Sequence; The Rhythm War – Term 1; Finance and Politics.
Right at the heart of such much of modern debates lies different rhythms in times. Individuals are required or requested to manifest themselves, occupy a time and place, identify with a series of thoughts are very different rhythms in time, some mythic, such momentary, but all rather complex. Each such rhythms defines not merely more an individual manages not their memories and passions (when exactly is it reasonable to be disgruntled or not?); which passion is this, greed or anger or righteous indignation?); but also their relations with other individuals, and with the entire communities. All of which might sound rather abstract, but actually the very point of these patterns is that they are tied various external reference point, point that enable and inspire a certain rhythms to manifest. In the current debate there are clearly a number of these rather incompatible conjurations of rhythms.
In the first essays of this series I look at these rhythms, and how they operate, and just as importantly I will attempt show exactly how incompatible they are. The point being that some many of our ‘problems; are founded upon the articulation one against the other of such incompatible rhythms in time. It is the no great wonder than we are so very good at creating problems within a worlds of plenty, and finding solutions so tricky, painful and slow. In this essay I will examine two the most important and distinctive manifest rhythms, money, and politics.
First and foremost are the complex patterns and flows tied to the notion of money. Money is a very real sense is our ultimate currency. It is the little lie we all are asked to identify with more than that it is lie we all must share. We all know what others think about their money. We all through it then become rather predicable to one another. We all are art of one another’s life’s and rhythms. And yet, of course, the very notion of money, and our money, gives us our place in this rhythms We know what we own, and can always look to what is ours (and seek to expand it). money then serves as the base level within which we all agree about what we are talking about. It originates what we are.
Two further points immediately follow. Firstly, money is not then simply one rhythms. On the contrary it only works because it straddle many otherwise rather different relations. Or perhaps better, this power lies in the fact that it allows one to orientated oneself in fundamentally the same way in differing circumstance. The economics of monetarism, with its concern on paying ones own way and debt, and the thrifty house wives then merge one within the other. Money becomes the right to understand or to apply homely feeling to global situations. It creates rhythms that paradoxically united what are surely distinct and different deals, that is global finance with its abstracts debates, and strangely obscene numbers and day to day life. It provides then a single rubric an impure pure crystal, or rather better a set of prejudices and appropriate passions, or feelings said to be on both rhythms, and so gives a word which to call our own. This move is rather vital in a democracy, where one needs to feel one owns and understands everything. If given its complexity, Global finance necessarily required an utterly alien language to articulate it then it would be hard to have a democracy at all, for we would loose all faith in the powers of the state to do anything about the rhythms of that which lies beyond us. To have that faith we have to have a handle on what such rhythms are, and what can be done about them. We need then to believe is a relatively simply money model that is universal.
Secondly money of course operates by doubling up this world of ours, even as it mumbles the part and claims always to be so practical and alone perhaps real. Money is then always also a fantasy, and can readily bread itself, and create new flows. Money can then breed from money. It can do with because we put monetary value on is not the real world, so much as the passionate. Indeed the very point of the power of money is that it exists also in that passionate world. It renders are passions a part of everyone sees world (and not merely are own concern). Its power lies then in the orchestration of our power to fantasize. It is then always also the world our greed creates, or our desire, the fantasy about what we are doing and what we could . Or better it is the point empty craving, and open fantasy, combines with possibility, and becomes if not real, then at least become monetized. Fancies have then a market value along with everything else. The trouble is thought of course that they remain empty fantasy all the same, a fantasy that as well all know can so easily collapse.
