Money and the Mastery of Symbolic Exchange (2024)

Portia: Myself and what is mine to you and yours
Is now converted: but now I was the lord
Of this fair mansion, master of my servants,
Queen o’er myself: and even now, but now,
This house, these servants and this same myself
Are yours, my lord: I give them with this ring;
Which when you part from, lose, or give away,
Let it presage the ruin of your love
And be my vantage to exclaim on you.

The Merchant of Venice

Introduction

Oscillation is the fundamental condition of nature — the exchange of states of tension for states of release — of being for non-being — and back again. At the smallest level of space time that human beings can currently imagine, the so called Quantum Foam, energy is being constantly exchanged between matter and anti-matter — then exchanged back into pure energy. The Universe is a shapeshifter — entropy allows nothing to stand still — and nothing is less still than the human mind. We generate a vast array of symbols to give this turbulence form, but those symbols quickly become shapeshifters themselves and begin their own dialogues with each other to create an endless array of new symbols — over which we often have little or no control.

Proteus was a demi-god associated with money and knowledge. Of course, he was a prolific shapeshifter — his domain was water. Like the Leprechaun, if you caught him he would tell you the secret of wealth — but his form was liquid — you had to hold him long enough to hear the answer to your question — and that was never easy.

This article will seek to explore how we human beings enter the human community and maintain our place in that community by means of the exchange of powerful symbols. We will explore the role money has assumed in this exchange, and how we may cease to be unwitting victims of unconscious symbolic processes and develop conscious mastery over the symbols we generate and exchange. We will make the argument that we can create a world of financial wellbeing and abundance for ourselves and our loved ones by becoming masters of symbolic exchange.

The View from Cognitive Science

Lord Horatio Nelson lost his right arm at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797. He later declared that he had discovered proof for the eternal life of the soul, since if his amputated arm could continue to feel sensations and reach for objects, then surely the soul could continue after death. Nelson had developed what’s known as a phantom limb, a phenomenon where the brain continues to act as if the amputated limb was still there. What’s perhaps more surprising is how quickly the brain will take possession of limbs that never belonged to the subject’s body in the first place. The Rubber Hand Experiment comes in several forms, but in each one of them the brain is tricked into believing that an obviously rubber hand actually belongs to the body. In one version, a volunteer is seated with her forearms resting on a table and her right hand hidden in a box that’s open at both ends. A rubber hand is aligned with her right shoulder, where her real hand would be. The right index finger of the rubber hand is stroked with a brush and, simultaneously and in sync, her real right index finger. The volunteer is asked to watch the rubber finger being stroked. Within 15 seconds she will find herself hallucinating that the rubber hand is her own hand and that the sensation of stroking is coming from the rubber hand. It’s an uncanny experience when her real hand seems to fade out of existence. Even more strange, the temperature in her real hand actually drops, as the brain pulls blood away from a hand it believes no longer exists.

The Rubber Hand Experiment

The brain is constantly mapping and re-mapping our bodies to give us our sense of self, but it’s not only our bodies that are included in these maps, but the important objects around us, and we feel the loss of these familiar objects as if they were parts of our own bodies. This is true of no object more so than money.

Our loved ones and our broader social circles give us warmth and protection from danger and pain, as do the buildings we live and work in and the important objects around us. In Western Capitalist societies these relationships are heavily mediated by money. Lack of money very often leads to social exclusion, homelessness, ill health and even death.

Laboratory experiments have shown that social support enhances endurance to physical pain and that lack of social support or social exclusion increases sensitivity to pain. Brown et al. (2003) examined the effect of social support on acute pain caused by placing the hands of volunteers in very cold water. Half the volunteers performed the task accompanied by another person who offered them encouragement, while the other half were asked to perform the task alone. They were then asked to rate the pain perceived on a scale of one to ten. All of those performing the task alone reported a higher level of pain than those who had support.

To investigate the role of money as a substitute for social support, a similar experiment was conducted by Zhou, Vohs, & Baumeister (2009). Volunteers were split into two groups. The first group were asked to count eighty $100 notes, while the second group were asked to count eighty pieces of blank paper. All were led to believe that the experiment sought to examine their finger dexterity. The participants were then asked to immerse their fingers in hot water, and to rate the pain perceived on a scale of one to ten. All of those who had counted the $100 notes reported feeling less pain than those who had counted blank paper. It appears that not only possessing money, but mere contact with money, offers an unconscious buffer against pain.

