The Double Meaning of Money

Money’s Symbolic Dualism

Analyzing the significance and implications of money’s symbolic dualism requires first defining what a symbol is and how symbols work. To do so, I rely on Schutz’s (1962) social phenomenological account of symbols. Schutz (1962:296) uses Husserl’s concept of “appresentation” as the vantage point for his analysis of symbols: “[B]y appresentation, we experience intuitively something as indicating or depicting significantly something else.” In other words, appresentation is a form of pairing or coupling association—a form of “passive synthesis” of two (or more) elements (Schutz 1962:294–96). Through such a pairing, the apprehension of one element of a previously constituted pair (be it an object, fact, or event) “wakens” or “calls forth” the other element of the pair—the appresented element (Schutz 1962:297). For example, a rectangular piece of cloth with a distinctive color pattern (i.e., a flag) appresents “the nation.”

Appresentation can take a variety of forms (e.g., marks, indications, signs), ³ but symbols are a unique form of appresentation. In other forms of appresentation, both elements of the pairing association pertain to the paramount reality of everyday life. In the case of symbols, the link is between an object, fact, or event within the reality of everyday life and ideas that transcend our experience of everyday life (Schutz 1962:331–32, 343). More specifically, according to Schutz (1962:329–31), in everyday life, we experience nature and society as transcending our perceptible world. We understand the open, indeed infinite, horizons of nature and society in terms of an order of things and events, and we render this order, which, as claimed, transcends our experience of everyday life, analogous to familiar phenomena within it. Symbols are the vehicles of this analogical apprehending.

Consider, for example, religious, scientific, or artistic symbols. Such symbols appresent ideas about things and events that transcend the reality of everyday life. The worlds of religion, science, and art stimulate our interest in significantly different ways—indeed, for this reason Schutz (1945, ⁴ 1962:294) goes so far as to call such worlds “multiple realities” ⁵ —but all of them can only be experienced in symbolic appresentation.

The same applies to “[s]ocial collectivities and institutionalized relations” (Schutz 1962:353). These constructs of commonsense thinking belong to an order of reality that transcends the paramount reality of everyday life. Put differently, they refer to ideas about social connections that have their reality beyond the trajectories of time, space, and social distance that characterize the actual social situations we experience day to day. ⁶ “For this very reason,” Schutz (1962:353) explains, “we can apprehend them only symbolically; but the symbols appresenting them themselves pertain to the paramount reality and motivate our actions within it.”

Thus, in the example of the symbol of a flag, the rectangular piece of colorful cloth is a physical and visible element within the paramount reality of the situation in which it is hoisted. But the social collectivity of “the nation” transcends our experience of this specific situation. In a similar way, the time spent doing something enjoyable together may be a symbol of “our friendship”; the institutionalized relation of “our friendship” is also a construct of commonsense thinking that transcends the paramount reality of the specific enjoyable situation (see Schutz 1962:353–54).

Moreover, although the construct of the nation transcends the flag-hoisting situation and the construct of our friendship transcends the enjoyable situation, both constructs are reaffirmed and rendered real, indeed present, through such situations. Referring to the famous Thomas theorem, wherein “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas 1928:572, cited in Schutz 1962:348), Schutz (1962:349) maintains that if an appresentational reference is part of a group’s socially approved knowledge, then the appresented part of the appresentational pair is “believed beyond question to be in its typicality an element of the world taken for granted.” In other words, the nation or our friendship would likely be experienced by the flag-hoisting group or by the two having fun together as concretely real components of these situations.

Now let us return to money. In the case of money’s symbolic dualism, money appresents two distinct sets of constructs about social relationships: an interpersonal set and an impersonal set. The interpersonal set, thoroughly demonstrated by Zelizer, pertains to the particular content and form of the relationship through which it flows, namely, the obligations and commitments of those who take part in the relationship and their role differentiations, status distinctions, and dependencies (e.g., a wife and a husband, a parent and a child, a donor and a recipient, an employee and an employer, and other institutionalized relational distinctions). The specific kind of money flows (e.g., money earmarked as an allowance, wage, donation) ⁷ symbolizes and helps define these structural differentiations and dependencies.

