Milton Friedman was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a Jewish immigrant family of modest means. He rose to become a leading light of the Chicago School of Economics, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976 for his work on the theory of money, and eventually became an influential adviser to Republican President Ronald Reagan and Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.²⁶⁹ He is credited as having been one of the masterminds in the construction of the post-communist global economic order, an order that has frequently been termed “neoliberal.”²⁷⁰

After he retired, Friedman wrote a paper, “The Island of Stone Money.”²⁷¹ He had found an obscure book of the same name written by William Henry Furness, published in 1910. This book had become somewhat visible to economists because it was followed by an extract in the Economic Journal in 1915.

Furness wrote about the people of Yap, several thousand inhabitants living on a small island in the Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Papua New Guinea and China. An ocean and an economic paradigm away, Cambridge University economist John Maynard Keynes had already discovered Furness’ writing because he discussed the same stone money in his Treatise on Money²⁷² – though Friedman never mentioned that. Like Keynes before him, Friedman thought the story of the Yap was nicely allegorical.

The people of Yap did not produce solely for their own needs, as First Peoples did. They also produced to exchange, Furness explained, buying and selling fish, pigs, and labor to build each other’s houses. Also unlike First Peoples, the Yap had systematic differences in wealth and social status, even a slave class.

The Yap system of exchange had produced differences in accumulated wealth represented by stone coins, called fei. These were made from limestone quarried on the island of Babelthuap, some 400 miles away. They were of different sizes, between one and twelve feet in diameter, and when they were this big, a hole was cut in the middle so they could be carried on a pole, slung shoulder to shoulder between two people. The value of a fei was measured in spans from the index finger to the thumb – the larger, the more valuable. If too large, they were stored outside the house.²⁷³

Concludes Furness, “the simple-hearted natives of Uap [Yap], who never heard of Adam Smith, have solved the ultimate problem of Political Economy, and found that labour is the true medium of exchange and the true standard of value.”²⁷⁴ The Yap had discovered money as a way to represent exchange value.

When a fei was too large and difficult to move, the person who had exchanged his product did not necessarily need to take physical possession (and it was only men who engaged in exchange). After a sale, “its new owner is quite content to accept the bare acknowledgment of ownership and without so much as a mark to indicate the exchange, the coin remains undisturbed on the former owner’s premises.” In this way, Furness goes on, “[t]he purchasing power of that stone remains, therefore, as valid as if it were leaning visibly against the side of the owner’s house, and represents wealth as potentially as the hoarded inactive gold of a miser of the middle ages, or as our silver dollars stacked in the treasury at Washington, which we never see nor touch, but trade with on the strength of a printed certificate that they are there.”²⁷⁵

Having told his version of the Yap story, Friedman asks, “how many of us have literal personal direct assurance of the existence of most of the items we regard as constituting our wealth? Entries in a bank account, property certified by pieces of paper called shares of stocks, and so on and on, illustrate how important ‘myth,’ unquestioned belief, is in monetary matters.”²⁷⁶

The meaning of the thing we call “money” was not just in the fei stones on Yap. Nor is it in our modern experience of markets (just) in the pieces of paper that are banknotes, or the plastic of credit cards, or an invoice or receipt, or the information we can today pull up on screens about our account transactions or balances – some of the multimodal media and transpositional practices by which we mean “money” today.

These texts, and objects, and images transpose for each other because they are not meanings by themselves. Rather they subsist in a social system of value transactions where these objects and actions only make sense as meaning transpositions, never just meanings-of because there are also meanings-in.^§MS2.2c The meaning of each transposition is within a system of credit and clearance, the decentralized negotiability of value.²⁷⁷ Such meaning is generated in the meeting of differential interests, and these interests are both solidary and antagonistic – obviously, deceptively, contradictorily, fluidly, unstably so.

Friedman could agree with Keynes on only a few things. One was the role of money in establishing certain kinds of elementary bonds of sociability in the process of exchange. The Yap were a salutary example for both of them. But beyond this, there was very little agreement.

Keynes’ larger conclusions about the politics of money, and the tension between solidary and antagonistic interests, was offered as a solution to the Great Depression in his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Here he argued that markets could not be trusted to support human interests and that sociability needed to be underwritten by governments. Intrinsically antagonistic interests in markets needed to be resolved by the state in the humane interests of civil society.

