The Capitalist Schema

The Capitalist Schema

Time, Money, and the
Culture of Abstraction

Christian Lotz

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Lotz, Christian, 1970– The capitalist schema : time, money, and the culture of abstraction / Christian Lotz.

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Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Capitalism–Philosophy. 2. Schematism (Philosophy) I. Title.

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Everything is rational in capitalism, except capitalism itself.
—Gilles Deleuze

List of Abbreviations

CI

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital, Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin.

CII

Marx, Karl. 1993a. Capital, Volume II. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Penguin.

CIII

Marx, Karl. 1993b. Capital, Volume III. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Penguin.

G

Marx, Karl. 1993c. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolous. London: Penguin.

GS

Adorno, Theodor W. 1998. Gesammelte Schriften. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

MEGA

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1972-2013. Gesamtausgabe. Berlin: Akademie.

MEW

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1952-2013. Werke, 42 volumes. Berlin: Dietz.

Acknowledgements

Above all, first, I would like to thank Corinne Painter, the better side of myself, herself a philosopher, for her patience with my still, after all these years in the US, imperfect English, and her help and corrections, without which this manuscript would not have seen the light of day.

I developed the seed ideas that inform the background of this book during 2011 while I was a DAAD visiting professor at the Brandenburg Technical University of Cottbus in Germany. I would like to thank students who took my graduate seminars on Marx’s Capital during summer 2012 at MSU and, at BTU, during summer 2013. Much of what I did not understand before concerning the social form under which everything is framed and regulated became much clearer to me when I was forced to explain to students this and other central philosophical aspects of Marx’s later philosophy. Having been heavily influenced by German Idealism and classical Phenomenology, Marx truly revolutionized my intellectual world. Teaching and thinking about Marx free from the lenses of its still distorted reception(s) and reductions was, and still is, important, as his thought is liberating in a world that becomes increasingly self-deceptive. Admittedly, some Marxists will reject “my” Marx, insofar as I do not pay (for the sake of the main argument) much attention to political questions, or to the concept of class. As such, the analysis presented in this book, as the main reviewer of this book remarked, might overestimate the role of money and capital. I hope though to have made clear that capital can never be absolutely self-related, as it is necessarily tied to labor and human creativity. For the sake of this text, I have “bracketed” political questions in their entirety, partly because I have no substantive answer to the question of how Marxism could exist again as a political force beyond the boundaries of academia, and what this would exactly entail. As to the question of classes, I believe that this question cannot be addressed without understanding the violence of capitalist dynamics, the topic of which goes far beyond the core question of social schematization, which is the focus of this book.

I also would like to thank the following students for their philosophical enthusiasm and for allowing me to test some of the ideas presented in this book during a weekly study group on Marx’s Grundrisse during winter 2011/2012: Michael Brown, Mladjo Ivanovic, Matthew Johnson, Shannon Proctor, Lila Wakeman, and Andrew Woodson. Given the current state of our profession and the ongoing dismantling of critical theoretical work, as well as the increase of positivistic, anti-intellectual and functional pressures on the humanities at US universities, their enthusiasm for philosophy and their critical attitude towards unquestioned assumptions underlying our contemporary world is a rare exception in our current intellectual and academic climate.

Finally, I would like to thank Zu Klampen Verlag for permitting me to use portions of my essay on Adorno that has been published in Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie (Lotz 2013a, 112-117) in chapter 2; as well as Taylor &Francis for allowing me to use small portions of material previously published in Rethinking Marxism (Lotz 2013b, 188-191 and Lotz 2014c, 130-136). These small text portions are used in chapter 1 and chapter 3.

Note on Quotations

As to the quotations from Marx and Engels that are used in this book, I decided to refer to the German original, sometimes the Critical edition (MEGA), but almost always the older Collected Works (MEW), as the English translations of Marx and Engels are often very imprecise. Unless otherwise noted, however, the reader can find the translation of these quotations by searching for them online at the Marxist Internet Archive, which is a good online source for the whole Marxist tradition in politics and philosophy. Moreover, as the reader will see, I work with many direct quotes from other authors. Having emerged out of a German academic background and education, I still highly value the precise inclusion of other’s ideas into academic texts (instead of transforming those into abstract arguments, or abstract title references); and as such, I tried to integrate many voices, from whom I learned much, into the text. It is my hope that this will not be interpreted as empty academic posturing.

Introduction

[T]he terminus industrial society suggests, to a certain degree, that it’s a question of the technocratic moment in Marx, which this term would like to show the way out of the world, immediately in itself; as if the essence of society followed the level of the productive forces in lockstep, independent of its social conditions. It’s astonishing how rarely the sociological establishment actually considers this, how rarely it is analyzed. The best part, which by no means needs to be the best, is forgotten, namely the totality, or in Hegel’s words the all-penetrating ether of society. This however is anything but ethereal, but on the contrary an ens realissimum. Insofar as it is abstractly veiled, the fault of its abstraction is not to be blamed on a solipsistic and reality-distant thinking, but on the exchange-relationships, the objective abstractions, which belongs to the social life-process. The power of that abstraction over humanity is far more corporeal than that of any single institution, which silently constitutes itself in advance according to the scheme of things and beats itself into human beings. The powerlessness which the individual experiences in the face of the totality is the most drastic expression of this. (Adorno, GS8, 364)

We are at a point in time at which the capitalist world is about to destroy the two sources of wealth, the laborer and the earth, not by only taking over the entirety of the globe, but also by the subsumption of the entirety of what was once called “human.” We are in the process of valorizing and capitalizing all aspects of human beings: their whole rational apparatus, their productivity, their bodies, and soon their genetic codes. The distinction between humans and nature is itself turned into one of capital’s growth. The “rift” in the universal metabolism of nature and humans (Foster 2010) will lead to major crises, within which social and natural problems are necessarily intertwined. Astonishingly, the main proponents of recent critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, does not have much to say about these ecological and social developments, which shows its underlying conservatism and idealist tendencies. I (especially) think that the turn of critical theory to the issue of normativity was a bad turn, and, as such, it is time to engage in fresh reflections on some insights that got lost in the aftermath of Habermas, Honneth, and their Anglo-American followers. From my point of view, this reflection necessarily contains a return to Marx, even if some will interpret this as return to battles that have already been fought. As I will argue in chapter 2 of this book, we should go back to Adorno in order to determine where Marx’s critique of political economy can be used as a fruitful correction and framework for readjusting the agenda in Critical Theory.[1] I will identify mainly two issues that determine the fate of Critical Theory after Adorno: [1] the analysis of the culture industry has often been misunderstood as an analysis of the psychological effects of a capitalist cultural system that “filters” and prefigures what can be conceived meaningfully in this culture, without taking into account that that this psychological schema should be rooted in a social-material schema that makes this cultural system capitalist, and [2], Adorno’s critical analysis remained, as I submit, at the surface of capitalism inasmuch as he takes “exchange” to be the central concept of capitalism without taking into account that exchange is itself derived from other social categories, particularly money.

