Fluidity ~ Cashflow ~ Capital flows ~ Liquid tears ~ when currencies freeze on accounts.
“Watery language naturalizes the movements of capital. To the degree that it is carried by aqueous imagery, capital is figured as a necessity, no less a biospheric feature than an ocean or a raincloud. Everyday metaphors imply that the “circulation” of wealth is as fundamental to the maintenance of life as the blood flowing through the veins of vascularized creatures, or the arterial branchings of river deltas. However, water is more than fundamental, essential, and “natural”; these aquatic images carry other powerful associations, as well. The ocean has long been regarded as a place of uncertainty and risk; it can be navigated more or less bravely, but never controlled. Like the unruly floodwaters feared by early civilizations, the movements of capital can, at any moment, crush a nascent economy, dispense or withdraw prosperity. “Flows” of investment can also blast the top off of a local mountain, poison air and water, and displace communities. Cloaked in a watery guise, the devastations wrought by floods or droughts of capital may be more readily interpreted as unfortunate inevitabilities.”
Still, Water metaphors help to figure a wide range of concepts and experiences, including time, emotional life, and collective identity. Can we reframe water in an anti-capitalist manner?
Janine MacLeod, "Water and the Material Imagination: Reading the Sea of Memory against the Flows of Capital," in Thinking with Water, edited by Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, 40-60 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1515/9780773589339-008.