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 endogenous money stock
The banking system has no direct control over the prices of individual commodities or over the rates of money earnings of the factors of production. Nor has it, in reality, any direct control over the quantity of money; for it is a characteristic of modern systems that the central bank is ready to buy for money at a stipulated rate of discount any quantities of securities of certain approved types. (Keynes, 1972, vol. 6, p. 189) Recently it has become convenient to divide the inflation problem into two distinct subquestions (Brunner, 1975). The first concentrates on the relation between monetary growth and inflation. Abundant empirical evidence confirms that the major historical accelerations and decelerations of inflation have been accompanied by accelerations and decelerations in the rate of growth of the money stock. The second focuses on the sources of the changes in the money stock, the "political economy" of monetary growth. Today's worldwide inflation appears to be a new phenomenon, and the processes behind monetary growth across time in particular countries, and across countries at a given time, are currently the subject of searching inquiry by many economists (Gordon, 1976). This article examines the interrelationships between these two subquestions. An analysis of the political economy of monetary growth leads to rejection of the statistical exogeneity of the money stock. The conclusion is reached that for the United States-at least in the postwar period-the high-powered monetary base, while exogenous in a control sense, is endogenous in a statistical sense, since it is closely correlated with the past rate of change in money wage rates. The chief empirical evidence for the monetarist
SEASONAL AND REGIONAL MPG AS INFLUENCED BY ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS AND TRAVEL PATTERNS
In-use fuel economy shortfall varies regionally and seasonally in response to changing environmental conditions and travel patterns. Shortfall changes by 25 percent or more are associated with variation in miles travelled per day by in-use vehicles. Monthly variations in northern states are twice those in the south; air conditioning penalties also vary by region. Although regional difference in annual levels are relatively small, shortfall can increase by 16 percent in densely populated urban areas. These variations have been quantified in an analysis of time-series mpg data and related to variables commonly reported in fuel economy surveys.