exX2022★★はスコット・ファーガソンが興味深い。Scott Ferguson ( @videotroph )
Scott Ferguson ( @videotroph ) pic.twitter.com/JgGDdV2IvV
— 地域通貨花子1 (@TiikituukaHana) September 14, 2022
Scott Ferguson
https://twitter.com/videotroph?s=21
https://iitomo2010.blogspot.com/2022/09/iitomo-mmt-edx-in-week-1-we-seek-to.html edX2022★★
邦訳
https://iitomo2010.blogspot.com/2022/09/20220914-mmt-edx-in-week-1-we-seek-to_14.html edX2022★★
https://iitomo2010.blogspot.com/2022/09/mmt_14.html 下書き
Interview with Scott Ferguson
★★
M:
Well hello and today I'm talking to Professor Scott Ferguson, who's in the Humanities area at the University of South Florida. And he does a lot of work in in the area of Humanities, Cultural Studies and those things and he'd become very interested in Modern Monetary Theory. And his work is illustrating, in my view, the the breadth in which we can work together in across the Social Sciences and within cross-Social Sciences in the Humanities. So Scott, welcome and thanks for joining us.
F:
Thanks for having me. I'm so happy to be here.
M:
Yeah and so can you just tell us what you say, the relationship between the work in Modern Monetary Theory and your work in the Humanities? What gives - it's a very interesting proposition?
F:
It is an interesting proposition. Yes, so obviously, Modern Monetary Theory begins with a set of unfamiliar and I believe more correct and I would say more capacious ideas about the way that not just economics works on a narrow sense, but the way that we might say political economy works with the way our society is - the way we live together as to use the Greek word - the 'polis', how the 'polis' operates and the polis operates not just through fiscal policy and treasury central bank operations, but also through culture and through art and through the kinds of values that we are making in in our culture and in our media. So what I do is I study culture and media and what I've done in my project is to ask old questions in the Humanities in new ways, so the old questions are these. Take a particular cultural object, let's say a blockbuster movie, that's what I like to study. So blockbuster movies - Marvel movies or ET or Terminator 2 - and we ask, well, how is this made not just technically but aesthetically, how are all the parts put together? What kind of camera work is involved? What is the sound design? Why are these big rumbly bass effects involved and how are they affecting my body? And we in the Humanities say, OK, this is how this stuff seems to be working and given the the larger society with where this movie is being made and where it's being enjoyed, what kind of values is it promoting? Is it promoting progressive values? Is it promoting reactionary values? Is it promoting some strange hodgepodge or both? Usually that's the case and very often this work gets done thinking about economics. But in the past, those economics have been largely orthodox and taking up what we call neoclassical ideas about the economy, also even what I would have called orthodox Marxist approaches that begin with an understanding of money as a commodity, as a private exchange relation that comes about in barter relationships between individuals. But as we know from Modern Monetary Theory, this is not actually the case historically or operationally. Instead, money is really a governance project. It's a public utility and it is not a private exchange relationship. Primarily, it can be, but it isn't necessarily and very often when when Humanities scholars and students ask about the social meaning of a blockbuster or a painting or a song, they have that kind of assumption, that orthodox assumption about money in the back of their mind and it leads to certain kinds of judgements. And they get very preoccupied about whether a work of art is a commodity or not a commodity. And in my work, what I'm trying to do is to say, hey, with an MMT's view of money - as a public utility, that can always be organised in another way for full employment, for full employment in the arts. We can begin to understand our culture in a new way. So that's primarily what I'm after. That's just a hint of what I do but it gives you a sense of how I frame this whole relationship between MMT and the Humanities.
M:
And can you give an example that might be of interest?
F:
Absolutely. So I'll give two quick examples. So one is, if you study the history of the blockbuster, as I do, you'll notice even at the level of explicit dialogue, they will make all kinds of claims, characters about the national debt, about unemployment. You know, if you look specifically, for example, a big 90s blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Toy Story and The Matrix, there's jokes about nervous jokes about unemployment all over these films, right? And we, as MMT scholars know that unemployment is not a natural effect of the market, but it is a policy choice, right? So we can say that the expressions of the blockbusters are giving voice to an anxiety about the threat of unemployment or actual unemployment that could be otherwise. And in a sense, I would say those blockbusters naturalise unemployment in a way that we would want to push back on and not naturalise.
The last example is a kind of more broader - a broader argument that I make about the way we think about aesthetics and culture in general. The way we think about aesthetics and culture typically in our Western societies is we we imagine aesthetics and culture as the opposite of money. Money is this kind of nasty, necessarily brutish, terrible thing that we have to deal with in the marketplace. And aesthetics and culture are those nice, lovely, rich experiences that are going to save us from money in our leisure time or on the weekend, right? And there's a long philosophical tradition that created this impression. And in my work, my argument is to say - no, this is a false division. And it's actually this division is based on on a bad idea of money - that money doesn't have to be horrible. Money is a public utility that could actually help create culture and help create aesthetic experiences, much like it did during the New Deal.
M:
Right and the last thing I really want to follow up on there is - this infiltration of these dominant economic ideas into fiction and into culture and into media - do you think that that's innocent or do you think that it's part of the sort of way in which the dominant paradigm maintains its position?
