Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Care

by Scott Ferguson

Declarations of Dependence rethinks the historical relationship between money and aesthetics in an effort to make critical theory newly answerable to politics. Scott Ferguson regrounds critical theory in the alternative conception of money articulated by the contemporary heterodox school of political economy known as Modern Monetary Theory. Applying the insights of this theory, Ferguson contends that money, rather than representing a private, finite, and alienating technology, is instead a public and fundamentally unlimited medium that harbors still-unrealized powers for inclusion, cultivation, and care.

Ferguson calls Modern Monetary Theory’s capacious ontology of money the “unheard-of center” of modern life. Here he installs this unheard-of center at the heart of critique to inaugurate a new critical theory that aims to actualize money’s curative potential in a sensuous here-and-now. Declarations of Dependence reimagines the relation between money and aesthetics in a manner that points beyond neoliberal privation and violence and, by doing so, lends critical theory fresh relevance and force.
             

222 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2018

Reviews

[Seth Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important work that precipitated, the burgeoning project(s) of humanities scholarship centering around MMT-inflected political economy. Though I am interested in and sympathetic to this work, this book remains quite dense. For the most part, this worked to its favor as the use of jargon often evoked a paragraph of meaning with only a word. Also in its defense, it makes no pretensions to being at all introductory. Still, I found myself puzzled on occasion. That said, there are truly great and important insights contained here.

I also fully expect myself to return to the text and references of this provocative work. I would not be surprised if my understanding and appreciation grew. Nevertheless, at this point, there are few, if any, people I can imagine myself recommending this slim tome to.

[Bob · Rating 1 out of 5]

Either MMT is just standard post-Keynesianism that's really into the monetary dimensions of economics, which is fine but then why all the misleading rhetoric, or it is essentially arguing that government spending involves few or no trade-offs between different types of productions & services, inflationary pressures are rare, & that taxation increases are unnecessary. The latter argument is a severe misapprehension that will deflate a left project even quicker than the deficit hawkery that all right-thinking post-Keynesians & Marxists decry, even though MMTers like to posture as if they're the only people on the left that think the government can spend more than it currently does.

As much as one can discern through this manifesto's impressive & aesthetically charged array of Thomist & Heideggerian jargon, it seems to embrace a cartoon physics perspective on the absolute limitlessness of printing money w/o externalities. It also seems to be pitting the service & care sectors of the economy against the productive sectors, stoking a conflict that one would think would only serve the interests of the billionaires whose taxes MMTers, for some reason, don't want to raise.

[Daniel Hawley · Rating 5 out of 5]

if i never again read a book this good, so be it

[Denys Bakirov · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very important work. The analysis traces predatory capitalism back to its roots in the haecceitas of of Duns Scotus is spot on. Implementation of MMT redeems the synthesis of Thomas Aquinas.