Substitution: On the Animating Spirit of Economic Rationality

Abstract

The term ‘substitution’, given minimal attention in thinking, became important in modern logic, but its treatment is highly technical. After a short review of its conceptual-historical background, the article discusses two important contemporary social and cultural theorists of substitution, Roberto Calasso and Michel Serres. It then turns to William Stanley Jevons, who first took up Boole’s logic, formulated the principle ‘substitution of similars’, the presumed heart of reasoning itself, constructed the first computer, and was a founder of neoclassical economics. The coincidence of these innovations in Jevons, through ‘substitution’, captures the way the modern world was set on its current trajectory, progressing towards a ‘substitution society’. The article concludes that as the key values of human life cannot be substituted, substitution as a general principle applied to human existence is absurd; economic theory, however, as shown in the ideas of Jevons, is founded on the exclusion of such genuine and meaningful concerns.

No one that ever lived ever thought so crooked as we. (Samuel Beckett, Endgame)

In our days, with the increasing dominance of ‘rational choice’ theory, even in political science and sociology, promoted by algorithms and AI, a proper elucidation of the specificity of modern ‘rationality’, especially the kind of rationality that animates the economy, is more needed than ever. This article, broadly following Max Weber’s problematisation of modern rationality (Szakolczai, 1998), claims that such specificity can be captured through ‘substitution’. It therefore hopes to open up a new research path into the character of substitution, all the more necessary as it is a little discussed theme in social and cultural theorising. More specifically, it argues that substitution plays a central role in the dynamics animating our world, perhaps even the central role; and also that such substitution, in the simple and trivial sense of replacing a ‘thing’, in the broadest possible sense (word, object, animal, human being), with another is violent, necessarily implying the elimination or destruction of the entity that is being replaced, at least in its main features and ‘identity’, and strictly speaking does not make sense, as every concrete ‘thing’ is unique in its character and history. Even worse: a world that functions on the basis of substitution eliminates the possibility of a meaningful life. The aim of this article is to substantiate these points, insofar as this is possible within such limits.

A Short Etymology, Semantics and Conceptual History

The word ‘substitution’ is from Latin and has a plain etymology: to ‘set up’ somebody ‘under’. Originally used in the legal-institutional sense of nominating an heir if there was a breach in the order of succession, it eventually became applied to replacing objects, and the word did not play any role in philosophy or logic. The same is true for medieval and early modern uses, whether in French or English: a sequential succession, primarily of human beings, within an institutional order. The more abstract and theoretical use of the word, in English, only takes place in the 19th century, in algebra and chemistry, while its first application in trade was in 1902, and significantly in a negative sense, as ‘dishonest replacement’. In all this period, the word was given no attention in thinking. This changed with modern logic.

Substitution in Logic

Substitution as a word, and as a concept, catapults into the centre of attention with the rise of modern mathematical logic. This requires two comments. First, while some idea concerning substitution was already there in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the word was not used. Giving only one example, in his translation of Buridan’s Treatise on Consequences, Peter King used the expression ‘Uniform Substitution Principle’, but the original Latin only specifies the meaning of a formal consequence, without using substitutio (King, 1985: 58, 66–7, 184–5). The medieval terminology rather recalls Foucault’s The Order of Things on similitude, helping to situate medieval logicians on a quite different episteme, where the focus was not on making substitutions but rather recognising everywhere similitudes, as signs of God’s creative hand.

Second, the three main periods in which logical investigations thrived can be brought together in a Nietzsche-Weberian terminology as periods of epigonism. Plato was not interested in logic as we know it, while Aristotle did not use the word logiké either, his main ‘logical’ work, the Organon, being compiled by his school after he died, codified during the Second Sophistic, and transmitted – in a highly questionable manner – by 6th-century Byzantine copyists. Similarly, logic was not a central concern of the great philosopher-theologians of the Duecento, Aquinas and Bonaventure, but thrived in the 14th century with Ockham and Buridan.

Modern mathematical logic emerged out of two threads: George Boole (1815–64), Professor of Mathematics at University College, Cork, and Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), Professor of Mathematics in Jena, founder of analytical philosophy. Of the two the more important, from the perspective of the present – computers, digitalisation, and the logic of substitution – is certainly Boole. However, Boole did not use the word ‘substitution’ as a concept. The word was placed into the centre of mathematical logic by William Jevons.

Here it must be stressed that words are important. We can only make ourselves understood through words, by those who understand the words we use, and the use of a word necessarily brings in all kind of affinities and adjacent meanings. It is not accidental that in Italian or French ‘word’ and ‘speech’ are identical (parola/parole). The word ‘substitution’ was rarely used, having a specific, limited meaning, and was primarily concerned with a passage between human beings. It was thus a highly ‘liminal’ term. This now became radically altered when the term first conquered logic, and then became the animating principle of everyday life.

Substitution in Social Theorising

It is striking, while also revealing, that there is still precious little discussion of substitution in social theory, outside formal logic. There isn’t a single article in any of the social theory or sociology journals of SAGE that discusses ‘substitution’ in any depth. The pioneer to discuss the term is Henri Bergson (1998 [1911]), and he importantly connects substitution to destruction, even annihilation, and thus to nothing (pp. 276–9). The term was also taken up by Levinas (Fox, 2011), who considered the substitution of the ‘other’ as a moral obligation, a kind of secular self-sacrifice, though with evident religious overtones.

