From "Touching the Void"

By Joe Simpson.

Touching the Void on Amazon. Joe Simpson's web site. 

Excerpts:

The voice kept urging me on, ‘Place-lift-brace-hop ... keep going. Look how far you’ve gone. Just do it, don’t think about it ...’

I did as I was told. Stumbling past and sometimes over boulders, falling, crying, swearing in a litany that matched the pattern of my hopping. I forgot why I was doing it; forgot even the idea that I probably wouldn’t make it. Running on instincts that I had never suspected were in me, and drifting down the sea of moraines in a blurred delirium of thirst, and pain and hopping, I timed myself religiously. I looked ahead to a landmark and gave myself half an hour to reach it. As I neared the mark, a furious bout of watch-glancing would ensue, until it became part of the pattern ... place-lift-brace-hop-time. If I realised I was behind time I tried to rush the last ten minutes of hopping. I fell so much more when I rushed but it had become so damned important to beat the watch. Only once did I fail to beat it, and I sobbed with annoyance. The watch became as crucial as my good leg. I had no sense of time passing, and with each fall I lay in a semi-stupor, accepting the pain and quite unaware of how long I had been there. A look at the watch would galvanise me into action, especially when I saw it had been five minutes and not the thirty seconds it had felt like.

[...]

As I gazed at the distant moraines I knew that I must at least try. I would probably die out there amid those boulders. The thought didn’t alarm me. It seemed reasonable, matter-of-fact. That was how it was. I could aim for something. If I died, well, that wasn’t so surprising, but I wouldn’t have just waited for it to happen. The horror of dying no longer affected me as it had in the crevasse. I now had the chance to confront it and struggle against it. It wasn’t a bleak dark terror any more, just fact, like my broken leg and frostbitten fingers, and I couldn’t be afraid of things like that. My leg would hurt when I fell, and when I couldn’t get up I would die. In a peculiar way it was refreshing to be faced with simple choices. It made me feel sharp and alert, and I looked ahead at the land stretching into distant haze and saw my part in it with a greater clarity and honesty than I had ever experienced before.

I had never been so entirely alone, and although this alarmed me it also gave me strength. An excited tingle ran down my spine. I was committed. The game had taken over, and I could no longer choose to walk away from it. It was ironic to have come here searching out adventure and then find myself involuntarily trapped in a challenge harder than any I had sought. For a while I felt thrilled as adrenalin boosted through me, but it couldn’t drive away the loneliness or shorten the miles of moraines tumbling towards the lakes. The sight of what lay ahead soon killed the excitement. I was abandoned to this awesome and lonely place. It sharpened my perception to see clearly and sharply the facts behind the mass of useless thoughts in my head, and to realise how vital it was just to be there, alive and conscious, and able to change things. There was silence, and snow, and a clear sky empty of life, and me, sitting there, taking it all in, accepting what I must try to achieve. There were no dark forces acting against me. A voice in my head told me that this was true, cutting through the jumble in my mind with its coldly rational sound.

It was as if there were two minds within me arguing the toss. The voice was clean and sharp and commanding. It was always right, and I listened to it when it spoke and acted on its decisions. The other mind rambled out a disconnected series of images, and memories and hopes, which I attended to in a daydream state as I set about obeying the orders of the voice. I had to get to the glacier. I would crawl on the glacier, but I didn’t think that far ahead. If my perspectives had sharpened, so too had they narrowed, until I thought only in terms of achieving predetermined aims and no further. Reaching the glacier was my aim. The voice told me exactly how to go about it, and I obeyed while my other mind jumped abstractedly from one idea to another.

[...]

A couple of times I looked back at the ice cliffs as I hobbled away down the rocks. Each time they grew smaller and I felt that I was shutting the door on something intangible but menacing that had been with me for so long. Those cliffs were the doors to the mountains. I grinned when I glanced at them. I had won a battle of some sort. I could feel it deep inside. Now it was just the patterns, and the pain, and water. Could I reach Bomb Alley tonight? Now that would be something to grin about! It wasn’t so far from here, twenty minutes’ walk, and that couldn’t be so hard! And that was my mistake. I stopped timing landmarks and set my sights on Bomb Alley and the silver floods of icy melt-water pouring down its flanks. When it became dark I had no idea how far Bomb Alley was, nor did I know how far I had crawled. Without checking my watch I had lain in stupefied exhaustion after every fall. Lain there and listened to endless stories running through the pain, watched short dreams of life in the real world, played songs to my heartbeat, licked the mud for water, and wasted countless hours in an empty dream. Now I staggered blind in the dark, obsessed with Bomb Alley, ignoring the voice which told me to sleep, and rest, and forget the alley. I got my head-torch from my sack and blundered on until the light died.