Results such as these have led psychologists Xinyue Zhao and Ding-Guo Gao (2008) to suggest that not only pain, but the anticipation of pain, leads us to seek social support and \ or money. They state, “In our view, social support is the primary defence against pain and the reliance on money may result from the failure of social support to accomplish its pain-buffering goal.”

But, not only does social exclusion result in a lack of pain buffer, but social exclusion is a cause of pain in and of itself. Rainville (2002) explains that the experience of pain has two separate components — pain sensation and pain affect. Tissue damage leads to pain sensation. Specialized pain receptors gather this information and transmit it to the brain for processing via the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. The other component, i.e. pain affect, consists of anxiety and \ or emotions that are associated with pain sensation. It is the emotional understanding of pain that leads the subject to seek to escape the painful environment — though unconscious forces may subvert any attempted escape. Because the emotional component of pain is separated from the purely physical sensation component, individuals can experience pain without receiving a signal indicating tissue damage. Because of this separation, threats to social support can and do trigger painful feelings, causing an emotional experience of pain without accompanying physical pain sensation. MacDonald & Leary (2005) define social pain as “a specific emotional reaction to the perception that one is being excluded from desired relationships or being devalued by desired relationship partners or groups”

If we accept the hypothesis that social support is the primary pain buffer of our species, and that money has taken on the role of a secondary pain buffer, we will see that the relationship between the two is complex. In a sense, money really can buy you love, and so the secondary pain buffer enhances the primary pain buffer — or may even bring it into being. Banerjee and Dittmar (2008) find that even young children are well aware that money and the nice things that money can buy can help them to win desirable friends and become accepted into desirable peer groups. Jorion (2006) notes that money and social support form a self-sustaining loop — having money leads to social support, and having social support leads to having money.

However, as Marx writes in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, “If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?” In some individuals, money acts to entirely replace social support.

Maner et al. (2007) found that some volunteers, subjected to social exclusion during experiments, did not want to reconnect with the perpetrators of the social pain — or even with new partners. The experimenters found that volunteers who were sensitive to the negative evaluation of other people were highly reluctant to chance being hurt again and that this fear of hurt overwhelmed their desire to reconnect with others. Individuals who were apt to generalize from a single instance of social rejection to other potential partners tended to view other people in general as sources of further rejection rather than as potential sources of social support.

Again, researchers asked themselves if money would lessen the emotional impact of social exclusion. Zhou, Vohs, et al. (2009) instructed one group of volunteers to count real money, and a second group to count pieces of blank paper. After counting the money or paper, participants were asked to play a virtual ball-tossing game, “Cyberball,” with what they believed to be three other players. In reality, these other players were a computer program, designed to inflict social exclusion on the human volunteers. Volunteers received the ball from other players for ten throws — and were then excluded from the game when the other three players stopped throwing them the ball. Afterward, all volunteers filled out a questionnaire that included a measure of social distress. Results showed that those who had counted the real money felt less pain from being excluded than those who had counted the blank paper.

Vohs et al. (2006) found that volunteers primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and others. Relative to people not reminded of money, people reminded of money become independent but socially insensitive. In another experiment, participants were assigned to three groups. Participants in the money group accidentally saw a screensaver with various denominations of currency, whereas those in the other two groups saw screensavers with neutral stimuli. Following the money prime, participants were told to have a conversation with another participant and they were asked to put two chairs together for the conversation. Participants who had been exposed to the money screensaver placed the two chairs farther apart than did participants in the other two groups. It seems that participants primed with money preferred more distance between themselves and others.

There are situations where the monetization of a transaction is actually sought to maintain distance. For example, when relationships break down, couples seek a shift from non-monetized transaction to monetized transaction to symbolize the social distance that now exists between them (Simpson, 1997). In addition, Thompson, Harred, and Burks (2003) documented how topless dancers managed the stigma of their occupation using the fact that they were paid for what they were doing. Money helped these dancers to distance themselves psychologically and emotionally from their job and their clients. Similarly, Prasad (1999) showed that clients used monetary exchange to distance themselves morally and emotionally from prostitutes.

