Poesis of Objecthood - Part Three

We can think of culture as the object in which the anxious subject of history finds repose, where Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus can seek shelter from the storm of progress, and where the unsettled nature of the individual can compose itself. Simply put, the subject, left to its own devices, does not know what to do with itself. To echo Pascal’s observation that the unhappiness of men comes from not knowing how to remain calm in a room. The subject rebels against the object, which is its ultimate destination, and yet it is envious of its stability, finding solace in alignment, but experiencing pain and suffering when not. The object is the eye of the cyclone, the calm at the center of a tempest of raging emotions. And although the manic depressive oscillates between samsara and nirvana, despair and elation dissipate in atmospheric thin air just as conflicting feelings slide off the impermeable feathers of an existential duck. While the subject acknowledges the overall indifference of the object, some nevertheless arouse desire or disdain, not in and of themselves but because of the combination of conditions and interactions that make them so. Gold and feces hold fundamentally divergent values for humans in comparison to plants; thus, an object, depending on its relations, can be a nutrient, a poison, or a much sought-after elixir. Aristotle believed that an object is determined by virtue of its internal principle of organization. Some qualities may be accidental, but the core ones are acquired. By contrast, relational ontology, including Hume, Whitehead, and many structuralists argue that qualities exist only through relation, making objects solely dependent on networks of interaction. Both positions are valid, but neither gets the last bite of the apple, since the fruit can be crunchy to humans, resourceful to a worm, soluble to cider, and too heavy for a tree. Its qualities are real but not identical since they are translations of one entity by another. Thus, an object has an internal coherence that allows it to withstand changing relations, as well as tendencies that may either manifest themselves or remain dormant potentialities. A tendency becomes actual through an interaction, the way a magic kiss turns a frog into a prince. This occurs within a spectrum of disposition that leads identity to a threshold of metamorphosis, in the same manner that carbon transforms into diamond and a caterpillar morphs into a butterfly. Thus, even though identity can withstand considerable transformation, it is held by a boundary, past which it no longer recognizes itself as the same object. Qualities, therefore, are neither wholly intrinsic nor entirely relational but arise in the encounter of the protagonists’ inherent dispositions, in the field of affordances in which they are anchored.

Although age and illness remind us that we are born into a body ultimately destined for failure, countless efforts aim to restore the state of gratification lost through its decline from grace. The sacred, it would seem, resides in the vernacular. Yet, there are rows upon rows of products dedicated to specific satisfactions, made readily available through institutionalized triggers of sensory stimuli and responses, designed for the immediate recreation of innocence, with paradise lost reclaimed by horticultural groves of coveted consumables. Top-tier economists may invent financial models that demystify global policy, but when it comes to revealing the hidden strings of consumption, they have little to add to the oldest profession in the world. The label of sex worker replaces a word whose etymology, interestingly, does not specifically refer to sex but to putting something up for sale. The semantic architecture of the Latin prostituere strongly suggests the action of placing something upright, or in front of, as if for public exposure in a shop window. Its primary focus is on exhibition, with a thing positioned favorably to indicate its public availability. The spatial arrangement gives way to the form of access, facilitating the offering of items for common use, or, with money involved, making merchandise available to anyone willing to pay. The focus shifts from location to access and eventually moves into the marketplace, reflecting changing attitudes toward sex and its public nature, as what was once contained within marriage, kinship, and lineage becomes readily available to the individual through a universal mode of exchange. From public display to availability to commercial trade, the sex worker derives value by straddling three distinct objects: the biological body, the labor performed, and the sexual service exchanged. The body as property remains under the control of the individual, its services offered for rent, granting temporary access to exclusive capacities through market exchange. Yanis Varoufakis has claimed that Technofeudalism has killed capitalism with a rental economy that surpasses ownership. However, this old form of lending suggests that rental does not oppose private property nor alter its fundamental paradigm; it may even be a prerequisite if ownership is understood in terms of access rather than title. The body of the sex worker, rented out under negotiated conditions, never changes ownership, emphasizing that prostituere is not about “turning into an object”, but about placing something in front of others for public and open availability. Here, we touch upon the relationship between the individual and the collective through the operation of monetary exchange. Explained to a child, the way currency functions in letting individuals move about in society can be likened to how the circulatory system distributes blood within an organism. There are different conditions in which this occurs, and to cite a few unusual examples, three areas of exchange have been observed among the Tiv of Nigeria: food, stock, and marital prestige, preventing money from mixing the values proper to each sphere. The Kula Ring of the Trobriand Islanders must continuously circulate to create bonds rather than accumulate goods. Most remarkable are the giant Rai stones of Yap Island in Micronesia that can measure up to twelve feet in diameter and become immovable. The carved and ominous disk-shaped rocks function as mnemonic ledgers, inscribing memory into a mineral archive. Each is a unique carving with a traceable past that transforms ownership into a sedimented monument of public knowledge. Rarely does currency translate into such physicality, with a presence that vibrates like a powerhouse of indigenous cohesion. However, when the collective principle is adapted to serve the individual and enhance its autonomy, these large-scale networks of exchange are replaced by the interchangeability of money, which substitutes social bonds with immediate equivalence and reduces public availability to paid individual access. If Money has value only because everyone agrees to recognize it, what would its equivalent be in the world as it is given to humans, other than the memory of water and a rich, oxygenated atmosphere? Money is better understood as the mediator between the individual and the collective, making currency a conjugation of the one and the many. The collective object is a resource manager, a shared component that does not lead to appropriation but rather facilitates the circulation and distribution of resources among a constellation of entities. Unless, as is often the case, money does not bridge private and public spheres but stands in between them like a gatekeeper and a toll booth.

