Source: https://academy.netadao.zone/
Good evening, everyone. I hope that you can hear me now. I was speaking and then saw that my mic was off, so if you can give me a thumbs up and just let me know before I launch into this again. And also, if you want to come up to speak, you can do that. I’ll try to keep an eye on request. I didn’t see any thumbs up, but I also know that Twitter has some lag here on Spaces, if you’re on desktop or on your phone, or if the stars are right. So it looks like it looks like I’m audible, so I’m going to hope that I am. Okay, so this is technically the… this is session 2.2, but it is the third session overall, because we have a zeroth meeting in which we recap. But this is the second official sort of discussion session for Coining Reasons Unit 2 on money. And we’ve begun this study of money by turning to economy. So we’ll… Poro, I saw that you requested and have tried to approve that. We’ll see if it’s working. Yeah, it was dropping me, but I’ve heard sometimes you need, like, a co-speaker. Or like, make me a co-host to see if it helps. Yeah, let me do that. And I can do the same for you, Ipluri, if you would like. Yeah, and Poro, like last time, if people come in, you can interrupt me at any point, sort of reset the room, summarize whatever, bring people up to speed. Yeah, I may not notice people coming in and out like that, so yeah. So this is the second session. We are looking at the Byzantine iconoclastic crisis, which concerned, in some sense, the fate of images in Western civilization, and by extension, the world. But which also fundamentally depended upon this concept of economy that the church patriarchs mobilized in their iconophilic arguments. Before we get into that, I just want to reprise a question from the previous session, which I think will stick with us for the duration of this unit, actually. And that question is essentially this. Does desire have a historicity? And if it does have a historicity, is it the history of something, or does it simply point to a thingness of history itself? Does it make history into a thing, something which can be manipulated? We saw last time we read Keith Tribe on the word economy, which Tribe is an economic historian and economist, and he traces this term from the ancient Greek oikonomia, through to the modern day economic science. There were several sort of gaps or curious omissions in Tribe’s accounting. One of those included the absence of any reference to property and to the development of property rights. Oh, I see Epleri dropped and rejoined. Epleri, if you’re having difficulties hearing or it’s cutting out, you may also need to take a speaker role. I know that’s happened to me on RACFM. But so this fundamental question that we’re addressing, does desire have historicity? This is sort of at the base of the debates around psychoanalysis and whether or not it’s a universalizing discourse. The psychoanalytic concept of desire is criticized as universalizing human nature and human being. And there are those like Michel Foucault and many of his followers who would contend rather that desire is always constructed. It is a culmination of historical circumstances and forces. The response that we can give, at least immediately, is that the human subject is a result of historical forces, yes, but not the fulfillment of them. And in this distinction between being the result of our history and the fulfillment of our history is something like human liberty or freedom, this margin of indeterminacy through which we define ourselves. So you’ll probably be able to assume then that my answer to the question of whether desire is the history of something or whether desire points to a thingness of history itself, I lean towards this latter option. The desire or economy reveals something, it manifests a history as manipulable in some way. And we’ll see that today as we look at the Church Father’s discussions of economy. I’m just looking back through the notes for last time. We had a, yes, there was a sort of protracted discussion of John Locke and his chapter on property from the Second Treatise on Government. And there was a double bind or a circular logic in Locke’s argument, which was that property grants people the use of a thing. But at the same time, property rights are established by using a thing. And the solution that emerges in Locke’s argument is that money, the money commodity for Locke, money is and should always be a sort of precious metal, this store of value. This intermediates, it becomes a durable good, which can substitute for non-durable goods, which otherwise are exposed to waste, to spoilage. So this circularity in Locke’s argument about property is part of what Karl Marx rejected in the idea of private property. He saw it as predatory. And there certainly is something logically inconsistent about it. So we’ll return to Marx in several sessions. We also discussed Michel Foucault, who on this point, I actually find quite compelling. Towards the end of his work, his career, which was cut short, he died of AIDS in the early 80s. So he published the first volume of the History of Sexuality, which includes this infamous, notorious dismissal of psychoanalysis as yet another round of whispering on a couch. He views it as essentially an extension of Catholic confessional. After this publication, Foucault was kind of slapped around. In France, at least. In America, he was celebrated. Americans were eager and happy to have some escape from Freudian sexuality. But in France, scholars and philosophers were much more ambivalent about Foucault’s argument. And so I actually find Foucault’s work after this point to generally be more productive and provocative. And this lecture course that he gave in 1978 to 1979, which is for some reason titled The Birth of Biopolitics, but which could just as easily be called The Birth of the Market. It contains this argument about Adam Smith, among other things, and the emergence of the market in modernity in the 16th and 17th century, and consequently the development of a particular kind of human subject, which is this homo economicus, or economic man and rational man. Foucault makes a particular point here, which is that this economic subject is distinct from a juridical subject. That is to say, someone who is subject to laws. And this is because the economic subject poses a particular challenge to sovereign power, or to governmental power. Foucault says that the economic subject says to sovereign power, you must not. And this is a long quote. But he 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, the subject of law, says to the sovereign. I have rights, I’ve 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 the sovereign 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 the impossibility of the existence of an economic sovereign. So this is Foucault’s spin on the reading of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. Many commentators take the important thing to be the hand. This hand goes around and it ties together the disparate fates of all of these individuals at work. It ties them into a collective process of production, which makes goods and distributes them across the globe. What Foucault emphasizes is not this hand, which has a kind of theological resonance to it, but precisely the invisibility of that hand, by which Foucault means that economic relations, economic exchange, the economy as such, affords no position. There’s no position any person can take over the economy, which will allow them to see it in its entirety. And therefore, there’s no overseeing the economy. There’s no supervision over the economy. This is what he means when he says there is no sovereign in economics. There is no economic sovereign. So this challenge of economics to politics is something that will continually be returning to. With Bitcoin, with cryptocurrencies, we see a similar challenge to political operations, particularly those in monetary policy, more than economic doctrine per se, for example, the regulation of this or that market. But there is always this problem of how we relate government and economy. And this is where the readings come in today. There were a few other points, somewhat scattered. So in addition to the Keith