The second set of constructs concerns impersonality: Money is “a language” of impersonal instrumentality, calculatedness, indifference, and so forth. Even as money is relationally earmarked—even as it is made into multiple “monies” appresenting particular relational contents and forms—its impersonal, “general potentiality” (or, I would argue, the sense of its general potentiality) persists, representing a possibility for “disearmarking” (Steiner 2009:100, emphasis in original). In other words, alongside money’s interpersonally attuned, “particularizing markers” (Zelizer 2000a:386), the broad “language of money” still appresentationally references relations of impersonality and indifference.

In their account of social discourses of money, Leyshon and Thrift (1997:31) maintain that “traditions of judgement” of money broadly coalesce into discourses of suspicion or liberation. ⁸ This account is relevant here because it illuminates how the impersonal set of constructs the language of money appresents can impinge on the interpersonal set. Namely, the language of money can incite suspicions about the commitments and obligations of partners in an interpersonal relationship while also feeding imaginaries of liberation from relational dependencies, that is, a sense money can “set one free.” Money, then, has the potential to arouse suspicion toward the very relational content it helps define and to incite awareness about the possible dissolution of the very structural forms it helps constitute. To be sure, I am not arguing that money necessarily leads to such dissolutions but, rather, that money’s symbolic dualism is likely to repeatedly surface their potentiality—to bring such dissolutions to mind.

This account can explain why, as Zelizer (1985:164) reports in Pricing the Priceless Child, rising compensations for the death of children have historically been entangled with the suspicion of “a commercialization of grief”; why in the early twentieth century, the practice of a wife’s “allowance” incited both (masculine) fears and (feminine) hopes of women’s liberation from a husband’s financial control (Zelizer 1997:51–53); or why, ultimately, “[i]ntimacy creates all sorts of dilemmas: is this person a gold digger or an intimate friend? Is this a caring relation or exploitation?” (Zelizer 2005:306–307). These and other descriptions appearing in Zelizer’s studies not only demonstrate her primary argument about the relational construction of multiple, personal monies, but they also assert the durability of the broad cultural constructs that construe money as impersonal, fungible, uniform, and so on—as a cause for interpersonal suspicion and as a force of liberation from relational dependencies.

Money is, of course, not unique in appresenting seemingly discordant constructs. Returning to the national flag, Ram (2004:24) observes that it is at once a symbol of local uniqueness (the colors, the tokens) and global uniformity (using a flag to convey collective identity and uniqueness). Similarly, denim jeans, report Miller and Woodward (2011:17), are often emblematic of personal singularity and individuality while also expressing a general citizenship of the world. Indeed, many symbols interlink seemingly discordant constructs and render them a unified, albeit at times tenuous, whole.

However, in the case of money’s symbolic dualism, a unity of this sort is unlikely because one set of constructs, the impersonal set, undermines the essential reliability of the other, the interpersonal set. In other words, the issue is not merely one of discordance but the subversion of plausibility. Money’s symbolic dualism evokes particular relational contents and forms and also the vulnerability and unreliability of any particular relational content and form; it references a generic undermining of what it helps to define as specific.

Thus, money’s symbolic dualism subverts the solidity of interpersonal meanings as common sense, namely, as a taken-for-granted knowledge that is accepted as “unquestionably plausible” as long as no counterevidence appears (Schutz 1962:326–27). Instead, money’s symbolic dualism, I argue, consistently makes the counterevidence—or, more precisely, the potentiality of counterevidence—felt. Its symbolic dualism indicates that particular, interpersonal relationships carry, in their open horizon of time, the potential dissolution of those meanings, which define them as personal and particular. ⁹ This symbolic dualism, then, constitutes a risk of lost interpersonal meanings.

