Discourse as capital
The famous critic of the modern Western culture Ivan Illich once said that language became capital in the 20th century. He and some intellectuals who closely worked with the then discourse noticed that words were gradually losing their independent meanings. Not that they became meaningless at all, but context started to determine a particular meaning of every word. And the context in its turn was completely stemmed from financial streams.
Unlike most people who were used to speaking their languages with no regard to any commercial value of the words, Illich saw a new framework for the relationship between discourse and finance. Total commercialization of everything we could say was quite a fresh perspective on the second signaling system in the days still not corrupted with the verbiage of commercial copywriting.
The precognition of Ivan Illiсh came true in the “advanced industrial” era. The discourse of highly monetized mass communication arose out of the requirements and wishes of those who were funding mass media. However, that was not the limit of the evolution of words. Illich could not anticipate how far it could go.
Now, we are living in the days when functions of money are transmitted to words of new global vocabulary. Words as units of meaning were always known to people throughout the ages. But today, we can use words as units of value capable of backing something (if not everything) in the material world. Even beyond any context.
Such activity as politics, for example, was always funded by various financial institutions in one or another form. To support a desired political order they were using either money as it is or anything that could be bought and anybody who could be hired for money. Today, a couple of sentences on toll-free Twitter can determine a direction to which an entire national economy should move along with all national treasures and debts.
In the past, the actual wealth went before what people were talking about. Today, a particular discourse precedes material possessions. In other words, modernist monetization of content is giving way to the postmodernist contextualization of economics.
Not everyone has realized it clearly but we all have already passed the threshold when the question about what came first — money or words was not a question any longer. Illich was hardly anticipating that a word instead of a coin could be accepted as either a unit of exchange or currency. Moreover, the very same symbols we use in words for our routine communication are applied to the creation of special sign systems (or languages) that can work as aggregators of value (Bitcoin). Such sophisticated inverse relationships between discourse and money could happen never but in the post-industrial world. Unfortunately, Ivan Illich (died in 2002) missed to capture it.
Some may argue that the functions of discourse described are fanciful and even far-fetched. They might notice that the unlimited commercialization of content undermines the very human culture where the meaning of many words always contained sacral significance — “in the beginning was the word”. Nothing but our unconscious holy awe before printed words talks on behalf of us in such a case. This atavism of the pre-modern times is irrelevant to the era of digital media. Besides, an old mechanism of monetization of printed texts which keeps dominating in many minds is living final days.
When buying books we pay a certain price for thousands of words in advance. Usually, we buy books before reading them. A lot of commercially created texts remain unsold and we consider their authors as losers. By default, we come to the conclusion that all those thousands of words in the failed books are worth nothing. Mercantilist mentality inherent in the modern-age market economy reveals itself in such behavior.
At the same time, we have nothing against the publishers who earn huge money through selling various non-commercial texts created in the distant past. Nobody cares about the copyright once the books’ authors have decomposed long ago. All actually known sacred books have long become commercially tradable. We often pay a much higher price for infantile comics than for a sacred text without hesitation. In fact, people desacralized printed words when the first booksellers appeared. The modern era made all our words conditionally valuable and sacredly neutral. The post-modern age is bringing value back to words. Moreover, it goes much farther proposing us to evaluate things around with nothing but discourse.
To grasp how it might work, it is necessary to realize the power of words in one or another context. It is important to figure out how much energy a certain discourse can release. We should always keep in mind the way we perceive the reality around — we are continuously thinking about the world to keep it existing. And we do thinking with words. We spell out the world, we articulate reality. Language is the only creator of reality and the mirror of existence, like it or leave it.
For illustrative purposes, let’s consider a contemporary case when two confused words on social media can change the reality around. Please note, that the physical phenomena staying behind the given words remain the same. Compare the two following nouns: “rebels” and “terrorists”. In the context of the present war in Ukraine, your civil status can be changed from a free citizen to a prisoner (needless to say that the realities of both statuses differ very much) if you confuse those words in the political Ukrainian discourse. The people who can be called either “rebels” or “terrorists” are the same: they are pro-Russia protestants from the Donbas region. But the official Ukrainian propaganda calls them terrorists only.