tribe, we also read Freud, whose essay, The Economic Problem of Masochism, notes that masochistic sexuality, which Freud, at this point in his career, recognizes as the primary form of enjoyment, our original disposition towards the world and towards ourselves. And the economic problem that it manifests, he says, comes in from guilt. This is Strachey’s translation, guilt. But the German term that he’s actually using there is scheud, or scheuden. And this word translates both guilt and debt. So for Freud, the fact that there is this primary masochistic sexuality, or primary masochism, indicates that there is, at the origin of human being, something like debt. And if we want to sort of extend or push this analogy or comparison a little bit, Freud emerges here on the side against commodity theorists of money. This includes Karl Marx. Karl Marx completely swallows whole the idea that money is a commodity. And that this is the basis of exchange. For Freud, the basis of exchange comes from debt. Not commodity, but debt. And this is somewhat aligned with Keynesianism and credit theories of money, but we’ll eventually see that Freud and psychoanalysis depart from these as well. As a final recap from last week. So this originary masochism, which for Freud is the death drive, it is embodied, or rather it is bodied forth by the death drive, is transformed in capitalism to a debt drive, to the pursuit, the endless creation of debt. Capitalism often makes this claim that it is sort of an analog for the natural state of human beings or all beings even. And I think that this draws upon what Monsaigne says about economy or oikonomia in ancient Greece, having a sort of providential or natural order to it. That capitalism claims this order for itself, but it does something to, in this transition from death drive to debt drive, there is something of a secret or a lie. And this obscure secret or lie has to do with capitalism’s effect on what Lacan calls the social link. Social links for Lacan are modes of discourse or modes of communicating, ways of understanding or interacting with each other. And in capitalism, it is money that comes to embody this negation or stifling of those social links. Money substitutes in some sense for that negation. Yeah. This notion that money substitutes or embodies negation, that it embodies something negative, a sort of gap or void and emptiness, has something in common with theories of potentiality. We noted that the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has written quite extensively on the divine economy and its relationship to government, Agamben draws a distinction. He says that there is a kind of potential, which escapes the potential, actual, dichotomy. If potential were always realized in actualization, we would have no experience of potentiality. We wouldn’t understand potentiality as such. It would always get absorbed or dissolved into reality. So there’s something about potentiality which persists, which resists actualization, and which he calls impotentiality. This sort of chronic impotence, as it were, in being. This capacity not to be, or capacity not to do, the capacity not to be realized, has an affect to it. There’s a sort of tone, emotional tone, to this impotentiality, which Agamben calls anxiety. And here he’s following psychoanalytic theory. And there is a kind of experience or weight of this impotentiality. There is a… we tend to think in this historicist mode, or Foucauldian mode, that the present is the result and the culmination of the past. But this idea of impotentiality underscores that there’s a virtual past, which ungrounds every present, which uproots our experience of the present and makes every experience of presentness or presence something of the order of a crisis. The present always requires a decision. You have to make a choice. You have to do something. It isn’t this leveled down, smooth flow of time. Impotentiality speaks to us of another kind of time. Another experience of time. With the result that the subject can never be reduced to a mere transient, a mere transient of the earth, doomed and equal to its death or disappearance. So anxiety here emerges as the call for each being to escape into sociality, to escape the self, to escape this condemnation to death and disappearance. We’re incapable of understanding ourselves by ourselves. And so we must go to the other, to acquire a self-image that is capable of binding our otherwise intolerable exposure to jouissance, to sexual enjoyment, to pleasure and pain. This domain of impotentiality, again, this is just preparing the ground for Manzain, can also be understood in the Islamic tradition, the esoteric Islamic tradition, I should say, the Sufis in particular. This concept they have of Herculea or Malakut is the concept of an imaginal world or an imaginal realm, as they refer to it. And this imaginal realm is something like an intermediary between the life that we live and sort of divine or eternal life. So this intermediate realm is actually the realm of ideas, in effect. And so Henry Corbin, this French Islamologist, writes on the weight of the impotential or of our unfinished past by saying that our authors suggest that if the past were really what we believe it to be, that is, if the past were completed and closed, it would not be the grounds of such vehement discussions. Our authors suggest that all of our acts of understanding are so many recommencements, reiterations 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. 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 interworld of Herculea, the world in which our symbols are, so to speak, taken literally. So all of that said, let’s now turn to the readings for today. And I should note that Tribe concludes his essay by saying that the development of the concept of economy or economic science is a scholarly shaggy dog story. This kind of blind wandering through circumstances without finality or purpose. And what you have in Manzan is precisely a counter to this point. Manzan sees in economy something which has a unified and dignified conceptual coherence. Sorry, just give me a moment. I see that I have a message here. Oh, yeah, and you can go ahead. I mean, just a few points that you mentioned that I find interesting. One is that money is technology that doesn’t waste. One concern I have with Bitcoiners is that they portray Bitcoin as savings that will always be valid and be valued. And I’m not sure that’s necessarily the case. I think it needs to be marketed, for one. It needs to grow from where it is, for one. And there’s no guarantees or assurances. But there’s great analogies where Saylor would say, gold is like a battery that drains. It may have been the best monetary technology at the time, but it has all these flaws, like it’ll lose 2% per year, even if you put your best efforts into it, like you put into a bank. Banks have all these entropies and risks. I’ll make my points, because I’m not sure what’s the most interesting. And then there’s also, like you’re saying, like, there’s two sources of powers with humans. There’s like the sovereign, and then there’s now emerging like monetary power or like corporate power, or like billionaires could like, billionaires are like more powerful than many nation states. So there’s, it’s sort of like an orthogonal. Oh, yeah, just to continue that, because like, maybe it’s not entirely related, but I found this a lot interesting. Like, in like British traditions, it’s like the power comes from like, the Queen. And that kind of gives like, and like, I guess, American Republic traditions, it comes from like people, and possibly that keeps people in check. Actually, I don’t think it applies here. But it’s a different check on, on like, what you call like sovereignty, instead of like, condition, constituent power. Like, like a reality check, or like, emergent technology. And, yeah, one more point is, negation comes up a lot. You bring up negation, I think it’s, I’m bad with the names of these psychoanalysts, Lacan, Laconian. But I’m trying to think like, in terms of like programming, there’s like these extension methods where like, you could take like a object class, and like, you can think of them as like, blueprints, and they’re kind of