Money inhabits then the space of collective dreams it is the single currency the ultimate language for those dreams and defines how and when they can be realizes upon this world of ours, and as such it is a vital reference in a complex society. As long as we all need money we all dream the same dream, and arrange our lives in the same series of fantasies. We all then divide it into working time (to earn the stuff) and spending time We all dream of the possibility that money gives, all think about the many worlds it might open up; we all send the same penny so very many times, in so many dreams and worlds . What we value here is then not so much possibility (which by itself might be rather assinating) so much as the possibility of possibility. We all then dream of choice and of having options, and yet then we are faced with them, can not chose, the rich are not therefore more happy, so much as often as not more confused (they have so many things then could be doing, so many more opportunities to be bored). Money creates as a single rhythm, am empty fantasy about fantasy, with day to day grind, and does so though the demand that everything ought to, in some sense of rather, cost something . Our society can, from fantasy to slavery, articulate the same flow, in the same set of passion. Our power to dream is thereby is rendered then safe and inhabitable. But it only remains so as long as the greed element in this mixed the fancy pure and greedy does not pull up the roots of reality. When it does, t(hat is when money becomes caught up too much in fantasy), then the entire system is in peril, and must look to other rhythms to safe money clutches the same nexus of passion, wild desire and day today life: it is then the golden brick word of fantasy, leading in the best traditions of the thing to a humbug.
Money becomes then only reconciled with itself through other rhythms, in particular in recent times, politics, but politics rhythm is again rather distinct. Politics operates in a strange word as absolute abstraction, and individual identification. to be a politician is then to think necessarily is stereotypes are the meet and drink of all political discussion. One worries about the feckless poor, and the single mother, the elderly pensioner or middle Britain. Likewise policy is defined essentially in the abstract. We say on some abstract and quasi-mythical level that we want to get the deficit down or pay more tax or whatever, but do not like the consequence. That is what initially gets votes in never practical policy so much as abstract fantasy. We vote based on a world we imagine.
A fact that then makes the country rather ungovernable or perhaps better it is never really clear what or who one is governing. Is one governing the abstraction, which are necessarily at best statistics and figure, and not people (and at worst blind mob led fantasy.? Or is one governing actually folk? and if so how? Individuals care about the patio being built, and the price of a washing machine, and no politician can influence such concerns. The tried and tested method is then to encourage folk to identify with these abstraction one needs then a very sought of abstraction. That is, one needs abstractions that are real enough in two sense. First they must or at least ought to have a numerical reality, that can be influenced one way or other. They need then o be defined by crime figures, immigration rate, or child poverty or exam results or whatever. There needs to be a figure to influence. And yet the figure by itself is never enough. There needs to be an emotional hook, that allows individuals to share and feel a part on the figures. We need then to care about them- to worry about them, to feel we are caught up with them, a d in them. they need to be a portrait of ourselves.
The result is that politics necessarily resolves around realties that fulfil both these criteria. It concerns only those statistics the majority of people easily and readily care about (or can be made to care about). There are statistics do not matter (and a politician will be thought shady, and academic too clever by have or a reformer a guilt merchant, if they mention them). Politics becomes the metre of received truths about figures and feeling. At best (and all politicians will try this) a politicians might by loose use of language be able to invent a new axis or domain in which these unholy little unions manifest. The big society is one such idea. If course means nothing in itself; indeed it almost means less that owing, for it is a phrase looking for meaning. It will then be judged a success when individuals inhabit it, give it figures, and facts and feelings A treble FFFs that its progenitors then hope to came as their terrain, their peculiarly concern, their guarantee of electoral success. Politicians cannot even then politics being concerned with impossible unions, monster of figure and feeling, all they can do is ensure or attempt to ensure that is it they that conjure these monster. That is it is they that give them the opportunity for expression. The trouble of course that none of us mightier what such a conjuration produces, but we will be (potentially at any rate) be such with it.
The game of the treble FFF’s is a game of accord. One needs to do something about the figures both on the meta level, that statistics need to change and on a personal level need to feel better, in some way they can (in some sense) identify with ones policies. It doe not matter a jot if the figures are Mickey mouse ones (or never made much sense ) nor is the reasons individuals feel better has very little to do with policy; all that matters is that one can convincing claim that it has. Policies is then haunted by the double nightmare that things get better and one is not given the credit; but also that things get worse and one is given automatically the blame (whether or not the cause is anything to do with ones own policies or not). This of course was the cleft stick that Gordon Brown found himself within. People stopped believing that anything he did was doing any good he might claim to be anything or do anything, but no one was listening. Or better no one felt like identifying with what he was saying, and cross relating it back to themselves an their own improved situation. All they would identify him with was failure, and with any worries of fear then had. He had then got caught up in a world where only the negative was his, the positive belonged to others.