Historically speaking, any political persecution appears when a certain discourse goes counter to what state officials proclaim. Nothing new is in such well-known phenomena as clandestine printing and underground literature as well. They were invented not in the postmodern era. The discourse of revolutionary organizations was always non-commercial. Activists were channeling their slogans towards masses to change a certain social order that, in its turn, could potentially alter the then economic conditions (this is why, by the way, all social revolutions finally failed, and we will get back to this issue later more than once). But in the present digital revolution, definite commercial drivers are available in any “revolutionary” discourse per se. For example, any mass-media content about global warming entails a certain business effect even if the general public remains unaware of it.
Stock markets react on such tiny pieces of content as tweets. It does not matter whether the tweets were created intentionally to provide such an effect or not. Hence, even random discourse from a virtual space can affect the real world. It means that such a discourse contains an independent commercial price, a capital with a particular countable value. Moreover, not the content itself (what is said), but the very availability of such content (the fact that something is said in a particular context) plays a critical role in all of this.
Talking about content, we mean not just pure texts. Various combinations of visuals and words, videos supplemented with speeches, and even graffiti all constitute the present discourse. However, those who consider words outdated in comparison with images are making a fundamental mistake. Even though visuals seem to dominate over the attention of the present audience, any video content cannot be created without a scenario that is a certain narrative no matter whether it is organized in a consistent textual plot or words spontaneously ramble in mind.
When we see an image, a certain discourse appears in our mind disregarding whether we are aware of it or not. This is how our highly-socialized thinking works in general. But what is new in this process is a triggering effect of the contemporary discourse that pushes us to do something or (more likely) to wish something. In the present over-commercialized world, it inevitably implies the movement of money in one or another form.
This century provides people with special environments where discourse gains unprecedented power. Virtual locations, where few dozens of words could entail very significant consequences for the entire humanity, appeared on the internet. Twitter is one of the most influential virtual playgrounds where each word is literally worth gold. This is where discourse (content + context) confers value on events in the real world. Again, please pay your special attention to the fact that a purely virtual phenomenon influences what we are used to calling the reality.
Why is Twitter so powerful today? How odd it may sound, Twitter provides what is really rare these days — verifiability of data. Almost nobody can personally check what stays behind the words said in public by one or another celebrity. Common people around the world are deprived of personal access to powers-that-be in most cases. An average housekeeper from Washington DC has a zero chance to offer a sufficiently appealing topic to the US President to be invited to the White House for a private audience. Even top-level bureaucrats have a few chances to meet their President face-to-face. In contrast to “the dark times” of the past when the farthest peasant could potentially get a personal audience with a duke, the present population has to be content with public images of the elite broadcasted by media channels only.
Twitter became a mouthpiece of many national leaders not for nothing. In contrast to newspapers and television, Twitter gives an opportunity (highly virtual and pretty questionable in terms of the authenticity of respondents from both sides) to communicate directly to those whose words can change the world. And that’s worth a lot.
Another critical characteristic of such an environment is accessibility. In contrast to the traditional places of importance such as parliaments, palaces, and cabinets where fateful discourses are delivered by quite small groups of powers-that-be, the contemporary social platforms involve broad masses with little to no moderation of what each participant can say. This is something more than just freedom of speech. This is freedom of access to power controls.
Once we are just entering the new field of post-social transformations, only a few of us are capable of realizing the true power we all hold in our hands. Obsolete governing patterns of liberal democracy (not to mention more archaic social models) prevent us from using those power controls with full force. But it will happen rather sooner than later when people give up thinking of themselves a flock headed by shepherds. But more on that later.
The present financial system is, probably, a sphere where words can outweigh any event happening in reality. Rumors and populist speculations affect the value of various commodities badly. In quite a usual phrase from a daily newsfeed “oil prices started rising after the recent news about…”, the keywords are namely “after news” while the very event described in the news has the secondary importance.
Cryptocurrencies are even a more telling example. A brief media publication from some famous non-crypto (!) investor which reflects his doubts in the legal status of crypto can crash the exchange rate of BTC almost instantly. Thousands of people lose their money as a result. At the same time, a couple of encouraging tweets from a famous crypto guru can trigger another bull run of Bitcoin at exchanges. Thousands of crypto holders (“hodlers” for people in the know) earn a lot as a result.