There were two contemporary thinkers who put substitution at the centre of their work, two mavericks: Michel Serres (1930–2019) and Roberto Calasso (1941–2021), both with strong affiliations to anthropology. ¹ Their work was not intertwined, though it has a point of contact in René Girard. Girard was a life-long friend of Serres, while Calasso was the Italian editor of Girard’s books. Following Girard, both Serres and Calasso emphasise the violence involved in substitution, considering substitution a hidden modality of sacrifice.

Roberto Calasso

For Calasso, substitution has foundational primacy over both exchange and sacrifice. Instead of considering exchange foundational, an evidence for modern economistic thinking, for Calasso sacrifice is the foundation of exchange, while sacrifice is based on substitution: substitution is ‘the heart of sacrifice’ (Calasso, 1983: 279). The act of sacrifice, to be possible, must be prepared in the mind, through substitution (p. 181; Calasso, 2010: 154); or, ‘the two essential points of every sacrificial act are substitution, and the transposition of order from what is visible to the order of the mind’ (2010: 42).

But what exactly is substitution? It is a ‘silent act of the mind’, simply ‘the most powerful [potente] act’ (Calasso, 2016: 130). Here Calasso seems to imply that substitution is all but identical to thinking, as if replacing the Cartesian ‘I think therefore I am’ with the phrase ‘I substitute therefore I am’. The ensuing passages in these crucial pages (pp. 130–1) seem to support such a view: substitution implies taking the place of something or someone else, or representing something else, which is the ‘secret’ of homo sapiens, the sign of consciousness and reflexivity, the coining of words, and behind words, the formation of mental images in the memory. Thus, it seems as if at the basis of substitution we would find ‘everything that is considered as “specific to man”’ (p. 131).

However, we should note that all this is in the conditional, or this is just what seems, and especially seems to us now, with codification, computer languages, and artificial intelligence taken for granted and considered clear signs of progress – this is just what seems, but not what really is. This is because substitution, powerful as it is, is not everything the mind does, is not identical to language or thinking, but is a very specific act of the mind: an act of ‘pure consciousness’, or an act where consciousness, or the mind, loses touch with our world, with reality, with the evidence of our senses, and starts to reflect on itself, animating itself, performing operations with its own products, words and signs, as if short-circuiting itself. If the coining of a word is a mental operation of the first order, then substitution is like a second-order operation. A word does not substitute for an object; we can eat bread, but we cannot eat the word ‘bread’. A word, or an expression, however, can substitute another expression; such substitution can progress into infinity, and – even more –through such mental acts it becomes possible to substitute, or replace, a real-word object or even person.

Calasso here introduces another central term to capture the character of this kind of thinking: bifurcation. It is discussed in two crucial passages in Kasch: first, in the passage where naming is traced to mental images, introducing – through a famous passage of the Upanishads – the ‘originary bifurcation of the psyche’, the appearance of pure acts of consciousness, different from sense perception, connected to merely watching the one who acts, and in doing so ‘it perennially superimposes his own gaze to the one who is watching the world’ (Calasso, 1983: 185). This sentence comes at the end of a crucial section, ‘Elements of Sacrifice’, discussing the links between sacrifice, exchange, and substitution. It starts with a summary condemnation of sacrifice as a practice, though at the same time recognising its central importance, and marking his distance from Enlightenment denunciation. Thus, sacrifice is not the expiation of a sin (colpa), but sin itself, and the only sin; it is also based on a trick (inganno), but not in the Enlightenment sense of priestly tricks: the real trick is not the invention of an other world but the empty game and short-circuiting of mental images: a distancing from reality through words, and the potentially infinite substitution and exchange of words with each other, until such processes, through a game of taking and giving, alter reality, and transform the world into a sacrificial game. It is in this sense that modernity, while refusing rituals of sacrifice with a horror, is nothing but an infinite extension, through industry, world wars, genocides and scientific experiments, of the sacrificial logic. The main reason is the primacy of substitution over both sacrifice and exchange: ‘It is said that sacrifice is at the origin of exchange: but exchange is a whole of which sacrifice is a subset; while exchange, in its own, is embedded in another category, which only makes it possible: this is substitution: this stands for that: who gives this, takes that’ (p. 185).

The second passage captures the same process in a slightly different manner, offering a typology of substitution. In one, substitution implies an artificial operation, a pure construct, and in such a case ‘a standing for b’ implies the annihilation or the killing of b; in the other, the connection is more direct, or one could say ‘organic’, and is illustrated by the way a granite splinter can ‘stand for’ the mountain from which it was taken. This second is defined as symbol, not in the linguistic sense of a mere sign, but in the sense of mysteries, where the discontinuity alludes back to an original continuity and – more than of a substitution – one should rather talk about an ‘interpenetration’ or an ‘indissoluble overlaying’ of things (Calasso, 1983: 273). In Foucault’s (1970) terminology, in the first case there is mere sign, which supposedly offers a perfect representation of the object, having no reality on its own, but actually only starts in this way an infinite game of mirroring and reflexion, while the second case recognises that words, and language, have their real existence, are parts of the real world. At any rate, consciousness, substitution and sacrifice are closely connected, revealing the inherent, latent violence in every act of substitution: ‘when a substitution takes place, the act is violent’ (Calasso, 2016: 126; see also 2010: 438–40). Calasso takes up Nietzsche’s problematisation of the world-alien and life-hostile ascetic priest, but focuses on sacrificial priests and adds the inherent violence of ‘pure’ consciousness.

