<nettime> bartering money digest [hart, holmes]

["nettime's_foreign_exchange" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

Re: <nettime> The barter origins of money
     Keith Hart <HART_KEITH@compuserve.com>
     Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>

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Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 07:58:47 -0400
From: Keith Hart <HART_KEITH@compuserve.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> The barter origins of money

Felix wrote: 

>Latour once wrote a brilliant article called "technology is society made
>durable". In this (or perhaps somewhere else) he compares human 
>societies with primate societies (baboons)…(the baboons) have nothing 
>other than their bodies to construct their society, they have real 
>subject-subject relationships. Very little mediation. Hence their
societies 
>hardly extend over time and space and have, essentially, to be recreated 
>every day. Humans, on the other hand, use objects to constitute society 
>(and themselves). This allows them to bridge time and space and 
>accumulate social learning in something more stable than human bodies. 


What follows is an attempt to string together some disparate ideas and to
hang them on the hook of Felix's comment. Maybe by the end we will even
return to the subject of money. Nettimers with an aversion to abstract
argument should stop here.

Michel Callon and Bruno Latour also wrote an article in 1981 called
"Unscrewing the big Leviathan" which I have always taken as a clear account
of their aims and method. They want to bring big social actors
(institutions as well as persons) down to size. They consider big and small
actors to be essentially the same, the difference being that former have
somehow appropriated the authorship of the latter ('translation') and have
hidden the means of their power in 'black boxes'. These contain material
and immaterial objects of various kinds. In this way human beings construct
more durable societies than baboons. They insist that sociologists should
be able to describe the actions of Renault as easily as those of a
telephonist, thereby reducing Leviathan to a human scale. But most of their
colleagues fetishise the gap between macro-structures and the
micro-decisions of ordinary lives. Callon and Latour would demystify
greatness.

One application of this approach is to the history of science. There was a
time when such history was a story about the ideas of great men. Thus James
Clerk Maxwell discovered electro-magnetism and we have his equations to
prove it (if you are trained to understand them). The new historians of
science often couldn't understand the equations, but they knew that there
was more to it than that. Maxwell was the head of a new physics laboratory
in Cambridge; the machines for his experiments were made by Darwin's son,
Horace; a whole new technology and social organization had to be built
involving humble workers as well as professors. This insight and approach
has spawned a sort of academic cult, comparable to the clique of
fieldworker anthropologists that formed around Malinowski between the wars.
I say 'cult' not to disparage, since I admire both groups and belong to one
of them, but to draw attention to the zeal with which a tightly knit
network has exposed the 'real life' source of hegemonic ideas. 

An emphasis on exposing how durable social organisation is constructed
might be represented as being subversive. Moreover, any new social forms we
might care to devise should be built to last. That was one of the aims of
my essay, to show that origin myths concerning money and markets may
conceal what is needed, if we are to build more effective economies. But
the same argument can easily be put to conservative ends. Functionalist
sociology has always been concerned with how society might endure in the
face of movement and instability. Durkheim borrowed from Kant to insist
that the chaotic busyness of our everyday lives is stabilised by the
internalisation of common ideas whose origin is society. He was animated by
the reasonable hope that, after a century of intermittent social
catastrophe, the Third Republic might be granted some longevity.

I had a professor called Meyer Fortes. He was not thrilled when the
students occupied his department of social anthropology in 1968. He used to
say to me, "You all want change, but you don't realise that what matters in
life is continuity." This argument makes more sense to me now than it did
then. He had studied a tribe in Northern Ghana and his basic question was,
How do social forms persist in a stateless society whose units are families
subject to the vagaries of birth, copulation and death? He was influenced
by a contemporary biologist, D'Arcy Thomson whose book, Growth and Form,
posed a similar question to the world of plants. Fortes came up with an
essentially Durkheimian answer. Kinship is a matter of biological flux, but
the political order of society imposes certain regularities on it at key
points in the development cycle of family life: marriage, the education of
children, funerals and so on. This political order, he held, was largely
ideal in nature; and in this he was true to Durkheim's master, Kant, on the
relationship between mental forms and material life

