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Currency as an image, money as a sign: Georgios Papadopoulos at TEDxUHowestSalon

631 views · Published 19 March 2013 · 12:43 · Indexed 1 October 2026

Channel: TEDx Talks · 2013 · Nonprofits & Activism

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Georgios Papadopoulos works as an economist and philosopher, researching on money and its socioeconomic functions - often in artistic frameworks.

Representation provides the basis for sociality. The capacity of the human mind to represent creates a layer of meaning that constructs the institutional framework for social interaction. Money contributes both as a sign and as an image to social constitution. Its main function is to mediate our relation to social reality by investing objects with economic value. Prices communicate the content of social constitution, organizing an order of meaning where all commodities are inserted as signifieds of economic value in accordance to their prices.

Signification is thereby regulated by money, the master signifier of economic value, which supports and quilts the signifying chain of commodities, effectively constituting the system of prices. At the same time the image of currency conditions our participation in the market by our identification with the complex of images visualizing value which composes the printed surface of currency. The content of money, if anything, is the being-there of a desire, a crystallization of all the imaginary enjoyment that its exchange can promise. The iconography of the money-image attempts to allude to the desire of the subject, to invest consumption and work with a surplus of enjoyment. To understand the workings of money is to solve the mystery of the market economy.

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