Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
1. Prolegomenon
2. Derrida on his Knees
3. The Secret
4. Spirit:Time
5. What is Capital besides Capital? (or Postone ‘de-forms’ Marx)
6. The Subject as Double Substance
1. Prolegomenon
Why is it that capitalism does not have to work – in the sense that
communism does? Whether it works or it is perceived to be broken, almost
irreparably – nothing can affect its survival – its perpetuation. This seems to
be anti-Darwinist or anti-evolutionary. An organism which survives merely
because it is – not because it is the best or fittest. Broken eternal capitalism is
a prime example of ‘inoperative power’. Its indifference to perfection or even
desirability is already rooted in the indifference of money to ‘whatever
commodity’ as long as such a commodity can ceaselessly perform the miracle
of turning money into more money. As Marx writes: “The capitalist knows,
that all commodities, no matter how shoddy they look or how bad they smell,
in faith and in truth are money, (…) and besides that, miraculous means to
make out of money more money.” [“Der Kapitalist weiß, daß alle Waren, wie
lumpig sie immer aussehen oder wie schlecht sie immer riechen, im Glauben
und in der Wahrheit Geld, (…) sind und zudem wundertätige Mittel, um aus
Geld mehr Geld zu machen.” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital Erster Band, Marx
Engels Werke abbreviated MEW Band 23, Berlin, 1975, p. 169)] In a similar
vein, Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts notes that the capitalist can make a
greater profit from derelict ‘cellar-dwellings’ rented to the proletariat than
The Undecidability of Capital
from the rent from palaces – as capital although a science of wealth, is also a
science of perishing (darben) – both in the commodities it can convert to ever
greater value and the molding (including deforming) of desire necessary for
their willing consumption. “Das rohe Bedürfnis des Arbeiters ist eine viel
größere Quelle des Gewinns als das feine des Reichen. Die Kellerwohnungen
in London bringen ihren Vermietern mehr ein als die Paläste (…)” [“The raw
desire of the worker is a much greater source of profit than the fine one of the
rich. The cellar flats in London yield more for their landlords than the palaces
(…)”, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (1844) in Marx Engels Werke
abbreviated MEW Band 40, Berlin, 1990, pp. 551-552)]
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The Undecidability of Capital
Capital does not necessarily imply an ever evolving higher level of civilisation
– but can do just as well or better with a worse one, as long as the basic
conditions of capital or M-C-M’ (money-commodity-more money) themselves
are given. Self-preservation is not an absolute value – it should hover at the
point of neediness. Neediness is the appropriate mode for the self-
preservation of the worker (includes all non-capitalists in capitalism); it is also
“the principle of national economy”. In this way morality protrudes into the
“essence” of the national economy.
Capital or money have desires (Bedürfnisse) which must be satisfied, the
worker must practice being without desire, being wasted.
The Roman Empire was built on Roman Army bread made of spelt flour, the
Egyptian pyramids on pharaonic bread made of kamut flour – the British
Empire (Bath), says an Englishman – an old Bluecoat boy – was built on
‘Mother’s Pride’. One of those white nothing loaves. Less than air. The
British are the Luftmenschen in the succession of imperialists. The Scots at
least have their oat biscuits – they eat them like the Indios in the Andes chew
on their coca leaves – to stave off exhaustion while mounting the heights in
thin air.
Just as in the figure of just going on there is an implicit ‘belief’ in the unending
repetitive character of a series or rule, we carry around an apriori syllogistic
rhetorical structure in thinking which presupposes that one thought must
follow from another thought and so on. But must it – does it? In the same
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The Undecidability of Capital
Each moment of the flux is a repetition of the one before so that in going on
there is only before never after. Badiou is quite taken by Beckett’s ‘bad verse’
(vers de mirliton) about such a flux of the same – what are numbers other
than this. In the counting of numbers there is the utter assumption that more
will always be the same as less – the unit of one added to a transfinite number
is no different than the unit of one added to one. Is this truth? Is the
following of the same by the same a kind of verification of the same? Would
then conversely a following of the same by the other be a falsification of the
same? Or of the other? In the following of the same by the same there is only
a change by substitution – that which was in the place of now moves out of
this place – or as Badiou would say is then non-being. But it is replaced by a
replica of itself – so the following of the same by the same is an unending
substitution of being by non-being. This is the thing’s undecidability.
Beckett’s verse is a kind of faux-Heraclitean homily:
“Flux causes (one notes already that flux itself is seen as a ‘cause’ sm)
That every thing
Even in being,
Every thing,
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The Undecidability of Capital
“That the thing can simultaneously be held in the place where it is and in the
place where it is not is given in the image of the flux; this flux, however, is
never the synthesis of being and non-being, and is not to be confused with
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The Undecidability of Capital
Hegelian becoming.” (Badiou, op. cit., p. 252) This balancing of the thing
between being and not-being in the flux of the same (mimetic flux) is what
Badiou calls its undecidability. But Beckett’s flux of the same seems to elude
simultaneity – for if something is to come, something else has to go. What
kind of myth is that? The myth of the number?
