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It would be of great theoretical interest to establish the conceptual link between this genesis of self-consciousness and the modem notion of paper money.
-Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative, 1993
IN LIGHT OF ITS PARADOXICAL DEFINITION AS BOTH A MATERIAL AND AN immaterial thing, debt is continually subject to a crisis of definition and representation.1 This made for an interesting visual problem in the eighteenth century for graphic satirists who, in search of a suitable visual language, often thought about debt in terms of credit or belief, trust, and faith in either a person or an institution. In 1797 Isaac Cruikshank, following a print designed by Gillray two months prior, etched "British Asignats [sic]" into the print Billy a cock-horse or the Modem Colossus amusing himself (fig. 1). In so doing, he envisioned that William Pitt, tasked with funding the war against Revolutionary France, replaced Britain's material wealth with spurious immaterial wealth. That is, Pitt had usurped the remains of real physical money in Britain and replaced it with paper money. Perhaps some viewers might have been reminded of the forged assignats produced by Britain between 1793 and 1795 as a furtive means of further debasing France's economy, but in this print Cruikshank reveals the fear that British bank notes might meet with the same desperate fate as French paper money.2 The public's faith in Pitt to repay this paper debt in specie remains doubtful. Tied to his lack of creditworthiness lurks the fear of financial collapse.
Much like our current debates about financial crises, fiscal cliffs, and quantitative easing, debt was frequently the subject of heated debate throughout the eighteenth century, notably during the South Sea crisis in 1720 and the Bank Restriction Act of 1797.3 The fact that money and public credit were based on both faith in government institutions and individuals created a deep sense of anxiety that graphic satirists, Gillray in particular, exploited in representation. This anxiety stemmed from the fact that money in all its variants maintains its value due purely to human agreement. Money is an "institutional fact" (existing within human institutions) and not a "brute fact" (existing independently of human institutions).4 That is, money carries what Georg Simmel called "the psychological fact of objective value" and not...