[...]

Turning towards the lakes I saw that I was a long way above the site of Bomb Alley. All that staggering in the dark had been for nothing. How stupid it had been to forget the watch-keeping yesterday, and how quickly I had lost any idea of time. Bomb Alley had then become a vague aim instead of a carefully planned objective. Without timing each stage I had drifted aimlessly with no sense of urgency. Today it had to be different. I decided that four hours would be enough to reach Bomb Alley. Twelve noon was the deadline, and I intended to break those hours into short stages, each one carefully timed. I searched ahead for the first landmark -- a tall pillar of red rock that stood out clearly above the sea of boulders. Half an hour to reach it, and then I would look for another.

[...]

I lay on my side watching them until I couldn’t fight off the appalling drowsy weakness any longer. The deterioration scared me deeply and made me wonder anxiously whether I had burnt myself out completely. It occurred to me that I was nearer to death than when I had been alone. The minute I knew help was at hand something had collapsed inside me. Whatever had been holding me together had gone. Now I could not think for myself, let alone crawl! There was nothing to fight for, no patterns to follow, no voice, and it frightened me to think that, without these, I might run out of life.

The Cost of Money

A recent report from the Institute for Business in the Global Context looks at how cash stacks up (lol) against other forms of money. A snippet from the introduction.

"Money is an abstraction built on trust. As such, alternatives to the most tangible form of money—currency or cash—and its replacement with cashless payments have become possible. Such an ecosystem is one where no transaction requires money in the form of notes and coins, and where value can be exchanged through the transfer of information between transacting parties. There have been multiple waves of such alternatives. Established alternatives to cash include checks, credit cards, debit cards, and prepaid debit cards. More recently, innovative options have sprung up that not only threaten to imperil the ubiquity of cash but also upend the traditional payment ecosystem. These include smartphone-enabled credit card acquirers, such as Square, and Automated Clearing House or ACH acquirers, such as PayPal and Dwolla. And then there are even more ambitious alternatives to cash that have been proposed, such as Bitcoin, a web-based cryptocurrency. Unlike traditional money, such alternatives do not derive their value from government fiat. Each of these alternatives have evolved networks within which they are uniformly accepted as a means of payment; the more established alternatives, of course, have the widest networks.

This study starts from a simple observation: cash derives its value from the information it contains and is a classic information good, which can be replaced by a digital substitute [...] Today most information goods with a sufficiently developed digital substitute have been disrupted and displaced. Cash, however, is different from the usual examples that spring to mind: communication, music, movies, and, increasingly, books. Money in the form of cash is a tangible embodiment of value. Cash is itself nothing more than a promise to pay: a completely interchangeable, transferable promise to pay the bearer. The purpose of money is to have stored wealth on hand for purchases today and tomorrow. Individuals derive a certain utility from holding cash that stems from many factors combining rational, behavioral, institutional and emotional drivers. That said, cash must be held in physical form, counted, guarded, and accounted for. It can be difficult to transport and send. Being possibly the last thing you can expect to recover from a stolen wallet, acceptable everywhere, and anonymous, it is inherently insecure. In any serious quantity, most legitimate businesses prefer some other party, such as a bank, to handle cash on their behalf. In other words, cash satisfies two of the most significant criteria of digital disruption: there are viable digital alternatives with wide networks of adopters and cash presents the carrier with multiple forms of disutility or costs.

This begs the questions: why has cash not been completely displaced, what are the costs and benefits of its continued use, and what are the implications for innovation in the use of cash and its alternatives?"

Double Coincidence of Pillages

Aeon has published a great article by Brett Scott (@suitpossum), one-time finance mole and author of The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance, which gives an introductory overview to alternative currencies, with special attention to Bitcoin and the Brixton Pound, and with an anthropologist's terrible, unstoppable cunning.

