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.
Making Our Way in a World of Our Making: The Anthropocene, Debt-Money, and the Pre-emptive Production of Our Future
The Anthropocene is a geological period defined by recent and ongoing human activities that invite decisive responses by humanity in order to grapple with contemporary and future ecological, biological, and social change. The Anthropocene can also be thought of as the era when it becomes clear that our desires, our ambitions, and our capacities for consumption exceed the capacities of our planet, our home. In response to this conundrum, we need a financial system and money form that reflects these new realities. In this chapter, I contend that these days the problem is not that money is necessarily limited or scarce (since it’s created out of nothing), it’s that it’s not usefully distributed and that those who control and allocate credit control the future. How, then, we might ask, will beneficial ecological change occur if private banks refuse to recognize that ecofriendly change can be economically profitable on a massive scale?
AXIOMATISABILITY OF WEAKLY FLAT, FLAT, AND PROJECTIVE S-ACTS
ABSTRACT This paper gives necessary and sufficient conditions on a monoid S that the class of flat left S-acts be (first order) axiomatisable. It presents also a streamlined version of the result of Stepanova that the class of projective left S-acts is axiomatisable if and only if the strongly flat left S-acts are axiomatisable and S is left perfect.