From Disincorporation to Rematerialization: Breaking Bad and the Life of Cash

Global capitalism creates a culture of abstraction, described by Fredric Jameson as “a kind of cyberspace in which money capital has reached its ultimate dematerialization, as messages which pass instantaneously from one nodal point to another across the former material world.” The “becoming information” of money has been celebrated by technophiles like David Wolman who contends paper money is now largely the stuff of “crooks and terrorists.” And indeed, the capitalists at the centre of complex televisual crime sagas like Breaking Bad are continually frustrated by the recalcitrant materiality of their paper profits. Martin Shuster suggests that Breaking Bad amounts to a critique of Western science, specifically its tendency to “empty” the material world of meaning by prioritizing “instrumental” reason. I argue that the comical efforts of Walter White (the show’s chemistry-teaching, drug-manufacturing protagonist) and other characters to control the unruly materialism of cash represents this failure of instrumental reason, whether expressed in chemical equations or prices, to achieve fully the “dematerialization,” or what White calls the “disincorporation,” of the world. Ultimately, the unmanageable corporeality of money allegorizes the persistence of non-capitalist, material desires in mass cultural products like Breaking Bad.