Monetary Mediations and the Overcoding of Potential: Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari and How the Affective Diagrammatics of Debt Have Gone Global
In this paper I focus on the affective dimension of debt and its primary mode of dissemination--privately and digitally created credit money. To do so, I examine the age-old--though increasingly visible--relationship between debtor and creditor, a relationship that today is (re)defining social, cultural, and political relations by (re)distributing power along a financially inflected debtor/creditor continuum. My aim is to focus not merely on the affectively charged nature of the creditor/debtor relationship, but to consider more closely the nonhuman agency or desire of credit-money itself. My suggestion is that contemporary credit-money can compellingly be understood as a sophisticated technology of dispossession and that today’s money-machine, which necessitates and gives rise to the infrastructure that supports it, affects the social landscape by pre-conditioning it, by opaquely overcoding the relationship between debtor and creditor on a grand scale (but also imperceptibly), until finally debt saturation, through the extension of credit, precipitates a credit crisis at which time all is revealed: that the creditor holds all the cards, that the debtor holds none, and no matter how much desire the debtor has to repay the exponentially compounding debts, the debtor’s future is, and will be forever, foreclosed by the promise to repay.
Mobile Affects, Open Secrets, and Global Illiquidity: Pockets, Pools, and Plasma
This article will take up Deleuze and Guattari’s allusive yet insightful writings on ‘the secret’ by considering the secret across three intermingling registers or modulations: as content (secret), as form (secrecy), and as expression (secretion). Setting the secret in relation to evolving modes of technological mediation and sociality as respectively pocket, pooling, and plasma, the article works through a trio of examples in order to understand the contemporary movements of secrets: the memories of secrets evoked in an intimately interactive music video by the band Arcade Fire (as an example of ‘pocket’); the movements of secrecy turned fabulative in the scopic-doublings of airport full-body scanners (as ‘pooling’); and, finally, the collective secretions that come to saturate and stretch around the globe as expressed by liquidity-seeking financial innovations (providing an angle onto ‘plasma’). These three instantiations of contemporary secrecy are framed by a discussion of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook – truly a couple for our age: each intent, in their own way, upon bringing an end to secrets. Throughout, we try to maintain close attention to the emerging rhythms and dissonances that engage secrecy in a dance between the half-voluntary and the half-enforced.
Structural causes of the global financial crisis: a critical assessment of the ‘new financial architecture’
We are in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. This crisis is the latest phase of the evolution of financial markets under the radical financial deregulation process that began in the late 1970s. This evolution has taken the form of cycles in which deregulation accompanied by rapid financial innovation stimulates powerful financial booms that end in crises. Governments respond to crises with bailouts that allow new expansions to begin. As a result, financial markets have become ever larger and financial crises have become more threatening to society, which forces governments to enact ever larger bailouts. This process culminated in the current global financial crisis, which is so deeply rooted that even unprecedented interventions by affected governments have, thus far, failed to contain it. In this paper we analyse the structural flaws in the financial system that helped bring on the current crisis and discuss prospects for financial reform.