The Money Post

Alec Monopoly: Scarface Money Monops (2017) 

Acrylic on canvas with resin (30 x 48 inches)  

artsy.net

 

 

"Money makes the world go around / The world go around / The world go around 

Money makes the world go around / It makes the world go 'round." [1]

 

 

Despite this dynamic aspect - and all too predictably - D. H. Lawrence hated money - hated it! 

 

In one poem, for example, he calls it our vast collective madness and in another he says that money is a perverted instinct [...] which rots the brain, the blood, the bones, the stones, the soul [2]. 

 

In his 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', meanwhile, Lawrence describes money as a golden wall which uniquely cuts us off from life; "not even the most fanatical dogmas of an iron-bound religion, can insulate us from the inrush of life and inspiration, as money can" [3].

 

Apart from these instances, there are many, many other occasions on which Lawrence delivers this anti-money sermon and even his fictional characters are obliged to trot out the same rhetoric. When not fucking Connie six ways from Sunday, for example, Mellors can't resist informing her that it is money - along with modern technology and forms of popular entertainment - which is to blame for sucking the spunk out of mankind [4].  

 

 

II. 

 

Interestingly, Lawrence's puritanical attitude towards money (and the love of money) aligns his thinking with those one might otherwise regard as his moral, political, and philosophical opponents: Christians, Marxists, and Freudians ...

 

This must surely make one suspicious of his thinking on this subject and question whether, as a matter of fact, money might be thought of in a more positive light; as that which creates happiness, rather than being at the root of all evil. 

 

That was certainly the view of the perverse materialist and utopian socialist Charles Fourier, who argued that happiness consists in having a number of diverse passions and - crucially - having the necessary financial means to satisfy them. In Fourier's ideal state, wealth is redeemed and money not only becomes desirable, but "participates in the brilliance of pleasure" [5].

 

Roland Barthes helps us understand why it is that Fourier insists that les sens ne peuvent avoir toute leur portée indirecte sans l'intervention de l'argent:   

 

"Curiously detached from commerce, from exchange, from the economy, Fourierist money is an analogic (poetic) metal, the sum of happiness. Its exaltation is obviously a countermeasure: it is because all (civilized) Philosophy has condemned money, that Fourier, destroyer of Philosophy and critic of Civilization, rehabilitates it: the love of wealth being a perjorative topos [...] Fourier turns contempt into praise [... and] everything, where money is concerned, seems to be conceived in view of this counter-discourse [...]" [6]

 

To advise his readers to seek out tangible wealth - gold, precious stones, and those luxury goods despised by our ascetic idealists - is, as Barthes says, a scandalous thing to do; a major transgression against the teachings of all those (including Lawrence) for whom money is something base and corrupting. 

      

I have to admit, I'm sympathetic to Fourier's view and have always smiled at a remark often attributed to Bo Derek: Whoever said money can't buy happiness simply didn't know where to go shopping.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from the song 'Money, Money', written by John Kander and Fred Ebb for the big screen version of the musical Cabaret (dir. Bob Fosse, 1972). To watch the song being performed by Joel Gray (as the Master of Ceremonies) and Liza Minnelli (as Sally Bowles): click here. 

      Whilst this is still my favourite song written about money, mention might also be made of ABBA's 1976 single 'Money, Money, Money', written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus: click here. And 'Money (That's What I Want)', a rhythm and blues track written by Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford and originally recorded by Barrett Strong in 1959, but which I remember as a single by the Flying Lizards in 1979: click here.          

 

[2] See the poems 'Money-madness' and 'Kill money' in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 421-22. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 363.  

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 217. See also the closing letter written by Mellors to Connie (pp. 298-302), in which he again expresses his hatred for money and complains about the fact that modern people have conflated living with spending.    

[5] Roland Barthes, 'Fourier', in Sade / Fourier / Loyola, trans. Richard Miller, (University of California Press, 1989), p. 85. 

[6] Ibid., pp. 85-86.

 

 

To read another recent post on Fourier, click here. 

Notes on the Youthful Writings of Gilles Deleuze 2: From Christ to the Bourgeoisie

 A young Deleuze pretending to read for the camera

 

 

I.

 

From Christ to the Bourgeoisie [a] was another very early text by Deleuze, first published in 1946, when he was twenty-one. It's central argument and conclusion is: "The relationship that connects Christianity and the Bourgeisie is not contingent." [275] Which is true, I suppose, though hardly an original insight.

 

Deleuze opens the essay by discussing the decline of spirit in our modern world, which critics and opponents of modernity and materialism often decry: "What they mean is that today, many people no longer believe in internal life, it doesn't pay." [266] 

 

Deleuze continues:

 

"To be sure, there are different reasons why the internal is disdained today. My first thoughts go to the revolutionary consciousness in an industrial and technological world. The greater the power of this technological world, the more it seems to empty people of all internal life like a chicken and reduce them to total exteriority." [266]

My first thought is that this seems rather unfair on chickens, which remain sacred birds within some cultures. One wonders how Deleuze might know anything about their internal life, or lack thereof? For whilst I'm sure this young French philosopher enjoyed many a dish of coq-au-vin, had he ever tried to form a relationship with a living bird? 

 

I'm doubtful: for despite what he might believe, they are intelligent and sensitive creatures, who display some degree of self-awareness (i.e., have a fairly complex inner life) [b].   

