Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- Ontology: the specter of greed -- History: fantasies of a capitalist -- Mystery: the materiality of symbols -- Revelation: Weber's Midas -- The economic sublime: the fantastic colors of money

Abstract: Two critiques of mass media in the twentieth century gestured at its effects on the capacity of patience. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Daniel Boorstin's The Image examine how the media changed our imagining of the world, the scope of its relevance for us, and our ways of being in it. This article follows their lead by inquiring how being online further undermines the capacity for patience, manifested most clearly in the self-generating rage characteristic of social networks' discourse. It refers this effect to three basic elements of the online world: the ubiquitous timeline format, the hybrid creature of written speech created by it, and digital objects that adapt themselves too closely to our needs, imaginings, and desires. All three foster a disruption of distances, where the remote and unfamiliar are experienced as unbearably close, a blurring of distinctions between inner life and external reality. A world composed of digital objects has lost what Hannah Arendt described as its power to "relate and separate people at the same time."

I want to start with a joke, which I believe should be attributed to the Jewish Italian comedian Moni Ovadia. A Jew tries to convince a gentile friend to buy a barrel of tuna fish from him. The friend is reluctant - what can he do with a barrel of fish? - but the Jew keeps nagging until he succumbs. A few days later the two meet, and the Jew notices his friend's fallen face. "What happened, is everything alright?" he inquires. "Don't ask", the friend answers. "I opened the barrel and it was awful. The fish was all rotten". "Have you gone out of your mind?!" the Jew replies. "It is not for eating! It is for buying and selling!"

Exploring the historical imagination that surfaces at the time of crisis, Samman contributes to the effort to conceive of financial capitalism as a more or less distinct political, social and cultural era. The question that remains is how the narrative tropes he explores are related to finance in its narrower sense. Why does historical imagination wear these specific forms in financial times?

I have always been somewhat suspicious of attempts to theorize money in linguistic terms. Though the symbolic and conventional aspects of money make a parallel with language seem attractive, such attempts usually refrain from considering the consequences of the fact that money belongs to the order of private property, which is strictly opposed to the common sphere of language. Wouldn't conceiving of money as language force us to confront the abhorrent, monstrous possibility of words that can be owned?