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+\chapter{}
+
+Starting from an other end, we can look again at the hypothetical annual report and
+balance sheet of our enterprise, Western Civilization. If we analyze, concretize, qualify, re-view, individualize or personify the
+bottom line, representing pools of capital, we unfold it to see a variety of sub-enterprises: factories, farms, plantations, mining
+operations, shipping, workers, slaves, wars, thievery, pieces of drama, the addition of last
+year's, last century's, last millenium's profits or losses, the whole ensemble of economic
+activity. These pools of money and nearmoney (an incredible array of quasi-liquid
+exchangables) have different key words, titles, identifiers, instructions and names attached to them, indicating by what rules
+they may be converted from one form into another: numbers
+to numbers, numbers to people, people to events, events to a varied range of goods...
+
+But to repersonify, re-invent, decrypt
+events out of our bottom line puts limits on
+their exchange potentials by pointing to sets
+of \emph{particular} people, their lives, energy expenditures, products. They are not given to
+us in the proper language. It is hard to tradea
+human being (or a ghost) \emph{directly} in our
+society, with its putative committment to
+humanist values (each and every human in
+the world is supposed to be of importance
+... but not their work). Yet, the abstracted,
+refined, distilled, symbolized value of part
+of a human, their work --- with the rest cast
+off --- can be stored, calculated and traded
+every day. Modern purification ceremonies.
+
+The coming of high-speed communications, computers and trading programs allows for the movement of keyworded, encrypted bundles of capital across barriers
+and borders, to be entered as a profit here ina
+tax haven (a souls bereft of bodies ascend to
+heaven), a loss in a taxed sub-world: expensive signals of expenses. \emph{All} forms of credit
+are highly abstract, general-purpose information. Otherwise, how could they be moved
+and interfused? (Citibank, Chase, the Bank
+for International Settlements, Banco Ambrosiano, the IMF, the Federal Reserve System,
+etc., all banks and securities houses are
+information-handling, transactions and communications companies.) Information cannot be too particularized in order to make
+entries in account books. Generalized, it can
+be teleported easily through the most complex
+spaces (where humans cannot be moved),
+some of which are not so much spaces but
+representations of spaces, magnetic perturbations, addresses standing for a country,
+another enterprise, files on a tape or disc, or
+in flight, entries in an account book. I can
+transmit six million dollars (how many
+lives; how many things?) froma U.S. bank to
+a Japanese bank, which has a branch (a
+presence, but not a nescessarily a facility; a
+designation) in Panama --- move it from a
+ledger marked \enquote{U.S.\slash Chase} to a ledger
+marked \enquote{Panama\slash Bank of Tokyo.} Has the
+money traveled? What does the question
+even mean? Yet the U.S., Panama, and Bank
+of Tokyo behave as if it has.
+
+If we intone \enquote{Russia,} six letters, we have
+some idea of what that means: the letters, or
+the sounded word, stands for the space in the
+file and that space, on tape or disc, matches
+up to the whole of Russia. (The code-name,
+the identifier, the recognition-signal, legitimizes the transaction. It must be precise. We
+cannot say we are sending \enquote{Oedipus,} for
+what does that mean? Or can we?
+
+At bottom, these forms represent the activities of people in the present, the past, and
+the future (when capital was/is/will be
+stored, built up, accreted). Money contains a
+past: it is a memory and energy-storage. The
+labor of old machines (animals, plants, and
+humans) which once converted sun, soil and
+seed into food, raw materials into things; all
+these and more are implicitly represented.
+The credits are a form of miraculous, nonenergetic, energy storage.
+
+We have reached a fascinating metaphysicality; energy storages which are not contained in material objects... Wood, coal, oil... these we can understand. With electricity, things become problematical. Electricity
+cannot be stored (except in limited ways;
+batteries). We must produce heat in order to
+drive the generators. But yet there are abstract,
+informational, non-heat, non-energized, \emph{symbolic} storage devices which nevertheless
+have the power to drive the energizer of machinery,
+the human. Money, securities, paper instruments of all kinds,
+electronic signals... all these (among others) have this power.
+But in order to energize they must recieve this power, which is purely a symbolizing activity which must take place in the context of a whole social climate which trains people to respond to the energy-stimulating information associated (not in) these devices, these instruments, these fictions. We are talking, in the long run, about belief-systems.
