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Cultures of Currencies

This book’s premise is not only the commonly accepted cultural rela-
tivity of economic concepts, but also the observation that the current
shift in the meaning of concepts like “market,” “currency,” “exchange,”
and “money” suggests that culture is undergoing a change with unpre-
dictable economic and political consequences. The essays in the book
raise basic questions concerning exchange – what is exchanged, who
exchanges and how, which kind of currency is used, and indeed what
is money and how does it convey and retain value over time. These is-
sues are all classical objects of economic theory, but less often have they
been approached from a cultural perspective. Works treating economic
and monetary issues from a cultural perspective are few and far apart,
and this book aims to contribute to such a perspective with a variety of
approaches.

Joan Ramon Resina is Professor in the Department of Iberian and Latin

American Cultures and the Department of Comparative Literature at
Stanford University, where he directs the Iberian Studies Program at the
Europe Center.
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
Cultures of Currencies
Literature and the Symbolic
Foundation of Money

Edited by
Joan Ramon Resina
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Joan Ramon Resina;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Joan Ramon Resina to be identified as the author
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 9781032208824 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781032208916 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003265733 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003265733
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents

List of Contributors vii

Introduction 1

1 What Does Money Signify? The “Transvaluation

of Values” Taking Place in the Relation between
Currency and Language 18
JA N SÖFF N ER

2 The Cultural Currency of Semiocapitalism: On the

General Law of Exchange 36
PH ILI PP KLEI NM ICH EL

3 Social Reconfigurations of Debt-Ridden Societies 50

DAV I D M U R I L L O

4 Money, Society, and Trust: Lessons from Crisis 64

GA BR IELA BA DICA

5 Rural Continuities in the Urban Revolution: Ethics of

Work, Labor and Pay in the West African Savannah 75
T I LL FÖRST ER

6 The Bonfires of Money: Capitalism,

Memory and Iconoclasm 98
GER M Á N L A BR A DOR M ÉN DEZ

7 The Libidinal Investments of the Social Field 119

ELSIE M ICH IE

8 Unpredictability as an Economic Value 129

SI MONA ŠK R A BEC
vi Contents
9 “Cultural Economy” and “Cultural Economics”:
Epistemological and Political Consequences of a
Fatal Intertwinement 150
G I OVA N N I L E G H I S S A

10 “I Have Sworn an Oath That I Will Have My Bond”:

Money, Law, and Prelegal Liability in
Shakespeare and Kleist 165
C H R IST I A N MOSER

11 The Alchemy of Money: Money as a Standard of Value 179

B RU N A I N G R AO

12 The Troubles of Production: Ezra Pound and Jean

Baudrillard on the Symbols of Exchange 206
J OA N R A M O N R E S I N A

Index 224
Contributors

Gabriela Badica (1989) completed her undergraduate degree in En-

glish Literature and Hispanic Studies and a Master of Arts degree
in Hispanic Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancou-
ver, Canada. She received her PhD in Iberian and Latin American
Cultures from Stanford University in 2020. Her dissertation is titled
“‘The Age of Foreclosures and Evictions’: Literature of the 2008
Financial Crisis in Spain.” During her PhD, she received the Stan-
ford University James A. Lyons Service Award (2016), the Stanford
Alumni Association Community Impact Award (2017), the Ric Wei-
land Graduate Fellowship in the School of Humanities (2017–2019),
and the Stanford University Centennial Teaching Award (2019). Her
research interests include interdisciplinary perspectives on the 2008
financial crisis and its effects on members of the Millennial genera-
tion, literature of the Spanish Civil War, and intersections between
technology and literatures, cultures, and languages. She works in tech
communications in Silicon Valley.
Till Förster holds the chair of Anthropology and is Founding Director of
the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
He works on visual culture and political transformations in Africa
and has conducted field research for many years in West and Central
Africa. In his work, he rejects normative, Western accounts of gover-
nance as being profoundly political. His work addresses the agency
of the actors, their political imagination, and how their interaction
leads to the formation of novel social and political regimes and so-
cial spaces. His recent publications focus on questions of governance
and social creativity, in particular in urban spaces. He has published
articles, special issues, and sections in journals such as African Stud-
ies Review, Social Dynamics, Development and Change, and coed-
ited The politics of Governance (Routledge 2015), African Art and
Agency in the Workshop (Indiana UP 2013), and Non-State Actors
As Standard Setters (Cambridge UP 2009).
Bruna Ingrao (Rome, 1947) holds a degree in Philosophy cum laude from
the Faculty of Humanities, University of Rome “La Sapienza,” where
viii Contributors
she later became Professor of Economics until her retirement. A his-
torian of economic thought, she has written on the history of general
equilibrium theory, notably the book The invisible Hand. General
Equilibrium in the History of Science, cowritten with the late Prof. G.
Israel (Ingrao, Israel 1990). Since her studies on general equilibrium,
she has been interested in methodology and ideas of rationality in
economics from an interdisciplinary perspective. Since 2001, she has
published interdisciplinary research on economics and literature. In
2005, she contributed several chapters to Economists in Cambridge.
A study through their correspondence, 1907–1946 (M.C. Marcuzzo,
A. Rosselli eds. 2005). In 2013, she published the book Portraits of
European Economists (Ingrao 2013). In 2019, jointly with Prof. C.
Sardoni, she wrote Banks and Finance in Modern Macroeconomics.
A Historical Perspective to explore why financial intermediaries dis-
appeared from mainstream models in macroeconomics in the second
half of the 20th century (Ingrao, Sardoni 2019). Her current research
interests are banks and finance in the history of macroeconomics,
economics and literature, and methodological debates in contempo-
rary economics.

Philipp Kleinmichel studied philosophy, art, and media theory in

Freiburg, Karlsruhe, and New York. He is a graduate of the Indepen-
dent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and
was a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Since January 2018,
he has been a research assistant at Zeppelin University and was pre-
viously a lecturer at the University of Gießen, the University of Ham-
burg, and the UDK Berlin, among others. His research focuses on the
transformation of art and culture in the digital age. Main publica-
tions include Im Namen der Kunst. Eine Genealogie der politischen
Ästhetik, Wien 2014, and The Art of Direct Action. Social Sculpture
and Beyond, coedited with Karen van den Berg and Cara Jordon,
Berlin 2019.

Germán Labrador Méndez (Vigo, 1980) is Professor in the Department

of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. His interests en-
compass literary and cultural history, memory studies, poetry, social
movements, and urban cultures. He is the author of Culpables por
la literatura. Imaginación política y contracultura en la transición
española (Guilty of Literature. Political Imagination and Counter-­
Culture in the Spanish Transition to Democracy) (1968–1984) (Siglo
XXI, 2017), among other books, and has cocurated the exhibition
The Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images from the
Spanish Transition (2018–2019) for the Museo Reina Sofia in Ma-
drid (MNCARS).
 Contributors ix
Giovanni Leghissa (1964) is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the De-
partment of Philosophy, University of Torino, Italy. He graduated in
Philosophy from the University of Trieste. From the same University,
he holds a PhD in Philosophy. He was Visiting Professor at the Insti-
tut für Philosophie at the University of Vienna, Austria, and at the
Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany. His work focuses
on phenomenology, continental philosophy, and psychoanalysis;
postcolonial, gender, and cultural studies; comparative philosophy;
post-humanism; and epistemology of economics and theory of orga-
nizations. He has authored five books: L’evidenza impossibile. Saggio
sull’immaginazione in Husserl (Trieste: LINT, 1999); Il dio mortale.
Ipotesi sulla religiosità moderna (Milano: Medusa, 2004); Il gioco
dell’identità. Differenza, alterità, rappresentazione (Milano: Mime-
sis, 2005), Incorporare l’antico. Filologia classica e invenzione della
modernità (Milano: Mimesis, 2007). Neoliberalismo. Un’introduz-
ione critica (Milano: Mimesis 2012), Postumani per scelta. Verso
un’ecosofia dei collettivi (Milan: Mimesis 2015), (with Giandomen-
ica Becchio) The Origins of Neoliberalism (Routledge, London 2017).
Per la critica della ragione europea. Riflessioni sulla spiritualità il-
luminista (Mimesis, Milano 2019). He is the coeditor, together with
Enrico Manera, of Filosofie del mito nel Novecento (Carocci, Rom
2015). He edited six collective volumes and special issues of journals.
He edited as well the Italian version of works of Husserl, Derrida,
Blumenberg, Hall, de Certeau, Overbeck, Tempels. He is a member
of the editorial board of the journal of philosophy aut aut and di-
rector of the online journal Philosophy Kitchen. Rivista di filosofia
contemporanea.
Elsie Michie is Associate Dean of the College of Humanities and So-
cial Sciences and Professor in the Department of English at Louisiana
State University. She received her PhD in English from Yale Univer-
sity in 1984. She has written two single-authored books: Outside
the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian
Woman Writer (Cornell, 1993) and The Vulgar Question of Money:
Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen
to Henry James (Johns Hopkins, 2011). She has edited four essay col-
lections and two critical editions. She is currently at work on a book
about Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George
Eliot, and Harriet Beecher Stowe entitled Trollopizing the Canon. She
is also working on a collection of essays that rethink the nature of
literary influence. Her essays have appeared in PMLA, Novel, Vic-
torian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Literature,
and Culture. Her work consistently deals with the intellectual impact
of various forms of exclusion: of characters, concepts, and authors.
x Contributors
Christian Moser is Professor of Comparative Literature and Head of
the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Bonn.
He has held visiting appointments at Columbia University and Ohio
State University and has been Fellow at the Morphomata Center for
Advanced Studies (Cologne University). Moser’s current research
interests lie in the field of literature and globalization, autobiogra-
phy studies, the poetics of the anecdote, the semantics of barbarism,
and law and literature. Recent books include: Figuren des Globalen.
Weltbezug und Welterzeugung in Literatur, Kunst und Medien (with
Linda Simonis); Barbarism Revisited. New Perspectives on an Old
Concept (with Maria Boletsi); The Intellectual Landscape in the
Works of J.M. Coetzee (with Tim Mehigan); and Barbarian: Explora-
tions of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature and the Arts (with
Markus Winkler and Maria Boletsi).
David Murillo is Associate Professor of the Department of Society,
Politics, and Sustainability at ESADE, University Ramon Llull (Bar-
celona). PhD in Sociology and BS in Humanities and in Business Ad-
ministration, he conducts research in areas like social innovation,
business ethics, critical management, and globalization studies, look-
ing particularly at the intersection of geopolitical, social, and eco-
nomic change. Among his latest works we find From Walmart to Al
Qaeda. An interdisciplinary approach to globalization, published
by Routledge in 2017. Other articles related to the abovementioned
themes have appeared in journals such as Technological Forecasting
and Social Change; Globalizations, International Politics; Interna-
tional Sociology; International Review of Sociology; Organization;
Journal of Business Ethics; and Business Ethics: A European Review
or Business Research Quarterly.
Joan Ramon Resina (Barcelona, 1956) is Professor in the Department of
Iberian and Latin American Cultures and the Department of Com-
parative Literature at Stanford University, where he directs the Iberian
Studies Program at the Europe Center. He holds a PhD in Compar-
ative Literature from U.C. Berkeley and a PhD in English from the
University of Barcelona. He has been Visiting Professor at various
European and North American universities. Awards include the Don-
ald Andrews Whittier Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center,
the Fulbright fellowship, the Alexander-von-Humboldt fellowship, a
Wien International Scholarship, a DAAD grant, fellowships at the
Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig and at the Internationales Kolleg
Morphomata in Cologne, the Serra d’Or prize for literary criticism,
the Omnium Cultural award (Ex Aequo with the TV channel Arte),
and the Literary Criticism Award of the Institució de les Lletres Cat-
alanes. He has been distinguished with the Cross of Saint George
by the Government of Catalonia. His publications include 170 essays
 Contributors xi
in professional journals and collective volumes. Between 1998 and
2004, he was general editor of Diacritics and coordinated a special
issue of this journal titled “New Coordinates: Spatial Mappings, Na-
tional Trajectories.” Select books include: The Ghost in the Consti-
tution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society (Liverpool
UP, 2017), Josep Pla: The World Seen in the Form of Articles (Toronto
UP, 2017), Barcelona’s Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of
an Urban Image (Stanford UP, 2008), Del Hispanismo a los Estudios
Ibéricos. Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural (2009),
El postnacionalisme en el mapa global (Angle Editorial, 2005), El
cadáver en la cocina: La novela policiaca en la cultura del desen-
canto (Anthropos, 1997), Los usos del clásico (Anthropos, 1991), Un
sueño de piedra: Ensayos sobre la literatura del modernismo europeo
(Anthropos, 1990), and La búsqueda del Grial (Anthropos, 1988).
For years he has contributed regularly to the daily press in Catalonia.
Simona Škrabec (Ljubljana, 1968) lives in Barcelona since 1992. She
graduated in German Philology and Comparative Literature from the
University of Ljubljana. In 2002, she obtained a PhD in Comparative
Literature from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). She
teaches literature at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and Universitat
Pompeu Fabra and translation at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Her main interests are the European literature of the 20th century
and the relation of literature to historical memory and identity. Her
most recent books are Pàtria prestada (Borrowed homeland, 2017)
and a collection of short stories, published in 2019, Surto del bosc
amb les mans tenyides (“I come out of the forest with dyed hands”).
She directed a project about cultural exchange between Germany and
Catalonia (Grenzen sind Straßen, 2007–2008), participated in the re-
search project To be translated or not to be (2007), and directed the
reports Culture’s Oxygen (2016) and Writing the Future in Indige-
nous Languages (2020), commissioned by UNESCO. She has trans-
lated more than 30 books. From 2014 to 2020, she was the Chair of
PEN International’s Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee.
Jan Söffner holds the chair for Cultural Theory and Cultural Analysis
at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, where he also functions
as vice president for teaching and didactics. Jan earned his PhD in
Italian Studies and his “Habilitation” (postdoctoral dissertation) in
Comparative Literature and Romance Studies. From 1999 to 2007,
he was research associate at the Department of Romance Studies at
the University of Cologne, and from 2008 to 2010 at the Center for
Literary and Cultural Research (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kultur-
forschung) in Berlin. In 2011 he was awarded a fellowship at the Cen-
ter for Advanced Studies Morphomata in Cologne and continued to
work there, until in 2014 he was offered an interim professorship for
xii Contributors
Romance Literature at the Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen.
In 2016 he held the position of Program Director at Wilhelm Fink
publishing house in Paderborn. Books authored: Nachdenken über
Game of Thrones. Zu George R.R. Martins Fantasyzyklus, Wilhelm
Fink, Paderborn 2017; Metaphern und Morphomata, Wilhelm Fink,
Paderborn [Series Morphomata], 2015; Partizipation. Metaphern,
Mimesis, Musik und die Kunst, Texte bewohnbar zu machen, Wil-
helm Fink, München 2014; Das Decameron und seine Rahmen des
Unlesbaren, Heidelberg: Winter, 2005.
Introduction