like, encapsulated into like a public API that you could kind of like, trust other people to use like a contract. But there’s this idea of like an extension method of like, you can like, modify it. So I’m not sure if that’s what you mean by negation, or you could create your own kind of like, custom API that’s like, local to what you need. So that’s what money could be doing, in terms of like, contrasting like, sovereign power and like, money power. Yeah, I think that that’s a great sort of analogy. And on the topic of negation, it is quite actually a deep well to go down. Freud has a short essay on negation, which I keep thinking I should assign, but then it opens up this whole thing, which actually may be helpful. So maybe I will find a way to include that. But in terms of the distinction between sovereign and monetary power, I think that there’s a, there’s some arguments that the, and we have to, we have to problematize this periodization of the transition from industrial capitalism in the 18th and 19th century to financial capitalism today. But I think that it’s still you can you can use that as a general sort of heuristic for understanding the overall shifts in power and stuff, means that today power is no longer distributed to those who own the means of production, the factories, the workers, whatever, but rather those who are closest to the source of monetary creation. And this creates a distribution of classes, a different distribution of power, which transforms power from a productive thing. It removes, if we understand power as sort of an assumption of something over other people, Marx understood capitalist power as coming at the moment of production. So when the worker is, the labor is in the factory, and they make something there, because they don’t own the means of their production, there is a surplus value, which the capitalist captures in the form of profit. And this is this is Marx’s idea of alienation, we’re alienated in our labor through these factories and, and economic systems. What Foucault emphasizes is a shift with with the emergence of financialization, power starts to emerge, or starts to be seized, not at the moment of production, but rather at the moment of exchange. And that’s in part because the moment of exchange now includes an exchange of monies. It’s no longer an exchange of goods for monies, but we actually have money markets. And it’s this purely sort of financialized circularization of financialization that today becomes the source of this monetary power, and also a source for abuse of that power. The last thing that you’re rather the first point that you brought up on Bitcoin, we’ll see actually next time, there’s a… so next time we’re reading Boyer, Zambo, and I forget all the other co-authors of this book, but it’s private money and public currencies. And the subtitle is The 16th Century Challenge. During the 16th century, from 1533 to 1579, there were these international fairs, which were held in, oh, another French word, Lyon, or Lyon, in France, where merchants from, you know, all over the world, quote unquote, where the world here means Europe, would gather every three months, and they would settle payments, settle debts. And they developed at these international fairs, what they call the écoute marque, which was simply a… it was purely a unit of account. So this écoute marque had a… it had purchase, it was only valid for the three days of the international fair. After that, it was worthless. But this actually allowed merchants from all over the world to, quote, again, the world, quote unquote, to exchange, even though they didn’t have the same currencies. And one of the arguments that Boyer, Zambo, and the co-authors make is that this was effective because it separated out store of value from unit of account and from medium of exchange. And this separation, this division, allowed for there to be a truly sort of decentralized international currency. Of course, how decentralized it was is up for debate. And what happened after this sort of crisis in 1579, which was a crisis in symbolic authority or political power, you had this shift towards metal currencies, sort of metallic prejudice arose with the French government making deals with these international fairs, merchant bankers, in ways that are highly reminiscent of today’s financialization. But yeah, we’ll get to that next time as well. But yeah, I think that this has led some theorists or some commentators to remark that a store of value is actually not… it’s actually an improper definition of money. That whenever you introduced precious metals and stores of value into moneyness, you end up distorting something about money. You open money up to abuse in some ways. I’m not sure I agree with the argument, but it does exist and we’ll look at it. And it’s not to say that there isn’t a place for a store of value. It’s just, do you want to build a monetary system, a financial system, a market around it? And that’s… as I think I’ve said on here before, I know I’ve said it before elsewhere, I think that Bitcoin only makes sense as a sort of monetary challenge or monetary innovation because there’s been this proliferation of shitcoins. And these shitcoins may be more capable of serving the unit of account function better than Bitcoin itself. So, yeah, something to keep in mind. And yeah, interrupt me if you have something. Oh yeah, just quickly on the topic of alienation. So, yeah, I just have an interesting point of like, we also think of like in Cosmos, like the implications of like these proof of stake assets, they’re staking rewards. And then you made the point of from like creation or like exchange. So maybe like the Game of Nodes folks might be interested that like the circle stake, the epistemology originated with Marx. Yeah, that’s… yeah, the question of circular economy, or I would call it really a fantasy of circular economy is, it’s a noble goal to strive for. But I think that you can strive for it and still be cognizant of the fact that within economy, Monsaigne says this somewhere, economy is connected fundamentally to mortality, to fatigue, to entropy. And this is in opposition to the idea of economy as slanting towards efficiency, optimization, and sort of the logic of good choices. Yeah, so there’s something in economy, which is fundamentally negative, which introduces a gap or lag into life. And this fatiguing gap or lag, which we’re always trying to keep up with, but never can, is actually in some sense, the motor or the engine of economic doctrine. So, on the topic of Monsaigne, it’s a very difficult reading. And I think that the difficulty, in one part, it’s because the style of writing is academic. But it’s also because it’s so sort of enmeshed and conversant with a very particular tradition of Christianity, which is this Eastern Orthodox Church, which I think for most Westerners is somewhat foreign, in a way. But there are a few things that may be useful to note. One is that she draws a distinction between natural image and artificial image. The artificial image is the icon, the natural image is just the image. But then Monsaigne, or maybe it’s her translator, I’m not actually sure, sort of promiscuously switches between these or fails to register whether she means image and its natural or artificial status. So, there’s some difficulty in her argument there, which almost makes it enigmatic. And I think that if you wanted to think about this problem of difficulty in reading arguments or reading scholarly text, you can compare it to poetry. So, there are some poets like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. And if you read their works, you have to know, you have to understand the tradition of literature. T.S. Eliot quotes from Homer and quotes from Dante, and it’s littered with all of this stuff. And so, there’s a sense in which that difficulty can be overcome if you study enough, or if you were of the right socioeconomic class, or if you work hard enough, you’ll overcome, you’ll penetrate that difficulty. There is another kind of poetic difficulty, however, which no amount of education will allow you to penetrate. And this is a difficulty which you could find in Emily Dickinson. Her poems are generally very simple. You can read