The Subjectivity of money: critical psychology and the economies of post-structuralism

Recent theory in critical psychology and elsewhere has looked to post-structuralism to provide more useful models of subjectivity and its relationship to power, identity and culture. Post-structuralist theory is often understood as a radical critique of contemporary power relations, and thus society in general. Foucault, Lyotard, lrigaray and Derrida often envisage the inter-relationship of subjects in contemporary power regimes as 'economic'. This is a significant development in an era whose only universal language of social meaning is economics. The aim of this paper is to show how post-structuralist theory both describes and enacts what it means to be a subject in such an economy, where identities circulate only in so far as they can be queered, and where structures operate only by way of their deconstruction. Post-structuralism does not merely replicate the logic of an economised world, but helps us to understand the cultural and historical forms that have made such a world possible. By outlining what post-structuralist theory means by the economy of subjectivity, this paper helps to clarify its value for contemporary psychological and cultural theory.