K O D I K A S / C O D E 44 (2021) · No. 1 - 3 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Money as a sign: Georg Simmel, Kurt Singer, and Karl Bühler. Das Geld als Zeichen (1995) Abstract: Money, like few other human inventions, is suited to the documentation and reconstruction of the process of building civilization because it is a phenomenon that has characterised humanity since Greek antiquity, i. e., throughout the codified history of humankind. Money is designed to be passed on again and again and to anticipate new, higher forms of social movement and the development towards ever higher abstraction in value and money thinking is a basic feature of all cultural history. Here money is used as the springboard to developing the semiotics of money, the “ essence ” of money, and the function of signs in the process of creating a civilization. 1.0 Introduction When money is mentioned, certain phrases come to mind, such as: “ Money is the end of comfort ” ; “ Where you ring the bell with a coin, all doors open ” ; “ Money doesn ’ t stink ” ; “ A cash register makes you sensual ” ; “ Money corrupts character ” or “ Money rules the world. ” This list could be extended almost indefinitely. But here I do not want to talk about social prejudices - although this would also be an exciting and productive topic in terms of cultural semiotics - but about the semiotics of money, the “ essence ” of money, and the function of signs in the process of creating a civilization. Money, like few other human inventions, is suited to the documentation and reconstruction of the process of building civilization because it is a phenomenon that has characterized humanity since Greek antiquity, i. e., throughout the codified history of humankind. I would like to support this initial hypothesis with two literary references: The Hegel Prize winner Jacques Le Goff shows in his fabulous book The Birth of Purgatory (Le Goff 1991) the role money plays in changing worldviews in the Middle Ages, and the no less important social scientist Max Weber examines the function of money in the genesis of capitalism in his influential, if not uncontroversial, work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1991). The results of these two studies converge in the thesis that only the invention of purgatory around 1170 finally paved the way for the modern monetary economy, which was vividly and impressively demonstrated by the Cologne exhibition ‘ Heaven Hell Purgatory ’ (Gezler 1994). 1.1 Sacred money and time thieves In the British Museum, you can find the oldest inscribed coin yet discovered, bearing the inscription “ phaenos eimi sema. ” This sign money refers to the Greek origin of money, about which we find valuable information in Bernhard Laum ’ s historical investigation of the sacral origin of the money (Laum 1924) and in Joachim Schacht ’ s cultural anthropology of money (Schacht 1967). The etymology of the concept of money shows the originally religious background of meaning, described as ‘ retribution, ’ ‘ substitution, ’ and ‘ sacrifice ’ . The Germanic term sacrifice (Opfer) is termed “ money ” (Geld) because it compensates for one ’ s benefactor ’ s services. In the Greek polis, the welfare of the state requires “ that the deities protecting the state be satisfied by allocating the gifts due to them. ” To “ distribute ” is “ nemein ” in German, corresponding to the noun nomos. Nomos, which was later used to refer to state law in general, originally indicated the “ order of distribution, ” and specifically cult law, because it laid out the distribution of offerings. In the sacral term nomos lies the beginnings of the state ’ s currency; for here first, the state determined a good and guaranteed its quality, and this good determined and guaranteed by the state serves as a valid means of payment ” (Laum 1924: 29). The official sacrificial good among Greeks, Romans, Indians, and Germanic peoples was cattle. Consequently, cattle acquired a value in monetary terms, or became money. However, not every animal is suitable for sacrifice; therefore, suitable sacrificial animals must be selected from the herd, for which binding standards and criteria are developed. For this purpose, animals of the same species are compared with each other, and from the comparison of their characteristics a norm is created, which from that moment on is considered a qualitative norm (cf. ibid.: 27). The validity of the cultic means of payment in ‘ livestock ’ is at first limited to exchange between gods and humans; but it does not take long at all for sacrificial money to transcend the cultic space and be used as a means of exchange in profane settings too. The next step in the development of chartal - state money - is taken when clay or metal animal idols or effigies take the place of real sacrificial animals. The substitution of the real sacrificial animals for idols without material value must be seen as a secondary act of semiotisation after the primary elementalisation, insofar as the value of animal symbols shifts from their materiality to the function they fulfill in communication between gods and humans; this function consists in being the solvent of a debt relationship (cf. ibid.: 90). To explain this semiotisation process, Laum gives the following example: First, Asclepius receives a real rooster as a sacrifice, then the image of a rooster, and this symbol is then stamped on the precious metal. The service of the god of salvation is thus first compensated by a good in kind, then by the coin; one can thus also speak of a sequence of stages in the sacrifice: economy