Miserliness and spendthrift behavior are two failed attempts to escape money’s power.

Evidence

It is as if, from the spendthrift’s point of view, the miser’s refusal to spend money represents a failed attempt to withdraw from the money economy, failed because in a money economy, the power of money to buy can never be denied. It will always at least buy itself. Going the miser one better, the spendthrift tries to buy his way out of the money economy. If the miser is always exchanging his money for itself, the spendthrift tries to exchange his for nothing and so, by staging the disappearance of money’s purchasing power, to stage the disappearance of money itself. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 449

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Simmel’s money philosophy read elsewhere; also to the reader’s own interest in how economic conditions surface in aesthetic form.
• SEED: A possible essay: current frugality trends and maximalist consumerism as twin doomed escapes from the cash economy — staging money’s disappearance.