The Limits of Representation and What Lies Beneath

This article attempts to demonstrate that the failure to recognize real conflicts and bring them to representation is the chief yet highly inconspicuous reason behind the regression of ways in which we understand and describe today’s reality. Crucially, this shortcoming has helped to elevate the language of economics to the rank of the basic idiom for the development of mutual representations. As my analyses show, the language of economy has become the principal medium of representation for communities separated by great distances and unable to recognize each other’s existence as rooted in their respective realities, despite the fact that they are deeply interconnected. For this reason, although global dependence and conflict, including exploitation and exclusion, remain faceless, they do find some expression in symbolic indices of anonymous capital flows, represented and made legible in streams of numbers.