Money as the form of value—its capitalist form—is the true sun around which all social relations are organized in capitalist societies. What needs to be understood, accordingly, is the universal and social-ontological role of money for the constitution of capitalist sociality and for what can be accessed meaningfully in this society. The constitution of this social schema that opens up and determines all meaningfulness in capitalism is, as I shall argue, deeply connected to time. Ultimately, as Marx remarks in Grundrisse, all economics goes back to the problem and concept of time. Time under capitalism, however, has two aspects: on the one hand, money is itself essentially a set of social relations defined in terms of time, on the other hand, social time is not simply visible in a specific capital driven production, circulation, and consumption time; instead, it also “temporalizes” itself in its specific past, present, and future social horizons. In order to make this point, I will take up Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s schematism and apply it to the issue of money in the form of credit and debt, future and past, which constitute the social horizons and therefore access to entities in capitalism. Put simply, what “tomorrow” means, is already constituted by money. Finally, a fully monetized world leads to a specific culture that, following Adorno, I will call “really abstract.” As Lukacs puts it in his later social ontology, “we must take note that this process of abstraction is a real process in the real social world. [...] this abstraction has the same ontological rigour of facticity as a car that runs you over” (Lukacs 1978, 40). However, in addition, I argue that we should give the notion of abstraction a productivist twist, insofar as we need to understand that this abstract culture is not simply the result of a valorized world, given that we are at a stage of capitalism within which culture is produced through industries that take on the whole mental apparatus of capitalist individuals. Once this circle is perfected, capital has fully taken on the whole productivity of humans as a result of its exploitation. Overall, then, the capitalist schema reveals itself as a social-material schema that can no longer be understood as an “epistemological” or “mental” schema.

As such, the position developed in this book is closer to classical Marxist positions than it is to contemporary French and Italian versions of materialisms, although I am influenced by figures such as Negri, whose intellectual and political creativity I deeply admire. Maurizio Lazzarato, for example, has criticized classical Marxists for their one-dimensionality in two regards: [1] the multiplicity of power relations are traced back to the economy, and [2], the “subjection of bodies is not explicable by monetary constraints and economic imperatives alone” (Lazzarato 2006, 172). His position is very representative both of critical theorists who are mostly concerned with “identity politics” and of recognition and post-Marxist inspired philosophers who are concerned with what has been called “postmodern” capitalist developments, such as Laclau and Mouffe. In my view, Lazzarato’s position should be rejected for two reasons: [1] it no longer allows us to speak of “society” or “social totality,” although Lazzarato and other post-Marxists constantly refer to units, such as “capitalism,” “capital,” or “society.” Accordingly, if we want to avoid the contradiction of, on the one hand, referring to such units and, on the other hand, theoretically denying them, we need to operate with a stronger concept of historical form, which allows us to return to Marx’s concept of economy as the form of capitalist social totality and the unifying structure for all social relations. Indeed, as I will argue in chapter 3, the concept of social totality is a critical concept. [2] Lazzarato is imprecise when he speaks of “monetary constraints,” as if money is something that can be found outside of social action and social relations, perhaps limiting their range.

Instead, as I will argue in what follows, we need to make a stronger claim and understand money in its specific social form (capitalism) as that which makes all social relations under capitalism, i.e., today all social relations, possible; and we need to take seriously the idea that potentially nothing can exist in a socially meaningful way outside of this form. To be sure, there are many relations between people where money is not directly involved, but, as I argue, in order to exist socially, i.e., in the social totality, even these relationships, need to be constituted by money. It is important to acknowledge here that money is not a thing, even though it appears in thinglike form. This allows me to claim that entities that fall outside of this monetized and capitalized framework are socially inexistent, as things can only exist that are discoverable within the capitalist monetization of all entities to which we have, because of this framework, access.

As some readers will notice, there is a subtle Heidegger-inspired “ring” to my thesis; despite this I do not think that Heidegger’s metaphysical framework or his notions of “being” and “enframing” help us understand social reality, though I certainly imply ontological assumptions. The same goes for Agamben’s concept of apparatus, and Deleuze’s concept of dispositif, insofar as these concepts have the tendency to be emptied out, universalized, and then count for all kinds of phenomena throughout the history of mankind. As a consequence, they lose their specificity and no longer help us understand the form of capitalist reality. As a consequence, other distinctions are introduced in order to describe the specificity of capitalist reality, such as “disciplinary societies” versus “control societies,” the implication of which is a switch from labor to power as the substance of social reality. In contrast, the position developed here, although it might sound at times as if it too heavily emphasizes the role of money and capital, is still based on the classical Marxian assumption that labor is the central social concept, and that labor, life, and social reality are closely intertwined concepts, which is also important for Negri’s philosophy. Capital as processing money (Marx) is the form of labor, or, put differently, it is the main categorial determination of the existence of labor, which does not mean that one is the cause of the other; rather, it means that in order to be social labor in capitalism, it needs to exist in monetized form.

The reflections presented in this book all ultimate originate and find their genesis in a beautiful passage in Marx’s Grundrisse that deals with money in capitalism, which contains the important thesis that money in capitalism plays the same role that the rational schematism played in traditional idealist philosophy, such as Kant’s.[2] For, according to Kant, the schematism makes it possible for a rational being to access and represent objects for the subject. Reason “projects,” so to speak, a framework under which all objects (entities) make sense and can exist. Already in the early Marx we can see how this idealist concept is turned into a social concept, namely, money. The task of understanding money, however, is a historical task, insofar as money in capitalism is a specific concept that determines the form of all accessible objects in a capitalist universe. I will later come back to this thesis in detail. For now, we should look at the whole passage even if it is a lengthy quote:

Because money is the general equivalent, the general power of purchasing, everything can be bought, everything may be transformed into money. But it can be transformed into money only by being alienated [alieniert], by its owner divesting himself of it. Everything is therefore alienable, or indifferent for the individual, external to him. Thus the so-called inalienable, eternal possessions, and the immovable, solid property relations corresponding to them, break down in the face of money. Furthermore, since money itself exists only in circulation, and exchanges in turn for articles of consumption etc.—for values which may all ultimately be reduced to purely individual pleasures, it follows that everything is valuable only in so far as it exists for the individual. With that, the independent value of things, except in so far as it consists in their mere being for others, in their relativity, exchangeability, the absolute value of all things and relations, is dissolved. Everything is sacrificed to egotistic pleasure. For, just as everything is alienable for money, everything is also obtainable by money. Everything is to be had for ‘hard cash,’ which, as itself something existing external to the individual, is to be catched [sic] by fraud, violence etc. Thus everything is appropriable by everyone, and it depends on chance what the individual can appropriate and what not, since it depends on the money in his possession. With that, the individual is posited, as such, as lord of all things. There are no absolute values, since, for money, value as such is relative. There is nothing inalienable, since everything is alienable for money. There is no higher or holier, since everything appropriable by money. The ‘res sacrae’ and ‘religiosae’, which may be ‘in nullius bonis,’ ‘nec aestimationem recipere, nec obligari alienarique posse,’ which are exempt from the ‘commercio hominum,’ do not exist for money—just as all men are equal before God. (MEW42, 728; G, 839)

This passage outlines at least six major aspects of money, though the list is not exhaustive and at this point it is unsystematic: [1] As the general equivalent money can buy everything; [2] money is constituted by its social externality, and thus it remains “alien” to its owner; [3] as this external force, money can “modify” (indeed alienate) all properties inherent in things; [4] money transforms everything into an instrumental thing that exist, for the self-interest of individuals; [5] money contains a violent aspect; [6] money becomes the new untouchable (“holy”) thing in capitalism, its new God. As an introduction to the overall topic of this book, we should briefly explicate these aspects. As we will see, in more complex contexts and in other respects, these aspects of money will return in almost all sections of this book.

Money as General Equivalent

The emphasis of what Marx says about the nature of money as the general equivalent should not be seen in the fact that it can purchase everything; rather, it should be seen in the fact that it can purchase everything. Why is this important? It is important because often we seem to think that only things in the market, things that are offered in supermarkets, gas stations or on Amazon can be purchased with money. If you are a banker, you might also think about the fact that you can buy money with money, or some other complex things that we find in the financial world. Marx, however, says everything, which includes things that have not (yet) been offered in markets and which might not even be available or developed at this point in time. “Everything” also includes ideas, thoughts, conscience, numbers, planets, friendship, air, and grass. What is remarkable, accordingly, is that money not only has an ontological dimension, but also has a universal quality, which implies that—at least potentially—money is related to every entity as something purchasable. This universality, which leads Marx to introduce the concept of value, makes everything in the universe exchangeable with everything else, and thereby, it introduces a real existing abstraction into the social world, if we assume that value is not only an economic concept, but also a concept with which we can understand all social relations in capitalism. Money, then, must be closely related to how we are supposed to understand sociality in capitalism, namely, as a sociality that takes on a specific determination, a form, that defines and regulates it. As Roberto Finelli puts it, “Marx’s Capital defines a socio-historical reality conceived as totality, because, in capitalism, there is a single dominant factor, a single Subject that pervades, organizes and orients all of reality, articulating and connecting to its needs” (Finelli 2007, 63), and this is money. However, it is a specific form of money, namely, one that we only find in capitalism. Indeed, as we will see, the universality of money is precisely the distinguishing character of money in capitalism: it defines everything as a social thing.