Indeed, with its monopoly over the creation and regulation of money, this was an essential social responsibility of governments – hence the necessity of deficit spending in times of economic contraction, and financing the welfare state to guarantee humane levels of access to material goods, as well as in purely economic terms to buttress aggregate demand during downswings in the business cycle.²⁷⁸

Friedman disagreed vehemently, and eventually Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and their successors came to follow Friedman’s line of thinking rather than Keynes’. At root was a fundamental disagreement about the underlying configuration of human interests, expressed through money and markets in all their multimodal transpositions.

Returning to the rosier side of Adam Smith, Friedman said that capitalism guaranteed freedom as a consequence of its “proposition that both parties to an economic transaction benefit from it, provided the transaction is bilaterally voluntary and informed. Exchange can therefore bring about co-ordination without coercion … Since the household always has the alternative of producing for itself, it need not enter any exchange unless both parties benefit from it.”²⁷⁹

Because the sociability of markets is inherently solidary, argued Friedman – though here we are using our terminology – governments should be as small as possible, and they had no business spending in deficit or supporting a welfare state.²⁸⁰ “No such thing as a free lunch,” he titled one of his best-selling books,²⁸¹ a paean to markets and their arguable freedoms. Besides, he claimed controversially, government didn’t solve the Great Depression; it had created it.²⁸²

Sociable markets certainly are, but the matter for dispute between Keynes and Friedman was whether that sociability is to interpreted to be intrinsically solidary (Friedman) or antagonistic (Keynes).

A more nuanced version of the analysis is that they are solidary to a degree, but also at the same time antagonistic, albeit sometimes deceptively so. The antagonistic part is in the inequalities that effectively make some bilateral transactions to some extent involuntary, for instance when, as between buyer and seller, boss and worker, there are power differentials. It is also hard to imagine how a modern household could produce for itself, a “freedom” Friedman proposes. Without inherited wealth it is difficult to see how it is possible to avoid the labor market.

So, it matters which parsing of the meaning of sociability you choose in the configuration of differential interests in the market. When we explore the interests expressed in multimodal transpositions mediated by money we find meanings which seem solidary in one moment but that are in conflict in another.

***

Sociability. The interaction of differential interests, solidary or antagonistic.

In the meeting of differential interests, sociability is the measure of our participation. Sociability can be innocently complementary, or antagonistic, and when antagonistic, explicitly or implicitly so.

Rhetoric and reification are each, in their own ways, sociable.

Rhetoric is explicit appeal to interest.^§2.1 The forms of its sociability can involve alignment of complementary interests, or an attempt to enforce realignment of interests that are antagonistic. Or a bit of both, in disingenuous appeal to alignment (“surely, we agree?”). Or the disingenuousness might just be a distractor for what proves in fact to be a rhetorical demand to realign (in the final analysis meaning, “and if you don’t seem to agree of your own accord, you must!”). These are slippery transpositions, always on the move.

Reification^§2.3 may be a matter of activation of meanings in things and states of affairs, habitually, unreflectively, customarily perhaps. And innocently perhaps, to smell the proverbial roses. Or it can involve alienation, in the case of a conflict of interests where one set of interests is, by design, at the expense of the other. Or a bit of both, in disingenuous activation, only seemingly innocent because it distracts from another perhaps less obvious level where there is a conflict of more fundamental interests.

The disjunctions of interest are always there. However, some disjunctions are complementary, others antagonistic. Some are explicit (rhetorics, denotations), others implicit in things and states of affairs (reifications, connotations). What seems or is made to seem solidary (rhetorical alignments and activations in states of affairs) can be antagonistic in fact (rhetorical realignments and reifications that alienate).

Such functional transpositions of meaning are always ready to happen, juxtaposed as they are in the metaphorical supermarket^§MS0d of meaning functions. They are imminent because they are immanent. Their immanence makes them imminent.

It follows also that any momentary occlusions are always ready to be revealed for what they are. Meanings that are hidden, surreptitiously or not-so surreptitiously favoring some interests at the expense of others, can always be exposed. In a transpositional grammar, so can the manner of their hiding.

