The economy of exchange
Thomas Bay, Stockholm University School of Business
Martin Fuglsang, Copenhagen Business School
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. 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, 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?
The problem of economic exchange in general lies in its style of repetition, in the economy’s incapacity of going beyond itself, of repeating 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. 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 grounded on this reductive principle of exchange in and through which everything – our way of thinking and living – remains the same (foreseeable and calculable).
According to Deleuze, however, there are two sorts of exchange or repetition (corresponding to the two economic forces described above). ‘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.’1 ‘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.’2
In this article we set out to repeat this 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 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.’3 We propose to do this by, in the Deleuzean sense, extract an event from the idea of a basic income4.
1 Gilles Deleuze Difference and Repetition (London: The Athlone Press 1994/1968) p. 287.
2 Gilles Deleuze The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press 1990/1969) pp. 287-288.
3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari What is Philosophy? (London: Verso 1994/1991) p. 99.
4 A basic income is an income paid by a community to all its members without means test or work requirement.