary exchange, this is Loick, introduces the necessity of non-use and non-consumption to the property order. This, arguably, is the birth of capitalism. And we could follow Marx and just as well flip this to say that submerging property rights in monetary exchange produces a surplus value which alienates laborers, those using the property, from the value of their labor, which is the title to their property, the result of their work. But whereas for Marx, the essentially political nature of economy hinges on this alienation of laborers from their labor and the process of production, Foucault’s argument about the emergence of homo economicus, with which we began, places the accent slightly differently. For Foucault, the market becomes a site of veridiction, as we said, a source of truth-telling and quasi-governmental rationality by virtue of the fact that it regulates individual lives, not through violence and repression, but by inculcating norms of desire and passion. There’s something to be said about this Foucaultian idea of the market as something which talks. This is, of course, we have this in sort of aphorisms, money talks, but the market now also becomes something which can be excited. The market can be nervous. Foucault mentions that people have read this emergence of economics, and particularly Adam Smith’s concept of the invisible hand, as the remains consequently of a theological concept of a natural order. A hand that ties together all the disparate threads of individual human action is not so unlike God, including with this power to speak, to be moved, to judge, and so forth, to the point that some even today have wondered whether the market is a new God for human civilization. But in fact, Foucault comes out against this reading. He regards the market as fundamentally atheistic by observing that what is essential in Smith’s formula is not the economic hand, but precisely its invisibility. And so you’ll recall that at the reorientation, our previous session, that we emphasized that economy links the visible, the invisible, and temporal power. This invisibility is important to Foucault because it means that economic activity is non-totalizable. What’s invisible about the economy, this veil that comes across the economy, is the fact that there is no perspective any individual or any group can take to see it all, to understand it in total. This means that, as Foucault says, homo economicus, economic man, is he who can say to the political sovereign, you must not. Foucault distinguishes the economic man’s, you must not, from a juridical subject or a subject of law, saying, you must not. This is another long quote here by Foucault. But he does not say, you must not. But economic man does not say, you must not because I have rights and you must not touch them. This is what the man of right, homo juridicus, says to the sovereign. I have rights, I have entrusted some of them to you, the others you must not touch. Homo economicus does not say this. He also tells the sovereign, you must not. But why must you not? You must not because you cannot. And you cannot in the sense that you are powerless. And why are you powerless? Why can’t you? You cannot because you do not know. And you do not know because you cannot know. There is no sovereign in economics. There is no economic sovereign. All the returns and revivals of 19th and 20th century liberal and neoliberal thought are still a way of posing the problem of this impossibility of the existence of an economic sovereign. So that’s the end of Coe’s quote. This tallies with our argument from unit one, that because the psychoanalytic subject is sexed, hence that its being is virtual, hence that it is only capable of encountering itself as and through exchange with others, that the human subject is fundamentally ungovernable, resistant not only to sovereign control, but to its own sovereignty. Bear with me here as I flip through and try to find and assemble the scattered fragments of my notes. So with Foucault and with Tribe, as you see, he moves from the 17th century Germanic understanding of economy over to the British traditions of thinking about economy with Mill, and the discussion of economics becomes suddenly the balancing of pleasure and pain. So you’ll see that here we’re talking about truth, desire, passion, while discussing economics. So we’re already back to psychoanalysis, meaning in some sense that we’re back to the study of communication. So one of the critiques that emerged of economic science in the 20th century comes from the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who frames his work, this anthropological study titled The Gift, as a critique of classical and neoclassical economic theories. Noting in particular, this is a sort of long quote from Mauss, nothing could be more dangerous than what Simeon called this unconscious sociology. Unconscious sociology is how Simeon had described the economy, or more particularly, the market. So the market is something which none of us consciously control, we’re all pursuing our own interests, and in doing so, there emerges a spontaneous order, a spontaneous or unconscious sociology. Okay, back to Mauss. For instance, Cook could still say in 1910, quote, in primitive societies barter alone is found in those more advanced direct sales practice. Sale on credit characterizes a