I saw an odd clip of Derrida on You Tube – speaking about Heidegger in some
dreary shabby classroom (Jacques Derrida on Martin Heidegger 2000). One
sees a few smirking auditors behind him. He is dressed in a pristine black
jacket and grey trousers, as if one could take his sartorial elegance for granted
although somehow out of place, he holds a microphone, he is in front of a
table on a dais painted black or dark blue. The table is covered with a blue
cloth. The most incongruous element in the scene is that he is ‘standing’ on
his knees. No explanation. A sheer fact. Hard to interpret. Is that a partial
definition of a fact? It resists (desists?) any ultimate interpretation – but
allows for an indefinite amount of speculation. This could be an axiom of
‘speculative realism’. The clip itself was not very revealing either. Derrida
disagrees with some things Heidegger says about “animality” (“that animals
don’t speak, don’t die, are poor in world” – he is suspicious of this, - “it has
heavy consequences”). He also “parts company” with Heidegger about other
things such as technology, epochality. His tone of voice and facial expressions
are emphatic, demanding. Derrida’s tie hangs suggestively below his belt –
the angle of his tilting – like a plumb line – showing how much he deviates
from the shortest distance to the floor. The impression is one of self-dwarfing.
Is Derrida assuming the position of the ‘penitent god’? God who asks
forgiveness from humanity? Benjamin suggests this aspect of God-ness in his
fragment on “Capitalism as Religion” – God is implicated in the debt/guilt of
capitalism and must seek atonement. Sacrifices are made to atone the guilt of
God. The crucifixion was another act of God asking forgiveness from his
creatures for their creaturely-ness. Or is Derrida rather enacting a kind of
Dostoyevskian gesture of humility – such as those required or carried out by
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The Undecidability of Capital
the various capricious holy men or holy fools who populate his novels. In The
Possessed penitents visiting a famous holy man must approach him on their
knees. When he elects to accept their penance they are made to drink a
horribly over sweetened tea (according to their degree of sinfulness) all the
while still on their knees. The enigmatic holy man in The Brothers
Karamazov, the ailing Starez, goes down on his knees in front of Dmitri, one
of the brothers, during a tumultuous family audience of the Karamazovs in his
hermitage cell. No one knows why. It is just the mystery of the divine holy
impulse. Although a sceptical monk who witnesses this genuflection –
attributes it to the showmanship of the dying Starez. The holy man senses a
crime will take place. Later one will say he foresaw everything.
Dmitri had just ridiculed his father for wooing a woman desired and courted
by both father and son.
Is Derrida the penitent at the feet of Heidegger, the holy man – or the self-
effacing holy man bending his knee to the ‘sinner’ Heidegger in absentia?
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The Undecidability of Capital
while singing) and equally difficult to abruptly end such kneeling. This extract
of less than a minute, the epitome of insignificance, could have remained a
recorded fact among the millions circulating seen and unremembered on the
internet (just like thought itself – you have to have thought much to forget
much as Robert Walser said), if it had not been ‘seized’ by a second act – that
of my protocol and futile (useless) interpretation.
Perhaps this fact is not just on video but also in writing somewhere already, a
‘curated’ video - although unknown to me. My act of impaling by writing is
my own first appropriation of this visual fact – the ‘trace’ of an inexplicable
gesture. Is my writing a third degree of reality? First the act of kneeling – the
capture of that specific moment as in a witnessing by the camera operator is
the second. The use of knee bending in literature has less power than the fact
of Derrida’s filmed kneeling, although it may have been itself an ‘onto-
theatrical’ gesture. In literature such an act would seem ‘excessive’. In ‘life’ or
the filmed version Derrida’s kneeling radiates the “brutality of the fact”
(Francis Bacon) – no amount of interpretation can change or erase it. One
can only shake one’s head like the woodcutter sitting in the ruin of Rashomon
Gate staring into the rain in the beginning of Kurosawa’s film Rashomon and
repeat “I don’t understand.”
The room itself seems to be miniaturized. The scale of the room where the
audience is sitting is greater than the site (spot) where Derrida is kneeling on
the dais. The room seems to shrink down on him like an inverted pyramid.
As a dramatic character he is reminiscent of Mnouchkine’s interpretation of
the tragic king Richard the Second in her staging of Shakespeare’s eponymous
play. Richard is obdurate and arrogant – unaware until too late of the
conspiracy against him by his rebellious vassals. The actor portraying the king
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The Undecidability of Capital
3. The Secret
The secret is like a fact, because it is of language but not only of language – it
is also the withholding of language. Otherwise it would not be a secret. It can
potentially be the infinite withholding of language, if the secret is ‘kept’
absolutely – it ceases to be just a secret, it ceases to be in total. The absolute
secret tends to nil, to void, to absence. So it is a fact of absence. The
attributes of language cease to inform it – no rhetoric, no sophistry can take
hold of a secret. The secret can be of a fact – besides being a fact – for
instance the secret identity of someone, the secret hiding place of something
valuable, stolen – but all secrets must be susceptible to being known or
unknown. The ‘secrets of the universe’ are not really secrets – because no one
‘has’ them either to divulge or conceal. Hence truth is not a secret as the
concept of aletheia might imply – something which comes out of its hiding.
Wherever it is hidden or revealed – whether it is seen or unseen (told or
untold?), the truth is indifferent to this hiding or disclosure. Does
Wittgenstein have anything to say about the secret – except that he is silent
about what cannot be said? But is that a secret? A secret must be sayable –
even if not said. A secret is not the ineffable. Truth is indifferent (adiaphoric)
to its being true or being known. So a secret could not necessarily be truth.
But could a fairy tale or a fiction be a secret? A secret ‘must’ be true or its
withholding would be of no consequence, but truth is not a secret. As a secret
withers away in its untelling – to this degree it exposes itself to the danger of
the ‘unthought’.
