MONEY FEELINGS

Still from Throwdown (Johnnie To, 2004).

People care about money. Of course, we all care about things that money could buy or that we do just for the money. But we also care about money, which seems at some level to be a bare intermediary whose only quality is exchange value and the funny looking presidents on the bills. In addition to standing in for values, money is a thing, a substance, a style of representation. Like evidence of glass or the austere sincerity of print journalism, it is not just form and content but a thing.

Money is gritty and tactile. In affective registers, we fetishizes it in just the opposite of the usual Marxist sense. Marxist “commodity fetishism” describes the regularized understanding of things as exchangeable objects, the reduction of craftsmanship and historical particularity to potential exchange value. Selling something on eBay, we present it as a thing that is worth money, usually stripping it of unsightly backstory about where it came from and what we did with it.

We fetishize money in the sense that money itself gives us feelings, commands attention, interacts with us through other intermediaries.

When we imagine money, we feel bitterly its slipping away, long for its embrace, and fear its sinister excess. For some of us, it’s best not think of it at all. That’s the promise of a full-time job with good pay and solid benefits, using debit cards, having an accountant, or Forrest Gump investing in Apple. Fiscal stoicism. Does it not elicit feelings in you to see someone get paid, throw away a dollar bill, or blow $500 upgrading a car in a way you can hardly notice?

Money is a medium whose material forms (cash, numbers on a screen, quantities spoke or calculated) we feel strongly about. Money can feel like ambition: cash money millionaires. Money can feel like corruption and soullessness: addicted to money. Money can feel like an everyday struggle: the paper chase. Money can feel like subjugation and misery: bills, debts, and poverty.