Declarations Of Dependence

Declarations of Dependence

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.

Selected Declarations of Dependence

Selected Declarations of Dependence is based on a set of forty-six familiar proverbs, used and abused in various ways. The proverbs provide the entire vocabulary of the opening story, "Their Words, For You." In the section called "Perverbs and Paraphrases," Mathews explores the narrative implications of the crossed proverb or "perverb," in which two regular proverbs are mixed ("A rolling stone leads to Rome.").

Selected Declarations of Dependence