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The Undecidability of Capital
But what if anything does the secret have to do with semblance (appearance)
or ‘Schein’ – with the veil of the aesthetic?
Benjamin discovers a philosophy of semblance in Goethe’s “Elective Affinities”
– and of what seems so nearly the same – of the secret, veiled being. But he is
rather confusing in his manner of determining the occult transitions from
semblance to secret and the eventual revelation of the secret – and if this is
the same as the unveiling of semblance. Can semblance ever be unveiled?
One could assume that in the logic of Goethe’s aesthetic there is either
semblance or no semblance (the unveiling of the secret) – nor can there be a
slow crumbling away of semblance, just as fictions neither age nor become
more true. Ottilie is the character in whom Goethe lays the signature of
beautiful tragic semblance. She is semblance whose tragedy is to have been
chosen as the semblance of tragedy. She is both figure and transfiguration –
the static center of what Hebbel likened to an “automaton in an anatomical
theatre” (quoted in Walter Benjamin, Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften, in
Illuminationen, Frankfurt, 1961, p. 135) – her semblance is not compelled by
external suffering or violence to its demise. The semblance, which represents
itself in her beauty, is one of imminent departure – a figurine meant to be
broken, a soft light soon to be extinguished. She is Goethe’s idol of tragedy
itself – an embodied fetish of the transition in the novel from the cathartic
affect to the sublime.
“Eben dieser Übergang ist es, der im Untergang des Scheines sich vollzieht.
Jener Schein, der in Ottiliens Schönheit sich darstellt, ist der untergehende.
Denn ist es nicht so zu verstehen, als führe äußere Not und Gewalt den
Untergang der Ottilie herauf, sondern in der Art ihres Scheins selbst liegt es
begründet, daß er verlöschen muß, daß er es bald muß.” (ibid., p. 139)
[“Particularly this transition is the one which occurs in the demise
(Untergang) of semblance. That semblance, which represents itself in
Ottilie’s beauty, is a sinking one. It is not to be understood, that distress and
violence lead to Ottilie’s perdition, rather it is grounded (begründet) in the
type of her semblance (Schein), that it must go out, that it must go soon.”]
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The Undecidability of Capital
Plato’s theory of beauty does not refer first to beautiful semblance in art (as
the work of art) but to beautiful life. But this is because Plato is caught
between despising and shunning art as unacceptable mimesis and his ideal of
philosophy as anti-mimetic discourse. Yet beauty as Schein is not merely an
imitation of life – if it were it would be reduced to economy – the
reproduction of life in its manifest sense where bodies represent other bodies
– or so it would seem. This mimetic nature of the ‘general economy’ (Bataille)
can be traced back to its “abysmally mimetic” original event – the work of
death or the sacrifice. The body of the sacrifice represents or imitates the
body of the community or its economy – which is the same thing. The ‘work of
death’ is substituted for and anticipates the ‘work of life’. This is almost the
opposite movement to that of a Heideggerian ‘unconcealing’ qua aletheia – as
the sacrifice or work of death ‘reveals’ in advance what is normally concealed
by the ‘work of life’. First comes the unconcealing – then the concealing. (see
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics,
Stanford, 1998, p. 124, note 124)
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The Undecidability of Capital
(Heidegger and Badiou, two points on the curve of ontology, stand for non-
metamorphosing or barren philosophy – never anywhere else than with itself
alias Being – unable to subtract from itself (not even as sacrifice). Although
errors are fertile – the fertility of errors is a substitute or disguise for the
sterility of philosophical monuments like Being. Heidegger himself laments
the impossibility of Dasein having or perceiving itself from a distance. The
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The Undecidability of Capital
What would be the purpose of such a bizarre collection of figures cut out of
their original textual ambient and turned into statues – the purpose for
philosophy (of the Heideggerian-deconstructionist provenance)? It seems
that for Heidegger it is the only way philosophy can engorge itself with poetry
not for the sake of the aesthetic enigma – but to furnish itself with the means
of representing itself in figures or types (Gestalt). Thus one will find figures
from Nazi propaganda such as Ernst Jünger’s Der Arbeiter Herrschaft und
Gestalt (The Worker - Rule and Type) next to scavengings from poetic sources
such as Rilke’s Angel and of course Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Once they have
undergone philosophical branding – the ensuing types become
indistinguishable convicts in philosophical detention, ‘bad’ and ‘good’
company herded together in one confinement. The intention, desire,
relentless strategy is that such figured types displayed behind philosophical
bars, painfully unconcealed in a metaphysical freak show, can never become
enigmas again. Aesthetic loss is philosophical (ontological) gain. Poetry (art)
becomes directly metaphysical (truth bearing) but only when imagination
(fiction) is seized upon by philosophy. This approximates what Badiou (also
in the wake of Heidegger) would call the state of being a “condition” of
philosophy; he admits that all these conditions are necessarily external to it.