them, My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun, is one of her lines, the title of the poem and the first line. And that sentence, My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun, like syntactically, it’s all there. But semantically, or with respect to its meaning, there’s something obscure about it, or as I would say, enigmatic. And this experience of the enigma in this argument generates in the reader a sense of privacy. So whereas the difficulty of T.S. Eliot, or this hermeneutic difficulty, sort of pushes one out to the social, you have to understand the world, you have to understand history. This more enigmatic difficulty of Emily Dickinson, it pushes one towards something private, towards something which is only resolvable internally, in a way. And just to kind of link that back to Karl Marx, Marx has this argument that the defense of privacy, of rights to privacy, you always have to be careful with that. Because the general thrust of the argument, as you encounter it out in the world, is that man has a property in himself, and that this property in himself is fundamentally what’s private. And this property relation of the self to self is the wrong basis for a theory of privacy. It ends up turning privacy into a thing where the neighbors are always too loud, or they’re too close, or whatever. And the theory of privacy that interests Marx is rather one that expands, which opens us up to each other in some weird way. And I think that it’s connected to this experience of the enigma. And for Manzain, the enigma is precisely what economy brings forth. Economy, she says, transforms divine mysteries into fleshy enigmas. Never more so than in the incarnation of the son, Jesus Christ, as God’s only begotten. But before we jump into Manzain, I will just say a few more words, because we read chapter two, which is the semantic study of the term economy. She doesn’t include a lot of background details on the crisis that she’s writing about. So just to get you up to speed on it, the Byzantine iconoclastic crisis was actually two crises, one in the 8th century, and then one in the 9th century. And what she focuses on is the second crisis, primarily. And the 8th century AD is the same century in which Islam, Muhammad founds Islam, and you have this emergence of Islamic countries. And among the sort of rules or laws of Islam is this prohibition on making images. So historians and scholars of this era have tended to read the iconoclastic crisis as fundamentally a political crisis between Western and Oriental or Islamic culture or Islamic law. In part, this had to do… this reading is supported by the notion that Rome falls in the 6th century or 5th century. And with the fall of Rome, the seat of power moves from Italy to Constantinople, to Byzantium. And so for hundreds of years, Byzantium becomes the sort of de facto empire, the world leader, as it were, again, world meaning Europe. And several hundred years into that, there’s this crisis. So the first cropping up of this crisis in the 700s is quelled somewhat unceremoniously. I am forgetting exactly… I have it here on notes somewhere. But in any case, the first crisis is quelled, but it’s unsatisfactory. And so almost 100 years later, 80 or 100 years later, there is this recrudescence of iconoclasm, which comes from Constantine V, who is the emperor of Byzantium. And Constantine wants to strip the church of its power to make icons, to make images, and preserve that power solely for himself. And this, again, supports the view that this is fundamentally a crisis or a clash over power, political power. But as Manzain notes, this interpretation of iconoclasm as fundamentally a sort of ideological veil for political machinations overlooks how deeply iconoclasm understands itself as a sort of fundamentalist or theological position. So Constantine was not by himself. He had advisors and followers and so forth who wrote on his behalf against the iconophiles. So these, the iconoclast arguments are largely today lost to us. We don’t have access to them except through their survival in what are surely tendentious excerpts from the iconophiles’ responses. This is a result of the Catholic Church’s practice of damnatio memoriae, of the burning or the erasure of dissent. So what we know of the iconoclast arguments comes to us through the iconophiles’ refutations. But we know that at least there are a few sort of recurring points in iconoclastic positions. One is the condemnation of graven images in Deuteronomy, and the perversion of God’s image by man-made icons. This argument, I think, has to set aside Akira poetic images such as the Veronica’s. I don’t know how familiar you are with the Catholic Church, but the Veronica’s are part of these relics that still are venerated by the Catholic Church. Veronica herself doesn’t appear in the New Testament, but rather is part of this expanded Bible that the Church uses. And if I have it correctly, the idea of the Veronica was that there was a woman who, it depends on who you’re reading, but she either reached out and touched Jesus’s robe and was healed, or in any case had some sort of robe through which the image of Jesus was imprinted. This is, by the way, the meaning of Akira poetic images or Akira poetic images. Akira means without a hand, and poetic means made. So, Akira poetic means the making of images without man’s hands. And you see this sometimes still today. People are like, well, this Cheeto looks like Christ or whatever. These spontaneous images of divinity, which are not constructed by anyone, but are the result of secondary processes. These images get kind of set aside in the iconoclast debates. And the interest is really in man-made images. So, the iconoclast, the artificial images reproduce the material, but not the spiritual, the visible, but not the invisible, and the finite, but not the infinite realities of God. These artificial images are consequently idols for idolaters. And this is how more than 800 years after crucifixion, the iconoclastic challenge raised the Trinity from a sort of minor theological problem to a grand solution. For in defending iconicity and artificial images, the church fathers, the patriarchs, had to make sense of why God presented himself as just such an artificial image that is a common mortal to the men of the earth. So, the term the fathers use in this connection is economy. They describe, they explain the Trinity through the economy, namely the economy of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, which you can map onto the economy of natural image, artificial image, or icon, and voice. Just to dilate a little bit on natural image, since it’s somewhat strange. It has to be understood that this natural image is fundamentally not concerned with visibility. When you read in the Bible that man is made in the image of God, but not God’s likeness, that is to say we’re fallen, you understand that God is a kind of schema or diagram which man inherits in this image. But that schema or diagram itself is invisible. So, this natural image, this image of God is itself invisible. The artificial image, by contrast, is visible. It is iconic. And this is in distinction with the natural image being eidetic, or eidetic, which is the platonic ancient Greek term for the idea. So, if you know much about Plato, you know that he regarded the material world as a world of these artificial images, but the world of ideas or the world of forms of eidos as the true world. Okay. So, this distinction between idea and icon is crucial for the development of economy. And it also is the sort of insertion of voice. It marks the insertion of voice through the Holy Ghost into the trajectory of Christianity. So, Monsaigne cites a number of authors, church fathers, and the sort of patristic discourse that occurred prior to iconoclasm around the term economy. John Chrysostom is one of these thinkers. And he’s probably the most important, although there are a few others. But for John, economy designated flexibility, guile, or even the spirit of the law, which was primarily in opposition to Akrabeu, or strict adherence to the letter of the law, sort of rigid and flexibility, which makes no room for circumstance or adaptation. And John of Chrysostom