Perhaps because of my own socialisation, I have not been convinced by the
latterday rush to celebrate the centrality of things, of bodies and objects
in human existence. I can see that constructing a world of disembodied
ideas is Cartesian and undialectical, as well as being an essential tool of
ideology. But it seems to me that those who now concern themselves with
objectification and embodiment as the main point are equally undialectical
and, a bit like the new historians of science, don't pay enough attention
to the intellectual history of their subject. If ideas are replaced with
objects, we get a sort of inverse Cartesianism. In any case, if objects can
be immaterial, it may not be easy to distinguish between ideas and objects.
As a writer and career intellectual, I would want to hold on to Hegel's
theory of objectification as the process of getting ideas out there for
inspection, out of the soup of incoherent experience swilling around inside
each of us. And I would like to be able to distinguish that process from
the meaning of a picture in my living room or my relationship to the
machine on which I wrote this thing.

The issue is surely one of dialectic. If the end of thought is to identify
an idea or an object or even to make social forms last, we end up where
Marx claimed Hegel did, content with the most durable instance of
abstraction we can find, with the absolute or its nearest proxy. It means
that the end of writing would be to produce a published book, to be
unconcerned with how, if it all, it enters society by being read. But life
is movement and forms take on the appearance of stability in relation to
that movement. This is how Marx described his own method in the
Introduction to Grundrisse. We must start from the concrete instance we
face, in all its complexity and movement. We then build up abstractions
after it. The third and most difficult step is to insert those abstractions
back into the concrete. There are various ways of doing this: laboratory
experiment, rhetoric, political mobilisation and so on. But the point is to
make society move, not to have an idea or an object to contemplate.

A brilliant example of Callon/Latour's project of demystifying greatness is
Frank Baum's populist allegory, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (1900). In it,
the Emerald City (New York) is controlled by the Wizard of Oz (a
contemporary plutocrat), who fools the Munchkins (the people of the city)
into not seeing how he and bankers in general manipulate the levers of
power. Dorothy, accompanied by representatives of farming and industry and
the Cowardly Lion (William Jennings Bryan), exposes the fraudulent
foundations of the Gold Standard and returns to Kansas with the aid of
silver slippers. Money is probably the most universal means of
communication we have. It is a powerful repository of memory. Indeed John
Locke thought that the invention of money alone evicted humanity from a
state of nature into the age of unequal property from which we now struggle
to emancipate ourselves. It did it by offering a more durable way of
preserving wealth.

This could lead us to seek the abolition of money and of exchange
institutions built on it. In  a book I am writing (The Human Economy), of
which the essay on barter is a part, I argue for a reform of markets and
money drawing on a more humane and people-centred account of what they are
and may be. This argument depends heavily on the need to find ways of
unifying individual and collective interests. I used Mauss to point to the
hidden social and spiritual dimensions of exchange in capitalist societies.
Felix added to this his concern with objects. In my book too I pay
particular attention to the part played by machines in economic life. But I
wonder if an emphasis on objects would reveal the hidden institutions that
support capitalist exchange. 

Try this thought experiment. An apparently pure example of a commercial
transaction is the purchase of a newspaper from a vending machine. All it
takes is a coin and the ability to open the front of the box. The buyer is
alone and the seller isn't even there. Here is an objective instance of the
Robinson Crusoe myth in action. But transport that vending machine to a
real desert island and you will soon discover how much was excluded by the
isolated act of private exchange. What do we need to put that activity
within an appropriate context of understanding. You tell me. But, for my
money, it takes more than the observation that we need things in order to
be ourselves. Indeed the vending machine might be a good example of how
objects may support the fetishisation of money and markets.

