Money emerges as allegory, an abstraction that succeeds only by marking its own failure.

Evidence

What follows, then, will not only be abstraction; it will be allegory, and a desperate effort to reach the “concept” which necessarily fails and thereupon marks itself as failure in order to succeed despite itself. This is, of course, in Marx, the money form, and the famous pages on commodity fetishism which ensue are Marx’s dramatic rehearsal of just this success and failure of the peculiar consequences that result from it. … If we recall Guy Debord’s remarkable formulation of the image as the “final form of commodity reification” (in The Society of the Spectacle), the relevance of the theory to contemporary society, to the media, to Postmodernism itself, is at once secured. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 521

Categorization

• XREF: Debord’s image as ‘final form of commodity reification’ is the direct bridge from value theory to postmodern media — core to explaining how the spectacle is economic form appearing. — connects to: Money as arbitrary fiction can only represent real social labour — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 612
• ADDENDUM: The image-as-reification argument parallels how ‘sacrifice’ functions as an abstraction that succeeds through failure in the third published article.