Mixed Signals: Political Economies of the Sign

Abstract

THE CAMERA—at its origin— was supposed to reflect real ity as fixed and frozen in its granular accuracy. Though, as with so many technological artifacts of its kind, the lens ended up changing the eye, as it offered both new ways of looking at and new ways of perceiving the world.1 Another set of optics found its way into economics during the period in which the camera filtered into popu lar use: the distinction between the nominal and the real. That concept pair came to imply both the link and the gaps between perception and value. To stay with the photographic theme, nominal values work like a camera pure and simple; they provide snapshots of markets at definite moments in time. Real values by contrast work more like spirit photo graphy; they capture the same moment but with the semitransparent specter of, among other things, inflation hanging over the scene.2 Those manmade spirits— which might nonetheless persuade an observer— provide an analogy of what would come to be called the Fisher equation (real variation = nominal variationexpected inflation). Here too intangible variables— including beliefs—do in fact haunt and so alter the economic scene. They have incredible powers of expanding and shrinking wealth without ever moving a decimal on a balance sheet. To simply track the evolution of concepts such as real/nominal from inside economic history is to see in two rather than three or four dimensions. If we broaden our perspective, it is a little uncanny that this concept pair grew alongside a host of others, each of which offered nascent understandings of that which we label as real ity. We might think, for instance, of the semiotic revolution in linguistics, which drew distinctions between sign,