Filthy lucre: gold,language, and exchange anxiety

This essay examines the discourse among newly emerging American right-wing groups around gold currency and the gold standard to develop the concept of exchange anxiety, a discomfort about the terms of subjects’ participation in social economies of exchange. Gold is a common thread linking many otherwise disparate conservative groups, and examining this continuity may demonstrate an underlying connective logic among newly emerging right-wing ideologies. Using Jacques Lacan’s notions of anxiety and psychosis, I argue that anxiety over the gold standard bears a metaphorical relationship to both language and excrement. This anxiety can be further illuminated with Lacan’s concept of the “yieldable object,” an intermediary between subject and Other that may serve as the object of the Other’s demand. Ultimately, the gold standard represents an insistence on intrinsic value that compensates for uncertainty about subjects’ participation in highly complex and rapidly changing social systems. Rather than directly refuting specific claims, engaged scholarship might profit by insisting on rhetoric’s traditional embrace of ambiguity and messiness to disrupt the delusional certainty advanced by extremist ideologies.