Analog Critique; or, Isn't Money Queer?

Abstract This essay introduces a critical theory of mediation developed by the Money on the Left Editorial Collective (MotL) and demonstrates the value of the collective's thinking for current debates in media theory. MotL is an interdisciplinary research and media collective that reclaims money's public powers for imaginative intersectional politics and media praxis. MotL understands money to be a boundless and contestable public utility that heterogeneously mediates collective life, jettisoning orthodox as well as Marxist reductions of money to a passive expression of private property and zero-;sum exchange. In doing so, MotL's project rejects the impoverished “nominalist” metaphysics that dominates modern Western approaches to mediation. Such metaphysics hold that processes of individuation are primary, while mediation is a secondary extension or imposition, however apparently necessary or constitutive. Contra nominalism, MotL insists that mediation is primary and generative, teeming with diverse social and aesthetic potentials. The author calls their approach to mediation analog critique, after an understudied tradition in medieval thought concerning the “amphibolus” or “analogous” “middle” that conditions existence. Putting analog critique into action, this essay not only lays bare the nominalist premises of much critical theory, but also sheds new light on current debates about the meaning of digital and analog technologies and the underlying logics they are presumed to perpetuate.