Money as Symbolic

I attended the annual convention of the National Communication Association last week in Chicago. The meeting was an opportunity for me to present two papers on the rhetoric of political economy. I wanted to give a snippet view of one of my papers, “Substitution and Atonement in Kenneth Burke’s Symbolic of Money.”

The paper is adapted from a larger work I published this summer in the KB Journal. Both try to make sense of Kenneth Burke’s treatment of money as a symbol. (Burke (1897-1993), by the way, was a major American literary/rhetorical critic influenced strongly by Aristotle, the New Testament, Marx, Freud, and William James.) The guiding question is what can be learned if we consider money in symbolic terms?

Money symbolically divides and unites us. Most obviously money divides us in terms of opportunities. The symbol of money divides societies along class lines and less obviously along racial lines. Burke notes that the words property and propriety are closely related etymologically – to be proper is to have property and be appropriate. The poor have dirty hands and dirty clothes. Nearly a billion of the world’s poorest people will never have a clean glass of water to drink their whole life through. Possessing or lacking money makes a world of difference.

But just as money can separate us, it can also bring us together. Think of all the thousands of combined dollars the Omninerds have spent on their computers in order to join this conversation. We spend billions as a society on telecommunications, books, magazines, &c., all in the name of bringing us together, sharing time together, and building a culture.

At the same time that the money symbol divides us from one another, it likewise divides us internally. For Burke, man is the symbol-using animal. Money is a powerful symbol because it caters to both our animality in the way it answers our necessity and to our symbol-usingness in the form of property. Which is another way of saying that the symbol of money can be both a means and an end. This is quite different than money qua money, which is a means sometimes confused for an end. We are just a little lower than the angels or just a little higher than the beasts, and all because of the power of speech (or, in other words, depending on how we use our symbols). The English words “peculiar,” “pecuniary,” and “fee” all have their origins in the idea of a flock or herd of farm animals. The money symbol has its origins in the domestication and possession of animals by other animals, and therefore it has a symbolic way of making us forget our own animal nature.

If we go backward in time, we find that for our remote ancestors placing an animal on an altar is akin to burning money. Money ultimately endangers religion. Because it is the lowest common denominator for motives it ultimately and symbolically challenges God, the highest common denominator for motives. Burke sees, then, the drive for financial self-improvement in terms of a limitation. Bettering our condition inevitably implicates us in a host of new ways that inevitably worsen our condition. A symbolic of motives allows us to see the oxymorons, ironies, and contradictions of our drive toward improvement. Betterment includes houses, clothes, and food, but it also must include our attitudes and the quality of our words.

The symbol of money is extraordinary because of its power to be converted into anything we choose. In fact, everything! Or so we imagine. The trust money manufactures must be universally valid – in the sense that money can answer any necessity and any preoccupation that enters the mind of the symbol-using animal. The universal validity of money is an idol with respect to eternity, but insofar as our needs are “purely temporal” (how’s that for oxymoron?), money often answers the call. Money’s power as substitution, however, is how we get to redemption by sacrifice. Atonement by sacrifice is a substitute that Burke implies has its origins in money. For the devout theologian believing in divine revelation the idea that Atonement derives from money is blasphemous. More likely, from the orthodox perspective, money is a corruption of the signs and tokens of substitution by sacrifice rather than the other way around. In the way of the sacrificial lamb, if we treat money symbolically as an end in itself it becomes a way of transcending our animal nature, but only if such transcendence is possible through human needs.

In closing, I give you the words of the Italian Medievalist and novelist Umberto Eco:

Money is an instrument. It is not a value – but we need values as well as instruments, ends as well as means. The great problem faced by human beings is finding a way to accept the fact that each of us will die.

Money can do a lot of things – but it cannot help reconcile you to your own death. It can sometimes help you postpone your own death: a man who can spend a million dollars on personal physicians will usually live longer than someone who cannot. But he can’t make himself live much longer than the average life-span of affluent people in the developed world.

And if you believe in money alone, then sooner or later, you discover money’s great limitation: it is unable to justify the fact that you are a mortal animal. Indeed, the more you try to escape that fact, the more you are forced to realize that your possessions can’t make sense of your death.