Art or especially poetry is one of those conditions. Lacoue-Labarthe makes
this ‘dependency’ of Heideggerian philosophy upon that which it would also
subordinate most explicit: “For if Zarathustra is a figure, in the strongest
sense (and we will see in a moment that for Heidegger it is a historical
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The Undecidability of Capital
The capitalist is a conscious subject only to the degree that he ‘loses’ his
subjectivity in his imitation of the restless movement of unceasing profit – the
self-processing process of capital. Capital, on the other hand, is the
“automatic subject” of its own self-valorisation, because, despite its constant
alternating metamorphoses into money and commodity, it never loses itself in
this movement. “It (value) moves constantly out of one form into the other,
without losing itself in this movement, and transforms itself in this way into
an automatic subject.” [“Er geht beständig aus der einen Form in die andre
über, ohne sich in dieser Bewegung zu verlieren, und verwandelt sich so in ein
automatisches Subjekt.” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, MEW 23, op. cit., p. 169)]
The capitalist, as the subject who loses his subjectivity in the subjectivity of
Capital, is only such when he functions as ‘personified capital’, or when his
subjective purposes are those of capital endowed or gifted with his own “will
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The Undecidability of Capital
The identity of the capitalist’s will and the will of capital is what constitutes
the moral certainty of the type. In an almost Schopenhauerian sense, the
capitalist is an “appearance of the will” (Erscheinung des Willen) of capital,
the same will which is objectified in any other thing alias commodity or
money. Musil writes in the second volume of “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften”
– in a conversation between Ulrich and Director F. “Das Geld ist ein
Vernunftwesen.” (Money is a being of reason.) because money decides where
it wants to be spent – he should have said – money is a being of will. Ulrich,
the logical mathematical hero of the novel seems to imply that the ‘ecstatic
society’ Kakanien – Austro-Hungary in the last year of its belle époque 1913 -
is at the most intermittently rational, whereas money is the guarantee of a
continuous flow of ratio. Money is always rational. Money means
“Großkapital”. The ‘reason’ of money is also the model for the logic infusing
Musil’s caricature of a scientific action-culture – quantitative, exact, barbaric–
the “logical structure of the world” (Carnap). Besides “Großkapital” – the
types, which inhabit this world, are merchants, warriors, hunters and
scientists.
The other half of the story – “world history” - is ‘love’ or passion. “Denn die
Weltgeschichte ist mindestens zur Hälfte eine Liebesgeschichte.” (motto of
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Hamburg, 1987, Band II)
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The Undecidability of Capital
Musil’s source for his observation “Money is a being of reason.” may have
been Heraclitus – a fusion of two of his axioms: “Fire is gifted with reason.”
[“Das Feuer ist vernunftbegabt.” In Heraklit Fragmente, München, 1986,
B64a, p. 23] and “For fire exchange is everything and fire is for everything like
money for gold and gold for money.” [“Für Feuer ist Gegentausch alles und
Feuer für alles wie Geld für Gold und Gold für Geld.” op. cit., B90, p. 29] By a
simple substitution – fire is like money, money is thus gifted with reason.
This moral certainty of the capitalist ectype translates into the cult of
authenticity of the bourgeois subject – his supposed absolute identity with
himself or ‘facticity’. This authenticity, says Adorno, is a lie, a fiction of
identity – or rather the true identity of the circulation sphere with itself. As a
type – the authenticity of the bourgeois subject – merely certifies (determines)
its absolute replaceability or the ultimate fungibility of things, their
quantifiability as epiphenomena of capital (fetish).
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The Undecidability of Capital
But one cannot be sure if this is not a piece of counterfeit (spurious) advice –
as Adorno calls this mimetic behavior the “Urform von Liebe” (Ur-form of
love) in which the “priests of authenticity” scent “Spuren jener Utopie, welche
das Gefüge der Herrschaft zu erschüttern vermöchte.” [“traces of that utopia,
which could shake the structure of domination”, ibid.]. One can almost hear
Adorno mocking Bloch as one of those ‘priests of authenticity’. But is
Nietzsche really one of them?
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The Undecidability of Capital
4. Spirit:Time
If the capitalist is the subject whose subjectivity is lost in capital – does that
mean that the proletariat is the subject whose subjectivity can be found in
capital? Does Marx imply this symmetry – or are they both lost?
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The Undecidability of Capital
19
The Undecidability of Capital
The proletariat on the other hand feels inauthentic (closer to ‘true being’) and
unfree as the ‘personification’ of abstract labour or his absolute identity (in
terms of the absolute negativity of capital) with formal ‘empty’ time. The
proletariat is conscious of himself as finitude, as time, in his state of being the
measure of the time of abstract labour. “We are not measuring time, we are
ourselves a measure of time.” (Shannee Marks, “Body of Grammar: Body of
Pain” (Exhibition Writings from The Accident Colony Triptych, Austrian
Cultural Forum London 2008) in Night Work Philosophy Interrupted,
forthcoming)
For Marx abstract labour and the time of abstract labour as its measure fuse to
near identity. Time is also the mark of quantification – or ‘wound’, a kind of
ignominy imprinted (branded) on the proletarian organism. He is nothing but
time, nothing more or less than what he quantifies in his abstract labour.
Quoting a factory inspection report of 30th April 1860 in which the ‘open
secret’ is acknowledged – “Moments are the elements of profit.” – Marx
expressly describes the worker as “personifizierte Arbeitszeit” [“personified
labour time”, Das Kapital, MEW 23, op. cit., pp. 257-258] He refers not to
Hegelian concepts but to the factory jargon of the time – the usual appellation
for workers who worked full time was simply “full times”, children under 13
who were only allowed to work six hours were called “half times”: “Der
Arbeiter ist hier nichts mehr als personifizierte Arbeitszeit.” [“The worker is
nothing more here than personified labour-time.”, ibid.]
