Utopian Trade: A Minimal Defense of Intellectual Exchange

Trade, in general, gets a bad rap. It is too often the stuff of arcane, if not sleazy, economic policy. It brings to mind meetings like the G-7 or G-20 with ugly, whitish men and a few women in expensive suits making decisions that further immiserate the planet, enrich billionaires, and consign what Jason Moore describes as the world-ecology to further and swifter destruction (2015, 3). One's sympathies rightly lie with the protesters outside rather than the functionaries within. Similarly, even when imagined within a more positive framework, trade seems too wonky a concept. Much better is exchange, production, or the creation of the commons. These have clear Marxist resonances and carry a conception of world-building within them. Focusing on trade too often seems to confirm Bruno Latour's description of economics as thoroughly modernist in its importation of values in the name of facts. When one's horizon is capitalist, trade and economics seem indeed to be necessarily modernist in the specific sense Latour means, not modernist as a collectivizing impulse to imagine other worlds, but modernist in the scientific sense of organized by value free calculations. Such calculations are full of violence, inequality, and moralized amorality (Latour 2004, 133-6).

Yet, as Kojin Karatani reminds us, trade has more capacious meanings than its resonances within capitalism (2014). Indeed, trade long preceded capitalism and we can assume it will persist beyond it as well. In Karatani's account of modes of exchange, trade becomes the engine for world building itself. While, I am not thoroughly persuaded by his account that the mode of exchange is dominant in capitalism (mode of production, and its subcategories such as entrepreneurial, corporate, and multinational capitalism, still seems like a necessary category here), it can function as a powerful way of reconceptualizing the possibilities of exchange, including intellectual exchange, in other political-economic formations, formations that themselves are present in subordinate ways within capitalism itself. While problematic in its complicated renovation of Adam Smith's economics to theorize contemporary China, Giovanni Arrighi's account of dynamics of trade and regimes of accumulation also emphasizes the way in which trade is not necessarily tied to capitalism (Arrighi 2007).

Without jettisoning the Marxist account of capitalism, then, I think Arrighi and especially Karatani give us a powerful impetus to reimagine trade as containing a utopian dimension. Such a project seems particularly necessary in our moment of the rise of rightist nationalisms, the explicit return of biological racism, and the ever greater atomization of social life into microidentities and microcommunities. The challenges of the current moment, with climate change accelerating faster than predicted and with global inequality and displacement taking place on ever greater scales, cannot be addressed on the level of the micro-group or even at the level of the group, "race," or nation. A planetary imaginary is necessary. Such an imaginary will of necessity involve forms of cultural cross-identification, sharing, and indeed, exchange. It will also involve attention to dynamics of power, inequality, and differential access to representation as well as other more insistently material resources. It will have to be attentive to what Marcarena Gómez-Barras describes as forms of "extractive capitalism," intellectual as well as material, accumulation by dispossession, and exploitation (indeed its vision and praxis should be opposed to each of these forms of violence), but it shouldn't use the critique of such forms of exploitation and appropriation to decry exchange, sharing, or cross-identification (Gómez-Barris 2017, 3). Nor should it use such a critique to shore up contemporary property relationships.

Yet much recent discourse, both theoretical and popular, in contemporary culture has affirmed boundaries, whether group-based or national, and vilified the dynamics of exchange. Some of this shift took place because of the overly celebratory theorizations of hybridity, syncretism, diaspora, and other discourses that accompanied the affirmative account of globalization in the 1990s. As Arif Dirlik and Andrew Culp, among others, have pointed out, the very language of hybridity, border crossing, syncretism, and flows that was central to much globalization and cultural studies discourse in...