Money-flat, broad, and deep - The Immanent Frame - 0 views
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religion capitalism globalization money history art symbolism
shared by Ed Webb on 23 Oct 17
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Is money transcendent or immanent?
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Money has supposedly become the be-all and end-all of our age, as the horizon of the good, and, as such, forges a closed, self-contained system. The modern era, the age of immanence, is also the age of money and capital, as economy has come to ground and delimit much of how we understand ourselves. Money and its preponderance appear correlated to the immanent
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Money signifies value, itself an ethereal category not fully exhausted by materialist definitions. Money “stands above” the plane of objects of labor, commodities, and use-values. Some might press further to claim that money has usurped the place of God in societal imagination, trading on theological residues to become the index for ultimate concern and even sovereign decision
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Years after Francis Fukuyama hailed with melancholic resignation the end of history, the supposed triumph and totalization of global capital remains tied to concerns about a loss of transcendence. Without the agonism of economic alternatives and manifest visions of different modes of production, can we still posit an “outside” to our moment? Is this all that there is?
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the global story of money and capital in the West. It is a polycentric tale that cannot forget the colonial encounter, as well as attempts to both manage and bypass the Near East. Even as European bankers and traders appropriated the calculus of double-entry bookkeeping from the Arabs, and in so doing generated conceptual changes that enabled capitalism, they sought trade routes that superseded—or transcended—the Silk Road. Explorers circumnavigated the globe to avoid that ancient enemy, the Islamic empires at Europe’s gates. Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus wanted to reach India and the Far East without dealing with the turbaned Moors who stood in the way, obscuring the view.