+
+History resides, embedded in each item we touch. A set of ghosts... remnants and memories of people who worked to produce money, wealth. Looking at a pool of credit, we are not permitted to infer the concrete existences, the lives, the sufferings, the pleasures now, of those pasts, this \emph{unspecified} stuff of phantoms. This analysis holds if we believe that capital is a residue, expropriated and stored work-energy, value and time (representing the expenditure of human energy, lives spent in forced labor). Electronic gold is the newest minimalist form. Capital represents a compressed work-and-time series omnipresent in credit and every processed or owned thing. A continuity of real and fictional people. (Why fictional? Information doesn't have to be about real things or people; it only has to be \emph{accepted} as real.) A revived theory of spirits.
+
+But when we come to the creation of
+credit --- as the material representation of embedded
+value, gold, gems, declines in importance --- by banks (real banks, or fraudulent shell-game banks, and all the interest-leveraging games they play, lending five,
+ten, twenty, a hundred times their assets; national treasuries with their printing presses
+running full-time, account-book manipulations), we have arrived at the manufacture of
+value out of nothing. If credit, value are
+linked to people (genetic series: or their
+residues, for they continue to work when
+dead) and the lives they once lived, or might
+have lived, then inflationary cycles create
+even more fictional people, fictional lives
+which impinge upon and crowd the living.
+These humans and their energies seem to be
+drawn out of the \emph{future} (looking at interest as
+a price based on usage and future realization, as expressed in money and time, which
+is to say energy-expenditure --- labor --- to be
+realized) and become another way of birthing fictional people and enterprises.
+
+Hence, in this world all the forms of credit
+(information), if convertable to the lives of
+populations, create \emph{population pressures} on
+a limited environment, recrowding the past,
+or emptying the future. They, these \emph{prespirits}, impinge on the economy and on
+daily life and the psyche. Fantastical?
+
+If dreams and myths have an effect on the
+lives of people, it is clear that metadreams
+and metamyths also have an effect. (What's a % make this a footnote
+metadream? The purest form is capital, information without specification. To take
+another example from other realms of discourse; the score of a psychological test,
+which converts psychic states into numbers.
+This involves the pricing of the tests plus the
+start-up costs for developing the tests, getting people to believe in its validity, and the
+investment in the formation of some psyche
+or intelligence-testing company, and the
+sales of such test, and so forth. None of this
+mentions cohorts of theoreticians who develop the background theories of human
+nature. What are we left with? A disembodied and quantified psyche.) Such manipulations violate the first law of thermodynamics, creating energy out of nothing or
+the future. You can violate the laws of nature, at least for a while, if you put enough
+money into it... So said the physicist, I.I.
+Rabi, clearly identifying money and energy as one.
+
+These labor\slash life\slash time\slash suffering residues,
+these generalized phantoms are peculiar
+ones. They have no meaning until the underwriters of an enterprise
+assign a value, a meaning to them. Assigning a value (and raising money against it) requires an act of
+confidence and the general acceptance of
+that assignation (which itself must be sold)
+is what constitutes the general act of faith in
+certain people's notions of present, past, the
+invisible, the future. Credit, \emph{credo}. You can
+invest in it, you can bank on it, you can buy a
+piece of the faith and people will be moved
+by it. By what? By this long series of conversions,
+metamorphoses, transubstantiations
+and appearances out of pure space, dyings
+and rebirths, incorporating a kind of serial
+cannibalism among its many charms. These
+acts of faith in the modern, rational age, are
+not merely cool and detached. They are
+attended by great excitations, curious passions and lusts, unseemly fights for status,
+murders, massacres, tortures, annihilations of
+populations, pomp, circumstance, exchanges
+of gifts, drink, drugs, bribes, kickbacks, display, ostentation, treachery, thievery, and so
+forth.
+
+Massed and abstracted capital represents
+not only a history but populations and their
+biographies. Economic archeology: capitalist historians, pushing progress, are counter-
+intelligence archeologists. They rewrite their
+history to deny that the suffering of populations ever took place, just as we deny the spirit
+world of \enquote{primitives} and their reverence
+for ancestors. We don't revere ancestors; we
+revere ancestry: inheritance, not inheritors.
+
+If you averaged out capital buildup per
+person per life, established historians, rewriting history, tell us that things were becoming better and better during the industrial revolution. Concentration of wealth is
+ignored. The invention of a class perspective created an oppositional classification,
+revealing one population's misery. But even
+Marx accepted these constructs; the evolutionary inevitable. He only wanted to change
+direction once these \enquote{necessary} sacrifices
+had been made. Both Marxists and capitalists have played the same kind of game.
+They didn't challenge the basic, agreed-upon, evolutionary-schemata, the concept of
+capital itself.
+