is several hundred years prior to this iconoclastic crisis. So, he’s writing in like 400, 500 AD. For John, this notion of economy is used to justify St. Paul’s claim that he appeared to the Jews as a Jew, that he appeared to the pagans as a pagan, and not as a Christian. St. Paul says that a Christian must adapt to the circumstances and engage in pious fraud to shepherd the wayward to the truth. So, John defends this economic model against Akrabeu. He defends, that is to say, the spirit of the law against the letter of the law, recognizing that sometimes it may be useful to bend the letter of the law to push people towards this truth. But it is iconoclast and, to some degree, sort of fundamentalist believers for whom such guile is a scandal. She mentions that it’s a crime, as far as they’re concerned. John and others would point out that God regularly employed economic adaptation to circumstances in order to appear to prophets, disciples, and people. And there is, moreover, this whole train of argument concerning whether this appearance of God to people in the figure of the sun involves absolute or relative designations, with iconophiles taking up an Aristotelian argument that the names father, son, and holy ghost are always relative. One is only a father in relation to a son and vice versa. And therefore, these names do not designate some absolute or rigorous essence, which could be susceptible of corruption. Because these terms are themselves already relative, they enter into economy and an economic use of them is justified. So, looking at time here, I just want to go through the text a little bit more closely for you. And we’ll just go from… I have this broken out in several ways, but I’ll try to do it just from beginning to end of the argument. So, right at the beginning, page 18, she observes that economic science comes to have something in common with philosophy. Namely, that both of them aim towards bringing forth the good life. That’s the end result of these projects. So, on page 19, she points out that in Aristotle, oikonomia designates the acquiring and maintenance of domestic needs so that economics comes before politics. This is, again, going back to this debate. But the binding of economy or oikonomia to agricultural work and the operations of nature gave to it, this is, quote, an organic objective and functional harmony, a providential and natural order that economy must respect. And I thought that it was interesting here that she mentions that although ancient and classical textual sources use oikonomia as a noun for quite a ways back as a verb, that is to economize, only appears in Sophocles’ play Electra. It appears, therefore, this verbing or doing of economy appears in what many psychoanalytic commentators regard as the female version of Oedipus Rex. So, these Electra and Oedipus both give their names to particular psychoanalytic complexes. And again, it sort of underscores this idea that in Freud, the pleasure principle is fundamentally an economic principle, but that there is a deeper mystery to economy than the balancing of pleasure and pain. There’s something deeper than that that we have to get at. So, even though economy must obey a natural order or natural law, agricultural laws, as it were… Sorry, so this question of obeying a natural order, a natural law, is not incidental to the early Greek conception. It suffuses the concept of economy entirely. She says, quote, whatever the domain concerned, economy always returns to a reflection on the law, its interpretation and legitimacy. This is, again, this is the conflict between economy and Akrabeya. This persistent concern with the law and its interpretation, especially natural and divine law, can be further contextualized by our reference to Foucault, who argues that this economic man is the one who says to the sovereign, you must not. Precisely because of this liquidation of sovereign control and absolute mastery, because there is no position one can take over the economy like this, Monsaigne tells us, this is page 20, the economy is a science of relations and relative terms, but she’s quick to add, but in no sense is it a relativist concept. This is an obscure, as I would say, enigmatic claim. On page 21, she uses this adjective imaginal. We’ve already discussed it in terms of the Islamic idea of Heraclia, Malakut, this realm of ideas or the transcendental versus the empirical. But we can also connect it in Lacan to the imaginary. In both cases, the imaginal and the Lacanian imaginary are often confused with images or visual experience, but in fact, they involve a quite subtler concern. In Lacan, the imaginary concerns not images, but symmetries, which are not only visual, but also auditory, temporal, and so on. So, rhythm is both the temporal and auditory symmetry. When you listen to music and it has a beat, there’s a symmetry in time and in audition. So, symmetry in Lacan or the transcendental or imaginal realm for the philosophers and theologians, in both cases, induce incarnation. This is a quote on 21. She says, that passage, by which she means the incarnation of God as a man, establishes the entry of the visible and the flesh into the concept of the economy. Yet the powerful bond that holds the economy and visible appearance together must not make people believe that they are dealing with the simple and intelligible visibility of reality. So, there, again, is this deeper question of visibility and invisibility that we have to get out. Commenting upon the challenge of thinking through the Trinity, which is to say the unity of the three persons of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Monsaigne quotes Pseudo-Dionysius, who remarks that since the way of negation appears to be more suitable to the realm of the divine, a manifestation through dissimilar shapes is more correctly to be applied to the invisible. And here, I would just want to underscore that Pseudo-Dionysius here is articulating the fact that theology tends to proceed via negativa in arguments. We can’t know God directly, but we know what God is not. And it’s by going through what God is not that we arrive at some dim awareness, which never rises to the full level of understanding. We can’t understand God, but it’s through this via negativa that we come to have some awareness of God. This tendency to proceed via negativa through negation is what the economy tries to respond to. I would also note that here Pseudo-Dionysius says that there’s a manifestation through dissimilar shapes that is more correctly to be applied to the invisible. When you think of Keith Tribe saying that his study of the term economy has resulted in a scholarly shaggy dog story, that there are all of these loose, disparate, unrelated things. Here with the Trinity, what we find is that economy is precisely this relation of loose, unrelated, disparate things. So you have the invisible image of God, you have the mortal flesh of Christ, and you have the voice or speech rhetoric of the Holy Spirit. And none of these things are commensurate, but economy puts them into relation through their incommensurability, through their dissimilarity. Monsaigne says that in connection with the always sought and always impossible meeting between God and humans that characterizes the Old Testament, this, she means the Trinity, is the opening of the historical field, a face-to-face meeting in exchange of looks henceforth possible and qualified as enigmatic. When she says that this is the opening of the historical field, she means that literally, our system of time, for most of us anyway, we write the year AD. And that is to say it’s history for us begins in some sense after this death of Christ, after this face-to-face meeting, this making possible the face-to-face between the finite and the infinite, the mortal and the immortal. This opens a new chapter in the development of history. And this face-to-face encounter is echoed in Saint Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians, where he writes, for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face-to-face. And for Monsaigne, she changes dimly, she restores to it something of its original Greek. And she says, for now we see in a mirror, in an enigma, but then we will see