In the preceding sections of this book we have looked at shopping and commodities. The ones that now follow are on money and markets. However, we could have taken for our examples any number of other equally expansive and fraught meanings – “race,” “gender,” “environment,” or such like. Each of these examples may have yielded meanings just as complex, just as significant in our lives, and at times just as misleading. The commodity is just one site of sociability around states of affairs and their meanings, albeit a centrally important one in modernity given its elemental meaning in the market, and its relations to the meanings of waged work, shopping, and a panoply of other “economic” as well as social things. Insofar as it is just one of a number of possible examples, the commodity merely serves us as an illustration, allowing us to demonstrate a method with which to parse the multimodal relations of differential interests.

***

“Phishing” is the attempt to defraud people through deceptive emails or text messages – fishing, baiting, and catching an unsuspecting user with an email, for instance, that appears to be from a trusted seller or business, but that directs the user to hand over money or account information to a thief. Etymologically, the word tracks back to “phreaking,” a term from the 1970s used to describe the theft of free international calls from phone companies by emulating the tone system then used for dial-up. The “ph” is for phone, and “phreak,” short for “free call.”²⁸³ “Phish” enters the lexicon in the 1990s.²⁸⁴

The Anti-Phishing Working Group is another entity in the distributed and democratically unaccountable structures of global governance which, in the era of digital meaning, have replaced the state. In the absence of global governance of a democratic variety, this is a quasi-private, self-appointed global police force for the internet.²⁸⁵ The Working Group received reports of 268,126 phishes in 2006, and 1,380,432 in 2016.²⁸⁶

In their book, Phishing for Phools, George Akerlof and Robert Schiller use the idea of phishing as a metaphor for the imperfection of markets – not just the deliberate deceptions of thieves, but also the intrinsic deceptions of their normal working.²⁸⁷

Akerlof won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 for his work on the asymmetric information that participants have in markets. It is impossible, for instance, to know whether a second-hand car is a “lemon,” because although sellers are going to know, they are not going to disclose this to buyers. The expectation that cars might be lemons affects sellers of good used cars, because uncertainty and lack of trust is built into the relationship. This is one of the reasons why even the best of second-hand cars is so much cheaper than a new car of the same model.²⁸⁸

In terms of our transpositional grammar, we have cars, drivers, and speech, perhaps also a written description in an advertisement. Underlying all these meanings is a sociable interest in the sale, a differential interest between buyer and seller that is solidary in one meaning function but antagonistic in another. This is intrinsic to exchange and the market, their function as sociable meanings.

Co-author Robert Schiller also won the Nobel Prize, in 2013, for his analyses of antagonistic interests leading to market failure, in his case the “irrational exuberance” that inflates asset prices.²⁸⁹

Akerlof and Schiller show in their book how “the free market system tends to spawn manipulation and deception.” They go on to document a multitude of antagonistic interests in the market. Advertising, for instance, contains systematic rhetorical exaggerations and omissions. In every sale, buyer and seller know that as well as producing a situation of “good-for-me/good-for-you,” markets also “produce good-for-me/bad-for-you’s. They do both, so long as a profit can be made.”²⁹⁰

Nor is it just the little person who has to deal with trickery intrinsic to the market relation, mediated by money and price. The high flyers in the system play the same game of deception, hence the savings and loans crisis of 1986–95, the junk bond crisis of the early 2000s, and the worthless mortgage-based securities and derivatives that without government bailouts in 2008–9 would have brought down the global system of money.²⁹¹

With the Friedmanites in mind, Akerlof and Schiller conclude, “economists … systematically ignore or downplay the role of trickery and deception in the working of markets … [C]ompetitive markets by their very nature spawn deception and trickery.”²⁹² This, in the words of another great theorist of the late capitalist market and aspirant to the Nobel Prize, is “the art of the deal.”²⁹³

The solution, say these two good neo-Keynesians, is regulation of markets by democratic governments. This is not to abolish the intrinsic antagonism that drives interests in markets – they wouldn’t have got their Nobel Prizes if they had gone that far. Regulatory measures are necessary if the antagonisms intrinsic to the market are not to follow their inevitable tendency to self-destruction. So, the market lives to see another day. According to the normal logic of the market, the banks should have been bankrupted in the 2008 collapse of the financial system, but they were saved by government, an unsurprising irony.

***

Antagonistic Interests. The meeting of differential interests, frequently enacted by compulsion, explicitly or by means of deception.