This risk of lost meanings should not be confused with the uncertainties that may be evoked by other forms of appresentation. Consider the case of “signs”: objects, facts, or events that appresent to an interpreter the “cogitations” (feelings, volitions, emotions, etc.) of another (Schutz 1962:319). In a late-night argument between a married couple, one partner may be uncertain if the other’s nod is a sign of genuine understanding or a veneer of understanding strategically designed to end the argument and allow them both to go to sleep. The sign (i.e., the nod) yields an interpretive uncertainty that might be consequential. Now imagine the couple is not arguing but rather discussing the investment of a sum of money one of them has suddenly inherited. The couple’s monetary investment in a joint future symbolizes their marital commitment, but according to my argument, this monetary investment will also symbolically evoke an awareness of the possible dissolution of their commitment—of a possible shift in money’s meaning. Indeed, it will symbolically evoke such an awareness even if no signs of dissolution intentions are apprehended as part of the experience of the actual situation. In other words, the relational effects of the symbol of money are less dependent on the visible existence of signs; if anything, money incites an impetus to look for the signs.

One might object that this impetus is likely to be slight in the context of close relationships. More specifically, it might be argued that marriage partners are not likely to experience the full appresented weight of the impersonal set of constructs because the relational context of their marriage, including the social norms, moral dictums, and emotional scripts at play in the personal realm, render these constructs irrelevant. At best, the impersonal set of constructs would be marginal in the spouses’ streams of experience even when their monetary preoccupations are extensive.

This objection has some merit, and it is important to take account of relational context in this regard. Yet it is also important to assess this relational context in all its complexity. For example, the norms, dictums, and scripts that privilege the interpersonal side of money’s symbolic dualism are arguably never the only ones at play, even in close relationships. When money is involved, the normative sanctioning of its personalized meanings often becomes a source of concern for additional parties that influence the marriage: for example, a worried best friend or family members who insist on the need for a prenuptial agreement. These parties reinforce the weight of the impersonal set of constructs appresented by money and the importance of paying attention to them. In a similar way, a marriage may be influenced by discourse leaders in the public sphere: screenwriters, public ideologues, advertising experts, social activists, and so on. Because normative, moral, and emotional scripts relating to money crosscut interrelational and intrarelational dynamics, multiple forces potentially sustain both sets of appresented constructs.

As anthropologist Keith Hart (2007:12) puts it, “[m]oney is always personal and impersonal.” As Hart (2007:13) further notes, although Zelizer is right in arguing that people personalize money and bend it to their purposes, this personalization does not overrule the fact that in capitalist societies money also “stands for alienation, detachment, impersonal society, the outside; its origins lie beyond our control.” Indeed, arguing that “[i]t will not do to replace one pole of a dialectical pair with the other,” Hart (2007:15) seeks to tap into “[m]oney’s power of synthesis” as a crucial step in social reform. However, the analysis of money’s symbolic meanings presented here indicates that such a synthesis is unlikely: As long as money continues to stand “for alienation, detachment, impersonal society, the outside,” its double meaning will not yield a synthesis but a sensed risk that interpersonal meanings stand to be lost. In the next section, I explore the implications of this sense of risk for intersubjective and subjective experiences.

The Implications of the Risk of Lost Meanings

The risk of lost meanings has a number of interrelated implications. First, as Luhmann (1988) argues, the experience of situations as situations of risk turns action into a problem of trust. In such cases, action must be carried out “in spite of the possibility of being disappointed by the action of others” and potentially regrettable results (Luhmann 1988:97).