Politics and money form very distinctive crystals of desire, passion, future casting and practical reality. Both at once abstract in their appeal to the future, and yet real, in that they demand they ought to be about the here and now. The recent years has then seen these two distinct conjurations in fairly violent conflict, a conflict that is very strangely lopsided. Money then collapsed ,and yet as ever politicians got the blame. There is perhaps a substantive reason for this, it was politicians after all who had in recent history unfitted the fantasy element of money from the actual, and allowed the fantasy in the form of global finance an unlimited possibility to unwind itself, This created in turn a finance of the possibility of possibility, an endless loop on money creation, a fools gold that politician then used as an endless money pot. Money allowed us as it so easily does to create in the name of a future hope the finance of a world where we wanted good services and lower taxes. It spliced together then our greed for property and our wanting to get for nothing, using the former to finance the latter. A marvellous trick while it lasted, but ultimate a confidence trick – for the union nly lasted as long as we believed in the future of endless rises in property upon (or possibility) upon which was based.
There is then in a sense a reason to blame Gordon Brown and his ilk for our finical woes. He was the man who did not stop save ourselves from ourselves, a mortal sin for a politician. And yet there was something else happening here. The point of money is fantasy, and if we loose it, we loose the right the dream. The point of politicians is then to take the blame, and they can be voted in and out of office. We would then rather destroy our economy, and create a major recession, turning a finical problem into social problem in the process) , than actually face down the failure of finance to actually be able to manufacture real dreams (or to be anything other than open ended powerful fantasy). This is not a failure of courage so as language - we simply cannot even begin to question money (we have no language to question the rich any more, or rather only the language of envy). We have no rhythms and no alternatives that come close to doing what it does. We therefore simply have to defend it, and have to take the pain ourselves. Above that is in a sense justified, as it was ultimately our greed and desire to have houses that were always worth more than we paid for them, that drove the entire process forward, as economic gurus banked on the rise, and politicians used then there profits by it, one might argue then we all ought to suffer, Accept of course it will not. Unless we raise taxation the main burden is going to fall on poor, who were more or less greedy than the rest, ut will pay a heavier price. The point is of coruse this has nothing to do with (cod) justice. We do it actually not because it is just so much as because we cannot think of any other alternative. That is, at a juncture of rhythms, were one must chose to blame money or politics, policies always looses out, and must do – that is part of its role. Politics is then defined not as the ultimate currency of dreams, so much as the ultimate place for blame. It is where we will, when all else fails, find our fall guys, and blame them repeatedly (blaming the bankers slipped then effortless into a protracted expenses scandal- as our blame moved from money to politics). Without such a fall guy, we might have to face the ultimate facts that something are created by the consequences of our own greed, while other disasters have no clear cause, to problems that are rather uncomfortable in a society that likes to have explained everything, and always has an answer. That is own can a society however liberal claim to be the end of history contain such irreconcilable and destablesizing conflicts? It cannot, and so must find an answer, so one to blame that is it needs its politicians.
The Rhythms of money and politics have then operate in strange world where real concerns become mythic, and fact and fantasy merge. They fashion then domain where individuals or at lest their concerns become caught up in the same axis, and so definable without such an axis democracy which attempt to actually address individuals ad the desire would be unthinkable. To be free one also needs to be predictable, so that society can act upon ones desire. And yet this uniformity is not something that sits that easily in the modern mind We are also told that we ought to be true individuals and so rebellious (within reason) an unpredictable, a potentially destabilizing rhythms, which the next series of crimes will examine.
No comments:
Post a Comment