This is because the idea behind substitution, of taking one’s place, must be understood literally: one can only ‘take one’s place’ if that person is eliminated, or killed: the core of substitution is death (Calasso, 1983: 279–80), even if it is hidden or occulted (p. 186), whether it is real or symbolic (p. 273). And if one starts applying substitution, the consequences are unforeseeable and by no means beneficial, even for the agent of substitution: ‘whoever is hurting by substitution can easily perish from substitution’ (Calasso, 2017: 37). Violence is central to each of the three interconnected terms: sacrifice – evidently; substitution – as it was discussed in the sentences above; and exchange – where violence is more hidden, as it is a poison that ‘kills slowly, though occasionally brusquely’ (Calasso, 1983: 280). In fact, due to the tight connections between imitation, forgery, and substitution, there is ‘a latent violence in every imitation’ (Calasso, 2016: 127); even knowledge, insofar as it implies substitution or imitation – as for example in codification – is inherently violent.

Calasso’s discussion of the inherent violence of substitution culminates in the section entitled ‘Law and Order’ [sic in Italian]. Here Calasso (1983) claims that both modalities of substitution, convention and substantial correspondence, imply violent death: the first murder, the second sacrifice (p. 213). In the first case, the substituted is killed, while in the second, the substitute is killed. Convention, which gave birth to formal systems, is a form of killing, as it ‘eliminates the given’ [annulla il dato], transposing its selected qualities – and only those that it selects – into mere signs, or codes: an idea again rhyming perfectly with Foucault’s ideas about representation in The Order of Things. In fact, in analogy with ‘duplicated representation’, one could talk of a ‘duplicated substitution’, as a substitute, just as a representation is a ‘manifestation of itself’ (Foucault, 1970: 65). Furthermore, and even more than a representation, a substitution can be extended into infinity, thus is limitless. Substitution sets up a game of infinite, limitless destruction, which is more effective – meaning: more destructive – the more it is taken for granted as mere technicality. Calasso here is close to Ellul’s (1964) technological society.

The main techniques for such annihilation of the given are mentioned at the end of the previous page, evoking our ‘inverted divinities’, quantification and experiments, themselves modalities of sacrifice. However, the issue is way broader than empirical research or mathematical statistics, touching the very heart of modernity: ‘Substitution, exchange, value: they are the cornerstones on which the world that defines itself as modern rotates. And their origins are in sacrificial practices’ (Calasso, 2010: 433). This leads to a major paradox: sacrificial rituals are now considered as superstitions, and yet no one would dare to consider substitution, exchange, and value as superstitions.

This leads to Calasso’s take on modernity, through substitution. Substitution is not only foundational, through sacrifice or exchange, but is central for contemporary societies, especially through digitalisation. The passage from analogous to digital, enthusiastically supported by all centralised authorities of our age, political or commercial, is a perfect illustration for the logic of substitution – which is also a sacrificial, thus trickster logic: ‘Digitality is the most perfect form of substitution’ (Calasso, 2016: 133). As a result, given that an exchange society is also a substitution society (Calasso, 1983: 313), driven by ‘the despotic regime of substitution’ (Calasso, 1983: 361), we now live under the sign of substitutability: and ‘thus the realm of substitution became the ground where the machine insinuated itself and finished by revealing itself more powerful than the sovereignty that preceded it’ (Calasso, 2016: 133) – though this required ignoring continuity: but everything is continuous in nature; and also ignoring the negligible, the residue: which means to make the concrete, every single person a sacrificial victim.

Michel Serres

Michel Serres similarly argues about perplexing affinities between modernity and sacrifice, through the infinite games of substitution and exchange. Serres discussed substitution in his most important book, The Parasite, corollary to the five-volume Hermes series. His ideas rhyme with those of Calasso: substitution is closely connected to sacrifice and exchange, and is violent. It is discussed first in a section about the biblical story of Joseph, entitled ‘Theory of the Joker’ (Serres, 2014 [1980]: 277–84), the joker being, together with the parasite, Serres’ terms for the anthropological trickster. This idea returns in a key passage of his next book, Genesis, a kind of prelude to his next series of books on foundations: ‘Those who are taking the places remain stable through exchange and substitution, by changing-of-the-guards and lieutenancy. Dialectics comes down to a combinatory apparatus. The one doesn’t get any further than the other. And through substitution, there is only murder and appearance’ (Serres, 1995: 77).

Parasitism, just as substitution, is self-destructive, Serres echoes Calasso, by destroying the agent who starts to apply it: ‘the parasited parasites the parasite’ (Serres, 2014 [1980]: 35), which is sort of Serres’ take on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic; in fact, the title of the section just before the key ‘Theory of the Quasi-Object’ is ‘Master and Slaves’ (p. 375). Substitution and the parasite are all but the same: they both attack and act through the middle, working through bifurcations. The term is central also for Serres (2014 [1980]: 44–5, 85–6, 290, 336, 339), often appearing at the start of sections (pp. 131, 261), to which Serres adds the explanatory synonym-expression ‘branching’ (pp. 377, 381, 421, 433), helping to identify parasites and bifurcation: ‘The new branchings are parasites’ (p. 429). Bifurcation transforms the given, shaping it into a new order (p. 160) – a purely mental order, an artificial, concocted order produced through a disengaged, separate and distant mind; this is why both Calasso and Serres are so hostile to Descartes, Kant, and the entire lineage of modern establishment rationalism, and this is why they are not taken seriously by ‘philosophers’.

