Common cents: situating money in time and place

Abstract

This paper engages with a wide range of social theories to argue for a more nuanced understanding of money that is attuned to its spatial and scalar dimensions. The paper begins with a brief overview of modernist and postmodernist accounts, including the works of Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Shell and Jean-Joseph Goux. These theories have provided a useful corrective to neoclassical economic accounts that distil the economic from society and culture, but they reinforce an understanding of money that is homogenizing, in that it is said to annihilate space by time. By contrast, network theories of money, which are reviewed in the following section of this paper, offer a more contextualized understanding of money's embeddedness in social relations, in particular vis-à-vis the trust that is invested in money forms and institutions that help to knit together the networks through which money circulates. The spatial dynamics of monetary circulation are intrinsic to this model, but there is little sense of the geopolitical dimensions of money's role in the territorialization of space. The studies of money that are reviewed in the penultimate section of this paper begin to address the dimensions of power at work in money's production and circulation, largely in terms of the rise of the state and national currencies, with particular attention to the particularities of money forms. As I argue in the conclusion to this paper, these various epistemological approaches are not easily reconciled. But I suggest that the aim should not be to resolve the paradoxes that emerge, but to foreground them. In so doing, not only will it be possible to think more carefully about the scales through which money circulates and which it helps to produce and reproduce, but to invest our understanding of money with a little more life and dynamism.