F:
I think the latter but I would say for the most part, unintentionally, right - not consciously, right? Now with I think - I thinkt we're in the middle of a paradigm crisis. And I think MMT is a huge part of throwing into question the dominant economic paradigm now, and I think increasingly dominant media and the writers and creators of that media are going to have to start making decisions - how they want to talk about our economies, in which case it might become intentional. But I think for the most part, if we're talking about my period of analysis of the last 40 years, it's really what we call the neoliberal period - I think it's for the most part, it's innocent in the sense that it's unintentional. But they are reproducing the status quo ideology absolutely, yeah.
M:
OK, so we better leave it there. Thanks very much and for all of those who are interested in Scott's work, you can just follow up from the links that we provide. And thanks, Scott. That was great. Thanks so much.
スコット・ファーガソン インタビュー
M:
今日は、南フロリダ大学の人文科学分野のScott Ferguson教授にお話をうかがいました。彼は人文科学、文化研究、そういった分野で多くの仕事をしていますが、現代通貨理論に非常に興味を持つようになりました。彼の研究は、社会科学全体、そして人文社会科学全体において、私たちが協力できる幅の広さを示していると私は考えています。では、スコットさん、ようこそ。
F:
お招きいただきありがとうございます。この場にいることができて、とても幸せです。
M:
現代通貨理論の研究と、あなたの人文科学の研究との関係について教えてください。非常に興味深い提案だと思うのですが、その理由は何でしょうか?
F:
興味深い命題ですね。現代貨幣論は、狭い意味での経済学だけでなく、政治経済学とでも言うべき、私たちの社会のあり方、ギリシャ語で言うところの「ポリス」のあり方、「ポリス」の運営方法、財政政策や中央銀行の運営だけでなく、文化や芸術、文化やメディアの中で作られる価値観を通じて、より正しく、より広い範囲で機能する方法についての、よくわからない、より正しいと私は思う一連の考えから始まっていますね。私は文化とメディアを研究していますが、このプロジェクトでは、人文科学における古い問いを新しい方法で問いかけることにしています。ある特定の文化的対象、例えば大ヒット映画を研究しています。マーベル映画や『ET』、『ターミネーター2』などの大ヒット映画について、技術的だけでなく美学的にもどのように作られているのか、すべてのパーツはどのように組み合わされているのか。どのようなカメラワークが使われているのか?サウンドデザインはどうなっているのか?なぜ、このような大きな低音の効果があるのか、そして、それが私の身体にどのような影響を与えているのか?そして、私たち人文科学者は、「このようなものがどのように機能しているのか」「この映画が作られ、楽しまれている大きな社会では、どのような価値観が促進されているのか?進歩的な価値観を促進しているのでしょうか?反動的な価値観を助長しているのでしょうか?あるいは、その両方を促進しているのでしょうか?
通常、このような場合、経済学について考えることが非常によくあります。しかし、過去には、経済学は主にオーソドックスなもので、経済に関する新古典派と呼ばれる考え方や、私がオーソドックスなマルクス主義的アプローチと呼んだもので、個人間の物々交換関係から生じる私的交換関係としての商品としてのお金の理解から始まるものでした。
しかし、『現代通貨理論』からわかるように、これは歴史的にも運用上も、実はそうではありません。むしろ、貨幣はガバナンスのプロジェクトなのです。公共事業であり、私的な交換関係ではありません。人文科学の研究者や学生が、大ヒット作や絵画や歌の社会的な意味について尋ねるとき、そのような仮定、つまりお金に関する正統派の仮定が頭の片隅にあり、それがある種の判断につながることが非常によくあるのです。そして、芸術作品が商品であるか、商品でないかということに、とても気をとられてしまうのです。私の仕事では、MMTの貨幣観、つまり公益事業としての貨幣を使えば、完全雇用や芸術における完全雇用のためにいつでも別の方法で組織化することができる、と言おうとしています。新しい方法で文化を理解し始めることができます。これが、私が求めているものです。これは私が行っていることのほんの一部ですが、MMTと人文科学の関係全体をどのように組み立てているか、おわかりいただけると思います。
M:
興味深い例を挙げていただけますか。
F:
もちろんです。簡単な例を2つ挙げます。ひとつは、私のように超大作の歴史を研究していると、明確な対話のレベルでも、国の借金や失業について、あらゆる種類の主張をすることに気がつくと思います。例えば、ジュラシック・パーク、トイ・ストーリー、マトリックスといった90年代の大作を見ると、これらの映画の至る所で失業に関する神経質なジョークが使われていますよね?そして、私たちMMTの研究者は、失業は市場の自然な効果ではなく、政策的な選択であることを知っていますよね?
ですから、ブロックバスターの表現は、そうでない可能性のある失業の脅威や実際の失業に対する不安を代弁していると言えるのです。そしてある意味で、私たちが自然化しないように背中を押してあげたいと思うような形で、それらのブロックバスターは失業を自然化させていると言えるでしょう。
最後の例は、美学や文化について考える方法について、より広範な議論を展開するものです。西洋社会で美学や文化について考えるとき、私たちは美学や文化をお金と対極にあるものとして想像します。お金というのは、市場で取引される、厄介で、必ずしも残忍で、恐ろしいものです。美学と文化は、余暇や週末に私たちをお金から救ってくれる、素敵な、美しい、豊かな体験ですよね?そして、このような印象を作り出した長い哲学的伝統があるのです。私の仕事では、これは間違った区分だと言いたいのです。実はこの区分は、お金に対する悪い考えに基づいているのです--お金は恐ろしいものである必要はない、と。お金は、ニューディール時代にそうであったように、文化を創造し、美的体験を生み出すのに実際に役立つ公共事業なのです。
M:
フィクションや文化、メディアの中に、こうした支配的な経済観念が入り込んでいることについて、あなたはそれが無実だと思いますか、それとも支配的なパラダイムがその地位を維持するための一種の方法の一部だと思いますか?
