/lit/ - Literature

>The homology Saussure established between labour and the signified on the one hand, and wages and the signifier on the other, is a kind of matrix which can be used as a base from which to survey political economy in its entirety Today, however, the contrary proves to be the case: signifiers are severed from signifieds and wages are severed from labour.

>‘Hot money' a name given to Euro-dollars, doubtless in order to characterise the senseless circulations of the monetary sign. Now, how ever, we should more accurately say that money has become 'cool', this term designating, following McLuhan and Riesman, an intense but non affective relativity of terms, a play sustained purely by the rules of the game, the commutation of terms and the exhaustion of these commutations. By contrast, 'hot' characterises the referential phase of the sign , with its singularity and the opacity of its signified in the real, its very powerful affect and its minimal commutability We are right in the middle of the sign's cool phase. The current system of labour is cool, every structural assemblage is, generally speaking, cool, while both 'classical' production and labour, hot processes par excellence, have been replaced by unlimited growth bound to a disinvestment of the contents and process of labour, which are cool processes.

>Coolness is the pure play of the values of discourse and the commutations of writing. It is the ease and aloofness of what now only really plays with codes signs and words, the omnipotence of operational simulation. To whatever extent affects or systems of reference remain, they remain hot. Any 'message' keeps us in the hot. We enter the cool era when the medium becomes the message. And this is precisely what has taken place with money Once a certain phase of disconnection has been reached, money is no longer a medium or a means to circulate commodities, it is circulation itself, that is to say, it is the realised form of the system in its twisting abstraction.

>Money is the first 'commodity' to assume the status of a sign and to escape use-value Henceforth, it intensifies the system of exchange-value, turning it into a visible sign, and in this way makes the transparency of the market (and therefore of rarity too) visible. Today however, money sanctions a further step: it also escapes exchange-value. Freed from the market itself, it become an autonomous simulacrum, relieved of every message and every signification of exchange, becoming a message it elf and exchanging amongst itself. Money is then no longer a commodity since it no longer contains any use-value or exchange-value, nor is it any longer a general equivalent, that is, it is no longer a mediating abstraction of the market. Money circulates at a greater rate than everything else, and has no common measure with anything else.

-- JB/SE&D