Chapter 4 Archaic Money

Barter Exchange and Gift-giving

The discussion here rests on a central thesis of Walter Benjamin (and in the body of thought known as dialogism, a meme of Michael Bakhtin) articulated by Benjamin below:

What is communicable in a mental entity is its logistic entity. Language communicates the linguistic being of things. A human communicates its own mental being in its language. Howev- er, the language of a human speaks in words. It is therefore the linguistic being of the human to name things. (p. 316–318, Reflections) To whom does the lamp communicate itself? Or the mountain? Or the fox? But here the answer is: to the human. This is not anthropomorphism. If the lamp and the mountain and the fox did not communicate them- selves to us, how should we be able to name them? Does a human communicate its mental being by the names that it gives things? Or in them? The paradoxical nature of these lies in their answer. Anyone who believes that a human communicates its mental being by names cannot also assume that it is their mental being that it communicates, for this does not happen through the names of things, that is, through the words by which he denotes a thing. (p. 254, Early Writings)

The defining characteristic of archaic money is no word for it in the language spoken within the community exists. Rather, it is implicit in the observed practices as communication to observers outside them. The anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in his major work The Gift (1950) observes distinct practices of reciprocity between subjects, having in common a social object, the commodity, which as such, communicates itself to us in money. This in turn, helps provide a semiotic grounding of a political economy that uses archaic money in different forms. Barter is a special case of the more general reciprocity type, being exchange of two things each of which is both a commodity and money. It is a distinct kind of exchange, but not as customarily thought because the exchange is

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004352506_005 74 chapter 4 un-mediated by money. Rather, to the contrary it consists of a pair of simulta- neous movements of commodity and money. In particular, then, barter is the purchase of a quantity of one commodity,

C2, by Party 1, who pays for it with a quantity of money in the form of a com- modity, C1; simultaneously it is a purchase of C1 by Party 2, who pays for it with

C2. The archaic money the first party pays for C2 is in natural units of C1. C2 thereby communicates itself in money: M(C1). And similarly, C1 communicates itself in M(C2), which Party 2 pays for C1. Two-Party (Simultaneous) Barter-Exchange

M(C)12→C [Party 1]//M(C)21→C [Party 2]

M(C)12/M(C )=P/21P.

Two aspects of barter differentiating it from other forms of exchange are of note. First, globally, money takes as many forms as there are commodities bar- tered. This is true to some extent of gift-giving as well, and hence a word for archaic money as a single being is not apparent. Indeed, the use of the word money in a capitalist context may be for the same reason, but in reverse. It is the different monies, conceptually, are not apparent. Conceptually, money is only seen as unitary. Mauss refers at one point to the archaic accounting method of the Trobriand Islanders with respect to the circulation of commodities as a “somewhat childish legal language which has given rise to a proliferation of distinctive names for all kinds of counter-services, according to the name of the service that is being compensated, the thing given, the occasion, etc” (p. 30). One sees here that such a method is not childish, but just the opposite. It is in line with the particular attribution of credit in its multi-dimensional form of money, associated both with barter and, gift-giving. A second, aspect of a pure act of barter, the moneys disappear, each commodity having been transformed back into natural objects consumed by the respective parties. For this reason, it is an attenuated practice both in generalized exchange systems as well as in archaic production and distribution. Money does not naturally circulate, but rather ceases to exist in the act of exchange. Barter is thereby accidental. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski introduces in his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) a category he names “ceremonial barter” in taxon- omy of reciprocities.

In this class, we have to describe payments which are ceremonially of- fered and must be received and re-paid later on. The exchange is based