When discussing abstract concepts, it is often useful to begin by recall-

ing the origin of the terms, because language can excavate the past better
than any other archaeological tool. And things, even modern ideas and
functions, sink their roots into the darkness of primitive times. This is
true of economics, as it is of other contemporary realities. So, at the point
of introducing a collection of essays on what one could call the cultural
unconscious of economics, it seems appropriate to call on etymology,
much as the bards of yore called on the muses at the beginning of their
poems. Oἰκονόμος (household management), derived from οἶκος (house
or home) and νόμος (management), reached the English language as a
cultism by way of Latin. In English, Latin words act as a screen, endow-
ing perfectly ordinary meanings with the luster of educated or technical
sophistication, but the original meaning of economics is still visible in
the plain terms of the German compound word Wirtschaft, which refers
to the activity (schafen) of a host (Wirt), and in the related Haushalt or
housekeeping (budget). How a concept having to do with the manage-
ment of resources inside the family enclosure broadened to the point
of encompassing the entire system of global relations is something of a
mystery. The transition from husbanding the resources necessary for the
family unit to faith in ever-expanding growth can hardly be explained
in reference to abstract ideas such as capital accumulation and magical
belief in non-real(ized) values, such as those traded in so-called futures
markets. The transition from οἶκος to the world, from managing scar-
city to creating wealth through exchange, can perhaps be understood by
analogy with the development first of communal and then state religion
from the domestic gods, the dii gentiles, whose worship established the
first notions of private law and the right to property. This was, according
to Fustel de Coulanges, the beginning of a social generalization leading
to the formation of suprafamilial units or phratries, then tribes, and
eventually the city, precursor of the modern state (132).
The oldest popular texts in the Western tradition, Hesiod’s Of Works
and Days and the Homeric epic poems, while preserving the memory
of the οἶκος as the center of economic activity, already show a society
engaged in exchanges formalized in different ways, more primitive in the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003265733-1
2 Introduction
Iliad and the Odyssey, more developed in Hesiod’s text. Hesiod speaks
of “fair dealings” (l. 216, p. 72) and of selling and buying land (l. 341, p.
75), an operation implying a price that could not have been expressed in
money as we understand it, because coinage had not yet been invented.
Even so, the notion of measuring value, which is money’s primary func-
tion, appears a few lines later in the commendation of proportional giv-
ing and taking among neighbors (ll. 349–350, pp. 75–76) and in the
exhortation to avoid “dishonest profit,” i.e., unequal exchange (l. 352,
p. 76). Trade appears explicitly in the text when Hesiod comes to discuss
navigation. He favors venturing a large amount of capital, recommend-
ing fleeting a large vessel rather than a smaller one, so as to transport
a bigger load of cargo and maximize the profit (ll. 643–644, p. 83). As
a practical man, however, he advises prudence and hedging one’s bets:
“Do not load all your goods on hollow ships; your cargo should be less
than what you leave behind” (ll. 689–690, p. 84). In other words, he
recommends diversification, a sensible advice that has endured through
the ages.
The much older Homeric poems describe more archaic forms of wealth
acquisition and distribution. Under the pretext of a punishing expedition
to avenge the elopement of Helen with Paris and to reclaim her for Me-
nelaus, the Achaeans engage in an activity common to marauding tribes
of the Bronze Age: the search for plunder and the capture of slaves. In his
contribution to this book, Jan Söffner recalls the beginning of the Iliad,
when Agamemnon takes Briseis back from Achilles, eliciting the hero’s
legendary wrath. The reason for this explosion of emotion, so damaging
to the Achaeans, is not the intrinsic (sexual) value of Briseis but rather
something like a breach of contract on the part of Agamemnon. “Briseis
is – so to speak – nothing more than the currency in which Agamemnon
paid Achilles for sacking the Trojans; and the value of this currency is
honor,” writes Söffner, adding that Achilles drops out of the combat
because he is wronged in being deprived of his “recompense within the
economy of gift exchange.”
Söffner is absolutely right in identifying the cause of Achilles’s acri-
mony as “failed recompense,” but I think it is important to distinguish
between an honor economy and a gift economy, although the two are
historically interrelated. Honor, as we know from Mauss’s classic Essai
sur le don, fuels nonmonetary exchanges and seemingly anti-economic
rituals such as the potlatch among the Kwakiutl tribes of the Pacific
Northwest Coast of Canada and the US. But in my opinion, it is nec-
essary to distinguish in the Iliad the honor motif, foregrounded in the
purported reason for the expedition, namely avenging Helen’s adulter-
ous elopement and Paris’s breach of the hospitality laws, from the under-
lying historical motif. Barry Strauss speaks of aggression, competition,
resentment, covetousness, and insecurity as factors for the war, pointing
out that they are attested in Greek and Trojan archaeological finds and
 Introduction 3
in Hittite and Near Eastern documents (18). Troy was an ancient empo-
rium, which had been subjected to repeated sieges. Its wealth was a mag-
net for bands of warriors who lived from pillage and the distribution of
booty. And such a band is what the Achaeans’ loose coalition was. As in
every marauding party or in modern organized crime, a hierarchy deter-
mines the distribution of the loot according to an internal honor system.
The structure of rewards must respect the implicit worth of each actor
in the capture of the prize. In primitive society, physical force was the
eminent criterion for the hierarchy of distribution, because the principle
of exchange at work was the amount of disposable violence weighted
against the quantity and quality of the compensation received in the
form of booty. Briseis was not just an object like any other. In that case,
Agamemnon could have placated Achilles by replacing her with another
slave. She was prestigious prey fit only for a hero, and this is the reason
why Agamemnon took her for himself after giving up Chryseis, his own
prize, in obedience to the gods’ command.
The gift principle does occur in the Iliad as a form of delayed reci-
procity (or long-term “debt”) between alien parties. It makes its appear-
ance with the wooden horse placed by the Greeks at the gates of Troy.
The Trojans’ misgivings about the “gift” are typical of the hesitation a
cautious signatory displays toward the fine print of a contract. Caution
regarding the acceptance of gifts was the subject of mythological tales
like the story of Persephone accepting the pomegranate offered by Hades
and as a result being obliged to stay with him for a third part of the year.
The point of these myths about the obligations lurking in a gift is that
whereas a plunder economy is close to the natural state in which values
are taken without the collaboration of the party that has them, culture
“is a state of reciprocity where one acquires valuables, achieves success
and defeats enemies by giving gifts” (Nagy 192).
The workings of a gift economy are plainly to be observed in the Od-
yssey, specifically in Book 13, where Alcinous, generous host to Ulysses,
bestows a treasure of clothes and gold on him, topping the presents with
a valuable tripod and a cauldron. In the Bronze Age these were expensive
items, and the rhapsode suggests that Alcinous’s generosity amounts to
something like public policy, the gifts being financed through taxation:
“But, come now, let us give him a great tripod and a cauldron, each man
of us, and we in turn will gather the cost from among the people, and
repay ourselves. It would be hard for one man to give so freely, without
requital” (2, XIII, p. 3). Not only do we see an early example of the
socialization of expenses as the condition for the emergence of the state,
but the Odyssey makes a point of distinguishing between a plunder
economy and a gift economy, underscoring how much more productive
the principle of reciprocity can be than the sheer distribution of spoils, a
form of acquisition that risks leaving the warrior empty-handed. Thus,
Poseidon, ever hostile to Odysseus, complains to Zeus about the values
4 Introduction
the hero has received from the Phaeacians, pointing out that they far
surpass what would have been allotted to him from the booty: “these
men have borne him in a swift ship over the sea and set him down in
Ithaca, and have given him gifts past telling, stores of bronze and gold
and woven clothing, more than Odysseus would ever have won for him-
self from Troy, if he had returned unscathed with his due share of the
spoil” (2, XIII, p. 13).
In a gift economy, what is given incorporates a principle of circula-
tion—the notion of hau described by Mauss and reinterpreted by others
after him—while its retention carries severe penalties. This is why, be-
lieving himself transported to a hostile island when he expected to be
taken home, Odysseus regrets being still in possession of the gifts of the
Phaeacians and not having any appropriate recipients for them; i.e., he
misses the presence of legitimate participants in the circulatory move-
ment of the gifts. “But now I do not know where to bestow this wealth;
yet here I cannot leave it, for fear it become the spoil of others to my
cost” (2, XIII, p. 17). In other words, Ulysses hopes to relieve himself of
obligations by passing on the valuables to those he would encumber with
honor. Yet, unable to do so at the moment, he prevents those valuables
from regressing to the plunder economy. Suspecting the Phaeacians who
carried him in their ship of having stolen some of the gifts, he engages
in the proto-commercial activity of taking inventory of his cargo: “‘But
come, I will count my goods, and go over them, for fear these men have
carried off some with them in the hollow ship.’ So, he spoke, and set
himself to counting the beautiful tripods, and the cauldrons, and the
gold, and the beautiful woven clothing, and of these he missed nothing”
(2, XIII, p. 19).
What is interesting about these stories and others like them is that they
present notions of fair dealing along with the sometimes dramatic con-
sequences of its failure—as in Achilles’s huffing indignation—without
recourse to money. The inexistence of a currency to accurately mea-
sure the values that change hands suggests that money is not a natural
symbol or a universal convention but a conceptual achievement that de-
pends on the presence of cultural prerequisites. But the invention and
evolution of money did not result in a complete caesura with respect to
premonetary traditions of exchange. In his provocative essay, Philipp
Kleinmichel argues for the persistence of the law of gift exchange within
the contemporary market economy, the way a living organism preserves
in its structure functional aspects from an earlier stage of its evolution.
Recalling Mauss’s understanding of gift exchange among some premon-
etary societies as a “total social service,” he argues that it represents an
economic law that responds to a permanent social necessity. Disregard
of this archaic law of enforced reciprocity can have severe political impli-
cations, whereby Kleinmichel’s reassessment of the social function of gift
exchange obtains not just descriptive but also prescriptive significance.
 Introduction 5
Money, in this view, is an expression, the most significant one, of the
more general law of gift exchange, which it nonetheless denies by push-
ing it behind or below—a psychoanalytical approach to money would be
appropriate in this respect—its conscious existence as a codified value
sign.
This book aims to explore the relation between culture and the
emergence and maintenance of that all-encompassing regulatory tool
in modern and contemporary society. The subject is hardly new and
other works already provide general and specific views on the relation
of money to cultural production. A strong case for the usefulness of
literary approaches to the economy can be found in Matt Seybold and
Michelle Chihara’s The Routledge Companion to Literature and Eco-
nomics, where contributor Christopher Newfield, for instance, argues
that literary works and analysis “express the economy’s internal con-
tradictions and incommensurabilities without reducing them to linear
or materialist causalities” (21), and Kimberly Hall proposes that some
recent American novels formally reflect “the transition away from a fiat
currency, a currency that has been issued and backed by a government
and centralizes authority, authenticity, and distribution, which results in
instability” (220). Regardless of the validity or plausibility of such a bold
statement—somewhat reliant on the “reflective” theory of literary texts,
as well as the Marxist correlation of economic base and ideological su-
perstructure—the authors of the current volume share the conviction
that literature, narrative in particular, understands exchange in ways
that are psychologically and socially more instructive than quantitative
analyses can ever be, because novels show valuation as a concrete total
social fact.
Unlike the abovementioned Companion, however, this book is not
exclusively or even principally about the economic implications of liter-
ary form, the historical correlation between printing books and printing
money (Mary McAleer Balkun in Seybold and Chihara 95–103), or an
economistic approach to literature as proposed by Alden Sajor Mar-
te-Wood (Seybold and Chihara 200). The present collection of essays is
less comprehensive and less concentrated in the literary space, although
the latter also features prominently; it is more focused (or dispersed, as
the perception might be) on a broad idea of money as both a product
of culture and a cultural force; and not only money but currency more
generally, i.e., any form of symbolic mediation that makes exchange pos-
sible or necessary.
A presumption common to all the contributors is that money owes
its omnipotence, remarked upon by the young Marx (Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) and by others such as critical theorist
Max Horkheimer, to its abstraction. Horkheimer actually saw in money
a substitute for sexual potency and a remedy for any such failure of
conjugal happiness (80). Before him, Georg Simmel had compared it to
6 Introduction
prostitution on account precisely of its objectivity as a means and lack
of attachment to any individual (377). In fact, Simmel saw in money the
motor-force of abstract thought and evermore abstract forms of social-
ization. One could say that money, an invention of the Near East like
monotheism, developed apace with the spread of the religions of the one
invisible god, as did the concept of debt, which shares its etymology with
sin, and of credit, which, in turn, shares it with faith. Fiduciary transac-
tions are faith-based, future-oriented dealings.
David Murillo’s contribution about the ever-present role of debt in
shaping social conditions suggests implicit parallelisms between these
two fields of social regulation. Although he does not raise the point
explicitly, it is hard to oversee that economism supersedes more than
replaces religion as general dispenser of norms and behavioral regula-
tor. Debt is the modern equivalent of sin; societies cannot be conceived
without it. There is more than a trace of Max Weber in Murillo’s anal-
ysis of the EU’s handling of national debt in the aftermath of the 2008
crisis, when German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble imposed Cal-
vinist-style austerity on the Greeks before the EU Commission and the
European Central Bank granted bailout funds the way a confessor grants
absolution: by prioritizing the financing of the debt rather than assisting
the ailing Greek economy. Says Murillo: “Nation-states, and citizens
under them, live in the pretense that there is no pardon for the sins of
debt. Current capitalism condemns us to selective memory in the same
manner that it condemns us to eternal debt. The paradox is that there
has never existed such a thing as eternal debt.” But if Weber was right
about the cultural genealogy of capitalism, attempts by indebted nations
to get out of debt are futile. They can only expect grace on the day of
reckoning and in the meantime continue to live on credit. That is, unless
they pluck up the courage to nail a set of anti-systemic theses on the door
of a local bank to “bring cognitive dissonance to the table: how much in-
coherence can the system endure? Courses on philosophy, on epistemol-
ogy, on liberal arts have the potential to spell systemic suspiciousness.”
The motivation behind this book is not scholastic; its project did not
begin with a theory but with a problem. The crisis of 2008–2011 was
a severe breakdown of trust in the financial institutions underpinning
Western society. The debasing of credit shook the very foundation of
people’s faith in the stability of the values created by labor. And as so-
cial trust broke down, labor itself collapsed in its social form as em-
ployment, along with confidence in the traditional repositories of value:
bonds, stocks, real state, the entire edifice of financial instruments. As
Gabriela Badica reminds us, in the US alone, between January 2008 and
February 2010, employment fell by 8.8 million. Other Western coun-
tries, particularly in Southern Europe, saw employment devastated to
a degree unknown since the 1930s. A cultural division cut across the
European continent, separating the “improvident” Catholic South from
 Introduction 7
the “responsible” Protestant North in a rehashing of the cicada and the
ant moral tale—as told by the parsimonious creditworthy countries. But
even if the cultural schism remained tacit for the most part, there were
allusions to a moral divide, which not by chance ran along the historical
rift at the onset of modernity. Exposure to subprime mortgages and other
forms of creative financing seemed to split the EU’s response to the crisis
between the contrary theories proposed for the emergence of capitalism.
One solution, championed by the Northern and Central European coun-
tries, relied on the culture of austerity described by Weber (1904–1905).
The other, endorsed mostly by the debt-strapped Southern countries,
advocated stimulus from the European Central Bank, which meant fur-
ther increasing the debt and redistributing it throughout the EU. This
solution recalled the financial policies of the Renaissance popes, in par-
ticular their system of taxation, which according to Werner Sombart
called into existence “an upper class of powerful international bankers,
who acted like yeast on the capitalist dough” (“The Role of Religion”
30). To this thesis, Sombart would later add the stimulating effect of
demand for luxury products in the spendthrift Catholic South (Luxury
and Capitalism). Arguably, the EU worsened the crisis by forcing finan-
cial austerity on countries already crippled by decelerating economies,
boosting unemployment, provoking a drop in tax revenue and social
security contributions, and weakening consumption, thus abetting de-
flationary pressures. The medicine risked killing the patient, and the EU
found itself trapped for years in a downward spiral of sluggish economic
activity and a struggling banking sector.
Although Weber’s and Sombart’s theses about the “spirit” of capital-
ism seem mutually exclusive, the truth probably partakes of both. Weber
explained the psychological dynamics of capitalization, while Sombart
pointed to the fact that consumption-driven demand quickened produc-
tion. And not just any demand but demand for luxury objects. Desire
for ever more refined goods provided the stimulus for specialized labor,
contributing to the market’s ramification. And indeed, the crisis that
crushed Southern European economies (including culturally Catholic
Ireland) in the early 2000s was the breaking point of an economy that
had played itself out very differently in the Northern export-oriented
countries and their Southern consumption-oriented counterparts.
If culture is a strong factor in shaping the economy, there is little doubt
that in Christian culture, the theological doctrines of the churches in-
fluenced the way people dealt with gainful activity in general and the
handling of money in particular. R.H. Tawney, a supporter of Weber’s
thesis, wrote that in the Reformed Church, business was “in itself a
kind of religion” and such teaching “was admirably designed to liberate
economic energies and to weld into a disciplined social force the rising
bourgeoisie” (43). Mention of the bourgeoisie is a significant qualifier,
pointing to a previous, pre-class-ideological criterion for the emergence
8 Introduction
of the economic system known as capitalism. Protestantism was funda-
mentally a revolt of the towns, while Catholicism held sway in countries
ruled by a landed aristocracy. With all the provisos justified by the ex-
istence of powerful commercial hubs and centers of finance in Renais-
sance Italian cities, the Reformation was inextricably associated with
urban transformation and the acceleration of an urban-specific econ-
omy. In England, the dissolution of the religious houses in the 1530s
“frequently accelerated changes in urban economics and finance, politics
and government, even in society and culture, to a degree that is at the
least noteworthy and at best dramatic” (Tittler 191). Steven E. Ozment
confirmed the beneficial effect of the Reformation on central European
cities, particularly in Germany and Switzerland, largely by their new-
found freedom from the “ecclesio-commercial complex that had long
served the distant interests of Rome and certain banking houses far bet-
ter than those of local communities” (117). In other words, secession
from the globalized economy of the Middle Ages (for “Catholic” is the
equivalent of “global”) provided the original impetus for the rise, if not
of unbridled capitalism, certainly of a rationalized version of it, lead-
ing eventually to the foundation of economics as a self-regulating force.
As “an unprecedented religious flattering of secular life” (Ozment 89),
Protestantism contributed to the emergence of an autonomous sphere for
economic relations.
Notwithstanding Martin Luther’s mistrust of the towns as places
where poverty went hand in hand with laziness, the sociological diver-
sion between rural and urban society and the associated political trans-
formations since the Renaissance provide the “material” background for
the emergence of the modern economy. Replacing the personal depen-
dence model with anonymous relations based on monetary transactions
paved the way for the contemporary virtualization of the market as the
endpoint of the transition from community to society (Tönnies). This
classic distinction not only referred to the relentless urbanization tak-
ing place in 19th-century Europe but also to the growing abstraction of
exchanges, which required an impersonal, all-pervasive medium to neu-
tralize the otherwise inassimilable features of cultural and personality
background. At least, this is the classic Western position. But non-West-
ern societies retained nonmonetary or other-monetary transaction cul-
tures well into the urban stage. Till Förster shows this bifurcation in a
study at the intersection between anthropology, economics, and urban
studies, arguing that in some African societies, pre-capitalist currencies
coexist with capitalist money in cities, thus conflating Tönnies’s catego-
ries and contesting their generalization.
Echoing Förster’s survey of the coexistence of pre-capitalist with capi-
talist economic transactions in modernizing societies, Germán Labrador
traces the contemporary forms of symbolic potlatch to the bonfires of
the Inquisition, proposing that, although seemingly anti-capitalist, “the
 Introduction 9
bonfires of money” are a modern political institution. In Spain, protes-
tors during the crisis of the Great Recession received prison sentences
for burning the “god money” in effigy. Linking these events with the