In his discussion of bifurcation Serres adds further details concerning the modality of historical origins, intuited by Calasso (1983: 185) as the ‘originary bifurcation of the psyche’. A bifurcation is like a crossroad (Serres, 2014 [1980]: 131), a ‘space of transformation’, except that, instead of having an intersection on the road which one is taking, the road itself splits into two, or ‘[h]istory bifurcates’ (p. 324). In fact, history is nothing else than a series of bifurcations, or in anthropological language ‘liminal moments’, though this is hidden from view, and so even the parasite plays a central role in Serres’ vision of history: ‘History (in general) as it is written or told is a network of bifurcations where parasites transit. With their noise they prohibit us hearing the noise of the parasites who are eating and the noise of the history they are making’ (pp. 422–3). Or, and making the hiding of the process crystal clear: ‘Parasites make history [. . .] parasites make us forget this’ (p. 423) For Serres, as for Calasso, the violence of substitution is ignored, can only be ignored, as it is hidden.

The most important discussion of substitution is contained at a central place of Parasite, in its last main chapter, discussing one of his most important ideas, the quasi-object (Serres, 2014 [1980]: 401ff). The quasi-object is a way to overcome Cartesian dualism: in contrast to the Cartesian object, dead, static, which an active subject can pick up and move, it is constantly in movement, circulating, and by such circulation generates both the subject and the collective to which it belongs. The Cartesian vision was central for mentally conceiving the real world as a mass of objects ready to be transformed and substituted for the ‘better’.

Serres uses games to illustrate his point: the game of slippers, and any ballgame. In such games the object is permanently moving around, designating the individual who happens to hold it as the subject – but subject only when caught with the object in hand, and at that point is not just the subject but the victim who can be tackled or – in a different game – sacrificed (Serres, 2014 [1980]: 403–7). Serres does not refer to it, but this is the way ballgames were played in ancient Meso-America, selecting sacrificial victims (Orr, 2001).

Such games are games of passages: the object must continuously circulate, is never at a fixed place but always in the middle, so could be called ‘liminal’. This passing around is characterised by two terms, ‘substitution’ and ‘vicariance’: ‘The game is this vicariance. It is the graph of substitutions’ (Serres, 2014 [1980]: 405); synonyms alluding to the primacy of space over object or subject. The game is about changing places – where the place, the position is set up first, and is changed through moving the quasi-object. The passing of the quasi-object creates a network, the collective itself: ‘The “we” is made by the bursts and occultations of the “I.” The “we” is made by the passes of the “I.” By exchanging the “I.” And by substitution and vicariance of the “I”’ (p. 407).

However, the society created by this particular game is a society of potential victims: any substitution society is bound to be a sacrificial society. The game is extremely dangerous (p. 408); it is a game where being is abolished by relations (p. 408); it is a game that at the same time is war – not a war of all against all, but always a war of all against one (p. 409). It is a game which thus ‘seems to be chance, since it’s played. In fact, it is only necessity enchained. [. . .] Everything always moves toward a war without risks, toward crime and theft’ (p. 409). But such a game can only be kept in motion if its violent character is disguised, hidden; and indeed, attention is systematically deflected from it, so that the game with its aims could become hidden and taken for granted (pp. 409–10).

It is with the discussion of substitution, and in two steps, by introducing two of his central terms, the joker and the quasi-object, that Parasite reaches its height, or rather true depth, as the book finishes by stating that, in spite of his best intentions, it ended up being a book about evil. Thus, we are back to the start, the question about contemporary global modernity: is this the pathology of a system, or the demonstration of the system being pathological (p. 36)?

The key figure in the effective, though also hidden, history of substitution in the modern world is William Stanley Jevons (1835–82). His work offers an intersection between the history of logic and economics. As he is best known as a founder of neoclassical economics, before going into details about his life-work, its conditions of emergence will be captured through a glimpse into the early history of neoclassical economics.

The Social-Experiential Background to Neoclassical Economics

The discovery of marginal utility is attributed to Jevons, Walras and Menger, in three books published independently of each other in 1871–4. Such coincidence, however, is due to more than a similar capturing of the ‘spirit of the times’: Jevons, Walras and Menger shared quite singular, and not just personal-individual, experiences. The cities in which they studied – London, Paris and Vienna – were seats of the first world fairs, or Expos (London, 1851, 1862; Paris, 1855, 1867; Vienna, 1873); and not just visiting but literally living these exhibitions was a central formative experience of each. Concerning Jevons, he was neither born nor lived much of his life in London. He went to London in the summer of 1850, to enrol in University College School, a prep school for nonconformists, and entered the university the next year. This meant that his first long year in London was spent under the spell of the first world fair, or the Great Exhibition, held in London from 1 May to 15 October 1851, as well reflected in his journal entries and letters. Thus, a letter of 17 November 1850 to his father mentioned the preparations with wonder: ‘[i]f the half-finished building makes such a stir, what will the Exhibition itself do!’ (Jevons, 1886: 9–10); a premonition confirmed by his awe-struck description of the famous Glass Palace in his letter of 1 June 1851: ‘I think that nothing can be more astonishing or wonderful than to walk round the galleries, or to look from one end to another’ (p. 10). A letter of about a month later contains a particularly apposite, more reflexive expression, characterising the Great Exhibition as ‘that place of all places’ (p. 10). The coincidence of Jevons’ first university year with the exposition is a case of the theoretically important phenomenon of a joint individual and collective liminality which, among others, defines the two world war generations, central for understanding the intellectual history of the 20th century. ²