In contrast to both traditional literature and conventional press, such a post-modern provider of textual information as the blogosphere endows words with hitherto unusual functions. Words can act as money in the very modus operandi of how blogging runs. It does not really matter if your blog’s content is composed of images, videos, and textual posts collected from any other people. If it gains a certain number of comments and “likes”, the attention of the audience reflected in words starts bringing profit to you. In many cases, if you do blogging you run a business. In some cases, it is legitimate to say that bloggers write not for money, they literally write money.
The social network industry as a whole can be considered as digital objectification of various vibrating discourses that go in parallel. Any narrative, even the most “groundless” is manifested in impulses of a binary code. The virtual medium is thoroughly drenched in commercial relations. This is where just words do matter while everything staying behind them is out of our personal fact-checking. And words keep evolving in our vocabularies under the impact of one or another context when meanings migrate from discourse to discourse. Their evolution can go in both directions as well. In other words, the value of a word can go up and down over time.
Even though the evolution of words is quite natural, it goes almost beyond our awareness. Unlikely anybody can explain why some words are gaining value while the other ones are losing it. It happens continuously but covertly. It is barely traceable by a broad public. The one who intuitively grasps which word costs the most at any given moment can get an opportunity to create a bigger capital by submitting a more appealing content.
The so-called “fancy buzzwords” symbolize the phenomena that are overestimated in broad discourse in most cases. “Sustainable development”, “global warming”, “fake news”, “artificial intelligence” are just a few examples of expressions the true meanings of which are heavily blurred due to misuse within irrelevant discourses. The frequency with which those words were used in public has almost devalued their capital to zero. Their linguistic strength became anorexic. However, at the beginning of their “semantic careers,” they brought a huge capital to those who were the first to implant them in mass consciousness.
Intuition, truth be told, is not enough to be a successful “discourse capitalist”. Knowledge is also required. A wide educational horizon won’t hurt when such a cliche as, for example, “democracy” needs to be used properly in one or another context. Cliches become cliches when the majority consider that everyone understands their original meaning by default. But in most cases, meaning by default is a trap. “Democracy” is a good example of how a word can change its original meaning for the opposite one over time.
“The power of the majority” in ancient Greece has mutated into “the power of the minority” in the present liberal system of electoral democracy. Thus, the “democracy” term itself has to be supplemented with a certain qualifier to have some value larger than zero. So, “direct democracy” comes closer to the Greek original while “liberal democracy” more likely reflects “the power of the minority”.
The practice is the third main factor for obtaining advanced “discourse literacy” in addition to both intuition and education. It means staying tuned to the ever-changing stream of consciousness going through global networks. Lurking continuously between various discourses on social media we can work out our ability to recognize which words have the highest value in one or another context. To be a “discourse capitalist” means collecting powerful words in a similar way we collect money — after getting through a certain threshold our modest savings can turn into capital. It makes our discourse so contextually relevant that the other people will have to follow our content almost unintentionally being hooked by the carefully selected words that shine like gold coins.
And finally, the true magic of nowadays has to happen: money will find its way to our pockets once the gravitation of our words becomes irresistible. The self-evolving mechanism “context-content-money” will start revolving around everything we are talking about like a perpetual motion machine with no fuel.
However, it only seems magic being actually just another expression of the “money makes money” law. The only difference is in the form of capital. In the present era of global social interactions via digital channels, capital has no option but to take the form of discourse. Once the very access to content on the internet is one of the basic human rights nowadays, the general capitalization of our routine is achieving an unprecedented degree. Capital has never been so easily available for broad masses. Today, our own will is the only thing needed to be immersed in the available ocean of various discourses. The great variety of contents around us is the ocean of infinite capital that, nonetheless, stays indifferent to both consumers and creators. This is our personal choice either to use this medium as a means of movement or to stay adrift.
Intuition, education, and practice all constitute a set of capabilities necessary to deliver a valuable discourse. But the problem is that such sort of discourse is inherent in the actually existing paradigm of modernity destined to be replaced. This is about a clear meaning available in every word even though it has certain mobility to migrate between different symbol carriers.