Keith

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Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 14:45:37 +0200
From: Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>
Subject: Re: The barter origins of money

This is a brilliant thread, and who could resist throwing their own 
home-made penny into such a wishing-well?


"I'm with Sahlins and Mauss and the Marx of Grundrisse who so 
brilliantly demolished the hierarchy of production and consumption 
that he chose to endorse in Capital," writes Keith Hart.

I'm not sure Marx endorsed the hierarchy, since the passages of the 
Grundrisse showing the potentially infinite creativity of human 
beings and the malleability of the measures and tokens of value are 
exactly what lie at the foundations of his work. It's the great idea 
that one could just leave behind such a lousy social system as 
salaried labor and commodity consumption. But soon Marx came to the 
conclusion that the potential was being totally forclosed by 
capitalism, which forces people to subordinate their uses to a 
particular kind of exchange, where the rich are always the ones to 
get richer. Head-on negative critique like that is a strategic 
choice, dictated by desperate need, when other options are 
impossible. The whole idea of Capital was to spark off a movement to 
demolish the hierarchy.

It's the old Albert O. Hirschman argument between voice and exit. 
When an organizational form - let's just take a big one, salaried 
production and commodity consumption - starts to fall off in quality, 
to become unsatisfactory, then what do you do? The easiest thing is 
to just leave it. Vote with your feet. Exodus. In the case at hand, 
that means seeking out different uses, inhabiting the gaps in the 
dominant patterns of exchange. There you can work on the creation of 
new objects of use, new codes or rituals or instruments of exchange, 
new ways to weave relations over time. This is always possible, at 
least to some degree - and to the extent that social theorists of 
capitalism had completely neglected to look at any divergent, 
alternative use values, the whole thread from Mauss to Sahlins had a 
great contribution to make, which has formed the leading strand of 
the left's reflection on society since the seventies.

The problem is, you can choose to build a peasant's hut (Sahlins' 
example), or you can be forced to live in it. The nobleman's castle 
(Sahlins' other example) was also a grain repository for the surplus 
taken from the peasants, and an armory to extort that surplus. At 
some point, the question of how the wealth is distributed starts to 
impinge on the far more interesting question of how to use your 
lifetime. The political battle - the option of voice - becomes 
necessary.

I think it's too late in the day to claim you can really choose 
between the two approaches. One the one hand, capitalism has never 
let a full-fledged exit option develop to any viable degree. They're 
always there to say "there is no alternative." On the other, who 
would give up even the limited chances to get out of commodity 
relations? The argument against voice is that it makes you conform to 
the other side, it makes you become "like them." I would say that 
real voice _only_ grows out of exit. Only the creation of alternative 
uses gives you a position from which to criticize capitalist society. 
But then you have to do it.

Geert asked Thomas Frank whether a new generation of culture critics 
could be coming up since the nineties. I'd say nettime and tactical 
media in general have been the exit from the dominant forms of 
intellectual exchange that has made our generation of critics 
possible. Creativity comes from exodus - in our cases, the exodus 
from professional and academic niches to freewheeling global 
communication. But the really interesting thing in Keith's original 
post on the barter origins of money is the notion that in market 
societies, an invisible social infrastructure makes possible all 
kinds of exchanges and uses. This invisible structure was what a 
thinker like Karl Polanyi tried to name, a few generations ago, when 
he described the conditions - and particularly the roles of the state 
- that make possible "freedom in a complex society."

During the dotcom boom we were told that the market itself would let 
the networked utopia bloom. Tulipomania. Now, as Geert and Thomas 
Frank seem to agree, the very same market forces are telling us to be 
patriotic, fight terrorism, regulate every kind of exchange, pump up 
the military and generally get back to serious business. So what are 
we going to say to them? Are we going to find the words to name those 
invisible structures, the ones that make our creativity possible? In 
the noblemen's skyscrapers lie both the money to pay for our forms of 
life, and the violence to effectively destroy our voices and uses.

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