Currency and the Collective Representations of Authority, Nationality, and Value

Abstract

Mainstream economics has consistently ignored the iconography of currency, describing money ‘just’ as a commodity. The paper is going to investigate the economic and political significance of the representations of authority and nationality in currency describing how these representation support its acceptability. The aim of the analysis is double: to decipher the visual identity of currency and its contribution to the acceptance of money in day-to-day transactions, as well as to discuss the operational principles of the monetary system as they are uncovered in the iconography of money. By answering these questions, the paper is going to trace the theoretical presuppositions and the cultural stereotypes that inform the representation of economic value and national identity as they are articulated in banknotes and coins with a specific emphasis on the European Monetary Union and the recent financial crisis that is still affecting its periphery.

KEYWORDS:

• signs
• economics
• identity
• money
• state

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This paper was written during my research assistantship at the Department of Aesthetics and Communication at the Aarhus University. I would like to thank my colleagues in Aarhus and particularly Christian Urlik Andersen, Geoff Cox, and Søren Bro Pold as well as my supervisor Arjo Klamer from the Erasmus University. I would like to thank especially the graphic designer Jack Henrie Fisher for the conversations we had on currency during the preparation of the edited volume Grexit (Papadopoulos 2012) that helped me to test and develop further my ideas on the subject.

Notes

1. ‘Indeed, while each national case is different, Helleiner suggests that there have been four main drivers: the desire to construct national markets, the promotion of both macroeconomic and fiscal goals, and the strengthening of national identities. The monopoly over the issue of currency legitimized the role of the state. In turn, currencies were used to promote ideas of the “imagined community” of the nation’ Gilbert (2013, pp. 23–24).

2. ‘Banknotes as themselves, refer to other economic realities, because of the economic significance of a currency note is only the promise of exchange potential – in other words, the money object is itself only a stand-in for future or past relationships to other material objects or social actors’ Mwangi (2010, p. 35).

3. ‘Currency is the fetish, where fetishism is fixed: belief in the value of the market price itself’ Nancy (2001, p. 3).

4. ‘First, currency is not just a neutral economic tool, as the economists would have it, but it embodies cultural, political, and economic values. Moreover, while there has been a tendency for people to take for granted the money that passes through their hands, these examples suggest that people are not so quick to do so anymore. Second, these two examples suggest that states and currencies are intimately imbricated, even as this relationship is unraveling’ Gilbert (2013, p. 21).

5. ‘All this being so, the age of transition to industrialism was bound, according to our model, also to be an age of nationalism, a period of turbulent readjustment, in which either political boundaries, or cultural ones, or both, were being modified, so as to satisfy the new nationalist imperative which now, for the first time, was making itself felt’ Gellner (1986, p. 40).

6. ‘It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ Anderson (1983, p. 6).

7. National identity has been under a process of constant reinvention, especially in the case of multicultural states like the USA or the USSR, the relative young countries in South America and supranational systems of governance like the European Union.

8. ‘As a narrative, nationalist iconographic narratives are designed to transpose the feeling of intimacy from the context of the family to the public space. Much like the word economy – as in oikos meaning house – this imagery is the means by which the public colonizes the private’ Roubanis (2007, p. 35, italics added).

9. ‘[I]n other words, archeology as a discipline, as a set of principles, devices, methods, and practices, creates its object of study, out of existing and real, past material traces. It is hard to avoid the comparison here with nationalism: nationalism produces the entity that gives meaning and purpose to it, the nation, and so does archeology, as it produces the object of its desire, its raison d’être, the archeological record. This homological link is not purely accidental’ Hamilakis (2007, p. 14).

10. According to Jan Penrose ‘scholars tend to simply evoke ill-defined notions of “the state”, “the national elite” and/or some unspecified part of “the government” to explain who determines banknote iconography and how this is achieved’ (Penrose 2011, p. 431).

11. ‘Technical images differ from traditional images in that the two are the result of dissimilar processes of translation. Traditional images have real situations as their source; technical images, on the other hand, start out from texts, which in turn have been written to break up images through translation, that is, images containing texts with images in their belly’ Finger et al. (2011, pp. 103–104).

12. The apparatus is an important concept in the Flusserian cultural system even though he is not explicit in defining them. In the glossary of his Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Flusser offers a general description of the term: ‘The apparatus is an organization or a system that enables something to function’ Flusser (2000 [1983], p. 83). Apparatuses are a kind of social machines, which combine technological and institutional elements. ‘Their intention is not to change the world but to change the meaning of the world. Their intention is symbolic’ Flusser (2000 [1983], p. 25). The way that apparatuses intervene and construct social experience is by representing social facts via technical images. What is important about apparatuses is their programmed and automatic operation. ‘Power has moved from the owner of objects to the programmer and the operator. The game of using symbols has become a power game – a hierarchical power game’ Flusser (2000 [1983], p. 29).

13. ‘The technical image is an image that is produced by apparatuses. ... Ontologically traditional images are abstractions of the first order insofar they abstract from the concrete world while technical images are abstractions of the third order: They abstract from texts which abstract from traditional images which themselves abstract from the concrete world. ... Ontologically, traditional images signify phenomena whereas technical images signify concepts. Decoding technical images consequently means to read of their actual status from them’ Flusser (2000 [1983], p. 14).

14. ‘The function of technical images is to liberate their receivers by magic from the necessity of thinking conceptually, at the same time replacing historical consciousness with a second-order magical consciousness and replacing the ability to think conceptually with a second-order imagination. This is what we mean when we say that technical images displace texts’ Flusser (2000 [1983], p. 17).

15. One of the two sides of the euro coins designed by the member states, and as such communicate the national identity of each participating country. The other side is common to all coins with the map of the European territory, similar to the one depicted in the banknotes.

16. ‘Representing doors and windows opened on emptiness, these notes refer only to a limitless, de-territorialized and dehumanized space: that of the market’ Théret (2001, p. 4) reference from Calligaro (2012).

17. http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/events/2009/theeuro/isola3_en2008-2009.pdf visited on 8.11.2013.