Money as Icon

This essay develops a particular perspective on the nature of the modern financial imaginary. Recent debates of money have emphasized its dual (both universal and particular) character but have been unable to convincingly articulate the nature of this duality. The argument put forward here suggests that we should take the intractability of the question “what is money?” as an important clue to the paradoxical nature of our financial experience. The paper pursues the point by considering money as an iconic sign and uses this as a point of entry into an analysis of its semiotic structure. Money is revealed to be a form of “mediated immediacy”, a sign that is capable of direct signification owing to the way its metaphors and mediations have become entrenched in the background of our subjectivity and come to constitute a particular kind of belief. The article then proceeds to a discussion that pursues the implications of this semiotic analysis for the psychological structure of our modern financial experience, arguing that our faith in money involves an experience of it as both traumatic and redemptive. Our paradoxically constructive responses to the anxiety engendered by money are central to modern capitalist governmentality.