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.
THE WORK THAT AFFECTIVE ECONOMICS DOES
This article focuses upon the concept of ‘affective economics’ arguing that it should be expanded to include a consideration of emerging forms of data-mining including ‘sentiment analysis’ and ‘predictive analytics’. Sentiment analysis in particular seeks to manipulate consumer behaviour by gathering data about emotional responses and conducting controlled experiments on consumers. Any consideration of affective economics should include the ways in which marketers seek to manage consumers through the collection not just of demographic information, but of extensive real-time databases of their online behaviour and conversations.
Observations of nearshore infragravity waves: Seaward and shoreward propagating components
[1] The variation of seaward and shoreward infragravity energy fluxes across the shoaling and surf zones of a gently sloping sandy beach is estimated from field observations and related to forcing by groups of sea and swell, dissipation, and shoreline reflection. Data from collocated pressure and velocity sensors deployed between 1 and 6 m water depth are combined, using the assumption of cross-shore propagation, to decompose the infragravity wave field into shoreward and seaward propagating components. Seaward of the surf zone, shoreward propagating infragravity waves are amplified by nonlinear interactions with groups of sea and swell, and the shoreward infragravity energy flux increases in the onshore direction. In the surf zone, nonlinear phase coupling between infragravity waves and groups of sea and swell decreases, as does the shoreward infragravity energy flux, consistent with the cessation of nonlinear forcing and the increased importance of infragravity wave dissipation. Seaward propagating infragravity waves are not phase coupled to incident wave groups, and their energy levels suggest strong infragravity wave reflection near the shoreline. The cross-shore variation of the seaward energy flux is weaker than that of the shoreward flux, resulting in cross-shore variation of the squared infragravity reflection coefficient (ratio of seaward to shoreward energy flux) between about 0.4 and 1.5.