Hornborg - Money and the Semiotics of Ecosystem Dissolution

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DOI: 10.1177/135918359900400202

1999 4: 143Journal of Material CultureAlf Hornborg

Money and the Semiotics of Ecosystem Dissolution

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MONEY AND THE SEMIOTICS

OF ECOSYSTEM

DISSOLUTION 1

ALF HORNBORG

Human Ecology Division, Lund University

Abstract

This paper argues for a semiotic approach to the problematic interface of

economics and ecology. It begins by tracing the origins of materialist science

and discussing strategies for transcending Cartesian dualism in the study of

human ecology. It then discusses pre-modernity, modernity and post-modernity as transformations of semiotic relations with implications for

identity and culture as well as human-environmental relations. The

phenomenon of money is identified as a vehicle and epitome of the

processes of semiotic abstraction we know as modernity. Various analogies

between money and language are scrutinized and rejected. The tendencies

of money to dissolve cultural and natural systems are understood as two

aspects of a single, ecosemioticprocess. Finally, a very general suggestion is

offered as to how the idea and institution of money could be transformed

so as to check the continued devastation of the biosphere.

Key Words Cartesian dualism economic anthropology human

ecology materialism modernity money semiotics sustainability

MATERIALIZED MEANINGS AND THE MEANING OF

MATERIAL

The distinction between material and non-material aspects of human life

is a reflection of the Cartesian compulsion to find a bedrock of unques-tionable truth with which to fill the void left by crumbling, pre-moderncertainties. It seems revealing that synonyms for material include essen-tial and relevant, whereas the word immaterial is generally used to

143

Journal of Material Culture

Copyright 1999SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Vol. 4(2): 143162 [1359-1835(199907)4:2; 143162;008706]

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mean unessential or irrelevant. We may in fact have been using the cat-egory of materialprescriptively, to cover that which is beyond questionand once and for all given. It appears to denote a reality posited as funda-

mentally objective and immune to the intervention of human con-sciousness. As such, it may have served to alleviate some of the horrorvacui generated by modern reflexivity (Bauman, 1992) and the gradualdisjunction of language and reality in European history (Szerszynski,1996). With God no longer at the helm, the spectre of a plastic universehad to be kept at bay. The existential significance of the notion of animmutable, objective substratum of reality grew out of the modernacknowledgement of a subjectobject dichotomy. The sovereignty of Godwas succeeded by the sovereignty of the material. Even as reluctant adualist as Marshall Sahlins (1976: 207) concedes that thought can only

kneel before the absolute sovereignty of the physical world.The notion of a distinct, material reality continues to provide the

foundation for objectivist grand narratives in natural science, eventhough the most cogent evidence against objectivism has come fromNobel prize-winning physicists such as Heisenberg. The human sciences,on the other hand, have increasingly confined their attention to theimages and projections of human subjects. Objectivism and construc-tivism thus represent two opposite responses to the Cartesian dilemma.Human cognition is either viewed as an increasingly exact representation

of reality or as a contingent construction of meaning-creating humans(Bernstein, 1983). One position takes the object as its point of departure,the other the subject. Although from the outset coeval and defined bythe same Cartesian matrix, the two alternative approaches have come tobe associated with social conditions of modernity and post-modernityrespectively, suggesting a temporal sequence in which objectivism yieldsto constructivism and grand narratives to a plurality of language games(Lyotard, 1984).

References to the material world are grand narrativespar excellence.

To the extent that post-modernists recommend an abandonment of uni-versalizing knowledge, they will thus inevitably have to deal with theconception of a material dimension as such. While it would be inad-visable to try to jettison the notion of constraints and circumstancesexternal to human consciousness, major advances can be made in con-ceptualizing ways in which consciousness and the world are interfused.This move will require a reconsideration of both the potency of con-sciousness and the permeability of the material. Beyond a general, post-structuralist acknowledgement of what Ardener (1989: 169) called

languagecategoryobject simultaneities, the challenge seems to be totrace some of the specific kinds of recursivity which link culture andlanguage, on the one hand, with material circumstances, on the other.

Much contemporary theorizing suggests a relationist theory of

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knowledge somewhere between the representationism of the natural sci-ences and the solipsism of much of the human sciences (see Maturanaand Varela, 1992). In this view, pioneered by Bateson (1972, 1979) and

now evident in a number of convergent approaches from both the naturaland human sciences (Hornborg, 1996) knowledge is neither a represen-tation nor a construction but a relation between the knower and theknown. Halfway between von Uexklls Umwelt and Gibsons affor-dances (see Ingold, 1992), knowledge is the relation through whichsubject and object are mutually specified. This insight is particularly rel-evant to the various discourses on human ecology (i.e. human-environ-mental relations), including the field known as environmental history(Bird, 1987). While not implying a regression to pre-modern monism, inwhich the world was pure Subject and Word and as such susceptible to

incantation, the acknowledgement of recursivity between subject andobject suggests a neo-monismwhich promises to transcend the Cartesiandilemma.

