The Acid of Money

I’ve been thinking here lately about questions of value: how do we determine what something is worth? The question stands at the heart of any examination of class and inequality. I think of the way recent discussions of the value of going to college have largely enacted a commodified dollar-value-only view of education, and the way I’ve wanted (and tried) to contend that there are other values that demand consideration. Bill Maurer, in “Uncanny Exchanges: The Possibilities and Failures of ‘Making Change’ with Alternative Monetary Forms” (Society and Space 21), asks, “Does the ability of money to render the qualitative into the quantitative flatten social relations” (317)? Maurer’s essay, which looks at how using, calculating with, and thinking about alternative monetary forms — his examples are the riba and zakat of Islamic finance specialists and the HOURs currency of Ithaca, New York — restage our economic beliefs about qualitative and quantitative valuation, problematizes this “false dichotomy between culture and practical reason” (318). In a similar vein, Steven Gudeman in Postmodern Gifts contends that “The many cases of reciprocity recorded by anthropologists challenge the idea that material life must be completely organized by market practices” (3): market modes of exchange and non-market modes of exchange, and their associated forms of valuation, can and do exist in a diverse economy.

Before I start sounding too hopeful, I should point out that Maurer sees alternative monetary forms as being “haunted by transcendental value” (332), and this transcendence is what I’ve followed Gibson-Graham in seeing as so problematic in contemporary representations of the economy, as well as in various instrumental representations of technology. Richard Barbrook, in “The Hi-Tech Gift Economy”, seems to completely buy into such conceptions of transcendence, suggesting that internet users “collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money or politics” and “give and receive information without thought of payment” to the point where, “In the absence of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed through the mutual obligation created by gifts of time and ideas”.

While Barbrook critiques “politicians and corporate leaders” who “believe that the future of capitalism lies in the commodification of information”, he seems to believe — like Negroponte et al — in technology as a magical force somehow solving all our problems. Of course, this may be partly due to Barbrook’s context: his March 1998 article still carries the optimistic near-sightedness of its time and its circumstances, the high water mark of the internet-driven economic boom of the nineties. Still, there is some sophistication to Barbrook’s perspective; his conclusions point to the existence of a “mixed economy” where “money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with one another, but also co-exist in symbiosis”.

In that final point I see a bit of common ground with Jill Walker’s perspective that “Links have a direct value on the Web and can be seen as a pseudo-monetary unit” but “This instrumental view of links does not exclude its other qualities”. Links have more than one value, and in fact can be seen as a form of gift, especially in the sense in which “The gift extends the commons to someone outside community, offering temporary participation or even permanent inclusion” (Gudeman 12). Earlier, Gudeman quotes Malinowski’s “fundamental human impulse to display, to share, to bestow” (7), and isn’t this what the link is all about, despite its valuation — as Jill compellingly describes — as a sort of abstracted currency? (Yes, I occasionally check my Blogshares value, although I don’t trade.) In this sense, a link has an “unstable or uncertain” value, incorporating both the quantitative and the qualitative: As Gudeman argues, “reciprocity is not the core of society but its expression” and “reciprocity is neither a primitive isolate nor the atom of society but its badge. If the gift is an unstable or uncertain category that is only because it is ‘about’ uncertainty itself” (21).

I know I’m not the most reciprocal linker. I look at smart, smart weblogs like Arete and wood s lot, look at the wealth of links they offer, and wonder how they make the time to read so much, compared to the scant 15 or 20 sites I have on my blogroll (I don’t actually read PhDweblogs very often, but it’s up there as a good place from which to find other folks who are engaged in similar pursuits). I worry that my lack of reciprocity may violate community conventions, or show me to be a jerk somehow: perhaps I should have a long blogroll; perhaps I should link to everyone who links to me. But that would be saying something different about myself. Now: the point of all this is that, if links have a Marxian exchange value, if they “can be seen as a pseudo monetary unit” in addition to their other forms of valuation, then this points to how the economic activities one engages in help to determine one’s identity.

If you’ve read Pierre Bourdieu or Thorstein Veblen, this is hardly a shocking insight, and probably not worth the emphasis. But it does point to how cultural meanings are bound up in economic practices, or, in other words, it shows one of the ways class gets created. And while cultural meanings and economic practices can be used to understand group membership, we should also understand, as Gudeman does, that the gift “connects incommensurate social worlds” (20); in tiny ways, the link can transgress or violate or rupture class boundaries. (Of course, the link can’t transgress the boundary between the class of those who have computers and the class of those who do not.) Gudeman’s most important insight, to me, are that “reciprocity is one way of groping with uncertainty at the limits of a community: making a gift secures, probes, and expands the borders of a group”, and that “Economies are built on the interlocked regimes of communal and commercial value, not gift versus commodity” (3).