higher stage of civilization. It appears first in an indirect manner, a combination of sale and loan. That’s the end of the quote from Cook. In fact, the origin of credit is different, Mauss says, it is to be found in a range of customs neglected by lawyers and economists is uninteresting, namely the gift. This giving of gifts does not figure anywhere at all in tribes account of the development of economic science. And this repression of the gift from the thinking of economy has tended to result in a… so in the rest of tribes book, if you have the stomach to read the rest of tribes book, there’s a shift away from this linguistic study of the word economy to economics as a form of calculation. And so it’s actually by repressing this anthropological reality of gift giving that economics can emerge as a science of exchange. Yeah, so gift giving is fundamentally linguistic. It’s fundamentally promissory in nature in these primitive societies that Mauss is studying. The gift always entails an obligation, a debt, which the receiver must at some point in the future repay. And so the argument that Mauss ends up making is that whereas classical and neoclassical economists will say that exchange barter is the beginning of economy, Mauss argues rather that gift giving is the beginning of economy and that exchange and barter only emerge later. In particular, they emerge when the time between receiving a gift and giving a gift back is narrowed to near instantaneity. That is the moment, that is the birth of barter and exchange. So, this Electra Stimili, an Italian theorist, comments on this fact. She says, when money is not first recognized as a means of payment or as a unit of account in the exchange of existing goods with their intrinsic and objective value, it is rather intimately linked to language and shows itself to be the institution through which the valuation process is constituted as a phenomenon of social communication. Adam Smith, too, had noted the fundamentally linguistic origin and nature of exchange in his lecture course from the 1760s, where he derives the principle of exchange from, quote, the power of persuasion. This is exemplified in a well-known quote of Smith’s, which has it that nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. So, this fundamentally linguistic nature of money and finance, which, by the way, is the title of a book by Christian Marazzi, another of these Italian thinkers, complicates the story of economics as the science of choice or of GDP. You’ll forgive me for a moment, just because I need to switch, switch pages here, so bear with me. Oh, and poor do I have approved you, or have tried to approve you. Okay. Okay. Coming back to… Okay. So, the idea of economics as the science of choice, whenever this notion of choice is reduced to individualistic incentives, as we mentioned earlier, it creates a justification for the status quo. This is the argument developed by Robert McDonald and others that incentive rhetoric transforms the current distribution of goods, services, powers, and so forth as the result of individuals’ free choices among the range of options which they can use to conduct their lives. But this notion of this rhetoric of incentives should be complicated because there is a sense in which all of our life is in some sense already chosen or pre-chosen for us. Our family, our nationality, our body, our world, and even our world historical realities. None of these are our choice. So, at certain zoomed out levels, responsibility for our life choices melts away. I choose an iPhone rather than a Samsung Galaxy, but that choice itself is structured by an unchosen or forced reality in which I must choose between an iPhone and a Galaxy, let’s say. I choose to live where I work, but where I can work, and hence where I can live, is not entirely my choice. Even my employer’s choice to hire me was unfree insofar as they were constrained to pick among a limited set of applicants. So, among all these forced choices, it is sometimes said there is only one free choice remaining to any individual, which is the choice of death or the act of suicide. Though even this choice can be considered conditioned, constructed, coerced, death by gun, by hanging, by car crash, or whatever, all presuppose certain unchosen conditions. It seems in effect that there is no escape. This process, though, is sort of shifting, resuming between levels of analysis. So, at a certain level, of course, my choice between an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy is a free choice, which I make freely. But if you just step back a little bit, it all kind of fades away. And this is a problem. The law, as it exists, has to set these scales, or else you won’t be able to hold criminals responsible for their behavior. And so, this discussion or the deliberation over what those proper levels are is always a fundamentally political discussion. But the affective result of this, the feeling, I think, that we get, or that we have when we become aware in certain moments that our choices are not free, is weariness. It’s fatigue. And here I’ll quote from Emmanuel Levinas, who says that there exists a weariness, which is a weariness of everything and everyone, and above all, a weariness of oneself. What wearies, then, is not a particular form of our life, our surroundings because they are