It seems that the only way to admit this recursivity into our modelsof society and environment would be by including theperson as a crucialcounterpart to both. Anthropology, with its accumulated insights aboutall three corners of what Steiner (1993) calls the human ecological tri-angle, i.e. ecology, society and personhood, ought to be uniquelyequipped to develop such an approach. Regrettably, the discipline suffers

internally from the same dichotomies and fragmentations which riddlethe academic community as a whole. Anthropologists tend to be eitherobjectivists or constructivists, specialized for example in ecologicalanthropology, economic anthropology or the anthropology of person-hood. Only by putting the pieces together will we come closer to theholistic ambition which general anthropology shares with general semi-otics (Anderson et al., 1984). The ecological crisis of modern society willthen be recognized as having two aspects that are ultimately connected:one objective and generated by the general-purpose market and its axiom

of universal interchangeability, the other subjective and founded in thealienation of the disembedded, modern individual. In whichever direc-tion we choose to trace the recursive logic of commoditization, abstrac-tion and disenchantment, the environmental crisis forces upon us theinsight which Descartes expelled from view, that the human subject, withits bundle of concepts, anxieties and aspirations, is recursively interfusedwith the planetary landscape.

TRANSCENDING DUALISM AND ADDRESSING REAL

PROBLEMS

A generalized semiotics provides a counter-narrative to the materialistorthodoxy of the natural sciences. Charles Sanders Peirce probably

Hornborg: M O N E Y A N D T H E S E M I O T I C S O F E C O S Y S T E M

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exaggerated when suggesting that the universe may be composed exclu-sively of signs (Sebeok, 1994: 14), but it can certainly be argued that theproduction and interpretation of signs is a criterion of all life (1994: 6).

Living things can be defined by their capacity to respond assubjects

(vonUexkll, 1982; Bateson, 1979). From cells to ecosystems, their materialreproduction is contingent on communication. Language, the mode ofcommunication with which we as humans are most familiar, is but oneof the most recent additions to the semiotics of ecosystems. Since lan-guage belongs to a wider family of communicative phenomena, theformal analyses of linguistics can be extended not only to various aspectsof culture (Lvi-Strauss, 1963), but also to semiotic dimensions of fieldsas diverse as biochemistry (Hoffmeyer, 1996), ecology (von Uexkll,1982), and economics (Sahlins, 1976; Baudrillard, 1981; Ahonen, 1989;

Lash and Urry, 1994). Wherever there are living subjects, their funda-mental condition is defined by the problem of interpreting signs. Thepenetrating analyses of Peirce (19311958) and De Saussure (1966) haveindicated that there are certain formal possibilities that generate thedifferent varieties of signs. Important parameters include the nature ofthe relations between sign, object and interpretant (Peirce) or betweensignifier and signified (De Saussure). Peirces framework, in particular,suggests that such formal properties of sign relations are variouslyidentifiable for instance in the biochemistry of organisms, plant and

animal communication in ecosystems, and the various sign systems ofhuman societies. Formal parallels can be established, for instance,between a virus, zoological mimicry, and confidence tricks.

The major challenge for a generalized semiotics, as I see it, is to applysuch tools for formal analysis to the pressing problems of communi-cation that are increasingly evident at the interface of ecology and econ-omics. Such a line of inquiry was pioneered by Bateson (1972) andRappaport (1979), but the thrust of their argument has been shunned bymainstream anthropology as functionalist and simplistically cybernetic

(e.g. Friedman, 1974, 1979). A formal, semiotic approach would be betterequipped to avoid the functionalist pitfalls of cybernetics. To speak ofcommunicative or adaptive disorder (Rappaport, 1979) is to invite criti-cism for implying a normative state of harmony or order. At some point,however, even the most skeptical of relativists would have to concedethat an economic signalling system that systematically destroys thematerial conditions of the species which devised it represents aproblemof communication. In identifying the formal sources of this problem, asemiotic approach could in fact help us visualize a remedy. Such a

problem-oriented semiotics would not be susceptible to challenges ofidealism (see Sebeok, 1994: 1415), as its very focus would be on theinterfusion of the symbolic and the material (see Hornborg, 1998). Ratherthan restrict itself to the analysis of culture, it would investigate how the


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logic of culture impinges on nature. The ambiguities and ambivalencesthat riddle post-modern culture, identity, and epistemology are closelyconnected to the runaway economic processes that generate accelerat-

ing environmental degradation worldwide.Although often excruciatingly vague, Baudrillards (1975, 1981,1993) intuitions about the transformations of capitalism may be a goodstarting-point. I would use the pre-modern, the modern, and the post-modern as analytical (rather than historical) categories corresponding todistinct kinds of subjectobject relations. As such, they also representdistinct ways of relating to signs. These modes of signification, further-more, are relevant to various levels of experience, e.g. the perception ofcommodities, the perception of human identities, and the perception ofthe world in general including, of course, the perception of nature. Bau-

drillard is primarily concerned with the transition from modern topost-modern, but the complete set of transformations would have toinclude the pre-modern.