Money as Alien Force

Money is not only a universal, in addition, it is also a real existing universal. As such, money needs to be established and constituted as something that is both inside and outside of every social relation, since we need to conceive it, at one and the same time, as something that regulates all social relations and as something that remains identical throughout all exchanges and social relations implied in them. As that which remains identical, it remains outside of all morphological changes (paper money, credit money, etc.) as well as outside of all cyclical changes, all circulations, all destructions and all creations of money within markets and the banking system. As a consequence, society as the social totality and reality within which individuals exist and in which they participate, appears to them “upside down,” since money establishes all social relations and defines the horizon in which all social facts are meaningful. If, however, social totality is established through money and money is something that is external—objective—to social individuals, then their own sociality and their own social being, i.e., their being in society, appears as something external to them. In this way, their own social being appears as a thing, reified, alienated, foreign, and, therefore, as a power and force that they no longer can control. As Sordello puts it, “money makes things happen. It is the source of action in the world and perhaps the only power we invest in. Life seems to depend upon it. Everything within us would like to say it does not, that this cannot be. But the Almighty Dollar has taken command” (quoted in Bifo 2011, 143).

Money as Alienation of Properties

Because money defines and is the form of all social relations, it breaks down all properties, values, hierarchies, traditional customs, etc. This is necessarily so because the center of social constitution and the center of social reality shifted in capitalism, since with the establishment of a monetized society no other “God” can be accepted. Two Gods in the universe would make them imperfect, and Gods do not like that! When everything can be bought (at least potentially), then all formerly holy and stable relations vanish, as Marx famously advances in the Communist Manifesto. By destabilizing all relations, money also turns things upside down: it is now possible to say, for example, that someone’s deed is good just because someone gave 30 million dollars to build a museum on campus.

Money as Individual Self-Interest

The effect of the appearance of the social totality as a thinglike [versachlicht] configuration, in turn, produces a paradoxical effect. Society itself appears to its members as something that exists only for them, for their interests, and for their pleasures. Self-interest and consumption are closely related to each other. This relation between self-interest and the social totality should now be acknowledged as paradoxical because in our age we finally start to realize that which Marx described in Capital as the proper existence of (capitalist) money, namely, world money, establishes an objective dependency of all individuals and institutions on earth on all other individuals and institutions. The crisis of 2008 demonstrated that it was possible for the world economy to crash. Indeed, it could have crashed in Frankfurt, Nairobi, New York, Beijing, and Tokyo at the same time. Consumption in the US depends on striking workers in China, and income in Germany depends upon consumption in Asia (and Greece). Consequently, the social network is becoming tighter, and, as a consequence, state-relations, educational institutions, and the whole framework of a world economy, is changing. A nice illustration of the paradox can be observed in many of my classes that I teach: students increasingly believe that it is their individual education, their individual achievements, that the university is a means for their individual ends, and that everything they encounter, such as other students, the food court, professors, and books, exists because of their self-interests. What they do not see is that “achievement” and their existence in the classroom does not have much to do with “individual” achievements and actions. The class room was built by company workers, with materials imported from Africa or taken from some place in Michigan; the projector was built in California with imported parts from China and with the help of logicians, mathematicians and engineers who put the hardware and the software together. Finally, they could not achieve anything without the professor in the classroom, who, at least in my case, was primarily educated in a different country with different educational institutions. Those students, accordingly, conceive of “society” as something external to them. We can observe the same paradox in regard to the upper classes who increasingly conceive of society as something that is a “thing,” external to them, which is something one can benefit from without being part of it. What, however, is the wealth that an investment banker “creates” by shifting some numbers around in a computer while sipping on her Starbucks coffee? Even if her personal account went up by several thousands of dollars in a few seconds, the investment banker did not achieve much, as the true wealth lies in the collective social labor that brings about any true social progression, advancement, and gain. She has not achieved anything, but instead of conceiving of herself as a parasite she conceives of society as the parasite. We could go on here indefinitely, but the principle should be clear: in truth, everything is a collective achievement and “social totality” necessarily relies upon how we are all related to each other as social beings, which we fail to understand if we understand society as a herd of unrelated individuals with unrelated interests. Money expresses the paradox best, as it is, on the one hand, in everyone’s pocket and defines the amount of social power each individual has, while, on the other hand, this individuality of money in our pockets is an illusion, since its purchasing “power” depends upon the entire system of exchanges and operations that are made possible through value, i.e., through the universal exchangeability of everything with everything.

Money and Violence

The externality of money and the externality of sociality as money, Marx understood clearly, has a violent aspect to it, which is, of course, most visible in the process of primitive accumulation, understood as the transformation of something that is not (yet) under the spell of capital into something that can no longer exist without this form. In this connection, the process through which peasants were driven from their lands had the consequence that

these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. (MEW23, 743; CI, 875)

As we know by now, primitive accumulation is not only the beginning of capitalism, but is connected to every process of accumulation. As Marx famously puts it in Capital,

to unleash the ‘eternal natural laws’ of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between the workers and the conditions of their labor, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, and at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-laborers, into the free ‘laboring poor,’ that artificial product of modern history. If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. (MEW23, 787; CI, 926)

This violence inscribed into the transformation of productive individuals into monetized living labor and labor power is repeated in the externality of money itself, as Marx assumes that the independence of privately laboring individuals and their dissociation in connection with the reduction of all social relations to monetary relations (at least those that count for the constitution of capitalist social totality) leads to a redefinition of “have” and “have-nots,” as well as to their inclusion in and exclusion from society as violent processes.

The aforementioned aspects do not allow us to understand the role and constitution of money in capitalism and the frame that it establishes for society sufficiently, which I will call the capitalist schema, but they are certainly indicators of what will follow. After a first sketchy introduction to the idea of a social schema in chapter 1, in chapters 2, 3, and 4 I will develop central aspects of a monetarily defined frame and world by developing the thesis that the Kantian concept of a rational schematism can be turned into a social-material concept, which is primarily not driven by the culture industry; but rather, it is money. As I will argue, Adorno and Horkheimer underestimated the role of money, which caused them to rely upon an abstract concept of exchange, and, as a consequence, they lost important insights that may be gained from a proper understanding of Marx’s philosophy.

Notes

1.

For a historical, but very helpful, overview of the developments within the Frankfurt School see Raulet 2006. Most Anglo-American scholarship still conceives of Adorno as a philosopher of culture and aesthetics, though he remained committed to a Marxian framework throughout his work (for this see Vincent 2006).

2.

I believe that Marx remains, with his rejection of a logic of being and with the rejection that social reality is logical, closer to Kant than to Hegel. All “analogies” between Marx and Hegel remain insufficient, as long as they do not really explain how one can transform a logic of being into a logic of social being. But this topic would go far beyond the scope of this book. The ideas presented in this book are in many aspects related to and extensions of topics that Postone 1996 deals with. Unfortunately, Frank Engster’s massive dissertation on money and the critique of political economy was published just a few days before I submitted the final manuscript to the press; for this, see Engster, Frank, Das Geld als Mass, Mittel und Methode. Das Rechnen mit der Identität der Zeit, Berlin: Neofelis Verlag 2014.