in kind - money economy (ibid.: 147). We have already heard that the coin calls itself a ‘ sign ’ in an irritatingly anthropomorphic speech act. The expression ‘ sign ’ refers to sacral contents of which Plato speaks in the 17th chapter of his Cratylus when he characterizes the body (soma) as the grave (sema) of the soul. Schacht interprets this play on words and comments on the body as the prison of the soul, after whose death a better fate awaits it in the hereafter. Literally Schacht says: Money as a sign: Georg Simmel, Kurt Singer, and Karl Bühler (1995) 91 The “ tomb ” would thus signify the “ separated ” soul, distinguished from the body. Death and grave are dark backgrounds of a golden life, as mystery tremendum breaks in place of the ‘ whole-other ’ : a place of an epiphany of the numinous (Schacht 1967: 70). Schacht points out that “ sema ” also has a second meaning in Plato: Robe, as the material covering of the spiritual. The garment is for Greek thinking, a sign of what it covers. The deity ’ s living garment is a woven work that requires secret knowledge. Work is poiein: this was the work of the ‘ initiated ’ smiths: Hephaistos forged the net. The smiths carried out the preparation of the early coinage body as a ‘ sign ’ and garment (ibid.: 71). The originally vivid, sacred character of Greek coins quickly disappeared: money became an abstract, anonymous store of value, removed from time, whose sacred content sunk into the subconscious (cf. ibid.: 79). The impersonality of money is among the most important causes of the Christian church ’ s deep-seated aversion to capitalist impulses, sharing its aversion to monetary transactions, especially usury, with other religions. Schacht has undertaken an analysis of the church ’ s aversion to financial transactions, concluding: The monetary system uses the language of religion, but it hollows it out. As a sign-like object with latent-absolutist magical illusory freedom from time, money is the material-fictive, ‘ peel-off ’ image of an image of God ‘ invested ’ in an abstract material ‘ sealed ’ in it as in a ‘ tombstone. ’ In this respect, it is the death mask of God (ibid.: 152). Jacques Le Goff emphasizes the same fact when he asks: What then does he (the usurer) trade, if not with the time that elapses between the points at which he first lends and later receives the interest-bearing repayment? But time belongs to none other than God. As a thief of time, the usurer is a thief of God ’ s property. According to St. Anselmus and St. Peter Lombard, all contemporaries agree on this: the usurer does not lend the debtor anything that belongs to him, but only the time that belongs to God. Thus, he may not profit from lending other people ’ s property (Le Goff 1988: 40). As clear as the ecclesiastical prohibition of usurious interest may have been until the 13th century, this firmly established worldview was thoroughly shaken with the invention of purgatory, insofar as it opened up for the first time the possibility of buying oneself free of one ’ s sins by paying a sum of money determined by the clergy to be suitable so that the soul would jump out of purgatory. Without a doubt, Le Goff is to be agreed with when he says: The hope of escaping the hall allowed the usurer to drive the economy and society of the 13th century on their way to capitalism (ibid.: 97). But it is also undeniable that the ecclesiastical liberalization of monetary transactions and, in its wake, the rampant sale of indulgences by the Roman Church were among the sources of the Reformation, just as, in turn, it took only a few theological quibbles for the spirit of pragmatism to unfold from Calvinism. 1.2 Order and chaos: money, value, and language If we place the theological-cultural-historical discussion of the previous section in a more general framework, it becomes apparent quite quickly that money is a particular form of expression that people use to communicate about values and the relations between values. Because of a whole series of apparent homologies, ranging from the nature of primary 92 Money as a sign: Georg Simmel, Kurt Singer, and Karl Bühler (1995) elementarisation to the organization of human exchange relations to their universality, parallels between language and money have therefore been drawn early on. Thus, already Adam Müller (1816) calls money “ a kind of language ” and Foucault (1977: 112) emphasizes that Turgot drew the first systematic parallel between money and words in his, ‘ etymology ’ article for the Encyclopedia (which, however, is not true! ). Since then, numerous works have addressed the relationship between language and money. In the present context, they should concern us only to the extent that they shed light on the semioticity of the two exchange systems. H. Walter Schmitz (1986) and Marcelo Dascal (1987), citing Quintilian, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, de Bonald, South, Trench, and Bréal, have pointed out that the analogy of word and coin is based on a much older tradition than Foucault supposed. The controversy regarding the admissibility and epistemological fruitfulness of paralleling money and language is between, on the one hand, Chartalists, who want to derive the value of money from the authority of the state, which Georg Friedrich Knapp put into a pointed and definitive form at the beginning of our century in his much-discussed Staatliche Theorie des Geldes (Knapp 1908), and, on the other hand, conventionalists, who, in determining the meaning of linguistic signs, take recourse to clear and precise definitions (cf. Dascal 1987: 11). For