F:
後者だと思いますが、ほとんどの場合、意図せず、そうですね、意識せず、ですね。今、私たちはパラダイムの危機の真っ只中にいると思います。支配的なメディアや、そのメディアのライターやクリエイターが、経済についてどう語りたいのか、決断を迫られることになるでしょう。しかし、この40年間という私の分析期間について言えば、それはまさに新自由主義時代と呼ばれるもので、ほとんどの場合、意図的でないという意味で無邪気なものだと思います。でも、現状維持のイデオロギーを絶対的に再生産している、うん。
M:
OK、では、この辺で。Scottの仕事に興味がある人は、私たちが提供するリンクからフォローアップできますよ。ありがとう、Scott。素晴らしかったです。ありがとうございました。
We’ve just heard from Professor Scott Ferguson about his interest in how Modern Monetary Theory, as a lens, reveals new ways of thinking about the arts and humanities and how social meaning is constructed. You don’t have to be watching a Netflix series for very long before the topic of unemployment or national debt turns up. In the same way that stereotypes about stockbrokers and bank managers are perpetuated in pop culture, messages and prejudices also become attached to the way the economy works.
The root of all evil
What do you think about some of Scott’s comments about money being associated with cold and ruthless matters compared to some of the artistic and creative things that money can facilitate?
Next, we’re going to hear from an expert in cognitive linguistics who has a few observations on the language that surrounds economics and how this effects the way we think and behave.
スコット・ファーガソン教授から、レンズとしての現代通貨理論が、芸術や人文科学の新しい考え方や社会的意味の構築方法を明らかにすることへの関心について話を聞いたところです。Netflixのシリーズを長く見ていると、失業や国の借金の話題が出てくることがあります。株式仲買人や銀行経営者についてのステレオタイプがポップカルチャーの中で永続しているのと同じように、メッセージや偏見も経済の仕組みに付随しているのです。
諸悪の根源
お金がもたらす芸術性や創造性に対して、お金は冷酷なものであるというスコットのコメントについて、どう思われますか?
次に、認知言語学の専門家から、経済学を取り巻く言語と、それが私たちの考え方や行動にどのような影響を与えるかについて、いくつかご意見を伺いたいと思います。
以下の文化研究を連想させた。
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https://twitter.com/jessicalburbank/status/1565066765834432512?s=21
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https://twitter.com/tiikituukahana/status/1565088179862278144?s=21
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https://twitter.com/tiikituukahana/status/1569943936919289856?s=21
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スコットファーガソン2018
Introduction
Critique after Modern Monetary Theory
Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return—that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent—a misfortune.
—Karl Marx
Money is no object.
—Stephanie Kelton
In the James Bond film Spectre (2015) a cabal of digital surveillance capitalists cum global terrorists attempt to take over the British national intelligence service. This clandestine group builds a flashy high-tech skyscraper in the heart of London, and at one point it is explained that only private investors would be able to afford this cutting-edge structure. In reality the scenes inside the fictitious data center were shot within London's current City Hall. Yet according to the film's harrowing story world, the British government simply does not have the money to commission such an extravagant edifice. Though mentioned only in passing, this comment about the insufficiency of public funds appears to structure the film's entire plot. The story pits what is essentially an embattled government program against the allegedly greater powers of global information capital, imagined as an unruly field of spectral agents that no state can capture or contain. Deemed "Bond for the age of austerity," Spectre's cash-strapped hero still gets a pair of handsome cars as well as a perfectly pressed ensemble for every climate and occasion.1 Sadly, however, what Spectre shows is that today, it is easier to believe a man can single-handedly take down an evil capitalist organization than it is to imagine a government being able to afford dazzling public infrastructures. Meanwhile, the true specter haunting the latest installment of the Bond franchise is not global info capitalism, as the film's narrative suggests. Rather, it is the limitless reserve of government treasury bonds that, according the contemporary heterodox school of political economy known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), could be immediately deployed to uplift everyone. Modern governments are said to spend by "borrowing" treasury bonds.2
Yet as MMT economist Scott Fullwiler explains, a sovereign currency-issuing government never needs to borrow, or even tax, before issuing such bonds. "Revenues for bond sales or taxes," as Fullwiler has it, "do not affect the government's operational ability to spend."3 Lest we forget, writes Fullwiler, it is impossible for a currency-issuing government to run out of a unit that it alone supplies. Additionally, MMT insists that government can always afford to take care of everyone without risking inflationary price rises, so long as public spending remains directed at real resources and unused productive capacities. MMT's startling revelation, then, is that austerity is a cruel fiction, an unnecessary condition that can be instantly reversed. More pointedly, there are no economic constraints to government's capacity to address urgent social and environmental crises; politics are the sole reason why we, as a public, cannot have what we need. Thus, in contrast to what the mainstream press alleged during the 2016 primary race, the U.S. government can afford everything former presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders proposed: universal healthcare; free university education; infrastructure repair; first-rate public housing; environmental retrofitting; and low-cost postal banking. But with MMT, we can do Bernie one better. Just ask Stephanie Kelton, a top MMT economist who also served as Sanders's chief economic advisor for his role as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee and subsequent presidential bid. In addition to what Sanders had officially proposed, Kelton suggests, we can also create a high-quality public child- and eldercare service; a robust public arts program; and a federally funded yet communally organized public works system, or "job guarantee," that would grant a living-wage job to everyone who wishes to have one.4 Think of the latter as something akin to a permanent but more inclusive and locally sensitive version of the Works Progress Administration implemented under the Franklin Delano Roosevelt presidency. This program would not only virtually eradicate problems of un- and underemployment. It would also establish