Three things really stick out for me. (a) The first is Scott's metaphor of financial instruments as high level code, and money itself as machine code. A bit more on that in a minute. (b) The second is his suggestion that the problem with general purpose money is that it is too efficient!

"[...] Part of the essence of the Brixton Pound is its deliberate inconvenience. We’re used to thinking that absence of friction must be a virtue in any transaction, but a local economy thrives on inconvenience. Chance encounters in the street market help to bind a community together and give it richness of character. We lose all that when we opt for the robotic mediocrity of the automatic till and debit-card reader. It’s a fine balance, of course, and the Brixton Pound recently added a pay-by-text system that combines the ease of electronic payment with the richness of local exchange. I still have to hand-deliver the books I sell that way — knocking on the door of a guy called Rico who writes a food blog, having a chat, getting to know someone I didn’t know before. The inconvenience is where the connection comes in [...]" (See note 4).

Of course we may be dealing with more than a "fine balance." We may be dealing with a sort of contradiction: forms of friction which are socially desirable overall could be unsustainably irritating at the level of the individual. Over on Brixton Pound's site, even Scott himself wistfully appspirates (appspirate, v.: The feeling of wishing there were an app for something), "I’d love a swish new mobile phone app to further streamline the pay-by-text system and that could alert me to shops that accept B£."

(c) The third thing which sticks out is the optimism. I'm optimistic too! But many people's main contact with alternative currencies -- loyalty card reward points, company scrip -- is anything but liberating. The right friction may be okay, but too much friction sloughs your skin right off.

Besides, at its origins standardised currency is already entangled with special purpose money. (See note 1).

At the Brixton Pound site again, Scott explains that there are "two sides to starting an alternative currency. Firstly, you need vendors who will accept it. Secondly, you need people who will use it to buy things. Ideally, over time, you want those two to form a close-ended loop".

One important kind of close-ended loop is between farmers and soldiers. Imagine that you live on a farm, exchanging with your neighbours via gift, favour and IOU. One day the news comes that you, or your male relative, must pay tax in official currency. But only the king's soldiers are salaried in official currency. So suddenly there is a pressing need for you to find something the soldiers want. (See note 2).

Or, of course, you could find something wanted by someone who has something the soldiers want . . . that is how an army and a mint (a rudimentary state, we might call it) can summon a market economy into the world. In a way, it's a bit like the Panoptican effect: instead of raping and pillaging every day, they only need to violently persecute a few tax dodgers about once a year. Perhaps this marvelous invention also solves the "double coincidence of pillages" problem, in which your family and farmstead get massacred and razed by latecomers who suspect you're holding out on them.

So just to be clear: I think Brixton Pound is a goodie. Soon as Kickbackstarter approve my "McDuck money bin skyscraper" project, I'm going to stack some Brix of my own. I just don't think alternative currencies are necessarily or categorically good, and I'm not sure I yet know what their risks and setbacks actually look like. Obviously if Tesco or News Corp found an alternative currency, we ought to be suspicious, but even then how do we formalise our suspicions into analysis and critique?

§

Now I'm once more on shaky ice. The three things I've mentioned -- money as code; money as friction; and the entanglement of alternative and standardised currency, the porousness of both to power and violence -- are certainly related. Perhaps together they can start to respond to that question.

I do also write in exchange for money. But ultimately it all gets spent on pastries.
— Damien Walter (@damiengwalter) September 17, 2013

I sometimes wonder if the world's net debt/credit situation could in principle be expressed without using numbers. After all, we frequently translate our finances into various qualitative formats: into narratives, desires, fears, complaints, counterfactuals ("if only we could afford..."), conditionals ("when I can afford..."), hypothecations ("baby, my salary covers the mortgage, yours covers the bills and groceries") and so on. I also know people who talk in a gripey, "First World Problem"-kind-of-way about incoming money as "already spent." The apotheosis of "already spent" money, and of a "close-ended loop," is in the "wages" "paid" to bonded laborers, where the arithmetic has become all but irrelevant: it is more a matter of order of magnitude of debt and repayments.