The point receives further support through the cases of Walras and Menger. Léon Walras (1834–1910) was neither born nor lived in Paris but only went there to study in 1854–5, and thus experienced there the second world fair, held in May–November 1855. The case of Carl Menger (1840–1926) is astonishingly similar. The Vienna Expo only opened in 1873, while Menger already published his book in 1871. However, preparations for the Expo, with which Vienna aimed at surpassing the Paris exposition of 1855 – a clear case of imitative rivalry at the heart of the modern world – started much earlier, a crucial date being the 1858 demolition of the old city walls and its replacement with the Ringstraße. Since that moment until 1873, Vienna lived in the feverish expectation of the opening of the Expo, an event for which the entire city was radically re-shaped, gaining its current form. Menger spent his first university year in Vienna in 1858, so just at the moment when preparations started, and after 1864, now as a journalist, was professionally obliged to follow such preparations, the talk of Vienna, in minute detail. Thus, the experiential background of his work was the same as Jevons’ and Walras’: neoclassical economics grew out of such world fair experiences.

Jevons: From the ‘Substitution of Similars’ to Marginal Utility Theory

William Stanley Jevons (1835–82) was a unique figure who in a strange kind of way was almost predestined to become the vehicle to launch the word ‘substitution’ on such a fateful career path. By family background he belonged to a non-conformist church, the Unitarians, a form of anti-Trinitarian Christianity, recalling the main figure of modern science, Isaac Newton. Furthermore, while born into a well-to-do family, his father’s firm went bankrupt when he was about 12, and as a result he had to interrupt his studies, where he was particularly interested in chemistry, taking up a job as metallurgical assayer in Australia. This was an experience as significant as the world fair experience, comparable to Descartes’ education-experience as a soldier, giving a very peculiar direction and training to his mind, given that chemistry grew out of alchemy – a favourite preoccupation for Newton – while alchemy emerged as a theoretisation of metallurgy (Horvath, 2021; see also Yates, 1964, 1975, 1992 [1966]), or the way to destroy the solidity of rocks in order to gain a liquid metal ore that could be put into a pre-arranged shape, producing a practically infinite number of similar, all but identical objects. ³

The Joint Re-founding of Philosophy and Economics

Jevons made path-breaking contributions in two fields, philosophy and economics, helping to bring the two together again, though differently than before. ⁴ The alterations brought about by Jevons were in one sense identical, as they implied the use of mathematics, or the re-founding of both philosophy and economics on the basis of mathematical principles. In another sense, however, these changes were radically opposite. In philosophy they meant the disempowering of the human mind through the expulsion of psychology from philosophy, through the idea that the basic laws of logic, to which now even mathematics is retraced, are independent of the human mind. In economics, however, the development went in the opposite direction: while political economy until Jevons, even in its name, was a social science, dealing with societies or nations as its basic unit, the theory of utility and value championed by Jevons was based on psychological operations, calculations of feelings, leading to the emotivism discussed by MacIntyre (1981). Yet again, the two operations can be brought together through the term ‘substitution’, centrally used in Jevons’ logical works, and then evidently assumed by his economics. Jevons can thus be considered as the thinker of substitution, who brought together the two, previously separate, meanings of the word: ‘substitution’ as a mathematical operation used to solve equations, and ‘substitution’ as the way a succession was produced under particular conditions.

Logic

The breakthrough in Jevons’ ideas, with the discovery of the substitution principle, came in the field of logic, in between his 1864 and 1869 books. The two books share many points, most importantly their roots in the ideas of Boole. Jevons was the first who took up the ideas of Boole (Grattan-Guinness, 2000: 56–7), and the two even corresponded. But Jevons was no simple disciple or populariser; his notation of Boole’s system eventually became preferred over Boole’s own (p. 59). Still, the word ‘substitution’ is not present either in Boole’s work or in Jevons’ 1864 book in other than the conventional mathematical sense.

It is, however, the title word of his 1869 book, its importance underlined in a most emphatic manner. In the preface, Jevons describes his principle, ‘the substitution of similars’, as a genuine philosopher’s stone for reasoning, given that ‘All acts of reasoning seem to me to be different cases of one uniform process’ (Jevons, 1869: v). The idea is considered as an all but natural extension of Boole’s work, and the book is devoted to ‘showing that all the forms of the old logic, as well as the fundamental rules of mathematical reasoning, may be explained upon the same principle’ (p. v), can even be considered as applying this principle to ‘the Primary Laws of Thought’ (p. vi). However, Jevons also considers the idea as almost being natural common sense, close to the way people always argued: this is a ‘familiar mode’, as ‘we continually argue by analogy from like to like’; and that in doing so we ‘take one thing as a representative of another’ (p. v). The result would be nothing less than a Copernican revolution in logic, as in this way ‘a vast mass of technicalities may be swept from our logical text-books, and yet the small remaining part of logical doctrine will prove far more useful than all the learning of the Schoolmen’ (p. vi).

