He exchanges pound notes for the letters M.P. As the dominant cultural fiction of developed societies, money is the ideal nonsensical sign. I have always found it amazing that in exchange for paper I can get a book or a dress, that the stock market actually rises and falls on rumor — mere talk — and that people trade in something called Futures, as if such a thing were possible. I accept that all this is part of my world, and yet I continue to find it bizarre. Dickens obviously shared this bafflement. As powerful as it is, money refers to nothing real. Currency floats. Dickens reiterates Marx’s idea of money as society’s founding gibberish, as “the general confounding and compounding of all things — the world upside down.” When money is hoarded, it becomes even more meaningless because it buys nothing. It just accumulates like so much wastepaper.
Why money should be so precious to an ass so dull as to exchange it for no other satisfaction, is strange; but there is no animal so sure to get laden with it, as the Ass who sees nothing written on the face of the earth as the three dry letters L.S.D. not Luxury, Sensuality, Dissoluteness, which they so often stand for, but the three dry letters.
In an age when designer labels and celebrity names are used to sell everything from cars to lipstick, when meaningless slogans and lyrics and acronyms are constantly beamed and displayed and written on screens and billboards and the covers of magazines, when right-wing politicians hammer out the same empty phrases ad nauseam, corrupting words like freedom and truth until they are no longer recognizable and refer to absolutely nothing,--Siri Hustvedt "Charles Dickens and the Morbid Fragment" in (2006) A Plea for Eros, pp. 166-7
One often hears economist say with respect, that is, without irony, put your money where your mouth is (see here Cowen and Tabarrok). The underlying idea is not just that money is more solid than cheap talk, but that staking money is a form of serious agency -- skin in the game -- whereas mere talking is prattle. (I consider the epistemologist, who treats betting as the sine qua non of rationality, in the same boat.)
Hustvedt, a terrific novelist and even better essayist, helps us note that this disdain for talk is puzzling not only because (i) talk often moves markets (and so is causally efficacious, one is tempted to say talk better be treated as an endogenous variable), but also because (ii) money is ultimately grounded in some gibberish.+
As an aside (for those who follow recent high profile debates surrounding modern monetary theory (hereafter MMT [see here for Krugman, here my friend Alexander Douglas (who used to be more in favor)], one reason I suspect why modern monetary theory seems so attractive to some is that in it money is not grounded in nonsense (nor the labor theory of value) but in the very real power of the state (which can demand payment in its own I.O.U.s.)* MMT is ultimately grounded in a kind of Hobbesian intuition.**
Let me return to Hustvedt, in virtue of the fact that money originates in gibberish and floats, she is inclined to suggest that it cannot refer to something real. The underlying idea is hitched to the (correct) thought that signs are arbitrary. (Given how philosophically sophisticated Hustvedt is, one may even say that the PSR is lurking behind her position.) Unlike Hustvedt I think that money can refer to something real even if (as I grant her) it is founded in the arbitrariness of nonsense and tracked with something arbitrary (a sign).
How so?
As any Connecticut poet (hoobla-how, hoobla-hoo, and hoo), or Humean-Deleuzian, can tell you, repetition can turn gibberish into something causally efficacious. And as Spinoza teaches, to be is to be a cause (and vice versa). This fact, that some of our beings/causes are grounded in nonsense, is an affront to those who think our starting points should be clear propositions. Be that as it may, because it has causal powers, money is as real as talk.++
In The Summer Without Men (Husvedt's 2011 novel), her narrator writes, "Repetition. Repetition, not identity. Nothing is repeated exactly, even words, because something has changed in the speaker and in the listener, because once said and then said again and again, the repetition itself alters the words." (51) I think the intuition -- the power of repetition -- is sound even if I am uneasy about Husvedt's manner of expressing it. While above I noted that repetition can generate identity, Husvedt is clear it can also, in the opposite direction, as it were, undermine identity.
In her comment on Dickens, Hustvedt makes the point in stark fashion: repetition can create gibberish from truth. Her claim is not the familiar one associated with the theory of propaganda that through repetition lies can become thought true,*** but rather that one can debase words, even true and respected ones, by repeating them in certain ways. That is, certain forms of repetition vacate truth.
That is it for now. But I add a perhaps puzzling paragraph as a promissory note (and explication on my first paragraph above). As regular readers know, I think (recall) Arendt is right that only a limited number of institutions (related to science and justice) are capable of producing truth in a reliable fashion.+++ (It's now a familiar thought that replication is important in some of their practices.) The slide from [A] 'X=true' to [B] 'X=true if and only you are willing to take a bet on X' is made possible, I suspect, by a certain form of such vacating, that is, pernicious repetition.
+To avoid confusion: I treat Husvedt as agnostic on the labor theory of value. I mention this because she mentions Marx in the vicinity. (Also nothing in this post turns on the idea that for you, LSD=Lysergic acid diethylamide.)
*I am treating nonsense and the taxman as contraries.
**I am pleased to see a revival of interest in ideas by Abba Lerner (who is often credited with originating MMT); here I should note that Lerner was a socialist who disliked state authority (so the Hobbesian intuition is not really his).
++A social ontologist may well worry that the causal efficacy of money and/or talk is derived from the causal efficacy of our supposedly more solid, intentions or our projections. I respond: all that is solid melts into air.
+++ In turn, these institutions have a tricky relationship to the world of politics (grounded in opinion).
***I mention this because she is also pointing to the closely aligned phenomenon of repetition of empty phrases.
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