ABSTRACT
In the days ofelectronic money, many observers ofeconomic change suppose that a century-old nightmare of depersonalisation is finally imprinting itself on everyday life. Georg Simmel stated the view strongly at the turn of the twentieth century: money's 'colorlessness', he declared, repainted the modern world into an 'evenly flat and gray tone' (Simmel [1908] 1950: 414). All meaningful nuances were stamped out by the new quantitative logic that asked only 'how much' but not 'what and how' (Simmel [1900] 1978: 259). Although analysts have repeatedly conceded that the process remains incomplete - thus legal theorist Margaret Radin (1996) speaks of 'incomplete commodification' - they havejust as regularly worried out loud that unchecked rationalisation of currency would produce general desiccation ofsocial relations. Jiirgen Habermas, for instance, argues that money is the medium by which the economic system'colonizes' the 'lifeworld' - the arena of routine social life - irrepressibly and systematically undermining 'domains of action dependent upon social integration' (Habermas 1989: 327). Social observers thus still accept with a remarkable lack of scepticism the notion that once money enters the realm of personal relations it inevitably bends those relations in the direction of instrumental rationalit/
For a century, therefore, the prevailing interpretation of money has shaped an absolute model of market money, based on the following five assumptions:
The functions and characteristics of money are defined strictly in economic terms. As an entirely homogenous, infinitely divisible, liquid object, lacking in quality, money is a matchless tool for market exchange. Even when the symbolic meaning of money is recognised, it either remains restricted to the economic sphere or is treated as a largely inconsequential feature.