just minimum standards for pay and benefits, put the means of production in the hands of workers, and ensure everyone's right to participate meaningfully in shaping our world. In order to rescue our society from the self-imposed horrors of austerity, we require neither Bond-like bodily prowess nor the computer-simulated collisions that dominate Spectre, along with most contemporary action media. After all, money is not physics, as MMT reminds us, nor is it a "bond" that takes the shape of physics. In contrast to the economic orthodoxy's insistence upon grounding money in local private exchanges, MMT argues that money is a creature of government and a public system of accounting and law. Money involves abstract inscriptions and simultaneous coordination between a centralized government and geographically dispersed institutions, not localized movements of alienable matter. With this, MMT makes perceptible what I call the unheard-of center of modern life. Precisely because money remains a centralized, abstract, and inalienable relation, MMT concludes, a currency-issuing polity can forever afford to guarantee persons' employment and involvement, access, and care. Meanwhile, what I shall refer to as the "Liberal" monetary imagination (in contrast to the imaginary of "small l" American "liberalism") has hidden this capacious center behind an alienating physics. In a tremendous feat of disavowal, it manages to reduce an acknowledged abstraction to a singular contract and then wrap this narrow association around a contracted physics. Thus, to lay bare money's boundless center and attain what is desperately needed, contemporary action media's explosive motion will be, at best, a weak ally and, at worst, an unwitting accomplice in a nefarious vanishing act. In place of Spectre's abstract physics, then, we shall require a more mysterious combination of elements that are at once more powerful and less substantial: a renewed critical praxis and a resolutely public capacity to generate money out of thin air. In this book, I aim to initiate and orient such a praxis by regrounding critical theory in the unheard-of center that MMT makes newly perceptible. To do so, I break with the Marxist understanding of money that has historically guided critical theory as well as the treatment of the aesthetic it has conditioned. Like orthodox economics, Marxism treats money as a more or less passive vehicle for material exchanges that are abstractly mediated. As a result, it tends to denounce the money relation as an inherently privative social process and hence as one that is incapable of serving collective well-being. Yet as MMT demonstrates, money is irreducible to a "crystal of value . . . into which the commodity eagerly solidifies" and out of which its abstract husk "dissolves," as Karl Marx artfully put it in Capital, Volume One.5 By insisting upon what might be called money's mediated immediacy, while also reducing the state to a revenue-constrained and generally unproductive spender, Marxism's expressly immanent critique of monetary abstraction reifies the very privation it rejects. As a consequence of adopting this ontology of money, I contend, critical theory misperceives political economy's actual conditions of possibility and hamstrings the most revolutionary weapon within reach. The Marxist reification of monetary privation, in turn, leads critical theorists to adopt an impoverished conception of the aesthetic, which constricts the curative capacities of money and aesthetics alike. As the conventional narrative has it, the modern bourgeoisie first sought refuge from the Liberal money regime by turning to the realm of sensibility, culture, and art that came to be called "the aesthetic."6
Whereas the Liberal monetary economy was plagued by sensory deprivation, experiential delimitation, and narrow social interests, the aesthetic sphere made room for sensory heterogeneity and repleteness, free play, and yearnings for universal communion. Although the aesthetic project failed to deliver on its mandate, critical theory invested a great deal of thought and hope in its utopian impulses. For some critical theorists, the aesthetic's failed strivings for autonomy became a form of negative illumination, pointing beyond present alienation toward alternative orders. For others, the aesthetic's sensuous and underdetermined communality made for an incipient utopia in the here-and-now. The aesthetic needed only to be generalized and deepened in order positively to overcome political economic alienation. As I shall claim here, however, in placing what Immanuel Kant called the aesthetic's "unbounded expansion" beyond and against monetary mediation, critical theory forecloses money's boundless public center and delimits aesthetic expansion to a contracted field. In a word, it debilitates money and aesthetics alike. My book, by contrast, joins critical theory's commitments to sensuous immanence with MMT's ontology of money and makes aesthetics newly answerable to political economy. To do so, it will be necessary to rethink the historical relationship between money and the aesthetic in three ways.
First, I argue that money alone harbors the capacity to cultivate a full, diverse, and variable collective life. I risk this claim without appealing to orthodox yarns about self-correcting markets or to mutualist dreams about self-supporting associations that are proffered by advocates of cyber and extra-state currencies. Instead, I presume worldly inclinations toward dissolution and aggression.
I critique desires to cure these centrifugal impulses with benevolent forms of mediated immediacy, and I affirm money's unrestricted capacity to socialize labor and accommodate myriad social differences.
Second, I contend that the modern problem of the aesthetic is best understood as a historical symptom. It is a response to the metaphysical thisness, or haecceity, to which the dominant Liberal ontology of money has reduced monetary abstraction. Coined by theologian Duns Scotus during the thirteenth century, haecceity (pronounced "hæk-see-ê-tee") is a metaphysical principle that denies causal dependencies between spatially separated beings. Instead, haecceity contracts the totality of being into the thisness of individuated particulars and, more significant, into the thisness of the contiguous and, typically, material relations that condition individuation. Haecceity eventually becomes the metaphysical basis for the hegemonic Liberal money form. Shrinking an expansive and noncontiguous social bond into a contracted and alienable relation, the modern Liberal imagination comes to treat monetary abstraction as a kind of haecceity-in-motion: a mobile and distinctly decentered thisness that seems to fill and evacuate private and public coffers. When the Liberal money form's contracted dynamics fail to support the social totality, the aesthetic arises as a symptomatic answer to money's haecceity. Specifically, the aesthetic seeks to redeem haecceity's universalizing promise in an alternative and improved form.