Melanesian shells sailing to foreign shores, Iroquois Wampum tightly packed in headbands, nodding heads dangling African cowries, prehistoric bronze rings sealing bonds, and Aztec cocoa beans passing from palm to palm. All indicate that currency behaves very differently in animistic societies, where wealth means participation in social continuity rather than private accumulation. These cultures rarely posit a transcendent source of value since agency is dispersed and embedded within multiple relationships. While money existed in ancient cultures, and circulated in Sumerian contracts, Phoenician long-distance trade, and Roman finance, it did not reproduce itself through abstraction until the theological idea was pronounced that universal rules apply equally everywhere. Not to imply a direct causality with monotheism, history suggests otherwise, but a homology, for the universe becomes unified under one transcendent principle in a parallel to money beginning to translate everything into a single measure. If the monetary substance does not exactly replace God, it nevertheless takes over universal mediation as a supreme equivalent, structured after the supreme being. Capital, differentiated from mere money, seeks to make all objects legible through exchange, by a ubiquitous principle that renders heterogeneous objects commensurable. The Sumerians and the Egyptians embedded money in a cosmic order. The Romans, probably the closest to modern financial systems, reached a limit with status and prestige. What differentiates Capital is that it requires the reduction of plurality to a single mediation. It ranks and evaluates, converts forests, grinds education, friendship, and attention into expected returns. It is notable that Islam, as part of the monotheistic trilogy, had very abundant commerce and by the tenth century, sophisticated bookkeeping and international banking, yet money was also understood as a medium of exchange that should not be hoarded. The prohibition of usury and the mandatory redistribution of wealth ensured that money does not generate more money on its own. Islam never developed Capital because property had social obligations, and wealth had communal responsibilities. God alone being absolute, money remained accountable to adl (justice) and mizan (balance), that is, arbitrated by divine law and jurisprudence. In Capitalism, by contrast, money assumes the functions once reserved for transcendence, dispensing universal measure and mediation, for potentially limitless expansion. When asked by a wealthy patron why he declined the enormous gift he was offered, the Sufi master Bayazid Bastami replied, “I refuse not because it is yours but because it may become mine”

Many individuals dedicate their public and personal lives to the collective; yet, in most cases, their efforts are based on the same ontological blueprint that makes the collective the subtext of the individual and the individual the model, if not the rare pearl, of the collective. In many Buddhist interpretations, the multiplicity of the phenomenal world is rooted in Māyā, a mirage of reality that cannot be fully revealed due to attachments and ignorance as one wanders through life, Samsāra. The essentially pedagogical act of transcending the self through discipline involves pulling the world out from under one's feet, as if it were a magic rug. Like the renunciation of the saint, whose choice to withdraw from the world encourages greater contemplation of grace, in the mirror image of how a monastery mimics the austerity of self-discipline. But who is to dissolve mountains, coins, tools, and strangers for the false sovereignty of the self? For Bayazid Bastami, fanā is not the annihilation of creation but the dissolution of the exclusive and legislative power of personhood, allowing the world to vibrate more intensely because it no longer revolves around the panoptical prison of subjectivity. Adab, an ethics of proportion, does not condemn the world to illusion but challenges the ego's sovereign centrality. The solipsistic indulgence that allows King Louis XV to shout, “After me, the deluge,” rather than humbly “my deluge shall pass.” It is not about replacing the self with god, nature, or consciousness but about restoring objecthood itself, where resources, people, and even money are encountered in proper measure. An exercise in restoring mizan, not by transcending symbols but by fostering good relations, is a spirituality that prevents any object, including the self, from becoming a universal mediator of others. If Capital elevates money as the measure of all things, the corrective step inspired by Bayazid is the dethronement of all claims to privileged centrality, with fanā serving as a restraint to counter economic accumulation. The yogi lying on reality’s crude bed of nails represents a transmigration of the self that hovers above necessity’s contingencies, absorbed in meditation to become a pure mirror that simultaneously erases the world in reflection. While the saint serves as a portal of retreat from the sensual world, the prostitute provides an interface for conditioned access to it, both bringing their imperatives, spiritual and physiological, to the exchange table between self and others. In politics, notably, individualism and collectivism are more or less structured within the same framework that constrains plurality with unity, dominated by an ideal that views divergence as lawless. Protecting plurality from reduction doesn’t equate to resolving plurality into unity; rather, reality is enriched by plurality without a universal eidos or telos. Decentering humanity reenchants the world, making trees branch out of the scenery, clouds drift past the weather forecast, coins spin beyond their purchasing power, and streetlights disengage from their utilitarian infrastructure. To the identity that is always seeking to annex alterity, the mizan awaits to restore the dignity of difference, not as an escape from the world but as a re-conjugation of the one and the many, interrupted by the insistence of a single object—be it the self, empire, or money—to become the universal measure.

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