BishopZ!

Part 1 : Why does Barter feel so Good?

By Hannah Davenport and Mason Dixon, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Why does Barter feel so good? In the moment of exchange, Barter feels refreshing in a way that nothing on Main Street ever does. The experience of bartered exchange provides something currency-based exchange does not, and cannot. And yet, Barter could not replace Money on a large scale. Barter can, at best, be a temporary supplement for Money, a perversion of our more civilized system.

The exchange of goods and services pervades our experience of the world, and Money currently mediates that process. Currency sets the stage of exchange, impersonally and invisibly. When we give someone currency for a product or service, our thoughts collect solely on the thing we receive and the value it has. Barter, however, causes us to also think about the thing given, and its value to the other person involved in the exchange. The mechanics of Barter place value on a localized scale, the scale of individuals, rather than the “value by mass consensus” that Money supposes. (Even if Barter were expanded to a larger system, it would fall prey to the same shortfalls that Money now has, and more. It would not feel good.)

Money is not sinister, far from it. Currency reduced haggling. It made the exchange process simpler, faster, transitive, by creating an agreed-upon independent measurement, by translating value into a common metric. Money scaled exchange value to the global scale by symbolizing a statistical distribution of value among all exchanges, a composite of all the price-setters and manipulators, yet the assessment of value is not static.

Within the experience of an individual exchange, buyers and sellers operate under the assumption that when they give $3 to the Butcher, that it is still worth $3 when the Butcher gives it to the Rancher. But, this sense of consistent value, and thus the sense of equal purchasing power, are continuously undermined by the economic system itself, by capitalism. The profit motive requires that sellers collude and buyers influence.

Money represents itself as an accurate measure, as stable as the milimeter or pi, and yet is not. The currency in your pocket has no more intrinsic value than a wave would have form, separated from the kinetic energy of the ocean. Investment, dividends, derivatives, accumulation, interest, inflation, arbitrage, supply and demand, are all statistically distributed across the economic system, altering even how the same product is valued by the same vendor week to week. Clearance sales and discount malls, are not the indicators of value correcting themselves, but rather indicators of their fluctuations.

Money gives the impression that its position is steady, its relation to value unchanging, and Barter does not. Barter never claimed consistency or equality. Barter in some way is more honest with its participants by making the exchange independent and temporary. Barter assumes space within the value-exchange proposition for things outside of the currency, such as brutality or social class.

And why should Money’s relativity be so troubling? Desire production leads contemporary capitalism; consumerism drives our identities towards exchange. Money in American culture is more than the language of exchange, it is part and parcel with the language of identity, with who we are as individuals. The distribution of wealth described by Money became the distribution of value we have as individuals. It’s description of us defines who we can make ourselves into. While Social Mobility has increased over the last 100 years, it has come at a cost, the cost of embedding desire into every aspect of our lives (the exchanges) from scrubbing bubbles to baseball. Money’s lie, that it describes a consistent value, lets us forget that it mediates our exchanges. It lets us forget that other forces are at work. The pervasiveness of exchange then enables Money to tax our identities.

if you have a Family, here are the things you buy…
if you are German-American here are the things you buy…
if you like to drive fast, here are the things you buy…
if you are a Foodie here are the things you buy…

Perhaps, this is why barter feels so refreshing. Barter opens a freedom for the individual within exchange, freedom to assign the world with the value we believe it should have. Even when it is inefficient, people will Barter to feel good; people will barter to feel free. Barter makes the exchange itself personally valuable, independent of the value of the things being exchanged. Barter replaces the function of money in the exchange process by negotiating and mapping the territory of exchange, not to the scale of investment or accumulation of wealth, but it is not necessary for Barter to do these things. Barter feels good in the experience of it, and that value-in-exchange is something we can inhabit, something we can identify with.

Barter resituates the power relationship of value-exchange from the currency-backer, to the micro-community of a particular exchange. For once, the individuals involved determine what is valuable. Barter mimics the relations we have with friends and family. Can helping someone move, giving a back-rub, or writing a poem translate to value between acquaintances or even strangers? Is it possible to expand this ability to share our values, skills and specialities, without needing to take it to scale of a federally-mandated currency?