Chapter 1

The Capitalist Schema

The word “schema,” originally used by the Greeks as a word for how things show up in their appearance and “shape,” has made it into our normal everyday language. Indeed, we speak of schemata in relation to our thinking, as well as in relation to the production of ideas, and actions, and, in recent psychology and phenomenology, we even speak of it in relation to our body. A “body schema” refers to the way our bodies develop certain patterns of movement and to the interactions of our outer organs, such as our hands, feet, and head. These schemata make it possible for us to drive cars without thinking about every move we make, to dream of our holidays while using all the tools necessary for cooking, and to clean our houses and cars without needing to control our body movements all the time. Our bodies are adjusted to standard patterns of movement that make it possible for us to move without needing to control our bodies. It is as if they act on their own.

In a more general sense, we can speak of schemata first in relation to abstract psychological or thought achievements. Someone who thinks in schemas or who thinks schematically is able to reduce more complex states of affairs and tasks to more simple problems and tasks. Secondly, schemata also enable us to repeat certain tasks and experiences. Thirdly, we use schema in a rather negative sense, as we not only mean that someone can reduce complex states of affairs to more simple problems, but also that something seems to force us to frame future events even before they have entered the present. Taken in this sense, schemas allow us to control the future before it has taken place. Fourth and finally, we mean by schema something that no longer allows someone to experience something unusual and different from the status quo. Someone who constantly thinks in schemata is no longer able to access anything outside the schema itself. Taken in this sense, a schema seems to be something that limits our fantasizing activity. A creative person, for example, is able to think “outside the box” and as such is able to think beyond schemata.

In what follows, we will see that all of these not yet precisely defined ways of talking about schemas reoccur in what I will call the capitalist schema. In this connection, I follow a side note offered by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment in which they claim that the Kantian problem of the schematism foreshadowed the problem of the culture industry and Hollywood. In brief, Kant’s claims, in his First Critique, that the condition of the possibility of referring to objects and reality depend upon how objects as such (“objecthood”) are constituted through human reason is taken by Adorno and Horkheimer to anticipate the culture industry. In other words, how objects as such are taken by human reason determines what we can experience. In this vein, Kant claims that human reason “schematizes” every object by bringing concepts and intuition in line with each other. As experience is only possible through the unity of both concepts and empirical experience, human reason determines what we can possibly experience. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s short comment, however, points to a social solution of the Kantian problem. Put simply, the problem of how we can have experiences and of how we can know and refer to objects as such becomes transformed, within a materialist framework, into the question of how we are able to know and refer to social reality and to social objects. The latter, however, turns the traditional question of how we can know about “reality” into a materialist question, as we now must assume that objects to which we can refer through the mind are prior to our mental reference, which is already constituted through society itself. The schematization of reality, in other words, no longer occurs through a mental or rational mechanism; rather, the schematization of reality occurs in society itself. As we are living under a specific social form of this reality, namely, under capitalism, we need to assume that objects are becoming accessible to us because they are schematized in accordance with the capitalist social form.[1]

As I will argue (with Marx and Adorno), this social form is centered in the commodity form and exchange, which, in turn, allows me to show that reality is something that emerges out of the principle of our contemporary society itself. As the constitution of commodities is tied to the way that we produce these commodities, I propose that our possible sense of what is real is ultimately produced by the capitalist form. As a consequence, individuals who go along with this production of reality are determined by the commodity exchange and the abstractions that occur in this exchange. I will give concrete examples of this thesis in regard to time: the future, the present, and the past are frames by the schema, which exemplarily can be demonstrated through the schematization of the past (i.e., what does “past” mean for individuals under capitalism?), and the schematization of the future (i.e., what does “future” mean for individuals under capitalism?). Both the past and the future are, these days, accessible (i.e., schematized) through the commodification and financialization of the past and the future. For example, the future of an individual is made “meaningful” through debt, and regulated by “credit.” As a consequence, the capitalist schematization of time and the commodification of experience turn our lives into “abstract” unities and, as a result, alienates us socially.

Accordingly, we can see here how the role of schemata becomes central for our whole culture, insofar as there is a “meta-schema” that goes back to the capitalist form of society. Going back to the four general meanings that I outlined in the first paragraph, we can see that the capitalist schema leads to the following four horizons of meaning: [1] the capitalist schema reduces the complexity of the reality to a manageable task for individuals, [2] this schema allows individuals and the system itself to repeat and reproduce, [3] it leads to a control of the future, and, [4] the capitalist schema takes away the ability to imagine a world differently from ours and constantly forces us to believe that we live in the best possible world. It integrates us. Seen from a philosophical point of view, it is interesting to note how the four aforementioned (rough) meanings of schematization in the sense used in this book all go back to a basic problem, namely, to the problem of how social “reality” is constituted, how it is interpreted and how it becomes accessible to us.

Rational beings, such as humans, are, in a very important regard, “limited,” inasmuch as we have no direct access to the objects and the world around us. We are unable to access the world independently from ourselves without referring to it through our perceptive capacities, without thinking, and without interpreting it. “Raw” nature, if there is such a thing, is only accessible to us through theories, thought, interpretation, and the “modifying” or manipulating of it through action. We always encounter the world as it is for us, as we need to make sense of it through our action and thought. What we encounter, then, is in some sense “produced” by us, though not in the sense of “making” it. For the making or creation of meaning always already depends upon a meaningful framework through which even the smallest units make sense to us. These frameworks, worlds, can be historical units, mentalities, ideas, and concrete lived surroundings. Capitalism, for example, is such a unit. Rather than being a universal framework for humans, it is a historically specific frame for everything individuals find themselves in and for everything that they can relate to: it frames their thoughts, their social relations, as well as their activities. Marx and Hegel are philosophers who became aware of these frames and saw the necessity for thinking about the way in which these frames and the individuals within these frames are related to each other and how the reproduction of this relation functions. In fact, the frame and the individual would not be effective if it would not be reproduced.

This simple insight that individuals, societies, and whole frameworks could not survive if they would not be reproduced must lead us to a more careful elaboration of labor as the “hinge” between individuals and the frame, especially since it is labor, which, through producing, reproduces itself and all social relations that are connected to production. It is, then, capitalism as a non-universal social form that determines these social relations, since it is ultimately nothing else than the specific form of production (as reproduction) under which we find ourselves. This form determines and forms everything that falls under it. It is, accordingly, the condition of the possibility for the meaningfulness by which individuals find themselves surrounded—even if, in most cases, individuals are not aware of this and unconsciously and unintentionally reproduce the form.[2]

It is the assumption of this book that the reproduction of the capitalist frame and the individuals defined by this frame reproduce themselves through what I call the capitalist schema, which renders everything individuals do meaningful to them and frames their experience. Ironically, as we will see, this schematization of the reality leads to something paradoxical, namely, to a turning of all social relations into something abstract and outside the control of the individuals who find themselves living within a capitalist framework. My thesis is as such not revolutionary, as I here follow the main insights of Marx’s philosophy. Though in recent philosophy traditional forms of thinking about the mind, thinking, science, etc., are under attack by philosophies that pay more attention to class, race, gender, history, and society, so far, we have not yet found the core of how to bridge, let alone solve, these problems, as it is clear that a theory of knowledge cannot simply be replaced by a social theory, especially if these are done in a postmodern fashion. In this sense, Marxist theory is here taken to overcome postmodern theorizing. Most social epistemologists operate with abstract concepts of “the” individual, “the” human, “the” society, etc., which brings us back to the philosophy of Marx and Critical Theory. For Marx’s philosophy and Critical Theory enables us to see more clearly what the capitalist form is and to avoid the aforementioned abstractions, especially if we take into account that one of Marx’s central insights is that these abstractions fail to see the specificity of the social world within which we find ourselves, as well as that these abstractions are themselves produced by this specific form of capitalist social life.

