on money (in the abstract)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

>>  Actually we all have Nixon Bucks and that has turned out to be less fun than it seemed at the gleeful printing thereof.<<


Right you are!

"Doc sat up, blinking, groping around in the tubelight for his stash, finding half a joint and lighting up./ What struck him was that Nixon right now had the exact freaked-out expression on his face that he did on the fake twenty-dollar bills Doc had gotten from Sancho. He took one out of his wallet now and consulted it, just to be sure. Yep. The two Nixons looked/just like photos/  of each other!/ 'Let's see,' Doc inhaled and considered. This same Nixonface here, live on the screen, had somehow/already/  been put into circulation, months ago, on millions, maybe billions, in false currency.... How could this be?" (Inherent Vice, pp. 120-1)

Does Pynchon care about monetary stability?

Of course money can be considered to be a social medium, yes, even the most successful social medium of all. Lots of theories, from Marx over Simmel and Parsons to Luhmann, have pointed this out over and over again. (And I do not even hold gold in my personal portfolio.) However, not only would the David Morris way, as Paul pointed out, be simply illegal in terms of EU-treaties (to understand this you have to know that the German acceptance of the Euro was the price for the reunification; otherwise France wouldn't have given its OK; in compensation, the regulations for the EZB were designed pretty much after the Bundesbank standards which explains its conservative ways in questions of monetary stability). It also would bring to the countries in need of help a very strict reform-course, shall say: A hidden government of IMF and Merkozy. The PIIGS countries, in all their brokeness, they cannot have both, fresh money and national sovereignty. Just look at Italy now! A bunch of apolitical technocrats is running the government for the international markets. The Italian people are screwed. Do people really want this? Isn't it, perhaps, better to bring that Euro project to an end?


Frieden/Peace!



On 21.11.2011 20:36, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> I too like the riff on irrational numbers , though there are many possible vectors of irrationality to be observed when people play with numbers.  Nevertheless you have Nixon bucks by the boatload to back up this argument. Actually we all have Nixon Bucks and that has turned out to be less fun than it seemed at the gleeful printing thereof.
> On Nov 21, 2011, at 12:07 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
>> Money nowadays may be a shared delusion, but as Simmel and all grounded economists
>> know, even in the most basic societies----small group (village/) of yeoman farmers, say---if
>> one basically self-sufficient farmer trades one crop for another or from the family that raises
>> chickens, then the medium of exchange can be called money. That's a message.......
>>
>> Money can be called metaphysical, existential.....like space as Paul said and time....
>>
>> And, if that small family village produced a surplus and could trade it or store it---see marx and an allusion in Lot49----
>> then they have created some kind of measurable 'wealth'.......
>>
>> If the villagers want even one person to do something that is not farming and he needs to eat, he gets 'paid' somehow
>> That's money....
>>
>> Here's more outrageuos pynchon-linking specuation that y'all can pick apart and make fun of:  irrational numbers'
>> shit in Against the Day might be---okay, are, I say---linked to all kinds of ways money---and other shit abstractions----
>> get so uprooted from basic reality that they are----irrational......
>>
>> like now.....
>
>

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