Solomon and Arndt (1993) suggest that anxiety around death provokes a desire for money. They asked volunteers to rate the appeal of finding a $20 bill while out on a walk. Volunteers who had been reminded of their own deaths were more excited by this prospect than those not reminded. Kasser and Sheldon (2000) asked volunteers to describe their expectations of their personal wealth fifteen years in the future. Again, those volunteers who had been reminded of their own deaths showed higher hopes of monetary wealth than those who were not reminded. The same researchers found that participants reminded of their own deaths were less willing to support environmental measures, such as the preservation of forests.

The Theurgy of Money

Karl Marx draws attention to the mystical qualities of money and other commodities. In Das Kapital he writes:

“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

He refers to the commodity, including money, as a fetish object, i.e. an inanimate object that is nonetheless attributed with human or supernatural powers. The word “fetish” has taken on rather negative connotations, but it originally had a much more neutral meaning. It comes from the Portuguese word “feitiço,” which denoted any religious relic or charm during the Middle Ages. In the early 1400s, Portuguese sailors used Arab mathematics and shipbuilding techniques to develop seagoing trading routes with West Africa. They found a land divided into large and well organized empires with large urban centres, i.e. the Empire of Mali, the Empire of Ghana and the Songhai Empire. Most of Europe’s gold was already coming from this region since the 1200s via trans-Saharan camel trains, which made the rulers of these empires extremely rich and able to lavish wealth on beautiful buildings, on the arts and on learning, with the most famous libraries being at Timbuktu. The official religion of these empires was Islam, but many elements of native religion remained. The Portuguese traders report that one native element still widespread, though Islamic scholars took a dim view of it, was the practice of swearing oaths of good will and honesty over sacred objects before trading could begin. The Portuguese used the same word “feitiço” to denote these objects.

Mansa Musa, Emperor of Mali

This is a Spanish depiction of Mansa Musa, Emperor of Mali, from 1375. At the time, he was the richest man in the world. He’s depicted with a gold crown and a gold coin. He undertook a pilgrimage to Mecca between 1324 and 1325, which became legendary all over Europe and the Arab world. He brought a retinue of 60,000 with him, and what in today’s money would be half a billion dollars worth of gold. He distributed this gold to the poor in every town and city he passed through on the pilgrimage, including Mecca and Medina. Unfortunately, the sudden injection of so much gold into the economies of these cities and towns caused runaway inflation and the global price of gold didn’t recover again for another ten years.

In effect, the fetish object became a concrete representation of the relationship the traders were entering into. And because the relationship is represented by a material object, it is in some sense obscured. The object is fixed and unmoving, but the human relationship it represents is constantly shifting. Marx saw something similar happening in Capitalist society, where relations between those who buy labour and those who must sell their labour are obscured by the object which represents these relations, i.e. money. Here is a relationship of unequal power that is hidden behind a price, so that the participants can pretend to themselves that the relationship is other than it really is.

It’s because of this element of fixation that Freud used the word fetish. He noticed that some of his patients attempted to ameliorate the anxiety of the sexual relation by representing it in a tangible object — one they felt they had some control over. Once this fixation became ingrained it became very difficult, if not impossible, for them to take the risk of entering into the ever flowing circulation of changes and exchanges that real sexual relations involve. We can think of the distinction Heracl*tus makes between a thing and a process, when he says one can never step in the same river twice. As a concept, the river is a fixed thing, but in reality it is an ever changing process. The sexual fetishist prefers the thing.

The Magic of Gifts

We will now consider a time long before the great empires of the Portuguese and the West Africans. A time of small tribal groups. Professor Kojin Karatani, drawing on the work of Marcel Mauss and other anthropologists, rejects the notion put forward by authors such as Adam Smith in his highly influential book, “The Wealth of Nations,” that money was invented at a late stage in human development to simplify barter and make it more convenient. Karatani suggests that money was there from the very start. Barter does not occur to any significant level inside of tribal groups. Tribal elders decide who will marry with whom, what house they will live in and what share of the tribe’s social product will be given to them. There is little need for barter. Barter occurs between different tribal groups. And a safe place is needed for this barter to be conducted — a religious place which neither side will dare to desecrate with murder or theft. The gods are invoked and gifts are exchanged between the chiefs of the participating tribes.