the tertium comparationis of money and language, in Tönnies as well as in de Saussure the concept of value is used, so that words appear in Tönnies as “ signs of objects as ideas ” and money as “ signs of objects as values ” (Tönnies, cf. Schmitz 1986: 144). Provided that signs express a social will under the aforementioned premise, a perfect analogy of language and money would be set in motion (cf. Schmitz 1986: 146). Ferdinand de Saussure, in his discussion of the concept of value, made a direct analogy between linguistics and political economy, which seemed to him to be admissible insofar as both sciences are concerned with the establishment of a system that permits the comparison of dissimilar things: Labor and wages on the one hand, and signifier and signified on the other. To compare dissimilar things, de Saussure resorted to the relation of ‘ simile: dissimile ’ which is equally fruitful in value and sign theory. Literally, de Saussure states: To answer this question, we want to state first that, outside of language, all values are governed by this principle. They are always formed: 1. by something dissimilar, which can be exchanged for that whose value is to be determined; 2. by similar things, which can be compared with that whose value is in question. These two factors are necessary for the existence of a value. Thus, to determine the value of a five-mark piece, one must know: 1. that it can be exchanged for a certain quantity of another thing, e. g., bread; 2. that one can compare it with a similar value of the same system, e. g., a one-mark piece, or with a coin of another system, e. g., a franc (Saussure 1967: 137). Ferruccio Rossi-Landi has taken the semiotic homologisation of linguistics and political economy a bit further, since, based on the observation that words and messages do not occur in the natural environment, he considers it justified to conclude that they are products of human labor (cf. Rossi-Landi 1983: 36). On this premise, he states: Like the other products of human work, words, expressions, and messages have a use value or utility insofar as they satisfy needs, in this case, the basic needs for expression and communication with all the changing stratification that have historically grown up around them (ibid.: 50), and he continues: Money as a sign: Georg Simmel, Kurt Singer, and Karl Bühler (1995) 93 We could argue from this that the field of linguistic value corresponds entirely to that of meaning or, somewhat more concretely, that ‘ having a value ’ is the same as ‘ having a meaning ’ (that ‘ being worth something is the same as ‘ meaning-something ” ) (ibid.). Rossi-Landi ’ s resolute equation of ‘ having a value ’ and ‘ having a meaning ’ is countered by weighty arguments, just as the analogization of language and money must not pass without comment: As true and important as it is to liberate language from the odium of its supposed naturalness and to integrate it dialectically into the process of social action, it would be disastrous to let language appear as the product of a linguistic total worker who generates linguistic surplus value because this would ultimately imply a reversal to a pre-critical, unhistorical thinking about language, in which a group of beings not yet gifted with language invented language in much the same way that money was invented to enable a higher form of sign traffic in a pre-existing process of social, religious interaction. Citing Victoria Lady Welby, Walter Schmitz has assembled many concerns about bringing language and money too close together that are very useful in the present context: Unlike words, coins are not arranged according to stylistic, aesthetic, or rhetorical considerations; complexions cannot be formed from them; they cannot be abbreviated and do not consist of units which, like speech sounds, could be modified in sound and writing; coins lack the variety of varying associations of words among different persons and the ability to be mutually interchangeable, often individually, despite ‘ external ’ dissimilarity; Coins of a class are all objects of the same value, but words of a class are not; coins are signs of a standard unit of measurement, words are not; finally, there is no equivalent in money to the possibility of changing the meaning of words by warmth or coldness of tone, by crying, serious, or smiling face, or by underlining or grass printing (Welby 1901: 195; cit. after Schmitz 1986: 149). Pertti Ahonen adds the following point to the list of differences between language and money: Language is not predominantly quantitative, quantifying, and quantifiable like money. The reciprocal convertibility of the linguistic and social values conveyed by different natural languages is as complete as the convertibility of the monetary values carried by different monies. Although, the convertibility of monetary values is not complete even in the case of single money (Ahonen 1989: 6). Another objection to any far-reaching assimilation of the concepts of sign and money, to which Walter Schmitz again draws attention, can be derived from considerations of Karl Bühler and Georg Simmel, which I will discuss in more detail in the following: while the concrete word is to be regarded sematologically as a “ sign thing, ” money remains attached to goods, however much it may approach sign things in its paper form (cf. Schmitz 1986: 154): Correspondingly, Simmel had spoken out against the complete loss of the “ substantial counter value ” of money and the complete dissolution in its symbolic value, “ because with the absolute completion of this development, the functional and symbolic character of money would also lose its hold and its purposeful meaning ” (Simmel 1920: 149), which manifests itself vividly in the “ gold illusion ” alias “ cover delusion ” that is still rampant today (cf., e. g., Schmolders 1966: 221). The many concerns against a too far-reaching constriction of language and money make it advisable to renounce this kind of parallelization and instead look for cultural-semiotic 94 Money as a sign: Georg Simmel, Kurt Singer, and Karl Bühler (1995) criteria suitable for the determination of money as a sign that can pass muster in a critical examination. 