dull and ordinary, our circle of friends because they are vulgar and cruel. Weariness concerns existence itself. In weariness, existence is something like the reminder of a commitment to exist and of the impossible refusal of this ultimate obligation. In weariness, we want to escape existence itself and not only one of its landscapes. So, that’s the end of the Levinas quote. Levinas, as I’ve mentioned before, was a student of Martin Heidegger’s and turned against Heidegger for various reasons. Heidegger had the idea that being, or capital B being, is donated to us, that it is fundamentally a gift. Here with Levinas, you hear him refer to the gift of being or the gift of life as an ultimate obligation. We don’t simply exist, but we have a commitment to exist. And Levinas refers to this as an irrevocable contract that we have. When you live, you don’t simply get to live. You have to go do something. You have to make something of your life. And this commitment is the source of weariness. So, whereas Heidegger views it as a gift, Levinas flips it and sees it as a kind of debt, a contractual debt that beings, lowercase beings, have to uppercase being. Again, pardon me as I flip through some notes. Yeah. So, this relationship of beings to their being, it manifests as a debt that we have to pay. Levinas refers to it as the ransom of existence. And now we’ll turn a little bit to psychoanalysis. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Boro, go ahead. Hi. Oh, yeah. You have a lot of… there’s a lot there. So, I think some of my job is just to dumb this down. So, just starting from the beginning, it was just interesting the way you framed it. Like, economics has always happened. And we kind of projected certain things in the past, like, I guess, certain thought leaders. And going on to what Locke was talking about, I guess, like ownership. And I guess that’s kind of like the libertarian idea of self-ownership, like you own yourself. So, you kind of own the effects of your actions. Like, people would say, like, you would own, like, a murder or something. But you would also own, like, the fish that you take out of the pond. There is a next step that I found was really interesting. I guess, like, if you, like, get stuff, like, I’m trying to think, like, Native Americans, they try to, like, make the use of all the buffalo. So, you don’t waste anything. So, like, as long as you’re not wasting, you’re kind of, like, absolved of guilt. But, like, if you kind of exchange for money, you kind of, that’s another being absolved of guilt. It’s like, it’s kind of gone. And you have this thing that tells you that you’ve done well. So, everything’s good. And I think I noticed the thread, like, a few more times and a few more thinkers. I kind of got lost with Foucault and Smith and the last point you were making. But, like, this absolving of guilt in the face of, like, acquiring economics. Yeah. So, yeah. The question, I think, with Locke was fundamentally about how are property rights established? Because the sort of modern contemporary idea of economy that we have, which is different from the ancient Greek oikonomia, concerns this concept of property. It’s sort of built around the concept of property. And so, Locke had advanced the argument that its use determines the title of property. So, if I go out, as you said, and fish, the fish that I catch are now mine. I have a title to them. There was a problem, however, with Locke’s subsequent argument when he tries to define what a title, a property right, is. Because he says there that the property title is what gives a man the license to use. And so, this, like, weird circularity in his thinking, use is what establishes property, but then property is what licenses use, is very difficult to resolve or to break out of. And in fact, Locke does so by introducing money to the problem. Money is this durable, non-perishable good. For Locke, money is gold and silver. It’s not IOUs or whatever. By introducing something which doesn’t perish, which doesn’t waste or spoil, it then becomes possible to acquire things for which you haven’t worked, for which you’ve put in no use of your, you haven’t worked or labored on it at all. But it also licenses the waste or the abuse of property. Property suddenly becomes something which one can own non-productively, which one has the right to not use or not consume. And this, again, like, even though Locke tries to escape that Locke of his property argument with money, you see that we’ve just come back up to a kind of circular, it introduces another circle into the argument. So, whereas property was initially the right to use, property in a money-based economy becomes the right to abuse, the right to waste, the right to spoil. And these remain sort of unresolved tensions in Locke’s work. And indeed, they do get taken up in certain strains of political thinking. In the 19th century, there are these very sort of absolutist takes on property rights, which are the sort of founding figures of today’s libertarians. The French anarchist Jean-Pierre Proudhon had derived this right to abuse things, he said, from the ancient Roman legal canons. But in fact, this was just a sort of popular myth of these libertarians who Proudhon was responding to. The argument that Proudhon ends up making is that property is theft, there just isn’t any