These gifts are thought to be imbued with spirit themselves and they contain healing powers and powers of divination. The Maori call this power “Hau.”

The gifts tie the chiefs and their tribes together in a bond of reciprocity. In effect, we have an exchange of symbolic gifts — a Symbolic Exchange. Each tribe is now defined in relation to each other, the gifts it has received and the gifts it has given. In Maori and other Polynesian and Native American cultures, these gifts could not be kept by the receiver, but had to be passed on in further relationship building.

Only after this Symbolic Exchange has been successfully completed is the sacred space considered safe for barter. But season and other factors will mean that all items cannot be exchanged at the same time. Credit will be needed. And it is the tokens of this credit that become money. No doubt the god or demigod of the sacred space is called on to enspirit these tokens so they will be respected. Over time, the tokens themselves take on some of the powers of the symbolic gifts and so we have the beginning of our own culture’s reverence for money.

This form of thinking is called Animism, i.e. the belief (even if unconscious) that all things are animate. It appears that we humans are hard wired to think in this way. Cognitive scientists have demonstrated that infants attribute agency to randomly generated objects moving on a computer screen. Karatani claims that Animism is the precondition for magic and that “magic appears only when a relation of reciprocal exchange is established with this anima.” He then proceeds to explain Animism by way of Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” theory.

Buber divides human attitudes toward the world into two types: the “I-Thou” relation and the “I-It” relation. As suggested above, humans have a natural tendency to humanize everything and relate to them as a “Thou.” However, when “I” objectify other beings for my own profit or to force them to my will, I turn them into an “It.” They are no longer a “Thou” for me.

The “I” in the “I-Thou” relation is different to the “I” in the “I-It” relation. The “I-It” relation is a Subject-Object relation. I am the subject in relation to an object which stands opposed to me. As a subject, I am to a certain extent created by the object opposed to me. I have made that object into a thing — a fixed thing — and so what opposes it as subject must also be a fixed thing. In effect, I have fetishized my own ego.

I am opposed by a thing which is quantifiable in money, therefore I am a thing quantifiable in money.

In complex, industrialized, societies, it’s very difficult to break out of this fetishizing process, which reduces the whole world to “resources” and labour hours, and drains the life out of our own bodies and minds leaving us with a constant anxious suspicion that we are not really living. And even when we do feel we’re living, there can be a sense that we are acting a role — yet another layer of fetishization.

In contrast, in the “I-Thou” relation, I stand in relation with Thou, not as a fixed subject but as a moving participant in an ever evolving exchange. A question is opposed to a question. An incomplete statement \ knowledge opposes an incomplete statement \ knowledge. As Lacanian psychoanalysis puts it, “a liminal process of opening and closing that never reaches any final stage.” (Thurston P69) Animism is adopting an “I-Thou” participation in the world.

However, even at the stage of hunter-gatherers, we could not live all our lives in an “I-Thou” universe. Hunters had to kill and eat animals, even as they recognised the spirits that dwelled within them. Other humans had to be killed in war. To do this, a certain objectification is needed, if only for a short time. Karatani claims that this transformation was carried out by means of sacrifices — “Sacrifices are gifts that impose a debt on nature, thereby sealing off the anima of nature and transforming it into an It.”

As mankind settled down and formed agricultural communities tied to a particular place, these sacrifices developed into elaborate magical practice that eventually ruled every aspect of life. The hunter-gatherers made simple sacrifices before killing and eating, then they moved on. But agricultural societies must live among the dead at all times. People offered gifts in order to keep the spirits of the dead in check. This took the form of funeral rites, as well as ancestor worship. The dead became the ancestral gods who were responsible for unifying clan society. The dead must be kept as an It. Fixed and kept away from the living. This is the work of the magician.

Later on, Monotheism allows the Thou to be passed entirely over to God, so that all of nature can be reduced to a single It — and expressed in terms of money.