In place of Liberal money's impoverished thisness, it offers a rich and open haecceity that is supposed to support the social order in a manner that money apparently cannot.
Yet the aesthetic project persistently falls short of its aim. This is not merely a consequence of ongoing social domination. It does not owe to the fact that money has somehow penetrated too deeply into social life. It is because haecceity remains an impoverished metaphysical foundation for any social order, no matter how expansive or universal its aims. The aesthetic is a symptom, then, because despite its salutary openings, it ultimately expresses rather than contests the Liberal money form's metaphysical commitment to haecceity.
As symptom, the aesthetic participates in making undetectable the nonlocal connections between spatially distant persons and environs that money's public center regularly maintains. It also disguises that center's limitless capacity to overcome neoliberal devastation.
Third, I turn the aesthetic's salutary openings toward nurturing and enlarging the money relation. To hang the future of the totality on thisness is to overlook the center's true causal dependencies. It is also to foreclose the center's boundless curative potential. Instead of setting aesthetic redemption against monetary alienation as critical theory has done in the past, I call upon the aesthetic's much disputed saving powers to assist in actualizing money's social potential. In this project, I remain committed to aesthetic expansion and its social potential, but such expansions must sit squarely within the world that money mediates. They must realize rather than resist the money relation. The aesthetic must seek to enlarge, not escape, money's own expansive field.
Finally, I should clarify: my claim is that not simply that MMT opens the history of modern money and aesthetics to untapped utopian possibilities for public spending and social care. Rather, my contention is an emphatically normative one. MMT shows that money's status as a centralized and unrestricted government utility never ceases to structure social production, that it does so as a matter of everyday operational reality. Whether or not this occurs consciously or well remains an urgent question. But no amount of disavowal or negligence can erase the empirical effects of money's boundless public center on modern history. As a result, MMT forces us to think of money's utopian and normative dimensions as inextricably intertwined. The Royal Road to the Neoliberal Unconscious This leads us back to where we began: the conspicuous convergence of money, physics, and aesthetics in contemporary action media. I opened with a brief analysis of Spectre not merely because the film crystallizes the toxic contradictions that organize neoliberal money relations. I do so because Spectre exemplifies the action aesthetics that define the neoliberal order and because the sublime haecceity that quavers at the center of such media plays a pivotal role in my argument about the history of modern money and aesthetics. My first claim is that these media physics provide a royal road to the neoliberal unconscious.
…
The neoliberal period eradicates this distinction; it presumes money's abstract status. Rather than reveal money's public center, however, neoliberal political economy paradoxically treats monetary abstraction like a contracted and alienable thing. In consequence, money is banished to a realm of material propinquity, making it impossible to contest its construction. In the domain of aesthetics, the neoliberal period finds critical theorists declaring more or less defunct the once-utopian strivings of aesthetic modernism and avant-gardism, which had given formal and technical abstractions pride of place. "Abstract art . . . creates new types of spatial relationships, new inventions of forms, new visuals laws," propounded artist and Bauhaus school member László Moholy-Nagy. "[It is] the visual counterpart to a more purposeful, cooperative human society."13 Inverting such formulas, Theodor Adorno transformed abstraction into a type of negative illumination that turns the indeterminacy of monetary abstraction toward the aesthetic's more reparative ends.
"If in monopoly capitalism it is primarily exchange value . . . that is consumed," writes Adorno, "in the modern artwork it is its abstractness, that irritating indeterminateness of what it is and to what purpose it is, that becomes a cipher of what the work is."14 Conversely, aestheticians in the neoliberal era imagine abstraction's alterity increasingly absorbed by monetary abstraction.
Nearly every aspect of collective experience is subsumed, according to Fredric Jameson, by the "bewildering new world space of late or multinational capital."15 This total subsumption of collective existence is supposed to make the historical antagonism between money and aesthetics all but obsolete. Like a slow-motion film depicting the shutdown of Rust Belt machinery, the dialectical machinery of modernity's money/aesthetics opposition grinds to an interminable finish.