The truism “time is money” refers to this obliquely in terms of circulation - the
price paid by the capitalist in the circulation sphere for the purchase of time
(the commodity labour-power) - the only commodity which yields more time
than needed for its reproduction alias surplus value or money. “When time
money ist, so ist es vom Standpunkt des Kapitals aus nur die fremde
Arbeitszeit, die allerdings im eigenlichsten Worte das money des Kapitals
ist.” [“When time is money, then it is from the point of view of capital, only the
strange (fremde) labour-time, which is in a literal sense the money of capital.”
Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Europäische
Verlagsanstalt Frankfurt, reprint of the Moscow edition of 1939 and 1941,
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The Undecidability of Capital
p. 528]
Average social labour-time and abstract labour collapse into one. Here Marx
follows Hegel’s determination of time as presented in the second volume of his
Enzyklopädie:
“Weil die Dinge endlich sind, darum sind sie in der Zeit; nicht weil sie in der
Zeit sind, darum gehen sie unter, sondern die Dinge selbst sind das zeitliche;
so zu sein ist ihre objektive Bestimmung.” [“Because things are finite,
therefore they are in time; not because they are in time, do they decline, rather
things are themselves the temporal, to be like that is their objective
determination.” G.W.F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden 9, Enzyklopädie der
philosophischen Wissenschaften II, “Die Naturphilosophie” Frankfurt, 1978,
p. 50]
Hegel refers to time as “die totale Negativität” [“total negativity” (op. cit.,
p. 55)]. Time passes into space and space into time as “the point”. The
concrete point is “the place” – unity of here and now (space and time). Spirit
is also a category of negativity – Hegel attributes to it the title of “absolute
negativity”. One can see a kinship between two ‘competing’ categories of
negativity – time as total negativity ‘haunts’ spirit as absolute negativity.
Transposed to a Hegelian Marx perspective – one could regard these
contradictory negativities as the site of an incongruous rupture between
capital as spirit and the proletariat as abstract labour/average time. Is that
perhaps the contradiction intended by Nietzsche when he writes: “Wahrhaft
seiend ist nur der Schmerz und der Widerspruch.” [“Truly existent is only
pain and contradiction.” op. cit., p. 204] There is perhaps no way to this “true
being” – but the site of rupture indicates such an ‘abyss’ where the
transfigured ‘pain’ of average time embodied in the proletariat (“the broken
Ur-pain” – Nietzsche, ibid. p. 205) contradicts absolute semblance or
“pleasure” (“the complete Ur-pleasure”, ibid.) embodied in what Nietzsche
calls will, Hegel – spirit, Marx - capital. Although for Hegel spirit (Geist)
incorporates (is) both contradiction and pain even evil – its dividedness
(Entzweiung) belongs to the nature of spirit. Geist is constituted as a
contradictory unity or identity of itself and not itself - necessarily exiting from
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The Undecidability of Capital
itself into its negative, its other, implying pain and contradiction to return to
itself as the idea – to become upon its return the idea returning to itself.
(see G.W.F. Hegel Werke in zwanzig Bänden 10, Enzyklopädie der
philosophischen Wissenschaften, III, “Die Philosophie des Geistes”,
Frankfurt, 1976, pp. 25-27) Since Marx and to a certain extent Nietzsche are
materialist thinkers – contradictory entities although mutually determinant
remain painfully separate.
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The Undecidability of Capital
erwarten hat als die – Gerberei.” (Marx, Das Kapital, MEW 23, op. cit., p.
191)
[“He, who before was the money-owner, now strides forward as capitalist; the
possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of
importance, smirking, intent on business; the other timid and holding back,
like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect
but—a hiding.”, Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, translated from the third German
edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels,
New York, 1967, p. 176]
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The Undecidability of Capital
The average social time is the ‘substance’, the essence – the lifetime of the
individual is appearance, contingency, accident.
The time of production or average social time – the socially average labour
time – implies at least two kinds of quantitative reduction of ‘human’ time.
Marx emphasizes that abstract labour is measured and has its magnitude in
the time of simple labour – devoid of any particular qualities - for instance
labour skills. This is the invention of capitalism as the social totality. In
addition, being exchange value, the commodities are made equivalent to one
another especially in their all being expressed in terms of the general
equivalent money (‘the great leveller’), hence the labour time expended in
their production must also be quantitatively equivalent.
The aim for capital – is that the time abstract labour spends in production
earning the means of subsistence should itself diminish – leading to more and
more ‘disposable’ time for capital. Disposable time (‘time regained’) is itself
reified – it becomes a commodity, in its turn raw material (use value) for
“varied new products which impose themselves on the market as uses of
socially organized time.” (Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, 1983,
p. 151) What else are ‘social media’ than reified time, what Debord calls
“spectacular time” – “the time of consumption of images (…) and the image of
the consumption of time” (Debord, op. cit., p. 153)?
Some of this time may even appear as leisure or holiday time for the worker –
but as Guy Debord notes – in the society of the spectacle – all time in and out
of the working day is subsumed under capital, becoming “pseudo-cyclical
time”: “Pseudo-cyclical time leans on the natural remains of cyclical time and
also uses it to compose new homologous combinations: day and night, work
and weekly rest, the recurrence of vacations.” (Debord, op. cit., p. 150) But
this pseudo-cycle of the spectacular is only possible because the initial violent
wrenching of the proletariat-to-be from his pre-capitalist setting creating ‘free’
producers – was the “violent expropriation of their own time”. (Debord, op.
cit., p. 159 - italics in the original) The time of abstract labour is also a
degraded time and essentially static.