Karatani, Kojin. The Structure of World History. Duke University Press.

Symbolic Exchange and Death

Although the term Symbolic Exchange was already in use among anthropologists by the 1960s, it was the philosopher Jean Baudrillard who refined and elaborated this concept for a wider public during the 1970s. In his ground breaking work, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), he claims that tribal people do not have a concept of biological death. The termination of a life would have no meaning for them. Indeed, to admit such a concept would be a danger to their whole social order, since such a termination could not be symbolically exchanged, and only that which can be symbolically exchanged can be part of the tribal order. Baudrillard suggests that modern consumer society has de-socialised death by making it a mere scientific fact, an objective consequence of the frailty of the individual body. But tribal cultures do not see the body as individual, they see it as a social relation, i.e. it only has meaning within the dynamics of the group. Baudrillard then goes into a lengthy analysis of tribal initiation, in which he looks at the social meaning of death for tribal peoples. The boys and girls of the tribe must first symbolically die during the initiation ordeal, so that they can be reborn fully socialized as members of the tribe. Since their re-birth is a spiritual one, it would then be nonsense to suggest that biological death is the end of life. Baudrillard writes,

“The important moment is when the Moh (the grand priests) put the Koy (the initiates) to death, so that the latter are then consumed by their ancestors, then the earth gives birth to them as their mother had given birth to them. After having been ‘killed’, the initiates are left in the hands of their initiatory, ‘cultural’ parents, who instruct them, care for them and train them (initiatory birth). It is clear that the initiation consists in an exchange being established where there had been only a brute fact: they pass from natural, aleatory and irreversible death to a death that is given and received, and that is therefore reversible in the social exchange, ‘soluble’ in exchange. At the same time the opposition between birth and death disappears: they can also be exchanged under the form of symbolic reversibility. Initiation is the crucial moment, the social nexus, the darkroom where birth and death stop being the terms of life and twist into one another again; not towards some mystical fusion, but in this instance to turn the initiate into a real social being. The uninitiated child has only been born biologically, he has only one ‘real’ father and one ‘real’ mother; in order to become a social being he must pass through the symbolic event of the initiatory birth/death, he must have gone through the circuit of life and death in order to enter into the symbolic reality of exchange.”

Baudrillard is not suggesting here that death is conjured away, but that the process of initiation removes the spilt between life and death, “and with it the concomitant fatality which weighs down on life as soon as it is split in this way. For life then becomes this biological irreversibility, this absurd physical destiny, life has then been lost in advance, since it is condemned to decline with the body.” In the tribal order, nothing can be allowed to exist in isolation — above all life or death. That which is isolated is outside of the law, outside of meaning, and so a cause of great anxiety. Initiation draws life and death together into the economy of symbolic exchange, and so into the circuit of meaning and wellbeing.

Symbolic Exchange versus Sign Value

While the gift represents a fluid relationship, and the fetish object represents but obscures a human relation, what Baudrillard calls “Sign Value” does not represent any actual human relation. Sign Value is the value a consumer gets from a brand name or any commodity that bestows social status on its owner — or at least makes the owner feel himself to be elevated in social status by owning this commodity. The world of Sing Value is a magic world, conjured up by the interactions and communications between the commodities themselves. Humans can only enter this magical world on the terms of the commodities.

For example, an Italian designer sofa will be part of a whole “atmosphere” that is signified by the entire collection of this designer’s products, along with the collections of other, similar designers. When a consumer buys these commodities, he is inserting himself into this dialogue between commodities as a passive element — an element that doesn’t take part in the conversation. He is buying into the atmosphere, the already existing Lifestyle.

Unlike Symbolic Exchange, this expense is unlikely to create or develop any relationship with other human beings. In a sense, it is an avoidance of such relations. There’s a sense of building a wall around oneself with such commodities. Baudrillard believes that Sign Value is cannibalizing Symbolic Exchange in Consumer Culture. It’s not clear if this behaviour is creating atomized human beings, or that this behaviour is the result of the process of atomization. However, it’s clear that as people put more and more of their time and money into Sign Value, the less they put into relationship building, i.e. Symbolic Exchange. To put it in the linguistic terms of Ferdinand de Saussaire, this “Lifestyle” is signified by a never ending chain of signifiers. There is never a point when the consumer has achieved the “Lifestyle,” as there is always a missing commodity from his collection — there is always a newer commodity or fashion item that must be bought.