autos-da-fe of the 16th and 17th centuries, Labrador says that in the con-
temporary trials against anti-capital protestors not a crime but a heresy
was punished. Capitalism has become a bad infinity. In Labrador’s poi-
gnant words: “In our culture there is already more money than world.”
Such heresy has historical precedents in the politically motivated torch-
ing of convents in 1835, 1909, and again in 1936, when during the rev-
olutionary months at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, anarchists
sought to destroy money in the form of the national currency. The pe-
seta, recalls Labrador, had a political history in the baroque celebration
of religious potlatches, inseparable from “a necropolitical dimension of
sacrifice, punishment and corpse immolation.” A decade after the adop-
tion of the European common currency, Spain entered into a protracted
crisis along with other countries but with aggravating aspects of its own.
Written on the threshold of the economic downturn, Rafael Chirbes’s
novel Crematorium resurrected the figure of Tomás de Torquemada,
Spain’s first Grand Inquisitor, in a stylistic nod to 19th-century novelist
Benito Pérez Galdós, who had already used this historical character al-
legorically in a novel that related the auto-da-fe to usurious moneylend-
ing. In the 21st century’s literary and cinematographic adaptation of the
money bonfire, what burns at the stake, says Labrador, are the utopias
of the previous century.
In 1961, Karl Popper observed that a reversal had taken place be-
tween sociology and anthropology, whereby social anthropology or
ethnology had become a social science, while sociology had resigned
itself to becoming one element within social anthropology, namely the
anthropology of a specific type of society, the Western European (68).
Popper criticized what he saw as a mistaken naturalistic, that is to say,
inductive approach in the social sciences through mimicry of the natural
sciences. He excepted political economics from that trend, at least in
English-speaking countries. Popper aimed his criticism at the pretense
of objectivity in the observational, allegedly descriptive method of an-
thropology, denouncing the assumption that the anthropologist can emit
the kind of “value-free” judgments that Weber associated with scientific
method. Today, most social scientists, including anthropologists, would
agree about the impossibility of the social scientist jumping out of the
shadow of his or her value system and would probably concur that she
needs to provide an account of the situational logic governing the disci-
pline as an institution.
But leaving aside the metacritical work of a few social scientists, such
admissions, often pro forma, tend to lose sight of the fact that institu-
tions pervade the realities of the social world. “Out there,” they can-
not be as neatly defined as in disciplinary traditions limited by the class
10 Introduction
of problems they study and by the theoretical models they develop in
view of those problems. Some ethnographers are poignantly aware of
the conundrum to which they are led by the need to elicit a value-free
description of social exchanges from the viewpoint of an observer who
is embedded in a value system. This is especially the case when the sys-
tem in question is the tradition that sets the protocols and behavioral
patterns for objective science. Clifford Geertz called this conundrum the
question of signature. He acknowledged that the establishment of autho-
rial presence in ethnographic work has been disguised for the most part,
because what is ultimately a narratological issue is typically presented
as an epistemological one (9). His distinction between “author-saturated
texts” and “author-evacuated ones” (9) suggests different disciplinary
conventions and traditions. One could say that if the discourse of eco-
nomics has tended to rely on author-evacuated theories and explana-
tions, this is due to the evermore abstract nature of the currencies on
which the concept of money has been articulated. To draw again from
the example of the epic, a parallelism exists in the Odyssey between the
pretextual circulation of the story of Troy, sung by the rhapsode at the
court of Alcinous in the presence of Ulysses, and the type of “currency”
the king of the Phaeacians showers on his guest: the clothes, tripods, and
cauldrons that are, like the epic poems, memorabilia of the valorous, i.e.,
value-eliciting actions in the war economy of the Bronze Age. But after
the epic poems were written down in the 8th century BC, thanks to the
adoption of alphabetic writing, they could be circulated in the absence
of the bard. The enormous leap in abstraction represented by the abil-
ity to condense meaning in non-ideographic and non-pictographic sym-
bols was soon followed by the substitution of coins for the cumbersome
wealth whose transportation and distribution posed serious logistical
problems for Ulysses.
There are reasons to consider the contemporaneous emergence of lit-
erature and money in the Middle East as part of one and the same civili-
zational impulse. The opinion that economics has something to gain or
to learn from the humanities in general and from literature in particu-
lar, expressed in different contexts by several contributors to this book,
states what should always have been obvious but wasn’t because of the
technification and self-circumscription of economic theory. I refer to
the fact that literature, not just the epic but also its modern recreation
in the novel, deals with forms of valuation and symbolic exchange in
concrete contexts, revealing society as a competitive marketplace and
the marketplace as a microcosm of the larger social system. As Elsie
Michie points out, in A Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith, the
father of modern economic theory, presented a choice between wealth
and virtue. This choice pervaded the 19th-century British marriage mar-
ket, as depicted by novelists from Jane Austen onwards, who present
their heroes with “the choice of a negatively depicted rich woman and a
 Introduction 11
positively depicted poor one.” The choice, I would argue, is not between
economic advantage and other forms of value (as Raymond Williams,
cited by Michie, proposed) but between different forms of estimation
and alternative currencies, virtue being at a premium in the 18th century
due to its convertibility to social promotion by means of the marriage
contract. But also, or perhaps for that very reason, due to its booming
demand in the quickly expanding book trade. In France the opposition
between riches and sentiments played itself out as the antinomy between
high society (gens du monde) and sincerity of heart in the philosophy
of Rousseau, especially in its popularization through novelistic form in
La Nouvelle Héloïse. If Austen’s concern with erotic investment and the
maximization of a woman’s value in the market of social reproduction is
what powered her novels, the success of Rousseau’s epistolary novel was
not due primarily to its entertainment value but to readers feeling mor-
ally improved through their interpenetration with the virtuous relations
of the characters. From readers’ letters about Rousseau’s novel, Robert
Darnton infers that they “did not read in order to enjoy literature but to
cope with life and especially family life” (241). This behavior, he says,
represented a new relation to the printed word.
If Darnton is right, the rise of the sentimental novel in the wake of
Smith’s differentiating values as either economic or moral suggests the
emergence of not only a new form of reading but also of the kind of
novum that Simona Škrabec considers essential to economic growth. For
her, literature is the “barbarian” at the gates, threatening the economy’s
calculability with the unpredictability that is the stuff of crises. Yet, she
claims that what is marginal to the system may be necessary to rethink
the consequences of the economy’s “civilizing actions.” By questioning
the symbolic priorities in the monetized and financialized universe, the
seemingly “irrational,” i.e., affective resolutions of Austen’s novels, of
Rousseau’s pitting the naked heart against the social-economic system
that produces gens du monde, or Rodoreda’s shaking the illusion of
bourgeois permanence by discovering the “ratty” essence of business
profitability at the heart of the family, fiction challenges the self-reliance
of economic analysis and exposes “under the harsh analytical spotlight
of a work of literature [...] those shadowy areas within families” that
economic analysis fails to illuminate (Becker, cited by Škrabec).
Against the “culturalist” critique of self-determining economics,
Giovanni Leghissa objects that the assumption that economic behavior
is an aspect of a broader cultural frame has become questionable. Such
“anthropological” embedding of all human behavior into “culture” may
have been true of premodern societies, such as those studied by Mauss,
or Homer for that matter, but modernity produced specialized, relatively
self-enclosed systems. The power of money to reproduce itself and to
grind down social complexity into quantitative relations that can be re-
solved within this unique symbolic medium meant that the economy
12 Introduction
could do without support from neighboring symbolic systems. It meant,
in fact, that it could exert a powerful gravitational force and drag those
systems into its orbit. This is at least the conclusion to which Niklas
Luhmann’s system theory leads. But Leghissa calls attention to the fact
that every economic transaction refers to “a grammar of motives whose
nature exceeds the economic realm.” Invoking economic sociologist
Viviana Zelizer, he suggests a form of interlocking cultural anchors of
economic transactions, which depend on the form of the interaction me-
diated by money. Money remains money, i.e., the universal medium of
exchange throughout all (modern) cultures, but the cultural meaning
derived from (or attached to) every transaction depends on the social
uses to which the transaction is put. This view validates Popper’s obser-
vation of the inverted relation between sociology and social anthropol-
ogy, with the “sociological science” of economics reduced to studying
the behavior of culturally specific economic agents. This is in line with
Leghissa’s questioning the validity of the rational choice theory and its
presumption that it can make reliable predictions about human behav-
ior. This presumption had led to an understanding of the human mind as
a calculating machine that can, in principle, be itself calculated.
Paradoxically, the rise of the rational choice economic theory ends up
not far from its apparent psychological opposite, behaviorism. In both
methodologies, conscious, free decisions are relegated to the status of
ignorance and expelled from the explanatory theory. The consequence
of adopting the theory of rational choice is to reverse the idea that the
economy is embedded in the social or cultural system; instead, it is now
society as a body of knowledges and practices that is subsumed under
the economy while the latter assumes the status of a hegemonic system.
Leghissa doubts the capacity of the rational choice model, with its claim
to value-free calculations, to allow for ethical, and one might say te-
leological, features of the good society, such as “redistributive justice,
access to services and public resources, equality, and so on.” In other
words, all those social conditions that straddle the various symbolic and
institutional subsystems of modern society are unified under the ultimate
symbolic value and epistemological conundrum of “human happiness.”
A value, we might add, whose definition moral philosophy and literature
made it their business to explore a long time ago, the one by investigating
the ethical imperative in the human conscience and the other by probing
into the recesses of the lives of myriad fictional characters.
Rational choice theory is reminiscent of Plato’s doctrine that no one
does evil knowingly, but only by failing to see it for what it is. Rational
choice relies on the human capacity to discern the good (a synonym
for one’s interest) and to act accordingly. It does not take into account
the Augustinian understanding of evil as that which is not. Augus-
tine’s moral psychology raises the strongest possible objection to ratio-
nal choice as the explanation for human behavior. Omnipresent in the
 Introduction 13
negative form of debt, of sin, evil for Augustine amounts to fraud. It is a
bad deal, whereby the will is duped into trading real substance for noth-
ing. Bankruptcy follows from the self-deprivation of being, and like a
company afflicted by financial disaster, the subject totters unable to sus-
tain itself: “hold fast to God, for if I do not remain in him, neither shall I
abide in myself” (Book 7, Ch. 11). The apostle Paul had already observed
how the incalculable throws a wrench into the gear of the will, even
when the latter is enlightened by reason: “I do not understand my own
actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. …
I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I
want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Romans 7: 15; 19, The
Oxford Annotated Bible). Paul inverts the Hegelian notion of the ruse
of reason, for here it is evil that utilizes man’s rational understanding of
his best interest in order to accomplish its own objective. Just as there
is a close relation between religion and the law, there is an etiological
connection between the law and the economy, as both can be traced
back to the justice (or equivalence) in exchange. In both areas exchange
involves a contractual, i.e., socially sanctioned, relation. That exchange
is subject to norms applies to premodern gift economies as much as to
modern contractual economies. But if the former relies on some indirect
sanction for breaches of faith (the hau may take its revenge on the party
that refuses to circulate the original gift or to augment it in accordance
with custom), the latter depends on written law ever more intensely.
Christian Moser recalls Adam Smith’s assertion of the interpenetra-
tion of language, trade, and contract, which Smith traced back to the hu-
man capacity for rational exchange. Yet, as just mentioned, rationality
can hardly be taken for granted when it comes to human action, despite,
if not precisely because of, the existence of man-made rational systems in
each of those areas of social action. Rationality governing the grammar
of communication, the equalization, i.e., fairness, of trade, and the just
interpretation of contracts according to their spirit are ideal constructs
which, like all human devices, can go sorely amiss if insisted upon in all
their systematic autonomy and theoretical purity. Through the examples
of The Merchant of Venice and Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, Moser shows
how economic rationality can be disrupted when a contractor pursues
the contractual relation in its utmost literality. The two cases are ex-
emplary in this regard, since the protagonists prioritize the rationality
encoded in the terms of the exchange at the expense of the uncodified
principle of gratuity or grace, a survival from premodern gift-based and
debt-forgiving societies. What Moser says about Shakespeare’s Vene-
tian society, namely, that it is not truly based on authoritative law but
“on pre-legal forms of commitment, for which the elements of risk and
contingency are constitutive,” could be said too about the modern mar-
ket economy in its liberal acceptation. If the hidden hand of the market is
believed to optimize the chances for equitable exchange by ensuring that
14 Introduction
supply and demand balance each other or expressed in a counter-Augus-
tinian manner by drawing public virtue from private vices (Mandeville),
Kohlhaas’s fixation on the literal, nonsymbolic nature of the pledge inter-
rupts the principle of circulation by denying the convertibility of objects
into abstract value. The pledge, says Moser, functions in this story as a
fetish symbolizing the integral order of the social. Kohlhaas represents
an economy of excess opposed to the economy of scarcity that regulates
mercantile exchange. Excess is the result of self-destructive insistence
on the connection between the pledge and personal life, which can be
given or thrown away in a variation on the potlatch, so as to ultimately
increase its value through its very disposal. The person cannot be sold
or traded through a neutralizing medium like money, which drowns the
concrete relations in order to elicit from their corpse the ghostly reful-
gence of exchange value.
These characters’ insistence on the literality of the law (Shylock)
and the absolute integrity of society in the pledge (Kohlhaas) has its
antithesis in the modern idea of money as standard of value that can
be established by reference to “the ratio of exchange” between specific
commodities. Presented by William Stanley Jevons as a way of avoiding
the ambiguity of the term “exchangeable value,” the notion of money as
“ratio of exchange” would appear to be an effort to detach economic
calculation and the definition of money from the messy (because cul-
turally laden) idea of value and to anchor exchange in the thoroughly
impersonal and thus precisely calculable relation between objects. Any
other consideration would hinder the goal of adopting some invariable
measure of value to explain and facilitate all transactions. In her critique
of Jevons’s proposal for a transparent system of simultaneous ideal bar-
ters (each ratio of exchange presupposing the ideal operation of trading
a set of articles), Bruna Ingrao raises the question about the meaning of
money as standard of value beyond the function of mere numeraire (i.e.,
a conventional unit) adopted “to express lists of prices in an accounting
perspective, even in a non-market society.” To go back once more to the
example in the Odyssey, Ulysses’s problem about transferring his newly
acquired wealth (“now I do not know where to bestow this wealth”) is
really the problem of on whom and in what proportion will he bestow
it. What is the exchange ratio in a system that is based neither on barter
nor on purchase? Applying the ratio of exchange as envisioned by Jevons
would entail setting tripods against cauldrons, cauldrons against cloth-
ing, and any of these against intangibles such as heroism or status, which
ultimately refer to a nonobjective yet socially determined standard of
value. To be generally recognized, the standard must be authorized by
the state (here represented by Alcinous); it just happens that in the so-
ciety depicted in the epic honor accrued in war is the unit of measure.
As Ingrao points out, Jevons’s ambition was to place standard value
outside of historical mutability by providing a stable yardstick of
 Introduction 15
purchasing power for contracts, i.e., transactions that would be resolved
in a future time. Discussing Keynes, Ingrao points to the 19th century’s
advancement of wealth through the steady flow of financial investment
as being dependent on investors’ trust in the stability of money. But that
trust would inevitably disappear through the forces of inflation or defla-
tion. In a 2004 book on The Nature of Money, G. Ingham foregrounded
the role of a recognized public authority in imposing some symbolic ob-
ject as currency, i.e., as a measure of abstract value. Ingrao objects to
this idea on historical and functional terms. The reference to the state,
she says, is loose (as is, admittedly, my own use of “state” for the court
of Alcinous) because social authority has undergone radical change over
time (and space, one might add). Emphasizing the role of the state in
modifying the purchasing power of the money standard (i.e., devalu-
ing or strengthening the currency by, for instance, manipulating interest
rates) does not take into consideration the effect of markets and credit/
debt relations. Discussing the emergence of money of account, i.e., of
some symbolic object invested with a collectively recognized measure of
value, Ingrao accepts Keynes’s comparison between the human ability to
create language conventions and systems of measurement, a comparison
that Jan Söffner disputes, although granting that money is a special case
of signification.
While the role of the state in establishing the social acceptance of the
money of account is undeniable, the temptation to fix the standard of
value and resolve the problem of inflation through the creation of fiat
money by the sole authority of the state, as in Ezra Pound’s schemes for
a “volitional economics,” loses sight of the considerable gap between
state and society even in totalitarian systems. An economy driven by
the authority of the leader in a rigidly centralized political system such
as Italian fascism ends up cutting out of the financial circuit the very
agents that Ingrao considers essential for the emergence, preservation,
and effectiveness of a currency: “the financial intermediaries, the global
network of money markets, the choices of millions of people who trade,
and their trust or mistrust in the multiple institutions by which curren-
cies are issued and regulated.”
Across the varied approaches to currency and exchange in this volume
lurks the question about the origin of the idea of value. The problem with
such questions is that they seem to appeal to historical analysis, whereas,
in fact, they refer to a metaphysical horizon from the moment “value”
is understood as something objective. It is the same with the question
about the origin of language. When does communication begin? John
1 famously places the word logos before creation, as synonymous for
the divine mind containing the principle of all the logoi, the reasons or
ideas that God brings into existence by speaking them in Genesis 1. Such
defining principles of human behavior as language and value are not to
be determined in the temporal sense of principia as beginnings. Hence,
16 Introduction
they cannot be the object of history, for as Gadamer observed, “as soon
as history is in play, what matters is not what is merely given, but deci-
sively, what is new” (16). Of language and value there can be no history,
as opposed to particular languages and the invention of currencies and
other techniques that subject value to the fluctuations and mutations in
the social organization of human life. Properly speaking, we do not have
a history of money but a history of the experience and uses of money,
just as we do not have a history of language but a historical linguistics
and, more and more, neurological studies of the language function in
the brain. This means that money, and more fundamentally value, can
only be understood in relation to the way it is experienced and put to
use. Money’s role can only be assessed in terms of its “yield” in relation
to fundamental needs arising from the relational nature of human life:
the need for abstract equality, for balance in exchange, and, in conse-
quence, for measure, leading to the search for a standard that ensures
those conditions across multiple exchanges not just simultaneously (as in
the one-time distribution of booty) but over long periods of time (as in
the completion of the hau’s cycle, the coming to term of a bond or the
execution of a future-oriented contract).
Whether the economy has become a self-enclosed, autonomous signi-
fying system or remains a subsystem of the broader cultural system that
is coextensive with the artificial environment of human invention is in
the end a moot question. All one can do, in this regard, is to describe the
contemporary mechanism of global exchange and the virtualization of
money growing out of itself through runaway futurization of debt and
the crisis-laden bubbles induced by the detachment between the sphere
of classic economics (what economists call “the fundamentals”) and the
fantasy of infinite growth. Or else, one can undertake a critique of “pure
economics” and attempt to reduce all economic activity to the a priori
conditions of signification and valuation, showing how these are at work
in all forms of exchange and more broadly in every form of human inter-
action. Such a critique is beyond the purpose of this book and certainly
beyond the capacity of its editor, but it is to be hoped that the sum and
interplay of the essays it features provide a few cues in this respect and,
with a distant nod to Marx, may be considered a modest contribution to
the critique of cultural economy.

