“Cash”

The distinction between cash and capital as such in the hyper-financialized global economy is constitutive of a new economic space (in the general sense) wherein the concept of wealth becomes distorted as a mediator of social relations. In the hyper-financialized global economy money is increasingly invisible, or is only made visible vis-à-vis the exchange value of commodities where the cars, clothes, etc. signify value/wealth that cannot otherwise exist materially. In the disjuncture between hidden and visible wealth, cash emerges as a critical placeholder of materiality in a world of immaterial value.

Cash economies, as a representation of the last stand of “real” money, demarcate a realm of radical expenditure outside of the logic of savings, credit, and investment (though this logic does have its own particular role for spending). In Appadurai’s meditations on Mumbai-as-Cosmopolis he speaks of the “gray area of speculation, solicitation, risk, and violence”[1] surrounding the cash-dominated Hindi film industry—the realm in wish wads of cash are king. Here, a shadow economy of materiality emerges where the “real economy” has made wealth invisible. When all wealth has become invisible, cash becomes an “anchor of materiality”[2] mediating sociability.

In this space, exchange is not mediated through the state, the banks, the insurance companies, the investment firms, etc. but instead exists in real time with a physical representability. Appadurai speaks of the “sensuous appeal of cash”[3]—real bills flying from one person to the next, “racing from pocket to pocket without the logistical drag of conversion, storage, restriction, accounting, and dematerialization to slow the fuel of consumption”[4]. This is consumption—it is immediate and joyous expenditure.

Shades of Bataille: here we see an infiltration of general economics in this byproduct of the hyper-financialized global economy—“the expenditure (the consumption) of wealth, rather than the production, is the primary object”[5] of the phenomenon described above. Utility is subordinated, if only momentarily, to the actual exchange of the physical bills. The wild exuberance of the cash transaction as a kind of ceremonial event is indicative of a particular manifestation of economic sociability which attempts to cement the materiality of wealth in the new invisible economy that has banished materiality to history.

“Trains”

The commuter rail serves a critical role in post-Fordist city as a means of transporting working bodies from distant sprawling suburbs to a variety of work places situated (geographically/socially) throughout the metropolis. During the rail voyage many riders undergo “complex transformations…turning from oppressed dwellers in shantytowns, slums, and disposable housing into well-dressed clerks, nurses, postmen, bank tellers, and secretaries”[6] Historically, the train has been a transformative machine, altering space, time, consciousness, perception, social relations, work, etc. The first rail journeys at the beginning of the 19^th century represented “the annihilation of space and time…a given spatial distance, traditionally covered in a fixed amount of travel time, could suddenly be dealt with in a fraction of that time.”[7] Of course, new technologies have managed to annihilate space even more radically, but the train still has a function within this context, crushing the space of modern mega-cities in a way which facilitates the flow of bodies to and from particular spaces as inscribed within the geography of the service-economic city. The “two hours and fifty miles” of daily rail commute redefines the space of the city dramatically.[8]

“The mode of human perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well” [9]

- Walter Benjamin

The transformation of individual workers during the trip from the outlaying shantytown to their places of work in the city center is similarly indicative of the psychologically transformative quality of the train and has a particular historical legacy. The train is a signifier of a modern crisis of perception where technology distorts and at times eradicates distinctions of space, time, wealth, and class. The commuter rail confuses class and social distinctions in much the same way it distorted space and time in the 19^th century. This distortion is imperative to the maintenance of the service-industrial economy—the individual with no wealth, no home, and no recognition, living in poverty in the outskirts of the city, must assume a very different identity (Appadurai’s well-dressed clerk, nurse, postmen, bank teller, secretary, etc) to integrate into the functioning of the center-city economy, lest the reality of suffering that this economy is predicated on be revealed.

Excursus—Witness the phenomenon of the railway bringing distant bodies/commodities together in this wonderful Oreo commercial:

“The City”

The post-Fordist city of the hyper-financialized global economy has a particular geography that is a product of the transition to service/finance at the expense of manufacturing. The dying or dead factory rotting behind monolithic compound walls is “at its heart”[10] Appadurai identifies this as the “master specter” in his exploration of Mumbai-as-Cosmopolis—the memory of the giant industrial complex plays a pivotal role in a “new imagery—where thousands of acres of factory space are rumored to be lying idle behind the high walls that conceal dying factories”[11] For the transitory/homeless poor in this context, this is a particularly cruel phenomenon. The very factory that has been crushed under the weight of the neo-liberal economic agenda is transformed via collective imagination into a space of hope—but this is a false hope, a “fantasy”, a “specter”. The “feast of hidden real estate just beyond the famine of the streets” is just a rotting factory, the product of global urban deindustrialization and capital flight.

“Progress/Utopia”

The supposed inevitability of the global economic order to which “there is no alternative” reeks of a false eschatology of progress. Here Benjamin’s angel of history resides—with “face…turned toward the past” and the catastrophe of time “piling wreckage upon wreckage” at his feet, a storm “irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”[12]

Appadurai identifies works of “the imagination… as constitutive of modern subjectivity” and posits “self-imagining as an everyday social project” vis-à-vis the hyper-connected, space-time crushing, mass-mediated social reality of this progress. In this context imagination is “neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern.”[13] Here, individual agency returns to contest the legacy of TINA. The consumption of globally dispersed mass media/commodities is a grounds for (re)appropriation—the total corporate homogenization of the globe is a falsehood perpetuated by ideologues on the right and activists on the left. This, however, should not be taken as a provocation to forgive the crimes of the neo-TINA agenda, nor should it serve as justification to herald total freedom via consumer choice. That too, would be a falsehood.

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[1] Appadurai “Spectral Housing” 60
[2] Appadurai 61
[3] Appadurai 61
[4] Appadurai 61
[5] Bataille “Accursed Share” 9
[6] Appadurai “Spectral Housing” 63
[7] Schivelbush “Railway Journey” 33
[8] Appadurai “Spectral Housing” 63
[9] Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 222
[10] Appadurai “Spectral Housing” 69
[11] Appadurai “Spectral Housing” 70
[12] Benjamin “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 257
[13] Appadurai “Here and Now” 3,4