Let us begin by suggesting that a pre-modern condition is one ofnaivety, where signs appear as straightforward indices of essential iden-tities, the crown indicates a king, and there is an identity of word andworld (see Szerszynski, 1996). It will immediately be obvious that nosociety we know of has ever been completely pre-modern in this sense:sources such as the Old Testament and the pervasive myth of the Trick-

ster clearly indicate a profound and archaic familiarity with fraudulence.Pre-modernity in the sense of constitutional naivety could perhaps onlybe established for infants (and irrespective of cultural context). In thissense, pre-modernity is a part of everyones biography and thus also ofeveryones frame of reference. It represents the unmediated and unre-flexive being-in-the-world glorified by the phenomenologists. A societyclassified as pre-modern, however, would be one where key relationsof power seen from a distance in time or space appear to be immu-nized or opaque to skeptical scrutiny. It is important to recognize the

relativity of this category. If the power structures of ancient monarchiesand empires now strike us as pre-modern in their immunity to rationalcritique, we may very well at this very moment be submitting ourselvesto other power structures that will strike our descendants as no lessfetishized by tradition, yet no less susceptible to deconstruction (seeHornborg, 1992).

The modern condition is one of reflexive uncertainty: the crown isunderstood as a symbol (conventionally) representing the king, andhuman language as a (provisional) representation of the world. This is

the historical space of the subjectobject dichotomy and of the possi-bility of fraudulence or falsehood, where the wearer of the crown maybe an impostor and Scripture may be mistaken. It has historical co-ordi-nates but is essentially more of a structural condition than a period in


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history. It is the moment of doubt that follows every major deconstruc-tion of power. It is a source of tremendous existential anxiety and cre-ativity, which can either be harnessed in the production of new

hegemonies to substitute for the old (e.g. science instead of religion) orassume the form of solipsism, disengagement and indifference.The latter alternative is what we have come to know as the post-

modern. It is a condition where the exhausting attitude of radical skep-ticism tends to give way to a structurally enforced, feigned gullibility. Allhope of certainty has vanished, but precisely because no pretence topower or truth can be admitted, any pretence is as good as any other.Signs are once again perceived as indices of identity, but now simply byvirtue of positing themselves as such, rather than through assumed cor-respondences with essences. Again there is an identity of word and

world, not, however, because the world is thought to be immediatelyknown, but because the hope of really knowing it has been abandoned.If the modern condition recognizes the symbol as founded on convention,the post-modern represents a return to indexicality, but now stripped ofphenomenological depth. A continuous exposure to signs (e.g. commer-cials, politicians, and manipulative messages in general) claiming tostand for qualities that they may not stand for tends to numb the abilityto distinguish between different kinds of sign relations. There is anatrophication of the critical pursuit of truth and authenticity, resulting

not so much in a reconflation of attribute (sign) and essence as in anabandonment of essence, or, in Baudrillards (1975: 1278) words, anautonomization of the signifier. This is the structural space of Bau-drillards (1981) political economy of the sign, Goffmans (1969)impression management, and Laschs (1980) culture of narcissism. Itis also characterized by an intense reflexivity concerning the con-structed nature of every feature of existence from personal identity to(perceptions of) the natural world.

In conditioning people to superficiality, late modern or post-modern

capitalism also conditions them to disenchantment with nature. Theabandonment of essence in the way we approach words and identitiesis paralleled in the way we approach the non-human environment. I willargue that it is also paralleled perhaps paradigmatically so in the waywe approach money. Consciousness of the constructed nature of socialreality generates fear of imminent collapse, whether of identities, mean-ings or stock markets. The movement from naive realism through thehazards of reflexivity and the threat of deconstruction has resulted instructurally similar responses at all these levels. There is thus a funda-

mental connection between the anything goes of New Age spiritualityand the final abandonment of the Bretton Woods gold standard.In order to understand these processes, we need to focus on the dis-

embedding, decontextualizing forces that are inherent in modernity, and


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that are the common denominator of markets, universalizing science,and the ecologically alienated individual. There is a fundamental,modern tendency towards abstraction in the economy, discourse and

personhood, which encourages superficiality in relation to place andpaves the way for environmental destruction. As Bateson (1972) and Rap-paport (1979) argued, the subjective and the objective dimensions ofenvironmental crisis are inseparable. If ecological relations are com-municative, and ecosystems thus contingent on a plurality of subjective,species-specific perspectives (von Uexkll, 1982), the dissolution of cul-tural meaning and the dismantling of ecosystems are two aspects of asingle process.