References
Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cul-
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Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis. The Ancient City. Garden City, NY: Dou-
bleday, 1956.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. The Beginning of Philosophy. Trans. Rod Coltman.
New York: Continuum, 1998.
 Introduction 17
Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives. The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1988.
Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Shield. Trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. A.T. Murray. Revised by George E. Dimock. 2
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Horkheimer, Max. Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969.
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University of Michigan Press, 1967.
———. “The Role of Religion in the Formation of the Capitalist Spirit” (Ex-
cerpt from The Quintessence of Capitalism, 1915). In Robert W. Green (ed.).
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and Capitalism. The Weber Thesis and Its Critics. Lexington, MA: D.C.
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Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott
Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958.
1 What Does Money Signify?
The “Transvaluation of
Values” Taking Place in the
Relation between Currency
and Language1
Jan Söffner

Signification and Significance

It is evident that money involves signification. Coins, bills, cheques,
banking accounts, bonds: none of the historically and culturally variant
items used as money bear their value in themselves, but instead refer to
those values – they signify values. In understanding money’s function,
it is very helpful to apply Ferdinand de Saussure’s2 influential and sys-
tematic terminology, for a simple reason: it doesn’t work. To be sure,
Saussure’s theory is relevant in some regards:

But that is it for the similarities; the differences between money and lan-
guage far outnumber them. I consider the following the most important:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003265733-2
 What Does Money Signify? 19
identity and therefore exchangeability of it signs, not on their dif-
ferentiation. Language, in turn, produces an infinite amount of
(nuanced) qualitative meanings which emerge from the combination
of the different signs. Conversely, money – in calculations with the
same sign – can differentiate nothing except quantities.
20 Jan Söffner

To sum up: while money does signify, it cannot adequately be described

as a full-fledged system of signification of the sort a linguistic system is.
In its signifying function, it resembles a virus: not being provided with a
full DNA profile, it does not produce signified meanings autonomously,
but rather inserts its significance (its values and debts) into other systems
of signification. In this, as a symbolic system, money can claim signifi-
cance, but does not allow for a full-blown signification.
In what follows, by recourse to a few case studies, I will focus on the
major consequences of these differences: the different kinds of values
produced by language and money (here, I will briefly trace the problem
of money in Christian theology), the different uncertainties in address-
ing the outer world (here, I will focus on the example of fictions and
 What Does Money Signify? 21
bubbles), and the modes of human existence they shape (here, I will con-
centrate on the relation between “Being” and “Having”).