distinction between those. And this goes back to this, whenever you break the Greek oikonomia into its two parts, oikos, the family, the dwelling, the household, but nomos has all of these ranges, range of meanings, pasture, law, etc. But for Carl Schmitt, the most essential thing about nomos is appropriation. This notion of appropriation, property as appropriation, is, yeah, that’s informing Proudhon’s argument, right? So, Adam Smith understands the basis of economic exchange to reside in the power of persuasion, which is to say in rhetoric. And this is an interesting point, because as the tribe reading that we had made note of, oikonomia could also refer or did also refer in ancient Greece to a… it was a particular term of rhetorical arts, which referred to the organization of the parts of the speaker’s discourse. So, here with Smith, we find that exchange depends upon this rhetorical power. And in the study of communication, there are sort of two general schools of thought, at least in the last 50 to 100 years, about the place of rhetoric. So, rhetoric is dismissed as inessential in both of these cases, but one of them dismisses rhetoric because it’s a minor fact, which is basically only distortive of communication. The other side dismisses rhetoric as inessential because it’s indistinguishable from communication. That is, all communication is rhetorical. So, there’s no ground left for rhetoric to subsist. So, we have here a case of something which is alloyed into communication. Rhetoric is alloyed to communication, but it doesn’t exist separately from it, and which is nevertheless not entirely eliminable. So, this language that I’m using about alloying comes from Freud, who we also read this week. Of course, not from the reading I gave you in Freud. So, the notion of the alloy comes from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud had argued that the death drive or the death instinct is alloyed to the life drives or to the pleasure principle. And the reading for this week was The Economic Problem of Masochism, which is a kind of postscript to that work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. So, let me unpack Freud’s argument for masochism here. So, The Economic Problem of Masochism, it has two meanings in Freud’s work, but one of them isn’t obvious because you’re reading him in translation and probably don’t know the German. But so, in the first one, this is something we’ve talked about before. Freud’s idea of the pleasure principle is essentially the utilitarian idea, which Keith Tribe talks about, I believe it’s on, it’s from pages 46 to 50-something. The utilitarian idea of economy was that essentially there’s a balancing of pleasure and pains, that people avoid pain and seek out pleasure. Freud inherits this model when he’s thinking about human beings. He calls it this pleasure principle. But then Freud noticed something strange. So, at the beginning of Freud’s career, he has the interpretation of dreams, it sort of makes his name. And his theory of dreams is that they are wish fulfillment. But Freud was immediately assailed with all sorts of people trying to disprove his theory. If you read the interpretation of dreams, it’s basically a very long catalog of his refutations of these claims. This interpretation of dreams is from 1900. Beyond the pleasure principles is a work from 1919-1921, and it follows after the events of World War I. So, at this time, Freud is now seeing patients with what was then called battle fatigue, or shell shock, or what we today call post-traumatic stress disorder. And Freud was compelled to observe, in working with these patients, that they have a compulsion to repeat. They repeat fundamentally unpleasant things. They have vivid nightmares and memories of horrific incidents, which are debilitating, and which clearly serve no purpose. So, this repetition, this compulsion to repeat, repetition compulsion, becomes the engine of what Freud calls the death drive, which is simply the the tension in human beings, or in life, to return to the inorganic. So, if you want to think about these arguments, quote unquote, economically, pleasure principle identifies a kind of homeostatic balance. The human body is supposedly at rest at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and so on and so forth. So, there’s a balancing of tension and discharge. The death drive asks a quite radical question. It says, if the point of life is homeostasis, why not simply discharge everything? Why not simply go to zero, return to the inorganic, return to the stasis of death? So, the pleasure principle is one of these things. Freud introduces the nirvana principle, or the death drive, as an alternative, or as something in competition with the pleasure principle. So, this nirvana principle, or the death drive, which doesn’t push us towards some happy equilibrium, but drives us down to zero, which compels us down to zero. This is how Freud begins to think about and to think through the experience of battle fatigue and post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s not a term that was in Freud’s own time, but that’s the essence of what he’s thinking about. And this idea of death drive or of repetition compulsion, return to the inorganic, forced a shift in Freud’s thinking. So, prior to all of this, Freud had understood sadism as the originary