MONEY AS FRAME

This essay responds to “Money as Art: The Form, the Material, and Capital” by the Marxist economist Costas Lapavitsas with refer-ence to the triple manifestation of crisis in the United States dur-ing the spring months of 2020. By triangulating the role of money in the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing mass unemployment, and the historical nationwide revolt in response to the police mur-der of George Floyd predicated on a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, Nicholas Huber makes a three-part claim. First, that acceptance of the Marxist theory of fetishism forecloses the possibility of conceiv-ing of capitalist money as art in the sense developed by Lapavitsas, insofar as the latter tends toward transhistorical concepts of both art and money. Following from this, any aesthetic function of mon-ey in the capitalist mode of production is inseparable from its total social function; that is, capitalist money is at once an economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic mediation unlike any other. Finally, Huber draws on Louis Marin’s typology of the frame in correspond-ence with Erik Olin Wright’s integrated class analytic framework to argue that the question of whether money is art or not leads us to a dead end. Huber suggests that a crisis such as the one unfolding in 2020 raises instead the more challenging question of what social system must come into being, such that a theory of capitalist money as art becomes intelligible.

Alter Egos

The draft gave rise to a booming economy of substitute brokers. While the so-called principal and his “alter ego” could, in theory, enter into an economic relationship that affirmed novelistic structures of character and personification, the insertion of middlemen brokers disrupted that possibility and posed the threat of turning substitutes into commodities. Tracking the development of this draft economy, the chapter traces its theorizations in diaries, letters, and poems, as well as in the iconography of the new paper currency, the greenback dollar bill. The chapter focuses in particular on the work of Emily Dickinson, whose career-defining interest in economics, embodiment, and split subjectivity took on additional urgency when her brother Austin procured the services of a substitute who was most likely a formerly enslaved black man. Concerned about the ability of poetic substitution to be representative, Dickinson developed an affirmation of substitution that rejected its monetization.

Social-Computation-Supporting Kinds

Social kinds are heterogeneous. As a consequence of this diversity, some authors have sought to identify and analyse different kinds of social kinds. One distinct kind of social kinds, however, has not yet received sufficient attention. I propose that there exists a class of social-computation-supporting kinds, or SCS-kinds for short. These SCS-kinds are united by the function of enabling computations implemented by social groups. Examples of such SCS-kinds are reimbursement form, US dollar bill, chair of the board. I will analyse SCS-kinds, contrast my analysis with theories of institutional kinds, and discuss the benefits of investigating SCS-kinds.

Redesigning a Pocket Monument

In 2016, the Treasury Department announced that its planned redesign of the twenty-dollar bill would feature Harriet Tubman, sparking jubilation from activists who had campaigned for female representation on paper currency. But the redesign also brought sharp rebukes from white conservatives, including Republican presidential candidates, who accused the Treasury of capitulating to “political correctness” at the expense of the honor and memory of President Andrew Jackson. This chapter draws from a previous content analysis of news and editorial coverage of the redesign to incite a Black feminist reparative reading to elevate Tubman’s radical legacy over narratives that affirmed her as a postracial icon.

Harriet Tubman and Andrew Jackson on the Twenty-Dollar Bill: A Monstrous Intimacy

The controversy surrounding the announcement by the US Treasury, in April 2016, that the portraits of Harriet Tubman and Andrew Jackson will “share” the twenty-dollar bill-which the latter has embodied for almost a century-highlights a glaring incongruity: A formerly enslaved black woman and abolitionist leader is being placed in iconic proximity with an exemplary historical representative of the United States as a national experiment built on whiteness, slavery, and genocide. Our essay revolves around three basic questions: Why Tubman? Why Jackson? Why Now? The Treasury’s decision and its subsequent vicissitudes allow insights into the blurring of Barack Obama’s avowed “post-racialism,” which presided over the idea to redesign the currency, into the overt white supremacy and anti-black violence at the onset of the Trump regime, which has de facto frozen the implementation of the new bill. The story serves, namely, as a commentary on paradigmatic antiblackness as a force that, being constitutive of American civil society, has been fortified by the “post-racial” pretences of the Obama era. With reference to Christina Sharpe’s notion of “monstrous intimacy” and Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of “fungibility,” we argue that the twenty-dollar bill affair reflects the ways in which the interlocutory life of civil society is fortified by the continuous positioning, in popular imagination and discourse, of the black female body as inert matter in modes of appropriation, violence, and representation that sustain America’s political and libidinal economy.