Money, meanng, power : The global financial market and dexterous communication

Abstract: This doctoral dissertation is a theoretical experiment. The aim is to put the social role of the global financial market in a different critical perspective. From a constructivist social ontology, drawn with the concepts, discourse, institutions and hegemony, the dissertation describes how the financial market drives a globally uniform, national institutional streamlining in accord with the hegemonic, economistic discourse. This description is followed by two deconstructions. First the author deconstructs some central ethical and ontological tenets for the economistic discourse, which are important for the social practices on, and institutionalisation of, the financial market. Second, a redifinition of money is made by help of a phenomenological understanding of the subject and economic interaction. This understanding provides for a framework in which money can be defined as a social technology (similar to letters) for bridging intersubjective distances. The anti-Cartesian unitary subject who undertakes production and consumption in this perspective creates and communicates dexterous meaning in a multidimensional subjective engagement with other subjects and society. When these pieces are combined we can see how the institutional streamlining driven by the global financial market spurs ethical polarisation and cognitive dissonances in people's life-worlds, which block us from acquiring and exercising our subjectivities in accord with the meaning we give them. This is discussed both as a democratic problem and a situation engendering local and global conflict. Some starting points and premises for a renegotiation of the global economistic discursive hegemony are indicated at the end.