form of human sexuality. And sadism has this, to use the term that we’ve been using from Wikinomos, it has this appropriative character. It’s focused on the external world. It takes objects and abuses them. And Freud had for a long time understood masochism simply as a kind of sadism turned around on itself. So, masochism prior to be on the pleasure principle was essentially sadism, the subject being sadistic towards themselves. Now, as you saw, what Freud says in this paper, the economic problem of masochism is that masochism actually has to be primary. After his experience with these post-traumatic victims, and after his admission that there is this repetition compulsion or death drive at work in the human being, masochism has to become, it has to come first. It has to be the primary experience of sexuality with sadism only emerging later. Now, okay, so this is one sense in which masochism is an economic problem. It disrupts the homeostatic operation of the pleasure principle, which is its own kind of economy. But there is another sense in which masochism concerns economics, which you won’t know unless you know some German. So, at the end of Freud’s essay, he mentions that there is a form of masochism called moral masochism. He defines, he distinguishes between three kinds. The first is a sort of erotogenic masochism is what he calls it. This is the situation of someone taking pleasure in pain. So, people who like being whipped, people who like being whatever. There’s a physical component of pain, which is experienced as pleasure. The second form of masochism is feminine masochism. And Freud almost considers this kind of masochism to be a tautology for femininity itself. He’s, of course, wrong about that, but we will not dwell on it for now. And then the third form of masochism he identifies is called moral masochism. And this moral masochism is fundamentally defined by guilt. He says that there’s an unconscious sense of guilt, which overrides the subject. And so, whereas erotogenic masochism was about the conversion of physical pain into pleasure, moral masochism and this unconscious sense of guilt are connected to fetishes of humiliation and so forth, which are not physical, but psychical. So, we can make a distinction here. This, okay, sorry, before that. So, this idea of guilt that Freud has, the German term for that is scheude or scheuden. This is the exact same word for debt. And so, this debt that we feel unconsciously becomes a driving force in masochism. So, we can make a distinction here. We can say masochism is fundamentally about guilt or about debt, but sadism is fundamentally concerned with shame. And shame, so shame has often been remarked as sort of paradoxical because on the one hand, it’s an extremely individuating experience. When we feel shame, we feel alone. We are singled out. We’ve been isolated. We’ve been identified. At the same time, shame is the most social of our feelings. So, even though we’re individuated, it always happens in this kind of social space. Masochism, on the other hand, has a kind of different structure to it, which concerns this guilt. These two models of sexuality furnish the two general models for thinkers when they generally conceive of desire. So, there’s desire as a power or capacity of the body, so that the question of desire is, how do I get what I want? But there’s a second and much, much smaller sort of more minority tradition that thinks of desire as an escape from some primordial chaos, some overwhelming flux, which is anxiety. If you think back to loving us, this ransom that we pay to capital being is this primordial chaos. We have to separate ourselves, we have to escape from it, and we have to make something of ourselves in the process. So, that the question is no longer, how do I get what I want, but what do I want? In the first place, how do I want? So, this is parallel to Levinas’s notion that the beings must somehow escape the heavy and nightmarish infinitude of being. We must pay the ransom of existence to make our lives livable. And that existence, sorry, that ransom in psychoanalysis is castration. Castration, meaning that we are subjects of language, and that by being speaking beings, creatures of language, we are deracinated, we are removed fundamentally from our instinct, from need. This is why Freud speaks of drive rather than instinct. The human being is driven, but does not have this instinctual connection to the world. So, desire as a power or capacity of the body, in which we ask, how do I get what I want, is Freud’s initial idea of sexuality. It’s why this appropriative, again, this nomos form of sadism is considered the primary sexual mode. The other model of desire is what Freud is forced to accept after death drive. A certain surrender becomes necessary at the beginning. And this surrender to what would otherwise overwhelm or swallow us up makes masochism the primary or originary sexual experience, saddling us with the debt or the guilt for our loss by castration. But Freud understands then by death drive is the human subject’s chronic neoteny, which is to say our retarded or decelerated development, our constitutive indeterminacy and flexibility, which Freud calls ambivalence and Lacan calls our lack of being. This idea of death drive becomes mirrored in economics under neoliberalism, which is to say