Systems of exchange: translation, money and the ecological turn

It is no coincidence that Marx, in the Grundrisse, spoke of money as a system of translation, while Saussure, in his Cours de linguistique générale, describes translation in terms taken from the political economy (Liu, 1999). Both are systems of exchange based on a concept of universal equivalence in which the exchange value attributed to the token (the coin or verbal sign) is unrelated to the inherent value of the material carrier. This has not always been the case, of course. Historically, coins and then paper money developed from the use as currency of intrinsically valuable commodities such as gold, while in semiotics, the conventional symbol evolved out of the motivated sign or icon. This paper traces the rise and demise of the universal equivalent in both translation and economics, and discusses the implications of the move back to an embedded and embodied understanding of meaning/value, with particularly attention to the ecological framework proposed by Michael Cronin (2017).