Deconstruction must be employed to understand why collapse occurs---absent a linguistic understanding of economics, it’s inevitable.

The unexplored terrain that emerged in the 1970s is the world of dematerialized currencies that Derrida believes has somehow transformed literature. Lifting the "curse" on irredeemable monies is tantamount to lifting the curse on signs that operate without reference, a central element of Derrida's linguistic project. The economic transformation of money in 1971 is in peculiar ways tied to the radical politics of the 1960s, as we can see by noting that in France an important suspension of convertibility of the franc occurred in May, 1968, in direct response to the threat of a General Strike. The radical disruption of the social order that seemed to many linked to the disruptions of deconstruction led to or was countered by the ending of "reference" in that most fundamental "sign" in the capitalist system, money. Jean Baudrillard recognizes a relationship between the new kind of rebellion of the left in the 1960s, the demise of the gold standard, and deconstruction, though his way of characterizing this complex relationship is to say that the development of an economic system based on what he calls "uncontrollable play" marked the end of the possibility of "materialist" contradictions, the end of the Marxist dialectic in which changes in means of production generate changes in the social order, so that a new form of resistance (to signs) was needed. He concludes that at a certain point in history, production was "elevated ... to a total abstraction, ... to the power of a code, which no longer even risks being called into question by an abolished referent" (his emphasis).5 Then in a footnote he explains that, "economically, this process culminates in the virtual international autonomy of finance capital, in the uncontrollable play of floating capital. Once currencies are extracted from all production cautions, and even from all reference to the gold standard, general equivalence becomes the strategic place of manipulation. Real production is everywhere subordinated to it. This apogee of the system corresponds to the triumph of the code" (129 n. 9). Baudrillard's comments suggest a peculiar relationship between deconstruction, sixties' radicalism, and the new definitions of money. The end of the gold standard results in uncontrollable play of capital which sounds like the freeplay that Derrida finds in language. In fact, if we read the new "definition" of a currency, it seems very much like a Derridean description of the endless "dissemination without return" of linguistic signifiers to define one sign is merely to put up other signs, and so on, never reaching any end. The dollar is redefined so that it is no longer a "silver certificate," a paper referring to physical objects, but rather simply a "federal reserve note," a note indicating that the Federal Reserve System owes the bearer a dollar. To have a dollar is to be owed a dollar: the sign that represents money actually represents that one has the right to another sign. After the 1970s, the question of what backs up currencies is no longer answered by an image of a huge stockpile of gold, but rather by a reserve system; internationally, this takes the form of the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, in which countries hold "reserve positions" or "s.d.r.s," "standard drawing rights"; they are granted rights to borrow, and those rights back up their currencies. Internationally, a dollar is now defined as a "basket" of so many marks plus so many yen, so many pounds, so many of every currency and similarly a mark is so many dollars plus so many yen, and so on. Defining a currency in terms of a basket of other currencies does rather seem like a system of freeplay of signifiers: searching for the "meaning" of one monetary sign leads only to an infinite sequence of other signs and ultimately circles back to the same sign. Monetary signifiers are defined in terms of their differences from other signifiers, not in terms of any signified. Payment across countries is no longer even mythologized as the transfer of objects; indeed payment in effect no longer exists at all; rather, payment has become the transfer of debt from one country to another. If being given an IOU is a way of deferring payment, the current economic system has made such deferrals permanent. The meaning of economic signs no longer derives from reference but rather from a code. Such changes in economics do not happen all at once and are never complete and uniform across the entire field of economic activity. New economic concepts emerge long before they become orthodoxy, and sometimes such concepts appear first in non-economic texts, as ironic mockery of common practices or descriptions of other social systems or even just imaginary possibilities. In Given Time, Derrida in effect retraces the long process of subtle changes in economic notions which led up to the final dematerialization of money in 1971, by citing from texts published near crucial moments in the history of the transformation of money. Derrida focuses particularly on an ironic story by Baudelaire, "The Counterfeit Coin," published in 1864, and on an account of the economics of "primitive" societies by Marcel Mauss, The Gift, published in 1925. Near each of these publication dates there was a significant change in the way Western governments backed up the money they issued, and elements in these texts reflect those changes. When Baudelaire wrote his story about counterfeit money, there was considerable international anxiety about governments issuing money backed by nothing, particularly the U.S. during the Civil War, which paid its troops with "Greenbacks" that it printed quite freely. In reaction to this anxiety, the official international gold standard was instituted in 1881. The gradual dematerialization that Derrida wants to trace was the undoing of this international treaty.