Values in Language and Values in Cash

The differences between linguistic and monetary value production can
easily be traced by referring to a brief history of the Christian attitude
toward money. I start with a condensed analysis of Christianity’s implicit
monetary theory. Jesus required his followers to “Render unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (Mat-
thew 22:21). He explains his order by referring to the emperor’s image,
which is stamped on every coin – indicating that all the money belongs to
the emperor. The comparison to God, who created mankind in his own
image, is evident: we are supposed to give ourselves (God’s property and
gift) to God and our money (the emperor’s property and our debt to him)
to the emperor. In this argument, our divine similitude is viewed as our
true value: if we give it to God, we are truer to Him and to ourselves, and
increase our own value while giving it away. The emperor’s currency how-
ever collapses if nobody will want his coins any longer; money (and the
emperor’s image upon it) in such an act displays itself as a mere parasite,
unable to create values on its own. Money is nothing if nobody wants it.
What will continue to work is language and its manner of valuation,
i.e., the words of Christ himself. This is because their value creation
works similarly to God’s image: once they are given away, they are not
spent and lost to the speaker; rather, their meaning proliferates. Jesus’s
saying is everywhere, while the coin that was shown to him is still just
one coin. So, as far as values produced by the (creational) Word (of God)
are concerned, we live like the birds of the heaven and the lilies in the
fields. Monetary values, though, not only trade scarce goods, but have
to emulate their scarcity.
To understand the biblical theory of money, we should also consider
the monetary metaphors Jesus uses when making his disciples pray:
“and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6, 12;
in Latin: “dimitte nobis debita nostra”; and in Greek: “aphes hēmin ta
opheilēmata hēmōn” – a more precise translation would therefore go:
“and cancel our debts, as we cancel those of our debtors”). Again the
argument is the same: once all debts are cancelled, the very debt-based
currency of social quid pro quo loses its meaning; we rather get to a
redeemed state without any mutual obligations. Yet the metaphors them-
selves make us understand that there are things about value and debt
that are better expressed in monetary terms – at least as long as we are
talking about the fallen world, where our daily bread is not given by
God, but bought from a baker.
However, the argument might be turned around if, in loosely draw-
ing on Michel Serres, 5 we accept that, as a parasite of other systems of
22 Jan Söffner
meaning, money can easily change their functioning. Once the value
of redemption enters the pecuniary logic and its inability for context-
resistant statements, it immediately turns into an investment, a bet.
Thus, paradoxically, in the late Middle Ages the reference to Christ him-
self has proven one of the most powerful ways of granting monetary
value: Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome was literally built on the outsell-
ing of salvation, which, in turn, required a huge amount of linguistic
signification in theological values, persuasion, and contracts.
This was evidently in clear contradiction to the text of the Bible and
the German Reformation started over Martin Luther’s frustration with
the Catholic Church’s practice of allowing sinners to literally pay for
salvation. With a gesture similar to Christ’s (i.e., arguing for rendering
what was the Pope’s to the Pope, and differentiating this from the act of
rendering to God, what was God’s), Luther devaluated the recent cur-
rency of indulgence letters with a single theological argument.
Yet, the story of Christ’s critique of money doesn’t end here. A famous
classic in cultural studies that – albeit implicitly – draws on the con-
sequences of the Protestant opposition to this financialization of faith
(thereby unifying market analysis and cultural analysis in an exemplary,
perhaps even paradigmatic, way) is Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism.6 According to Weber’s analysis, Calvinist,
Puritan, and Methodist Protestants, by the power of their theological
discourse, learned that God’s mercy was unfathomable and most im-
portantly that it was impossible to work for redemption by one’s own
means. The will was not free, as God had already settled the issue of
who was doomed, and it was as impossible to petition him as it was to
know about one’s fate.
However, this was only the discursive way to transcribe the moral at-
titudes of these Protestants – and questions about obligation (debt) and
the personal state within a hierarchy (personal value) can be addressed
by another system of signs as well: money. The irony of this approach
lies, once more, in a complete turnaround of an argument in the act of
transcribing discursive values into monetary values. Influenced as he was
by the Augustinian idea of an inherent sin and hence infinite debt toward
the Creator – for which monetary value could not possibly be used –
Luther’s theological discourse did not easily translate into monetary sig-
nification. But this did not mean that a transvaluation into monetary
values was impossible; and in the act of this transcription, Protestant
theology, as Weber argued, even became the theological condition for
capitalism.
The loophole that made money enter the theological discourse was
the quest to understand God’s plans from the economic condition of
a person. As goes the logic, if a given person dwells in divine grace,
then God will turn them into his tool. A market participant, though, is
most efficient – and thus appears as a particularly good instrument for
 What Does Money Signify? 23
God – when they can invest a lot of currency. So financial success – lived
out in such a way that gains were not consumed for earthly pleasures but
immediately re-invested – became a signature of the theological status of
a person. Where – to Luther’s disdain – the Catholics had established a
market on which grace could be bought as a consumer good for which
the Church held the monopoly, the Protestants turned grace into a cur-
rency; they thereby volatized its value and subjected it to the logic of
investment. Weber accordingly observes that a new market subject had
emerged: the capitalist, being a person who accumulates monetary value
not for what can be bought with it (and be these religious values), but
for the sake of putting it to work again. According to this logic, Weber
does not position the self-interested homo oeconomicus at the base of
capitalism; homo oeconomicus was rather the effect of re-transcribing
religious values into the system of monetary signification.
To sum up: the Christian examples and thought experiments render
clear that the combination of the linguistic and the monetary medium of
exchange allows for a variety of imperfect transcriptions, which however
prove extremely productive precisely because of their imperfection and
hence their calling for productive solutions.7 Once we try to make lin-
guistic meaning count in monetary terms, money infects it with its own
logic of exchange (e.g., the sale of redemption or the financial bookkeep-
ing of divine grace). But the same goes the other way around: discursive
forms of value production can infect markets – as, at least according to
Weber, happened in the protestant formation of capitalism, i.e., a mar-
ket shaped by Christian values.
These interferences of different values are quite unavoidable. Indeed,
in order to function, money heavily relies on linguistic significations –
contracts, verbal negotiations, verbally coined knowledge, belief sys-
tems, etc. As famously argued by Jean-Joseph Goux8 and Marc Shell,9
both systems of signification are largely interdependent. Therefore, mon-
etary value can easily be criticized into its own malfunctioning (e.g., by
sowing mistrust in the validity of gold with regards to the real values of
life [see above], the validity of paper money with regards to the value of
gold, the validity of virtual money with regards to paper money, etc.).
But it can also be talked (and symbolized) into its functioning, often by
reference to religious symbols. The necessity and at the same time the
impossibility of mapping monetary and discursive values onto one an-
other can easily be seen by observing how readily the problem of linguis-
tic (disseminative and abundance-based) value creation turns toward
monetary metaphors (like making an argument “count,” “buying into”
a hypothesis, etc.). However, the problem of monetary signification be-
ing parasitic to linguistic values is apparent in the attempt to naturalize
monetary signifiers in order to create mutual reliance among the market
participants (in metaphors like “credit” [from Latin: credere/believe] or
“trust”) and in the religious and ideological symbology used for money
24 Jan Söffner
(a tradition numismatics can trace back to the beginnings of coins).10
The list of similar metaphors is long – and it speaks to the essential pro-
ductivity of the transcription between the incongruent symbolic systems.
In following the line of metaphors, one can easily develop the argument
that linguistic signification is in need of valorization, while monetary
signification is in need of faith.
Indeed, the interrelation is largely asymmetrical: language can create
context-resistant meanings without money, whereas money cannot cre-
ate any meaning (value) without relying upon a context of values created
by linguistic means. Accordingly, more often than not, the two systems
have to transcribe inadequate values into the logic of their own respec-
tive functioning. The notion of money as a mere medium of exchange, as
prominent as it is in economic theory, is therefore flawed – it presumes
commodities whose values are presupposed as givens to be just traded
by the use of money – but this omits the complex interrelation between
any currency and its context: the act of transcription or “transvaluation
of values” (to deliberately misuse Friedrich Nietzsche’s powerful formu-
lation), without which money could not be money at all.

Fiction and Bubbles

The difference between the two referential instabilities (the instability
of language denoting an extralinguistic “given” and the instability of a
“given” value) is also displayed in the terms denoting them. The linguis-
tic referential instabilities are mostly related to as errors, lies, bullshit,
and fictions, whereas the most central terms for the monetary referen-
tial instability are frauds, counterfeits, and falsely assumed or pretended
creditworthiness leading to bubbles: money of unsubstantiated value.
Lies and frauds are performative equivalents (the referential uncertainty
refers to deceit within a given context), while fictions and bubbles are
denotative equivalents (the referential uncertainty opens up a virtual
space transcending the given context). Plenty could be said about lies
and fraud, but the difference between fiction and bubbles is much more
telling, or to put it in other words: the different functioning of money
and language is best displayed in the transvaluation of the possible.
Language has the potential of making meanings refer not only to giv-
ens but also to mere possibilities and even impossibilities – along the
lines of the potential to produce context-resistant meanings. It therefore
produces a categorical uncertainty about any linguistic referential status
and leads to a point where virtually any utterance can be simply fiction
or can be used to performatively produce its own (change in) reality
rather than referring to a stable set of givens. Money, however, is already
referential all the time: its signified value is produced only in its contex-
tual relation. However, its value is always uncertain as well, because it
relies on the (in)stability of this very context. The implicit question is
 What Does Money Signify? 25
whether a monetary signifier still denotes its value in the future (when
it will be re-exchanged); even worse, if there is any reason to doubt this,
it loses value already in the present. Monetary signification is hence as
prone to bubbles as linguistic signification is prone to fiction.
Against this backdrop, it becomes clear why monetary signification
is in constant need of faith; otherwise, its values have no relation to the
sociocultural realities that constitute the respective contexts. If all coins
are rendered to Caesar, and hence if Caesar’s reality as a ruler is ques-
tioned, they lose their value; and if faith in currency is lost due to, say,
inflation, then other currencies (e.g., cigarettes) will step in. Cultures of
currencies are the only place where currencies have value – and these
cultures have to produce faith in their respective currencies or those cur-
rencies will not even be currencies.
However, linguistic realities are in need of actualization; otherwise,
all language games11 remain games of mere potentialities at best and
fictions or bullshit at worse. Their kingdom is not of this world, unless
it is somehow forced into worldliness – by truth-producing rules of dis-
course, by use of (sometimes brute) force, by practical use and usability,
by sociocultural recognition and status, or by other kinds of valoriza-
tion bridging its problematic referential status. For all of these options
of valorization and hence actualization, money can potentially be used.
To give a simple example, it is by performative (mostly ritual-based)
speech acts12 and written acts (in the form of certificates, contracts,
and then habitually perpetuated recognition) based on other linguistic
contexts (laws, discourses, systems of knowledge, habitual everyday
hermeneutics) that I can call myself “professor” at a “university.” Yuval
Noah Harari would call both the title and the institution “fictional” in
essence,13 because neither could have been produced by a merely refer-
ential use of language; rather than being linguistic meanings referring to
a given context, they are context-resistant meanings (fictions) that have
then materialized in a context, building a new reality there. As noted,
monetary signification would be unable to build such a context-resistant
reality, let alone turn it into a referential one. Nevertheless, it is able
to grant the payroll, which linguistic signification would not have been
able to do – and without this payroll, neither my professorship nor the
university would exist. It takes more than linguistic fiction to build an
institution (any institution); it also takes a future value (or a bubble)
turning into a present value.
This reciprocal complementation is, again, asymmetrical. Monetary
signification lends actualized value to linguistic fictions by transcribing
the dichotomy of fiction and reality into a dichotomy of potential and
actualization (which, as with all kinds of transcription, cannot entirely
do justice to the phenomenon transcribed, i.e., to the status and identity
of a professor). Linguistic signification, in turn, lends an ideal and insti-
tutional reality to what the monetary value needs as its context in order
26 Jan Söffner
to be valuable, and thereby produces a reverse problem of transcription,
because status and identity follow a different logic of reward than pecu-
niary remuneration or “symbolic capital,” as Pierre Bourdieu called it.14
The terminology I have used to describe this difference and comple-
mentary relation between monetary signification and linguistic significa-
tion is borrowed from Aristotelian and medieval scholastic philosophy,
and borrowed in a way philosophers would call illegitimate (since this
philosophy uses the term to describe ontological relations, while I use
it to describe economic ones). Yet this proves helpful when describing
the semiology of money. Money does not turn a fiction into reality (a
context-resistant meaning becoming a meaning referring to a context),
because doing so requires the referential gap between signified meaning
and the thing it might (or might not) refer to – the very gap which money
does not have. Rather, money transforms a bubble (the bet on the real-
ity of institution and title) into a value, actualizing a potential, or bet-
ter, transcribing the logic of fiction and fact into a logic of potentiality
and actuality. As such, it operates in the gap between what scholastic
philosophers called potentialitas (that which can become manifest) and
actualitas (that which has become – and now is – manifest). And since
money does not signify anything but values within a context, its sig-
nification has the power to actualize potential values and nothing but
values. Without this actualization of value, both my institution and my
title would most probably have remained merely fictional; but by dint of
money alone they would not have materialized even as fictions, let alone
as symbolic capital.
I might do a little more justice to the medieval system of thought when
describing linguistic signification. Language has the option, and prob-
lem, of an insecure relation between nomina (words) and res (things
given); this allows for a nominalist position (the nomina have context-
resistant meanings without any certain reference to the res) and a realist
one (the nomina can be brought into a secure referential relation to the
res). What Harari calls “fiction” would be a nominalist view on lan-
guage without secure reference to things given, thereby producing its
own given things, its reality. Once this reality is established, though,
the fictions have become res and are now things given – and thus nom-
inalism has proven a constructivist kind of realism after all. What is
important here is that everything is about res (things referred to), not
actus (things manifested by action); and hence, we might say that the
issue is always realitas (a word invented by the scholastic philosopher
Duns Scotus, meaning: that which turns things into things), not actual-
itas (the dominant concept used for describing the world in the Middle
Ages). This scholastic definition of “reality” thus holds true for the phe-
nomenon in which lending reality to my title and my university means
turning them into things given in a referential reality (while the payroll
renders them an actual value).
 What Does Money Signify? 27
Now it could be argued, of course, that by lending monetary signifi-
cation the power of actualization in human culture, I am overplaying
my cards. Coins (and thus money in the modern sense) were invented
only in the 5th century BCE; the actualization of (fictional) institutions,
however, is much older. Indeed, it has recently been discovered that even
chimpanzees have a sense of owing and returning commodities.15 Da-
vid Graeber, in his history of debt, goes back as far as 5,000 years,16
while Marcel Mauss has described how power structures can be insti-
tutionalized by the exhaustion of wealth through what he labeled with
the Northwest American indigenous term “potlatch,”17 thereby putting
forth the theory that money is universal, albeit not in its current form.
Indeed, as Bronislaw Malinowski has shown, economies actualizing
well-calculated and well-negotiated potentialities (and using this actual-
ization for reality-constitution) also exist in moneyless societies whose
economies are based on gift exchange. To be sure, such practices can-
not be called full-blown cultures of currency. Yet this does not mean
that gift exchange, in the Maussian sense, is bound to generosity and
altruism only; it rather constitutes a symbolic system of obligations. In
his famous Argonauts of the Western Pacific,18 Malinowski accordingly
argued that the exchange of gifts in such systems can be executed with a
delay of several years, maintaining a kind of debt for the gift receivers,
and hence also the potential for actualization of a return for the givers.
According to this view, monetary signification does not require an al-
gebraic accounting system, but can exist in other (often more complex)
forms of exchange and negotiation, which are related to group memory.
Here too, and this is my point, the actualization of potentia (Latin
for potential and power) is also a way of playing out the potentiali-
tas, as described above, as a form of execution and establishment of
power – and without this dimension, no social fiction could ever turn
into a stable reality. It is not discourse (i.e., the establishment of power
through forms language use and the establishment of particular forms
of language use through power) alone that accounts for the realization
and actualization of such institutions. The power (potentia) itself, and
thus the establishment and maintenance of institutions, always resides
as well on their valuation through the negotiation of possible futures
vouching for their power and value through threats, debt, and (material
as well as virtual) commodities. And it is at this point that the cultures of
currencies (monetary currencies as well as the “currencies” Malinowski
and Mauss described in their theories about the exchange of gifts and
debts) come into play as a complementary supplement to the cultures of
linguistic signification.
In reflecting the differences between similar moneyless and money-
based cultures of currencies, one might therefore argue that currency
and accounting are to monetary signification what writing is to linguis-
tic signification: an externalized medium leading to an enrichment in
28 Jan Söffner
reliability and abstraction as well as to an impoverishment in memory
and ritualistic presence. As Jacques Derrida argued that there is already
a logic of écriture present even in non-written language, one might even
argue that there is, so to speak, a kind of culture of currency even in cul-
tures that do not have money – that of a claimable, repayable obligation,
whose logic of quid pro quo enters the realm of comparison of values
even where this comparison is not rendered in algebraic calculation (and
not even algebraic calculation is categorically excluded from nonmone-
tary economies).
Thus, to sum up, it is possible to argue that while the invention of
coins has changed the monetary system, it has not invented it; and, as a
proof to the validity of this claim, it can be observed that so many early
currencies developed out of status symbols and symbols of power, in-
cluding rare metals, stones, shells, etc. Moreover, it can also be claimed
that the negotiation of obligation (and hence of debt) is always a nego-
tiation of power and status as well – and in this, it can take on a func-
tion in human society that may on the one hand replace both violence
and hierarchical social orders, but on the other hand can always also be
taken into their service. For example, as David Graeber has prominently
shown, the function of debt is always the actualization of a power that
otherwise would remain virtual at best and fictional at worst. But it does
not stop here. Language and money also enable different yet interrelated
forms of power.