How precise and wide-ranging could such qualitative redescription of money become? Just as a thought experiment (or a sort of focus imaginarius): could money's whole influence within human life at a particular moment in history be expressed as magnificent library of interlaced legalistic contracts?

I suspect any attempt, as it progressed from quarter-serious to half-serious, would find that its qualitative redescriptions resembled legal contracts less and less, as they more and more resembled computer programs. Perhaps there'd be a lot of complicated if-then-else nesting. "If I do not grow enough surplus crops to sell to the soldiers" . . . well, human behaviour is complex, and the numbers, perhaps, would creep back in eventually -- but might be better-behaved, having spent some time in the doghouse.

I'm not a computer scientist (unless you count Klik & Play) or an anthropologist (unless I'm not telling), so maybe I'm fetishizing the intellectual resources of these disciplines a bit. What I'm groping for are ways of demystifying the "generality" of general purpose money. That is, models and heuristics which would let us trace, with unprecedented specificity, standardised currency's own special purposes, affinities, dispositions, limitations, etc. (See note 3). Such techniques would have to stand against (i) the dogmatic assertion that any unit of currency must count as a medium of exchange for all the goods and services denominated in the same currency -- even for those on which in practice (that is, when social, cultural, psychological and other factors are taken into account) it is unlikely to be spent -- and also (ii) against the dogmatic counter-assertion that all money is always already spent: that social relations among people are more intelligible when the illusion of money is stripped out of them, along with whatever mechanisms sustain that illusion.

Likewise, friction isn't just an inconvenience over which communities can bond emotionally. Scott also quickly starts talking about serendipity and networking opportunities, for instance. "Friction" is really just a starting point for thinking about all the social, cultural, psychological, geographic and other dimensions of the circulation of value.

Note 1: I am using "standardised currency" and "general purpose money" interchangeably; and "alternative currency" and "special purpose money" interchangeably. But I'm also trying to blur some boundaries between what's standard and what's alternative, between what's general purpose and special purpose, in the hope of eventually coming up with more robust and exacting categories.

Note 2: The IOUs of course could be denominated in whatever -- crops, animals, textiles, a hard currency no longer in circulation. Almost anything will do as a unit of account. And if the scenario is all a bit simplified and abstract, well: anthropologists complain that economists still trot out the thoroughly discredited myth that "money emerged to solve the double coincidence of wants problem inherent to barter economies"; economists retort that it's not a myth, it's more a sort of pedagogical parable, and so the anthropologists better provide a counter-parable or STFU; so maybe there's your counter-parable.

Note 3: Compare Scott again:

"[...] I don’t suggest that we start suspiciously eyeing the change handed back to us in shops. Coins are designed to be symbolic and abstract, and perhaps that’s required. What we need though, is the right kind of doublethink, a carefully managed form of cognitive dissonance that allows us to see the centuries of real technological change that lie behind them, the oil and dirt and oceanic dragnets, the limestone blast furnaces and neon lighting systems and chemicals synthesised from fossilised trees. Perhaps we can tinker with the word ‘money’ itself. It’s a mass noun, like you’d use for some kind of tangible substance, and it makes money sound like a ‘thing-in-itself’. As a kind of mental discipline, I prefer to use a different word: COGAS. It stands for ‘claims on goods and services’, which is all money really is. And now I have a word that describes itself, as opposed to one that actively hides its own reality. It sounds trivial, but the linguistic process works a subtle psychological loop, referring money to the world outside itself. It’s a simple way to start peeling back the façade. 

"To go deeper, we need to start actually experimenting with alternatives. Money, we know, is a technology, and it can be designed for different purposes — always for exchange, of course, but with auxiliary characteristics. To uncover and experience these characteristics, I actively play around with as many esoteric currencies as possible [...]"

Note 4: Smofs of the Jürgen Habermas fandom will rapidly spot a certain coin lying glinting on its flip side. Rather than thinking about how money (a steering medium which allows people to co-ordinate their actions without necessarily understanding each other's motives) may actually be rooted in a shared lifeworld (a sphere in which communicative rationality has priority, in which action is oriented towards mutual understanding, and in which conflicting norms lead to deliberative resolutions), Scott is interested here in how aspects of a lifeworld may emerge from a particular form of money. Steering media embedded in lifeworld and lifeworld embedded in steering media . . .

