Planning to Flee from Financing
Continuing to to chart lines of flight from my earlier dispatch on fugitive planning, this dispatch introduces a second project in fugitive planning in order to further qualify my propositions regarding alternatives to administration and supervision. The project of “planning to flee from financing” introduced in this dispatch is a complementary project to that of “planning to flee from schooling” introduced in my last dispatch.
“If it don’t make money, it don’t make sense.” — That is gist of the domineering statements, implements, and environments that form the capitalist powers that prevail over our deathly world of suffering.
Capitalist power formations are bent on filtering and channeling what makes money apart from what doesn't make money, privileging the former over the later. The end result of this filtering and channeling: what makes money comes to make the most sense, and everything else either comes to make less sense or becomes nonsensical.
You will never find a job doing philosophy that way.
You won’t make any money with that style of art.
Nobody is going to fund that line of scientific research.
If the lines above make sense to you, it is because you are familiar with the financial statements implied by these lines: bank statements, credit statements, billing statements, and invoice statements, of course, but also statements like credit reports, which aggregate the earlier mentioned statements in order to facilitate the normalization and optimization of their distributions and trends. The existence and prevalence of such financial statements are what allow us make sense of so many propositions which take it for granted that practicing philosophy, art, and science must either be (i) a way to turn our time into money, (ii) a way to spend what extra money we might have when we have time to waste, or (iii) a senseless waste of time and money that we cannot spare.
The domineering financial statements discussed above often work in tandem with the domineering educational statements that I discussed in my previous dispatch. Working in tandem, these statements privilege the well-schooled and the well-financed; they tell us, “If you ain’t been schooled, you ain’t really learned nuthin’. But school learnin’ ain’t all that! Those who ain’t bein’ schooled to make money are bein’ schooled in nonsense.”
“Mastered economics 'cause you took yourself from squalor…”
To drive home this point a little bit, let us regard how it is that concatenations of financing and schooling powers stratify our societies.
In first place, the well-schooled moneymakers, the Masters of the Universe, live the highlife.
In last place, the poorly schooled scroungers, the Wretched of the Earth, live the lowlife.
Jostling and mingling to make a life for themselves somewhere betwixt and between the highlife and the lowlife, we find the poorly schooled moneymakers, the Horatios, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, we find the well-schooled scroungers, the Rogers. The Horatios endeavor to use their hard won economic capital as leverage to gain a higher social status; the Rogers, by contrast, endeavor to use their cleverly won cultural capital as leverage to the same end.
The Masters of the Universe play the Horatios and the Rogers against each other and against the Wretched of the Earth by extending honorary Master of the Universe status to the Horatios who can make the most money and to the Rogers who can secure the most rarefied educational and cultural credentials. The ruse is, of course, that the Horatios and the Rogers have to grapple amongst themselves and trample over the Wretched of the Earth in order to win honorary Master of the Universe status.
Masters of the Universe (n.): Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) coined the term “Masters of the Universe” in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) to describe Wall Street types — specifically white males working in the FIRE industries (i.e., finance, insurance, and real estate) who thought they could do whatever they wanted without answering to anyone. Thirty-five years hence, the Big Tech-Bros (i.e., the surveillance capitalists) have joined the FIRE-men in forming the upper echelons of the Masters of the Universe.
Rogers (n.): 16th century thieves' slang for begging vagabonds who pretend to be poor scholars from Oxford or Cambridge.
Horatios (n.): persons resembling characters from the fiction of Horatio Alger (1832-1899) who rise from humble beginnings to achieve success through self-reliance and hard work.
Wretched of the Earth (n.): Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) coined the term “Wretched of the Earth” in his treatise of the same name (1961) to describe the oppressed masses of peoples — primarily black, brown, and indigenous peoples — whose lives had been rendered superfluous and expendable by the advance of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
I have a dream. It is (i) to be able live and learn otherwise than being schooled, (ii) to be able to make sense of my life and my learning otherwise than making money, and (iii) to be able to do all the above without being counted amongst the Wretched of the Earth and subjected to murder as the unintended consequence of routine disciplinary action, or as normal(ized) accident, or as the collateral damage of society’s pursuit of progressive optimization.
How, I wonder, might I deconstruct the domineering statements, implements, and environments that have furnished me with motives, means, and opportunities to dismiss my dream as a mere fantasy?
And, going further, how might I (re-)construct convivial statements, implements, and environments so as to furnish myself with motives, means, and opportunities to make my dream a reality?
These are my problems. What are my solutions?
Well, my instincts are telling me that I ought to begin by deconstructing domineering statements and (re-)constructing convivial statements…
Recapping the conclusion of my previous dispatch, rather than regarding a student’s wretched transcript as an evaluation of a student's ability to learn, I propose regarding their wretched transcript as an evaluation of the performance of the schooling system, and I propose using the wretched transcript not to reform the school system but, instead, to determine what artful reparations are owed to the student for having been failed by the school system. What's more, I propose that artful reparations in this regard should come in the form of time and resources to conduct experiments in living and learning otherwise than being schooled. With respect to schooling, then, I would deconstruct wretched transcripts that document students’ academic failures and use what remains of them to (re-)construct alternative statements that would enable students to conduct and log their own experiments in living and learning otherwise than being schooled.
I would proceed in a similar manner when it comes to financing. Rather than regarding an individual’s wretched credit report as an evaluation of an individual's ability to earn, I propose regarding the wretched credit report as an evaluation of the performance of the financial system, and I propose using the wretched credit report not to reform the financial system but, instead, to determine what artful reparations are owed to the individual for having been failed by the financial system. What's more, I propose that artful reparations in this regard should come in the form of time and resources to conduct experiments in making sense of life and learning otherwise than making money. With respect to financing, then, I would deconstruct wretched credit reports that document individuals’ economic failures and use what remains of them to (re-)construct alternative statements that would enable individuals to conduct and log experiments in making sense of life and learning otherwise than making money.
