Simmel’s Quantification

In my readings in the anthropology and sociology of money, two figures have often stood out against whom contemporary scholars have mounted critiques: Karl Marx and Georg Simmel. While Marx advanced one of the most comprehensive analyses and critiques of capitalism, he’s often taken to have overly abstracted the capitalist economy from everyday life, to the degree that readers come to understand capitalism as having soaked through and colonized all aspects of life. As for Simmel, scholars have dismissed his analysis of money as reductive because of how he claimed that money objectifies the subjective dimensions of everyday life.

I’ve ventured into Marx’s writings but very little into Simmel’s, so up to this point, I’ve been fairly satisfied with a second-hand take on Simmel. That is, until Nigel Dodd (2014) has drawn on Simmel’s work in interesting ways. Dodd finds it unfortunate that scholars have focused on and critiqued Simmel’s view that “money transforms social life by reducing qualitative relations to quantitative ones” (30). But on the brighter side of things, Simmel’s viewpoint has invited and incited scholars to develop many “insights into the nature of money” (30).

While Simmel is the foremost thinker in Dodd’s book, Dodd does not read him as a rigid thinker who said that money objectifies everyday life. Rather, he reads Simmel as “a rich and multifaceted thinker” who had a much more fluid and flexible concept of society than most other sociologists (Dodd 2015, 438). Geoffrey Ingham’s (2004) approach to the nature of money, for example, represents a more traditional way of thinking about society because he seeks to establish a “general theory” that money is strictly and entirely a product of society.

Simmel, in contrast, proposed a softer notion of society, something akin to sociation or association. We can contrast Simmel to, say, Emile Durkheim’s notion of collective consciousness, the idea that society is greater than the sum of each individual. For Simmel, society is not a thing that exists elsewhere but is characterized as an ongoing process “which exists within and through myriad interactions” (Dodd 2015, 436). Society, that is, is the outcome of our collective associations (Simmel could be said to be Humean because society is immanent to human action and experience).

Simmel’s approach to society corresponds to the way he thinks of the economy. The economy is not something that exists out there but is immanent to the act of exchange. And the same goes for the world of value. Simmel defined value as demand: the intensity for which one desires an object (Dodd 2014, 27). Value arises in the process of exchange when two owners give one another what the other possesses. Exchange then is a “mutual sacrifice:” “to gain something, we must simultaneously lose” (27–28).

For Simmel, value corresponds to the distance between a person and the object they desire, and this distance is proportional to the sacrifice required to possess this object. Value, therefore, “accrues to the desired object by virtue of the sacrifice needed to acquire it in exchange” (Dodd 2014, 28). Value is not the property of objects themselves, but the distance between the person and the object.

Simmel argued that while value arises in the relation between person and object, “value comes to appear as an objective property of things themselves” (Dodd 2014, 28). This occurs when we desire more than one object. In a world of many objects of desire, we come to compare them and quantify their value. Value then appears as though it were a property of objects rather than a relation between persons and objects. Quantification conditions the possibility for money, and for value itself to become price: “The monetary price of an object is the external manifestation of the sacrifice that is offered in exchange for it: it is a quantitative objectification of that sacrifice” (29).

Simmel was not simply interested in how value arose and how it came to be quantified by money. He had a larger scope of interest: “he sought to understand how money brings order to a world in which objects and values are in perpetual flux” (29). This relates to Simmel’s notion of society and economy, where each is made through ongoing associations. Money, he thought, established consistency and flatness to the unfoldings and variations of social life.

For Simmel (2002), human life depends on differences, that our minds are “stimulated by the difference between present impressions and those which have preceded” (11), and he worried that as money circulates more and more across society, it would come to increasingly quantify the qualitative differences in everyday life. In the money economy, we become indifferent “towards the distinction between things” (14). As Simmel wrote, “the meaning and the value of the distinctions between things, and therewith of the things themselves, are experienced as meaningless” (14). This essentially rational “intellectualist” manner of social relations was not for Simmel a product of money, as though money were shaping us into rational actors, but rather intellectualism was the manner in which modern people — specifically those living in large cities where the money economy occupied the virtual totality of urban space — sought to protect their inner lives. This is a crucial point from Simmel: money is not that which shapes us but rather that which brings us to adopt a “blasé attitude” to protect our values and uniqueness from money — “the frightful leveler” (14). Simmel, therefore, never departs from his conception of society and economy: both domains are immanent to everyday social interaction and association.

In Simmel’s approach to large cities, where the money economy proliferated — indeed, both city and money would appear to be co-constitutive for Simmel — he observed that residents engaged in activities that made them stand out (18). This is because our need for difference demands expression, and the metropolis, alongside the money economy, have given rise to a whole array of specializations and variations. If we extend Simmel’s observations to the notion of modern money, we find a contradiction, or a dialectic: modern money is an object that reduces difference to make all things commensurable and therefore tradeable with one another, but it incites the further proliferation of particularities and differences.

REFERENCES

Dodd, Nigel. 2014. The Social Life of Money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Dodd, Nigel. 2015. “Redeeming Simmel’s Money.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 435–41.

Ingham, Geoffrey. 2004. The Nature of Money. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Simmel, Georg. 2002. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Blackwell City Reader, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 11–19. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell