In this work modern financial ideas are considerd through the prism of semiotics and financial theories are analyzed as semiotic systems. This approach allows better analyzing the role of the latters in modern culture, politics, social life. The basic idea of the work consists in analyzing semiotics of gift and semiotics of profit in life of modern people. Author bases her analysis on theories of Lewis Hyde, Marcel Henaff, Georges Bataille, who analyzed the role of gift and potlatch phenomena, as well as on theories of numerous economists and philosophers of economics such as Randall Wray, James Rickards, Ha-Joon Chang, George Soros etc., who worked on questions of methodology and history of economics and financial theory.
The main problem is that the modern economic theory demonstretes inclination to more and more mathematization which is considered as a means of attaining more exactness and therewith scientism. This leads to that the modern economic and finance theories become more and more abstract and go away from real aspects of economic and social life. The semiotic analysis can solve this problem and return them to reality.
It was demonstrated in the work that the base of social unity and convention is myth and phenomenon of potlatch; that an aspiration to some inner integrity and unity lies in the foundation of the latter and that this aspiration is realized in destruction and self-destruction (gift is a variant of annihilation of material values). The destruction, however, according to Georges Bataille, beget symbolic values that become foundation of the myth lying in the base of social integrity and unity. That means that namely the practices of gift and potlatch create the society inside of which the economics of profit is possible. In other words market system as itself cannot provide social unity, even mare it itself becomes possible only after attaining of the social unity. It was shown also that money plays role of the so-called implicative logical relations in the theory of relational holism. It was shown as well that if personification is a primal constituent of human thinking then the phenomenon of property is a form of personification and namely the understanding of property makes the human, differing it from animals. Money in this context is the concept by mean of which the reflection over property questions is done. It is demonstrated that if the basic correlate of all material processes and human actions is energy then money is a sign or token of energetic transactions in human society, as well as that money is the mean of abstracting in processes of human activity comprehending and planning through debt and promissory notes. The latter compounds key aspect of money essence and in this context the natural process of money virtualization (from concrete subjects as means of paying to coins, to paper money, electronic money and crypto-currencies) correlates with processes of virtualization and rationalization in other spheres of human activity; it’s shown that the money as the primal abstraction engender other abstractions, the economic theory is based on, including a abstracted and simplified view on human, culture, politics. The concept of the so-called homo economicus is the most known of them. At last it was shown the processes of finances and financial institutes have synergetic and emergentic character represented by fractal semiotics. The theory is built through generalization, abstraction and idealization, such as “ideal market”, “essentially planned economy”, “demand and request”, etc. They create some semiotic and conceptual structures through prism of which one estimates real economic processes. One of the elements of such structures is an idea of “homo economicus”. Money is suggested to be at the core of the calculation which becomes a mean of self-control not only in the economic sphere but also in the sphere of politics and legislations.
Money is an instrument like the language. Similarly to how the language can not only describe objects but also insert some transformations connected to desires, intentions or attitudes to that one who speaks into its description, so does money bear risk of the respective deviations in itself.
The phenomenon of property and its existential going through in the sociocultural reality are a manifestation of a mental operation of the personification of extrapolated functions. The property becomes the original fundament of the future international economic relations followed by stages of the gift economy, and, lately, by the profit economy at which, properly speaking, the phenomenon of money appears.
