Talking Money - A Conversation with Georgios Papadopoulos

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens, initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of The Critical Practices Program in fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open ended process of relationing which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series, I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

Today, I am having a conversation with Georgios Papadopoulos. With a background in economics. Georgios combines economics and philosophy with an exploratory artistic practice that focuses on the institution of money, its socio-economic functions and the technologies that support it. Georgios is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement VII, with a collective research focus on the notion of community economies. In this conversation, we discuss his research into money as an institution to trace alternative systems of valuation that lead the way towards a community economy.

Georgios, welcome to Pali-Room.

Thank you, Myrto. I am really happy to be here. Somehow this is a very nice way to end these seven weeks long residency and also to look back to what happened and also reflect on my practice. So thank you again for having me.

Thank you for joining me and thank you for allowing me to reflect together on these seven weeks. I would like to start this conversation by discussing a bit your practice. I know that you have been oscillating between two positions, that of the economist and that of the artist. Two rather conflicting viewpoints, one could say. I am curious to know why did you turn to art and how do you negotiate these two positions in your life?

I think this move away from conventional economics and towards a more artistic oriented research had to do with the growing feeling of dissatisfaction with conventional economics, that reached a peak in the times of the financial crisis that started in 2009 and somehow really hit Greece in 2010 and 2011 until 2015. So, through my position as an economist I found it progressively difficult both to discuss with my peers, but even more to find a position from where I could produce a discourse that could make sense of what was happening around me. Also, like a discourse that could help friends, family, my social circle to come to terms with this kind of very devastating and very —I would say— traumatic experience of the financial collapse in 2008-2009. Finding myself, so to say, unable to articulate a critique from within economics, I progressively moved away and started off thinking different kind of strategies, but also different kind of discourses to come into terms with what was happening and at the same time, I found myself institutionally in a context that was very, I would say, supportive of this kind of shift from economics to the arts.

At the time, already in the beginning of 2008 and until the end of 2009, exactly at the time when the financial crisis started really developing as saying the magnitude of the failure of the financial markets I was a resident at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, in the Theory department. I was still kind of in the shoes of the economist. Maybe an alternative or critical economist, but nonetheless an economist. The characteristic of this academic institution or this educational institution, if you prefer, was an idea or a methodology of transdisciplinarity that was based on bringing together practitioners from the arts, from design, and also theorists trying to find ways to build more collective works, collective projects that could somehow combine this kind of three sets of tools or three sets of practices. So on the one hand, there was this kind of collapse, both, I would say institutional, but also theoretical in what we could refer to the neoclassical economic paradigm. And at the same time, I was finding myself in a context where I was exposed and somehow, I would say, even infected by different practices and different ideas. So this pushed me towards the arts.

During the first years, immediately after the end of this residency, I was very much engaged with performance art and I was somehow, maybe even sometimes tempted to self describe what I was doing as artistic practice. Nonetheless, the more I was getting into the art world, the more uneasy I felt with this kind of label, mainly because my artistic training was relatively incomplete. Also, I think my contribution in the artistic or creative process was not very substantial in terms of creating a practice. What I was actually doing was kind of being in a constant dialog with artists. So, I realized that I was not really an artist myself. I was not doing exactly artistic practice, but I was an interlocutor with artists trying to explain what's happening in the financial markets at the time, trying to formulate a critique of neoclassical economics, of the neoliberal economic paradigm, and trying to help them to develop a practice that was kind of conductive or productive towards this critique. This kind of collaboration continues until today and I think that was also part of the reason that or the attitude or the intention with which I was coming into The School of Infinite Rehearsals and how I worked with my colleagues, my fellow residents. But even though this kind of trajectory continues, I tend to describe myself now more as a writer than an artist, and I think this kind of identity very much describes my practice, which is mainly writing, thinking, being in conversation with artists and theorists, but at the same time create this kind of open space and distance myself from a specific kind of disciplinary framework of economics, either mainstream or heterodox.

What resonated with me by reading through your work is how you treat money not only as a system of exchange, but actually as a system of representation. Something that I feel is often being overlooked in the case of money. I am borrowing your own words here "how money is actually a technology of intermediation, a governance structure of itself that not only facilitates the circulation of economic value, but also regulates a process of collective negotiation around the valuation."