The concept of disembedding, in signifying the alienation ofpersons, objects or concepts from the contexts from which they have pre-

viously derived their meaning, is a thoroughly semiotic concept. It wasapplied by Karl Polanyi (1944) to the process whereby capitalist econ-omic institutions achieved their own, autonomous logic vis--vis otherdimensions of modern society. More recently, the term has been muchused by Anthony Giddens (1990) and his followers in sociology. Thephenomena that it tries to capture, of course, have been central concernsof sociology for more than a century (e.g. Weber, Marx, Simmel,Durkheim, Tnnies). We know much about what disembedding meansin terms of identities and social relations, but the concept still has a lot

of analytical potential to be explored in relation to problems of ecologyand sustainability. The challenge for a monistic, post-Cartesian humanecology is to develop perspectives that humanize nature and naturalizesociety in the same move, and the concept of ecological (dis)embedded-ness suggests a promising avenue in that direction.

There is another way of expressing the process of disembedding,which might make more sense to those who prefer stories closer tonatural science. It would have to begin with a critique of what has beenreferred to as universal selection theory, i.e. the argument of Richard

Dawkins (1976) and others suggesting that cultural ideas and artefactsare subject to selective processes formally similar to those operating innature. In anthropology, the closest may be Dan Sperbers (1985: 301)notion of an epidemiology of ideas. The problem with universal selec-tion theory is that it seems to assume that the meanings of words or arte-facts are embodied in those words or artefacts. We all know, however,that meanings emerge in contexts. We need only go back to Peircestriadic definition of the sign, which always includes the interpretant.Selection theory has no way of handling these interpretive contexts, and

yet they must be crucial for the process of selection itself. Semiotics isa necessary corrective to selection theory (see Sahlins, 1976: 208; Bruun,in press).

With this much established, however, an interesting new perspective


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suggests itself: jointly, selection theory and semiotics provide us withanother way of understanding modernity and post-modernity. From thepoint of view of universal selection theory, the specifics of local contexts

of interpretation can be seen asconstraints

on reproductive success. Log-ically, the ideas, artefacts, and human persons which should thus beselected for are those that are least dependent on context. Abstract lan-guage, universalizing knowledge, general-purpose money, globalized com-modities, and cosmopolitan personalities all share one fundamentalfeature: they are free to transcend specific, local contexts. They are notcommitted toplace. There is thus an inverse relation between experien-tial depth and spatial expansion. McDonalds are testimony to the ecologyof cultural diffusion.

MONEY, MEANING, AND THE OPERATIONAL LOGIC

OF EMPTY SIGNS

Selection thus tends to increase the arbitrariness of the signobjectrelation, suggesting a continuous movement along Peirces well-knownscale from index to icon to symbol. Inevitably, we have to scrutinize thatparamount artefact of modernity, money itself. The sequence from thepre-modern through the modern to the post-modern can be traced in theevolution of the money sign, and corresponds to the spectrum of

interpretations ranging from realistto nominalist theories of money. Theformer posits intrinsic meaning or value in money, whereas the latterdoes not (see Ahonen, 1989: 15). The movement towards semioticabstraction, discussed at length by Simmel (1990), can be described indifferent terms, depending on whether we are using the concepts of DeSaussure or of Peirce. If our point of departure is De Saussures dyadicmodel of signifier and signified, we can observe that money has had anhistorical tendency to repeatedly convert signifiers into signifieds. Tobegin with, gold signified exchange value. The signification was indexi-

cal to the extent that value was perceived as an essential quality of gold.With time, paper money came to signify gold. The ambiguities sur-rounding the value of paper money have generated, in the past century,various crises and negotiations concerning the relation between moneyand gold, until the gold standard was finally abandoned in 1971 (for his-torical details of these transformations, see Corbridge and Thrift, 1994).Presently, electronic money can be said to signify paper money. We arethus faced with a chain of signifiersignified relations, where increas-ingly abstract signifiers tend to eclipse their more tangible predecessors,

and where the connection to the most concrete signified (gold) has dis-solved.The same process can be approached from the perspective of Peirces

notions of firstness, secondness and thirdness:


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The first is that whose being is simply in itself, not referring to anything nor

lying behind anything. The second is that which is what it is by force of

something to which it is second. The third is that which is what it is owing

to things between which it mediates and which it brings into relation to each

other. (Peirce, 19311958, quoted in Ahonen, 1989: 17)

These conditions are not to be seen as properties of particular phenom-ena, but as various ways of perceiving signs. Whether gold, paper ordigits on a computer screen, of course, money risks being fetishized intointrinsic value (firstness), but the increasing ethereality (and volatility)of the money sign has undoubtedly been associated with greater reflex-ivity concerning its secondness in relation to what it is understood torepresent. It could be argued, finally, that consciousness of the third-

ness of money emerged in Marxs deconstruction of fetishism, revealinghow social relations between men assume the form of a relation betweenthings. In the first, the sign is the object or essence to which it refers (thevalue of gold). In the second, the sign represents the object (paper moneyreferring to a gold standard). In the third, the sign mediates betweenobjects (money representing not an essential value but a relation ofexchange between humans). In this final understanding of the signnature of money, it becomes obvious that money is nothing in itself, nordoes it even refer to an object, but only organizes social relations. In the

movement from firstness through secondness to thirdness, money meta-morphosed from index to symbol and then into an empty sign thatstands only for itself (that is, everything and nothing).2