The House of Being and the House of Having

If, as Martin Heidegger has famously stated, language is the “House of
Being”19 – the House as a way of existential dwelling – then it is more
than just a bon mot to state that money may be called the House of Hav-
ing. To put it differently: if the way we dwell in the world, through our
ability to understand ourselves and our world as beings (and hence, for
Heidegger, to partake in Being with a capital B), implies the linguistic
gap between meaning and reference, then we could also claim that our
way of inhabiting the world through debt and possession (i.e., having)
requires the monetary mode of signification (which lacks that linguistic
gap).
To avoid some imminent misunderstandings: I am well aware that po-
sitioning these two symbolic systems according to such a strong existen-
tial position produces a very limited view. After the “Linguistic Turn,”
the humanities have been haunted by so many complementary and con-
tradicting turns that every scholar has to admit that human and cultural
existence is much broader, even when it comes to just its symbolic parts;
existence cannot at all be brought down to just two “Houses” let alone
just one, as in Heidegger. I absolutely admit this limitation; focusing on
 What Does Money Signify? 29
these two symbolic systems is a reduction allowing for focus, nothing
more.
Moreover, a similar statement might conjure up a traditional criticism
against “having” as a way of living, such as that uttered by Erich Fromm
in his famous To Have or to Be. 20 A strong precursor for tying such a
criticism to the effects of monetarily shaped (capitalist) societies can be
found in the fascinating Philosophie des Geldes by Georg Simmel, 21
who argued that money – and hence its way of turning the human re-
lation to the world and to its values into a number-based abstraction –
leads to an objectivation of human subjectivity.
Indeed, in introducing the terminology of the “Houses” of Being and
Having, the reference to Heidegger is revealed as weaker than it might
have been. I rather had the Greek word “oikos” in mind, from which
the term “economy” derives, meaning that the House of Being is not
just a linguistic form of dwelling, but that this dwelling translates into
an economy as easily as the monetary form of dwelling will. So the two
houses can also reflect two kinds of economies and value production.
If seen from an economic angle, being does not only mean human ex-
istence in its essence, it also entails social status, which is as much part
of an economy as is property. Accordingly, we can distinguish econo-
mies based on having and economies based on being. The German (anti-
capitalist) colloquialism describing the economy of Having goes: “Haste
was, dann biste was” (if you have something, then you are somebody),
meaning that status depends on property. However, for an economy of
being, it is status that counts, and property depends on status. One could
therefore easily state for such an economy: “Biste was, dann haste was”
(if you are somebody, then you have something).
A good example of such an economy of being is the feudal society
of the Middle Ages, where the symbolic order and its discourses de-
cided much more upon property than vice versa. One might even argue
that status and property were to be considered one and the same: who-
ever had status (i.e., the nobility), owned (or lent) more than land and
goods. The king or emperor lent the whole country God’s grace, then
lent smaller parts to the dukes, who, while owing the sovereign all the
riches they had, received a good part of it as a “gift.” In turn, the dukes
lent minor slices of the realm to the counts, who again owed everything
to them and received what they had as a gift. They, in turn, lent the land
to the peasants working on it, who did not own any of the fruits of their
labor but received them, once more, as a gift. Everything produced, ev-
ery commodity, was distributed to the respective liege lords and partially
received back as a “gift.” Exchange of property was secondary in such a
hierarchical economy; property depended on status, i.e., the sociocultur-
ally determined “being.” Indeed, close to no money was needed in this
economy; the power of money only flourished through the rise of the free
30 Jan Söffner
cities, introducing a bourgeois economy based on property rather than
status (and, from the beginning, on the ability to buy status and power
as well).
But let’s stick to similar economies of being, because certainly sta-
tus could be negotiated (and not just be taken by force in wars), most
prominently though marriage contracts, i.e., a way of using the status of
persons, and thus the persons themselves, as a currency, making deals
through offspring and trading in bloodlines. This way of trading persons
to negotiate status was not limited to medieval aristocratic societies, al-
though the currency in other economies of Being was not necessarily the
offspring.
One example is a terrible narration from a premonetary culture: the
beginning of the Iliad. The wrath of Achilles, in this text, begins as his
superior, Agamemnon, takes the woman Briseis away from him. Mod-
ern readers might think of jealousy as a source for this wrath or perhaps
the loss of the sexual pleasures Briseis offered to Achilles. The truth,
however, is even worse. Briseis does not count even as a sexual object, let
alone as a person; she is rather a “gift,” literally in the sense of “prize” or
“price” (γέρας). When the gods decide that Agamemnon has to return his
own prize-woman, Chryseis, as punishment for the Greeks’ looting, he
responds by taking Achilles’s prize instead. The women are completely
interchangeable, countable, and replaceable; in the hierarchical economy
at stake, they function solely as prizes upon which kinship and obliga-
tion reside. So Briseis is, so to speak, nothing more than the currency in
which Agamemnon paid Achilles for sacking some islands, and the value
of this currency is honor. To restore honor where it can no longer be
traded for by the currency of gifts, Achilles has to leave the community
of the Greek warriors; when Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles,
the latter stops fighting for him. His wrath draws profoundly on failed
recompense within the economy of gift exchange.
It is easy to see that value before modern currencies is more personal
and less abstract, and that it is bound to an economy of gifts rather than
deals. But obviously this does not mean that it must function more hu-
manely or less abstractly. Briseis bears a meaning that is not intrinsic to
herself, but rather arbitrarily imposed upon her; this meaning does not
multiply in transaction, but is grounded in scarcity. Furthermore, the
gift market consists of only one sign (women are replaced by women and
nothing else), following simple rules of accounting rather than a syntax;
value is counted in quantity, not in quality, enabling an economy of debt
(the legal obligation Achilles has to his superior to hand over Briseis
and the debt Agamemnon, in turn, owes to Achilles – a debt that will
be “negotiated” by the plot of the Iliad, because Achilles’s absence from
battle constitutes a new debt against the Greeks). There is no distinction
between signified value and reference, and thus Briseis can function as
an actualization of the symbolic order at stake. In this, I think it is safe
 What Does Money Signify? 31
to say that while we are clearly facing a currency, this currency is much
more closely tied to symbolic capital than a modern currency would ap-
pear to be, since the economy is not tied to the introduction of coins. But
then again, saying all that makes this example speak strongly against
the humanist assumption that the introduction of money made for a less
humane economy than an economy of being would have been.
So, what are the differences between a currency of status symbols (like
Briseis and Chryseis) on the one hand and a modern monetary currency
on the other? First, status symbols are aristocratic. They are symbols of
power, designating supremacy – and accounting for obligations in terms
of this very supremacy. Accordingly, the currency is mostly based on sta-
tus (i.e., what somebody “is”) rather than property (i.e., what somebody
“has”).
The transition from an economy based on being and status toward an
economy based on property is an extremely interesting field of research
too, which has been closely studied from the late Middle Ages and the
rise of mercantile, bourgeois cultures in the free cities through the 19th
century – the centuries in which the aristocratic and feudal society was
replaced by mercantile and capitalist economies. Exchange, indeed, po-
tentially counters the aimed-at stability of a hierarchical distribution of
property and obligation: the more an economy focuses on markets and
exchange, the more its monetary value will be independent from the
owner’s status, and consequently, the personal (hierarchical) value of the
subjects will count less than the value of the traded goods. The notion
of property will more and more depend on accumulation rather than
natural status values, thereby developing a different culture of values –
one that tends to be based more on property than on status and there-
fore as a side effect, abstracting more from identity and uniqueness, as
was Simmel’s claim, who, indeed, lived in a capitalist time, in which
the question of who one was had been increasingly liberated from the
burden of status-based power, thereby paving the ground for concepts of
being focused on identity and subjectivity.
This transition from a status-based to a property-based economy
has famously been described in literature: prominently in Boccaccio’s
Decameron, a text based in mercantile culture yet discussing the de-
cline of chivalric values, and in Balzac’s Comédie humaine, where the
transition from status-based to money-based power is a recurring topic.
Even Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of distinct forms of symbolic (hence
language-analogous) forms of capital stands in this tradition. His con-
cept of status value still mattering in capitalist economies, in a way,
traces the resilience of the economic House of Being in economies that
appear to come across as a House of Having only – and he traces how
being and status withdraw especially to those aspects of human culture
that can hardly be simply exchanged, but rather must be innate (e.g.,
one’s family) or at least require long education and training (as does his
32 Jan Söffner
famous concept of “habitus” engulfing habits, attitudes, conversational
skills, and taste). Bourdieu expands the conflict between the symbolic
systems to a dimension of “being” that can hardly be grasped by lan-
guage alone (you cannot acquire a skill or habit by just talking about
it), but he also expands the conflict between the Houses of Having and
Being to a time in which aristocracy no longer plays a crucial role. Nev-
ertheless, as he convincingly argued, the conflict easily translated into
one of old and new money, i.e., between more “aristocratic” capitalists
and nouveaux riches.
This theory does not only trace the long transition into the 20th
century, but points at the difficulties of trading symbolic values and
monetary values: difficulties threatening any economy because of the
incompatibility of the two systems of signification and hence the always
imperfect (and therefore productive) transcription and negotiation be-
tween the two. Symbolic capital is always eager for a monetary remuner-
ation and thus the actualization of its (fictional) values which, as such, it
cannot offer, whereas, in turn, monetary capital always faces a problem
when it tries to buy status and, more importantly, when it seeks to estab-
lish and secure the sociocultural context without which it cannot exist
(as is theorized in fields of research such as “relational economics”).22
Indeed, both types of economy necessarily coexist, as was the case
when this medieval feudal system became entangled with foreign trade
(of, say, silk and spices). A completely impersonal and just exchange-
based monetary economy would be impossible, because, without debts
and values constantly being traded in socioculturally counting values
of property and obligations (and thus hierarchies of status), they would
cease to have value. The conflicting coexistence and complementary co-
operation between the two kinds of value production – the value of the
House of Being (as present in aristocratic economies) and the value of
the House of Having (as present in money-based economies) – define any
given monetary value and render its specificity.
It should therefore not come as a surprise then that the digital rating
economy has found new ways of smoothing the process of transcription
between status value and exchange value. The currently most sophisti-
cated version can be observed in consumer ratings on the online mar-
ket and their effect on what the Chinese government has labeled Social
Credit System: an algorithmic (and no longer linguistic) symbolic system
rendering and establishing new forms of status value, which present far
fewer problems when being transcribed in or exchanged for currency
value. Capitalistic societies use the same technology to turn the individ-
ual and subjective being of people into a product for the placement of
advertisements. It remains to be seen how far we can go in the current at-
tempt to exchange the age-old symbolic (not just linguistic) House of Be-
ing for an algorithmic one, which is an even larger question than the one
addressed in this paper. If it were possible, though, then the transcription
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 CHAPTER XIII

THE END OF THE SALONICA AND

MESOPOTAMIA CAMPAIGNS
I. 4th Battalion

B
efore studying the final phases and great events of 1918 in
France and Flanders, and the conclusion of the war in that area,
it may be as well to see how matters ended further afield and in
other regions where the Buffs were engaged. It may be remembered
that the 10th left Palestine in March, when the initial successes of
the German offensive rendered it necessary to reinforce the Western
Armies with every available man. Therefore the continuation of the
history of that battalion is similar, as regards locality, to that of the
1st, 6th and 7th. The 4th remained in India till some time after the
end of the struggle. The 5th endured a weary time in Mesopotamia,
and the 2nd was in the neighbourhood of Salonica. As far as the 4th
Battalion is concerned, with the exception of the tour of work at
Aden, already described, it saw no war as a unit, though nearly all its
individual members at some time or another were seriously
engaged. For instance, when this battalion returned from the Aden
campaign and was stationed at Bareilly, it sent, as well as
detachments to the north-west frontier of India, about five hundred
officers and men to the 5th in Mesopotamia.
In July, 1918, the 4th Battalion proceeded to Multan, in the
Punjaub, and was in this place when news of the armistice reached
India. Now, the great cessation of hostilities brought the blessings of
peace to all the rest of the Buffs, even if it brought no immediate
change of surroundings, but this was not the case as regards the
garrison of India; all sorts of internal troubles were fomented in the
great eastern dependency, particularly in the Punjaub, chiefly
because certain ignorant and foolish folk at home are too full of the
sense of their own importance to leave the ruling of foreign lands to
those of our nation who really know all about it and have made their
adopted country their life study. Troublous times there were, and in
May, 1919, six months after war was supposed to have ended,
martial law having been proclaimed, the Buffs were employed on
different important points on the railway line and at Amballa, Lahore
and other places. Another Afghan war, too, broke out and about half
the battalion was employed upon it, both officers and men being
called upon to perform various duties at the front. Headquarters,
under Lt.-Colonel Dunstan, who had succeeded Lt.-Colonel Gosling,
remained at Lahore during the hot weather of 1919. At last, at the
end of October, a year after the European peace, the men were
collected, embarked on the s.s. Nevasa and landed at Devonport in
November, after five years’ foreign service, which must be a record,
or nearly so, for a strictly home service unit.
The good work of this battalion is recorded in the following letter
written, just before its departure from India, by the Commander-in-
Chief, General Sir C. C. Munro:—
“Officers, Warrant Officers, Non-Commissioned Officers and Men
of the 4th Battalion the Buffs, East Kent Regiment. On your
departure from India I desire to place on record my high appreciation
of your services to the Empire during the period of the Great War.
“Many of you, previous to the outbreak of War, had by joining the
Territorial Force already given proof of that patriotism and public
spirit for which the Force has rendered itself so conspicuous.
“On the declaration of War, your ranks were filled by eager
volunteers animated by the same spirit of self-sacrifice. When called
upon to undertake the further obligation of service overseas your
response was immediate and unanimous. By so doing you set free a
large number of regular units for service in the main theatres of war, at
a time when every trained soldier was of the greatest value. Many of
you have seen service, and by your conduct and bearing have added
to the reputation of the famous regiment whose name you bear.
“Since the termination of active fighting in all the theatres of war
you have been subjected to the further stress of waiting for your relief.
That you appreciated the difficulties which the authorities have had to
face in this respect is clear from the patience with which you have
borne this trying period.
 “You are returning to your homes in Kent, and I bid you God Speed
and a Happy Homecoming.
“As an old Commander of a Territorial Division at home I am proud
to have again been associated with you in India.”

The government of India, in a long resolution at Delhi (dated

31.12.19), recorded that:—
“The Governors-General in Council desire to express to all ranks of
the 4th Battalion the Buffs, East Kent Regiment, the thanks of the
Government of India for their patriotic services, which will long be
remembered and will serve as a noble and enduring example of good
citizenship to future generations.”