24
The Undecidability of Capital
25
The Undecidability of Capital
mehr des Ureinen: als Abbilder des Abbildes sind es die reinsten
Ruhemomente des Seins. Das wahrhaft Nichtseiende – das
Kunstwerk.(…)Das Sein befriedigt sich im vollkommenen Schein.”
[“Our pain is an imagined (one): our imagination always gets caught in
the imagination. Our life is an imagined life. We are not moving a step
forward. Freedom of the will, every activity is only imagination. So also the
working of genius is imagination. These reflections in genius are
reflections of appearance, no longer the ur-one: as images (copies) of
the image (copy) they are being’s purest moments of rest. The true not-
being – the work of art (…) Being contents itself in perfect semblance.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe 7, Herausgegeben von Giorgio
Colli und Mazzimo Montinari, München, 1988, Nachgelassene Fragmente
Ende 1870 - April 1871, 7 [157], p. 200 – emphasis in the original.
Note: Besides imagination Vorstellung means idea or representation.)]
26
The Undecidability of Capital
and always old. All its self-negating properties such as the eternal return of
valorisation and decapitalisation (‘crisis’) are included within its semblance or
‘totality’. Capital thus is without history. As a value-form, capital performing
as semblance has its origins in another more elementary semblance – in
money. It cannot be deduced as an aesthetic category (as it appears for us)
from the material ‘natural’ substrata of production – but is itself an advanced
formation of the mercantile economy of money. “Welthandel und Weltmarkt
eröffnen im 16. Jahrhundert die moderne Lebensgeschichte des Kapitals.
Sehen wir ab vom stofflichen Inhalt der Warenzirkulation, vom Austausch
der verschiednen Gebrauchswerte, und betrachten wir nur die ökonomischen
Formen, die dieser Prozeß erzeugt, so finden wir als sein letztes Produkt das
Geld. Dies letzte Produkt der Warenzirkulation ist die erste
Erscheinungsform des Kapitals.(…)Jedoch bedarf es nicht des Rückblicks auf
die Entstehungsgeschichte des Kapitals, um das Geld als seine erste
Erscheinungsform zu erkennen. Dieselbe Geschichte spielt täglich vor unsren
Augen.”
[“World commerce and world market open the modern life history of capital
in the 16th century. If we disregard the material content of the commodity
circulation, the exchange of different use-values, and consider only the
economic forms, which this process produces, we find its last product to be
money. This last product of the commodity circulation is capital’s first form of
appearance.(…) However, we have no need to look back to the history of the
genesis of capital to recognize money as its first form of appearance. The
same history plays daily before our very eyes.” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, MEW
23, op. cit., p. 161)]
Capital is ahistorical in the sense that each day it repeats its own history – its
birth out of the head of money.
Yet capital has its own ‘internal’ temporal side – mostly neglected in
discussions of its spiritual nature – this temporal side though is not value-
creating but rather the limit of value, negative and sterile. It is the time of
circulation which determines the speed of turnover and accumulation, in
other words the realisation of value. This time itself must be deducted from
27
The Undecidability of Capital
As the name of Marx’s work is Capital and not Labour, it is not surprising that
it would be seen as the overriding subject of its own production process. For
28
The Undecidability of Capital
Postone is not content with anointing capital as subject of its so-called self-
valorisation process - he designates capital as the subject of history, as secular
‘spirit’, claiming that this is how Marx intended his critique be understood.
Implicit in Postone’s inference is the notion that the repetitive cycle of capital
valorisation and devalorisation, what Marx calls its lifeline (Lebenslauf) – its
own reproduction and self-destruction process – is identical with historical
process or historical time as such.
Postone cites a crucial well-known passage from the first volume of Capital
where Marx analyses the “general formula of capital” as proof of his
contention:
“At this point in his exposition, Marx describes his concept of capital in terms
that clearly relate it to Hegel’s concept of Geist:
It [value] is constantly changing from one form into the other without becoming lost
in this movement; it thus transforms itself into an automatic subject ….In truth,
however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming
29
The Undecidability of Capital
the form in turn of money and of commmodities, it changes its own magnitude,…and
thus valorizes itelf….For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus-value is
its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization….[V]alue suddenly
presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own,
and for which the commodity and money are both mere forms.
Marx, then, explicitly characterizes capital as the self-moving substance which
is Subject. In so doing, Marx suggests that a historical Subject in the Hegelian
sense does indeed exist in capitalism, yet he does not identify it with any social
grouping, such as the proletariat, or with humanity. Rather, Marx analyzes it
in terms of the structure of social relations constituted by forms of objectifying
practice and grasped by the category of capital (and, hence, value). (…) they
possess the attributes that Hegel accorded the Geist. It is in this sense, then,
that a historical Subject as conceived by Hegel exists in capitalism.” (Moishe
Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, Cambridge, 2003, p. 75)
But is this the Subject as conceived by Marx? Why would Marx consider
capital the subject of history when he develops its forms so as to show that in
its operation it is ahistorical – repeating its own history over and over again
every day? Irreversible history – the Doppelgänger of the eternal present of
the life cycle of Capital – is itself a semblance (result) of a universal quantified
time of capitalist production or “circulating capital” in the wide sense. The
seeming paradox of at least two different unitary times of capital would
disappear if circulation were not the historical-ontological ground of Capital
from which it goes out and to which it returns. The two times: the cyclical
unitary time (revolutions) of Capital in its complete repetitive cycle of being
always what it is not at any particular moment - unifies within itself as its
‘necessary illusion’ – the irreversible time of universal world history.
