'Show Me the Money!'
Authors: Rizzo Sergio 
Published: October 2020

Precious metals are to mercantile capitalism what paper is to industrial capitalism and what plastic and electronics are to post-industrial capitalism—which is to say, the different materials and their specific textual forms become the dominant, if not always preferred, means of transferring and storing value or wealth in their respective capitalist phases. As a distinct “text,” what separates the precious metals from the materials that follow them is that they are seen as “natural money.” In Capital, for example, Karl Marx endorses Galiani’s view that “although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver”(92-3). Common enough even among contemporary economists, this view relies upon a conception of “Nature” and money that paper began to unsettle and that the new forms of plastic and electronic money altogether erase. Thus Marshall McLuhan early on proclaimed that the new electronic technologies put “the very concept of money [ . . . ] in jeopardy . . .” (138-9). Even if this is in part true—and I think it is—how does one explain the current proliferation of money thanks to plastic cards and electronic money? Georg Simmel, in his monumental The Philosophy of Money, provides one possible answer. Discussing the war between Spain and the Netherlands, Simmel generalizes “ . . . and one might say paradoxically that, the more it is really money in its essential significance, the less need there is for it to be money in a material sense”(171). Plastic and electronic technologies, far from threatening the “very concept of money,” have worked to free the “essential significance” of money from its previous material forms. Certain forms of money may indeed be in jeopardy but, precisely because of this, the concept of money is all the more necessary to the ideological harmony of post-industrial capitalism.
It would even be going too far to say that the new plastic and electronic forms of exchange threaten the aura of money. Instead, it is more advantageous to see these differing materials and their textual forms as representing competing mythologies. As a starting point, consider the de a ocho reales (pieces-of-eight) often referred to as the Spanish or pillar dollar. Minted from silver that came from the Spanish Empire’s silver mines in the New World, it represents the peak of mercantile capitalism. On its obverse side is the image of two worlds between two columns, representing the Pillars of Hercules. Winding around the columns is a banner with the inscription “plus ultra” (more beyond). On one level, this promise was frighteningly true—estimates range from a staggering 145,000 to 165,000 tons of silver extracted from the New World by Europeans (Weatherford 100). And yet, the promise of infinite wealth is belied, ultimately, by the finite nature of the material being used to fashion this text.
In contrast, consider the inscription found on the first coin minted in 1787 by the newly established United States of America. The one-cent copper coin bears the motto “Fugio MIND YOUR BUSINESS” and shows the sun above a sundial. The references to time (fugio or I fly) are clearly indebted to the axiom “time is money”, which comes from a founding father of the new nation, Benjamin Franklin, who, perhaps more than any other, lived out and popularized its revolutionary ideology. “Mind your business” is equally Franklinesque and equally expressive of the spirit necessary for the emergence of industrial capitalism. Nonetheless, the coin’s advice, like the Spanish dollar’s promise, contains its own instability. The relatively congenial warning that wasting your time will cost you money is undercut by the pugnacious double entendre contained in “mind your business”, which can also mean stay out of other people’s affairs. The double meaning of “mind your business” encapsulates a rationalist utopia of individual citizens who serve the common good simply by tending to their own gardens or minding their own businesses. In less than seventy-five years, America’s Civil War violently exposed the internal contradictions of such an aspiration.
Switching the motto of the Spanish silver dollar with that of the American copper penny results in a jarring confusion that illustrates the ideological divide between mercantile and industrial capital that the two coins represent. The Spanish dollar promises infinite wealth based upon trade, an individual’s appetite for “more,” and access to scarce commodities (gold and silver). The American penny promises endless work based upon production, self-interest, and access to cheap commodities, such as copper. This American work ethic fueled a pathological amassing of wealth that is similar to and yet distinct from the mercantile period preceding it. The differences and similarities are like those that Marx finds between the miser and the capitalist: “This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser”(151). Adapting Marx’s comparison, then, it would be more accurate to say the mercantile capitalist is an unfinished capitalist, distracted from his purpose by the maddening allure of the miser’s horde. While the industrial capitalist, on the other hand, may be the truer capitalist, he is still a miser, albeit a rational one.
If capitalists are going to realize their full potential as “rational misers” the history of America shows they can only achieve this with a medium of exchange that is cheaper, more accessible, and more disposable than copper or any other metal. Through paper currency, America not only financed its revolution, making it the first nation in the history of the world to do so, it also financed its westward expansion, the North’s victory in the Civil War, and it unleashed the productive capacities necessary for an industrial revolution that would surpass its European rivals.
The design found on America’s modern one-dollar bill—which except for minor changes has remained the same since 1935—reveals a textual indeterminacy, like that found in the Spanish dollar and America’s revolutionary copper penny. The first aspect of its indeterminacy is in the nature of all paper currencies. Their cheap materials, relatively easy production, and fiat value make them attractive to counterfeiters as well as governments. To a degree unmatched by coins, paper money’s text is driven by anxieties over counterfeiting. For example, the signatures of the U.S. Treasurer and Secretary of the Treasury on the front of America’s paper currency are motivated in part by this anxiety. But the signing of an official’s name holds a deeper significance, one that separates paper currency from metal. Paper currency seems to call for a signature the way metal coins call for heads in profile. Metal coins, even when machine made, still evoke the artisan and his mode of production—circumscribed, organic, and coherent. The very real artisanship that goes into paper currency is lost in a surreal sea of printed signs—open, fragmented, and dreamlike. The signature, although mechanically reproduced, leaves the trace of a human hand and the individual to which it belongs. In a world where exchange value is created by artificial means that are essentially limitless, the signature is a reassuring reminder of human limits and authority.