2.0 Simmel, Singer, and Bühler on Money as a Sign It may seem a little arbitrary to bring together the cultural philosopher, and social scientist Georg Simmel (1858 - 1918), the national economist, Plato specialist, and Japanese expert Kurt Singer (1886 - 1963), and the linguistic psychologist Karl Bühler (1879 - 1963) in a comparative consideration of money as a sign, but several circumstances speak in favor of making this bold comparison. First and foremost, we have biographical motives: Kurt Singer, after all, studied for eight semesters with Simmel in Berlin, attended his Privatissime, and noted in his “ Abriss eines Lebenslaufes ” that it was “ Simmel ’ s Philosophie des Geldes (1900) that became my bridge to the theory of money ” (NL Kurt Singer: CH 1: 2). For the close relationship between Georg Simmel and Kurt Singer, it is probably also quite revealing that the two of them, accompanied by Walther Rathenau, visited the literary salon of Sabine Lepsius, which Stefan George, who was admired by Simmel and Singer, also occasionally frequented. For the time being, there is no useful data available on the comparably close relations between Karl Bühler and the other two, but this cannot be particularly surprising due to the difficult estate situation in all three cases 1 . Hence, in the present case, we have to rely on some circumstantial evidence and conjecture. Bühler may have become acquainted with the work of Georg Simmel during his time in Berlin as a research assistant to Carl Stumpf, which I would like to deduce from the simple fact that Simmel was the talk of the town in Berlin academic circles. That Bühler carefully studied Simmel ’ s Philosophy of Money is evident from several verbatim quotations scattered throughout Bühler ’ s published and unpublished work. Finally, one may assume bona fide that Bühler must not have missed the publication of Singer ’ s Hamburg habilitation thesis Das Geld als Zeichen (Money as a Sign) (Singer 1920) in his Jenenser publishing house Fischer. Another line of connection between the three scholars is Simmel ’ s student Ernst Cassirer, who was active in Hamburg at the same time as Singer. The cultural philosopher and semiotician Cassirer authored a decisive expert opinion that led to Singer being awarded the Walther Rathenau Prize. It can be assumed that Kurt Singer, keenly interested in relevant problems, participated at least passively in the German Society for Psychology Language Day organized by Karl Bühler in Hamburg, at which Ernst Cassirer was one of the speakers. Apart from the biographical and literary points of contact, however, it is above all the content-related aspects that suggest a comparison between Simmel, Singer, and Bühler. The works of Simmel, Singer, and Bühler stand out from the flood of money-theoretical studies of the time insofar as, in contrast to all other works, they approach the problem of money from a sign-theoretical perspective and in their semiotic studies aimed less or not at all at solving money-theoretical problems, but rather used the problem of money paradigma- 1 Large parts of Georg Simmel ’ s, Kurt Singer ’ s, and Karl Bühler ’ s estates have been lost and could not be determined until today despite intensive research. Money as a sign: Georg Simmel, Kurt Singer, and Karl Bühler (1995) 95 tically for their cultural-semiotic interests, which Simmel explained at the beginning of his Philosophy of Money: No line of these investigations is meant in national economic terms. The phenomena of valuations and purchase, of exchange and means of exchange, of forms of production and assets, which the national economy considers from one point of view, are here considered from another. [ … ] The first (part of the book) is intended to make it possible to understand the essence of money from the conditions and relations of general life, and the other, conversely, the essence and formation of the latter from the effectiveness of money (Simmel 1900: VIf). In accordance with this claim and intention, I will not undertake a - presumptuous - reconstruction of the complete works of the three theorists under discussion here but will limit myself to the treatment of the individual, albeit essential, moments that are suitable for sketching cultural semiotics of money, whereby I expressly take up Simmel ’ s position “ that one fixes the outlines, forms, and goals of a science out of the abundance of existing sciences and preserved theories before one goes to the actual construction of the same ” (Simmel 1890: 2), a position that Karl Bühler also advocated almost verbatim (cf. Bühler 1934: 21 f.). 