Making sense of money with magic

Money is a magical object endowed with the power to achieve the impossible.

An astute observation, it raised the energy in the room as Dr Azfar Hussain began his talk on the magical properties of currency in a world overwhelmed with capital. 

He was speaking on the final day of the international conference on the theme, ‘Magic and Literature’, organised by the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) on Saturday.

A prominent theorist, he roped in Karl Marx who in turn ropes in William Shakespeare to understand money through their discerning eyes.

‘Marx was a Shakespearefreak’, he said. Having read his works religiously during his time in exile at England, Marx discovered that the 16th century playwright had an astounding sense of political economy.

Shakespeare, who had only experienced an early form of capitalism, described money, or gold in his time, as a ‘visible yellow god’ with the power to bind opposites and even ‘mak’st them kiss’, said Dr Hussain.

Like one's mouth kissing his own bottom, as a Shakespearean Marx puts it.

Not only that, it “speak’st with every tongue,” he said, citing from ‘Timon of Athens’, making its language universal.  

Another declaration of its divinity was made by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who said, “God didn’t die, he was transformed into money.”

Now the question is, how does a piece of paper generate the kind of power which allows it to ‘talk, scream, command, unite, divide, create and destroy – asked the professor, as Marx did in his piece, ‘The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society’.

The answer lies in how capital has transformed the world to the point where people have lost touch with the essence of existence. 

“Money takes on life by itself... because of the system, we humans as agents do not project power on to it. What happens in an anthropomorphic matter,” he told bdnews24.com. 

“It is in the stubborn logic of capital, which is at the same time flexible... magic without exchange value ceases to be magical.”

Humans thrive in the ‘magical abundance of money’ but are dehumanised in its absence, meaning it has an eerie authority over the nature of being itself.  

Hussain said money was beyond the corporeal and can even be sexy by the way it is systematically juxtaposed with the female body. His inspection of money, with the interplay of Marx and Shakespeare, added a unique facet to the diversity of the conference’s treatment of magic. 

To top the performance, the Michigan-based Liberal Arts professor recited ‘A Poem Written for Cash’, which he wrote in a bar in a penniless-state as a graduate student.

“ ... they say poetry should be naked, or dressed, or full, or empty, or dirty or pure and I say cash is neither prose nor poetry but cash! cash! cash! ... ” 

Forty-five papers were presented in parallel sessions on the second day alone. The conference, which had bdnews24.com as media partner, witnessed a total of 87 academic papers on magic in relation to popular culture, nature, memory, commodity, resistance, reality and more.