This ‘universal history’ though is not really history at all but as noted by Guy
Debord, it is “(…) still only the refusal within history of history itself.”
“145 With the development of capitalism, irreversible time is unified on a
world scale. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is
gathered under the development of this time. But this history, which is
everywhere simultaneously the same, is still only the refusal within history of
30
The Undecidability of Capital
history itself. What appears the world over as the same day is the time of
economic production cut up into equal abstract fragments. Unified
irreversible time is the time of the world market and, as a corollary, of the
world spectacle.” (Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, Detroit,
1983)
Irreversible history haunts the cyclical “life-act”(Lebensakt) of Capital as its
other ‘present’, its ‘spectacle’.
Capital transforms itself in the circular movement of its circulating self in its
various phases of money, commodity, production process, more money, in the
market, in the circulation, as rent or interest bearing capital, as credit or
finance – at any specific moment always that which it is not as the subject of
the whole. If it were to be what it is, it would cease to be in its own endless
process of valorisation meaning it would cease to be at all. Hence it is
temporal only in a formal sense –it can never be historical.
In all the unitary time of capital there is not one atom of history. Neither can
one find, as Postone claims, an “immanent logic of history” in its “alienated
form of social relations”. (Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social
Domination, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 270) In another passage
Postone seems to retreat from this claim – citing “Marx’s analysis” whereby
“the capital form of social relations (…)is blind, processual, and quasi-
organic.” (ibid.) Capital then is a form of ‘second nature’ – the quasi-organic
31
The Undecidability of Capital
Marx defines value in the first chapter of Das Kapital as having as its
‘substance’ abstract human labour, whose measure in turn is the time of
labour. Abstract human labour represents a multiple complex process of
reduction and quantification of human activity. Abstract labour is first of all
the most ‘simple’ form of labour or labour in its simple form – this is of course
an ideal of simplification. Marx suggests other ways of determining this
simplification – it is also an average – but not just any average, it is average
social labour determined by the average productivity at any given time in the
social body alias capitalist society. Marx does not describe the exact way such
a social average is constructed – not in this chapter – its operation is merely
assumed. The social average is an indefinite unknown means of quantifying
labour, which together with the apparent ‘visible’ abstraction of the measure
of time determine the value produced by abstract human labour. This labour
thus is not the least qualified nor is it the most qualified – it is an average.
(The process of proletarisation described by Marx as “original accumulation”
was in most cases a degrading of the skills of labourers – the transfer of these
skills to the more efficient machine for the purpose of cheaper production of
larger quantities of commodities – irregardless of their quality.) Average
social time, the composite of these various processes of reduction or laying
bare of labour, is not pure quantity although it is a measure of
standardisation. Value is measured by the simple duration of labour-time
32
The Undecidability of Capital
Physicists studying cities and corporations have recently confirmed the same
tendency of stagnation despite ‘dynamic’ appearances– from a statistical
mathematical perspective. Corporations are feeble – this is capital – they
have a longevity of about 40-50 years. Cities are indestructible – this is
history – the terrain of the ‘multitude’. Cities are a more likely subject of
history. Citing the work of Bettencourt and West, Jonah Lehrer writes in the
New York Times of 17th December 2010: “At first glance, cities and companies
look very similar. They’re both large agglomerations of people, interacting in a
well-defined physical space. They contain infrastructure and human capital;
the mayor is like a C.E.O. But it turns out that cities and companies differ in a
very fundamental regard: cities almost never die, while companies are
extremely ephemeral. As West notes, Hurricane Katrina couldn’t wipe out
New Orleans, and a nuclear bomb did not erase Hiroshima from the map. In
contrast, where are Pan Am and Enron today? The modern corporation has an
average life span of 40 to 50 years.
This raises the obvious question: Why are corporations so fleeting? After
buying data on more than 23,000 publicly traded companies, Bettencourt and
West discovered that corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, was
entirely sublinear. As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit
per employee shrinks. West gets giddy when he shows me the linear
regression charts. “Look at this bloody plot,” he says. “It’s ridiculous how well
the points line up.” The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in
which efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of
33
The Undecidability of Capital
bureaucracy. “When a company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West
says. “And then, if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is
happy and rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line,
and so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the
beginning of the end.”
The danger, West says, is that the inevitable decline in profit per employee
makes large companies increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. Since the
company now has to support an expensive staff — overhead costs increase
with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to significant losses. As West
puts it, “Companies are killed by their need to keep on getting bigger.” ”
(Jonah Lehrer, A Physicist Solves the City, New York Times, December 17,
2010, online)
These looming elements of the ineluctable and recurring crisis of capital – the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall and capital’s fatal drive towards unlimited
concentration - both utter counter-movements to any dynamic of rational
efficiency – are dismissed by Postone as “surface phenomena” of capital. (see
“Time, Labor, and Social Domination, op. cit., page 311 note 15) Postone’s
“theory of capital” ‘de-forms’ Marx’s critique of political economy in the
attempt to free capital of any blemish which could spoil his interpretation of
capital as the apex of history or perfect ‘spirit’ – akin to Hegel’s Geist.
34
The Undecidability of Capital
He concludes the following chapter on the “The Buying and Selling of Labour-
Power”” almost in symmetry to the ending of the chapter on the “general
formula”, so as to warn the reader – what he has seen in the preceding
chapters is how capital appears to expand itself spontaneously – but is not
how this expansion alias surplus value really arises. The new element he has
introduced by the end of the sixth chapter – is that unique commodity which
has the power within itself to create value – the commodity of labour power.
