The most underestimated Uber-Text
„Living Currency“ by Pierre Klossowski is a very much underestimated text that can help us to understand evolutions of today and to look more sustainable forward into the 21st century.
It was when researching about the future of money and payment when I came across this text and started reading and was gripped and intrigued and felt I had found something unique. One of these rare moments in life when you discover something you know you will shape your thinking.
I then talked to someone who answered as always: of course I know. Not out of the view of an Alleswisser, but out of experience. And it was an answer that struked me. Of course she knew Pierre Klossowski and his groundbreaking text called “Living currency”.
Claire Parnet told me Michel Foucault had called the text an Uber text long before Uber was a thing. Claire had worked among many things with Gilles Deleuze on the famous Abecedaire and on the book “Dialogues”. Foucault had also called „Living Currency“ the greatest book of our time.
What stricked me with the Klossowski text is not what I found out while reading but what I find out every time I read it. It is a text although published 1970 that tells us much about today and and so the 21st century.
Born in Paris of parents with polish descent Pierre Klossowski became a writer, translator and artist. Bis brother was the painter Balthus. At the age of 18 Klossowski was the secretary of Andre Gide. In working about Marquis de Sade texts and re-editing them or in writing about sexuality he kickstarted debates and controversy.
Klossowski inspired with his work French philosophers like Deleuze and Foucault. So one can describe him as a philosophers philosopher. For avid readers his book might today also play the role of works by Epiktet or Sun Tse — a book one might look into when searching for inspiration or advice.
Now in the 21st century reading this text with the evolution of technology in mind, the rise of robots, AI, digital payments and currencies, the evolution of immersive media, spatial computing, Human Computer Interaction, Human Centered Design, the disappearance of computer systems into the cloud with AI assistants this text serves in a technological language as a Proxy. It allows reading while having a question in mind and challenging this question with arguments by Klossowski. So somehow like having a chat with someone on the internet who disguises his time and place in wrapping it up with other information.
For Klossowski „Living Currency“ is neither prostitution or slavery but humans themselves are used as currency, a living currency, and they can function as currency because they are sources of sensation, emotion and pleasure. This is the provocative argument he plans of humans in society: in taking a celebrity like Sharon Tate (for whom Quentin Tarantino found in „Once Upon the Time in Hollywood“ another ending) and her very tragic death as an example. „In the sphere of commerce, what counts is not the creature itself but rather the emotion it provokes in its possible consumer. To help us understand this, consider a false and banal example: the movie star, who represents only a single factor of production. When newspapers assess the dollar value of the visual qualities of someone like Sharon Tate, the day after her tragic death, or calculate the management costs or expenses of any other woman on the screen, industrialism itself is expressing the source of emotion in numbers, in terms of profitability or maintenance costs, and hence quantitatively. This is possible only because these women are not designated as „living currency“ but instead are being treated as industrial slaves.“
One of Deleuze’s reactions to the text of Klossowski: « You introduce desire into Infrastructure or inversely the category of Production into desire. » This is all very bold and helps to rethink our ultra mediated society today when Influencer turned into Sinnfluencer, omnipresent and always on. Which turn their faces into artificially blown visages based on beauty filters on platforms and which animate then the rendezvous at a beauty surgant to adapt the real faces to the image the sinnfluencers represent on the web.
Celebrity status one can argue is not the only thing, the pure presence does turn on platforms into desire for more and so into monetisation and a certain kind of value. Also videogames, social media platforms, streaming services only work with the desire of its users. And Deleuzes observation sheds a light on the core functionality of technology which is always based on human interaction.
This view on humanity in its core is perhaps the message today. Beside that is touches ground with numerous other subjects like Right on your body, freedom, Feminism, virtualisation, about the fact that more products are available than we can watch or listen to or play with. It is also book about real value of digital objects and so leads to the thinking of John Perry Barlow and his essay about „The Economy of Ideas“ from 1994. This is alone is a sharp contrast to the infinity of cyberspace Barlow claims.
The core of Klossowskis writing is his view on humans and humanity. In this sense reading Klossowski can inspire not only a rethinking of strategy or rewriting business-plans for digital endeavours. It can help to learn for a more sustainable and human relation to value and values especially in a time when digital trends like digitale currencies or AI seem to be blown beyond redeemable promise.
