Re: <nettime> The barter origins of money

[Keith Hart <HART_KEITH@compuserve.com>]

Message text written by Felix Stalder

>> Exchange is more than the interplay of private interests, more
>> than the coercion of state laws. It is the way that human beings
reconcile
>> their individuality with belonging to others in society.

>"Not even capitalism, despite its ostensible organization by and for
>pragmatic advantage, can escape this cultural constitution of an
apparently
>objective praxis. For, as Marx also taught, all production, even where it
>is governed by the commodity-form, by exchange-value, remains the
>production of use-values. Without consumption, the object does not
complete
>itself as a product: a house left unoccupied is no house. Yet, use-values
>cannot be specifically understood on the natural level of 'needs' and
>'wants' -- precisely because men do not merely produce 'housing' or
>'shelter': they produce a dwelling of definite sorts, a peasant's hut or a
>nobleman's castle. This determination of use-values, of a particular type
>of house as a particular type of home, represents  a continuous process of
>social life in which men reciprocally define objects in terms of
themselves
>and themselves in terms of objects."

>Marshall Sahlins: La Pensee Bourgeoise. 1976 (2000)

It is true that exchange involves subject-object relations as well as those
linking individuals to society. There is a lot to like about Sahlins'
cultural approach, as expressed above and more fully in the essay cited ,
to be found in his wonderful recent collection, Culture and Practice (Zone,
2000). Moreover a strategic focus on material objects as  symbols of social
relations has been developed very profitably in anthropology, history of
science and other disciplines following the work of Appadurai, Latour and
Callon, Miller etc. Marcel Mauss, who was the inspiration for the first
quote above, certainly recognised that capitalist markets had made both the
social and the personal or spiritual aspects of exchange invisible. It is
less obvious that Marx could be recruited as a source for this idea, since,
from the very beginning of Capital, he rejected consumption of use values
as a basis for the social analysis of commodity exchange and hence of
capitalism. It seems different to us now, but remember that he was writing
at a time when the price of corn was taken as a useful proxy for the value
of workers' wages. And of course the consumptionist emphasis expressed so
eloquently in the Sahlins quote has itself been attacked from the left,
most recently in a new book by David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological
Theory of Value (Palgrave, 2001). 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.

Keith Hart


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