An economy is a system of exchanges of goods, services, permissions, attentions etc., all of which are concrete objects or actions, or consequential dispositions. All of this could therefore continue to function is exactly the same way without money, say if money were replaced by some other signalling system that was purely abstract or disembodied, that did not require a quasi-objective status on the same level as the matters concretely exchanged. But, of course this would not work without either collapsing the system or rapidly recreating a new form of money. What would have been withdrawn was the factor of motivation, the eliciting of active desires and purposes, and a system of ratios and equivalences which structures desires. Money however, doesn't 'know' how to do this, it is an abstract catalyst that enables motives to be mediated between minds in general - it the medium for a vast analogue computer. Motives and desires seem to be ultimately grounded in biology, but their mediation by money creates a vast superstructural filiation of further motives and desires, a sort of monstrous exoskeleton without which the world as we know it would collapse. Is there a psychic equivalent to this phenomenon? Surely there is? One the one hand the symbolic order, but on the other something like the endocrine system, and perhaps an inextricable combination of the two. You cannot understand the life-world without taking this into consideration, yet it is largely hidden from self-consciousness.