Animal Money

By Michael Cisco 

Published by Lazy Fascist Press in 2015

Every time that we read, we create a specific moment, an experience that is immediate, forcing us to take in that which is directly in front of us, made up of all things from our past, allowing for interpretation while also being anticipatory, where we theorize about what is ahead and start to desire certain outcomes. Each session is different from the one before. This compounds as we read further and rely on our memory of what we’ve read, so that our understanding of the object in front of us is interpretive at best, made up of our past, present, and future desire, our memory and its problematic retellings. Which is all to say that this review is going to be imprecise and inaccurate, this first paragraph inspired by the final part of Animal Money and the ideas it presents, which, along with its surreal, sci-fi mystery backdrop might just be the maximalist beach read (if such a thing exists) that you’ve been looking for.

What begins as the story of a group of economists who are trying to invent a new form of money, quickly turns into an absurdist thriller. There’s paranoid plots ala Pynchon as well as Jarry-esque descriptions and full-tilt action. The narrative smashes one scene after another into what actually ends up being the story of SuperAesop, who, turns out, is the real protagonist of the book. He is a stand-in victim of future society, one in which Animal Money is set, a world that is fully willing to sacrifice its people to the Great Experiment of capitalism, dehumanizing and categorizing everything until the entire world becomes slick, stylized, shapeless ala some Apple(™) design, and he, SuperAesop, is caught in the middle of various events and realities and timelines, trying to get revenge on those who let him, quite literally, get fucked in the ass. 

We shift around, chasing narrative threads that center on a missing president, or cultural equivalent, as both the group of economists and SuperAesop search for her. What happened to her? Where is she? Why does it matter so much? What connection do all these people have? We float between perspectives, to the point that the group of economists, who are distinct people, end up feeling like one collective thought, one mind. These shifts, sort of Donoso-ian can be disorienting, and it’s not just because of the nature of them. Still, the book maintains a tight narrative focus that is constantly propelled by some sense of dread and/or paranoia, always moving things forward in seemingly linear fashion, presented in largely unadorned prose with roughly hewn sketches of characters and settings, so that it feels like an easy read (which, just knowing how these things go) might be a turn off for some. 

Just like this review by a random person on the internet, it’s not without its flaws. Characterization is often poor and descriptions tend to be largely nonsensical, making certain things about this world more difficult to imagine that perhaps necessary (it also creates a less immediate, more alien feel, so it cuts both ways).  There are slight stylistic shifts as well. All of this points, perhaps, to a need for a stronger edit, though I do appreciate that this is addressed intertextually: “Don’t complain that I don’t get any character development. This is my fucking “character!””(538) And, a lot of the overarching points are made in overt ways or reemphasized to the point of semi-annoyance, but what the hell else is an author supposed to do in a world with non-existent attention spans? Overall, these are small gripes in a much larger body of solid, thought-provoking narrative.

Animal Money brings into focus the conditions needed for new thought forms to take shape, for those new ways of thinking to gather enough oxygen to catch flame and spread among an entire populace, how the conditions must be right for gestation, how the aesthetic parameters must be met to form a force that, neither good nor bad, can spread itself, embed itself in other minds, into actualization. “To grow, it has to enter into human thinking, that’s its habitat, or growth medium. It cultures in human thoughts and then diversifies itself from human to human, using books and so on as charging stations or capacitors to regenerate, to heal itself, inoculate itself against counter-arguments maybe, like a vaccine.” (303) It addresses the ways in which thoughts or concepts are controlled by environmental conditioning and much of this book is about hiding and secrets and paranoia. 

Or is it about an inevitability of how ideas will form given the infinite possibility of forms and conditions that give rise to intelligence? Either way, it’s fun to think about, and I appreciate the playing field presented here, e.g., the idea that money is a sharing of ideas and that this sharing multiplies itself by subsequently being shared again, so that humans are the biome of animal money, that we can create an environment wherein the spread of ideas and thoughts becomes valuable and is what is prized above material exchange (which itself is an illusion, an agreed upon valuation of immaterial values for something material). In this way books, including this one, are a kind of ultimate form of animal money, little vaults of potential that allow us the opportunity to become fabulously wealthy, loaded beyond our dreams: “Wealth is the idea of money released from quantity; it’s like the idea of infinite space understood, misunderstood as the idea of an infinite amount of a quantity of space.” (160)

More than some Marxist wet dream, animal money (the concept) creates perforations in reality (explaining some of the wildness in the narrative), which allows us to travel through space, freeing our potential, unshackling us from confines of exchange, and the perforations are able to be solved and allow for alternative systems, “by seeking it in an escape back into exchange, which is to say the mystery of its disappearance is put into circulation.” (748). Put another way, as soon as the mystery of something is revealed, the magic of the thing no longer exists. This allows for a cultural unity around the mystery of non-transactional exchange, focusing on participation (“We want, very much want, a currency that offers every person who uses it nothing to save, or to spend, or to exchange to the exclusion of someone else, so, in exchange for exchange itself, you take participation.” (55)) Animal Money asks us (the reader) to stop and consider at least one really big ideology (money, commerce, transactional exchange) that we internalize so early in life that we never stop to question or analyze it or to think about it more broadly: “Why let others decide how your social power, your time, your work will be unitized and stored up? Why not make your own money? Why not make your own society? What choice do you really have?” (765)  It’s just one of all of the ideologies that form our beliefs, but it’s a big one, certainly worth considering, of being aware that we are choosing to believe in it (because it is ultimately immaterial and exists on faith). In this way, I like to think, Slavoj Žižek would be pleased (if you can imagine such a thing).

Heavy Lit rating: Recommended