There certainly seem to be Freudian echoes in this theme: identifying with
the object of desire as a way to avoid ever losing it ...
What gets added here perhaps is the explicitly bodily dimension ... that in
use the tool transforms how our body works for/as us, and as
transformative/desired tool we can construe it as a sign that is also as
aspect of our meaning for/to ourselves, i.e. Selfhood, identity. Again the
duality of the material-functional-artifactual and the ideal-semiotic, but
now situated neither solely in the realm of immaterial mind (ego, identity,
personality) nor solely in the domain of the socio-cultural (cf.
Ilyenkovian "ideal" as socially objective, signs as elements of cultural
semiotics), but in construals of the material: tool and body on various,
multiple scales as participating in both material systems (ecological,
economic; extended-body or cyborg, and immediate bodypart-body scales) and
semiotic systems (cultural, social; self-construction, identity meaning
system) ...
So much for the "cyborg", but what of "desire"? arising from needs that are
about the relations of the body in the ecology, the labor unit in the
economy, the self-identity in the cultural system of values ... all at
once, and mutually interdependent ... so that that camera on the arm
participates in all three, gains different sorts of affordances in relation
to each, and the affordances/functions from one create possibilities of
gain/loss in the others ... and a potential dynamic of desire: to be
inseparable from the camera for its material functions, for its uses in the
social community/economy, for the "I" that I am when/as user/using it in
these functions ... and more, perhaps, desire with origins in a body that
is materially transformed (neurological habitus, etc.) from/in such use
(erroneously conceived in a different ideology as "dependence"), and a
dynamic of other losses, other kinds of needs for power, for efficacy, for
intimacy, for the kinds of meanings "photographer" "videographer" can have
... and the bodily basis of their pleasure ...
and so back to re-constituting the issues that concerned Herr Freud. ... ...
On another point, I am not much of an economic expert myself, but I would
think that the connection of abstract money to gold HAS been severed, that
we could in the political economy manage to represent all gold reserves in
some specially marked monetary unit, so that if the material gold
disappeared, nothing would change financially. Perhaps this is just an
aspect of the "translatability" of signs, or really of the legendary
"arbitrariness of the signifier" ... to the extent that money is purely a
sign, the signifier can float free. Of course it is not entirely clear
whether money indeed is a pure sign ... and even if so, what the signified
is. If it is "value", then that certainly seems to be itself a sign ... and
the matter is not going to be disentangled too easily. Is it possible that
monetary values are only in fact signs of themselves? self-referential ...
the sort of sign postulated by Baudrillard (who has some interesting
semiotic critiques and extensions of Marx's analyses on these matters in
his earlier writing) as truly post-modern, having no signified beyond its
own fact and pattern of use.
Has anyone seen a good semiotic theory of monetary value walking around? JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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