Market, materiality and moral metalanguage

Abstract

Accounts of the social transformations wrought by capitalism commonly draw on assumptions about the abstraction taken to be inherent to money and markets. This article raises questions about some of the presupposed features of abstraction. It argues that economic transactions, like any social interaction, require semiotic mediation. Moreover, insofar as markets necessarily involve economic ideologies held by their participants, they cannot be wholly free of some kinds of moral claims. Since those moral claims are reproduced in the semiotic forms that transactions take, markets cannot achieve full social disembedding, at least in the most radical sense. This may be true not just of simple marketplaces but the more recent, supposedly decontextualized and abstract economic forms. The semiotic mediation of markets should enter into any political or moral understanding of their workings, insofar as signifying practices are inherently material, and thus inseparable from causalities and the power-laden contexts they mediate. The resemblance between ideologies of money and of the sign as modes of radical abstraction is not accidental, since both are products of ideological depictions of `modernity' as a dematerialization of the world.