In many respects, the financial crisis gravitated around money, which is one of the main topics of my research and also the topic of my PhD that I did Rotterdam. I think it's very important to understand money not just as a means of exchange, but also as you suggest, as a system of representation. In conventional economics this is described as the unit of account or as the measurement machine of the economic system. So, it's the existence of money and the intermediation of money in exchanges that gives rise to the system of prices. The system of prices is itself a symbolic order, a system of representation that puts commodities, services and even people in a kind of ordering, in a system of comparison in terms of an absolute quantity of value. So if we think how our social environment is structured, how our experience of society is structured by this kind of process, as we get enculturated in the economic system, we get progressively trained to see things in terms of economic value, in terms of prices. So we learn to recognize what is important by the value that is attached to it by the markets. And this value is always made my money. So in that sense, money becomes a value of organizing and understanding the world.

Considering value as a structure and money as a medium through which we construct meaning, I am thinking that social transformation demands a collective redefinition or conceptualization of value. I would like to ask you, what other systems of intermediation would you propose for the democratization of the economic system?

I think this is a very central question about how the economy functions, but also how the economic system has this tendency to colonize all the other systems of social representation. I think this is both a political and I would say, practical of technical issue. Political, of course, because, neoliberal institutions tend to present themselves as an all-encompassing system of social organization. So there is this kind of underlying assumption that the economic value or price is the ultimate criterion of any kind of political decision. For example, if one looks at the environment with this market for CO2 emission, or health care, or education, everything in the end of the day boils down to questions of costs, efficiency and basically money. Nonetheless, of course, it is I think, obvious to anyone that this system is very abstractive and also ignores the most elementary human or social right. There is no place for solidarity. There is no place for compassion. There is no place for morality. There's even no place for aesthetics or pleasure. So this is, I guess, the very obvious case of value against value. The economic system provides this monocultural system of money where everything is prized and everything is weigthed and calculated and on the other hand, we can see how society, social movements, organizations, artistic institutions, individual people, but also counter cultures try to articulate first their own kind of system of valuation developing it according to a specific kind of set of principles, of criteria, of even moral values, if you want, and at the same time, how to position this alternative system vis a vis like the market valuation. There is this constant struggle.

There have been efforts to organize alternative systems of valuation that are very similar to money by infusing them with social ideas. Alternative currencies is a very common example of this process, not always very successful, but nonetheless, οne of the efforts that is made to infect the economic and monetary system with values of solidarity, values of respecting the environment, values of care and values of local support mechanisms. And I think this is one of the ways that this could move forward. Another way is completely ignoring the monetary system and its kind of system of prices and establishing relations that are not based on exchange, but rather on solidarity, on community, more religious principles or artistic ideas. So there are these, I would say, two possibilities. On the one hand, try to reprogram money to introduce other values than individualism and efficiency and the other way to maybe ignore as much as possible the whole system of economic exchange and market valuation.

What you were saying brings me to another question that has to do with scale. It's always to my mind that small communities or small groups of people try to deal differently with money by creating alternative currencies or other ways of formulating their exchanges. But we're always talking about small groups and there seems to be no way that we can globally create the system that would pervade the whole of society, let's say.

I guess this is also a little bit both the advantage, but also the disadvantage of the monetary system. It's a very simple mechanism that collects information and produces very simple properties about commodities and relations. You can scale it up as much as as you like, especially now with information or communication technologies where information travels much faster and the possibility of processing this very simple information is also very easy and efficient. You get his kind of tendency of market system to get globalized. But unfortunately, when we we talk about qualitative valuation, not quantitative as in the case of price, then the definition of specific kind of relationships, or specific kind of acts of valuation needs to be somehow mediated by a more sophisticated system of negotiation. It's not just supply and demand. It's not just about revealing the preferences of the consumers and the producers that needs to be considered, but this had to be modified by other kind of consideration, about the environment or about social values or aesthetic ideas or considerations. So it's very difficult, first of all, to decide which of these principles should be included in this kind of negotiation and even more difficult is how to negotiate this in a larger scale.

