Trans-Rational Cash: Ghost-Money, Hong Kong and Nonmodern Networks

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I examine through Bruno Latour's concept of nonmodern networks the intersections of the hyper-modernity of Hong Kong's ‘real’ money economy with that of an economy of ghost-money that, through the act of burning, serves as an offering to the dead and the divine. The essay reconfigures Latour's ‘modern constitution’ as it relates to philosophy, myth and modernity as they are organised around the values of a currency that trespass all boundaries.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the essay as well as Colin Danby, Seth Henderson, Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce, Selina Lai-Henderson, David Palmer and Scarlet Poon for their generous support and expertise.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Gray Kochhar-Lindgren is Professor and Director of the University of Hong Kong's Common Core, working with multiple partners to deepen the interdisciplinary general education experience of the university's students. With a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University, he has taught in the United States, Switzerland and Germany, and, in 2009–2010, served as a Fulbright Scholar at the Hong Kong American Center and the University of Hong Kong. The author of Narcissus Transformed; Starting Time; TechnoLogics; Night Café; Philosophy, Art, and the Specters of Jacques Derrida; and Kant in Hong Kong: Walking, Thinking, and the City, Dr Kochhar-Lindgren is currently working on philosophy in the streets, abiding with the impossible and the global transdisciplinary university.

ORCID

Gray Kochhar-Lindgren http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5593-0753

Notes

¹Latour uses ‘the Middle Kingdom’ to indicate the nonmodern throughout We Have Never Been Modern, linking it on occasion explicitly with China. Although I take his point that everything occurs in media res – without origin or endpoint – I am not sure that ‘middle’ is the best term, since it indicates known and measurable ends, to indicate the emergence of a network sensibility. I prefer the ‘between’, but there is no perfectly adequate descriptor. The Middle Kingdom in the traditional Chinese sense is certainly not applicable to rewriting the Modern Constitution.

²For excellent analyses of the historical development of these practices see Blake (2011), Hou (1975) and Scott (2007).

³In the preface to his 1841 dissertation, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, Marx identified his own, and philosophy's, task with that of Prometheus. ‘Philosophy makes no secret of it’, he writes,

[t]he confession of Prometheus: ‘In simple words, I hate the pack of gods' (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound) is its own confession, its own aphorism against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity. It will have none other beside. But to those poor March hares who rejoice over the apparently worsened civil position of philosophy, it responds again, as Prometheus replied to the servant of the gods, Hermes: ‘Be sure of this, I would not change my state / Of evil fortune for your servitude. / Better to be the servant of this rock / Than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus' (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound). Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.

⁴Derrida, analysing multiple uses of the trans- in the folies of the architect Bernard Tschumi, notes that

trans- (transcript, transference, etc) and, above all, de- or dis- . . . These words speak of destabilisation, deconstruction, dehiscence and, first of all, dissociation, disjunction, disruption, difference. An architecture of heterogeneity, interruption, non-coincidence. But who would ever have built in this manner? Who would have counted on only the energies in dis- and de-? No work results from a simple displacement or dislocation. Therefore, invention is needed. A path must be traced for another writing. (Derrida 1997: 333)

⁵In ‘Anaximander's Saying’, Heidegger develops a meticulously dense translation of the passage that comes to us as the oldest extant Greek philosophical fragment. Generally, it has been translated as, ‘[b]ut that from which things have their arising also gives rise to their passing away according to necessity; they give justice and pay penalty to each other for the injustice according to the ordinance of time’. Heidegger notes that the ‘usual view’ of the passage is that it simply observes that ‘[T]hings develop and then they decay, exhibiting thereby a kind of barter system of nature's unchanging economy’ (Heidegger 2002: 248). After developing his own reading, Heidegger translates the passage as ‘alongside the line of usage; for they let order and reck belong to one another (in the surmounting) of dis-order’, admitting that we can ‘only reflect on the translation by thinking through the saying. Thinking, however, is the poeticizing of the truth of being in the historical dialogue between those who think’ (Heidegger 2002: 280). This is not the time to follow the translation in detail, but suffice it to say that analytic links between nature's ‘barter system’, the ‘dis-jointure’ of the between, and the presencing of being, especially by the seer – who ‘sees the future tense out of the perfect’ (260) – could help illuminate the ‘debts’ to be paid by the living and the dead.

⁶See also Heidegger 2012, The Essence of Human Freedom. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1997: 36–37) was first published in 1929, The Essence of Human Freedom in 1930.

⁷See Lawrence Weschler 1999, Boggs: A Comedy of Values for delightful discussion of the many-faceted relationship between art, money, the ‘original’ and value.