The birth of money-simulacrum
The approach described in Lectures of the Will to Know (1971) is very distant from the traditional interpretation of money imposed by mainstream economics, from which not even Marx in The Capital nor Foucault in The Order of Things (1966) could evade. On the one hand, mainstream nineteenth-century economists believed that the mature use of money as a means of exchange started with the birth and development of market economics. On the other hand, the Foucault of The Order of Things argues that the analysis of wealth and money theory can be traced back to the classical era, that is, the period between Cervantes’ Don Quixote and de Sade’s Justine. Alternatively, in 1971 Foucault traces a conception of money according to the eighteenth-century perspectiveoftraditionalpoliticaleconomy: “Commercial, international, market origin of money. Mercantilist interpretation of money restricting it from the start to function of representation and exposing it to that “fetishism” which consists in taking the sign for the thing itself, through a sort of primary and radical philosophical error. In fact, this interpretation may account for some early uses of money in Lydia and Phoenicia. But money was not adopted and used in Greece on the basis of this model” (LWK, 135). To support his argument, Foucault examines two opposite examples of the employment of money in Ancient Greece in the seventh century B.C.: Corinth and Athens. What interests us is in which way the two cities and in particular the two political protagonists, respectively Cypselus and Solon, associate their politics to the introduction of a currency. In both cases, the two options would contribute to cause, and anticipate, relevant
historical effects on Western governance
vicissitudes. For Corinth, and its tyrant
Cypselus, it was a political operation in
which “the rich have been forced to make
an economic sacrifice [and] money comes
to the fore enabling the preservation of
power through the intermediary of the
tyrant” (LWK, 159); for Athens, and the
legislator Solon, the political choice has the
opposite course of that of Corinth because
“the rich have been forced to a political
sacrifice, [and] eumonia enables them to
preserve economic privileges” (LWK,159).
It is clear that Foucault points at Solon’s
way of managing the nomos as the agenda
for Western democracies in the nineteenth
and early twentieth century: faced with
growing social demands, the wealthiest
classes chose to allow substantial power
distributions in order to preserve their
economic privileges. The refined Corinthian
economic choices, to which corresponds a
brutal tyrannical one, show an excellent
example of monetary measures – i.e. the
systemic management of the nomisma –
which would be adopted throughout the
twentieth century and this first period of the
twenty-first. In fact, contemporary money
intervenes at the core of an institutional
operation in which wealth is redistributed
to an already wealthy minority without
redistributing power to the majority of
the social body. This is because the social
sharing of power has reached its boundary
– the maximum limit of feasibility for
economic oligarchies – within which less
wealthy classes participate to liberal
democracies. Foucault seems to suggest
that there has not been a time in Western
history from the seventh century in Greece
in which our societies have not struggled
between the two poles of distribution,
the economical and the political one,
with money playing the role of functional
membrane manageable between the two
antipodes. Returning to the Greek cities:
money became money-simulacrum and, at
the same time, money-metron, i.e. money
as measure. The Corinthian invented money
as “the instrument of power which is being
shifted, and which, through an interplay of
new regulations, ensures the preservation
of class domination. At this point, money
is no longer a symbol which effectuates
and is not yet a representative sign. It
should be understood as a fixed series of
superimposed substitutions” (LWK, 141).
Foucault, indeed, looks at Corinthian money
as a series of substitutions: religious,
economic, political and social. The game
of substitutions and superimpositions
between money and effectual reality
generates fixation and not representation:
“whereas the sign represents, the
simulacrum replaces one substitution for
another. It is its reality as simulacrum that
has enabled money to remain for a long time
not only an economic instrument but a thing
issuing from and returning to power, by a
sort of inner intensity or force: a religiously
protected object it would be impious,
sacrilegious to adulterate” (LWK, 141). But,
with even greater depth, Foucault argues
that money is “as simulacrum that is sign: getting it to function as sign in a market
economy is an avatar of its real history as
simulacrum” (LWK, 142). For money, being
a regulatory simulacrum is primary, before
entering history as a sign and then as fetish.
Actually, the sign is only a moment within
the duration of money-simulacrum: it is
on such fine edge of strategy, power and
substitution that Klossowski’s monnaie
vivante intervenes, description of that
triangle that dominates us: desire, value
and simulacrum (Foucault, personal letter
sent to Klossowski, autumn 1970).
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