THE ECONOMY OF EXCHANGE
Thomas Bay Stockholm University School of Business
Martin Fuglsang Copenhagen Business School
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Economic forces.— Economy is the tension between savings and expenditure, investment and consumption; or, in more general terms, between containment and dissipation. This tension or intensity is nothing but pure economic energy, sheer play of economic forces, that is, forces the act and react upon forces, as a self-relation of forces unfolding their capabilities of transformation and sedimentation. On the one hand the active forces of production: continuously expanding exceeding dispersing proliferating multiplying human experience. On the other the reactive forces of limitation: incessantly imposing laws, codes, restrictions, restraints, constraints upon human experience. The productive forces work on the virtual plane of composition, an atmosphere of singularised intensities where unformed experience emerges. The forces of limitation operate on the actual plane of organisation, surrounding production, forming it; experience which is separated from its mode of production by being defined according to a recognised code or convention, identified as a certain type of experience. The former forces are experimental and creative, deterritorialising forces; the latter are curbing and contractive, reterritorialising forces. When these two economic forces encounter each other, there is exchange. The question is: what kind of exchange?
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Problematization.— The problem of economic exchange in general lies in its style of repetition, that is, in which mode it repeats and turn upon itself by its logic of self-circulation. In this sense the general problem of economic exchange becomes the economy’s incapacity to go beyond itself, to repeat something outside the capitalist system of exchange. Economic exchange reduces the potential of economic repetition to a closed set of functions, a common measure (capital), ensuring thereby that the economic future is reproduced on the basis of the past, or what could be called the linearity of economic circulation. Hence, economic exchange is an exchange without change, an exchange that has lost its transformative capacities, its excessive capabilities, its ex-(tra-being). This is all very well as long as we all agree on the supposition that the new, the different – in short: the future – should always be predicated on this linear and reductive principle of exchange in and through which everything – our way of thinking and living – remains the same (foreseeable and calculable). Economic exchange thus becomes a repetitive Doxology of Sense in which of our existence becomes sensible by resemblance in a horizon of common sense; a function of identification that treats and organises difference in general in the image of the Same. What is at stake here is the possible modes of existence, ways of being, styles of life involved in economic exchanges; that is to say, the different ways in which an economy may be thought and lived.
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Exchange.— According to Deleuze there are two sorts of exchange or repetition. ‘One of these repetitions is of the same, having no difference but that which is subtracted or drawn off; the other is of the Different, and includes difference. One has fixed terms and places; the other essentially includes displacement and disguise. One is negative and by default; the other is positive and by excess.’ ‘One false and the other true, one hopeless and the other salutary, one constraining and the other liberating; one which would have exactness as its contradictory criterion, and another which would respond to other criteria. … True repetition addresses something singular, unchangeable, and different, without “identity” … true repetition is in the gift, in the economy of the gift which is opposed to the mercantile economy of exchange. … in the gift, repetition surges forth as the highest power of the unexchangeable.’
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Repetition.— We set out to repeat the unexchangeable economy of exchange – the creative potential of exchange, the economy’s potential to repeat differently – hoping thereby to be able to produce new forms of exchange that do not yet have a people whose world they represent or place they inhabit, and that hence will alter completely our way of thinking and living. Or, expressed differently, we will attempt to turn exchange ‘back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth, a new people.’ We propose to do this by, in the Deleuzean sense, extract an event from the idea of a basic income. As such economic exchange is never a terrain of transactions, but as always, a battlefield of values, or to be more precise, an ethical quest for the value of values.
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In imperfect disequilibrio.— Let us get rid of the taken for granted conceptual coupling between economy and equilibrium, the idea of economy as a state of equal balance between opposing forces – nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, economy is all about forces, but forces with a single purpose: to dominate the forces they encounter. Economy is a continuous play of forces; a plays in which forces are dominating inferior forces or being dominated by superior forces. An economy in perfect equilibrio is no longer an economy, but a morality of common sense. Economy in disequilibrium is economic warfare, as an ethical voyage into the singularised event.