A peculiar, semiotic conundrum posed by money is that it representsa code with only one sign. It is like imagining a language with onephoneme, an alphabet with one letter, or a DNA molecule with only onekind of nucleotide. As such, it is a sign with a completely arbitrary ref-erent, lacking even a conventional relation (as in Peirces definition ofsymbol) to any specific thing that it signifies. Nothing meaningful can be

expressed with it, because meaning emerges in contrasts, or in differ-ences between what something stands for and what it doesntstand for.In fact, if there were two kinds of money, instead of one, it would makeall the difference in the world. Recall the multi-centric economy of theNigerian Tiv that Paul Bohannan (1955) described 40 years ago, and that in theory, at least recognized three distinct kinds of values (see later).I believe that it could be argued that an economic transaction among theTiv in the 1940s embodied more meaning in a formal, semiotic sense than modern market exchanges. In widening the reach of general-

purpose money, we have, in a sense, divested ourselves of the possibilityof investing the economy with meaning.3

Let us more systematically address the uniqueness of money as asemiotic phenomenon. From the perspective of general systems theory


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problematic both with respect to significance and value. A unit ofmoney does not relate to a specified commodity in the way that a wordrelates to a specific concept, nor does it relate to other denominations

in any other sense than a purely quantitative one. In both respects,money obviously lacks the kind of meaning invested in words. KarlBhlers comparison of words, commodities, and coins (see Nth, 1996:4) fares no better. His suggestion that coins signify monetary value isno more enlightening than to say that words signify meaning. Thecrucial difference is that specificwords signify specific concepts, but nosimilar statement can be made for a specific unit of money. Nor are wehelped in this respect by Bhlers argument that the materiality of coinsor bills qualifies them as commodities (Nth, 1996: 5), first because suchmateriality has nothing to do with specificity of signification, second

because a very small percentage of circulated money today assumessuch material forms. Commodities are certainly signs in the Saussureansense, and the study of consumption is founded on this important obser-vation,4 but money is not a commodity. In De Saussures definition contra De Saussure himself as well as for example Ahonen (1989: 23) money should not even qualify as a sign, for a (Saussurean) sign isfounded on the intimate and reciprocal relation between signifier andsignified, and no such relation is possible with as non-specific a signi-fier as money.

Yet, Polanyi (1968: 178) too suggests that modern money offers astriking resemblance to language and writing. He sees it as a system ofsymbols and a semantic system linking symbols to quantifiableobjects (1968: 175, 194). To Polanyi, general-purpose money appears asan almost complete parallel to language and writing with its all-purposesounds and signs (1968: 179). But the comparison is as unsatisfying asDe Saussures. Polanyi finds the relation between money and its usesanalogous to the relation between sounds and words. However, theformer is a relation of exchangeability, as De Saussure observed, whereas

the latter is not. Sounds and words are merely two successive levels ofintegration within the domain of signifiers; an analogy with the uses ofmoney would have to include, as did De Saussure, the concepts signifiedby words. Polanyi elsewhere recognizes the limitations of his compari-son. For one thing, only quantifiable objects can serve as money (1968:180), a restriction obviously inapplicable to language. Second, thepurpose served by the system as a whole must be inferred from theactual uses, and can hardly be said to be as clear as that of writing orlanguage (1968: 194). Clearly, the sense in which money signifies some-

thing is different from that implied by the linguistic sign.But several authors have continued to fall for the temptation to posita complete correspondence between money and linguistic symbols.Codere (1968: 559), for instance, writes:


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Money is a symbol. It functions as a sign, it is semiotic. It is a symbol of

both past and future exchangeable goods, the idea of goods being understood

to include services. As a symbol its particular physical character is arbitrary

within certain practical limitations, as are all symbols . . .

Crump (1981: 16) similarly suggests that money is a symbol signifyingwhat it can be converted into. He recognizes, however, the chameleon-like property of money (1981: 122), and the fact that it gives no infor-mation about itself that is not cultural tautology (1981: 1).

De Saussures distinction between value and significance resurfacesin several corresponding, conceptual pairs applied to the two allegeddimensions of money. When referring only to the tautological, arithmeticsystem of which they are a part, Crump argues, the denominations of

money should be seen as metonyms; when used in transactions beyondthe boundaries of the money system, however, he suggests that theirrelation to whatever they are converted into could be seen as meta-phorical (Crump, 1981: 2723). Similarly, Schacht (1973: 127) has usedDe Saussures concepts of syntagmatic and associative relations for trans-actions within and beyond the money complex, respectively.

