Most economic thinking begins from scarcity. There is not enough to go round, and the task of an economy is to allocate what there is. The theory set out here begins from the opposite end. Its starting point is that life on earth has too much, and that the real problem every society faces is not how to get more but what to do with the excess.
The idea belongs to the same mid-twentieth-century current as the philosophy of transgression described in What Transgression Was For, and to some of the same writers. It is less often read than the theory of taboo, and it is the stranger of the two. This primer explains it in order, gives its best evidence, and follows it into the later readings that took it further than its author would have gone.
Begin with the sun
The theory opens with an observation from physics. The sun pours out energy without limit and without return. It asks nothing of what it lights. Every living thing runs, in the end, on this gift, and a living system usually receives more energy than it needs simply to stay alive.
At first the surplus goes into growth. A plant puts out more leaves, a population expands, a city adds a district. But growth meets limits: space runs out, rivals push back, the ground is full. At that point the surplus is still arriving, and it has to go somewhere. It must be spent without profit, whether gladly or disastrously.
From this the theory draws a distinction between two kinds of economy. A restricted economy is the one we usually mean: a firm, a household, a nation keeping accounts, measuring everything by return. A general economy is the view from the sun, in which the accounts never balance, energy always exceeds need, and the decisive question is how the excess will be burned off.
The ways of spending
Seen from that height, a great deal of human behavior that looks irrational turns out to be the discharge of surplus. The theory sorts it into a rough sequence.
- Growth
- The surplus is reinvested: more fields, more children, more machines. This is the only use a restricted economy recognizes, and it can continue only while there is room.
- Luxury
- The surplus is spent on what serves no purpose: ornament, monuments, fine clothes, the elaborate meal. Luxury is not decadence on this account. It is a society releasing pressure.
- Festival and sacrifice
- The surplus is destroyed on purpose and in public. The feast consumes a year's stores in a week; the offering burns what could have been eaten. The destruction is the meaning.
- Catastrophe
- A society that refuses every other outlet spends its surplus anyway, through war, crash or collapse. This is waste that nobody chose.
The argument with the most bite concerns the last term. A society that has persuaded itself that everything must be useful, that leisure is recovery and art an investment, has not abolished expenditure. It has only removed the forms that could be controlled. The surplus will still be spent, and the theory predicts that the spending will come as a disaster.
The gift that humiliates
The theory's favorite evidence came from anthropology, and in particular from accounts of the potlatch, the ceremonial feast of the peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast. In the descriptions the philosophers read, a chief gained rank by giving away wealth on a staggering scale: blankets, food, copper plaques of great value. In the most dramatic cases property was destroyed outright before rivals, who were then obliged to match the loss or lose face.
Here was a society in which status came not from accumulation but from loss, and in which the gift was a weapon. Whoever gave most could not be repaid, and whoever could not repay was diminished. The philosophers drew a general lesson. Prestige, they argued, has always been a matter of what one can afford to waste.
Two cautions belong here. The theorists knew the potlatch only from other people's books, and those books were shaped by outsiders who often saw rivalry where participants saw obligation, kinship and the marking of names and deaths. The ceremonies were also, for most of the period in question, banned by colonial law. A Western philosophy of excess was built in part on the image of a practice its own governments were working to suppress, which is the kind of irony the theory itself would appreciate and seldom noticed.
Prestige, they argued, has always been a matter of what one can afford to waste.
Sovereignty is nothing
The theory's most difficult term is sovereignty, and it does not mean what political philosophy means by it. It is not power over others. It is the condition of a moment that is not subordinate to any later moment: an act performed for nothing beyond itself.
Most of life is servile in this sense. We work for the wage, eat to work, sleep to eat. Every moment is a means to the next. Sovereign moments break the chain. Laughter is one; so are erotic abandon, intoxication, tears, the sacred terror of the rite, the instant of pure play. In each, the calculating self briefly stops calculating, and the future loses its grip.
This is why the theory's author could end one of his volumes with the claim that sovereignty is nothing. It is not a thing one can own, store or put to use. As soon as it is used it becomes servile again. A festival organized to boost tourism is no longer a festival in this sense, and a sacrifice performed to secure a harvest is already half commerce.
Readers who went further
The theory was offered as an economics, however eccentric. Later readers made it into a metaphysics, and one strand of that reading deserves a warning label.
In the late twentieth century a number of writers took the solar picture literally and to the end. If the universe is energy seeking release, then every stable form, including the human self, is a temporary dam. Culture, morality and even the organism are obstructions that energy will sooner or later overwhelm. On this reading the desire for dissolution is the most honest desire there is, and collapse is not a misfortune but a homecoming.
These books are vivid, frequently brilliant and deliberately feverish. They contributed something to the cluster of ideas now called accelerationism. They also make an elementary mistake, which is to treat a description of what happens as a recommendation of what should. That surplus will be spent does not tell us how it should be spent. The original theory, for all its relish of excess, ended by asking for a more intelligent management of waste: festivals rather than wars, gifts rather than ruins. Its wilder heirs kept the relish and dropped the request. A fuller account of where that road leads is given in Pessimism: A User's Manual, which distinguishes the despair that wants to understand from the despair that wants to win.
What the theory is good for
As a cosmology the theory is unprovable, and as a history it is selective. As a way of looking, it is unusually productive. It directs attention to the part of a society's life that the society's own accounts leave out.
- Where does this society spend what it cannot use? On what is it lavish, and who decides?
- Which forms of waste are honored, and which are condemned? The stadium and the cathedral are admired; the binge and the riot are not. What separates them?
- What has been justified as useful that is really a ceremony: the motorcade, the launch event, the annual report bound in leather?
- If the official channels for excess were closed, where would it go instead?
Asked of the present, the questions tend to produce uncomfortable answers. A culture that describes itself as rational, efficient and austere turns out to be extravagant everywhere it is not looking: in its weapons, its spectacles, its disposable goods and its deliberate destruction of unsold stock. The slow apocalypse of the old industrial towns can be read in the same light, as surplus that was once spent on making things and now goes into keeping their absence decent.
The theory's final claim is its most humane, and the one most often forgotten. People do not only want to accumulate. They also want, at times, to give everything away, to laugh at the price, to burn the candle for its light rather than its use. A civilization that cannot make room for that desire will not abolish it. It will meet it later, and on worse terms.