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Economic etymology.— Etymologically, nomos signifies not only the law, nōmos, but a nomos very different from the law, nomōs. No doubt ‘nomos came to designate the law, but that was originally because it was distribution, a mode of distribution. It is a very special kind of distribution, one without division into shares, in a space without border or enclosure.’ It thus appears as if a lawless nomōs potentially transgresses, or, rather, displaces the law of nōmos. But how does this work? ‘The root of nomos is nem and seems to have meant originally “to bend”. These origins become most clearly visible in the meaning of the verb nemō which very frequently appears in Homer: to deal out, to dispense. A second meaning of nemō refers to the life of herdsmen: to pasture, to graze the flocks, to drive them to pasture, feeding them, and it is from this sphere that the word seems to have acquired the connotation: “to spread on” and “to dwell in a habitat”. Like many ancient words nemō has thus two opposite meanings ... one meaning pointing to limitations imposed by acts of appropriation and apportioning, the other to expansion.’ Deleuze and Guattari further qualify this etymology: ‘The root “Nem” indicates distribution, not allocation, even when the two are linked. In the pastoral sense, the distribution of animals is effected in a nonlimited space and implies no parcelling out of land. ... To take to pasture (nemō) refers not to a parcelling out but to a scattering, to a repartition of animals. It was only after Solon that Nomos came to be identified with the laws themselves.’
Obviously, nomōs, the economy’s way out, its creative line of flight, somehow bends the law, nōmos, producing thereby an opening, a turbulence of transformative movements, an inventive battlefield in the midst of economic practice itself. On the one hand the passive, formative forces of nōmos; on the other the active, form-breaking forces of nomōs. This warlike play of difference, this encounter between limitation and extension, is a composition of forces, a mode of intensity, an economic difference — economy. It is in this sense that economy does not circulated, but folds as an non-linear wave, where the concept of the fold refers both to a gesture or a ‘cut’ drawing its conceptual power from the principles of painting and to the imaginary world of mathematics: geometry, topology and the recent theory of fractals. It anticipates an insight that does not have to coincide with personal experience, but to that of the event. Etymologically the fold refers exactly to the Greek nem[ein] and from this point of departure to nōmos and nome, the pasture and most forceful the nomad, the one that does not move but for whom the earth deterritorializes as a fold and thereby eradicates any idea of parceling and allocation, leaving only the force of distribution and dispersal.
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An Economy is defined by the kind of exchanges it tolerates.— There are two sorts of economy. The first kind is controlled by its formative, containing forces. It is an economy in which all work and its relations – the economy’s contents – are turned into commodities available for endless circulation, indefinite repetitions; an economy in which every form of human interaction is transformed into a potentially infinite series of transactions; a system of reciprocal exchanges in which nothing can be given without being returned or repaid. Its purpose, in short, is to subordinate every vital aspect of life to its own workings. And to the extend that economic forces relates to power along the line of its exchange, it would be constituted by a reactive will and a morel ressentiment overcoding every aspect its exchange. It goes without saying, this economy does not tolerate a generous (that is, a potentially creative) exchange. We call it: contained economy. The second kind of economy is dominated by its excessive, form-breaking forces, its creative lines of flight. This is an economy that produces virtualities, potentialities, opportunities, regardless of whether or not this will yield profit or return; it is a capacity for making a difference, for creating new economic relations, for repeating its own generous forces. Again, to the extend that economic forces relates to power along the line of its exchange, it would be constituted by a will to power and a symptomatology of ethics seeking the relative free and pre-signified signs that exist in every ‘system’ of formation and organisation. This, to be sure, is an extremely risky economy. We call it: dissipative economy.
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Contained economy.— In an economy defined by its containing forces – that is, a sedentary capitalistic economy – the economic becomes a mechanism that economizes new objects by reiterating them – simultaneously repeating and altering, repeating while altering – that is to say, by repeating differently the objects it economizes. The first aspect of this economic transformation process could be characterized as a (productive) abstraction, where useful things or goods are turned into exchangeable commodities. Or, in more general terms: ‘Abstraction is the erasure of difference in the service of likeness or equality. … Abstraction converts the thing from use-value to exchange-value, transforms it “within” into something exchangeable.’ The second aspect, the condition of possibility, if you like, of the first and as such always already part of it, is a (limiting) reduction, a reduction of the different ways in which a thing may be used, implying that for a thing to be exchangeable the things exchanged must ‘be like or equal to a third, which in and for itself is neither the one or the other. Each of them, insofar as it is exchange-value, must thus be reducible to this third’ – that is to say, the similarity, likeness or resemblance on the basis of which the things exchanged can be put into relation and hence compared. Or stated another way, this reductive force reduces a thing’s characteristic and unique qualities to pure, calculable quantity. To sum up, by erasing every trace of usefulness, that is, the relation between the thing and the user, by drawing away (ab-stracting) from the good its manifold usefulness, all that is left is its ‘immediate universal exchangeability’ – at once the opening-up AND closure of any economic system whatsoever. In the sense, that economy as containing forces also composes a logic of sense, or to be more precise, a doxology of sense, that is, a common sense of truism, fixation and obsession, then we have a logic of sense, that subsumes all the qualities and faculties of being under a transcendental and abstract unity, equalising every diversity and difference to a common modulation and variation. Let us call this the principle of reductive abstraction.
