La natura linguistica del denaro

Abstract

The ‘linguistic turn of money’ of the post-Fordist economy and the current process of financialization, its growing pervasiveness, which have characterized the new capitalism for the last three decades, have radically altered the relationship between money and language. The entrance of language directly into the process of production, ‘putting language to work’, and the transformation of the places of the production of commodities into ‘loquacious factories’, on one hand, as well as financialization as the modality of the production of ‘collective conventions’ for the appropriation of wealth in which the mimetic-communicative acting of the multitude of investors is central, on the other hand – allow us to speak of the linguistic nature of money. What we are witnessing here is a real and true overtaking of the classical relationship between money and language which, from John Locke to J. M. Keynes, from Saussure to the most recent theorists of money, in a game of reciprocal cross-references and of searching for isomorphisms, has characterized the theory of money and that of language as distinct spheres of analysis. Today, money and language overlap to such a degree that the moneyness of money as ‘absolute convention’ is inseparable from praxis and communicative-linguistic strategy. The form of value of commodities is simultaneously monetary and linguistic. We have arrived at this historical result by way of the progressive de-substantialization of the value of commodities – be it Marxist labor-value or neoclassical utility-value – just as we arrived at the performative becoming of language, at the linguistic capacity for ‘making things with words’. Value lies not in the objects, material or immaterial, but is a collective production, an institution, which more or less permits the organization of a life in common. The social validation of wealth is actualized in the production of collective beliefs (conventions) as the rational (and not only ‘behavioral’) modality of the functioning of financial markets. The conventions are, by definition, ‘cognitive constrains’ which act upon the multiplicity of subjects operating within financial markets by way of communicative-linguistic acting. The crisis of contemporary financial capitalism requires that we question the limits of the linguistic nature of money, the structural contradictions of an economic-financial system in which the performativity itself of the monetary-communicative strategy comes into play.