face-to-face. So for hundreds of years prior to this Byzantine iconoclastic crisis, there was the tension between the patriarchs of the church who favoured akrideia, this inflexible adherence to the letter of the law at all cost, and those who favoured economic standpoints, a flexible and adaptive adherence to the spirit of the law. Still hundreds of years prior to the political convulsions of iconoclasm, John Chrysostom champions this economic model. And according to Monsaigne, page 23, the introduction, sorry, championed the economic model which permitted the telling of pious lies, so long as they led the fallen to truth. But according to Monsaigne, the introduction of Trinitarian thought overcomes this distinction. The introduction of the Trinity, the thinking of economy, overcomes this opposition between akrideia and economy, between letter and spirit of law. It forces them to be reconciled in some way. And one potentially striking consequence of the distinction between economy and akrideia is that miracles which involve the suspension or the breaking of natural laws are always in this framework economic. Economy is what allows for the bending of rules, for the suspension of rules. And this applies above all to the miraculous resurrection of the flesh. Saint Augustine had noted in his work, the Trinity, the great difficulty that Trinity poses to human understanding. She gives a long quote here. This wisdom then, the wisdom of the Trinity, which is God, how do we understand it to be a Trinity? I did not say how do we believe, for this ought not to be questioned among the faithful. But if there is any way by which we can see by our understanding what we believe, what would this seeing be? As it turns out, we will see by understanding rather than by our senses through the concept of economy, which establishes a regime of visuality alternative to that of the eye. As a concept of understanding, economy will be both the science of the internal structure of its object, that is the science of the relations between the persons of the Trinity, or understanding and seeing, and the science of the doctrinal statement of those relations speaking. This is page 24. Here arises both a philosophical and aesthetic problem. Economy defined in speech now defines speech. This participation of the concept of economy in its own definition is shared with violence and negation. So violence is supposedly the violation of boundary and norms, such that the setting of any boundaries and norms around violence is itself always subject to violation. We couldn’t understand violence without it violating its own limits. Likewise, negation, which is simply what is not, is the operator of linguistic definition as such, according to Saussure, for whom each word is not all the other words in this complex of eternally negative differences. So for Saussure, cat is not bat, cat is not rat, cat is not hat. But there comes this moment, this sort of incestuous moment, when we need to define the operator of negation. Not is not hot. So the word that we’re trying to define here participates in the active definition. This redoubling or this participation in definition comes to us as withdrawal. And this withdrawal is connected to the enigma of these systems, the enigma of violence, the enigma of negation, the enigma of economy. I’m just going to go through some other quotes here. So Monsaigne gives us, once we have all of this sort of established and the importance of the flesh, the entrance of the flesh into economy, she mentions that this is what legitimates the idea that the Catholic Church has, that it is a kind of stand-in or substitute for the Virgin, for the mother of God, the mother of the world. Page 32, the Virgin gives birth to the image and the Father gives it its name. This understanding of the church as the womb or the body of the mother in turn transforms, in turn, transforms believers into the viscera of the body, that is, the sort of internal organs. So on page 34, she says, Christ is therefore economy par excellence. He is image, relation, and organ. The economy will take on two orders of similitude, natural absolute similitude and relative similitude or formal resemblance. It takes on these two orders because it is an organ, the agent that relates them to each other, such as the economy that opens to us at present the double field of nature, body and cosmos, and symbolic operations, speech, jurisdiction, and strategy. On page 37, the economy is not in place to resolve apparent contradictions, but to keep the route open between the visible spectacle and the spectacle of mystery, which once again will make of that creation an enigmatic mirror of its creator. So the economy reveals the extent to which man and creation in general is in the image, but not the likeness of the creator. Indeed, the economy makes us pass from a regime of mystery to one of enigma. This is page 37. And it’s in this regime of enigma that we discover and exercise our liberty. In terms of the political question of economy, it’s worth observing here that the economy always involves some deliberations on freedom, precisely because economy is this balancing of visible and invisible worlds. If you assume that the visible world, as Plato did, is a kind of sham, a mirage, then you have to have some means of accessing the true life, the good life. And it’s through this economy, this salvific economy, or economy of saving, that the Christian tradition seeks to lead us to the light. There is a strong claim which links the divine and human economies, not just human economies, but physiological economies. I believe this is 38. She says, the organic and physiological economy has its roots in the divinity of our primitive incarnation. You can find a very similar argument, an echo of this argument in Lacan, who in Seminar 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, says that the word or the symbol is what sets our body to homeostasis. I read Lacan before reading this text many years before, and I always stumbled over this part of his argument, because it just sounds so outlandish, so extremely, sort of wildly speculative to say that the symbol, the word, sets our body to homeostasis. But I think that this gives it some sense. In terms of some Lacanian overlay, there is a question about jouissance, which isn’t named as such. But on page 40, she says, far from concerning a concept that wanting to say everything and no longer meaning anything, we encounter a term that can, for the first time among the Greeks, give voice to something that provides the foundations for both organic life and freedom of thought. This term is economy. This something, we might say, presents itself as a to-suffer, a paschkein, or passion, which will subsume both the affectivity and power of suffering by declaring it to be in the mode of a paschal joy. And so, this jouissance has some connection to joy. But as we’ve discussed before, maybe I should say more about this. It’s a joy, which is a joy in suffering. Maybe the way to put this is that we say that there’s deeper to economy than the relationship of pleasure and pain. Freud starts with this pleasure principle and then finds that it gets frustrated in certain cases, in certain cases which happen to be quite widespread. The distinction we can make is then between pleasure and satisfaction. You can be satisfied in pain. You can be satisfied in unhappiness. And this satisfaction, or this jouissance, which extends beyond or exceeds the economy of pleasure and pain, is the secret or the enigma which organizes that economy. And I would say that education or the learning is always of the order of jouissance. The other day, I caught myself saying, oh, it’s fun to learn. And then afterwards kicking myself because it’s actually not fun to learn. It’s quite painful. But there is a satisfaction in learning and in thinking. And that satisfaction, or that jouissance, is what sort of holds you or binds you to thought. Shortly after there on page 41, she again gives this sort of summary, or I would take it as a summary of the relationship between pleasure principle and death drive. She says, the economy can thus also lead to the closing of all orifices and the halt of all elementary functions of