II. 5th Battalion

On the 1st April, 1917, the defeated Turkish 14th Corps was
broken into fragments and driven up the two great rivers and the
Diala, while their 13th Corps was falling back before the Russians,
who were coming down from the hills to the north-east of Baghdad.
Our own people were covering the city from any possible attempt
that the enemy might make down the rivers. On the 2nd April touch
was established with the Russians, so our people from the Diala
were withdrawn, a further advance up both banks of the Tigris
considered and, as a preliminary, about the 8th of the month portions
of the enemy were driven over the Shatt el Adhaim river. The Buffs
at this time were at Hinaidi, which is about two miles below Baghdad,
but in view of the contemplated operations the battalion started for
the north on the 3rd April, doing no less than twenty-six miles the
first day, the distance being divided into two considerable marches.
This journey was continued during the following two or three days,
and on the 8th April the battalion was at Dugamia. It was discovered,
however, on this date that over six thousand of the enemy, with
thirty-two guns, had issued from the Jebel Hamrin and were moving
down the right bank of the Nahr Khalis Canal towards Deltawa.
Indeed, by the evening of the 9th they had reached a point seven
miles or so south-west of Deli Abbas. The Buffs, with the rest of the
brigade, were ordered at short notice to Deltawa, in support of a
force under Lt.-Colonel Champain, and a picquet line was thrown out
to the north of the place, Dogras being on the left and Buffs on the
right. The following day it was found impossible to reach the position
which it was intended to occupy, owing to the presence of several
very steep nullahs deep with water, and the brigade counter-
marched and moved through Deltawa.
On the 10th it proceeded to a point opposite Abdullah Effendi and
found the country partially inundated, the banks or “bunds” having
been broken. All this day and part of the next, the enemy continued
his advance down the canal, lured on by our cavalry which retreated
before him; but on the 11th he met with failure, for on that day British
troops, including the Buffs, had been sent up the right bank of the
Nahr Khalis towards Deli Abbas to meet him, while another column,
after a night march from Dogamia, fell upon his right flank. This latter
movement proved a complete surprise, was entirely successful and
resulted in a Turkish retreat, hurried somewhat at first, but soon
covered by an efficient and properly worked rear guard, which
caused the pursuit to be a slow one, though quite continuous. On the
12th the Buffs reached the junction of the Nahr Khalis, with the Nahr
Tahwila, where they bivouacked with B Company, and the Dogras in
front on picquet. The next day the cavalry tried a turning movement,
with a view to reaching the Kifri road at a point behind the retreating
army, but lack of water caused this adventure to fail. The Buffs,
leaving B Company and the Dogras behind, continued the advance
with the 13th Brigade R.F.A. and took up, in conjunction with the
102nd Grenadiers, a fresh picquet line for the night. The regiment
lost two men killed and nineteen wounded on this date. On the 14th
this new picquet line was sniped all day by a few men supported by
a rear guard with machine guns, and Captain Dolamore of the
Middlesex, who was attached to the Buffs, was killed, thirteen men
being wounded. After marching forward a few miles on the 15th, it
was determined to stop the pursuit, as it was not advisable to enter
the hilly country of the Jebel Hamrin, where the defence would have
great advantages; so the original idea of crossing the Shatt el
Adhaim was resumed, those who had interfered with the scheme
having been now driven away. So the marching of the next two days
was in an opposite direction, and on the 18th at 4 a.m. the Buffs
started, in support of the 38th Brigade, for the point where the
smaller stream joined the Tigris, at which place a bridge was thrown
and the crossing at once commenced. The Buffs got over about
noon without opposition, proceeded to Deluiya and at dusk went out
on picquet along the Nahrwan Canal. The Turkish opposition on the
left bank of the Tigris had collapsed and many prisoners were taken.
The following day all available lorries and ambulances spread away
over the country behind the cavalry, with a view to collecting booty,
but this enterprise was of no avail at all: the local Arab had seen to
all that business. The enemy still had some fight left in him on the
other side of the great river, however, and on the 20th April the Buffs
marched up the left bank as escort to the R.F.A. The next day the
Turks stood to fight on the other side of the water, and, their
aeroplane having been destroyed, they were unaware of anything
likely to interfere with their plans on the bank opposite to them; but
our guns enfiladed their position with very marked success and, after
this participation in the action, the troops marched back seven miles
to Deluiya. Of course, the main avenue of communication between
the army of Mesopotamia and the base had always been the river,
and the spot up to which the boats could come with safety was
constantly being changed as the armies advanced up stream. This
river-head, as it was called, was the advanced depot for supplies,
and when troops wandered far from river-head they were badly fed.
Consequently, the 22nd April was a red-letter day because a better
and fuller supply of rations was issued, as the boats now came up to
Samjali, where a bridge over the Tigris had been made on the 19th.
While operations had been going on on the right bank of the main
river it became clear that the other Turkish corps was again issuing
from the Jebel Hamrin, this time down the Shatt el Adhaim, and that
it was advancing against our troops on the left bank. On the 23rd his
leading units had reached Dahuba with the remainder seventeen
miles in rear, and it was determined to endeavour to crush this
leading force before it could be reinforced, so a night march and
attack at dawn was arranged. The enemy’s position ran north-west
from the Shatt el Adhaim, and his right flank was bent back in a
northerly direction in front of Dahuba. Specially detailed parties of a
hundred Buffs and a hundred Dogras, under Captain Jones of the
latter regiment, proceeded in motor-cars to surprise and attack the
Turks’ extreme right at 6 a.m., but our guns had already so cleverly
made use of the surprise element, and with such great effect, that
the position had already been abandoned. The Buffs took up a
picquet line, but, being relieved by the 102nd Grenadiers, they
marched back to bivouac on the river. The next day the pursuit
commenced. The enemy was retiring up both banks of the Shatt el
Adhaim, and the British force followed for three sultry days, reaching
Satha on the evening of the 27th. Here the Turk was close to his
Jebel Hamrin, from which hilly region he had so recently issued, and
here, amongst the foothills, he elected to stand while a strong rear
guard covered the withdrawal to his selected position. Opposite to
this the Buffs bivouacked for the night, being in reserve to the rest of
Thomson’s force, which was holding a portion of our picquet line,
about two miles separating our main line from that of the enemy.
Reconnaissance was rendered almost impossible by reason of the
heat and low visibility, besides during the night there came on one of
those dreadful dust-storms so common in these regions, and this
one lasted for about forty-eight hours. The last day of the month saw
a very successful attack made on the position, in spite of the dust-
storm, which, however, greatly assisted the enemy to secure his line
of retreat after he had been defeated. During this fight the Buffs were
in reserve; the 35th Brigade, however, bore their full share of the
victory, which resulted in the capture of numerous prisoners and
trophies. In describing the events recorded above, Sir Stanley
Maude in his official despatches uses the following words: “During
this period of hard marching and heavy fighting the Buffs specially
distinguished themselves on several occasions.” On the 1st May our
aeroplanes reported the enemy seven miles away in full retreat.
Sir Stanley Maude now determined that a redistribution of the
troops for the hot weather was a necessity, and as the resistance of
the enemy was thoroughly broken the chief matter to consider now
was the wellbeing of our men during the trying portion of the year
which was before them. On the 5th May the Buffs marched to Satha,
thence on to Dahuba, and on the 10th crossed the pontoon bridge
over the Adhaim, escorting transport and guns. A certain amount of
time was spent at Bakuba and more at Abu Kamed, on Diala river. At
the latter place the battalion remained all the early summer and was
employed chiefly in digging and wiring. Hot weather in the plains of
India, with all the appliances and inventions of long experience to
mitigate the discomforts of existence, is trying enough, but month
after month of lassitude and exhaustion caused by summer in a
burning country without any such mitigation is a terrible trial to the
strongest; the experience was just one that had to be lived through,
and that is all about it.
Early in August a little break came, bringing with it, at any rate, a
change of scene: our aeroplanes reported that the Turks were
entrenching a position south-west of Shahroban, and it was
determined to occupy that place at once. Therefore on the 13th
August the Buffs with the remainder of their brigade crossed the
Diala river to Bakuba, and then moved towards the north-east and
on the 19th reached Misdad from Abu Jisra without opposition. The
next day the brigade moved out at 4.30 a.m. to march on Shahroban
with orders to skirt the town, the Buffs to go round the south side and
the Dogras the north. The great objective was a certain nullah, and
this was occupied without opposition at 6.35 a.m. Then another
period of monotony set in and until the 18th October the battalion
was at Shahroban in Mesopotamia, and that was all its history.
The Jebel Hamrin, though not a lofty range of mountains, is a very
broken set of hills, and it is from this region that the waters which
feed the canals is obtained. So long as the Turks remained in
possession of these hills, so long had they control of the canals.
Early in October, therefore, it was decided to take over this Jebel
Hamrin, but first to clear the left bank of the Diala from the enemy.
This was done by attacking a position he held near Deli Abbas, on
which occasion all objectives were gained, and the British were
enabled to take up a line astride of the Diala river where it issues
from the gorge of the Jebel, and so gain control of the head waters
of the canals. In connection with these operations the Buffs, who had
a series of canals on their front, began their work on the 18th
October by sending A Company out to seize two bridges—Lieut.
Bonner’s platoon to attack, while that under Sgt. Turnbull occupied a
mound close by. Certain opposition was encountered, but we held
the bridges by 10 a.m., at which hour no enemy was in sight. Two
Buffs were killed and one wounded. During the evening B Company
advanced and took up a picquet line along the Haruniyah Canal
without opposition, C Company took over the mounds and D was in
reserve three hundred yards to the south-west. The next day
picquets were pushed out early and occupied the line of the Ruz
Canal. Meanwhile Egerton’s force had secured the Jebel Hamrin,
and at 3 p.m. the battalion was ordered through the hills. The next
day Kizil Robat was occupied by cavalry and the Norfolk Regiment.
The Buffs had four men wounded while digging, the working party
being shelled by a camel gun from across the Diala. On the 30th
October the battalion, with many others, was issued with winter
clothing and settled down to road-making in the Jebel, for the
General Commanding-in-Chief had decreed that all the
communications in this district were to be made good, the canals
bridged in many places and the wild hills penetrated everywhere by
roads fit for wheeled traffic. The enemy tried a counter-
demonstration on the other side of the Tigris, and what was still a
war rolled away to the westward of the troops in which we are
interested.
On the 19th November the army received the sad news of the
death by cholera of their Commander-in-Chief, Sir Stanley Maude—
a soldier much beloved and highly respected by officers and men.
He had won the war in Mesopotamia, and all had gone well there
from the moment of his taking over. He was the son of General Sir F.
F. Maude, V.C., G.C.B., the first commanding officer of the 2nd
Battalion The Buffs, which unit was added to the regiment in 1857.
Towards the end of November the enemy had retired so far both
up the Tigris and the Euphrates that Sir W. R. Marshall, who had
succeeded Maude, considered that the only way to strike him was to
attack that portion of his forces which were holding certain passes in
the Jebel Hamrin and Kara Tepe. There is a stream called the Nahrin
which, flowing from the north, joins the Diala to the east of the Jebel,
and the Turks had flooded the low land east of the junction of the two
streams, so creating a considerable obstacle in connection with any
attack from the southward on Kara Tepe. At midnight on the 2nd/3rd
December the brigade held the left bank of the Diala from Tawila to
Sawaya, with the Buffs in the centre, and the orders were to engage
the enemy’s picquets on the far bank at dawn, while the 37th
Brigade attacked due west from the north of Kizil Robat, but the
scheme was found unworkable in its entirety, simply because the
35th Brigade had no means of crossing. The fords had disappeared
and it was two o’clock in the afternoon before the Buffs got over,
after which the brigade concentrated again and bivouacked for the
night. During the day the enemy was reported to be retiring on Kara
Tepe, having been driven from the Jebel passes by the 13th Division.
On the 4th December the advance on Kara Tepe continued, the 35th
Brigade halting about five miles short of it. The Buffs were the
brigade advance guard during this day. It was a trying march, for two
reasons: water was very scarce—and it is an undoubted hardship to
have to work and march, even in December, without an adequate
supply of water, and also the progress was terribly slow because the
ground was intercepted by nullahs, many of which had to be filled in
and prepared for crossing. At daybreak on the 5th the march was
continued and, after moving about four miles, water was found in
some small nullahs. Here the brigade deployed for attack, the 37th
Dogras leading, with the 2/4th Ghurkas in support, the Buffs soon
coming up in echelon on the right of the Ghurkas. The attack of the
brigade was materially assisted by a flank advance by the 40th
(British) Brigade and the whole work proved extremely easy, the
previous marching being the worst feature of the operation. The
whole position was taken and the enemy soon in full retreat on Kifri.
The pursuit was not pushed far, and the Buffs, after passing through
a dust storm on its way to Kizil Robat on the 7th, and after a long
and dusty march the next day, found themselves back in their old
camping ground north of Shahroban.
January, 1918, proved a very wet month, but work of all sorts was
carried on during the early part of the year, and this work included
extensive gardening and farming operations. There is but little to
record for the year 1918; as far as the 5th Battalion is concerned,
their enemy was broken, but the final surrender was not till the end
of October, and in the meantime the men remained for the most part
in the same camp and worked at gardening and also at a new
railway which was in progress. The news of a few honours was
received during the hot weather. On the 21st May Pte. A. W. King
was mentioned in despatches; as were Captain W. A. Harrison,
attached from the 4th Battalion, and Lieut. Weldon on the 11th June.
R.Q.M.S. Middleditch, C.Q.M.S. Woodruff and Pte. Friend all got the
Meritorious Service Medal in August.
The news of the armistice with Turkey was received on the 1st
November, 1918, and of the armistice with Germany on the 11th.
There is nothing to show that the story about the latter news being
received by the men in silence, and that later on wild cheering was
heard but ascertained to be only because a belated consignment of
ration rum had at last turned up, relates to the 5th Battalion of the
Buffs. As after every war, when peace or its equivalent is proclaimed,
the exiled soldier’s thoughts immediately and naturally turn to home;
of course they do. However that may be, orders came that the Buffs
were to be one of the regiments to remain in Mesopotamia for
another hot season.
The cadre of the battalion, a very tiny remnant of those who
embarked in 1914, reached home in January, 1920, under command
of Lt.-Colonel J. Body, D.S.O., O.B.E. This battalion was therefore
actually a few days longer abroad than the 4th. Casualties during the
war were 12 officers and 118 other ranks killed; 26 officers and 533
other ranks wounded. Honours: two D.S.O.’s, one bar to D.S.O., one
Albert Medal, two O.B.E.’s, one M.B.E., six M.C.’s, sixteen D.C.M.’s,
one M.M., eight M.S.M.’s, five foreign decorations and fifty-two
mentions in despatches.