According to Möllering (2001:403), trust relies on a “mechanism of bracketing the unknowable,” of “suspension”: a mechanism that enables a “proverbial leap of trust” from particular interpretive bases to a state of favorable expectations. Take, for example, an economic relationship between a creditor and a debtor. In this type of relationship, the “leap of trust” needs some form of interpretive foothold from which to take off: Personal knowledge, perhaps, or a preexisting acquaintance between the two parties can aid the formation of favorable expectations. ¹⁰

Ironically, however, when the creditor and debtor are not just acquaintances but close friends, the situation is much more complex. On the one hand, loans between close friends sometimes entail unique exchange procedures resembling gifts (e.g., unspecified conditions or time of return; Lainer-Vos 2013:151), ¹¹ thus symbolizing the fact of a friendship. On the other hand, money’s symbolically evoked suspicions and imaginaries of dissolution are likely to be experienced as a threat to that which differentiates the relationship as a close friendship, that is, to the foothold itself. In other words, whereas a mere, preexisting acquaintance offers a foothold for trust in an economic transaction, close friends who engage in such a transaction are likely to feel that their relational foothold is distressed. The unique exchange procedures that differentiate this transaction as a loan between friends will reaffirm the sense that here there is much more to interpersonally lose—that much is at risk. “Leaping” will in this sense become more difficult, not less, and trust will tend to surface as a relational preoccupation.

Let us take a closer look at this example. Friends might routinely exchange meals through mutual dinner invitations, ask favors of one another, and even borrow clothes from one another, but apart from extreme situations, such exchanges will be seen as an expression of “our friendship”, albeit an expression that likely entails an obligating grammar of reciprocity (e.g., Offer 1997). A loan might resemble such exchanges in many ways, but as a consequence of money’s symbolic dualism, it is not merely “our friendship” that will be evoked but also the possibility of the dissolution of this friendship. Money’s symbolic dualism will thus uniquely implicate the relationship. Indeed, I suggest this symbolic dualism is an important cause of the tensions and trust concerns that are characteristic of monetary exchanges between individuals who are close (see examples in Wherry, Seefeldt, and Alvarez 2019). Although never the sole possible source of relational trust preoccupations, the more money matters arise and draw attention in a relationship, the more these trust preoccupations are likely to grow. ¹²

The sense of a risk of lost interpersonal meanings and the consequent preoccupations with trust have further phenomenological implications. Notably, they have the potential to constrain intersubjective understandings and experiences. To explain why this is so, I must make a small detour to once again revisit Schutz’s (1967) work, this time his work on intersubjectivity.

For Schutz (1967:163–67), intersubjectivity is based on what he refers to as “the We-relationship”: a jointly lived-through relationship where, in its pure form, “the partners are aware of each other and sympathetically participate in each other’s lives for however short a time.” In this We-relationship, partners are immersed in a “common stream of consciousness”; they “grow older together” (Schutz 1967:167, 181). This relationship might not even involve talking—the partners might, for example, merely be watching a bird in flight together (Schutz 1967:165)—but as long as they experience one another as fully subjective beings who are jointly watching the bird (“we are seeing a flying bird”), a We-relationship would be constituted. For Schutz, the We-relationship unfolds only in copresence, but as Ivana (2016:526) argues, there is a “dimension of continuity” to sharing an internal time consciousness and “growing old together.”

In all cases, a common, intersubjective world can only be constituted through the We-relationship, through such reciprocal experiences of each other as subjects. In these reciprocal experiences, Schutz (1967:170, emphasis in original) writes,

The many different mirror images of Self within Self are not therefore caught sight of one by one but are experienced as a continuum within a single experience. Within the unity of this experience I can be aware simultaneously of what is going on in my mind and in yours, living through the two series of experiences as one series—what we are experiencing together.

Hence, for each partner, the We-relationship holds the potential to expand and enrich understanding of the Other by enabling them to concretely live through the Other’s subjective meaning context.