…
Approached from MMT's heterodox conception of money, or what I am calling money's boundless public center, these origins reveal themselves afresh. Situating the traditional money/aesthetics dialectic in the context of an emergent thisness and an incipient Liberal political economy, Declarations of Dependence reconstructs the historical relationship between money and aesthetics. Uncovering a more salutatory metaphysics, it severs the noose of neoliberalism and envisions new supports for the collectivity I wish to release. Modernity's Unreconciled Origins The source of the historical dialectic that terminates with neoliberal action media, I have suggested, lies in the social and political turmoil of northern Italy during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Specifically, the essential features of the modern relationship between money and the aesthetic can be traced to the remarkable economic and cultural life of the late medieval city-state. At first blush, today's internationally connected and hi-tech political economy seems to share little with the comparatively localized and pre-industrial world of Renaissance Florence. Moreover, what British Sentimentalists and German Idealists would later imagine as a quasi-autonomous aesthetic sphere was largely absent in the Florentine context. If anything, the primary tension in the period stretching from 1350 to 1500 was between money and morality, commerce and spirituality, economic life and the life of the church. Still, money and what we call the aesthetic remained bedfellows during this period. Humanist apologists for Florentine elites boasted about the role of the rich in provisioning artworks for both civic and church institutions. This, along with complaints of papal profligacy, led to conflicts between money's purportedly corrupting influence and the church as institutional center of morality. A contradictory wellspring for contemporary relationships to money and aesthetics, early modern Florence also supplied the budding metaphysics of haecceitas that first shaped a proto-Liberal political economy and an ontology of money as alienable thisness. Prior to this transformation, an explicitly nonproximate, or transcendent, causality held sway over the late medieval intellectual order. Developed furthest by scholastic theologians such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, this causality begins with a boundless center occupied by God and the Universal Church. It then conceptualizes change through the relation of nonproximate copresences, which realize the center's potential through finite local activities that never exhaust God's endless abundance. From the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, this transcendent causality informed the operation and theorization of the papal money system under which the northern Italian city-states grew. In northern Europe, where the principles arising from the Thomist tradition received some of their most compelling practical applications, jurists such as Henry de Bracton argued that sovereign governance constituted the center of economic relations. They also insisted on what they deemed the "sacredness" of the public purse, or "fisc," which was infinite, ubiquitous, and inalienable.16
Beginning in the fourteenth century, however, challenges to this vision began to emerge. Thomism's transcendent causality was spurned for an immanent haecceitas, first by Franciscan nominalists such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham and, later, by humanists of the Florentine tradition like Petrarch and Lorenzo Valla. This immanent haecceitas informed Florence's libertine ethos of free associationism, which imagined discrete interactions between embodied agents as the sole source of causality, meaning, and value.17
It also drove Florence into a war against the pope during which the city-state fought for both political and economic sovereignty.18
…
With this, Renaissance perspective's gravitropic phenomenology redeems the anemic haecceity that organizes the money relation in the Florentine Republic.
By rendering haecceity a totalizing and all-inclusive relation of material propinquity, Quattrocento perspective at once reduces relationality to contiguity and imagines that this contiguity is capable of holding the social order together. In the centuries that followed, Renaissance-era conflicts between money and morality slowly transmuted into a recognizably modern dialectic between money and aesthetics. Still, it is the gravitropic wish made palpable by Florence's enduring visual culture that contained the secret to this dialectic's still-unreconciled origins. The modern process begins when, in the midst of religious strife and war, elites in the Dutch republic and England suppressed lingering philosophical and legal arguments for money's sovereign inalienability. They adopted a Florentine-like money form based on haecceity and deployed it at a far grander scale. The Dutch and English internationalized haecceity, in other words, first through the former's break with the Spanish Empire in the late sixteenth century and, later, the latter's founding of the Bank of England in 1694. In each case, a growing bourgeoisie established a new type of economic order, one that treated money as a private and alienable thisness that restricted government spending to finite tax revenues and bond sales. As a consequence, production increased and social life transformed. Rather than mobilize a boundless public fisc to employ and care for everyone, however, it gave rise to ongoing financial instability, mass unemployment, poverty, and starvation. Indeed, in spite of its gains, the money form's haecceity brought metaphysical uncertainty to modern thought and life. In the Dutch context René Descartes inaugurated modern philosophy with haecceity as an unquestioned yet decidedly anxious metaphysical ground. In Mediations on First Philosophy (1641), the French émigré staged a now legendary encounter with a melting piece of wax, which served to demonstrate the untrustworthiness of the material world. Answering this unreliability, Descartes appealed to the purported certainty of abstract mathematics and rational cognition.20 In the process, however, his melting wax stamped haecceity's spectacle of disintegration on the soul of modernity's rational subject. Hardly born with Descartes, his metaphysical drama was well known to Dutch speculators during the "Tulip Mania" market bubble of 1637 as well as to the thousands faced with unreasonable bread prices as a result. More broadly, it was familiar to Calvinist multitudes whose identities were shaped by what, from a contemporary perspective, was a series of tax revolts against extractive papal tithes and indulgences. Still, it is Descartes who makes a hemorrhaging haecceity the foundation for a "first philosophy" and for heralding a new age of metaphysics forged in contingency, uncertainty, and volatility. Descartes paved the way for a modern regime of knowing that refused transcendent causalities and struggled to find its bearings in the erratic thisness of an immanent here-and-now. John Locke, for example, roots the operations of reason in contiguous associations among individual ideas.21
Locke's epistemology strives at once to know and stabilize worldly relations via the thisness of specific ideas and the haecceity of the associations generated when individual ideas meet. Unsurprisingly, these same metaphysics also inform Locke's philosophy of money, which attempts to balance modern economic relations on the thisness of individual agents and the heredity of their allegedly free associations. Writers such as Adam Smith develop this balancing act yet further. Building on the ideas of Descartes, Locke, and Isaac Newton, Smith refashioned the imagination into a faculty for envisaging hidden links between disjointed appearances. In so doing, he not only attributed haecceity to individuals and associations but also installed it in the intervals he imagined to exist between material beings and relations.22
