Paper Money And Its (Urban) Images: Toward Capitalist Metaphysics

Nail Ferguson launches his study on the monetary politics in the modern age (Ferguson, 2002) citing Thomas Carlyle. The latter is very well known for his fear that modernity would turn all human relations into economic affairs and in this way people can be changed into modern monsters. He was constantly moralizing that we (humans) have forgotten that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings (Carlyle shaped the term ‘cash nexus’, which is now frequently used). Ferguson’s “Cash Nexus” tends to show that actually we are not bonded completely to economic relations and homo sapience is not home economicus, constantly aiming to maximize his effectiveness with every transaction. People very often have unpredictable behavior and their reasons can be illogical and emotional. But nevertheless we still believe that money, and certainly economics makes ‘the world go around’. In this study I aim to investigate the cultural role that money plays in the West. My assumptions are based on the symbolical character of the inter-human and inter-national communication. Although there are always practical reasons, which stay behind different cultural phenomena, symbolical aspects may play a crucial role in such spheres as economics and politics. European historians in the 19th century described the progressive development of English, French,German, Dutch and other national state structures in terms of capital. Capital and the monetary relations were seen as universal phenomena, which develop historically in different cultures around the globe. But the growing number of African or Indian histories in 1960-80s showed that transitional and theoretical concepts like development, progress, and capital are culturally and locally (mainly in Europe) construed. Money does not have the only one meaning and monetary relations differ from culture to culture. Paper money is a peculiar invention of the European modernity, though it was known before its implementation in the West. Monetary communication and development of capital in the West advanced in the context of metaphysics of modernity. In this paper I will investigate the symbolical substance of paper money, its metaphysical character. Paper money does not have a substance; there is nothing material, which can objectify its value. My hypothesis is that the images of historical narrations, portraits and everything what can be called the visual memory – participated in the process of creation of paper money in Europe. Paper money as a symbol has a very complicated nature and its emblematic character I will analyze in the following study.