There are flaws in these claims that money can be viewed as asymbol or as a metaphor. De Saussure would not have agreed withCodere that money is a symbol, for to the former, a symbol is never

entirely arbitrary, and there are always remnants of a natural connec-tion between signifier and signified. Clearly, there are no such connec-tions between money and what it can be converted into. Even if, likeCodere, we adopt Peirces definition of a symbol as an arbitrary associ-ation of sign and object (which distinguishes it from an icon or index),this does not warrant classifying money as a symbol. In the case ofmoney, arbitrariness characterizes the relation between sign and objectnot only in Peirces sense, where that relation however arbitrary isat least codified as a cultural convention, but also in the sense that the

relation is totally contextual and unpredictable over time. There is, inother words, no convention connecting the money sign with any specificobject. In fact, it would be more reasonable to say that a commodity,because it is assigned a specific price, signifies a certain sum of money,than to say that a sum of money signifies an unspecified commodity (seeNth, 1996: 34).

Finally, it seems unwarranted to think of the conversion of moneyinto goods (or vice versa) as metaphorical, since metaphors juxtaposesubstantial, cultural domains, and money simply does not constitute a

domain in this sense. In order to qualify as a cultural domain, the cat-egory of abstract exchange value would have to be internally differenti-ated so as to exhibit some kind of structure. This was indeed the case intraditional, multi-centric economies documented by anthropologists.


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Thus, the three spheres of exchange among the Tiv (Bohannan, 1955)would have entailed transactions and relations that could be viewed asmetaphorical. It could, for instance, be argued that, for the Tiv, chick-

ens were to cattle what utensils were to cloth; chickens and utensilsbelonged to the sphere of subsistence items, cattle and cloth to that ofprestige items. Within the prestige sphere of the Tiv, brass rods func-tioned as a special-purpose currency. If some other medium of exchange(say, cereals, as in ancient Babylonia) would have operated as a similarlyrestricted currency within the sphere of subsistence items, we wouldhave been able to say that it related to brass rods as subsistence to pres-tige, or perhaps as individual to society. The relation between the twokinds of money could then be seen as a metaphor for the relationbetween short-term and long-term values (see Parry and Bloch, 1989),

and would not be reducible to a simple matter of quantity. Each kind ofmoney would derive its meaning from that opposition. The undifferen-tiated nature of modern money, by reducing itself to tautology, appearsto preclude any such metaphorical messages.5

Viewed from outer space, money is an ecosemiotic6phenomenonthat has very tangible effects on ecosystems and the biosphere as awhole (Hornborg, 1992, 1998). If it were not for general-purposemoney, nobody would be able to trade tracts of rainforest for Coca-Cola. Much as Bateson and Rappaport did, we could regard money as

a communicative disorder. The ecologist Crawford Holling (Holling andSanderson, 1996) notes that natural systems tend to show a kind of cor-respondence between temporal and spatial scales, so that the moreinclusive a system is, the longer its time span. A forest is thus morepermanent than a tree, a tree more permanent than a leaf, and so on.To trade rainforests for carbonated beverages obviously does notagreewith this pattern.

The recognition of more than one kind of money or exchange value,as among the Tiv, can serve to codify the recognition of different levels

of social integration. The subsistence sphere among the Tiv, for instance,pertained to the physical reproduction of households, whereas theexchange of prestige goods and people represented the reproduction oflarger social units. From the point of view of communication theory, therelative autonomy of such social levels may be as important as that ofthe levels of integration studied by the biological sciences. Parry andBloch (1989: 257) suggest that the fundamental problem confronting allsocieties is the mode in which individual (short-term) and social (long-term) goals and projects are to be articulated. The two spheres, they

argue, must be kept separate but related. They concede that it is arguablethat the uniqueness of capitalist ideology is that the values of the short-term order have become elaborated into a theory of long-term repro-duction (1989: 29).


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A similar understanding of capitalism as a confusion of levels orlogical types is evident in Sahlins (1976) conclusion, inspired by Bau-drillard, that the success of capitalist institutions can be attributed to the

fact that they are disembedded from any of the specific cultural codeswhich define the contents of consumption at particular times and in par-ticular places. It is precisely in its unspecificity its lack of an object(Peirce) or signified (De Saussure) that the notion of a growing GNPmanages to disguise as rational the arbitrary production of symbolicvalue. In this system, the economy is the main site of symbolic pro-duction (Sahlins, 1976: 211). Compare, says Sahlins (1976: 213), theeconomists utility with C.S. Peirces general notion of the sign assomething which stands to somebody for something in some respect orcapacity. The conceptual cornerstone of economic science is thus as

vague as the most abstract definition possible of the most elementaryunit of communication. It specifies absolutely nothing about the sub-stance of economic processes. The all-engulfing character of modernityis generated by this tendency toward abstraction, i.e. by the use of signs(including concepts such as utility) that can stand for anything toanybody. The core of our culture is a black hole; at the heart of our cos-mology are empty signs.