In Smith's account the positive substance or force that fills these intervals matters less than his presumption that some contiguous element holds the universe in place. It is the task of the imagination to confront these gaps and speculate about the underlying material relations that govern the universe. As a site of metaphysical ordering, this invisible contiguous interval permits Smith to imagine money as a relatively autonomous field made of myriad imperceptible exchanges.23 Smith's "invisible hand" fills out the gaps in the field of exchange and brings with it a sense of order and balance. Thus, while he sees the market as an imperfect system that requires government's visible support, Smith nonetheless reduces the whole of political economy to a problem of haecceity. He does not engage its boundlessness as a public center that organizes and supports inalienable, noncontiguous relations. Skeptical philosophy maintains Smith's commitment to thisness as a paradoxical remedy to the precariousness of haecceity. David Hume affirms, for instance, the power of reason despite its dependency on a fleeting and untrustworthy here-and-now. Evacuating metaphysical categories such as substance, force, and selfhood, Hume relies on irony to subvert any widely accepted claims to metaphysical certainty.24 In this sense the Scotsman realizes the destruction of metaphysical principles initiated by his predecessor Scotus. Like his precursors, moreover, Hume demonstrates a tenacious commitment to the metaphysics of haecceity, one that escapes his corrosive irony. His devotion to thisness likewise orients Hume's influential contributions to modern political economy. Most notably, haecceity grounds Hume's well-known "species-flow" theory of international trade. According to this theory, laissez-faire governance is supposed to ensure an even distribution of money and goods between states on the analogy of a fluid passing back and forth between contiguous chambers.25 With this, Hume makes a finite physical flow between nation-states the central mechanism responsible for production and distribution. It is Marx, however, who goes furthest in grounding critique in haecceity. Rather than attuning critique to the ways that monetary governance actively organizes precariousness and poverty across disparate spaces, or railing against the state for creating mass unemployment and financial instability, Marx derides earlier juridical arguments for money's fiat status, calling them "sycophantic service [to] crowned heads."26 He develops an elaborate poetics of capital that, by turns, vilifies and eroticizes money's estranging movements. Money is a "fetish," according to Marx.27 It combines religious obfuscation and primitivist charms and transmutes a material relationship between persons into an alienating movement of things. Money is also a "crystal of value."28 This crystal is supposed to siphon "surplus value" from the populace as it traverses geographic spaces. "Vampire-like, capital only lives by sucking living labor," writes Marx, one of many appeals to Gothic monsters.29 Money is a "chemical bond" that destroys living bonds and does so through "monstrous exactions."30 It creates "abysses," "earthquakes," and "volcanic eruptions."31
Money, in Marx's hands, is haecceity at its most unmanageable and unmoored. Of course, the objective of Marxist poetics is never to conflate sign and referent, word and thing. It is to make money's imperceptible haecceity feel viscerally present so as to denounce Smith's benign interval for its essential privation and injustice. This is, in fact, how we ought to read the metaphorical thrust of The Communist Manifesto (1848): "All fixed, fast-frozen relations . . . are swept away," and "all that is solid melts into air."32 If such slogans now read as archetypical of modern experience, it is neither because they literally depict money's operations nor because they describe money's concrete effects. It is because as figures, Marx's spectacles of disintegration go furthest to express the calamitous haecceity around which the modern era has come to revolve. Accordingly, when British Sentimentalists and German Idealists first set sensibility, culture, and art against the money relation, they tendered the aesthetic as a concerted response to the concrete alienations and volatilities that Marx describes and money appears to condition. Yet in truth, I argue, the aesthetic first arose as an answer to the Liberal metaphysics of money and its disintegrating haecceity and only secondarily as a response to money's concrete historical effects. As Liberal money's harrowing thisness threatened persons with privation, constricted action, and social isolation, the aesthetic formed a counter-image of collective belonging that was heterogeneous, replete, and strove for universal communion. In this taken-for-granted striving, however, the aesthetic project meets its historical limit. That limit, I contend, is the modern metaphysics of haecceity, the gravitropic visuality of which—from Florentine perspective to neoliberal action media—holds the key for assessing how to overcome the limits of monetary and aesthetic thisness. The Basis of Social Security More than any form of artistic experience, gravitropic visuality reveals the essence and limit of the modern aesthetic project. Expressing a wish for haecceity to live up to its promise, the gravitropic aesthetic articulates collective desires for a social bond that is not only materially contiguous but also proves capable of securing far-flung persons and things in its all-encompassing grip. The aesthetic is, precisely, the promise of haecceity writ large.
Modernity's overinvestment in thisness, meanwhile, is where gravitropism finds its limit. The aesthetic is limited because its overinvestment in haecceity arises at the expense of the transcendent tethers that wed a governing body to currency users. The money relation is, after all, a social obligation that orchestrates activity at a distance, not a contiguous physics that pushes this way and the other. Indeed, no amount of sensuous abundance or fellow feeling in the here-and-now can transform that obligation's essential structure or reorganize the boundless public center that conditions it. Money always outstrips the aesthetic in terms of scope, capacity, and social responsibility. In a way, we can say the aesthetic marks a threshold beyond which haecceity prevents any concerted social activity from expanding. It designates the full extension of haecceity's saving powers. The aesthetic is nothing but that frontier's very name.
…
Notes
Introduction
1. Jerry Ibbotson, “Spectre: A Brilliant Bond for the Age of Austerity,” YorkMix, November 15, 2105, accessed June 30, 2016, http://www.yorkmix.com/things- to-do/films/film-review-spectre-brilliant-bond-for-the-age-of-austerity/.
2. L. Randall Wray, Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability (Northampton MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006).
3. Scott Fullwiler, “Interest Rates and Fiscal Sustainability,” Working Paper no. 53, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College (July 2006), accessed August 1, 2016, http://www.cfeps.org/pubs/wp-pdf/wp53-Fullwiler.pdf, 15.
