The Cosmic Economy

Image from Burning Man ’08 slideshow.

Ever since listening to this NPR story and watching the government suck at dealing with the economic crisis, I have been thinking about Baudrillard‘s idea of ‘symbolic exchange’ as an alternative economic model to capitalism.

Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy has some good background on the idea:

The term “symbolic exchange” was derived from Georges Bataille’s notion of a “general economy” where expenditure, waste, sacrifice, and destruction were claimed to be more fundamental to human life than economies of production and utility. Bataille’s model was the sun that freely expended its energy without asking anything in return. He argued that if individuals wanted to be truly sovereign (e.g., free from the imperatives of capitalism) they should pursue a “general economy” of expenditure, giving, sacrifice, and destruction to escape determination by existing imperatives of utility.

Baudrillard’s idea of ‘social exchange’ leads right back to the sun…back to the ancient logic of the Universe.

Governed by the laws of thermodynamics, the sun is part of a cosmic system encoded with the logic of sustainability and conservation:

Energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but it can neither be created nor destroyed.

Unfortunately for his clients, Bernie Madoff wasn’t encoded with similar codes of sustainability and conservation. Instead, Madoff represents human economic systems which are encoded with the logic of expediency and debt.

It makes sense to me that more economists should take the path of Bataille and mine cosmic systems for organizing economic principles in the name of sustainability and conservation.

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It’s ironic that the best example of a large-scale sun-based economy is called Burning Man.

Burning Man’s gift culture and annual ritual of destroying a giant wooden man with fire resonates deeply with Bataille’s view of sharing and destruction as a means ‘to escape determination by existing imperatives of utility.’