The same idea is expressed in no less weighty terms in the content of the book: ‘all reasoning consists in taking one thing as a representative, that is to say, as a substitute, for another’ (pp. 66–7); or ‘[t]hat most familiar process in mathematical reasoning, of substituting one member of an equation for the other, appears to be the type of all reasoning’ (p. 20). The former is significant as it shows – already indicated in the previous citation – that from the perspective of Jevons’ thinking, and thus from the perspective of microeconomics and logic, substitution, exchange and representation are identical processes, though historically, politically and legally this is by no means true, while the latter indicates that Jevons intends to extend his principle of substitution from formal logic to any situation of ordinary life, which will have its significance for his economic theory. This will also be a major point of contention against John Stuart Mill, who still attempted to maintain some distinction between ordinary human life and reasoning and the type of reasoning characteristic to logic and economic theory. Central to Jevons’ project was the elimination of such difference, and it is through this act that he can be considered a master of ceremonies towards global modernity.

Substitution

The centrality of substitution was the key discovery of Jevons, and he was certainly conscious and proud of his achievement. Apart from Boole, his other main predecessor was Jeremy Bentham, with the ‘quantification of the predicate’, an idea not published by him but developed from his notes by his nephew George Bentham. Jevons argues that it was by bringing this idea of the Benthams into Boole’s theory that the missing key was found and the system became complete. This is because the ‘quantification of the predicate’ implies that the distinction between subject and predicate, basic assumption of grammar and thus logic, is overcome: the relation between subject and predicate becomes a simple identity – thus the two terms, as the sides and variables in an equation, can be interchanged. ⁵ The ‘true clue to the analogy of mathematics and logic’ (1869: 9) is thus found, as through the quantification of the predicate ‘[t]he proposition becomes an equation of subject and predicate’ (p. 8), and thus, just as the two sides of the equation, become ‘convertible with each other’ (p. 14). The corollary is that ‘the equation [is] the fundamental form of reasoning’ (p. 14), and thus, just as in an equation the variables can be freely substituted with equivalent expressions, the same principle of substitution now applies to logic, and thus to philosophy. Logic, philosophy, and language work by infinitely and forever substituting one term or expression for another, insofar as they are equals, or similars, or simply likes.

Even further, as ‘the instrument of substitution is always an equation’, any relation can be expressed through substitution (1869: 19), so substitution can be extended to any kind of reasoning. At this point he offers a series of illustrations to his point, including the cases of inequalities, tracing them back to identities and equalities, resumed by the claim that ‘we always reason by means of identities or equalities’ (p. 23). This claim becomes the starting point of the proposal to simplify the rules of logic, through ‘an obvious extension of the one great process of substitution to all kinds of identity’ (p. 23), arguing that the ‘universal process of the substitution of equals, or, if the phrase be preferred, substitution of similars’ (pp. 23–4), applies to all forms of reasoning.

At this point, any reader might become uneasy about the rather strange way in which terms like ‘equality’, ‘identity’, ‘similarity’, ‘analogous’, or even simply ‘like’, are used as if they were interchangeable; and this interchangeability is made into the very principle of reasoning, through substitution. Indeed, it has been recognised that Jevons failed to define his terms, and the relations between them (Mosselmans and Van Moer, 2008: 517). Yet, he is evidently not bothered with this, as instead of offering precision, he moves further, claiming literally unlimited applicability for his ideas, especially the principle of substitution, in an ever more inflated language: ‘I have yet a striking proof to offer of the truth of the views I am putting forward; for when once we lay down the primary laws of thought, and employ them by means of the principle of substitution, we find that an unlimited system of forms of indirect reasoning develops itself spontaneously’ (Jevons, 1869: 44). He follows again by examples for his ‘indirect inference’, also defined as his ‘method’ (p. 53, last line), which is the occasion to introduce his logical abacus, predecessor of the computer, as a ‘mechanical aid’, and the term ‘mechanisation’. ⁶ Dupuy’s subtitle, ‘The Mechanization of the Mind’, literally captures what Jevons was aiming at, given that according to him his machine ‘may be considered a machine capable of reasoning, or of replacing almost entirely the action of the mind in drawing inferences’ (p. 60).

Yet Jevons does not stop at this point, but rather makes the truly fateful decision of turning back to common life and everyday reasoning, from the heights of this first thinking machine. Instead of being satisfied with creating a logical machine for solving specific problems, on the contrary, he considers this as occasion for mending the eternal isolation of philosophical logic, or the ‘divorce existing between the logic of the schools and the logic of common life’ (1869: 60), and working on their ‘reconciliation’ – a task, however, which he defers to the future. The most important work in this direction is his Theory of Political Economy.

The Theory of Political Economy

Given the centrality of ‘substitution’ to Jevons’ 1869 book on logic, presented as an earth-shattering discovery, the key to human reasoning itself, one would expect the term to play a central role in his 1871 book on economics as well. Yet this is not the case, as while the word is occasionally used, it is unemphatic and unspecific. Yet, in a way, the book, and Jevons’ entire economic theory, is about nothing else but substitution, in the various senses of the term – not just as discussed in his 1869 book but also by Calasso and Serres. With this, we enter a series of enigmas, that can only be scratched in this article, and which certainly requires further, sustained attention, including the exact manner and reasons why Jevons ‘hid’ the term in his economics, while the discovery of the principle of substitution contributed to his discovery of the basic principles of modern economics, and also how and why at the same time this was done, independently, by Walras and Menger.

