The Currency of Failure: Money and Middle-Class Critique in Post-Crisis Buenos Aires

Abstract

The 2001–2002 Argentine financial crisis entailed a dramatic currency devaluation. I argue that the devalued peso served as a key site for self-reflexive national critiques, which circulated as a privileged currency of middle-class distinction. This essay engages with the ambivalences of a world of critical practice in which practitioners framed their own critiques as the compulsory labor of a people trapped by a paradoxical monetary reality, posited as socially constructed yet nonetheless inescapable. Tracing the links among disparate modes of signification and evaluation, the essay sketches a post-crisis, middle-class representational economy predicated on these practices of suspicious interpretation.