As Marx famously develops in the introduction to his Grundrisse in 1858, production cannot be separated from consumption, distribution, and exchange. These four moments belong to a totality and unity in which all other elements, such as need, subjectivity, individuals, and etc., are possible. Accordingly, as Marx argues, even the theoretical positions developed in a totality depend upon the mode and form of that totality. As Marx puts it, certain abstractions in Political Economy were only possible because these abstractions really occur in specific modes of that social totality. Labor, for example, can only appear to Political Economy as something universal and abstract if labor is, in social reality, something abstract. And, indeed, under capitalism the concrete character of labor gets lost. What counts in capitalism is only labor power itself, and, as a consequence, labor appears to the laboring individuals as something external and unessential (abstract) (MEW42, 38). For example, most of us move from one “job” to another “job,” especially given that, as laborers, we are always replaceable; for in our system, labor is not defined by who labors, nor is it determined by how we concretely labor. Instead, labor is monetized and, as such, no longer dependent on concrete social relationships. Indeed, most jobs in the twenty first century are mobile, flexible, and replaceable.

The relationship between what is “in” us, such as the mind or the psyche, and what is “out there,” such as society and reality, is complex and should not simply be reduced by materialist philosophies. The most unsuccessful attempt to do this is certainly Engels’ “mirror” theory of knowledge and social reality, within which Engels famously assumed that what is in our minds is simply the mental translation of what is “out there.” This mirror theory of knowledge utterly failed and remains shockingly naïve. For example, it cannot handle logical concepts, propositions, many scientific theories, and psychological structures. What we need, then, is a dialectical theory of this relationship, such as what was developed, in parts, in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. Taking into account that there is an ongoing movement between subject and object, concept and experience, intuition and reason, etc., we can learn that certain structures and forms that we develop about the subjective sphere remain dependent upon the objective sphere. For example, it is certainly nonsense to claim that the whole content of Kant’s First Critique can be deduced from a materialist principle. What we can show, however, is that the main structures, principles, and concepts introduced by Kant ultimately go back to social structures. Put differently, Kant’s way of handling epistemology is itself schematic. Dialectic leads to the insight that the relationship between these capacities of subjects to organize, arrange, and interpret their worlds (= know their worlds) simply refer to the subjective side of the objective coin, namely, the social schema on which knowledge and episteme are based.

By following a Kantian tradition of philosophy I do believe that everything we think and do is ultimately filtered through a schema that—behind our backs—structures every reference and makes the relation between subject and object possible. By connecting this issue to the concept of time, I shall, in addition, lay out a further step not taken by the Frankfurt School: I intend to demonstrate that the experience of time in capitalism is “schematized” by the monetary impact of the past and future. By looking at how money and capital are related to time, we can learn that the experience of time and an individual’s attempt to make sense of the past and future is structured and limited through the capitalist schema. However, before I go into more detail, I should like to outline, briefly, three major concepts that will lead to a more careful elaboration of the capitalist schema, which will be more carefully elaborated on in the upcoming chapters of this book, where much attention will be paid to Marx’s philosophy.

Commodity Exchange

The social schema that is the main focus of this book is centered in a principle analyzed in the Marxist tradition as “real abstraction,” which occurs in commodity exchange. As Marx puts it in his economic manuscripts in 1859, it “is only by being exchanged that the products of labor acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values, which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility” (MEW23, 87; CI, 166). What is interesting for us here, is not only the constitution of value through exchange, but especially Marx’s thesis that through exchange all relations and entities (if we assume that capitalist dynamics make everything exchangeable) receive a “uniform social status.” In fact, capitalist sociality is established through value. What we need to see, accordingly, is the fact that value as the form of wealth in capitalist societies (Postone 1993) establishes itself not only as something that occurs in the exchange of commodities, but also as something that makes the objects exchanged abstract, insofar as now all social relations are determined by a universal relationship that binds all individuals together in an abstract form. Universal exchangeability of entities as commodities presupposes that everything becomes comparable, and universal comparison of everything with everything presupposes a universal concept and criterion under which this comparison can be successful.

For Marx, this universal concept is value and the first real appearance of this abstract universal is money. Hinting at the uniformity of everything is important for our purposes here, as it can help us explain not only how individuals as individuals access reality, but also how this access is mediated and schematized through the establishment of the object (=the reality) in exchange, namely, through capital (at first in the form of money). In his economic manuscripts in 1859 Marx writes: “Labor, which manifests itself in exchange-value, appears to be the labor of an isolated individual. It becomes social by assuming the form of its direct opposite, of an abstract Universal.” (MEW13, 21; trans. altered). Three things are important in what Marx points out here: first, the atomization of individuals in capitalist societies, i.e., the fact that the form of our social bond is atomization is an effect of the equalization of labor within capitalism through the commodity form that labor takes on in the exchange process. The equalization, in other words, turns every individual, ironically, into what it is not, namely, a universal. Second, labor becomes a social relationship because, paradoxically put, it takes on a uniform and abstract form. As a consequence, our lives and our cultures become really abstract. Third, the technologies that are the driving force behind capital not only are themselves abstract units (theories, ideas, science, etc.), but exist in the means of production, which, in turn, produces the individuals needed for the capitalist mode of production (I will deal with the second and third points in detail in chapter 5).

All of this leads to the conclusion that the form under which concrete objects can possibly be encountered is the universal form of these objects (i.e., in the terms used above, their objecthood), namely, as commodities that imply the form of the totality that is expressed in the commodity form, which is capital. It is clear from this, then, that the reflections in this book differ from any standard neoclassical economic thinking that takes exchange, especially exchange understood as barter, as the beginning point of reflection. With Marx, I believe that exchange is a surface phenomenon, although value cannot be understood without taking on the exchange form. Exchange is as important as its genesis. In fact, it is its genesis. This insight increasingly also reaches standard economic theory. As John Smithin puts it, “as against this primeval belief in the supremacy of the act of exchange, however, in actual social systems things are far more complicated. […] Markets and the notion of market exchange, as they actually function in the enterprise system, are built upon the prior institutions of money and private property” (Smithin 2011, 76).

Money

In his Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) and in his comments on Mill’s Elements of Political Economy (1844), Marx had not yet developed his later theory of money and capital, and as such, his work remained grounded in an idealist framework. His reflections around that time are nevertheless important for our topic, however, as Marx here thinks about money as something that bridges epistemological and social questions. For we can see rather concretely how object constitution is possible through social forms. Marx writes:

By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object [der Gegenstand] in the eminent sense. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is therefore regarded as an omnipotent being. Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. (MEW40, 563; trans. altered)

Three aspects are important in this quote: [1] Marx defines money here as the object, [2] it becomes a universal force, and [3] it becomes the universal mediator of social life. How is this related to the Kantian question of how we can access the reality? In brief, for Kant the conditions of the possibility for representing the reality are given through a rational structure that determines every experience and makes it possible for us to have a representation at all. The most abstract structure is that of an object as such. Before we can have any experience at all, our reason projects in advance, so to speak, a “super-concept” of the reality, which is the concept of object or objecthood. The famous categories that Kant determines as the pure part of reason make up this objecthood and thereby enable humans to refer to something in the world and to encounter specific objects, such as this car or that tree. It is clear that objecthood must be universal in nature and, as such, it is not identical with empirically encountered things in our world; indeed, it makes any representation of empirical objects possible. If we now go back to Marx, we can see that Marx thinks about money in a very similar fashion. Though in the end his thoughts on money are influenced by how Hegel defines the universal object in the Phenomenology of Spirit, we can see that Marx thinks of money as something that is, so to speak, the social replacement of the epistemologically defined object, i.e., objecthood.