Sign Value can be regarded as a super-fetishisation, where the entire environment of the consumer is turned into a never ending procession of fetish objects, and the human being becomes totally alienated in a world where he is dead and dead things live.

The System of Objects. Installation by Andreas Angelidakis, 2013. Based on Jean Baudrillard’s 1968 book of the same name.

The Symptom as Gift

Symptoms are a message of suffering from the unconscious. They too can act as gifts. Or become fixated and act as fetish objects. Freud’s Little Hans case provides us with a phobic symptom which served to call his father into a relation with him, i.e. the little boy offered his father the gift of his phobia of horses in unconscious expectation that his father would reciprocate with the gift of separation from his overweening mother. As psychiatrist Jacques Lacan colourfully puts it;

Don’t you know that it’s not longing for the maternal breast that provokes anxiety, but its imminence? What provokes anxiety is everything that announces to us, that lets us glimpse, that we’re going to be taken back onto the lap. It is not, contrary to what is said, the rhythm of the mother’s alternating presence and absence. The proof of this is that the infant revels in repeating this game of presence and absence. The security of presence is the possibility of absence. The most anguishing thing for the infant is precisely the moment when the relationship upon which he’s established himself, of the lack that turns him into desire, is disrupted, and this relationship is most disrupted when there’s no possibility of any lack, when the mother is on his back all the while, and especially when she’s wiping his backside.
(Seminar X: Anxiety, p. 53)

Lacan is referring to Freud’s “Fort Da” game, in which he saw his little grandson throw a toy away from him, and then pull it back to him, over and over again. When the toy was away the child would exclaim “Fort” or “Away.” When it returned he would exclaim “Da” or “There.” Freud interprets this game as an effort on the part of the child to come to terms with the presence and absence of his mother. Lacan extends this interpretation to suggest that the toy serves to symbolize, and thus provide a kind of antidote to, an anxious symptom generated by the oscillation between the presence and absence of the space between him and his mother — rather than the presence and absence of the mother herself. Or to be more precise, the opening and contracting of that portion of her desire that points away from the child and towards the father or the outside world. This oscillating space gives him the scope to assert himself as a being separate to his mother.

One could say that the Fort Da game is a kind of symptom. It’s how the child’s anxiety manifests itself in the world for others to see. And not only do we see it, but we hear it. We hear the child’s incantation bringing it into being. Symptoms, gifts and fetish objects are always the result of an incantation — the casting of a spell — whether that spell is caste by the conscious or the unconscious mind. The purpose of psychoanalysis has always been to discover the wording of that spell, so that the patient understands his or her own work.

To make this point clearer, let’s consider two plays by Shakespeare that will be familiar to many readers. One of the most spectacular gifts in literature is the handkerchief Othello gives to Desdemona, and which Iago uses to ruin him. Another is the ring that Portia gives to Bassanio in the Merchant of Venice.

Let’s read this famous dialogue between Othello and Desdemona first. It’s clear from Desdemona’s reactions that when Othello first gave her the handkerchief as a gift, he didn’t lead her to believe that it was something of great importance. So much so that she is utterly shocked when she now hears the spell that Othello incants around it. The fact is that it wasn’t really so important until this spell had been caste. With these magical words, Othello weaves into the handkerchief the supernatural power to make bonds between human beings — and to break them too with dreadful consequences. Here now is a charm, touched with the powers of mind reading and prophesy. Its silk is of holy worms and its translucent earth colour comes from the dust of the mummified hearts of virgins. In short, Othello, through the magic of words, creates a fetish object that will now manifest his terrible anxiety in the world as a symptom. This symptom will prevent any further emotional movement between husband and wife, and represent their relationship as a sentence of death.

