Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 12/14/21

"First International Bank. Crocker Bank. Bank of America. Pentecostal Savings (or is that one a church?). All bunched together in the heart of the city, alongside the big airlines.

Money is fluid. Like grace, it is never yours. Coming to claim it is an offence against the divinity. Have you deserved this favour? Who are you and what are you going to do with it? You are suspected of wanting to put it to some use, and an evil one no doubt, whereas money is so beautiful in the fluid and intemporal state it is in at the bank, when it is being invested rather than spent. Shame on you and kiss the hand that gives it to you.

It is true that ownership of money burns your fingers, like power. We need people to take this risk for us and we should be eternally grateful to them. This is why I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them? And yet the atmosphere in a bank is that of the confessional (there is no more kafkaesque situation): admit that you have money, confess that this is not normal.

And it is true: having money is an awkward situation, from which the bank is only too happy to deliver you: 'Your money interests us'--the bank holds you to ransom, its greed knows no bounds. Its immodest gaze reveals your private parts to you, and you are forced to hand your money over to appease it.

One day I tried to close my account, taking all the money out in cash. The teller would not let me go with such a sum on me: it was obscene, dangerous, immoral. Would I not at least take travellers' checques? 'No, the whole lot in cash.' I was mad.

In America, you are stark raving mad if, instead of believing in money and its marvellous fluidity, you want to carry it round on you in banknotes. Money is dirty; that you must admit. And we really do need all these concrete and metal sanctuaries to protect us from it. So banks fulfill a crucial social function, and it is quite logical that these buildings should form the monumental heart of every town and city."

-Jean Baudrillard, America

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 12/14/21

"In order to grasp how globalization and global antagonism works, we should distinguish carefully between domination and hegemony. One could say that hegemony is the ultimate stage of domination and its terminal phase.

Domination is characterized by the master/slave relation, which is still a dual relation with potential alienation, a relationship of force and conflicts. It has a violent history of oppression and liberation. There are the dominators and the dominated--it remains a symbolic relationship. Everything changes with the emancipation of the slave and the internalization of the master by the emancipated slave. Hegemony begins here in the disappearance of the dual, personal, agonistic domination for the sake of integral reality--the reality of networks, of the virtual and total exchange where there are no longer dominators or dominated.

Indeed, it could be said that hegemony brings domination to an end. We, emancipated workers, internalize the Global Order and its operational setup of which we are the hostages far more than the slaves. Consensus, be it voluntary or involuntary, replaces traditional servitude, which still belongs to the symbolic register of domination.

[...]

Contrary to domination, a hegemony of world power is no longer a dual, personal or real form of domination, but the domination of networks, of calculation and integral exchange.

Domination can be overthrown from the outside. Hegemony can only be inverted or reversed from the inside.

[...]

We have here the profile of the new type of confrontation characterizing the era of Hegemony. It is not a class struggle or a fight for liberation on the global level (since the 'liberation' of exchange and democracy, which were the counterpoint to domination, are the strategies of hegemony). [...] It is an irreducibility, an irreducible antagonism to the global principle of generalized exchange.

In other words, a confrontation that is no longer precisely political but metaphysical and symbolic in the strong sense. It is a confrontation, a divide that exists not only at the heart of the dominant power, but at the heart of our individual existence."

-Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power