Falsify the Currency!

This essay argues that the economic crisis that began in 2008 is not the result, as some say, of the “real” economy being subordinated to the fictional values of finance. To understand the crisis, in fact, one has to recognize how increasingly the values produced in the contemporary biopolitical economy cannot be gauged by standard measures. The role of finance, in part, is to create quantitative measures for goods whose values are fundamentally immeasurable. There is a strange correspondence, in other words, between biopolitical production and the operations of finance. The second section of the essay follows Michel Foucault's interpretation of the Iranian Revolution to read the cycle of struggles in 2011 as biopolitical struggles.