Othello: I have a salt and sorry rheum offends me;
Lend me thy handkerchief.
Desdemona: Here, my lord.
Othello: That which I gave you.
Desdemona: I have it not about me.
Othello: Not?
Desdemona: No, indeed, my lord.
Othello: That is a fault.
That handkerchief
Did an Egyptian to my mother give;
She was a charmer, and could almost read
The thoughts of people: she told her, while she kept it,
‘Twould make her amiable and subdue my father
Entirely to her love, but if she lost it
Or made gift of it, my father’s eye
Should hold her loathed and his spirits should hunt
After new fancies: she, dying, gave it me;
And bid me, when my fate would have me wive,
To give it her. I did so: and take heed on’t;
Make it a darling like your precious eye;
To lose’t or give’t away were such perdition
As nothing else could match.
Desdemona: Is’t possible?
Othello: ’Tis true: there’s magic in the web of it:
A sibyl, that had number’d in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew’d the work;
The worms were hallow’d that did breed the silk;
And it was dyed in mummy which the skilful
Conserved of maidens’ hearts.

Martin Drolling. Interior of a Kitchen, 1815. The beautiful translucent brown colour is called Mummy, and was widely used in Renaissance painting. This pigment is obtained by grinding down mummies looted from Egyptian graves. To this day, the pigment cannot be obtained in any other way, and so is used no more.

The Merchant of Venice is a play abounding in gifts, money and fetish objects. Antonio borrows money from Shylock so that he can give it to Bassanio to seek the hand of Portia in marriage. Shylock has a turquoise ring his wife gave him as a young man, with which he would not part for a wilderness of monkeys. But, everything else in life he reduces to fetish objects, from the money he lends at interest to the pound of flesh that represents his hatred for Antonio. But, let’s focus on the ring that Portia gives to Bassanio. In declaring her love for him, she makes him a gift of herself and all that his hers. She represents her love with the gift of a ring. Like Othello, she warns Bassanio against losing or giving the ring away. But, unlike Othello, she incants her spell around the ring at the time of giving, so that Bassanio knows this ring will be important to their future life together. Her incantation is of joy and abundant generosity, and the warning she gives at the end of the spell is not fixed in dire consequences but is expressed in the subjunctive case, i.e. allows enough space for a “might be.”

Portia: Myself and what is mine to you and yours
Is now converted: but now I was the lord
Of this fair mansion, master of my servants,
Queen o’er myself: and even now, but now,
This house, these servants and this same myself
Are yours, my lord: I give them with this ring;
Which when you part from, lose, or give away,
Let it presage the ruin of your love
And be my vantage to exclaim on you.

Portia knows that her rival will not be another woman, but the male group which has always been something of a threat to the institution of marriage. Like the protagonist in the 1950s hit song, “Those wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine,” Bassanio is still very much one of the lads and may not be quite ready to give up the bachelor life. By a process of Symbolic Exchange, Portia must resymbolize the relation between Bassanio and Antonio without doing it violence and in such a way that Antonio becomes part of the family’s strength. The circulation of the ring as a gift will be central to how she succeeds in this task.

When Antonio hears the ruling of the court that Shylock may cut a pound of flesh from his breast because of the unpaid loan he took for love of Bassanio, he is almost happy that he has such a way to prove his love. There is even a hint that his love is greater than Portia’s love could be. His mood is calm as he says to his friend,

Antonio: Commend me to your honorable wife

Tell her the process of Antonio’s end.

Say how I loved you. Speak me fair in death.

And when the tale is told, bid her be judge

Whether Bassanio had not once a love.

Portia’s abundantly flexible intellect now comes into full play. She exchanges the role of a wife for the robes of a male judge and gives Venice her famous lesson in the quality of mercy, which is not fixed or measured or counted out in coin, but “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.” Portia weaves a charm around mercy itself, so that it is understood as an eternal and ever-flowing gift, which is twice blessed, blessing him who gives and him who takes. She gives Antonio the gift of his life, and, in her judge’s disguise, asks of his friend Bassanio a gift in return — the ring she gave him as wife. Bassanio is anguished, but when Portia insists, Bassanio cannot refuse the “man” who has saved his friend’s life. Portia has method in her madness. Later, back in her role as wife, she receives this promise from Antonio,

Antonio: I once did lend my body for his wealth,

Which but for him that had your husband’s ring

Had quite miscarried. I dare be bound again,

My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord

Will never more break faith advisedly.

