| Economic metaphor provides post-structuralist theory with a powerful means of articulation. Economic metaphor facilitates theoretical descriptions of the point where mind touches matter, where the concrete and abstract are melded. But at what cost? This thesis argues that the economic metaphor is quite useful in attempting to reach a sense of what difference might be. Any economy relies on difference as its generative (read endlessly commodifiable) principle. Within a capitalist system, the desistance of difference is encouraged, but ultimately curbed by capitalization. Capitalization, in rendering difference semi-similar enough to be calculable, does not thwart the free play of differences, as experienced in the simulacrum, the event, or even the gift. It would not, as difference drives economy, and it could not, as difference always desists, no matter how we sheath it in regimes of identity. But how do we think this difference, when we are accustomed to accepting the conditions of its curbing? The first step is to recognize the ways in which difference is engineered by economy. The second is to critique this process of manipulation and measure. The third is to realize that theory also capitalizes on difference, which is not even to mention the ways in which theory capitalizes on its difference from economics, through the metaphor effect. Fourth and final is to try and think of thought as a process of expenditure, a generative, creative, prodigal project that does not partition, or proceed parsimoniously, but spends. |