market rationality. The market repurposes our indeterminacy and flexibility as sites of surplus value. You can think of the gig economy as an emblem of this repurposing. And under market rationality, both the left and the right speak the language of revolution, but to different ends. So this is part of capitalist economy’s claim to being of a piece with human nature. But whereas the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive is the transcendental principle of the pleasure principle, this is a Deleuzian expression, the capitalist economy transforms our lack of being into a condition of our voluntary servitude to the market. No longer do we have a transcendental death drive, but this immanentized debt drive. This shift from death drive to debt drive under liberal order is what allows capitalism to claim that it is simply an extension or an amplification, a magnification of human being, human nature. Capitalism here tells a lie, but it does so in the guise of a truth. This is actually the secret behind what Foucault calls the veridiction or the truth telling of the market. And the first step, I think, is to just go ahead and to admit that there is a connection between capitalism and human nature. There are some Marxists who will get upset about this and want to deny it, but for my money anyway, the defenders of capitalism have a stronger hand here than those arguing for returns to quasi-Aristotelian or quasi-religious alternatives. This can be jihadis, Martha Nussbaum, whoever. So the important thing isn’t to deny the connection between capitalist economy and human nature, but to understand the special twist that makes capitalism possible. Here I am sort of running towards the end of my notes, which need to be elaborated, but that’s okay because we’re running late here. So this will be abbreviated and we’ll return to this next time. In effect, the market severs the social link. The social link is a term specific to Lacan. He has these four discourses, the master’s discourse, the university discourse, and so forth. And each of these constitute what he calls social links, or links between people and their culture. In capitalism, although all that is solid has not quite, or anyway not yet, melted into air, the market does throw human values into general equivalence. So how do societies function after the negation of these social links and the general equivalence of their values? It is money that embodies this negation. We can say that money is the token of capitalism’s repression or foreclosure of social link. Money is a mere representative. It is a stand-in and not a recuperative representation for what has been lost in circulation. Capitalism then is connected to human nature, except that this connection precisely consists in immunitizing or materializing the disconnection of social links through the money form. So I have two final notes here, which probably could have been inserted a little bit better in the course of this discussion, but we’ll come back to this. Okay, so if money is this, the money form, or the money commodity, is a negation of social link, it indicates that there is a kind of potentiality. Money has a potential as opposed to an actual status. Money is, in some sense, some call it frozen desire, or another way of thinking about it is it’s a kind of suspension of value between goods and services. And so I want to say something about this idea of potentiality. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has written quite extensively on the development of economy in theology, notes that if potentiality were merely a capacity to be or do, we would hardly experience it as such. We probably wouldn’t even know about potentiality if this were all it was, because it would be consumed in its actualization. So there must be an impotentiality, a potential not to be, a potential not to do, which is never actualizable, and that precedes the potential actual distinction. For Agamben, the Scrivener Bartleby, from the Herman Melville story, is the prime figure of this impotentiality. The affective tone of this capacity not to be is anxiety, an affect that registers our connection to a past that has not, or not yet, or never will be past, a virtual past which is at work in every present. You can think of this virtual past, or this past that isn’t past, again, in terms of the Levinasian notion of the ransom of existence. There’s something in existence which weighs on the creatures of existence, which is larger than themselves, in which they can’t discharge, in some sense. So against the historicist view, which holds the present is simply the result of the past, the cumulative sum of all of these effects and processes and forms and forces, this virtual past ungrounds every present and every presence with it, with the result that human subjects cannot be reduced to a mere transient of the earth, doomed and equal to their inevitable death and disappearance. Anxiety emerges as the call for each being to escape, but to escape into sociality, to escape into the social, into exchange with others. Because we are incapable of understanding ourselves by ourselves, we must go to the other to acquire a self-image capable of binding our otherwise intolerable exposure to jouissance, that is to sexual enjoyment or to this death drive. And guilt and shame are the two modes by which