By Will Beaman
Money is often introduced in critical theory as a problem. It appears as the medium that makes unlike things commensurable by reducing them to sameness, the abstraction that removes social life from the conditions that give it substance, or the sign that circulates by displacing the relations on which it depends. In one register, this is the Marxist account of commodity abstraction and estrangement. More specifically, it is the tendency within Marxist political economy to identify money with the value-form, and the value-form with a mystifying equivalence that becomes socially real and destructive. In another register, money becomes part of a deconstructive account of debt, mediation, and the impossibility of meanings or values ever being wholly self-identical. What these approaches share is the claim that money is bound up with failed identity: either it asserts an equivalence that does not in fact exist, or it reveals that equivalence never fully holds. Money is therefore treated either as a false identity or as a site of identity’s failure.
I want to start from a different premise. Money does not need to be understood first as the positing of identity. Commensuration is not exhausted by equivalence in the strongest sense, and credit should not be understood only as false unification or as a relation whose non-identity appears primarily as failure or guilt. Money is better understood as a practice of open public reference. At its most basic level, it stages comparison without requiring identity. By reference I do not mean only precise signification. References can also sample and remix, compare partially, cite selectively, echo playfully, or suggest likeness without exhausting what they carry forward. What matters here is a public act of relating—one that makes coordination, valuation, and obligation possible without discovering a pre-given sameness beneath them. The question, then, is not whether money imposes identity on a heterogeneous world, but what kind of reference money is.
Marxist criticism is most useful when it shows how capitalist monetary forms narrow what can count as socially intelligible. When labor appears only as wage labor, when production appears only through profitability, and when public capacity appears as fixed, money becomes a disciplinary medium. But it is not enough to say that capital captures money and thereby generates socially real abstractions. That still risks treating reification as the basic ontology of money rather than as one historically powerful monetary idiom. What appears here as private value or abstract equivalence is better understood as a genre of reference—a way of organizing relations that presents its own ratios as self-grounding while treating the conditions of issuance and receivability as if they were already settled. Even in these privational forms, money is not ontologically private. It remains a contested public utility, and the terms on which claims are issued, received, and made to count are never fully removed from political struggle.
A similar point can be made about deconstructive accounts of debt and mediation. These traditions are right to insist that identity does not close. Debt is never just a neutral balancing of accounts but is bound up with obligation, memory, punishment, and the effort to make a claim hold over time. More generally, settlement never arrives in a final and self-contained form, because any act of meaning or repayment depends on signs, conventions, and contexts that exceed it. Derrida’s term différance combines difference and deferral to name this condition: meaning is never simply present all at once in a self-identical form. A word becomes intelligible through its differences from other words, through traces of prior use, and through its repeatability across contexts. What appears self-grounding or immediately given is therefore mediated. Applied to economic life, the point is that a price does not contain the full reality of the good it prices, and a wage does not contain the full reality of the labor it measures. Monetary signs are in no objective sense equal to the world they organize. If one begins from identity or presence, non-coincidence appears as différance.
If différance clarifies the mediated conditions of signification, we might use référance to clarify the mediated conditions of reference. Derrida’s altered spelling marks a difference that is visible in writing but not audible in speech, making the temporal discontinuity of signification legible at the level of the word itself. Référance transvalues that gesture. It marks not only the non-presence of meaning, but the inscribability of claims across the spacing of currency issuance and uptake. Just as writing happens here and reading happens there, issuance happens here and receivability is negotiated there as a reversible stagecraft rather than a closed transfer. Rather than starting from identity and its failure, référance begins from relations that are non-identical from the start and do not require identity as their ground. If one begins instead from analogy and provision, from a shared problem that referential coordination across non-identity helps organize and contest, the same field appears as référance. The inadequacy of identity is the site of différance; non-identical relation is the site of référance. These do not necessarily name different empirical objects. They name different descriptions of the same mediated field. Référance names an open public reference: a way of suggesting likeness and holding claims together without discovering a final identity beneath them. Money, on this account, is not the successful representation of a prior economic reality, and it is not merely the symptom of a constitutive lack. It is a partial articulation of the social world as countable and revisable.
In monetary life, référance works through analogy: a way of holding heterogeneous things in accountable relation without making them identical. Analogy here does not mean approximation to a fixed norm. It means that likeness can be suggested and coordinated without being gathered into identity. A wage does not make labor the same thing as money. A price does not make a good identical with a number. A budget line does not make a public need identical with its accounting expression. Identity fails, but coordination still takes place.
The reparations movement offers a political example. A cash payment may form part of reparations for slavery without being identical to reparations or exhausting their meaning. Indeed, reparations are possible in part because money is not exhausted by any punctual scene of settlement. Its non-identity makes it intertemporally inscribable as a medium of repair, capable of carrying past harms, present claims, and future obligations in relation. The relation is not merely metaphorical or supplementary. It is analogical. Payment participates in a broader project of repair that can also take juridical, institutional, pedagogical, and aesthetic forms. This is part of how reparations remain durable across changing media and struggles: not because the claim is reducible to one self-identical demand, but because it can be carried forward across different scenes of reference. Reparations, in this sense, name an open historical and political problem-space rather than a single settled form.
Existing monetary forms often conceal the work of reference. We might think of this in terms similar to the continuity system in cinema. Continuity editing does not literally create seamless space-time. It produces continuity as an effect while hiding the cuts, conventions, and labor that make it possible. Some monetary forms work in the same way. They stage commensurability as a simple fact and obscure the referential work by which non-identical terms are brought into relation. What appears as neutral equivalence is often the product of historically specific conventions that present themselves as natural.
For that reason, reconstruction matters as much as critique. Reconstruction begins not from failed closure but from non-identical relation. Monetary institutions are never complete, never innocent, and never outside power. But they are not simply illusions waiting to be exposed. They are infrastructures through which claims become receivable, contestable, and revisable. To reference is also to cite: to carry something forward and make it count within a shared scene of recognition. Credit clarifies the connection. To credit is not only to finance but also to acknowledge, attribute, and extend receivability in monetary terms.
The historical period of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War extends the reparations analogy. In that moment, the terms under which social life could count within public institutions were reorganized. New images were put forward in which labor appeared as employable beyond the plantation. Citizenship appeared as enfranchisable across race. Land appeared as redistributable rather than fixed within the slaveholding order. Credit appeared as more issuable to newly recognized participants in public life. Black participation appeared as precious and indispensable to public life. None of these predicates produced stable identities, and all were violently contested. Yet they established new relations through which claims could be made and received within a multiracial democracy. Reconstruction therefore names not only a historical period but a problem of reference: how heterogeneous lives can be sustained together within shared institutions without collapsing their differences into a single form.
The political economic question is therefore what kinds of open public references monetary forms establish, and whether they do so reflexively or under the cover of objectivity. A reconstructive critique of money asks who may issue, who may count, what may be valued, which obligations are recognized, and which forms of life are treated as worthy of support. The task is to reconstruct money as accountable relation rather than failed identity.
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