III. 2nd Battalion

New Year’s Day, 1917, found the 2nd Battalion at Barakli Dzuma,
on the eastern side of the River Struma, on the flat ground and under
the hills which were occupied by the Bulgarian troops. A more or less
quiet time ensued after the raid on “Little Ferdy” trench previously
described, though the Buffs made a demonstration on the 8th
January in aid of the Middlesex, which regiment carried out on that
day a somewhat similar attempt on two trenches on their front. There
was, too, at this time a good deal of patrol work done, mostly in the
direction of the railway. On the 23rd the battalion, changing places
with the 3rd Royal Fusiliers, moved to Ormanli, and a few days later
to Lozista, where it remained working very regularly all February.
News had arrived on the 9th January of a D.S.O. for Captain
Sebastian, and D.C.M.’s for L.-Sgt. Spiller and L.-Corpl. Geohegan.
Some little excitement about this time was caused by a rumour that
numerous Turks were slipping through our lines and sailing over the
lake to join the Bulgarians, but, in spite of several efforts, none were
ever caught.
There came a distinct change of scene early in June, and the
chief incidents immediately before that date were as follows: on the
4th March the Bulgarians tried to burn the village of Butkova; on the
13th C.S.M. Andrews was awarded the (Italian) Bronze Medal for
Military Valour; on the 17th there was heavy shelling on the right of
the battalion and the Bulgarians made a demonstration, their infantry
advancing to within six hundred yards of our trenches, but we
suffered no casualties; and on the 19th the battalion moved to
Haznatar, B and C Companies going on three days later to Ormanli
to find the guard on Koprivi Bridge. L.-Corpl. Arnold, of D Company,
died on the 24th of wounds received when out patrolling. On the 28th
and 29th Haznatar was flooded owing to the rising of the river. From
the 4th to 14th April the Buffs were at Orljak and then returned to
Haznatar. There was always a good deal of patrolling work to be
done at this latter place, which was in the advanced British lines, so
that casualties from the enemy’s shell fire were not altogether
infrequent. For instance, five occurred on the 21st April, one of the
men dying of his wounds. On the 2nd May Captain Vertue had a
narrow escape and indeed owed his life or his liberty to C.S.M.
Andrews. The captain and the sergeant-major were out together, and
seeing a Bulgar they fired on him. A minute or two later several of
the enemy appeared and then returned the fire; Vertue was
wounded, but Andrews immediately picked him up and carried him
back. 2nd Lieut. Goodheart was wounded on the 12th.
In the middle of May a minor action was arranged and carried out
by the Buffs and 3rd Royal Fusiliers. The latter were on the Buffs’
right and opposite the “Ferdy” group of enemy trenches. During the
afternoon of the 15th troops began to get into assembly positions
and were ready at 6 p.m. Half an hour later our artillery opened and
C and D Companies deployed and advanced, each with one platoon
in front extended to five paces; another fifty yards in rear, and the
remaining two a hundred yards behind again. These went through
the enemy’s line and took what was known as the “Essex” group of
trenches, while the Royal Fusiliers on the right took the “Ferdy”
group. The Buffs’ casualty list was but six wounded, and several
thousand rounds of ammunition and some rifles were found in the
captured trenches. Patrols were immediately sent out to front and
flanks and the place consolidated, in case of counter-attack, which
was, in fact, attempted but without result. On the 27th May the
brigade was relieved by the 84th and marched to Orljak.
During the month of May, as has been seen, the casualty list from
the action of the enemy was a very small one, but this flat valley of
the Struma appears to have been a very unhealthy and malarious
place in the summer time and not fitted for even the temporary home
of Englishmen. During the month ninety-three Buffs were admitted to
hospital, and 63 per cent of the cases were diagnosed as malaria.
What was worse, during the following month, though the regiment
left the valley, it took the malarial germs with it in the men’s blood,
and no less than 240 were admitted to hospital. On the 7th June the
battalion left Orljak and marched away, making for the healthy hills.
The final object was Paprat, which was reached on the 29th June by
a circuitous route, and after a stay of ten days at a place called
Vaisili. Here the battalion remained for the whole of the month of
July, the men’s health wonderfully improving by the change.
August took the battalion into what was to them an entirely new
region. The Allied Army covered Salonica by means of a line north of
the town, and roughly some forty miles away from it, the right of this
line being thrown back about Butkova, Barakli Dzuma and the River
Struma. Up to now this flank had been the scene of the Buffs’
adventures and activities, but August was to be spent in the main
part of the line and in the vicinity of Lake Doiran. A deep valley or
pass runs up a gentle slope from Lake Doiran towards the east to
Dova Tepe, and thence downward again to Butkova lake and the
vale of the Struma. On either side of this pass are lofty ranges of
mountains. That on the south was in our hands and is the same
range on which Paprat stands. The mountains to the north were
occupied by the enemy. The railway, which passes over the flat land
on the eastern side of the Struma, crosses that stream above
Demirhissar, makes a sharp turn westward and penetrates the valley
in question, going on to Doiran. The British line was just south of this
railway and on the foothills of the southern range of hills which are
called the Krusha Balkans. The positions taken up by the companies
were as follows: D Company was on Hairy Hill, B Company on Lucky
Hill, C on Bermondsey Ridge, with A Company in reserve on a small
spur behind it. The enemy at this part of the line was at some
distance away, but he had posts of varying strength in all the villages
north of the railway line. The first work undertaken was the
strengthening of all our defences, which, with the making of the
Buffs’ redoubt, was no light labour on account of the hard and rocky
ground. A great deal of reconnaissance was also undertaken mostly
in the direction of Chalki or Cakli Station and village. There is a great
deal of wood, shrub and vegetation about this portion of the country,
which rendered patrolling a matter of some difficulty and danger.
However, on the 25th August a raiding expedition was carried out
by C Company, under Captain Sebastian, having D Company in
support; the plan being that the first-named was to be just south of
the Cakli railway station by 3.30 and that two Lewis guns were to be
on Lonely Hill. The raiders were then to rush the station, turn south-
west and clear Cakli village, push on to Erdzili and Karlu Ovacu and
ultimately to withdraw as soon as the villages were clear, covered by
a rear guard. A party of the enemy was seen by 2nd Lieut. W. G.
Neve’s platoon when close to the railway line and fire was opened
through the dense scrub, the Bulgars at once retiring. Seeing this
retreat, Neve at once dashed on ahead of his men and reached the
railway embankment, where he was shot in the head; he died on
reaching the aid post. Our scouts now discovered that the enemy
had retired to a trench four hundred yards north-north-west of the
station, but from there he continued his retreat up a nullah to Garbali,
so the trench was occupied by our people, and from there C
Company turned left for Cakli village; but two platoons had to be left
behind at the station while Sebastian advanced, having scouts out
on his right flank, that is to the north of him. However, he entered the
village unopposed. Here, finding that one platoon would not suffice
to guard it even temporarily, he put two in position and asked for
more men, with the result that Lieut. Marden came up from the
reserve with half the company, one platoon going to the village and
the other to the station. After scouts had been out to reconnoitre
north of Stevens Wood, Sebastian went on and entered the two
villages of Erdzili and Karlu Ovacu and, after reporting his success,
got orders to withdraw. Before these orders came to hand, however,
2nd Lieut. Manning with one platoon had been sent to take up a
position north and north-west of the villages, and he was told to find
2nd Lieut. Renton, who was in charge of the scouts. This was the
commencement of a hunt for the scouts in the dense bush. The
order to withdraw had come through, but the scattered men could
not be found, though Sebastian sent patrol after patrol in search.
This, of course, had the effect of greatly delaying the withdrawal, but
Renton and his men were found at last and all was well and a lesson
in bush warfare learnt.
The battalion was relieved from this part of the country on the
27th and for a good many days was on the march again, mostly on
the high ground till Turbes was reached; here work was commenced
on the mainline defences on the right bank of the Struma about
Orljak bridge. The battalion remained at Turbes till the 14th October.
Towards the end of August Lt.-Colonel Thewles, D.S.O., Captain
Vertue, M.C., Lieut. Beswick and L.-Corpl. Boswell were mentioned
in despatches.
COUNTRY NORTH OF BAGHDAD
 COUNTRY NEAR CAKLI STATION
In the middle of October a move was made to Nevolyen and a
winter scheme of work and arrangements commenced. The orders
were to hold a line on the left bank from Nevolyen to Jenikoj, so on
the 13th two platoons of C Company proceeded to the former to
clear the village and hold it, while a similar party of the 3rd Royal
Fusiliers occupied Jenikoj and some of another brigade Cuculuk. No
opposition was encountered.
About this time there was established what was called an
enterprise company: that is, one at a time, the companies were
struck off all digging and other work, of which there was a good deal,
and was kept apart solely for patrolling and minor enterprises. On
the 25th October C Company, which had the first turn of this work,
sent two patrols to Papalova to look out upon the enemy. About 7.15
a.m. some fifty Bulgars approached from Prosenik, but these were
driven off.
 The battalion remained at Nevolyen till the 14th November, and
those few days were remarkable only for certain actions of minor
enterprise and for scouting. For instance, on the 27th October Lieut.
Renton, who was in charge of the scouts, found signs of the enemy
about Prosenik and fired on one or two of them. Two days later
about fifty Bulgar cavalry and thirty infantry were seen to enter
Prosenik by our scouts who were well handled by Sgt. Rand but
eventually had to withdraw, losing one killed, one wounded and one
missing. On the last day of the month Captain Vertue took C
Company out at 3 a.m. to take position round Papalova and lie in
wait for hostile scouts. About 6.15 a.m. some thirty infantry with a
few horsemen appeared and opened rapid but wild fire. They
advanced a little and the company hoped they were coming right on,
but they halted; our platoon, which had observed them, immediately
opened fire with rifle, Lewis gun and grenade. Other parties, each
about the same strength, appeared opposite our other platoons and
similarly fired wildly, but all shortly withdrew and soon afterwards the
enemy opened a small barrage between Papalova and Prosenik
which apparently caught their own people, for shouting was heard
and men were seen to fall. At 9.45 the company was ordered to
withdraw and in doing so was heavily shelled, 2nd Lieut. Young and
one man being wounded.
The 14th November took the Buffs back to billets at Orljak, where
labour and training took place on alternate days for some time. On
the 14th January, 1918, the regiment relieved the 3rd Middlesex in
what was known as the West Line and occupied six redoubts there,
on the improvement of which a good deal of labour was expended
and which was the battalion home till the middle of February, when
A, B and C Companies retired to Orljak on relief, and D Company,
under Lieut. Bremner, became enterprise company in lieu of one of
the East Surrey Regiment. This company soon got busy laying
ambushes and so on and, as usual, watching Prosenik and, for a
change, Kalandra as well; but on the 5th March it got rather into
trouble attempting a more extensive raid with the aid of B Company
and one platoon of A. Bremner left Nevolyen at 8.30 p.m. and,
moving by Kalandra and dropping B Company as supports upon the
way, arrived within one hundred yards of the Bulgar trenches, when
a heavy fire was suddenly opened with rifle and bomb. Lieut. Asprey
with four or five men got up to the wire round one of the posts and
were engaged in cutting it when a bomb fell amongst them,
wounding them all but one. Finding that the posts were strongly
wired and the enemy alert, and being hampered by the darkness,
Bremner withdrew, having Lieut. Asprey and six men wounded. The
next day B Company relieved D as raiding company.
On the 27th March the Buffs moved away again, but an incident
which occurred on the 13th to the enterprise company is worthy of
record. Two platoons, under Captain Howgrave-Graham and Lieut.
Wilson, lay up as day ambushes in the vicinity of Prosenik, and they
were visited by small parties of the enemy at 9 o’clock and again at
3.30. Every effort was made to capture some of these. Wilson with
five or six of his men made a sortie for the purpose, and one of the
party was hit by a Bulgar who had ensconced himself in a cunning
spot from which he could enfilade Wilson’s communication trench.
Two stretcher-bearers went out to fetch in the wounded man, but the
wily Bulgarian hit them both. This seems to have annoyed L.-Corpl.
Wykes, who went out to see about matters. Of course, he too was
fired on, but he managed to kill the troublesome fellow, and then,
picking up the wounded Corpl. Stanley, carried him away. The
enemy seeing this, opened heavy fire, but Wykes was one of those
men who like to carry through any job they may undertake, so he
staggered along with his comrade for a thousand yards till he
reached the support sections, the shells screaming and bursting
around him the whole time. Wilson, being now heavily shelled,
withdrew. He was wounded in doing so, but gamely stuck to his job
of commanding his men. Captain Howgrave-Graham, noticing
Wilson’s withdrawal, conformed and the whole party returned to
Nevolyen; the supporting platoon, however, remained at Papalova till
evening. The advanced platoons had, besides Wilson, seven men
wounded and Pte. Harrold, one of the stretcher-bearers, killed. L.-
Corpl. Wykes was given the M.M. for his gallantry and Wilson got the
M.C.
The move alluded to above was ultimately to the same
neighbourhood as before, near Lake Doiran, headquarters being at a
place called Grec Avance, but the march took ten days, round by
Mirova, Kirkul and Alexia, and on arrival the old work of patrolling
toward Cakli and its neighbourhood was undertaken anew. The men
were in a number of posts, wired all round, but on the 1st June they
were withdrawn a little to a second line in rear, the wire of the old
position being demolished and the works destroyed. The enemy at
this period were observed to be mostly about the village of Akinjali,
near Lake Doiran. A great number of the Bulgarians were deserting
about this time to our lines. No masses of them came over, but there
was a pretty constant dribble. The old line was reoccupied and the
works repaired in August.
The Greek King Constantine having been deposed, the people,
under his son Alexander, had by this time definitely thrown in their lot
with the allies and their armies had now been in the field against the
Bulgarians since the beginning of March. The enemy was obviously
losing heart, as the desertions proved. Victory was crowning the
allied arms at last on the Western front, and a grand general
offensive in the neighbourhood of Salonica was consequently
planned to commence in the middle of September. The part allotted
to the British contingent was the attack and capture of the heights to
the west and to the north-east of Lake Doiran, and in this it was to be
assisted by two divisions and other troops of the Greek army.
On the morning of the 15th September the English General, Sir
George Milne, got orders from the French General-in-Chief of the
allies that the troops were to take the offensive on the morning of the
18th. On that date the Greeks attacked and pierced the Akinjali
outpost line while the British conformed; with the result that the Buffs
took up position along the railway line on their front, remaining there
all day, but concentrating at 10 p.m. ready for a move. The next day
orders came to take up a line from Akinjali Wood to Lake Doiran, to
cover the retirement of the Greeks and to dig trenches and erect
barbed-wire defences. In this way four days passed, hostile cavalry
being seen in Akinjali on the evening of the 21st. Our line was along
the Koja Suju and at Brest. On the 23rd the regiment, being relieved,
marched to Surlovo and in the evening to Doiran town. On the 25th
the battalion moved to Obasi, but owing to the great congestion of