But is not this a general human condition? Are not religious ideasuniversally based on signs designed to accommodate everything (Rap-

paport, 1979)? There is a peculiar relation between money and theSacred, two ideas or memes in Dawkins (1976) words that bothsignify encompassment, abstraction, and the transcendence of context.In a complex sense, money is a transmutation and an inversion ofthe Sacred. We can think of the biblical Mammon, or of Marxs conceptof money fetishism. The same capacity for abstraction which gave us theSacred, the ultimate, the irreducible, also gave us money, for whichnothing is sacred and everything reducible. The Sacred is abstractionrooted or embedded in local resonance; money and science is dis-

embeddedabstraction (Hornborg, 1994). And the universal selection the-orists could no doubt observe that human history has selected for moneyand science, at the expense of the Sacred.

Crump (1981: 274) is certainly right when he observes that languageand money are both means of communication. This is what justifies asemiotic analysis. His one general conclusion, however, is simply thatmoney is a means for transmitting signals (1981: 291). But then, so isair. What do we make of this vacuity? It seems that the only way to dealwith such a tautological medium is through a tautological theory. Thus,

Gudeman (1986) shows that neoclassical economics, like the money itpurports to understand, is uniquely self-referential and non-metaphori-cal, and suggests that this very vacuity has made it the ideal accompliceof imperialism.


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A RECOVERY OF SPECIFICITY?

Crump (1981: 125) concedes that there is no theoretical objection to asystem in which all commodities are divided into n classes . . . each with

its own money. The only rationale he seems to be able to see for suchmonetary boundaries, however, is political. He suggests that the primaryfunction of any boundary is control, and that every boundary repre-sents a conflict of interests (1981: 1312). This is a simplistic perspec-tive deriving from liberal economic ideology and thus in itself political.A much more profound view is offered by Kopytoff (1986), who showsthat all societies recognize spheres of human life which are not to bemediated by money, i.e. the values of which are incommensurable. Allsocieties struggle to find a balance between commoditization and singu-

larization, between the totally homogeneous and the totally hetero-geneous economy. The counterdrive to total commoditization is thecognitive discrimination we know as culture (1986: 73). In underminingcognitive discrimination, commoditization is fundamentally anti-cul-tural, but culture tends to resist total commoditization by processes ofsingularization and sacralization. The fact thatpoweroften asserts itselfin this way (Kopytoff, 1986; cf. Crumps view, discussed earlier) is onlyone aspect of this phenomenon of culture. Kopytoff discusses variousways in which commoditization now tends to threaten the only major

discrimination still adhered to in the modern West, namely that betweenobjects and persons. He suggests that exchange and commoditization isa fundamentally seductive idea (1986: 72), and asks,

. . . how secure are the Western cultural ramparts that defend the humansphere against commoditization, especially in a secularized society that finds

it increasingly difficult to appeal to any transcendental sanctions for cultural

discrimination and classification? (Kopytoff, 1986: 85)

Responding to Kopytoff, Parry and Bloch (1989: 16) instead emphasizethe political and coercive background to commoditization: If money is

really such a fundamentally seductive idea it is perhaps strange thatthe colonial powers in Africa should have repeatedly found that theyneeded to tax people in order to draw them into the wider economy. Itis true that traditional cultures generally did not dismantle their systemsof meaning voluntarily, without struggle, but the general tendency inhistory suggests that commoditization, once introduced, is not very likelyto be reversed. The political dimension of these processes of abstractionis obvious, but does not refute the seductive, cultural inertia throughwhich they are continuously being reproduced. How does one reverse a

process of categorical abstraction? By means of which selective pressurescan abstract categories be undone?From different perspectives, I regard both Kopytoffs (1986) and

Parry and Blochs (1989) contributions as arguments that could lend


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support to a normative vision of a multi- or at least bi-centric economy.The tendency to distinguish between the short-term and the long-termis related to what Kopytoff calls singularization. Space will not permit

me here to pursue the various institutional practicalities of a bi-centriceconomy, but I hope to have suggested some of its theoretical foun-dations. It is as much within the capacity of our species to devise sucha system as it is to create a global currency. Perhaps the two projectscould be articulated: local currencies for subsistence and short-termreproduction, a global currency for telecommunications and long-termsocial projects. The primary objective of such a distinction betweenincommensurable, local and global currencies should be to inhibitexploitative exchanges of labour time and natural space between localecosystems. In the present, general-purpose market, such exchanges

permit seemingly limitless capital accumulation to the detriment ofglobal peripheries (see Emmanuel, 1972; Bunker, 1985; Hornborg, 1998).A bi-centric economy would be a way of immunizing the specific andlocal from the dissolvent logic of the abstract and global. It would rep-resent an acknowledgement of those other forms of humanity, to quoteSahlins (1976: 221), whose difference from us consists in having dis-covered not merely other codes of existence but ways of achieving anend that still eludes us: the mastery by society of societys mastery overnature.