Dissipative attentiveness.— Have we forgotten how to be idle or lazy – for leisurely doing as little as possible or doing nothing at all? If so, we would consider this a problem. Leisure (σχολή) – freedom from having one’s attention occupied, from engagement, employment, business, work, toil and so on; from, in short, economic activity – according to Aristotle, is namely an absolutely imperative human practice, since without it we would have no time for contemplation, for philosophizing, for learned discussions (Politics 1328b/1329a/1334a). Or, to be more precise, if it were not for the idleness that necessarily ensues from leisurable activities, we would not be able to think. Hence idleness is not, in this sense, an apathetic state of indolence, laziness, slothfulness or sluggishness; and even less, of course, is it, as the proverb suggests, the mother of all vices. Idleness refers to a vacant state having no reasonable ground or useful purpose, a condition of groundlessness, uselessness, worthlessness and frivolousness – in relation to the self-explanatory and incontestable usefulness of economic activity. However, if we consider one of the practical effects of leisure – of having time at one's own disposal, time which one can spend as one pleases, free or unoccupied time – as involving a set of opportunities afforded by freedom from economic activity, then perhaps the useless and frivolous features of idleness are put in a slightly different light. Instead of being of little or no weight, value or importance, and hence not worthy of serious attention, perhaps we should think of idleness as providing a different kind of attentiveness, an unconcentrated or unfocused – anexact – attention that indeed would be something quite different from inattention, but that would still be attentive. This is dissipative attentiveness.
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Boredom.— ‘Known under several aliases—anguish, ennui, tedium, doldrums, humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy, languor, accidie, etc.—boredom is a complex phenomenon and by and large a product of repetition.’ If economy in general, as we have argued, deals with exchange and repetition (although of different sorts), if capitalistic economy in particular is all about indefinite repetitions of the same, and ‘life’s main medium is precisely repetition’, then it may not be such a bad idea to take a good look at the concept and practice of boredom. ‘The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor. In a manner of speaking, boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. … For boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn about your own size, the more humble and the more compassionate you become to your likes, to that dust aswirl in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table. Ah, how much life went into those flecks! Not from your point of view but from theirs. You are to them what time is to you; that’s why they look so small. And do you know what the dust says when it’s being wiped off the table? …
“ ‘Remember me,’ whispers the dust.” And one hears in this that if we learn about ourselves from time, perhaps time, in turn, may learn something from us. What would that be? That inferior in significance, we best it in sensitivity. This is what it means—to be insignificant. … You are insignificant because you are finite. Yet the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life, emotions, joy, fears, compassion. … passion is the privilege of the insignificant.’
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Basic income.— ‘A basic income [citizen’s wage, citizenship income, social wage] is an income paid by a political community to all its members on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement.’ What would happen if we started paying people wages simply for being citizens, without them having to reciprocate through work? What about Lutheran work ethic – would one really continue working in the sweat of one’s brow, or would one rather quit working once and for all? Would this create innumerable hordes of lazy idlers – clock watchers, lazybones, lotus eaters, moochers, spongers, laggards, slubberdegullions, shirkers, et cetera? And as a result, would this imply a complete economical and societal collapse? Or would a citizen’s wage rather give a stimulus to people’s creative urge and spirit of enterprise? Would this perhaps even be the starting point for a whole series of social, cultural and economic experiments, engagements and ventures?
A citizen’s wage is a nice example of a dissipative economic strategy. It is our contention that it should be possible to extract an event from the encounter – an ardent and potentially revolutionary encounter, a passionate repetition or exchange – between the idea of a citizen’s wage and the contained economy through the concept of idleness (intensified by the concepts of leisure and boredom) – the concept does certainly seem interesting and important enough in this connection...
[It should be noted that this text is a work in progress]