We accept the flexibility of the word meanings in the ever-changing fabric of the internet content, but the majority of us can hardly accept the right of a word to have no meaning at all. More specifically, we can accept the availability of meaningless words in our discourse, but the opportunity to exploit them consciously on a day-to-day basis is still far from our usual content creation. Yes, we use them sometimes, but we do it automatically just to fill the gap between the other meaningful words.
“Decentralization” and “cryptoeconomy” are the words whose functions in most cases have quite a parasitic nature. Although they have no meaning in many discourses, they sound great. We can use such words just for fun on Facebook keeping in mind that they are carriers of nothing. The mass “facebookers” won’t notice a trick most probably because the modernity left a deep imprint of causation in their consciousness: if somebody says “decentralization”, it must mean something. A clear smell of postmodernity is available in a meaningless discourse. And this is not for the masses.
Only few brilliant postmodernist creators can deliberately operate a meaningless discourse in an organic graceful manner. David Lynch, for example, creates movies intelligent criticism of which is impossible. Any interpretation of their plots cannot go beyond what is happening on the screen. His oeuvre is the distilled postmodernist aesthetics. No undertones, allusions, or hidden messages are available there. Neither David Lynch himself nor any other person could unscramble a narrative of the visual sequence. And this is not because the pure truth emanates from the screen, but because any postmodernist discourse is not determined by causation.
Nonetheless, anybody can try to find personal truth in it. Why not? Since exclusive rights on the truth of the highest instance belong to nobody, we all are free to choose our own private truth supposedly available at any discourse. Full freedom from big narratives of the past along with their “concrete” morality is the greatest challenge of postmodernism.
From time to time, in the epoch of the “sustainable” modernity, some texts of the postmodernist type was created. In contrast to the movies of David Lynch, they were composed of several covert layers of meaning that overlapped each other through numerous allusions and quotes having little to no connections to the main plot. Being objectively meaningless, such texts held a certain value when subjective perusal either endowed them with some individual meaning or brought just aesthetic satisfaction to readers.
One of the oldest examples of such books is “Ulysses” by James Joyce. It was created long before the postmodernist discourse appeared in mass culture. If we try to read its main text without checking all quotes, references, and footnotes that constitute two-thirds of the entire text, quite a legitimate question may arise: what is in it for me? Trivial mass consciousness cannot recognize any value in Joyce’s masterpiece since its value is hidden between the lines and in multiple references. Indeed, special intellectual sensibility is required to grasp the value of such a complicated content.
But aesthete intellectuals are in awe of “Ulysses”. James Joyce masterfully combined two in one: a multilayer formation of allusions making a curious mind to get lost in references to the world literature and the aesthetic enjoyment of reading a trivial but artistically created story. Even if two thirds of the text stay beyond understanding, any reader having the taste for postmodernism can recognize a huge literary capital in the discourse of James Joyce. This is an example of how words gain value without having to meet the consistency of the “classic” narratives.
A characteristic sign of discourse that is turning into a capital in the logic of postmodernity is an opportunity to pay for the words independent from their certain meaning. Isn’t it about control? As Michel Foucault used to say, the one who controls discourse controls everything. Is anybody capable of taking control over the global discourse with money?
Such suspicion seems legitimate, but it reflects the logic of modernity. Millions of separate pieces of content coexist simultaneously in the present virtual environment. They cannot and do not constitute any common discourse since the days of big narratives have gone. Today, It is hard to control even your own discourse to be adequately relevant to the zeitgeist. And it is always worth remembering the current relationships between discourse and finance: just discourse creates value, not vice versa.
Individual acceptance of the value of any particular piece of content is anticipated in the nearest future when a peer-to-peer mode of interactions on the network becomes a norm. The negation of outdated forms of capital is what the postmodernist discourse leads to. Material wealth is becoming conditional in virtual environments while discourse is turning into an unconditional capital. Creativeness staying behind such capital outweighs social conventions staying behind money. We should liberate discourse from the dictatorship of meaning the same way capital is exempted from the dictatorship of both material commodities and fiat money.
Traditions and society, meanings and material wealth, financial capital and outdated narratives all are in question in the run-up to the post-industrial paradigm. The future post-human texts will have very different fates. The concoction of postmodernity is boiling now and its scent in the form of streams of special discourse goes through the white noise of today’s late modernity. Those who have nostrils must smell.