I hope to have shown that a recovery of specificity and locallyembedded economies is, more than anything else, a communicative orsemiotic challenge. In order to achieve sustainability, the money sign willhave to be re-equipped with a certain capacity for discrimination. Wecould begin by reminding ourselves that general-purpose money is a rela-tively new phenomenon, and that multi-centric economies were onceubiquitous rather than exotic. One of the more philosophical accountsof such a system is De Coppets (1968) description of the role of moneyamong the traditional Areare of the Solomon Islands:

The circulation of these moneys is subject to precise rules, so that, together

with men, women, children and other goods recognized in the local culture,

they form a system of exchanges which maintains and perpetuates the estab-

lished patterns of social organization. The implicit immortality of the society,

as such, is thus maintained by the mortality of the people and goods which,

momentarily, cross its path. Both the living and the dead combine in theeventual destruction of all things, so that in the end nothing remains save

these strings of money, and the unceasing ballet which they perform. (trans-

lated passage quoted from Crump, 1981: 19)

If in the end nothing remains save the code itself, this is a recognitionof the predicament of living systems. Like all structures, the biosphereis composed of differences. If it is mankinds mission to devise a coded


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system of signals to integrate this most inclusive of living systems, ourmonetary system must recognize those differences or continue toannihilate them.

In a rich discussion of environmental justice and the social con-struction of space and time, David Harvey (1996) draws on Munns(1986) study of the exchange of kula valuables in Melanesia. It is as ifthe socio-material logic of money protrudes with greater clarity in its ear-liest (i.e. least abstract, most discriminatory) form, where the moneyobjects retain distinct identities and prescribed channels of circulation.The kula valuables suggest material signs poised on the very thresholdbetween the realms of personalized gifts and abstract exchange values,i.e. between economies of genuine symbols and economies of empty sig-nifiers. The circulation of these material objects generates specific struc-

tures of claims and reciprocities in space and time. The push and pull ofsuch relations constitute gravitational fields that variously extend thesocial reach of individual persons. It becomes clear that money signs aregenerative of social space and time and, by implication, that differentlydesigned money institutions will generate different kinds of spatio-tem-poral worlds. This should be a crucial implication of Harveys strugglesto reconcile particularism and universalism, constructivism and objec-tivism, phenomenology and historical materialism. The scope of materialagency in human worlds hinges on the organization of sign relations. Any

attempt to reorganize the material dimension of global society will haveto proceed by means of a reorganization of the semiotics of money. Ifthere is to be any hope of achieving the mastery by society of societysmastery over nature, money signifiers must once again be equippedwith signifieds, i.e. reconverted into symbols. I believe that this is aninsight with which any struggle for environmental justice and ecologicalsustainability will have to begin.

Notes1. I would like to thank the Nordic Council of Ministers for financial support.

Parts of this text overlap with segments of papers previously presented atmeetings of the American Anthropological Association (1996, 1997) and theFirst International Conference of the European Association for BioeconomicStudies (1991). One of the AAA papers was published in the April 1998 issueof Anthropology Today, and I am grateful to the editor of that journal forallowing me to reproduce six paragraphs from it in the present article.Thanks also to Edwina Taborsky for critical comments on an earlier version.

2. Ahonens (1989) application of Peirces categories to money is at timesconfusing. He thus classifies gold coins as iconic while money backed by

the state or by a stock of bullion is classified as indexical (Ahonen, 1989:26). I would argue that the former are indexical and the latter (if backed bybullion, as in the Bretton Woods system) either iconic or symbolic,depending on the form or iconography of the money items themselves (for


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examples of iconic money, see Simmel 1990: 1445). The specific referenceto a gold (or other) standard is the only (and very restricted) sense in whichmoney can serve as a symbol of something which it can be converted into.

3. Although more or less exotic exceptions can certainly be found (Parry and

Bloch, 1989), they do little to invalidate the long-standing sociologicalconclusion that, by and large, modern money has had a tendency to rendersocial relations increasingly abstract (see Giddens, 1990, Corbridge andThrift, 1994: 20).

4. The lineage of scholars who have pursued this observation from De Saussureincludes Bhler, Lefebvre, Rossi-Landi, Eco, Baudrillard, Sahlins, andDouglas and Isherwood (see Nth, 1996).

5. The only (and flawed) sense in which modern money can be said toapproach metaphor, I believe, is Simmels (1990: 158) idea that a given sumof money should relate to the total quantity of money in society as thecommodity that it can be exchanged for relates to the total quantity of

commodities.6. For a review of the emerging discourse on ecosemiotics, see Nth (1997).

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ALF HORNBORG is Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University. His

PhD is in Cultural Anthropology.Address: Human Ecology Division, Lund Uni-

versity, Finngatan 16, 223 62 Lund, Sweden. [email: [email protected]]


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Hornborg - Money and the Semiotics of Ecosystem Dissolution

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