life, even while it remains the principle of the organization and harmonious functioning of the body’s organs. So this possibility that economy will lead not just to efficiency and optimization, but potentially to this closing of all orifices and the halting of all functions of life. This is the Freudian death drive, the nirvana principle or jouissance, as it underwrites economic organization. From here in Manzain’s argument, she turns to the notion of economy as guile, or economy as lying, economy as pious fraud. And for the church fathers, this was justified by relating economy or divine ministration to essentially the actions of medicine. So on page 42, this unveiling of the primordial invisibility of the body’s interior is essential for the plan of salvation. And this unveiling of that primordial invisibility, you see that in the Catholic martyrs, but especially, of course, in Christ’s crucifixion. She says, it is the mystery of the interior that offers itself enigmatically to the gaze in order to be deciphered. On the same model is he who seals the passage from the old covenant to the new. So this concern with the body’s interior and the understanding of church fathers as medicine men goes to the concept of pious fraud, which she discusses on page 45. The encyclopedia article that Manzain cites on pious fraud ends by noting that non-believers turned pious fraud into a crime. Manzain underscores this mistake of non-believers when she quips that such accusations come only from those who cannot accept the economy in its most profound conceptual coherence. Page 46, if God found it useful to employ guile with those who believe only in what they see by agreeing to promote the economic figure that is Christ. I think my quote here is butchered somehow. If God found it useful to employ guile with those who believe only in what they see by agreeing to promote the economy. Yeah, I don’t know what I’m missing here. I’m missing a word of some sort. This figure Christ, who… okay. If God found it useful to employ guile with those who believe only in what they see through this figure of Christ, which marks his filial or his familial visibility in the visible world, then those who in turn are responsible on earth for serving God can remain silent about the truth or use guile with the enemy so long as they do so for salvific, that is to say economic, ends. There’s a very strange, I will use the term precisely, enigmatic comment on page 47, which concerns Christ’s body both as a vital organ and as an economic tool for God’s providential plan. She says the organic ambivalence between a tool and a vital organ or we could say between an artificial and a natural image, as at the heart of a system of thought concerning technē, this is the Greek word for creation, practices of creativity, that will assume a natural model in order to raise artifice to the level of an ontological manifestation. This will become yet another way of defining the economy. And here I would just remind you from unit one that we talked about this psychoanalyst Victor Tosk, who has this idea of the genitals as a kind of originary technology of human beings. The genitals are the sort of proto-Dao of the body. They take directions from somewhere else. They have this status of an artifice, which is soldered on to the body. And Lacan will also make this argument that the organs are always what he calls obšea, this object of desire. So whereas for Aristotle economy precedes politics, it organizes and grounds politics, for the patriarchs, the power to engage in pious fraud or economic accommodation was only granted to those who are already servants of Christ and invested with Episcopal authority. So here we have the inversion, we have a flipping. Politics now comes before economy. And to return us here on page 48 to this question about the historicity of desire, the historicity of economy, Monsaigne writes, the economy is thus a manifestation in history, but it is not limited by history. It exceeds all strictly historical circumstances in order to reveal the meaning of history itself. And this question of the meaning of history, I found recently, I’ve been interested in this psychoanalyst, Norman O’Brown, and he has a book, Life Against Death, the psychoanalytical meaning of history. And the very last or the penultimate chapter of that book is titled Filthy Luker, which is sort of his psychoanalytic take on money and economy. And I’m thinking of finding some way to insert that into this unit. So anyway, economy reveals the meaning of history, but it’s not limited by history. In terms of this meaning of history and final truth or ultimate truth, the Christian economists understood themselves as akin to medical doctors dispensing health. And moreover, they regarded unvarnished truth as potentially toxic to those who are unprepared. So Monsaigne cites Athanasios, who writes, just as the medical doctor has recourse to subterfuge in order to make one drink the medicine, so the church will make us swallow its message by employing formulations adapted to our respective illnesses and dispositions. This is page 50. In the course of this development, the economy, having started out simply as a circumstantial cure, turns into a synonym for all thought incarnated in life. We hear an echo of this conclusion in Lacan’s argument that there’s a distinction between naked truth and clothed deception. But this distinction doesn’t make them opposites, they actually are constitutive of each other. The truth comes to us that is in the form of a lie. So again, in Seminar 7, Lacan remarks that truth has the structure of a fiction. We’re almost here to the end. So the misunderstanding of economy by both non-believers and fundamentalists, or by those who adhere to Akrabeya, is predicated on the same foreclosure of economy’s communicative power. Monsaigne asks and answers, this is page 53, what then is the ongoing refusal to recognize the doctrinal coherence of the term economy, other than an early disavowal of the links that bind the future of the doctrine concerning the father’s natural image to political stakes and temporal interest. In appearing to dissociate themselves from a highly metaphysical or religious integration of the concept of economy, historians and translators arrive at the same result as strictly religious souls do, because both, in the same way, separate out what is structurally designed to communicate. So the economy, as these church fathers are arguing for it, is the means by which we communicate with people from different circumstances, different perspectives, different positions. And what these historians of economic science, what the fundamentalists ignore or neglect, is precisely this design for communication. That the economy is designed to communicate with souls. On page 61, that whole page sort of concerns the discussion we were having earlier about the distinction between economic versus sovereign power. So you might look there. And on page 66, the last page of the reading, she says that the image, or again to use Lacanian terms, the imaginary, addresses itself to the element in each one of us that founds our adherence to life and thought as though they were the same thing. This, as though they were the same thing, is… you can think about this in terms of the Freudian unconscious. So Freud’s idea of the unconscious is that in the interpretation of dreams, he presents it as the primary process. And it’s consciousness and sort of rational deliberation, which he says is the secondary process. And this is because when we sleep, we engage in this primary process by which our wishes are reconstructed and are in some sense answered or fulfilled. So Freud’s observation was that this primary process happens even when we aren’t conscious. And therefore, this conscious secondary process must itself be in some ways informed by that primary process. So here we can make an important point. Many people, in fact, regard the unconscious as a kind of repository. They think that it’s a kind of dump site where stuff that you don’t like gets repressed and it goes there and that’s it. But Freud himself gives some… he gives some credence to this interpretation in some of his works. But this original idea he has of the unconscious