Supreme Fictions: Money and Words as Commodifying Signifiers

Abstract

Language, as both speech and writing, and money, as both coinage and credit, each constitute highly organized and conventional systems of exchange (of goods, other currencies, information, innuendo, amusement, and any possible emotional attitude). And each system is material and symbolic at once: sounds or letters, metal or paper (and now, in both, electric impulses on a screen) — the material stuff (or energy) conveys intangible, symbolic meanings, and values, which, in turn, form conceptions of that stuff. Things that do exist can project in our imagination things that don’t — fictions, business plans, dividend estimates, moneys of account. I shall try here to elucidate the functional nature shared by these systems, and then suggest that it helps to account for the (so far) unstoppable force of capitalism, which, if we count its origins in banking, commerce, and corporate equity, seems co-extensive with modernity.¹