The first point, and premise, is that substitution, in the precise sense the word is used by Calasso – to cut the ties between words and everyday life experiences, starting a potentially infinite circulation of signs and meanings – has been central for economics since the very start: the entire history of the discipline is saturated by a tireless redefinition of the words of everyday life. It is not possible here to enter into detail; let me only mention the word ‘economics’ itself, traced to Aristotle’s oikonomia: but that word has a completely different meaning, describing a normative discourse about the governance of individual households, and not a presumed subfield of social life – not to mention the contemporary globalised meaning. Micro-economic theorists still talk about ‘household utility function’ when they really mean ‘individual pleasure derived from consumption’. This way of proceeding, by the way, is identical to the way of proceeding of Bacon: the redefinition of the words of everyday life, which are downgraded as mere ‘idols of the marketplace’.

Returning to Jevons, this article will present and discuss only two of his central ideas: the denial of the intrinsic utility of things, and of their intrinsic value. Both ideas rely on the experience of infinite substitutability, characteristic of world fairs, and the principle of the substitution of similars, the discovery of his logic. Both imply, and as a performative speech act actually enact, a radical redefinition of the relations between what is economic and what is not – even the internal logic of economics.

The first concerns the severing of the ties between exchange and utility – or to alter the exchange of differents into the substitution of similars. Since time immemorial, and for the most evident reasons – genuine reasons – people exchanged objects they had in abundance for very different objects they lacked. However, Jevons redefined the very meaning of exchange in two steps: by shifting the focus from the inherent quality of objects – central for ‘traditional’ exchange, its very reason – to the psychological satisfaction produced by possessing or consuming objects; and by a parallel shifting of the basis of calculation from the values and prices of different objects to different additional quantities of the same object – in contrast to the satisfaction produced by different additional quantities of different objects.

The first idea continues a long trend in economic thinking and utilitarianism, with Jeremy Bentham as the central figure, who redefined utility from the use value of objects to the pain or pleasure derived from them. Jevons, however, made the additional step, in explicit contrast to the ideas of JS Mill, the last main representative of classical political economy, in denying the very idea of the intrinsic utility of objects; at least, in the sense of the reason for being exchanged (Jevons, 1888 [1871]: 43). The second, however, is an all but completely new idea, and we need to explore its possible sources.

New ideas are the products of new experiences, or some operations made with old ideas – or their combination. In this case, the new experience, shared by Jevons, Walras and Menger, was the world fair – and it is quite astonishing that historians of economic ideas so far have failed to make the connection. It requires further studies of world fairs, and the experiences of those who attended them, to adjudicate the exact difference of these experiences, along the lines of the pioneering studies of Susman (1984 [1980]) or Silla (2018), and their contribution to the kind of thinking promoted by neoclassical economics. It certainly has to do with the heightened theatricality of the experience, a kind of theatricalisation of technological change, together with the unprecedented joining of carnivalesque consumption and stock-market calculations. But at the same time such new experiences, certainly as far as theoretical developments are concerned, were joined to further operations on existing ideas, and it is here that substitution plays a crucial role, in a sense that can be best understood through Foucault’s idea of ‘duplicated representation’ – as central to the chaotic experiences encountered at a world fair was the continuous, infinite substitution of the various products and spectacles with each other, while such discrete acts of substitution embodied and represented the principle of infinite substitutability itself.

The ideas of Jevons culminate in a final step, a kind of genuine final solution – and this is also where the underlying trickster logic can be captured, below and beyond the presumed benevolent public service. This is the second central idea mentioned above: beyond denying the idea of an inherent utility, Jevons also denies that there is such a thing as inherent value. Value, just as utility, is not a quality of a thing but ‘a circumstance of an object’; talking about an ‘intrinsic value’ is talking about a ‘nonentity’ (Jevons, 1888: 77).

The argument is elaborated in the immediately following section, with the telling, Baconian title ‘Popular Use of the Term Value’ (p. 78), through a three-fold classification: ‘value in use’, ‘esteem, or urgency of desire’, and ‘ratio of exchange’. As for the first, Jevons returns to Adam Smith and the trivial distinction between use value and exchange value. The difference between the two is presented through the example of water and its ‘circumstance’: as abundant, water clearly has no exchange value. However, instead of now accepting the term ‘use value’, he introduces the expression ‘total utility’, meaning the use of a commodity, in this case water, until the additional ‘utility’ – of course meaning pleasure – derived from its use becomes very low, close to zero. What this means, in the terminology introduced by him, is that the utility gained from a ‘thing’, instead of being associated with the ‘thing’ as an entity with its own qualities, becomes reduced, replaced or ‘substituted’ by a presumed infinite series: the integration of the differential pleasures derived from its consumption. This situation, considered as ‘normal’ or ‘regular’ by Jevons, applies for a specific context: the never-before-existing situation of a world fair, where those attending the fair are torn out of their everyday life and made to face, suddenly, an infinite number of ‘consumer’ choices. ⁷

One might say that this is our situation now, in our daily life, when we go into a supermarket or a shopping mall. This is indeed the case; but supermarkets and shopping malls did not exist before world fairs. They are, rather, minor versions of world fairs – just as the stock market, originally, was a fair made permanent, in the late Renaissance. This is the experiential basis of neoclassical economics, and not the human condition. Jevons, however, acts as if we lived permanently in a world fair – and elaborates the intellectual tools that enable the taking for grantedness of such a gross illusion.