There is, however, a question of degree. According to Schutz (1967:164), the pure We-relationship is “concretized and actualized to a greater or lesser degree and filled with content.” A crucial factor that limits the degree of actualization is reflection, especially, I would argue, apprehensive and tensed reflection. “Once we reflect upon our interaction with another, we are no longer immersed in the experience of interaction; we have switched to looking back upon it and we have broken its continuity by doing so” (Ivana 2016:520). Accordingly, “[t]he more I reflect,” writes Schutz (1967:167), “the more my partner becomes transformed into a mere object of thought.” In other words, thoughts about the relationship pull us out of the We-relationship, inhibiting our involvement in it. Reflection, particularly frequent reflection, thus segments the unified flow of experience by provoking a gaze on it from the outside. ¹³ This reflection might contribute to objectified knowledge, but as it unfolds, it also hinders genuine relatedness to the partner.

Returning to the issue of monetization, I argued that it evokes both a sensed risk of lost interpersonal meanings and preoccupations with trust. Granted that contextual variations exist, this risk and its consequent trust preoccupations are likely to denaturalize and incite frequent (and often tensed) reflections on the relationship. ¹⁴ In Schutzian terms, we might say the sensed risk and trust preoccupations continuously pull awareness out of the undivided stream of the We. Accordingly, the more that money and money management figures into an interpersonal relationship, the more the contents of the We-relationship are likely to be constrained and immersion in it hindered.

This does not imply that relationships that involve money cease to be significant or sustainable. As Zelizer (2005:34–35; see also Bandelj 2012) persuasively argues, people put effort into “defining and disciplining” relations that involve money flows and engage in the “relational work” of finding viable matches between social ties and their boundaries, economic transactions, and medias of exchange. Viable matches, Zelizer (2007:615) claims, can reduce confusion, demonstrate and enact relational agreements, reinforce mutual benefits, and identify the relationship to third parties. Relatedly, Wherry (2016:132) argues that individuals and households also engage in “relational accounting” to “organize, evaluate, justify and keep track of financial activities.” This relational accounting begins with “trans-situational” cultural codes that have a moral character, it involves ritually sanctioned meanings of events and life stages, and it entails relational work where the meanings of relationships function performatively in ways that can help maintain and repair these relationships (Wherry 2016).

Still, I argue, relational work has a limit as far as the We-relationship is concerned. Although it can help maintain and repair relationships, it cannot forge or restore the We-relationship’s unity of experience because it entails a heightened impetus for reflective awareness and effort. “It is relational work,” writes Bandelj (2012:179, emphasis in original) in her elaboration of the concept, “in the sense that it is an intentional effort or activity directed toward the production or accomplishment of a goal, even if that goal is not clearly defined from the start.” Thus, if indeed “[i]ncluding economic transactions in social relations generally magnifies the effort that people invest in defining and disciplining their relations” (Zelizer 2005:34), then the potential immersion of relational partners in the lived experience of togetherness will be commensurately weakened by the frequency and scope of such transactions.

The plethora of legal mechanisms for managing the mingling of intimate relations and economic activity (see in this regard Zelizer 2005) and the interrelated mechanisms for coping with money-related suspicions and dissolution anxieties cannot restore the We-relationship either. Consider the many legal mechanisms through which partners in a relationship seek to control each other’s monetary behavior: prenuptial agreements, contracts, guardianships, wills, and more. Such legal mechanisms seem to tackle the risk of lost meanings head-on by explicitly surfacing and coping with the possibility of interpersonal dissolutions. Consider also information-seeking mechanisms such as hiring private detectives. However much such mechanisms might help “manage” the sensed risk constituted through money’s symbolic dualism, they also keep the partners in a relationship on guard. In doing so, they actually reaffirm the sense of risk that is involved in monetization, thereby further constraining immersion in the lived experience of togetherness.

Are there ways to somehow not experience the risk of lost meanings despite money’s presence in a relationship? The next section will examine this question.

Avoiding the Risk of Lost Meanings

As Zelizer (2005) rightly argues, money extensively permeates interpersonal relationships. We lead “connected lives” (Zelizer 2005:32), and even the most intimate relations intersect with economic activity in countless ways. In other words, money is very much “in” interpersonal relationships. But, as I will argue, there do seem to be ways in which people prevent, or seek to prevent, experiences of the risk of lost meanings.