Usually when you have communities that are small, homogeneous and relatively well connected, then this possibility can arise and it does arise and there is time and space and also desire for this kind of negotiations. But the more heterogeneous a group becomes, the bigger it becomes, this kind of process becomes very difficult. And also even the very basic agreement of a shared system of values is lacking. So, scaling up is always an issue, but at the same time, maybe there is a reason that this scaling up should not happen. We think that the globalized marketplace is a good thing, but at the same time, there is a lot of concern about how this globalized system destroys diversity, how it imposes very specific kind of monopolistic tendencies, how it defines, transforms and alienates communities from their basic values. So I think that it is maybe not necessarily a good thing to always work on a very high level of abstraction. Maybe this inability to try to scale up this more socially conscious or morally important systems of exchange might be also a sign that we maybe should not try to move towards that direction, or at least always keep this kind of lower level considerations present and active in the whole process.

We can also recognize an interesting inversion. It's not only that money produces a new system of representation. The case of banknotes and coins are a very useful example and I was wondering whether you could elaborate maybe a bit more on how currency relies, but also contributes to the process of collective representations of community identity and value, and comment on how this mechanism might work now when currency is completely phased out by digital platforms of economic valuation and exchange.

As I suggested already, systems of exchange create this kind of homogenized tendency towards communities by imposing a shared system of economic valuation. But at the same time, for money to operate, we have to have this kind of community. And this was both true for more alternative or socially conscious economic exchange systems, but I think also on the level of the nation states or now in the case of intergovernmental areas, like the European Union. Even there, there must be some kind of an elementary consensus about identity, about trust, about institutions, about civil society in order for money to operate. This is already being represented and pursued by the very materialization of money into currencies. When we look at banknotes and coins, we always see a kind of a very specific set of symbols. We see national important landscapes or historically defining monuments of a culture that suggests this kind of construction of a set identity. We see important figures of the states who somehow are connected with a historical trajectory of development, of a national identity. So this somehow tries to communicate already the fact that there is a community that serves both a cultural system of references, historical continuity, but also currency. And this is the very elementary basis for the building of a trust that money needs to inspire in order to operate.

At the same time, this kind of production of an iconography of national identity and economic value is also a sign or a representation towards other countries. Money and currency is one of the first things that people would recognize when they go into a new foreign country. Also, even you could say a cliche representation of the Greek or the now European or maybe Russian or Japanese national identities is both a construction that is directed towards the nation state internally, but also it's one of the most recognizable areas where this identity is represented internationally for the rest of the world. I think that currency next to flags is probably the second most important place for representing and communicating national identity. So there are these two parallel processes. On the one hand, you see that money is kind of homogenizing a culture, by imposing a unitary system of valuation, but at the same time it relies to this kind of homogenization in order to function and represents it through this kind of very simple iconographies of what a nation means or how a nation is defined both geographically, culturally and historically.

So what happens now —and I think it's already maybe an interesting thing to look at the euro— is that currencies are becoming more and more invisible. Because we use different platforms to pay, from bank cards to mobile phones, maybe even digital currencies or cryptos and this kind of level or this function of representation that money used to fulfill, somehow disappears at the same time. If we see the euro, which is a very interesting kind of experiment, but also one of the youngest currencies —I think it's now maybe a little bit more than 20 years old— we see this process of disintification and neutralization already happening. If you look at the banknotes, there is this kind of pattern of architectural styles that define European culture, but this is already deterritorialized. We see like Gothic or Greco-Roman arches. These are not representations of a specific kind of monument that exists, but kind of an architectural style. So already here we see that in the same way the nation states become more and more obsolete, the representations in money become more and more abstract. And this process of abstraction is becoming more and more visible with digital platforms. Again, we have corporate logos. We have a specific visual architecture of the platform itself, both to make them more user friendly, but also in order to somehow provide a different kind —a payment platform is the same in Bangkok as in Mexico City or Quebec. It's very interesting how this process of global integration of the payment system and payment platforms creates also a kind of common frame of reference for the users to navigate. Also, this creates a different way to develop and protect your identity. So I think it's interesting to see this kind of trajectory from nation state to global economy and at the same time the trajectory from national currencies to digital platforms and how one mirrors the other visually and aesthetically.

In one of your previous works, you actually played a bit with this abstraction and tried to comment on the financial crisis that was happening in Greece using the banknotes as a reference.