Anthropologist David Graeber says that “all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.”²⁹⁴ For a transpositional grammar, we rephrase this: all meaningful human affairs are by their nature sociable, however in some moments solidary, other moments antagonistic. At still other times solidary and antagonistic interests subsist in uneasy tension within a single event. Money and markets, for instance, both entail social trust, but also in their nature engender mistrust.

At one end of the continuum, we have interests that are simply solidary, what Graeber calls “baseline communism.”²⁹⁵ The factory may be a rotten place to work, but “pass me the spanner” is an enactment of differential interests that is unproblematically solidary. Your having a spanner, and my need for one, are expressed in words, objects, space, and body. The effect is the enactment of solidary interests.

The market establishes patterns for the negotiation of differential interests that are in some respects solidary and at the same time and in other respects antagonistic. “Can I help you?” says the shop assistant, ready to lead you to a product whose whereabouts and qualities they know. But in the moment when the help leads to a sale, the personal element in human relations is removed, and the earlier human relation of help, perhaps in connection with your potential use of the product, is reduced to the reified abstraction that is money.²⁹⁶ Cold-blooded calculation kicks in, and the differential interests have become intrinsically antagonistic. The initial friendliness, in retrospect, has been simulated, an uneasy transposition between the solidary and the antagonistic.

Moving towards the antagonistic end of the spectrum, we have actions that go beyond the bounds of systematically acceptable antagonism. Theft, phishing, and false advertising fall within the logic of markets; they make sense in terms of the logic of money. But they go beyond the bounds of civility and ethics, taking things too far, to a point where they may become system-threatening. Often, however, this is a fine line, and some of the most “successful” parts of the market operate in a conveniently gray ethical zone.

Finally, interests often meet in relationships of pure compulsion, unmitigated antagonism. The boss’s orders are an example of this. Alfred Chandler’s The Visible Hand, a classic of management theory, is one of the most devastating critiques of the one-sided version of Smith urged by Milton Friedman and his followers.²⁹⁷ Modern organizations are hierarchical institutional forms, so they need to be “managed.” Inside organizations, neither is there freedom in the sense of liberal-democratic freedom (voting for the bosses?), nor is there freedom in the sense of Friedman’s freedom of the market. The historical origins of this form of organization are the slave household and the feudal estate.

Organizations may attempt to hide the antagonism with the fictions of “teams” and voluntaristic “workplace cultures.”²⁹⁸ But the reality, Graeber argues, is that within the confines of the organization and the working day, interests are configured in ways that are not in essence different from slavery.²⁹⁹ Intransigence leads to dismissal, and the only way to escape the compulsion is to resign. Then you have to join another hierarchical organization to survive, and this is not really freedom at all.^§2.3a

Some societies – First Peoples, for instance – didn’t have money or markets, nor hierarchical work organization. These are recent inventions, no more than a few thousand years old across the span of species existence of perhaps a hundred thousand years. They are new to a majority of the world’s people only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Furtive attempts were made in these centuries to abolish markets and organizational hierarchies, leading to the creation of another kind of “actually existing communism.” The agenda: to create societies of freely “associated producers,” where purely solidary interests were established – “from each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.”³⁰⁰ But over the course of the twentieth century these communisms themselves succumbed to hierarchy of vicious proportions.

In its early years, the Soviet Union set about abolishing money entirely, though unsuccessfully.³⁰¹ By the end of the third quarter of the twentieth century and for a third of the world’s population, the countries whose states and economies were managed on the Soviet model managed to all-but eliminate the market. They replaced productive organizations based on private property with state-owned bureaucracies. This shows that dramatic change is possible in the fundamental relations of human interest, although not necessarily for the better.

In the first commercial societies, market relations were limited, mostly restricted to trade in luxury commodities for the rich, while the majority mostly subsisted. On a world scale, this remained the case until the twentieth century, when by century’s end and after the Cold War, few of the human species remained unaffected by the social meanings of money and markets.

However, even in high capitalism, where much of life has now been commodified, we still have home cooking, domestic child and elder care, private parties, sometimes even old-fashioned selflessness. This tells us that solidary interests of an ordinary kind, uncompromised by antagonism, might still be possible on a wider scale.

• Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 274-84. [§ markers are cross-references to other sections in this book and the companion volume (MS); footnotes are in this book.]