Consider secrets. According to Zelizer (1997:43), attempts to hide money or involvement with money from relational partners are a common occurrence: “[H]usbands, wives, and children often lie, deceive, or simply conceal [financial] information from each other.” Obviously, when money is hidden, its double meaning is hidden with it. Secrecy is in this sense a strategy for preventing a relational partner from experiencing the risk of lost meanings.

Of course, people hide financial information to prevent not just awareness of money but also monetary requests and expectations. In their study about lending among friends and kin, Wherry and colleagues (2019) provide examples. Focusing on low- and moderate-income individuals, Wherry and colleagues (2019) report that people who are asked for money often want to refuse but feel they cannot do so outright. Wherry and colleagues (2019:753) draw in part on Rossman’s (2014) concept of “obfuscatory relational work” ¹⁵ to describe situations in which potential lenders try to avoid awkwardness by seeking ways “to say no without saying no” or by telling “half-truths about not being able to help in the way borrowers would like.” In some cases, obfuscated requests and refusals “can take a turn for the worse,” even leading to the termination of contact (Wherry et al. 2019:765–66). Hence, once a request for monetary help exists, the requested money is “in” the relationship even if help is directly or indirectly denied.

In all cases, even if successful, secrets or “half-truths” cannot restore or enrich the contents of the We-relationship. First, the secret-keeping side of the relationship is likely to become engaged in a heightened, reflective awareness of unfolding interactions—a hypervigilance. Second, the relationship between a secret keeper and the unknowing partner cannot manifest the reciprocal recognition of subjecthood that defines the We-relationship. After all, the underlying premise of the We-relationship is that I envision the Other as able to recognize my subjectivity the same way I recognize theirs (see Ivana 2016:523). Mutual recognition is obscured if one partner seeks to lead the Other to a misrecognition. The detachment and reflective calculatedness of secrecy thus hinder immersion in the lived duration of the We, altering the nature of the connection with the Other.

Another way people might try to avoid experiencing the risk of lost meanings is through commodification. If one looks at personal or intimate relations as commodities in a market exchange between mere sellers and buyers, as “only business,” then, at face value, the risk of lost interpersonal meanings is avoided simply because there are no meanings to lose. Interpersonal meanings cannot be lost if they are declared nonexistent from the outset. Such a framing, however, is bound to take a toll on persons on both sides of the transaction.

Regarding the side of sellers, the experience of the personal as personal in many ways persists despite commodification. Selling personal services or “commodities” thus often leads to alienation and estrangement from aspects of one’s self (Hochschild 1983). In her study of a commercial surrogacy clinic in the Global South, Hochschild (2017:166–67) reveals that such services call for emotional detachment and entail inner friction, threatening the service providers’ sense of dignity and necessitating “emotional labor.” Hochschild (2017:169) concludes:

It is often the poorest among us who are forced to detach their emotions from that which they treasure—a kidney, a baby, sexual intimacy, a close relationship with children growing up in one’s native country. Their task is to encounter estrangement. Ours is to create a far more humane way to distribute the goods of this earth.

In the final line of this passage, we see the type of inner threats these transactions entail for the better-off, who are much more likely to be on the buying side of such transactions: threats to the sense of moral self-virtue.

These threats might seem small in the context of a market society. After all, such societies rest on a system of justification that serves as a kind of moral protective shield for the self-concept—albeit only a partial one (Ailon 2021; Fromm [1939] 1968). As Prasad (1999:184) argues in her study of the market for sex, “market economies are embedded in a moral system,” which enables some people to justify the commodification of the intimate by rendering it consistent with the privileged ideals of “democracy, formal economic equality, and the rights of the individual.” In these economies, “[c]ommodity exchange can therefore be valued for maintaining a democratic context between participants, that is, for treating participants as formal equals, as well as for offering freedom from the ambiguities and status manipulations of gift exchange, where participants may harbor hidden social agendas” (Prasad 1999:184–85). The customers Prasad (1999:181) interviewed indeed “praise[d] ‘market exchange’ of sex for lacking the ambiguity, status-dependence, and potential hypocrisy that they see in the ‘gift exchange’ of sex characteristic of romantic relationships.”