Note 5: Compare the poet Sean Bonney in "Letter Against Ritual":

"[...] How he couldn't tell the difference between his prison cell and the entire cluster of universes. How the stars were nothing but apocalypse routines, the constellations negative barricades. I was thinking about the work-ethic, how it's evoked obsessively, like an enemy ritual, some kind of barbaric, aristocratic superstition. About zero-hours contracts, anti-magnetic nebulae sucking the working day inside out. Negative-hours. Gruel shovelled into all the spinning pits of past and future centuries, spellbound in absolute gravity, an invisibility blocking every pavement I was walking down. I wanted to cry. In fact I think I did. Actually, no. I was laughing my head off. A grotesque, medieval cackle. No despair, just defiance and contempt. Ancient disturbances. Ghost towns and marching bands. Invisible factories. Nostalgia crackling into pain and pure noise. No sleep. No dreams. An endless, undifferentiated regime of ersatz work [...]"

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

As usual, my emphases / underlinings / paragraphs.

Democracy to come thus cannot be a community of substitutable persons. In other words, what the democracy to come can oppose to the practice of nation-states is not the action of political subjects playing the part of the anyone.

It is the commitment to an absolute other, an other that can never become the same as us, that cannot be substituted— or, we can add, an other that cannot stage his or her otherness, that cannot stage the relationship between his or her inclusion and his or her exclusion.

Democracy to come is a democracy without a demos, with no possibility for a subject to perform the kratos of the demos.

Such a democracy implies another status of the heteron: the heteron as the outside, the distant, the asymmetric, the nonsubstitutable. Derrida’s notion of hospitality implies much more than the obligation to overstep the borders of nation-states in order to deal with what he calls the “ten
plagues” of the International Order. What the hospes goes beyond is above all the border that allows reciprocity or substitutability.

In this sense, the hospes is the strict opposite of the demos. The character of the hospes opens up an irreconcilable gap between the stage of the possible or the calculable and the stage of the unconditional, the impossible, or the incalculable.

What this precludes is the aesthetic performance of the as if. The hospes erases the heterotopy of the demos as he creates a radical gap between the sphere of political compromise and the sphere of the unconditional, between the calculable of the law and the incalculable of justice.

What is dismissed by this opposition is the performance of those who play the part of the demos that they are not. When protesters say in the streets that “this is just” or “this is unjust,” their “is” is not the deployment of a determinant concept subsuming its object. It is the clash of two justices, the clash of two worlds. This is what a political dissensus or heterotopy means.

But it is the kind of justice that Derrida rules out. In his view there can only be either the normal, consensual application of the rule operating as a machine or the law of unconditional justice. This is what the “to come” means.

The ethical to come is the opposite of the aesthetic as if. It means that democracy cannot be presented, even in the dissensual figure of the demos, that is, of the subject that acts as if it were the demos.

There can be no substitution of the whole by the part, no subject performing the equivalence between sameness and otherness. The heterotopy of the demos is substituted by two forms of irreducible heterogeneity: the temporal heterogeneity of the to come and the spatial heterogeneity of the hospes.

These two forms are combined in the figure of the first-comer and the newcomer. The hospes or the newcomer is the other that cannot come to the place of the same, the other whose part cannot be played by an other. 

This dissymmetry is clearly spelled out by Derrida in Rogues when he identifies the anyone that is at the heart of the democracy to come. This anyone is not the subject of a dissensus, the subject who affirms the capacity of those who have no capacity. It is the object of a concern. Derrida gives to the “first to happen by [le premier venu],” a term he borrows from Jean Paulhan, a quite significant meaning; it is, he says, “anyone, no matter who, at the permeable limit between ‘who’ and ‘what,’ the living being, the cadaver, and the ghost.”

The anyone thus becomes the exact contrary of what appeared first; it is the absolute singularity of the figure that Aristotle conjured up at the beginning of Politics, the being that is less or more than the human being—less insofar as it is the animal, the cadaver, or the ghost that is entrusted to our care (a` revoir). The other, in that sense, is whoever or whatever that requires that I answer for him, her, or it. This is what responsibility is: the commitment to an other that is entrusted to me, for whom or for which I must answer.