Yes, this was my second book. It was an edited volume called Grexit. I was trying to create or to develop a narrative about the very strange relations that Greece and the European Union had in these years when the financial crisis had reached the highest point, especially in Greece with the haircuts of the national debt, the austerity program, the intervention of the IMF and all of the discussion about how Greece should leave the European Monetary Union, leave the euro and go back to the drachma. So what I tried to do in this book is to trace the cultural history of the Greek currency, to see how the first modern drachmas were produced, to show the different kind of visual identities that the drachma adopted, how they were designed, what was their frame of reference, what was the narrative that was developed, etc. But at the same time, I tried to experiment with the very design of the book itself. I was working at the time with two very competent graphic designers and the whole idea of the book is to use specific kind of security technologies that the bank notes have and insert them in the text as visual elements. So there was this idea of using a specific kind of coloring that is particular to banknotes, micro typography, even this kind of digital safeguards that prevent banknotes to be scanned, and then integrate all these elements in the book. So the book was not only assuming or addressing the content of the cultural context of banknotes and their history, but also adopting a series of the very technical characteristics of the banknotes. I think it was a very interesting mirroring.

Another very important thing about bank notes —I think this is also a very interesting research strategy— is that banknotes are very disciplined systems of representation. There are specific elements that should always be there. Security technologies are very prominent and this creates a very specific space for intervention. What I realized by working in this very disciplined or very specific space, both theoretically and aesthetically or artistically, is that this created strangely a lot of space for experimentation. Because if you have a lot of elements or variables that are very specific, this in a very paradoxical way gives you a lot of freedom. So this created a very —I hope—, fertile ground, both theoretically and aesthetically, to discuss about money, to discuss about crisis, to discuss about the experience of Greece in the European Union in these years of extreme antagonism and despair and uncertainty.

Well, I think we made a very nice introduction into your thinking around money and the economic system. But I would like to move this discussion a little bit further and talk more specifically about The School of Infinite Rehearsals and the Movement group that you were part of. In a previous conversation that we had together you told me that there is a contradiction between community or society, to speak more broadly, and economy, in the sense that money allows the individual to become independent and break its ties from the social nexus. So I'm interested to hear from you, how do you perceive the term community economies?

I think this is a very productive contradiction, especially at the level of community. Because communities suggest this organic even bond between the members. It also points out to a relationship, that is not a relationship of efficiency, of means and ends, but a relationship of coexistence. In this context the individual or the subject is connected in a very specific way with the community. Its well-being is dependent on the well-being of the community and his whole existence somehow is defined by the existence of the community.

One of the main processes or the main trajectories of modernity is this kind of disengagement, for all good and for all bad, of the subject from a community and the creation of more impersonal relationships. So division of labor starts to develop, individuals stop to rely so much on the community. Also, the monocultural character of the communities is becoming eroded and a distance is created. This distance, first of all, transforms the relationship between a subject and a community creating what we call now the individual and individualism and creates this more mechanic way of coexistence where the individuals use the community or the society or the system for its own benefit. So the environment becomes a means to the ends of the satisfaction of the desires of the individual. And this is always very much defined by the emergence of money, which makes the division of labor possible. So people could just focus on one kind of activity, produce, sell their surplus, and with the money they get they can buy other stuff to satisfy their needs. This kind of existence of money triggers this process of division of labor and leads to more and more diversification. So even the traditional structures, like family or the production of specific kind of commodities are being very much delegated to third parties. The individual has to do just one thing very good and then through activity has to finance other activities, like family support, care, health, well-being. Everything is somehow mediated by money and delegated to other agents. And this, of course, creates a very important sense of alienation, both because the individual tends to be alienated from the product of his or her own work, but also because the individual is alienated from other, more traditional institutions. I mentioned already the family. Maybe religion could be another one. Social bonds or social groups are also kind of being eroded by this process. So it's very, very strange when you put the term of economy and community together, because economy actually is like a force that antagonizes the existence of community. It creates this tension and also the possibility of the birth of the individual. Economy is actually the very institution that transformed the community from a social system of coexistence to the means for the satisfaction of the ends of the individual.

So, are community economies possible or not?