2.1 Georg Simmel: Interactions In his Philosophy of Money, which I would have called Cultural Semiotics of Money, Georg Simmel provides convincing evidence that money represents the hidden object of modernity. Simmel arrives at this opinion because he recognizes money as a measure of value and a universal medium of exchange and identifies a significance that goes far beyond its economic function. Modern society is a money society not only because its economic transactions are based on money, but because the modern spirit finds its most perfect expression in money (cf. Frankel 1979: 20). Aldo Haesler (Kintzele 1993: 236) attributes the fact that money could become the perfect expression of modernity to a monetary Copernican revolution: “ Money no longer serves exchange transactions, but these serve money. ” This provocative formulation leads us to the semiotic roots of Simmel ’ s approach. Simmel sees the specificity of the economy as a special form of traffic and behavior “ not both in the fact that it exchanges values and that it exchanges values ” (Simmel 1900: 31 f.). Unlike Rossi-Landi, however, Simmel does not determine a value as a static property of an object, but rather derives the concept of value from the exchange relationship that two economic subjects enter into in giving up a sacrifice and pocketing a profit (cf. ibid.: 48 f.; cf. also: Pohlmann 1987: 74 f.): “ No matter how carefully one examines an object for its determinations, one will not find the economic value, since this consists exclusively in the reciprocal relationship that is established between several objects based on these determinations, each one conditioning the other and giving it back the meaning it receives from it ” (Simmel 1900: 61). Simmel ’ s concept of interaction, which not only plays a prominent role in the Philosophy of Money but in my opinion represents the decisive pivot of the entire approach, was originally developed as a counter-opinion to a monocausal view of history and society of historical materialism (cf. Becker 1971: 6), as Simmel explains his basic intention in the preface to his Philosophy of Money: 96 Money as a sign: Georg Simmel, Kurt Singer, and Karl Bühler (1995) In methodological terms, this basic intention can be expressed as follows: to build a floor under historical materialism in such a way that the inclusion of economic life in the causes of spiritual culture preserved its explanatory value, but those very economic forms themselves are recognized as the result of deeper valuations and currents of psychological, even metaphysical presuppositions (Simmel 1900: X), He must have been well aware that lowering the semiotic foundations transported by the concept of interaction did not fortify historical materialism, but rather turned it upside down, to use a not entirely unencumbered expression. Simmel, however, does not dwell long on this certainly not insignificant controversy, but draws his first conclusions from the insight that all social life is interaction: Since Simmel, from the perspective of his interaction concept, does not understand ‘ society ’ as a ‘ uniformly fixed ’ but as a ‘ gradual concept, ’ he consequently cannot let the process of cognition begin with it (cf. Hubner-Funk 1982: 75); instead, he refers back to the double category of “ I and Thou ” 2 , which had already been laid down in his Kant dissertation. the interrelation of which seems to him to be a suitable basis for the constitution of society, to which Friedrich Tenbruck notes: Simmel starts from the following conviction: ‘ The insight that man in his whole being and all his expressions is determined by the fact that he lives in interactions with other people - must, however, lead to a new way of looking at all so-called humanities. ( … ) We now believe in understanding the historical phenomena from the interaction and the cooperation of the individuals, from the summation and sublimation of innumerable individual amounts, and from the embodiment of the social energies in entities that stand and develop beyond the individual (Tenbruck 1958: 594). But suppose it is true that society must always be understood as the specific interrelation of exchanging subjects. In that case, we must systematically consider that interrelation always has a specific form, which is why the concept of society that follows the interrelation can always only be thought of as formed. If the respective specific interaction is to be considered a form of socialization, we must immediately ask about the historical expression of this relation. Simmel gives an unmistakable answer to this question, which is why I would like to let him speak at length: 2 If, in an area as central to the social sciences as the question of the constitution of “ I ” and “ Thou ” , community and society, a certain terminological and methodological relationship seems to be obvious, this does not necessarily indicate a theoretical dependence of the authors concerned. In the case of Georg Simmel and George Herbert Mead, however, things might be somewhat different, because in the interpretation of Mead ’ s social psychology, I think, the fact that Mead had come to Berlin via Leipzig, where he had listened to W. Wundt, to study with Dilthey and even to write a dissertation on Kant ’ s concept of space, has not yet been properly appreciated. If I put myself rightly in the mindset of an American student who had come to Berlin to study with one of Berlin ’ s best-known philosophers, it will be fair to assume (was not lost on this student) that Dilthey and Simmel were in constant personal contact and conflict, so it would stand to reason that Mead took note of Simmel ’ s works, especially since there were not that many other significant social scientists at the time and in the immediate vicinity who could have diverted his attention. In the absence of comprehensive evidence of Mead ’ s familiarity with Simmel ’ s thought, I must content myself for the time being with