The Capital of Words

The refrain against so-called “rent seeking” always goes the same - I’m sure in the early years, when the development of written language took place there was the cry - but is this really necessary? After all, we can speak perfectly well to each other, why introduce an intermediary? And further before, writers of the pure and original will often state a case to the dawn of language itself, as some obscuring illusion that separates one from the real. A famous anecdote, Jean-Paul Sartre seething at the foot of a tree-stump - but how do I really know who you are?

The real is a concept emerging itself from alienation. The concept of there being some interior missed is one only constructed by a remove from that interior, and to be more radical, is a concept constructed by the very interior. The interior, the “real” is not the thing lost in the move to language, but the thing created for language. By constructing the notion of the real, one withdraws into the private, secondary space of language, by that very distance, speech is born. Hence the purpose of “Truth”, the ever important concept, emerges only as something that one is distanced from. The removal, the separation of oneself from the real is the act of language, to forever dance around, separate, and build second-order systems of reference-to, something that is instantly perceived at the moment of experience.

Language is always superstructural by this, secondary and above. It then mutates, develops orders of itself that then refer to the underlying previous. Written language first emerges as a set of pictograms, numerical dashes, evolving in complexity, as a tool of the leisured and ruling class, calculating economic, military, or mythic matters. It then fell, from its initial minority adoption, its infrastructure descended upon the below until the situation today where literacy is the norm in almost all of the world.

Information networks grow by this mechanism. Speech is interesting, far moreso than the “real”, as it has the potential for unlimited growth. While experience is monodirectional and single-moment, speech is infinite. One human can transmit to another, who can then uptake, reinterpret, pass on or change the message, across each node - each individual. This is the human capacity - to combine, interpret, morph - to create. That the power of “good and evil” was what got Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden of the Real is no coincidence. The divide, to appraise, is to invent language, to steal the power that was solely the province of God, as the originator of the “real”.

And so - civilization - brought about by this process of accumulating greater and greater levels of abstractions. Abstractions are fascinating in their ability to talk beyond their supposed direct reference, to talk to each other without any “truthful” reference to the “real”. An abstraction is capable of dealing with itself, as language will always refer to other language, which in turn, will only construct further and further accumulations of language as the ever-growing garden continues to be watered and fertilized by every speaker and writer.

And so too, was capitalism born, as early as civilization was itself. In one of the early issues of American Affairs, an article was published on so-called “grey money”, referring to these anonymous entities, private equity firms, hedge funds, investment groups, that controlled such an outsize portion of the world’s ownership. This is not an accident. Not out of any nefarious accumulation, from an earlier era when economics was more “real”, but out of how capitalism has functioned, always. Capitalism too, didn’t originate alien from some evil wizard or out of any exceptional new era when the steam engine was invented, as many of our contemporary thinkers will say on the question of theodicy, but out of this same process. Abstractions, formulated atop material things. In language, the narrative is more direct, with that of a sole individual first philosopher who decided to abstract the real from the experienced, but identical in economics. Material manipulation, the things of the world processed, harvested, yoked, sculpted, emerged via the same social-linguistic abstraction - now via the abstraction of money or trade, which we foolishly single out as separate from other identical forms of the process of abstraction via social-communicative relations between people. The grey-money often spoken of in anger is nothing new in this regard. Economics in itself, is nothing more than another emergent system, a fruiting body from the mycelium of language, identical to the internet, art, or etiquette.