Michael Tratner: Derrida's Debt to Milton Friedman.

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In the essay Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, Jacques Derrida says it is important to trace the literary consequences of certain events in economic history: "To study, for example, in so-called modern literature, that is, contemporaneous with capital - city, polis, metropolis - of a state and with a state of capital, the transformation of money forms (metallic, fiduciary - the bank note - or scriptural - the bank check), a certain rarification of payments in cash, the recourse to credit cards, the coded signature, and so forth, in short, a certain dematerialization of money, and therefore of all the scenes that depend on it." [1] The transformation Derrida describes is part of the development of late capitalism; though his essay analyzes a short story by the nineteenth century writer Baudelaire, the transformation away from "metallic" to "fiduciary" forms of money officially occurred in the twentieth century, as did the spread of credit cards and coded signatures. As the economic historian Randall Hinshaw notes, during the twentieth century "commodity money is gradually being displaced by fiduciary money . . . in 1937, gold or commodity money made up about 91% of the world’s monetary reserves . . . this figure had dropped to 49% in mid-1966." [2] In other words, fiduciary money became the dominant form of money at just about the time that Derrida began developing his literary theories.

[See also: The Gift – Mauss, Bataille, Hyde, and Derrida.]

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Alison Clarke: Consuming Children and Making Mothers : Birthday Parties, Gifts and the Pursuit of Sameness.

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ABSTRACT

Children's birthday parties, and related consumption, form an integral part of the social process of mothering in contemporary consumer culture. From the choosing of the 'right' present to the arrangement of the 'appropriate' party theme, an enormous pressure is exerted upon mothers to maintain social equilibrium through the circulation of their children and gifts amongst and across households. Ethnographic research in Britain suggests that the economic growth of children's party provision and services is coupled with a popular discourse that laments the loss of 'authentic' kinship-based birthday parties and home-made provisioning. In contrast to this spoken discourse, this article reveals how women in fact avidly embrace market goods and services; as a means of generating a culture of sameness that avoids the risks (to the motherhood as a collective, localised phenomenon) of exceptional or overtly accomplished mothering. Commercialised, mass produced goods and birthday services are used as a means of limiting expressive gift relations and hospitality. In this sense, the search for sameness, through the cultural practice of making children's parties, is at once liberating and potentially oppressive in its strive for the normative and its inadvertent exclusion of 'other' care-givers. Furthermore, children and their related material culture are consumed, through the birthday party circuit, as a means of generating specific types of mothering.

Keywords: children's birthday parties, contemporary motherhood, gifts, material culture.

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John Milbank: Can there be a General Gift Economy : Liberality Versus Liberalism.

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Today we live in very peculiar circumstances indeed. The welfare of this world is being wrecked by the ideology of neo-liberalism and yet its historic challengers – conservatism and socialism -- are in total disarray. Socialism, in particular, appears to be wrong-footed by the discovery that liberalism and not socialism is the bearer of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’. If the suspicion then arises that perhaps modernity and progress are themselves by no means on the side of justice, then socialists today characteristically begin to half-realise that their own traditions in their Marxist, Social Democratic and Fabian forms have been themselves too grounded in modes of thought that celebrate only utility and the supposedly ‘natural’ desires, goods and needs of isolated individuals.

For these reasons, there is no merit whatsoever in the contention of the ageing left (Habermas, Hobsbaum etc) that we are faced with an abandonment of progress and the enlightenment by a postmodern era. To the contrary, it is clear that what we are now faced with is rampant enlightenment, after the failure of secular ideologies derived from the 19th C – socialism, positivism, communism – that sought to some degree to qualify enlightenment individualism and formalism with organicism, distributive justice and socio-historical substance.

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