There Is No Economy but Only the Debt to the Center: Money, Capital, and the Tributary
Zack Baker
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There Is No Economy but Only the Debt to the Center: Money, Capital, and the Tributary
Zack Baker and Dennis Bouvard<br>Jan 12, 2026
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Republished from Anthropoetics XXVIII, no. 2 (Spring 2023)
https://center.study/post/there-is-no-economy-pdf
There Is No Economy but Only the Debt to the Center: Money, Capital and the Tributary
“What is new is that the commercial transaction is no longer an extension of the originary scene but a minimal model of it.” (Eric Gans, “On Firstness,” in The Originary Hypothesis: a Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, 45)In this essay, we are going to argue that the commercial transaction is an extension of the originary scene. In his chapter in The Originary Hypothesis, Gans gives due weight to the asymmetries implicit in the formally equal market exchange, in particular the asymmetries between producer and consumer, and between those who go “first” (innovate) and those who must respond to or resist the innovation. He does not, that is, like classical liberal economists, use the formal equality of partners in exchange to obscure the actual inequalities constituting it. This is a momentary symmetry created out of the wider sphere of inequalities and sustained by the faith that one might oneself find a way of entering the system “firstly” in some regard. While, as opposed to the Maussian scene of gift exchange which extends itself temporally and indefinitely, and hence remains an extension of the originary scene, the commercial transaction takes place through each side “gifting” the other simultaneously, whereby the transaction can be closed (like, presumably, the originary scene itself, upon the consumption of the shared meal). But there is an asymmetry built into even this exchange, insofar as<br>[o]ne of the “things” exchanged is normally a more or less nonconsumable medium of exchange that confers value on the other. We recall that in the system of the gift/counter-gift the recipient’s gift exists only in the form of a sign that recognizes a debt not to the other but to the sacred center. Money is the concrete realization of this sign of recognition; it bears a “meaning” but as opposed to the ordinary sign, it is a credit drawn on the sacred that cannot be freely reproduced. The scene of a transaction dissolves instantly because money allows the “gift’s” recipient to pay his debt at once. (45)For this simultaneity of debt cancellation to imply that the modern exchange system represents a rupture with the originary scene the kind of transaction described here would have to be the normal or definitive form of exchange in a market society. But this simultaneity of gifting only exists on the most “everyday” level of exchange, like, saying, buying a cup of coffee in a diner (although the increasingly universal use of credit cards delays even this debt repayment somewhat). At least as normal are exchanges where there is in fact some delay, whether in the loans (student, car, home) many if not most citizens in a modern market society take out at some point in their lives, the payment of wages which generally takes place after one has completed the agreed upon service, pensions, inheritance, the lines of credit businesses generally rely upon, insurance and, perhaps, above all, the lending central banks stand ready to do when as a last resort the continuance of the exchange system depends (or at least is perceived to depend) on them doing so. Gans speaks much more about exchange than about money, but it would be hard to improve upon the definition he provides here of money as the “concrete realization” of the “sign of recognition” to the sacred center, a “credit drawn upon the sacred that cannot be freely reproduced.” Whence this sacred upon which credit is drawn, if the umbilical cord to the originary scene and, presumably, the ritual order, has been cut? In this brief and remarkable essay, in which the entire array of concerns Gans has occupied himself with in the intervening years, such as White Guilt, antisemitism, victimary resentment, the attack on firstness, and the crisis of the Western order all these phenomena portend, he also, I think, provides us with a glimpse of what must be elided in order to conclude that the market order has been set adrift from the ritual.<br>As Gans points out in this essay and elsewhere, the gift economy is not directly replaced by the market economy dominated by exchanges mediated by money; rather, the gift economy is supplanted by the usurpation of the ritual center by the Big Man whose control over resources is such as to make any attempt to compete with him on the field of gift-giving futile. There is way-station, though, from the gift economy to the market economy, and that is the retrieval of the originary moral model by Judaism and then Christianity:<br>The unique divinity who occupies the center in relation to the entire...