This first seminar took place on tuesday the 8th of December at Dek 22

Program:

19.00 Presentation by Marco Sachy (Research Master student @ EIPE)

19.30 Short break

19.40 Comments:

         - Commenting economist: David Bassett (Research Master student @ EIPE)

         - Commenting philosopher: Sanne Van Driel (MPhil student @ EUR)

20.10 Open Discussion with attendants

Marco Sachy: "Across Monetary Paradigms: Monetary Tree and Monetary Rhizome"

        As a purposeful philosophical response to the actual world economic situation, I will unfold a monetary-economics interpretation of the first chapter of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattary Mille Plateaux - Capitalisme and Schizophrenie. The goal is to elicit the guideline for making a comparison between the Modern and Analytical metaphor of the 'tree' with the Post-Modern and Continental one of the 'rhizome' in view of a (re)interpretation of the 'monetary economic' in order to cope with the crisis from a fruitful pjilosophical perspective. The thesis is  that on the one hand a configuration with the 'tree' as both a syntactic (Cf. Noam Chomsky's 'syntagmatic tree') and epistemic leading metaphor (Cf. Francis Bacon who 'reads and decrypts the Book of Nature') brings about a hierarchical, top-down framework for producing scientific knowledge, and of course economic thought. This in turn leads to a limitation in the intrinsic possibilities of scientific knowledge whose production is in fact inherently and officially constrained in printed books and vertical-oriented university careers resulting from a pyramid-structured economic system in Western societies by putting the 'arborescent paradigm' at the root of modernity with dichotomy as the tree trunk. On the other hand and conversely, Deleuze and Guattari's 'rhizome' is a suitable metaphor to exemplify that in different configurations (and in this sense literally 'post-modern') such as nets or webs, knots' connections are the outcome of a now unified (and no more schizophrenic for the economic agents) systemic process, which is now a-centered, a-hierachical and horizontal. Indeed, the Monetary Tree is well exemplified by the oligarchic structure of economic policy insitutions which manage the 'systemic scarcity of money' at both national and global levels by inducing a competitive and thereby positional economic system - WB; IMF; ECB; FED, etc. By contrast, the Monetary Rhizome represents all the attempts made to counterbalance the scarcity-designed side effects of the fiat money system - for instance, Microfinance sector, Complementary local currencies, also solidarity-based ones, time money (LETS, Noppes in Amsterdam, Ithaca Hours etc.), or still scrip money, which conversely are always sufficient and induce cooperation and a more sustainable monetary system. Put it in another way, the economic rhizome promotes a relation to power, in which 'the best leadership is when at the end people claim they did it themselves'.