Monitoreo del tráfico de paquetes del eNodeB

Both plots involve a promise which can never be fulfilled or an investment which can never be realized. Moll will never tell us her ‘true name’ so the promise of the opening pages can

never be realised. There is no ‘true name’; this is a condition of the text. The proposal on which the Bank of England is based refers to a ‘perpetual fund of interest’. There is no end envisaged, an iterative cycle is set in motion which can never end without destroying itself. The capital investment was not to be repaid until the organization was no longer in existence; people were buying the debt and the perpetual interest that it would generate. The original capital investment did have to be repaid in 1946 when the Bank was nationalised, it proved very difficult to track the original investors. As the perpetual fund of interest is projected there is a kind of magic taking place which allows the same money to, in effect, be spent many times over. The Bank is assumed to be creditable, to have value, so money is given to the Bank to give to the King. The King pays a return on the money which is then passed to the investors. The debt becomes of value. The Bank is then seen further as a creditable institution, more people wish to invest in it or to bank with it and so money starts to circulate; organizations are then given credit for having invested in or loaned from the Bank of England, in an endless process which can only work as long as it is never completed; if everyone asks for their money back then the game is over. Catherine Ingrassia in her study of the novels of Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) draws out this quality and comparison in relation to speculative investment and the novel:

In her fiction, as Michael McKeon accurately describes, “love is sheer inconstancy, like commodity exchange an endless circuit in which the movement toward completion and consumption, a perpetual imagining of an end which must never come, becomes an end in itself. (41) The “love” relationship within Haywood’s fiction, the perpetual imagining of an end which must never come, mirrors the implicit understanding on which speculative investment depends: the continued deferral of complete repayment until a date which will, of course, never arrive.112

Clapham too notes that the Bank created an almost magical circle of money raising which, ultimately, financed the industrial revolution.113 In this system, money or credit/value was for the first time disconnected from property or land, disconnected from something real and linked now to speculation, an imaginative enterprise. Theories of wealth generation also supported speculation. As Pincus notes, Locke’s notion that labour created property made property potentially infinite and transformed England ‘from an agrarian to a manufacturing society, from a society bounded by limited raw materials to a society fuelled by the limitless possibilities of human creation’. 114 Speculation involves projections, financial and imaginative; the future is predicted and a price placed on that future which then operates as something real in the market, something which can be bought and sold. This prospect was unnerving to those with vested interests in land, and derided by key people from the literary establishment such as Pope and Swift.

However unnerving, the prospect of easy money, money made from money, was also attractive. In Writing and the Rise of Finance, Colin Nicholson has documented how Pope, Swift and Gay all invested in the markets they derided. ‘So it becomes an interesting reflection upon subsequent canon-formation and the cultural valorisation it encoded’, he notes, ‘that some of the most remembered voices from a time of the greatest explosion of financial and commercial activity England has hitherto seen, publicly set themselves determinedly at variance with what was happening, while privately seeking profit from it’.115 It has been described as a period of wild capitalism not unlike our own. 116 In all this wild speculation, the relationship between reality and fiction was shifting: the value of an investment project lay in how realistic its claims to future wealth were seen to be, in how realistic its projections were to possible stakeholders.

The very nature of the project of the Bank replicates this idea of something being made-up, something coming from nothing, to a degree which was almost seen at the time as magical. The project of the Bank depended on the idea of debt as having value; a profound shift in a nation that jailed debtors. More profoundly than anything else, it established the idea of a national debt which could be sold as a commodity, thereby the nation became a

commercial venture, held together by a bet on the future.

A debt is a negative, it is the absence of money, and thereby the future became based on nothing – something for nothing, a future positive for a present negative. This signals a shift in the nature of the imagination, in the relationship between tangible reality and created realities, in the relationship between signified and signifier. This shift was expressed by Defoe in his Essay on Publick Credit. Credit he declared ‘gives Motion, yet it self cannot be said to Exist; it creates Forms, yet has it self no Form; it is neither Quantity or Quality; it has no whereness, or Whenness, Scite or Habit. I should say it is the essential Shadow of Something that is not’.117 The Bank and Moll are making it up as they go along – making something out of nothing, offering promises that can never be fulfilled. They are both imaginative productions, a phrase I have taken from Colin Nicholson’s study. 118 This shift to an idea of credit, based on nothing substantial, created anxiety and uncertainty. The next section discusses the role of Moll and the Bank in managing this anxiety.