There is no space here for following in detail the turns and twists of his argument. The corollary, in this section, is that all three meanings of value are traced to the same identical source, their marginal utility, or the pleasure derived from the last unit consumed – a point that, we have seen, is of extremely limited experiential value yet is considered by Jevons as normal, even model-like. This leads him to claim that the ‘value’ of the everyday word ‘value’ is zero, so it should simply disappear; or, the ‘remedy consists in substituting for the dangerous name value that one of three stated meanings which is intended in each case. In this work, therefore, I shall discontinue the use of the word value altogether’ (p. 80). Thus, our economist-logician is transmogrified into a medic, offering a ‘remedy’ against the confusion generated by the everyday use of the word. However, as is always the case with illusionists, this is based on the failure to recall that the entire discussion of economics is limited to goods as commodities, that any ‘thing’ of value, in the ordinary sense, thus meaning to be important and dear for us, is not available for exchange, is ‘excluded’ from the start. Furthermore, such everyday use is outright defined as a ‘danger’ – or, through the word ‘remedy’, it is to be conceived of as a ‘disease’, or better a virus, infecting the minds of unsuspecting individuals. From the perspective of Jevons, anybody talking about the ‘intrinsic value’ of things, things understood in the most general sense of entities, services, relations, is a dangerous subversive – though, and in the same way, from the perspective of everyday common human existence, carried on for thousands of years, believing that everything that exists in the world (or almost) has an intrinsic value, as otherwise it could not exist, it is Jevons who is thus revealed, with his ideas, as a subversive. Neoclassical economics offers a truly dangerous logic of subversion. But the tricks of Jevons do not end here, as he is far from adhering to his own proclaimed maxim and would abundantly use the word ‘value’ in the rest of his book: according to a PDF version of the book, the use of the word in the sentence disclaiming its use is only the 106th use of the 247 total uses of the word ‘value’ in the book.

With this, the revaluation of values operated by Jevons, and his fellow economic theorists, is complete. Furthermore, just as in the case of substitution, the main operator of this revaluation, one could talk about a duplicated substitution, even here this revaluation is double, as it is done through changing the meaning of the very word value. In the book, he draws the consequences by offering the law of marginal utility: the ‘keystone of the whole Theory of Exchange, and of the principal problems of Economics, lies in this proposition – The ratio of exchange of any two commodities will be the reciprocal of the ratio of the final degrees of utility of the quantities of commodity available for consumption after the exchange is completed’ (p. 95, emphasis in original). Once the everyday meaning of value was hidden, even cancelled, he further claims that the truth of this proposition by now should be self-evident – and then makes the further point that this also corresponds to ‘the principles of human nature’ (p. 95), basing this on a theory about foundational desire, taken from French economists (pp. 40–1, 82–3) – contrasting with the way Girard (1961) based his theory of mimetic desire on French novelists.

Here we should return to the starting point of the entire line of argument – indeed, to the very premise before the start of an economic analysis – the ultimate point of any human reality, that there are a great number of ‘things’ in life that have so significant intrinsic qualities that it is simply not a question of substituting them or giving them up for exchange. As Mauss (2002 [1924]: 83) said, ‘[a] considerable part of our morality and our lives themselves are still permeated with this same atmosphere of gift, where obligation and liberty intermingle. Fortunately, everything is still not wholly categorized in terms of buying and selling’. While this is a triviality, there is a reason to evoke it here, as the kind of argumentation Jevons performs ignores it altogether, yet arrives at conclusions which question, even destroy, this ultimate reality – while ignoring this destruction, and the underlying ignorance.

Conclusion

As substitution evidently, by its name, implies change, even exchange, fluidity and instability, it could not possibly serve as a basic foundational concept for social understanding. However, and for the same reason, it might – and, as this article argued, it indeed does – serve such a role in our contemporary situation, with its vertiginous degree of accelerated change, a situation of permanent liminality. Substitution is a quite magical operation of the ruling powers, putting them into a win-win situation, as it downgrades both the one who is substituted – as they are done away with; and the one who substitutes – as they are just substitutes. Our world, driven by economic considerations and pursuing relentless technological changes, assumes that everything can be interchanged with everything else, not just in terms of the commercial exchange of objects but through the substitution of people in any imaginable position and in any possible way, assuming that such change, any change, is always for the better.

But what if this claim is fundamentally, gravely wrong? The slogan ‘we want change’, repeated all over the globe, fuelled by the media, is evidently wrong, as ‘change’ can mean anything and does not necessarily imply something better, so behind such a slogan there is an evident misunderstanding of the very nature of ‘change’, just as the possible value of stability. Another major contemporary slogan, this time clearly of neoliberal-managerial origins, though having Soviet-communist affinities, is that ‘nobody is unsubstitutable’, implying that through a ‘democratic’ process any position-holder can be demoted, but really meaning that anybody judged too independent by the ‘organisation’ can be removed.

But, again, what if this is all wrong, in principle and from the start, and if nobody and nothing were substitutable? It takes very little to show – indeed it is plainly evident – that this is the case: that everything, at least every concrete living being, is unsubstitutable; that substitution, except for the very limited conditions covered in its original meaning, makes no sense at all. There isn’t a tree in a garden or a public square that can be substituted; if, for any reason, such a tree dies or is cut down, it takes decades until a new one can grow. The same applies for any household pet; and we have not even mentioned a human being.

Substitution as a principle applied to human existence therefore is absurd; and the recognition of such absurdity can serve as a genuine fixed point and foundation from which the main features of our contemporary world, which is moving from an exchange economy and representative politics towards a substitution society, can be understood: a first condition to alter them, returning to the possibility of a meaningful existence.