THE ECONOMY OF EXCHANGE

Thomas Bay
Stockholm University

This is a working paper. Quite a lot, in other words, still remains to be (re)written.
And erased for example extensive quotations that have been used to create an
ambience of what still hasnt been thought through and written on certain topics.
Hopefully the plot is still, despite these inconveniences, comprehensible.

1
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 selfcirculation. In this sense the general problem of economic exchange becomes the
economys 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
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.1 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
economy may be thought and lived.
3
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.2 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

1
2

Gilles Deleuze The Logic of Sense (London: The Athlone Press 1990/1968) pp. 77-78.
Gilles Deleuze Difference and Repetition (London: The Athlone Press 1994/1968) p. 287.

which is opposed to the mercantile economy of exchange. in the gift, repetition

surges forth as the highest power of the unexchangeable. 3
4
Repetition. We set out to repeat the unexchangeable economy of exchange the
creative potential of exchange, the economys 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.4 We
propose to do this by, in the Deleuzean sense, extract an event from the idea of a basic
income5. 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.
5
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.
6

Gilles Deleuze The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press 1990/1969) pp.
287-288.
4 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari What is Philosophy? (London: Verso 1994/1991) p. 99.
5 A basic income (citizens wage, citizenship income, social wage), acoording to Philippe van
Parijs (Basic Income: A Simple and Powerful Idea for the Twenty-first Century, in Politics &
Society, 32/1 2004 pp. 7-34) is an income paid by a political community to all its members on
an individual basis, without means test or work requirement.
3

Etymology. Nomos signifies not only the law, nmos, but a nomos very different
from the law, noms. 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.6
It thus appears as if a lawless noms potentially transgresses, or, rather, displaces the
law of nmos. 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 nem which very frequently appears in Homer: to deal out, to dispense. A
second meaning of nem 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 nem has thus two opposite meanings ... one meaning pointing to
limitations imposed by acts of appropriation and apportioning, the other to
expansion.7 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 (nem) 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.8
Obviously, noms, the economys way out, its creative line of flight, somehow bends the
law, nmos, 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 nmos; on the other the active, form-breaking forces of
noms. 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 circulate, but folds as a non-linear
wave, where the concept of the fold refers both to a gesture or a cut drawing its

Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus (London: The Athlone Press 1988) p.
380.
7 Kurt Singer Oikonomia: An Inquiry into Beginnings of Economic Thought and Language (in
Kyklos, 11 1958) pp. 37-38 .
8 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus (London: The Athlone Press 1988) p.
557.
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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 nomos and nem, the pasture and most forcefully the nomad, the one that
does not move but for whom the earth deterritorialises as a fold and thereby eradicates
any idea of parceling and allocation, leaving only the force of distribution and
dispersal.
7
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 economys 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 extent that economic forces relates to power along
the line of its exchange, it would be constituted by a reactive will and a moral
ressentiment overcoding every aspect of its exchange. It goes without saying, this
economy does not tolerate a generous (that is, a virtual, 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 extent that economic
forces relate 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. 9 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 third10 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 things 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 11 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.

Thomas Keenan Fables of Responsibility (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997) p. 112.
Karl Marx Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Vintage 1977/1867) p. 127.
11 Karl Marx Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Vintage 1977/1867) p. 162.
9

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This reductive abstraction the simultaneous re- and de-animation of use-objects is

of course extremely productive in a contained economical sense. Based on a reductive
system of similarity or common measure (de-animation), the use-value is opened up to
something else, its own abstract exchangeability (re-animation), making possible
thereby a world in which everything is not simply infinitely but necessarily
exchangeable. An exchange is always an exchange of something: something for
something else. Something must take the place of what is exchanged, namely that for
which what is exchanged is exchanged. What is exchanged must return as something
else. There must not be nothing, no-thing, departure without the arrival of the return.
Comparability seems to be the order-word of this exchangeable world of similarity,
reciprocity and return. And in it there is little or no room for escape, the possibility of
passing, for passibility, for a pass-word, a gift: for, in short, a basic income. The
economic seems to encourage the proliferation of the new, but this is always a new
grounded on the principle of capitalistic exchange, in turn anchored in an external,
transcendental foundation and unity: Capital.
9
Dissipative economy. In an era of capitalism, where any exchange is quantifiable
and reinvested to produce further exchange, Deleuze insisted on an expenditure and
excess: productions that are not for any foreseeable or calculable end but that produce
the new as such.12 A dissipative economy is defined by its excessive, experimental
forces, its creative lines of flight, that is to say, by its virtual qualities. This is an
economy imbued with a maximum of intensity; it articulates a dissipative force,
unformed energy capable of generating its own limitations as products of its own
activities. An economy limited by nothing beyond itself produces containment as an
after-effect of its own affirmative generosity, its immanent productive power.
Containment, in other words, is an effect of the creative fatigue of the economy itself,
ensuing from a diminishing capacity to be affected by the forces it encounters. Is this
dissipative force to be found in the economy itself, within the economys own
immanent boundaries? Expressed differently, is it possible to think the economic as
nothing other than itself and its own limits, that is, without subjecting its forces to an