Portia: (giving Antonio the ring)

Then you shall be his surety. Give him this.

Portia has enrolled Antonio as surety for Bassanio’s fidelity, and now it is Antonio who incants a spell over the ring as he gives it to Bassanio, swearing him to keep it always. The ring has circulated as gift between Portia, Bassanio and Antonio, representing an abundant economy of friendship, marriage and family.

However, like the toy that Freud’s grandson played with, this ring has the structure of a symptom. There is pleasure in pain. Underneath the joy of the wedding scene, there is a deep anxiety. A fear of the outsider coming too close. As Portia tells the court, the prosperity of Venice depends on the bond of the foreigner and the bond of the native being equal before the eyes of the law. But there is an unease among the natives. Until Bassanio arrives, all of Portia’s suitors have been foreign, and Portia tells Nerissa that “there is not one among them but I dote on his very absence” and “I wish them all safe trips home.” Shylock’s usury is key to Venetian trade, but the Venetians are ill at ease with it. This unease becomes a present danger, as Antonio’s very life comes under threat from Shylock’s revenge. So like the toy Freud spoke of, the ring in infused with a power to symbolize this anxiety and, in some respect, to master it. Where the toy symbolizes presence and absence, the ring symbolizes an inside and an outside. Venetians will be on the inside, and foreigners safely on the outside. Even Shylock is included by force into the inside, when he is commanded to be baptized a Christian and he is ordered to bequeath his money to his Christian son in law.

The ring also represents a certain unease on the part of Portia as a woman in a man’s world. In Freudian terms, Venice is the world of the Money-Phallus — and power lies with him who possesses that phallus. Portia gently subverts that phallic logic when opportunity presents itself. It is Portia who gives the wedding ring to her husband, not the other way around. It’s Portia’s intellect that saves Antonio, as she takes on a role women are excluded from. Portia and Nerissa make bawdy jokes about their husbands being cuckolds before their marriages are even consummated, and leave their husbands to blush at the thought. And most remarkably, Portia, in the City of the Money-Phallus, exchanges the economy of calculation for the economy of the gift.

Conclusions

We have seen a remarkable continuity between cognitive science, political economy, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature for the understanding that human beings feel the need to represent our relationships in the form of physical objects. In today’s world, these physical objects will more than likely have been obtained with money, or money itself may be the object in question.

Cognitive Science suggests that social support is our main defence against pain and anxiety and has considered the use of money to supplement, or even replace, social support. We can take a theoretical step beyond these findings and make a reasonable claim that this social support is mediated by Symbolic Exchange. The more we can master the production and exchange of symbols, the deeper and more lasting will be our access to social support — and thus to money.

Over the centuries, and indeed millennia, we see a very marked tendency for Symbolic Exchange to be cannibalised by a process of fetishisation. The convenience of money and electronic credit has speeded up the process of fetishisation to an extraordinary degree. We have been losing the power to create symbols and use the exchange of these symbols to create the world around us. Instead, we receive a ready-made world of commodities, which often seem more alive than we do. This has led to an epidemic of anxiety in Western countries in recent years.

We can’t turn back time and become like the innocent hunter-gatherers of old. We have seen far too much. But, we can begin to consciously understand what we have seen. We can make conscious decisions based on that understanding, rather than allowing unconscious societal processes to continually subvert our wellbeing, drain our energy, and ultimately make us poorer.

Let’s finish this essay with an account of a very beautiful and powerful Symbolic Exchange.

“When I was pregnant with my first child, my family threw a small baby shower for me, providing me with the real necessities ― things like onesies, diaper bags and burp cloths. I remember feeling so grateful for all the very practical and useful gifts. At the end of the party, my mother placed a large box on my lap. I had no idea what it could be ― I had already received everything I had asked for, and then some. I unwrapped the present to discover a stunning baby quilt made in the same distinctive pattern as the quilt my grandmother had made for my mother when I was a child. Then it hit me: My sweet grandmother had made this baby quilt for my baby long before I could even have a child of my own. She probably knew as she patiently stitched it that she would never meet the child for whom she was sewing. I still tear up every time I look at it.”
— Louise Cramer