"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? "
certainly according to the marxian theory of money and value, everything
changes financially if there is no gold for the paper tokens to stand for,
indeed there is no money at all. money is not merely a sign since money as
gold is itself a commodity and its exhange relations with all other
commodities is determined by the law of value (ie by the relative
quantities of socially necessary labour time embodied in them). nor is
value a signifier. i think the link between money and language can be
pushed too far (eg baudrillard).
best wishes
P