12

Claire Colebrook Gilles Deleuze (London Routledge, 2002) p. 66.

external, transcendental foundation (Capital)? The answer is undoubtedly yes, and will
be elaborated here...
10
The Gift. Is there a place for a gift in economics? If there is such a place, it must be
located beyond the economy, outside this realm of predictability a boundary,
moreover, beyond which calculation must necessarily fail, since one can give only in
the measure of the incalculable13. But before essaying beyond this limit, let us rest for a
moment, give ourselves time for idleness, preparation and readiness, and in the
meantime listen to what Jacques Derrida has to say on the economy of the gift; and
whether or not the gift will allow us to, in Blanchots words, take the step (not) beyond,
that is, not beyond economy but unto the beyond of economy. How does a gift work?
For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or
debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or
her, there will not have been a gift, whether this restitution is immediate or whether it
is programmed by a complex calculation of a long-term deferral if the donee gives
back the same thing, for example an invitation to lunch ... the gift is annulled. It is
annulled each time there is restitution or countergift ... The simple identification of the
gift seems to destroy it ... At the limit, the gift as gift ought not appear as gift: either to
the donee or to the donor. It cannot be gift as gift except by not being present as gift. 14
How then, is the gift related to economy? A gift, if there is any, would no doubt be
related to economy. One cannot treat the gift, this goes without saying, without treating
this relation to economy, even to the money economy. But is not the gift, if there is any,
also that which interrupts economy? That which, in suspending economic calculation,
no longer gives rise to exchange? That which opens the circle [of economy] so as to defy
reciprocity or symmetry, the common measure, and so as to turn aside the return in
view of the no-return? If the figure of the circle is essential to economics, the gift
must remain aneconomic. Not that it remains foreign to the circle, but it must keep a

Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995/1992) p.
157.
14 Jacques Derrida Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press 1992/1991) pp. 12, 14.
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relation of foreignness to the circle, a relation without relation of familiar foreignness.

It is perhaps in this sense that the gift is the impossible. Not impossible but the
impossible. The very figure of the impossible. It announces itself, gives itself to be
thought as the impossible. 15
11
Human subjectivity as force of production. When we talk of late capitalism, we are
emphasising a transmutation of capitalism as a world which to some extent was
prophetically visualized by Marx in Grundrisse where he writes: Nature builds no
machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are
products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human
will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human
brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The
development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has
become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the
process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been
transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production
have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs
of social practice, of the real life process.16
This of course carried for Marx a kind of utopia, a state of liberating transmutation
where the political economy of capitalism would break down from within, because it
would decrease labour-time in the process of production and thereby dissolve the
general measurement of value and wealth, that is, the classical labour theory of value
and a production based on exchange value so very dominant in the birth of the selfcontained discipline of economics. But as we witness today, this is not the case, there is
no internal breakdown within the capitalistic process of production in the societal
actualisations we at present know as the information-society or the knowledgeeconomy. On the contrary, what we are witnessing is a general transformation of the

Jacques Derrida Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press 1992/1991) p. 7.
16 Karl Marx Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Harmonsdsworth:
Penguin Books 1973) p. 706.
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valorisation of capitalistic production and its constituent forces of production, that is, a
transformation of its conceptualisation of measurement, its entities known as
commodities and its components for and in the process for production, all in all,
expanding the landscape and not least the horizon in which capitalistic production
takes place. What we call leisure time or more precisely the time of non-work have in
this state of late capitalism become a differentiated commodity of excess and thereby
an environment recognized by an endless cultural consumption creating a marketplace
for desire, dreams, hopes and delirium and as such, the mode of production have
changed the flow of energy form the discipline of hands and the confinement of bodies
to the control of the human subjectivity, that is, the mode of existence understood as
the ontological fabric in which the subject and its worlds become.
12
A critical encounter. In an era where capitalism is actualised in and through the ideal
of liberal education, and where the general intellect, the general social knowledge or
cultural habitus in short: our subjectivity has become a direct force of production,
productivity can no longer be compensated by traditional wages. When subjectivity
becomes the modus vivendi and outcome of production, and leisure time becomes the
(unthinkable) prerequisite for any kind of (contained) economy when, in a sense, life
becomes inseparable from work the idea of a basic income becomes not simply a
logical alternative, but at the very same time a fundamental immanent critique of the
doxology of contained economy.
A basic income 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 basic income, a citizens wage, and the doxology of contained economy.

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