The thing is that... I think when this process of individuation starts, already the idea of community needs to be renegotiated. So it has to be a conscious decision by the individuals now to try to safeguard certain of the principles of the community, try to maintain specific kind of bonds to the community and this is always a process of constant negotiation: how much the economic system permeates social and community relations? What is allowed to be in the field of the market or the field of exchange and what remains on a more protected sphere where economic considerations are not included. So it's very, very interesting and very difficult to maintain economy and community in a balanced relationship, because there is always the tendency to get much more specialized, much more detached from more traditional community structures and become more efficient. I think that when this process is triggered there is a mechanism that draws away individuals from the traditional social relations.

It's interesting to hear your take on the term and I am curious in this very interdisciplinary group, where you were obviously bringing your own background and your own engagement with economics, how did you manage to establish a common ground?

I have to say that for me it was the first time to work in such a diverse and such a large group. We were seven of us. I usually work or I have been working with one or two people together and even then, the roles were very much defined from the beginning, as well as what we were trying to achieve, what's the end product, if any, or what is the reason of this kind of working together in a coexistence. In the case of The School of Infinite Rehearsals there was this kind of new condition for me. It was not only a very much larger group than I used to work with and much more diverse, but it was also a space where there was no preexisting agreements or preexisting expectations that would define what this collaboration was about. This was very, I would say, frustrating, but also very liberating at the same time. And it was also a very, very productive process for me in the sense that it gave me both insights on how this kind of process works or how this kind of negotiation of research interests and setting of research skills could be productive. But at the same time, it allowed me to have a very intimate intellectual relationship with the other residents. So I learned a lot in this process of just negotiating on what we do, sharing skills. This was, I think, a very very useful experience intellectually.

Another thing that I would say was very enlightening about this process is that it made the context of this working together very visible. Because there was no internal gravitational point there, the space that was somehow engulfing us and contextualizig us, Onassis AiR as an institution, became very visible. What is possible, how work is being conducted, what is the role of the facilitators or the team of Onassis AiR that organize this kind of process was very apparent. Also, I could see how certain elements of the program could function, because I was somehow living in this kind of choreographed research environment. This was also a very rewarding experience, because I've never had this position of organizing a research project of this kind of, I would say, experimental anarchy.

I have one last question before we close our discussion. I know that at the moment you are about to start looking more deeply into the relationship between economy and theology and I am very curious to hear from you what kind of connections you're willing to trace between these two fields.

Even though it seems that there is a very big rift between economy and theology, already there is this immediate reference to the sacred and the profane, the religious and the commercial. But at the same time, I think theology was very much connected to the economy from the beginning. And I'm not just going to mention the very tired, but also very important reference of Max Weber and the Protestant ethic, but also the very idea of value goes back to the divine. Gold and religion and ritual are inexricably connected and this somehow creates the foundation for people to value things or recognize some things as exceptional and not exceptional.

Two other elements that I want to refer to is that strangely the economy is a concept that comes from theology. There is this idea of the economy in the plan of God to save the humanity. An economist also used to explain apparent contradictions that we see in the world, like why is there evil in the world, why certain things are allowed to happen and why, let's say we don't have this kind of very strict moral order. All these are somehow accommodated in this idea that sometimes the means are justified by the ends. So the means of the existence of evil is a means to allow humans to be both free and to save themselves. A different way that economy also features in theology has to do strangely or very uncannily with the question of representation. One of the main debates, especially in many monotheistic religions, but something that somehow is still very prominent in Christianity is the question of representation of God or the representation of the saints. And again here is the idea of an economic reasoning that allows this kind of process. Because representations of the divine, which are prohibited in all the other monotheistic religions —in Islam and Judaism— is allowed in Christianity as a way again to realize the divine plan and also as a way to support faith by the Christendom and creating this kind of space for ritual and communion and mass and the Eucharist. Economy becomes an argument for basically the representation of authority. We see how the very discussion of how authority in power is represented is filtered through economics via theology in order to produce this kind of political system of representation that allows for a specific plan to be realized, the divine plan of salvation of humans. And of course, in this process, I would hope to save myself not just be theoretically involved while doing in this kind of discourse.

I hope you're saved. Georgios, it was very nice talking with you today. Thank you for sharing!

Thanks a lot.

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.