Yet the moral beliefs underlying this moral protective shield indicate it is crucial for such customers not to catch glimpses of subjective experiences that would contradict these beliefs: that is, glimpses of the sellers’ unwillingness, distress, or desperation, or the effort that goes into the “emotional labor” (Hochschild 1983, 2017) needed to cover up or deny such subjective experiences. In other words, the moral protective shield of those on the buying side of such transactions is arguably dependent on the solidity of preexisting typifications of the sellers as free to choose, autonomous, and unambivalent and, one might add, on the solidity of preexisting stigmatizations of these sellers as somehow deserving of their own estrangement.

But sustaining such typifications and stigmas in the context of long-term or intimate relations, commodified as these may be, is actually quite difficult. The We-relationship, the mutual experience of each other as fully subjective beings, can clearly threaten such preexisting typifications and stigmas. According to social phenomenology, even when such typifications and stigmas are deeply rooted, people are able to change or transcend them if counterevidence presents itself. The experience of not really knowing an interaction partner as much as we thought can lead us to reevaluate the knowledge about them that we had, until that moment, taken for granted (Schutz 1967). Although preexisting typifications and stigmas can hinder the We-relationship from the outset (Ivana 2016:520) ¹⁶ and buyers may accordingly become emotionally and cognitively invested in sustaining them, even the most deeply rooted typifications and stigmas are not immutable.

Of course, when a person buys a shirt or spaghetti, the potential for the mutability of preexisting typifications is limited. Indeed, in most commercial exchanges, and even in most economic interactions that are culturally modeled on the commercial exchange, institutionalized norms and cultural practices limit the potential for such mutability by limiting the opportunities for questioning what we think we know about the Other (Ailon 2020). For example, normative pressures to economize time—to limit the duration and focus of economic interactions—inhibit the potential to “watch” (Schutz 1967:117) the flow of exchange partners’ lived experiences in ways that might challenge our preexisting beliefs about them. Additionally, the institutionalized division between the private and public spheres limits opportunities to come close enough to the private lives of exchange partners to catch a glimpse of their being; to wonder what is going on in their minds or to put ourselves in their place and identify our lived experiences with theirs in ways that could challenge objectified knowledge about them (Ailon 2020; see also Schutz 1967:113–14). However, when the “commodity” is a long-term, ongoing personal service such as care or an intimate service like sex, the opportunities for glimpsing and enriching understanding of the Other’s lived experiences remain more open. Theoretically, there is much that could interrupt the seeming unquestionability of preexisting typifications of sellers as being truly free to choose, unambivalent, or, when stigmas are involved, as somehow deserving of their fates.

Here we might note a crucial nuance pertaining to the interrelation between money and the We-relationship. In the previous section, when discussing the effects of monetization on interpersonal relations, I emphasized how the contents of the We-relationship are vulnerable to erosion. Now, in the context of commodified relations, I am arguing that the We-relationship cannot be easily rent asunder. However vulnerable its contents might be, the emergence of the We-relationship is phenomenologically fundamental. All that it requires is for people to intentionally turn toward each other as fellow human beings (Schutz 1967:163–67). Because long-term, personal, or intimate exchanges offer more time and opportunity to experience the seller as a fellow human being, the We-relationship becomes a significant threat to the buyer’s underlying moral self. Moreover, because feelings such as self-respect or self-dignity are dependent on the experience of an underlying moral self (see Denzin 1984:83–85), the We-relationship becomes not only a moral but an emotional threat to buyers. Attempts to avoid the risk of lost meanings through commodification (much like the ability to avoid it through secrets and half-truths) are thus bound to entail interpersonal, moral, and emotional costs.