the albeit essential reference that George Mead reviewed Georg Simmel ’ s Philosophy of Money in 1900/ 01 in the Journal of Political Economy. Hans Joas, the editor of Mead ’ s Gesammelte Aufsätze, notes that this review was obviously limited, because of the place of printing, to the question of the significance of Simmel ’ s work for national economics (cf. Joas 1980: 41). Money as a sign: Georg Simmel, Kurt Singer, and Karl Bühler (1995) 97 As a visible object, it (the money) is the body with which the economic value abstracted from the valuable objects themselves has clothed itself, comparable to the word, which is an acousticphysiological occurrence but has its whole meaning for us only in the inner conception it carries or symbolizes. If now the economic value of the objects consists in the mutual relation, which they, as exchangeable, enter, then the money is therefore the expression of this relation, which has reached independence; it is the representation of the abstract asset, in that out of the economic relation, i. e., the exchangeability of the objects, the fact of this relation is differentiated and gains a conceptual - and for its part tied to a visible symbol - existence in relation to those objects (Simmel 1900: 87). Once money has taken over the role of the expressive function of social interrelations, the “ absolute character of the movement of the world ” (ibid.: 583) is not invalidated, but on the contrary, underlined: Quite in the sense in which for Simmel there can be no completed system of cognition, but always only an incomplete process of cognition (cf. Becker 1971: 73), which the American semiotician Peirce had certainly subscribed to in this form, money is designed to be passed on again and again and to anticipate new, higher forms of social movement. Günter Schmölders (1966: 35) succinctly states that the development towards ever higher abstraction in value and money thinking is a basic feature of all cultural history, which I have discussed elsewhere under the term ‘ Distortion ’ (Verzeichnung) (cf. Eschbach 1989), and Simmel explains: This is an increasing spiritualization of money. The essence of the spirit is to preserve unity to the multiplicity. In the sensual reality, everything is side by side, in the spirit alone there is a togetherness. Using the concept, and its characteristics, employing its judgment, subject, and predicate enter into a unity to which there is no analogy in the immediacy of the tangible. [ … ] That is why money, the abstraction of interaction, can only find a symbol in everything spatialsubstantial because the sensual juxtaposition of the same contradicts its essence. Only in the mail, in which the substance recedes, money becomes real money, i. e., that real interrelation and point of unity of interacting value elements, which can only be the act of the spirit (Simmel 1900: 190). But if money is to be addressed in progressive abstraction as a “ social function that has become substance, ” as Rammstedt (Kintzele 1993: 30) formulates, and if with money the “ function of exchange ” is “ crystallized into an entity that exists for itself ” (ibid.), then money replaces interaction, so that Simmel ’ s analysis of human exchange relations boils down to the punch line that money as a symbolization of all exchange relations in modernity has taken over the role of a symbol of all valuations (cf. Köhnke in Kintzele 1993: 152), which is why today a critique of the sign would no longer be called for, but a critique of political economy. 2.2 Kurt Singer: Validity As far as I know, Kurt Singer was the first German scientist to undertake a semiotic investigation at a German university. Singer ’ s habilitation thesis, published in 1920 under the title Das Geld als Zeichen (Money as a Sign), argues, unlike Simmel ’ s philosophy of money, for long stretches quite national economic, but since he developed his moneytheoretical investigations based on a semiotic methodology that differs from and complements Simmel ’ s considerations in certain respects, it is certainly helpful to pay some attention to Singer ’ s approach. To properly assess Singer ’ s approach from the outset, it is far from sufficient to recall the beginnings of his studies with Simmel; of at least equal importance for Kurt Singer would be 98 Money as a sign: Georg Simmel, Kurt Singer, and Karl Bühler (1995) Die Staatliche Theorie des Geldes (The State Theory of Money) by Georg Friedrich Knapp, to whom Singer went with a recommendation from Gustav Schmoller after his studies still in Strasbourg. How deeply Singer was impressed by Knapp ’ s theory of money is expressed in his “ Abriss eines Lebenslaufs ” (Outline of a resume) mentioned earlier: Since the publication of Georg Friedrich Knapp ’ s Die Staatliche Theorie des Geldes (1905), it was clear to me that I had to devote my best professional energies for quite some time to the interpretation, defense, and further education of the then almost completely unrecognized work (NL Kurt Singer: CII 1: 2). After his doctorate, in which he dealt with the problems of Indian monetary reform, Singer worked as an assistant to the Hamburg banker Friedrich Bendixen, who maintained a longstanding intensive correspondence with Knapp on the latter ’ s theory of money. In this context, it remains to mention that Kurt Singer edited the correspondence between Bendixen and Knapp on the state theory of money from his Australian exile in the 1950s through the mediation of the first German president, Theodor Heuss (cf. Singer 1958), who was married to Elli Heuss-Knapp, the daughter of Singer ’ s doctoral supervisor. Singer, like Simmel, starts from the premise that money arose from the needs of exchange, which is why a theory of money must be grounded in a theory of exchange (cf. Singer 1920: 3). Singer ’ s answer to the question of the specificity of human exchange, however, does not aim at an interdependence theory of human interactions as in Simmel, but strictly chartalistically at the validity of a certain order of the system of payments, as reflected, for example, in paragraph 1 of the Münzgesetz of 1873: “ The gold mark applies in the German Reich. ” According to this concept of validity, the gold mark would be nothing more than a name for that quantity of metal that is contained in cash in accordance with the applicable coinage: Payment transactions then mean the handing over of goods in exchange for certain quantities of metal and the measurement of the value of the goods against the value of the currency (ibid.: 63). This understanding of money, which is oriented toward the concept of validity, is plausible only under the condition that the monetary constitution guarantees the redemption of every valid means of payment (i. e., coins and banknotes) in the form of monetary metal, as was the case in Germany until the beginning of the First World War. With the replacement of the gold currency, a new explanation must be sought as to how even irredeemable means of payment can fulfil their monetary function if they do not guarantee to possess a certain quantity of gold. This question, which was already discussed during the First World War and even more intensively at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, is solved by Singer in the following way: The concept of money presupposes the concept of the unit of value and the concept of the community of payment and at the same time the recognition of the basic fact that money is a socialstate, supra-individual institution: a thing that does not depend on the will of the individual, but is regulated by groups or institutions, a thing in the use of which the individual is dependent on the norms and measures of a somehow defined totality, which need not necessarily take the form of an association, but which has regularly taken on the form of one in recent centuries (ibid.: 65 f.). Means of payment as bearers of value units are not selected because they fulfill some human need with material value, but because they are suitable for use in payment transactions: Money as a sign: Georg Simmel, Kurt Singer, and Karl Bühler (1995) 99 Money is not regarded by the payer as useful for use, but as one suitable for payment: not as the bearer of a value, but as the embodiment of a validity. [ … ] Pieces whose validity is established not by weighing but by proclamation we call chartal means of payment, charto (mark) meaning a movable shaped thing which is conceived by the legal system as carrying a certain meaning (ibid.: 72 f.). In an important historical aside, Singer points out that Plato, in the second book of the Politeia, referred to money as a “ symbollon ” and always understood it to mean something concrete that represented something else, “ which is not to be considered a real value in itself, but for which a real value is exchanged ” (ibid.: 78). In this context, we should also briefly recall Freyer ’ s cultural semiotics, whose Theorie des objektiven Geistes (Freyer 1928) had a lasting influence not only on Büher. Freyer described signs as a form of objective mind whose meaning content essentially points beyond itself, i. e., is not centrically but vectorially structured. This means that signs do not derive their sense from themselves, but through their directedness towards other persons, objects, facts, or behavioral expectations (cf. Heinemann 1969: 49). The historical reference to Plato makes it unmistakably clear why Singer called his treatise Das Geld als Zeichen, for his theory of money is a pragmatic theory of the use of monetary signs in a system of means of payment whose validity owes itself to a norm or set of the state or the community: The value, i. e., the measure of economic significance that a monetary sign has for the economic agent, is based on the ability of the monetary sign to serve for the fulfillment of obligations in the amount of the validity conferred on it by proclamation - and therefore also to be usable for the purchase of goods. The so-called ‘ value of money ’ is nothing but the value of the goods that can be bought for it; it is a reflex phenomenon. One does not accept money when selling goods because it supposedly has exchange value, ’ but money has value for the individual because he can buy goods with it (Singer 1920: 89). Without any doubt, it would be conceivable to exchange goods for goods in direct transactions without any intermediary function of money, as we know from historical examples of the economy in kind as well as from current traps in which the intermediaries, which have become insecure, are dispensed with in times of hyperinflation. The temporary renunciation of the intermediary services of money does not, however, disprove its actual purpose, which Aristotle already saw in making the values of things comparable to each other, measurable against each other, which could not be completely exchanged without a standard of value in force, since things are incomparable in themselves and are only made commensurable for exchange through the mediating activity of money, so that Singer can claim that it is only through money, valid based on a state norm, that the community of exchangers is made possible in the true sense (cf. ibid.: 187). 