So if at the end of the chapter 4 in which Postone’s “automatic subject” holds
sway Marx writes:
“Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process, and, as
such, capital. It comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and
multiplies itself within its circuit, comes back out of it with expanded bulk,
and begins the same round ever afresh. M-M’, money which begets money,
such is the description of Capital from the mouths of its first interpreters, the
Mercantilists.(…)M-C-M’ is therefore in reality the general formula of capital
35
The Undecidability of Capital
as it appears prima facie within the sphere of circulation.” (Karl Marx, Capital
Vol. I, op. cit., pp. 154-155)
36
The Undecidability of Capital
So in a Hegelian sense capital flows out of itself into its negation – labour-
power metamorphosed in the production sphere into abstract labour which
creates value – to return to the circulation sphere where this value must be
realised as M’ or capital. But Postone further twists Marx and his inheriting of
Hegelian dialectical forms. For Postone Hegel is the source for Marx’s so-
called discovery of capital as the “subject-object of history” which Postone
paraphrases quite literally: “For Hegel, then, the Geist is simultaneously
subjective and objective – it is the identical subject-object, the “substance”
that is at the same time “Subject”(…)” (Postone, op. cit., p. 72)
But Hegel’s substance is precisely itself and not itself – “Geist and not Geist”
(Adorno, Negative Dialektik, op. cit., p. 199) – and as such dialectical.
Without the “work of the negative” the substance, even if the substance were
“the life of God” would be empty, bland and lifeless writes Hegel. Adorno also
criticizes Hegel for “blowing up” Geist into the “Whole” – whereas the
“differentia specifica” of Geist is that it is a Subject, “subjectivistic”: “Geist, der
Totalität sein soll, ist ein Nonsens (…)” [“Spirit meant to be totality is
nonsense (…) ibid.] comparing this thinking to the logic of totalitarian
singular parties of the 20th century.
Postone revives a vulgar “identity-philosophy”, denuded of the negativity
inherent in both Hegel and Marx. Waxing lyrical, he turns Marx’s critique of
capital into a positive concept of pure affirmation – Capital as Geist, Subject
and “homogeneous totality” (see Postone, op. cit. pp. 78-79), whereby
especially for Hegel Geist is inherently contradictory and divided (entzweit) –
in other words negativity.
37
The Undecidability of Capital
Marx was able to recognize the dialectic of capital and its negation abstract
labour as a double subject or a hybrid substance through the forms of Hegel’s
Logic and Phenomenology (e.g. Herr-Knecht, master-slave). This negativity
of substance with itself is reciprocal – capital being also the negation of
abstract labour.
Contrary to Postone’s claim, that the “mature Marx” of Das Kapital had
abandoned his critique of Hegel’s dialectic as an inverted mystified one which
had to be turned upside down to discover its “rational core” in the “mystical
cover” – Marx reiterates, in an approving response to a Russian reviewer of
the Russian translation of Das Kapital, precisely this view in his Afterword to
the second German edition of Das Kapital Volume I (London 1873). But in its
“rational form” Hegel’s dialectic disquiets the bourgeoisie, because its
movement leaves nothing fixed, in its positive grasp of what exists it always
includes the negation of what exists implying a “necessary demise” of
capitalist social formations – all the more realistic, according to Marx, given
the cyclical nature of capital and its always imminent “general crisis”. The
essence of Hegel’s dialectic is “critical and revolutionary” (Marx). One
wonders why Postone is at such pains to prove Marx has ‘recanted’ his
revolutionary ‘demystification’ of Hegel’s dialectic. (see Postone, op. cit., p. 75)
38
The Undecidability of Capital
continues to emphasize that this “living substance” far from being identical
with itself – is as “Subject, pure simple negativity, precisely so the splitting of
the simple; or the opposing doubling, which is again the negation of this
indifferent diversity and is its opposite:” [“Sie (die lebendige Substanz) ist als
Subjekt die reine einfache Negativität, eben dadurch die Entzweiung des
Einfachen; oder die entgegensetzende Verdopplung, welche wieder die
Negation dieser gleichgültigen Verschiedenheit und ihres Gegensatzes ist:”,
G.W.F. Hegel, Vorrede, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke in zwanzig
Bänden 3, Frankfurt, 1976, p. 23)]
39
The Undecidability of Capital
Postone most peculiarly excises the market and property relations from the
process of production of capital. He quarantines abstract labour in the
production sphere, where it supposedly creates value without the intrusion of
money in this process. In this purified world of capital – class struggle and
exploitation melt away like “les neiges d’antan”.
“Note that the market-mediated mode of circulation is not an essential
moment of this dynamic. (…) If the market mode of circulation does play a
role in this dynamic, it is as a subordinate moment (…) To focus exclusively on
the mode of circulation is to deflect attention away from important
implications of the commodity form for the trajectory of capitalist
development in Marx’s critical theory.” (Postone, op. cit., p. 291)
The commodity form only exists in circulation. What else is the commodity
form other than the receptacle of dead congealed labour, stripped of its
qualities, like Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, in which
form it circulates (as money or commodity) in the circulation sphere – just as
abstract labour is the quantitative form of living labour engaged in the
production process of said commodity form?
Circulation without the commodity is empty. The commodity without
circulation has no value. In an absurd way, Postone’s ‘theory of capital’ misses
above all capital.
40