 

Personally, I'm with Lawrence on this point: I like to imagine that even a common brown hen is a goddess in her own rights and blossoms into splendid being, just as we do, within the fourth dimension and that we might form a vital (non-anthropocentric) relationship with her [c].     

 

But I digress ... And, to be fair, there's an ambiguity in what Deleuze writes here; he could be saying that chickens too are emptied of internal life (i.e. have their being negated) within techno-industrial society thanks to factory farming (Heidegger controversially suggests that there is a metaphysical equivalence between mechanised food production and the Nazi extermination camps).      

 

Anyway, let's move on ... And let's do so by immediately pointing out that Deleuze isn't necessarily complaining about this loss of soul - because, like Sartre, he hates moist interiority and regards the issue as a far more complex one than it is often characterised. For one thing, Deleuze suggests the possibility of a spiritual life outside of (and without reference to) any interiority and he believes in a revolution that takes place as a form of action and as an event in the world, rather than in us:

 

"The revolution is not supposed to take place inside us, it is external - and if we do it in ourselves, it is only a way to avoid doing it outside." [267]

 

Again, like Sartre whom he quotes, Deleuze suggests that ultimately everything is outside - including the self (l'existence précède l'essence, and all that jazz):

"'Outside, in the world, among others. It is not in some hiding-place that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a human among humans.'" [268]

 

Interestingly, Deleuze finds this existentialism in the Gospel: Christ, he says, shows us a new possibility of life that is not lived posthumously in some kind of heaven, but in the external world. Only this, paradoxically, "is not a social, historical, localized world: it is our own internal life" [268].

 

Unfortunately, it's not this aspect of the Gospel that has triumphed and ultimately Christianity has been more bad news than good and brought about the disastrous "dissociation of Nature and Spirit" [268]. Deleuze continues:

 

"Some might say that the union did not exist at the time of the Greeks either. No matter. The identity of Nature and Spirit exists as nostalgia in the modern consciousness; whether it is defined in reference to Greece, to a state preceding original sin, or, if you prefer psychoanalysis, to a state prior to the trauma of birth, it matters little. Once upon a time there was a union between Nature and Spirit and this union formed an external world. Nature was mind and mind, nature; the subject was not involved except as an error coefficient." [268-69]  

 

Christianity subjectified both nature and spirit and ended up with a torn consciousness unable to grasp in itself "the relationship of natural life to spiritual life" [269]. Jesus as mediator came to fix this via the Gospel which is "the exteriority of an interiority" [269]. 

To be honest, I'm not sure I understand this. But let's see how Deleuze now relates this material to the bourgeois opposition between private life and the state ...

 

II.

At first glance, says Deleuze, this latter opposition seems "very different from the Christian opposition between Nature and Spirit" [269]. But - surprise, surprise - it isn't:

 

"The bourgeois has been able to internalize internal life as mediation of nature and spirit. By becoming private life, Nature was spiritualized in the form of family [...] and Spirit was naturalized in the form of homeland [...] What is important is that the bourgeoisie is defined first by the internal life and the primacy of the subject. [...] There is bourgeoisie as soon as there is submission of the exterior to an internal order [...]" [269]

 

Deleuze expands:

 

"The bourgeoisie is essentially internalized internal life, in other words the mediation of private life and state. Yet it fears the two extremes equally. [...] Its domain is the golden mean. It hates the excess of an overly individualistic private life of a romantic nature [...] Yet it is no less fearful of the state [...] The domain of the bourgeoisie is the domain of the apparently calm humanism of human rights. The bourgeois Person is substantialized mediation; it is defined formally by equality [...] and materially by internal life. If formal equality is materially refuted, there is no contradiction in the eyes of the bourgeois nor is there a reason for revolution. The bourgeois remains coherent." [270]

Ultimately, they have no interest in the question of to be or not to be; they wish to have (to own, to possess); property rights are their concern - not ontological unfolding. But money - as an abstract flow - is problematic; it is not substantialized, "on the contrary, it is fluctuating [...] Whence the threat and danger" [271]. Anticipating his work with Félix Guattari written twenty-five years later, Deleuze notes: "Money negates its own essence [...]" [271] and capitalism inexorably moves towards its own external limit [d].

So, in sum: the fraudulent and secretive bourgeoisie internalise interior life in the form of property, money, and possession: "everything that Christ abhorred and that he came to fight, to substitute being for it" [273] - coming, in effect, not to save the world, but to save man from the world (in all its manifest evil). 

 

Having said that, I rather like the world in all its demirugal and external beauty and resent the idea of salvation, however you present it ...      

 

Notes 

 

[a] Gilles Deleuze, 'From Christ to the Bourgeoisie', Letters and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2020). All page numbers given in the above post refer to this work.

 

[b] See Lori Marino, 'Thinking chickens: a review of cognition, emotion, and behavior in the domestic chicken', Animal Cognition 20, (Jan 2017), pp. 127-147. Click here to read online. 

 

[c] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Him With His Tail in His Mouth', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 307-317. Lawrence discusses forming a relationship with his Rhode Island Red on pp. 313-316.  

[d] In Anti-Oedipus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari describe money as that which has been substituted by capitalism for the very notion of a social code and which has created "an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius". See Anti-Oeipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al, (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 33. 

 

Part 1 of this series on Deleuze's youthful writings - Description of Women - can be read by clicking here.