human beings confront and live this virtual past through their social relations. On this topic of a virtual past, since at our next session, we will be reading Marie-José Monzain, whose work focuses on the Byzantine iconoclastic crisis. So this is like 700, 800 to 900 AD. If you know much about the histories of religion, this is coincident with the birth of Islam. And there are many, many historians and many contemporaries to the Byzantine iconoclastic crisis, who regarded it as a confrontation, in some sense, between Christian iconography and the Islamic prohibition on images. So just to sort of give a foretaste or a pre-sentiment of our next session, I wanted to share a quote from Henri Corbin. He was a French Islamologist, who had a very interesting kind of career. He was the first person to translate Martin Heidegger into French, so he introduced him into France. But Corbin sort of began as a normal philosopher, like many other people, and then got swept away into this research on Islam and Islamic thinking. And his work has helped us tremendously from the perspective of intellectual history, because much like you see with Keith Tribe’s essay, historians often leap from the ancient Greeks and Romans all the way up to 16th century Europe, and sort of pass over in silence, or with just some token remarks about the Middle Ages. But in reality, what happened between these two periods was that the Library of Alexandria, these works by Greek philosophers migrated, they moved to what would become Islamic centers. And so during the height of this sort of Islamic cultural activity, during probably 1000 AD to 1200 or 1300 AD, there are all of these thinkers, Ibn Arabi, Al-Farabi, and so on and so forth, pseudo-Arabi. Corban found that by going to these thinkers, who had in various ways sort of modified Aristotle and Plato’s teachings, that he found what he said was the key to Heidegger’s philosophy, the secret that would unlock Heidegger’s philosophy. I still don’t know what that means exactly, but ever since I read that, I’ve been intrigued by what Corban has found. Okay, so anyway, on this idea of a virtual or unfinished past, and I’ll end here with this. This is the prologue to Corban’s book, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. He says, quote, our authors, that is these Islamic thinkers, suggest that if the past were really what we believe it to be, that is completed and closed, it would not be the grounds of such vehement discussions. Our authors suggest that all our acts of understanding are so many recommencements, reiterations, repetitions of events, still unconcluded. Each one of us, willy-nilly, is the initiator of events in Herculea, whether they abort in its hell or bear fruit in its paradise. This, by the way, this concept of Herculea is, in Islam, if you Google it, you’ll see immediately, but Herculea is this sort of inter-world, a world between the material plane and divine existence. Yeah, so Corban continues, for all our mental constructions, all our imperatives, all our wishes, even the love which is the most consubstantial with our being, all that would be nothing but metaphor without the inter-world of Herculea, the world in which our symbols are, so to speak, taken literally. So that’s the end of that quote. So next time when we look at Manzain, we’ll be looking precisely at this problem of taking symbols literally. We’ll also be thinking about coins. Coins are, of course, made up of two things. The optional reading next time is the chapter 7000 BC from Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus, in which they make this argument about money and about coinage, which is that it’s always made up of two things. So on the one hand, there’s something precious, a precious metal, for example. On the other hand, there’s always a sign, there’s an insignia of the king, of the kingdom, of whatever, which comes to define the coin. And much of the arguments and debates in the Byzantine iconoclastic crisis concerned who had the right to make and produce images. The emperor, of course, wanted his face on the coinage. And so there’s this back and forth that happens with the removal and the destruction of images. It’s a very interesting discussion that I think we’ll have. It will be, I think, maybe a little bit difficult. So my usual caveat here, if you are reading through those texts and are getting overwhelmed or have no idea how to integrate or process ideas about 800 AD politics, the best advice I can give you is just kind of like, nod your head and move on, or read half asleep. You can doze through the sentences that are strange. And we’ll be able to unpack some of it next time. On the agenda for next time, or rather than the next session being next week, because I’m working on the junior working group and I need to get some stuff out pretty significantly. Also, I need to get some stuff done for NAIDA DAO. We will push the next session one week out. So two weeks. So not next week, but the week after for Marie-José Monsaigne. So that’s all I have for tonight. Thank you everyone for joining, for listening. If you have any questions or anything and want to talk more, you can DM me on Discord as LittleD or just post in the Coining Reason channel on NAIDA DAO. But have a good evening or good morning, wherever you are, and see you guys next time. Thanks everyone.