Although money remains “hidden” behind a veil of empirical experiences and the natural appearance of things, it nonetheless defines objects as what they are, and thereby, it establishes itself, as an almost metaphysical force behind everything, determining all possible social relations. As this does not seem to be plausible at first glance, let us consider an example: when we go into a supermarket we can see, at least if we are in the Western world, a range of products. An average supermarket in a Western country holds around 40,000 different items. In their empirical appearance, these products all seem to be different, as their natural properties differ. Some are bigger, some are smaller, and all fight for our attention through a host of other properties, such as color, shape, packaging, and symbols. Now, what is it that makes those objects all identical and defines them as objects in this space? It is first of all the fact that they can be bought with money or, put differently, that they can be exchanged with money. So, money is in this case really the object that we encounter when we go to the supermarket, since all objects here receive their existence only through a universal condition of their possibility, which in this case is money (we will see later that labor is part of this picture). It is, then, also clear that it determines all social relationships contained in the universality of this “super-object” called money. For example, all commodities found in the supermarket are only there because they contain a myriad of relations through production and other exchanges. The materials come from some place on earth, the designs come from product design companies, the ingredients had to be chemically tested and perhaps found through research in the biosciences. In addition, someone had to put everything together and transport everything from one place to another. Finally, money defines every step we take, and every step we can take in the supermarket, as, for example, we can only leave the building if we pay. Isn’t it a bit frightening to notice that the sole reason for the actual “encounter” of individuals in this place is money? The social relationships established in this place are absolutely inessential to the individuals moving around in this space and are abstractly defined by something else that remains hidden behind every move. Accordingly, the only “tie” between the individuals in this store is money, as it establishes their relationship as buyers, their needs, and what they are. Subjectively, we might think that it was our intention or our will to go to the store, to buy something for our needs and to chat with the nice person at the checkout; but this is an illusion. The real reason for everything that happens and the real reason that this practice is even possible is money (money is taken here as the short version of what Marx later calls value).

It is precisely the latter that Marx has in mind when he speaks (in the quote above) as the mediator of everything. I will later deal with more aspects of money and the transition from epistemological to social questions. But for now, it should be clear that we need to think more about money as a force in our life, i.e., as something that frames everything in a hidden and unconscious way. Put bluntly, we see the objects in the supermarket because the money form of the objects is the hidden objecthood that renders our references to them, including actions, behavior, and attitudes, possible. We should note though that this definition of money as the hidden universal is not sufficient, since money is itself just an abstraction from something that is ultimately more concrete and “behind” money, namely, capital as the driving force of capitalism and its dynamics. In his later theory, it is capital itself that forms the social totality of capitalism as a real Universal and as the force driving everything forward (MEW42, 41). Even non-Marxist economists have recently argued for such a view. As Hansjörg Herr puts it, “in a capitalist economy, a real sphere that is separable from the monetary sphere, as neoclassical economists preach indefatigably, simply does not exist. In a capitalist economy money is everywhere” (Herr 2011, 225).[3] In some regard, this book is about the philosophical analysis of Herr’s empirical thesis. The universality of money, however, also leads us to another aspect that needs to be considered, namely, the culture of abstraction.

Culture of Abstraction

The foregoing should inspire us to want to learn more about ourselves and our lives under capitalism, especially as the further investigation of principles of commodity exchange and money can lead to the insight that the capitalist schema that determines and “frames” our access to reality can be spelled out in three regards: [1] it can be concretely analyzed in terms of what Adorno and Horkheimer called the “culture industry”; [2] in more contemporary terms, it can be analyzed in terms of the technical production of consciousness and mind itself; and, [3] in broader social terms, it can be analyzed as what Albert Toscano has called “the culture of abstraction” (Toscano 2008a), which refers to a society that is itself abstract. The culture industry chapter in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment has often been discussed and has stirred a long-lasting debate about the role of the media in the production of attitudes, ideas, and the reduction of reality within the minds of the consumers of culture. I will therefore not deal in any detail with these ideas; instead, I will focus on extending their initial claims by offering an analysis of technology as the production of what is in the mind of consumers. In my view, Adorno and Horkheimer remained too close to the ideology concept of the early Marx; for instance, they assumed that the culture industry schematizes the receptive capacities of individuals under capitalism: Hollywood, advertisement, event culture, etc., leads to a fragmented and reduced concept of social reality, and ultimately leads to an impoverished social environment through the ideology produced by the culture industry.

In contrast to this, Bernard Stiegler, whom I follow in this regard, has argued that we need to see the central role of technology in this process, as we can no longer simply talk about the culture industry in terms of the media system; rather, we need to realize that all human capacities, such as vision, hearing, thinking, feeling, and etc., are in the process of being taken over and produced by consciousness industries that determine what we can see, hear, and think on an even more fundamental level. As he puts it, “the time of consciousness has itself become a merchandise” (Stiegler 2011a, 77). The electronics industries and the bio-technology industries play an important role here. So, since—now in contrast to Stiegler—I maintain that the dynamics of this development from the culture industry to the consciousness industry is founded upon the capitalist schema, I believe we need to understand how these new developments and tendencies are simply an extension of the culture of abstraction introduced by the capitalist schema. Commodity exchange and money (as the pre-form of capital) have a “ghostlike” existence, as they subject every entity in the universe to the capitalist form. For example, if one wants to buy a star in the universe (or give one as a gift), one can do so by visiting the web site of the Sternwarte Solingen.[4]

There remains, in other words, nothing outside the money form (not even the universe itself), once capital has established itself as the real abstract universal in our lives. To underline this point, the universality of capital also includes “virtual” or “ideal” entities, such as conscience, knowledge, ideas, and life styles. Accordingly, claims that we are now in a new phase of capitalism because we no longer exchange commodities, but experiences, life-styles, etc., is false: “the subjective experience of individual consumption is the ultimate goal of the entire production process, it is logical to bypass the object, and to commodify and sell this experience directly” (Zizek 2002, 287). Zizek himself rejects this position by arguing that the “post-modern” capitalism still needs the market to function and depends upon a “material infrastructure,” such as food, transportation, etc. Zizek’s position does not go far enough though, insofar as we need to reject the post-modern position because it operates with a false concept of “object,” which Zizek does not include in his critical analysis. In capitalism all entities are already (potentially) commodifiable, as its form is universal, and, accordingly, it does not matter whether these objects are “real” objects or “subjective” experiences. This is, however, only the first step, since the capitalist dynamics not only expands into the universe, but also takes over and produces all inner capacities from breathing, heart beating, walking, vision, and seeing. Indeed, nanotechnologies and virtual technologies are about to replace virtually all bodily and mental functions of humans. The human as the cyborg, as is famously put forward by Donna Haraway, has by now become a concept that is no longer considered a legitimate way to grasp reality, given that we are about to produce the human body through technology industries, and in this way, we are capitalizing and financializing even the most inner and intimate sphere of ourselves. Medical devices, such as pacemakers and artificial knees, are not simply medical devices to make our lives better and healthier; rather, they are the result of a research-driven process that is market dependent. The exploitation of labor, then, is something that has moved into us. Finally, the culture of abstraction becomes visible in broader social and psychological terms as well, which I will examine through a broader analysis of how our world is reified and socially alienated.

So, let us start to analyze the capitalist schema in more detail.

Notes

1.

I am taking over the concept of “social form” from Marx here; for example, see MEGA II.2, 71.

2.

It should be clear, however, that I try to shift the focus of Critical Theory back to a Marxian framework of thought, as I believe that the move from Adorno/Horkheimer to Habermas, Honneth, and Jaeggi has unfortunately given up on this framework, which leads to the contradiction of being critical towards capitalism without having a philosophical theory of capitalism. The latter point is nicely visible in Honneth’s last book Das Recht der Freiheit within which he tries to show that capitalism implies a normative framework that he calls “normative economism” (Honneth 2011, 380) and which is based on the assumption that in a market-oriented economy recognition is already in place (Ibid.). Here, however, I imply (though I will not deal with normative questions in this book) the opposite position, as normative positions such as Honneth’s theory of “capitalism with a human face” already depend upon the schema that I analyze.

