The institutional architecture of the ECB conveys an insistence that the soundness of the Euro must be conceptualized and managed across a vast communicative field within which confidence is continually shaped and modeled as a public discourse. The Euro was designed as a “public currency” with emphatic communicative features, features that remain very much in the making. In this talk I outline what I mean by a public currency as well as examine how the ECB assimilated a Kultur crafted by the Deutsche Bundesbank to underwrite this monetary regime. The lecture refers to research that examines an intellectual regime that informs contemporary practices of central banking. Initially designed and formalized as policy by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand these practices seeks to influence future sensibilities—not just sensibilities about the future but also sensibilities in the future—to shape the expectations that impel the most fundamental dynamic of market economies: the evolution of prices. The focus of the research is currently on the central banks of New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, the European Union, and the German Federal Bank’s role within the European Central Bank.
Douglas Holmes, professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University, New York, is currently working on a new book: Public Currency: Communicative imperatives in central banks. His previous publications include Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (2000) and Cultural Disenchantments: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy (1989. He is known for his work on European identities examining how the EU imparts to its citizens the distinctive challenge and the ambiguous burden to negotiate continually the cognitive meanings and the political exigencies of a pluralist Europe. In his collaboration with George Marcus he has focused on a foundational question for contemporary ethnography: How do we design projects within settings where diverse ethnographic exigencies operate, settings within which subjects themselves experiment creatively with the intellectual modalities of ethnography?