as a process, which is co-original with the secondary process, indicates that we can never escape or be done with the unconscious. So it happens that there are psychoanalysts who think that the essence of psychoanalysis is speaking the repressed, bringing the repressed to speech. And if you do that, then everything will be fine and well. But what this idea of a primary process actually points to is that we’re never done repressing. And both Freud and Lacan end their careers sort of in anguish over the mystery of what they call primary repression, a repression which cannot be discharged through speech, this sort of negativity at the heart of life. So at the very end of Monsaigne’s article, she says, this brief presentation of the economy then comes back to rhetoric. But the flesh that it is concerned with does not reduce to the fragile and mortal envelope that renders us visible to the eyes of others during our ephemeral passage through this life. The true flesh, the one that lives in the word and image, does not concern appearance, but a becoming visible. This becoming visible concerns the relationship between the natural image or God’s invisibility and the iconic dimension of phenomenal reality. So I think one of the most powerful arguments that iconophiles made against the iconoclast is that the Bible itself is an icon. It was transcribed by men, compiled by men. And the Bible itself is this iconic object. So the claim that we encountered last time from Keith Tribe, that the economy is a loose or empty concept splayed out in multiple incompatible directions, overlooks that the Byzantine use of economy already precisely designated relations between and among the dissimilar and the incommensurate, in particular between the visible and the invisible. Moreover, rather than being an empty concept, the iconophiles economy becomes a concept of withdrawal and emptiness. The essence of the image, or again, the Lacanian imaginary, is not visibility, but the economy of icons. Economy thereby becomes a means of converting mystery to enigma. This is a quote from Monzain from later in her book. She says, thus the icon made in the image of the image will no longer be expressive, signifying, or referential. It will not be inscribed in the space of a gap, but will rather incarnate withdrawal itself. This withdrawal is perhaps akin to what Emmanuel Kant calls… it’s not purposelessness, but purposive purposelessness, in which Kant is linked to freedom. So the iconic economy manifests invisibility, not in a sort of dialectic or polar opposition to the visible, as though the visible and the invisible designate separate things that one could oppose. It manifests invisibility rather as the heart of the visible itself. So this is probably the sort of headiest, densest part of this unit. Anything that goes through Eastern Orthodoxy and these crises between the religions, I think, is generally quite difficult. But we will continue to return to this idea of economy, not as something that resolves contradictions or competing claims, but as rather making visible or incarnating something that has withdrawn in itself. And we can say here, I think, at the end, that the traditional view, or I call it traditional, but the widespread view of God is that he created the world, he created the universe, and then abandoned it. He absconded off to some other dimension, some other realm. What the economy, this Byzantine economy, suggests is something slightly different and perhaps more disturbing. God created the world, yes, but in that act of creation, he withdrew into the world. The principle of creation withdraws into that creation. And he does so as an obscure mirror. This is the translation that Monsaigne gives of Saint Paul. For now we see in a mirror, in an enigma, but then at the time of revelation, we will see face to face. So God withdraws into creation, and when he does so, he cracks existence. And you can think of this crack of existence or the splitting of existence as what we’ve discussed in terms of ontological difference, or the difference between beings and being. And the question of economy, consequently, always involves this stewarding or shepherding of beings in the name of capital capital being towards the good life, towards the truth, or what have you. One final note, not final, but one more note on this Christian idea of life and truth. We mentioned Giorgio Agamben, this Italian thinker, who’s done quite a lot of work on divine economy, in this sort of genealogy of church doctrine. For Agamben, there are two kinds of life. He recognizes bios and zoe. And these are the ancient Greek terms. Bios, we have it today in biology. Zoe, we have in zoology. And the distinction that Agamben makes between these things is he says that zoe is a sort of naked or bare life, and bios is clothed or political life, the life of speech, the life of man. What’s interesting is that when you read the Gospels, if you read them in Koine Greek, as they were originally written, you’ll see that John, in particular, and John is something of a radical in terms of the Gospels. He’s quite a radical figure, actually. But John makes the distinction not between bios and zoe, but between a third kind of life, which he calls psuche. And this psuche or psyche is inherited to us by us today as psychology, among other terms. But this psuche or psyche in John is always everlasting life, life that is eternal, life that participates in word and image in the Trinity, and which marks the departure from both the naked life of zoe, of animal life, and the clothed life of human politics and human organizations. So this psyche is a kind of life which interrupts, which splits between these two. And the question of the market, of a market logic or governmentality based on the market, is fundamentally concerned with the administration of life. This is one reason I think why Foucault’s lectures are called the birth of biopolitics, even though he barely mentions it in those lectures. But this administration of life itself is gradually becomes, gradually and then all at once becomes, this sort of mandate of economic science. Okay, so I will now wrap up. Next week, we’re reading, or next time we’re reading, we’re moving forward, or coming back anyway, to the beginning of Tribe’s argument. We’ll be reading this Boyer-Zambeau et al. text, Private Money and Public Currencies. And we’ll, I can’t help myself, I’m also going to add, yeah, we’ll also read a shorter essay, I think it’s 10 or so pages, Massimo Amato’s Silence is Golden, Preliminary Notes on Speech, Money, and Calculation. And Amato uses gold to think about this relationship between rhetoric, economy, and a number. And so that will be probably the more theoretical of the readings that we’ll do. But the primary emphasis will be on the 16th century market fairs, and the ecu de marque. Yeah, okay. So that was a lot, I feel like it was a lot anyway. If you have any questions or comments, let me know. Otherwise, we’ll wrap up in a minute. All right. Thanks, everyone, for listening, for following along and putting up with this. Next time, we will be on sort of firmer ground, for the most part, talking about real economies and not divine economies. So it may be easier to find some points for attachment or question. But yeah, that’s all I have for this evening. So okay, I will get the readings updated, hopefully tonight or tomorrow. Also, Poro, this isn’t Coining Reason business, but Native DAO business, I had mentioned that I was going to post our vote card. And then I saw that they were going to put up the sail with the whale proposal this week. And I think I know that I would prefer to put our vote card up after we vote on that, because I feel like that decision should, if it can anyway, it should be able to be used in the conversation around it on Twitter. So I’ll wait until that goes live and then post all of that. All right. Oh, go ahead. Sorry. Oh, just on that, it makes sense. It seems like the most contentious of the bunch. Yeah, that’s kind of, yeah, I didn’t want to make like multiple posts about it. So I decided I’ll just hold off until they’re ready. But I do have it drafted. So yeah. Okay, thanks for listening. Have a good evening and see you tomorrow. Later.