path: root/ch11.tex

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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.