A different sort of tension is on the back of the dollar bill. Here the front and back of the Great Seal of the United States are on either side of a “ONE” in large letters at the center of the rectangular design. The contraries contained in the Great Seal—war and peace represented by the olive branch and arrows the eagle holds in its talons and the material and the spiritual aspects of life represented by the unfinished pyramid and the eye of the Deity that shines above it—draw the viewer into a web of triangular sight lines. The back of the Seal encircles an apparent triangle formed by the pyramid and the eye above it. The encircled triangle in the Seal’s front is subtler. It is made by the number thirteen which appears in the thirteen stars above the eagle’s head and the thirteen olive leaves and arrows held in the eagle’s talons. This triangular symmetry is reinforced by the four numeral 1s with “one” written across them that appear one in each corner of the bill’s design. These 1s create bisecting diagonal sight lines that connect with and pass through the “ONE” at the center of the rectangle, thereby cutting the rectangle into four symmetrical triangles. At the very least, all this (in)visible triangular symmetry could be called overdetermined—an excessive attempt to impress order on a chaotic world and to naturalize the text’s claim as “legal tender.”
If, as Simmel maintains, “all money is credit” (Ingham 24), then by one line of reasoning, it would be easy for credit cards to acknowledge this truth. Instead, like the other monetary forms we have examined, their texts work to obfuscate the social character of exchange value and naturalize or mythologize their authority. Like paper money’s connection to the printing press, credit cards are also connected to a revolutionary technology, the petroleum industry. It is fitting that credit cards are made of plastic, a by-product of oil refineries, since they originated in the 1930s as a convenience to drivers provided by the major oil companies. Even as different businesses extended the use of credit cards, they have retained their early association with the world of travel and the pleasures of mobility—both physical and social.
With the company’s origin in the travel business, the American Express credit card is uniquely positioned to exploit the pleasures of mobility, and the history of its credit card designs helps to illustrate some of the ideological shifting required of post-industrial capitalism. As Jack Weatherford points out in his History of Money, American Express made effective use of a card class system. Starting in 1958 with their purple card, the color of royalty, they sought to attract consumers with a feeling of exclusivity. Some years later, they switched to the famous green card, the color of American money. In 1966, they added the distinction of the gold card for elite members. As the numbers of gold card members swelled, they sought further distinctions, such as the black card that was quickly replaced by the platinum card (229). A striking aspect of these textual permutations, given the focus of this paper, is the credit company’s reliance on the security of older monetary forms, such as precious metals and American paper currency, to attract consumers. Now that credit cards rule supreme, it is hard to recall consumers’ earlier antipathy towards them. In 1971, after credit cards were well established, one study found that almost one-third of the families interviewed thought it was “bad business to use credit cards,” and even among credit card users, nearly one-fifth felt it was “bad” (Moore and Russell 78). In contrast, the design of the latest card by American Express, its blue card, boldly proclaims the apotheosis of credit—a blue hologram suspended in transparent plastic. Here is the ultimate medium: a transparency that promises to take its possessor at the speed of light into the depths of hyperspace.
Beneath these specific historical texts, lies a deeper and more general ontological association between plastic and movement, which Roland Barthes uncovers in his ruminations upon the substance in Mythologies. In its protean ability to imitate life, plastic is “less a thing than the trace of a movement”(97). And Barthes maintains our new plastic mobility revolutionizes our relationship to life itself. The finite character of metal and paper for storing and transferring wealth were always more or less apparent. Precious metals were limited by the natural laws of scarcity—first come, first served. Paper promised a world of infinite wealth, but it always threatened to hyperinflate, collapsing into worthless piles. Sometimes implicitly or sometimes explicitly, paper still relied on nature’s scarcity in order to justify its claim to value. Plastic needs no such justification. As Barthes puts it, with plastic, “the hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized . . .”(99). In a plastic world, there are no limits on what or how much we can produce. And in such a world, only an abstract and infinite medium of exchange, such as credit, can promise to return our alienated labor to us through the plasticized commodities it purchases.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Anette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1990.
Ingham, Geoffry. “’Babylonian Madness’: On the Historical and Sociological Origins of
Money.” What Is Money? Ed. John Smithin. London: Routledge, 2000. 16-41.
Marx, Karl. Capital Volume One. Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International,
1987.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1995.
Moore, Carl H. and Alvin E. Russell. Money: Its Origin, Development and Modern Use.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987.
Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Ed. David Frisby. Trans. Tom Bottomore and
David Frisby. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Weatherford, Jack. The History of Money. New York: Crown, 1997.

Citation reference for this article
MLA Style

Rizzo, Sergio. "'Show Me the Money!'" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture
<http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/09-rizzo.php>.

APA Style

Rizzo, S. (2004, Jan 12). 'Show Me the Money!'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7,
<http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/09-rizzo.php>