"The disembeddedness provided for in modern money economies is vastly greater than was the case in any of the pre-modern civilisations in which money existed. Even in the most developed of monetary systems in the pre-modern era, such as that of the Roman Empire, no advance was made beyond what in Keynes’s terms would be commodity money, in the shape of material coinage. Today, “money proper” is independent of the means whereby it is represented, taking the form of pure information lodged as figures in a computer printout. It is the wrong metaphor to see money, as Parsons does, as a circulating medium. As coinage or cash, money circulates; but in a modern economic order the large bulk of monetary transactions do not take this form. Cencini points out that the conventional ideas that money “circulates,” and can be thought of as a “flow,” are essentially misleading. 22 If money flowed—say, like water—its circulation would be expressed directly in terms of time. It would follow from this that the greater the velocity, the narrower the stream needed for the same quantity to flow per unit of time. In the case of money, this would mean that the amount required for a given transaction would be proportional to the velocity of its circulation. But it is plainly nonsense to say that payment of £100 could equally well be carried out with £50 or £10. Money does not relate to time (or, more accurately, time-space) as a flow, but precisely as a means of bracketing time-space by coupling instantaneity and deferral, presence and absence. In R. S. Sayers’s words, “No asset is in action as a medium of exchange except in the very moment of being transferred from one ownership to another, in settlement of some transaction.”"

"The consequences of modernity", Anthony Giddens, 1990