Looking Ahead

At face value, money is undergoing changes that hold the potential to challenge prevailing cultural notions of it as a language of impersonality and indifference and thus to disband its symbolic dualism. The digital revolution, for example, has introduced a “new sociability” of money, where, as Guseva and Rona-Tas (2017:203–204) write, “[i]n a complete break with any other form of money used in the past, digital money now has a unique photographic memory of unlimited capacity, registering the history of its movement, every transaction, and every single actor involved” (see also Hart 2007). In this digital sense, money’s personalization has deepened. Consider also the current flurry of attempts to invent alternative, local currencies and their circulation in the institutional structures that Zelizer (2011:315, 319) calls “circuits of commerce”: “[M]any of the new local currencies come out of a broader movement seeking to escape what participants commonly regard as the corrupting effects of national and global economies” (see also Dodd 2014).

The implications of these changes and innovations for money’s symbolic dualism, however, are hardly straightforward. For example, digital money is not only characterized by the personalization of transaction data but also by unintelligible complexity, abstractness, and vastness. “Digital transaction data,” Guseva and Rona-Tas (2017:207) explain, “are generated at an astonishing speed that vastly outpaces any human actor’s ability to process them.” While these transaction data enable powerful institutions and actors to monitor and control the behavior of others (Guseva and Rona-Tas 2017), the unintelligible complexity of these data arguably hinders their ability to dissolve the commonsensical association of money and impersonality. Moreover, digital money is dependent on the organizations and abstractions of the impersonal economy and is a means of linking individuals to this economy’s vast, global reaches; in these senses, too, money remains “both personal and impersonal” (Hart 2007:16).

The case of alternative, local currencies is similarly complex. As Zelizer (2011:326) notes, in some ideological streams, the meanings attributed to such projects end up reinforcing the commonsensical hostile worlds ideas about money “by postulating a frontier between the impure external world of legal tender and the purity of local money.” Indeed, it seems that the local circuits’ mere ambition to “alternative-ness” both relies on and reaffirms the commonsensical association between the resisted-money and the impersonal set of constructs—the constructs the local currency is posed as an alternative to.

Still, there is a potential open-endedness to such currencies that we cannot rule out. For example, in Maurer’s (2005:51, 57) ethnographic description of Ithaca’s local currency, HOURS, he discusses local currencies’ “entanglements with that which they supposedly reject or seek to stand apart from,” but he also emphasizes the importance of the fact that they continue “to trundle along,” setting in motion new kinds of truths and associations. There are also new schemas for (re)thinking the relationship between local currencies and officially sanctioned money, including a “monetary pluralism” whereby different monies are to circulate in complementary, coexisting networks (Dodd 2014:383). Local currencies can thus yield new thinking and possibly new institutional configurations.

The effects of such changes on the risk of lost meanings depend on the extent to which local currencies are set free from money’s long-entrenched symbolic dualism. Are local currencies experienced as part of the language of money, carrying along some version of this language’s symbolic association with impersonality and indifference even as they also symbolize other things, such as relationships of solidarity, community, and moral commitment? Or have local currencies become a separate everyday language, institutionally bound to a specific locale and finally free of money’s long-entrenched double meaning?

Because intersubjectivity is deeply shaped by constructs of commonsense thinking that are symbolically evoked and rendered real in everyday relational life, we must turn our analytic gaze toward these constructs. Local currencies, as well as digitalization and other monetary developments, have no doubt introduced many changes to everyday economic lives, and they will continue to do so in the future. But as far as their relational effects are concerned, we must look beyond any seemingly objective changes they introduce and examine the types of commonsense beliefs they carry along in their baggage of symbolic meanings. For it is not merely money’s shape or form in the realm of the paramount reality that affects relationships, but the way money symbolically connects this realm to ideas transcending it: ideas about the links that tie us together and about the forces that keep us apart.