4. L. Randall Wray, “Policy for Full Employment and Price Stability,” in Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 221–60.
5. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Dover Publications, 2011), 125.
6. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991).
7. Thomas Schatz, “The New Hollywood,” in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8–37.
8. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
9. Frederick Wasser, Steven Spielberg’s America (New York: Polity, 2010), 66.
10. Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 39–69.
11. Amy Rust, Passionate Detachments: Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967–1974 (New York: SUNY Press, 2017).
12. Chester McArthur Destler, American Radicalism: 1865–1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1946).
13. Hilton Kramer, “Abstraction and Utopia,” in The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985–2005 (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2009), 34.
14. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hulot-Kentor (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 29–30.
15. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 6. 16. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 87–192.
17. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). 18. David S. Peterson, “The War of the Eight Saints,” in Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence, ed. by William J. Connell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 173–214.
19. Lorenzo Valla, ed., and trans. Brendan Cook, Correspondence (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 111. I am indebted to Cook for this alternative translation.
20. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans. and ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16–23.
21. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Complete and Unabridged in One Volume (Greensborough NC: WLC, 2009).
22. Adam Smith, “The History of Astronomy,” in The Essential Adam Smith, ed. Robert L. Heilbroner (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), 22–37.
23. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
24. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986).
25. David Hume, Political Discourses (1752) (Whitefish MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2009).
26. Marx, Capital, Volume One, 103–4.
27. Marx, Capital, Volume One, 81–161.
28. Marx, Capital, Volume One, 125.
29. Marx, Capital, Volume One, 257; Mark Neocleous, “The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx’s Vampires,” History of Political Thought 24, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 668–84.
30. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. See The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto, trans. Martin Milligan (Amherst MA: Prometheus Books, 1988), 138. Later Marx speaks of money’s “monstrous exactions,” in Capital, Volume One, 268.
31. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 19.
32. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore (Radford VA: Wilder Publications, 2008), 11; Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 19.
33. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (London: Continuum Publishing, 1975), 219–20. 34. Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy (London: Zed Books, 2013), 64–65.
35. L. Randall Wray, “Teoría Monetaria Moderna ¿Austeridad presupuestaria frente a déficits públicos?”, delivered at Open Space FUHEM, Saturday, March 7, 2015, http://www.fuhem.es/ecosocial/noticias.aspx?v=9715&n=0.
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A8%E3%83%8F%E3%83%8D%E3%82%B9%E3%83%BB%E3%83%89%E3%82%A5%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B9%E3%83%BB%E3%82%B9%E3%82%B3%E3%83%88%E3%82%A5%E3%82%B9
ヨハネス・ドゥンス・スコトゥス
ヨハネス・ドゥンス・スコトゥス(Johannes Duns Scotus、1266年? - 1308年11月8日)は、中世ヨーロッパの神学者・哲学者。トマス・アクィナス後のスコラ学の正統な継承者。アリストテレスに通じ、その思想の徹底的な緻密さから「精妙博士」(Doctor Subtilis)といわれたフランシスコ会士。盛期スコラ学と後期スコラ学をつなぎ、スコトゥス学派の祖となった。ドゥンスのジョン(John of Duns)とも呼ばれる。
生涯
スコットランド・ベリックシャー(現在のスコティッシュ・ボーダーズ)のドゥンス(Duns)で生まれ、オックスフォードとパリで哲学・神学を学んだ。1302年からパリ大学で教鞭を執った。最後はケルンで教え、そこで亡くなった。主著として『命題集註』が知られている。
現在、出身地のドゥンスには銅像が建てられている。
思想
トマス・アクィナスと異なり、スコトゥスは神学を「人間を神への愛に導く実践的な学問」であると考えた。また個物に本質を見出したアリストテレスから一歩進んで、存在が個物においてのみ成り立つ(「知性は個をとらえる」)と考えたところにスコトゥスの思想の特徴がある。さらには必然的なものである自然と、必然的なものでない意思の自由をわけて考えたスコトゥスにとって、人間の幸福は(トマスが言うような)神を直観することではなく神を愛することにあった。この考えは近代の主体主義のルーツとなっていく。 個人の自由意志を尊重する学説を提唱したが、この自由意志こそが個人を個人として成立させる「このもの性」であると説いた[1]。
存在の一義性や、個物の此の性の概念は、現代の哲学者ジル・ドゥルーズに、大きな影響を与えた。
備考
英語で「のろま、劣等生」を意味するdunceという普通名詞は、スコトゥス学派に対して反対派が蔑称としてDunsesと呼びかけたことに由来すると言われている。
伝承によれば、彼はまだ生きている状態で埋葬され、後に棺を掘り起こした際に、その内側には外に出ようとしてもがき引きちぎられた彼の血まみれの腕があった、とされる。
出典
- 甲田烈『手にとるように哲学がわかる本』2008年、かんき出版、101ページ。
関連項目
・八木雄二 - 哲学者。博士論文「ドゥンス・スコトゥスにおける「存在の一義性」の研究」で文学博士号を取得。平凡社新書『中世哲学への招待』のような一般向け書籍などでドゥンス・スコトゥスを多く取り扱っている。
| 表示 | ||
|---|---|---|
| フランシスコ会士 | ||
| 修道院 | ||
| 教会・伝道施設 | ||
| 関連項目 | ||
| 派出・系列修道会 | ||


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