## Metadata - Author: [[Alf Hornborg]] - Full Title: Liquidate - Category: #books ## Highlights - Because it is contingent on money, modern technology is an inherently distributed phenomenon, saving time and space for some at the expense of time and space lost by others. ([Location 234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=234)) - Instead of systematically dismantling constraints on generalised commensurability, as is the aspiration of mainstream neoliberal economics, a policy for greater sustainability and global justice would rather acknowledge and reinforce distinctions between different kinds of values. Such distinctions were pervasive in the many premodern economies that anthropologists call ‘multicentric.’ Applied to the modern context, it might mean recognising the incommensurability of local resources for subsistence, on the one hand, and products of advanced research and engineering – such as medical and information technologies – on the other hand. ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=345)) - If the expansion of the world market can be reassessed as nothing short of a semiotic self-destruction of the biosphere, human efforts to redesign money to promote sustainability could be understood as the biosphere – through the agency of humans – aiming to rectify an evolutionary detour and taking control over its own future. ([Location 358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=358)) - does not communicate any indication of what it might refer to, whether through contiguity, similarity, or convention. This level of semiotic freedom appears to represent a threshold where its repercussions no longer generate increasing diversity but rather the opposite: accelerating entropy. It is the point at which freedom from constraints shades into chaos. Paradoxically, the sign that most historians and not least economists celebrate as the epitome of human progress is simultaneously the root of the global ecological crisis that threatens us, along with innumerable other species, with extinction. At this point in history, further progress must mean acknowledging the semiotic basis of the Anthropocene predicament and assuming control over our own semiosis. ([Location 713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=713)) - A conundrum of money is that it is a measure of value that itself changes in value. ([Location 1046](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=1046)) - The notion of ‘value’ – that which money purportedly measures – must necessarily be elusive, given that it is itself a measure of how much money it will fetch. This circularity indeed evokes a house of mirrors. Bjerg suggests that ‘it is the very elusiveness of value that generates financial trading.’105 The only approximations of ‘real’ values for a financial trader are the future assessments of other traders. Ignorance and conjectures are fundamental to the functioning of money. Referring to Slavoj Zizek, Bjerg concludes that ‘[m]oney works not because we know how it works and how it comes into being, but rather because we do not know how it works and how it comes into being.’ ([Location 1331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=1331)) - Until their worldview is transformed by ‘Axial ideologies’ such as Christianity, most people experience the world as inhabited by a great number of ‘spirits,’ that is, nonhuman ‘metapersons’ with ‘the essential attributes of persons, a core of the same mental, temperamental, and volitional capacities.’112 In other words, a pre-Axial world is an immense cosmic society composed of various kinds of inevitably anthropomorphic beings who must be appeased in order for success or even health to be guaranteed. Navigating in such a world is like navigating in a vastly extended network of intersubjective social relations requiring sensitivity and diplomacy. Immanentism thus necessarily implies a relational understanding of the world. It was to account for such ‘pre-Axial’ ontologies that Edward Tylor in 1871 proposed the concept of animism. ([Location 1364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=1364)) - Sahlins suggests that the early modern period and Enlightenment can be thought of as a ‘Second Axial Age,’ in which abstract categories such as ‘religion,’ ‘politics,’ ‘science,’ and ‘economy’ further reinforced the dichotomy between the material and the spiritual – or natural and supernatural – that had been introduced in the Axial Age. ([Location 1373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=1373)) - What did de Brosses, Marx, and Freud have in mind when they applied the concept to primitive religion, ideological mystification, and sexual deviation? In all three cases, what these post-Enlightenment thinkers found extraordinary was the perception among certain people that an object – an amulet, a banknote, or a shoe – had immanent power. To the people concerned, these artefacts had an agency of their own that affected their persons. All three thinkers felt compelled to expose these varieties of fetishism by revealing more encompassing relations – theological,27 economic, or psychological – that accounted for the myopic infatuation with objects. In semiotic terms, the objects had come to serve as indexical signs of what they referred to – divinity, economic value, or sexual desire. ([Location 1823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=1823)) - To thus understand fetishism as the attribution to objects of the power to organise society necessarily implies that such objects are perceived as intrinsically empowered. In modern societies, the closest thing to feitiços would be contracts, legal texts, and – of course – money. As Graeber observes, this phenomenon – humans making things which they then treat as if those things had power over them – is precisely what Marx had in mind when he used the concept of fetishism. ([Location 1871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=1871)) - From a Marxist perspective, as money represents the value of labour, and labourers work to get money, money is also ‘a representation that brings into being what it represents.’ ([Location 1879](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=1879)) - Graeber notes that the logic of fetishism – whether identified in magic, power relations, or the economy – is ultimately the paradox of something that exists ‘only if other people think it does.’ ([Location 1881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=1881)) - Thus, in Marx’s view, the surplus value generated by labour erroneously appears to be the product of capital. This is most evident in the concept of interest-bearing capital, expressed in the formula M-M1, which mystifies the social relations between capitalists and workers by attributing to money the capacity to propagate itself by itself. In Marx’s own words, ‘[i]nterest-bearing capital is the consummate automatic fetish….’ ([Location 1886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=1886)) - In money the unfettered dominion of the estranged thing over man becomes manifest. The rule of the person over the person now becomes the universal rule of the thing over the person, the product over the producer. ([Location 1892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=1892)) - Note: Direct quote from maex - Commodities are alienated from inputs not only of human labour but also of materials and nonhuman energy, which are equally essential. Whereas McNeill refers to Marx’s remark that, ‘[f]rom the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form,’50 it is just as true to observe that all other biophysical inputs in production, embodied in commodities traded on the market, assume a social form. ([Location 1908](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=1908)) - The technological fetish differs from the original feitiço in that its power is not restricted to belief-based social phenomena like causing illness or underscoring authority but can include the physical power to transform the material world. ([Location 1954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=1954)) - Human history entails the integration of previously autonomous sociometabolic systems into an increasingly global social metabolism. These metabolic processes are enabled by processes of monetisation and conceptual abstraction, whereby categories such as ‘value,’ ‘price,’ ‘work,’ ‘energy,’ and ‘electricity’ serve to recast previously contextualised resources into disembedded, fungible commodities that are accessible for extraction. To apply a rather dramatic metaphor, the conceptual reframing3 or reconfiguration of the world in such terms can be compared to the processes through which a predator’s gastric acids dissolve its prey for digestion. ([Location 2862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=2862)) - We should recall that the much celebrated technical, scientific, and artistic expertise of modern society is reserved for a small minority of its population, while its overwhelming majority is compelled to perform tasks that are very rarely conducive to creativity. Semiotic freedom, in other words, is a matter of highly uneven global distribution. Moreover, whatever expertise is encouraged in modernity tends to be dependent on advanced technologies, which means that it is defined by those technologies rather than by the inherent skill of a human being. ([Location 4344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=4344)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - It is paradoxical that the unique symbolic capacity of the human species, which has granted it unprecedented levels of semiotic freedom, has finally yielded a sign that is so devoid of meaning that it systematically undermines both the cultural and the biological diversity of the biosphere from which it emerged. It is as if money represents a threshold, where the evolutionary increase in semiotic freedom reaches a point at which it is reversed. ([Location 4378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=4378)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - In having become completely dependent on the industrially produced groceries that we can purchase in supermarkets, most of us are entirely incompetent at deriving our subsistence from the natural environment. ([Location 4408](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=4408)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - As Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and David Harmon explain, ‘much of the knowledge of how to maintain biodiversity is encoded in the small languages of Indigenous and local peoples, and it disappears when the languages disappear.’ ([Location 4446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=4446)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - general ([Location 4519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D81DQCDH&location=4519)) - Tags: [[aqua]]