3.

For this, also see Smith 2005, 174.

4.

For this check http://www.sterne-zu-verkaufen.de

Chapter 2

The Capitalist Thing

One could argue that the identification of objects with commodities is unjustified, as it seems, simply, not to be empirically true that everything we find around us is a commodity. This claim, of course, is as such correct, as we still walk through forests on Sundays, hike up mountains during our holidays, or travel to see the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of France. The argument presented here is on a different level, however, as the claim is that we can no longer access these objects of knowledge, perception, action, etc. without the potential form that regulates their access as social objects. We could —and often already do—imagine and think of these things as commodities. The meaning of the Atlantic Ocean is certainly determined by the possibility that we can exploit its natural resources, use it for ships, trade, and military. We also already understand the Atlantic Ocean as something that we can investigate with technologically advanced instruments and as a source for capital investments in the fishing industries. The case of the BP oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 neatly demonstrated that the ocean appeared in that case as something framed primarily by capital calculation. The argument presented here, therefore, is based on a social theory, since we need to show that the understanding and being of entities around us is nowadays constituted by commodities in their money form. It is clear, then, that we need to prepare an understanding of commodities as something that is a form rather than an object, given that commodities are not simply objects we can grasp with our hands, walk on, or see with our eyes; rather, they exist primarily in the form of social relations. Consequently, the understanding of these entities as potentially constituted by the money form is the transcendental condition of their possibility to appear within the worlds in which we live.

In this section I will set up the switch from an epistemological to a materialist framework by briefly reconstructing how Adorno interprets the epistemological framework introduced by Kant, as his reconstruction nicely demonstrates how the question of how subjects constitute objects turns, from the materialist viewpoint, into a question of social schematization. Instead of going into more detail about Adorno’s whole philosophy, which would require a discussion of his Negative Dialectics and his lecture courses given after 1950, I will push the issue back to a contemporary Marxist framework. Accordingly, I shall try to introduce a way to get from the question of object constitution through knowledge and perception to a materialist conception of this relation first by showing how the Kantian epistemological framework can be transformed into a materialist framework and second by arguing that this shift leads to a change in our conception of what a “thing” is.

In short, a thing under the capitalist schema and in a capitalist world is something that appears already in a certain social form before we can refer to it in some abstract cognitive or epistemological fashion (if such a thing is possible at all). For example, when Marx begins the Capital with the remark that the wealth in capitalist societies “appears as an immense collection of commodities” (MEW23, 49, CI, 125) he points to the problem I have in mind. On the one hand, “things” are not simply bare “objects” under capitalism; rather, they are encountered as a particular kind of thing, in this case as commodities. By “commodities,” as we will later see, we do not simply mean soup cans and pizza boxes; rather, commodities are themselves the expression of social relations, and, thus, in principle, everything can become a commodity under capitalism. Accordingly, commodities are not ontologically fixed objects, such as trees or art works (which themselves can become commodities); instead, what we mean when we refer to commodities is a form. However, the form under which these things appear as commodities remains hidden and needs exposure (either through a Critique of Political Economy or phenomenology) in order to show that the thing is not an object for perception, but is schematized as a social relation (in the form of money, value, capital, etc.). So, again, encountering “objects” in capitalism means to encounter them in a schematized way, namely, as commodities. Indeed, the commodity form itself depends upon the money form, etc. Consequently, what we really encounter through the schema is the social form through which entities become accessible to us.

Before, however, we can proceed with this step we need to demonstrate how the position which, for example, Marx simply presupposes at the beginning of Capital, can be rendered intelligible in relation to epistemology.[1] In order to facilitate this step in my argument and analysis, I shall utilize Adorno’s Kant interpretation, as Adorno (following some ideas by Lukacs and Sohn-Rethel) not only tries to give a social interpretation of Kant’s epistemology, but also employs the concept of schema from Kant. Kant’s philosophy, in other words, is used here as the reference theory, given that he offers us both a viewpoint that may be rejected from the standpoint of critical theory, as well as a theory of schematism, which is connected to the problem of imagination in Kant. Accordingly, one can show through Kant that [1] the thing is social, [2] the schema is social, and [3] the imagination is social, which, in turn, has consequences for the experience of time and temporality. After my discussion and critique of Adorno, I will demonstrate that the thing under capitalism is the commodity in its money form, that the schema is the abstraction through the money form, and that the experience of time depends upon the monetization of past, present, and future (debt and credit). All of this, I shall argue, is the condition for the possibility of what Adorno and Horkheimer were most concerned about in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, namely, instrumental reason. Just as we can no longer assume a “neutral” epistemological relation to objects, we should also no longer assume that “reason”—even in its instrumental form—constitutes reality. Instrumentality follows from a specific relationship towards the future, which is socially schematized under capitalism in a monetary form.

Though I utilize Adorno here in order to set up my further analyses, I argue that Adorno’s interpretation remains insufficient, as Adorno only abstractly takes up the task of developing a theory of the society and the social object [Gegenständlichkeit]; for though he tries to transform Kant’s epistemological point of view into a critical point of view, he fails to do this in terms of a Critique of Political Economy. He therefore claims that the Kantian relation between subject and object can be translated into the relation of labor and nature. This relation, however, is not sufficient for a historically specific social theory, as the laboring of a subject on nature as such is universal and has nothing to do with capitalism. I need, therefore, to argue that the capitalist schema no longer gives us objects abstractly defined by a human relation; rather, this relation exists only in and as a specific social form, which is the commodity, but since commodities are not simply “things,” we must also acknowledge that their specific form is money. Adorno, in other words, does not show that the schema, when interpreted as a social schema, must be a specific schema that—under current conditions—belongs to capitalism as “socio-transcendental a priori” (Zizek 2006, 56). As a consequence, Adorno, in his whole work—with rare exceptions—never follows through with reintroducing the commodity form through money and capital. The reason for this failure is simple: Adorno failed to understand that commodities are not simply defined by use and exchange value and that taking away exchange would leave us with the use value; rather, the exchange value needs additional categorical determinations in order to exist socially as exchange value. In fact, Adorno works against his own theory as it is presented in Negative Dialectics, insofar as he works with abstract concepts, a charge that he usually directs against his enemies.

This position is nicely visible in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, as the commodity concept and the critique of the culture industry remains unspecific in relation to its real social framework, i.e., capitalism. The position reached in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example, still fetishizes labor and exchange as something independent from its historically specific forms. Hence it falls back onto an anthropological framework that Adorno usually rejects as “asocial” and abstract.[2] The problem, however, involves showing not only how “thinghood” under capitalism is not really what it seems to be, but also showing how this appearance is historically specific and thus bound to a specific form. For example, the general assumption that things appear in exchange societies that are framed can only be convincing if one can show how exchange has taken on a specific form, given that exchange is also present in non-capitalist societies. Consequently, Adorno fails to see that exchange under capitalism can only be thought of as commodity exchange, which in turn presupposes at least the money form. But, rather astonishingly money as a social form is absent from Adorno’s work.

I will start with Adorno’s Kant interpretation before I proceed with a critique of Adorno’s position.