2.3 Karl Bühler: Imprint Unlike Georg Simmel and Kurt Singer, Karl Bühler has only occasionally and marginally expressed special sematological considerations on the problem of money, if one disregards the unpublished text “ Das Geld als Zeichen ” (Money as a Sign), which was written as a lecture manuscript while in exile in America. However, since Bühler ’ s considerations touch on an aspect that seems suitable for bringing about a sematological differentiation of “ trafficked things ” such as brand names, coins, and words, the discussion of Bühler ’ s approach undoubtedly belongs in the present context. 100 Money as a sign: Georg Simmel, Kurt Singer, and Karl Bühler (1995) The manufacturers of cigarettes, detergents, chocolate, soft drinks, cars, etc. provide their products with trademarks that they have legally protected and which at least fulfill the double function of guaranteeing a constant standard of quality ( “ Persil remains Persil ” ) and which secondly - despite the ban on comparative advertising in Germany - are supposed to ensure differentiation from competing products and, if possible, semantically more or less dressed up superiority over the competing products ( “ The new Astra. There are already enough half-measures. ” “ That only works with Malaysia Airlines. ” “ The lead is growing: WirtschaftsWoche ” ). The consistent quality of brand products is carefully monitored and constantly subjected to strict controls, for which white-clad experts are preferably brought forward to assure seamless laboratory monitoring; occasionally, well-known company owners also appear to vouch for the house brand with their “ good names ” . In the case of coins and banknotes, such quality control does not take place in everyday transactions to the same extent as for branded articles; rather, in ordinary business transactions, users essentially rely on the agreement that “ a dollar is a dollar, ” although, in the age of the color photocopier, one increasingly encounters equipment in gas stations, exchange offices and banks that makes it possible to check authenticity quickly and discreetly. However, whether a freshly minted coin, a freshly printed banknote, or a banknote showing clear signs of use, is placed on the counter does not change the nominal market value. Whereas branded articles come with quality guarantees and coins and banknotes, beyond the unconcerned act of purchase, have an imprint of the mint and - depending on the attractiveness of the currency - more or less refined signaling (in German banknotes, for instance, the watermark, the silver stripe, and the numbering), in linguistic traffic one may well afford a phonematically poorly minted word coin if the recipient can only guess what this poorly minted word coin is supposed to mean. Bühler points out that in case of doubt, the recipient makes a “ correct ” coinage as a form of protection from misunderstandings or to instruct the speaker, “ as all language teachers do professionally towards their students ” (Bühler 1934: 61). Generalizing from this, Bühler states: It is the phonematic imprint on the sound image of a word, to which, comparable to the trademark and the coinage, a traffic convention is attached! (ibid.). After pointing out the similarities of trafficked things, however, it is a matter of working out the special features “ to fully grasp the peculiarity of the linguistic traffic signs ” (ibid.). In broad agreement with Simmel and Singer, Bühler emphasizes the special semiological nature of the language. In contrast, regardless of its historical manifestation (coin, banknote, bill of exchange, check, check card), money may approach signs asymptotically, but ultimately remains attached to goods. This sematological difference between word and coin has already been mentioned repeatedly, but must now be explicitly stated: while money owes itself to a more or less static, dyadic substitution relation, in which one material represents another, i. e., a certain quantity of goods and this substitution relation is also reversible if necessary, the linguistic sign arises from a dynamic, triadic representation relation, in which a material, phonematically imprinted something at the sound image, establishes an interpretation-requiring and irreversible relation between a signified object and its meaning. Elsewhere, Bühler writes: Money as a sign: Georg Simmel, Kurt Singer, and Karl Bühler (1995) 101 For now, however, the sign-like, used in intersubjective intercourse, can be characterized as an orientation device of community life (Bühler 1934: 48). As elementary as this distinction between the material-bound semiosis of money and the material-debound semiosis of language may be, it has been criminally disregarded repeatedly. It has provoked all kinds of “ material fallacy, ” which Bühler never tires of criticizing. As self-evident as it should be that one cannot develop linguistics from physical and physiological data, but that linguistics must constitute the core of a general sematology (cf. ibid.: 9), it should also be clear in the opposite sense that a well-understood causal view is also unavoidable in the overall framework of linguistic analysis: Signs presuppose the psychophysical systems of humankind. Such systems are used as detectors. Otherwise, signs do not become manifest in world events. [ … ] In chemistry, the sign factor is omitted for the scientific determination of the processes; in linguistics, however, it is indispensable, with it the principle of abstract relevance (ibid.: 273). 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