Page 52 - Cultural Theory

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••• Georg Simmel •••

characterizes modern experience. The study of monetary exchange is therefore an
effective route into the elucidation of the various and diverse exchange relationships
out of which society is composed. As he (1900: 101) puts it, society, like money, is:

a structure that transcends the individual, but that is not abstract. Historical life
thus escapes the alternative of taking place either in individuals or in abstract
generalities. Society is the universal, which at the same time, is concretely alive.
From this arises the unique significance that exchange, as the economic-historical
realisation of the relativity of things, has for society; exchange raises the specific
object and its significance for the individual above its singularity, not into the
sphere of abstraction, but into that of lively interaction.

Simmel regards money to be the purest form of exchange relation. There are two
reasons for this. First, it is an exchange of social values. It involves two parties agree-
ing on a shared currency which encapsulates the social values that place upon a
physical or cultural act of exchange, whether that act be based in the expenditure of
labour or the accumulation of a commodity.
Second, it is predicated in trust. Without mutual trust in the money economy, the
notion of a shared currency is void. This notion of mutual trust is intrinsically con-
ditional. For it is perfectly possible for mutual judgements of value to disintegrate.
On this account, economic recessions and slumps are conditions in which mutual
trust relations have momentarily decomposed. However, even in these conditions
social actors operate on the general assumption that trust relations will be eventually
reconfigured at a new level of functionality. In every monetary transaction, the oper-
ation of reciprocal, yet contingent relations of trust, which is the foundation of the
mentalities of Modernity, is revealed.
The study of money also appealed to another of Simmel’s core methodological pre-
suppositions: interconnectedness. His analysis of social relations proceeds on the basis
that everything is connected to everything else. By bearing down on monetary
exchange the totality of the social constellation may be captured. As Siegfried Kracauer
noted (quoted in Frisby 2002: 101), from the study of money Simmel provided a com-
prehensive picture of the interconnectedness and entanglement of phenomena. He
clearly extracts their essence in order to melt it down once more into a multitude of con-
nections … and reveals the many common meetings that reside within them. Amongst
these phenomena belong, for instance, exchange, ownership, greed, extravagance, cyn-
icism, individual freedom, the style of life, culture, the value of personality, etc.
This interest in elucidating the place of the concrete in the totality of relations is pow-
erfully articulated in Simmel’s view of the psychology of money. He recognizes a duality
of structure in which money is commonly acknowledged to both symbolize the chain of
distance between human relations and to be the embodiment of goal resolution.
To clarify the point, in the money economy an event which is remote from the
immediate circumstances of subjective life can over-turn the assumptions upon
which all of subjective life is conducted. The collapse of a distant market, the main-
tenance of an obscure credit restriction can produce inflation that decreases the value

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