What I don’t say in the video is the Substack App seems pretty cool. Especially if you’re more phone than pc - which a lot of people are these days.
Anyway, below is the first section of my ‘About’ page mistake.
I can tell from my stats that it’s not had very many reads. Obviously it needs to be a proper About page. I’ll get around to re-writing it asap.
Money is the mute object that structures discourse.
[ So read on & redeem thyself! ]
Substack, so they tell us, is ‘the home for great writing’ - a place for writers. But I’m not a writer. I mean, I write. But I wouldn’t call myself a writer.
My inability to commit to an occupation has followed me through my 58 years on Earth. I consider the problem in the book I wrote. Even though I’m not a writer.
As it goes, my quantum cat-in-a-box writer thing was put to the test just the other day (30/11/23) at Tom Sharp’s TypoCircle talk. Tom asked writers to raise their hands. My friend Carrie - who is a writer and who stuck her hand up straight away - tried valiantly to push my arm into the air. I half resisted and so as ever I was betwixt and between. Both writer and non-writer simultaneously.
I appreciate this is an odd way to start an ‘About’ page in a place that’s full of writers. And obviously, I’ve nothing against writers per se. Some of my best friends etc.
But since I wrote The Money Burner’s Manual in 2015 I’ve been worried about words.
The following is from a Sermon I’ve not yet published (at the time of writing 17/12/23). I think it comes close to capturing my feeling about the little tricksters.
[R]enunciation without action is pure rhetoric.
Meaning is emaciated by money.
Confronted by money, the value of language
lies only in its propensity to create a persuasive reality
wherein money’s negation might be materially enacted.
If, and only if, we can incorporate
an active transgression to our spiritual and moral praxis
will individuals transform their relation to money.
For a long while, I ran a blog where I mostly wrote quasi-academic pieces about the nature of money. It’s still going but as well as words, I started to question the value of academic thought, too. Again, some of my best friends etc…
In the the years after we began plastering over the rupture of the Financial Crisis, as Occupy faded and everything just returned pretty much to how it was, I noticed I wasn’t alone in feeling despondent about the value of academia in understanding the world of money. A few of those who study economics and finance - particularly from outside the disciplines of Economics and Finance - felt a shake up was needed.
In a nutshell the problem as I see it is that academia fails to recognise how money works to structure our thoughts (and language). This has led me to question the validity of any formal understanding of money and to conclude that money is a mystery not a puzzle. If I’m right - if money is really a mystery - then we’d be wise to find new ways of dealing with it.
But even though I’ve got these issues with words, I still love my money books.
» The next instalment will be ‘Sex is the mute object that structures discourse’
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