Kant with Adorno

As we said above, according to Adorno, Kant has (unintentionally) conceptualized what the culture industry realizes: the world gets precensored according to standards that determine what can be perceived. Accordingly, Adorno gives the schematism as a cognitive process a wider meaning, as he interprets the reduction of knowledge to “mere” cognition as a social operation. What can be known is—on the large scale—precisely determined by the process of schematization, through which universal and individual, concept and intuition, as well as intellect and experience, are “framed.” In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, this framework is conceived as reification: what we experience has gone through a schema that “allows” us to detect in our experience only that which was prefabricated through the schema. In a curious move, Adorno gives the famous interpretation of the culture industry a new turn:

Kant intuitively anticipated what Hollywood has consciously put into practice: images are precensored during production by the same standard of understanding which will later determine their reception by viewers. The perception by which public judgment feels itself confirmed has been shaped by that judgment even before the perception takes place. (Adorno, GS3, 162)

The inner meaning of the culture industry chapter is clearly centered on the function of the schematism. Unfortunately, Adorno and Horkheimer do not reveal the two real sources of their thesis that the culture industry is the social form of schematization, which are: [1] the interpretation of Kant’s schematism chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason as well as [2] the fundament of the transcendental schematism in the exchange principle. The exchange principle, accordingly, is the real source of the schematism produced by the culture industry.

Let me briefly turn to Adorno’s Kant interpretation. Adorno rejects the Neo-Kantian claim (or what he conceives as such a claim) that Kant’s main work is either a theory of nature or an epistemology; instead, he claims that the real core of the whole work is metaphysical, pointing to Kant’s statement from the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason within which Kant claims that the purpose of his work is to prepare the way for a metaphysics as science (Adorno 2002b, 85). The metaphysical core of the Critique of Pure Reason that Adorno is interested in is especially visible through its implicit reference to the Ancient difference between ‘to on’ and ‘ta onta,’ which Adorno calls the “ontological meaning” of Kant’s analysis. The categorical framework of beings for Adorno points, in Heidegger’s terms, to the difference between beings and Being and, hence, is based upon metaphysical assumptions:

You can see here very clearly that, as the precondition of the possibility of knowledge in general, the Kantian concept of the a priori is not just to be understood in functional terms, that is, not just with reference to the constitution of knowledge, the grounding of experience. Over and above that, Kant ascribes a kind of ontological meaning, that is, a kind of ideal existence, to these root concepts, to the categories and forms of intuition, and it is this ideal existence that he is attempting to salvage. (Adorno 2002b, 86)

What Adorno has in mind here is quite simple, namely, he claims that Kant’s theory of knowledge of objects is itself rooted in a metaphysical framework, as Kant claims that there is a necessary (unchanging and ideal) condition for the possibility of referring to (or experiencing) objects, i.e., of knowing them. The possibility of knowledge, according to this understanding, depends upon an ontological framework that constitutes knowledge as knowledge. Knowledge can only be knowledge because it is held in place by what Adorno calls an an “ontological meaning” and “ideal existence,” namely, Kant’s assumption that thinghood (i.e., what entities are) makes knowledge possible: “This means, then, that the ontological difference has the meaning that ta onta are indeed constituted through the on, through pure existence, but that conversely, pure existence only aquires truth insofar as it relates to ta onta.” (Adorno 2002b, 87) The “on” as the underlying “ideal existence” is interpreted by Adorno as the concept of the thing, which makes all references to something in the world possible: “But it is quite obvious that the epitome of nature or of the world is a concept of the thing, that is, the supreme synthesis, the all- inclusive ensemble of all existing things in general” (Adorno 2002b, 94).[3] So, here we find a first shadow of what we introduced above as “the” thing: Kant does not mean by thing or thinghood a thing found in our daily experience, but a sort of schema of things (i.e., thinghood) that makes daily experience possible. This ontological or metaphysical framework, however, as Adorno correctly points out, remains ideal (as ‘on’ it can never change).

Since the pure concepts are called “categories” by Kant and since categories are pure thoughts or rules under which object reference can be thought, thinghood turns into the lawfulness of experience (Adorno 2002b, 94). This insight is very important, as we should not confuse the thing or what a thing is with the synthesis of appearances or with the synthesis of intuition and concepts in general; rather, the thing is identical with the lawfulness of the appearances as the latter’s condition of possibility, as there are “cognitive” rules that establish the thinkability of objects. If experiences would not be cognitively framed by pure rules of how to think objects as such (i.e., thinghood), no unity and no object reference could be established, as it would be unclear to us, so to speak, what an object as such is. Reason, therefore, needs to think the object before it can experience an object. We can see that Kant, according to Adorno, returns to an Ancient theme: the fleeting character of the world would not allow us to refer to anything “objective,” stable, and fixed in it, if the fleetingness would not itself be identical or be based on the ruled forms of the objects that we possibly can experience. Since the categories and pure determinations of the thing are determinations of thought, Adorno concludes that Kant is unable to avoid falling back onto idealism:

this unity of consciousness is conceived as the correlative of the unity of the thing, the unity of the object. That is to say, the mechanisms that Kant represents as the truly transcendental mechanisms, those which provide the foundations for subjective unity, are indistinguishable in reality from those which enable us to perceive things, objective existent beings, as identical objects. (Adorno 2002b, 94)

Since the unity of consciousness hangs on the transcendental apperception as a logical unity, the lawfulness of the thing is not only (ultimately) identical with the unity of consciousness itself but also with the objects in their identity. The condition for the possibility of experiencing something in the (fleeting) world is the unity of consciousness as the lawfulness of things and the unity of these objects. Kant is an idealist because the unity of the lawfulness of things (established by reason) is ultimately identical with the unity of things or, put more precisely, the unity of the thing. Thinghood, according to Adorno’s interpretation, is, moreover, identical with reification; for the fixed and stable character of the thing turns out to be identical with the fixed and stable character of the subject: “reification,” as Adorno puts it, “is a function of subjectivization. In other words, the more subjectivization there is, the more reification there is” (Adorno 2002b, 114). Let me briefly clarify this: if the fleeting character of the world is only knowable if reason constitutes, a priori, a stable framework for this change, i.e., the knowability or representability of the world, then this must count both for subject and for object, as the unity of objects, i.e., objecthood, is identical with the ruledness of reason. As this framework of rules and categories is itself not changing and, is instead ideal (as Kant needs to assume that this is always in place and cannot itself change to, say, forty-four categories or be in place on a random basis), he assumes that something remains ontologically external to the flux and process of the constituted reality, namely, the object (now grasped in its subject-constitution). Something that remains “abstract,” separated, and external from a living process, Adorno—following Lukacs—calls “reified.”

The most important step within Adorno’s interpretation of Kant is his claim that the relation between subject and object in Kant depends upon the activity of the subject. The materialist interpretation of the First Critique would not be understandable if we would not assume that the subject is active. As this activity can be interpreted as labor, we are able to see that what Kant really deals with is the relation between subject and nature: “the world, reality as a whole, is turned into a product, in fact, the product of labor, of effort” (Adorno 2002b, 115). This relation between subject and object is, for sure, paradoxical: for, on the one hand, the subject seems to construct the identity of the thing (as lawfulness), but on the other hand, the subject thereby turns itself into a fixed something. In addition, as Adorno claims in the footsteps of Lukacs, “the livelier the subject becomes, the deader the world becomes. We might talk here of the ‘commodity character’ of the world, whose rigidity and inflexibility keeps increasing thanks to this process” (Adorno 2002b, 115). What seems to be the “spontaneity” of the subject is in reality the absolute inflexibility of the subject (and, consequently, things, too). This paradox is then further interpreted by Adorno as the “essential antinomy of bourgeois society in general” (Adorno 2002b, 115). On the one hand, the world becomes increasingly dependent upon activities of the subject and has been transformed into a world that is made by subjects; on the other hand, the world that we create increasingly dominates us, since with every activity the independent object-character of the world increases. Every domination of the object, according to Adorno, leads, hence, to a domination of the subject.

So far, so good. Adorno’s Kant interpretation, however, is not the last word in his materialist interpretation of object constitution as a social relation, as the domination of the subject through itself in thinglike forms is, according to Adorno, derived from the real abstraction that occurs in commodity exchange (I will come back to the topic of real abstraction in chapter three).[4] Adorno’s thesis that “reification is a function of subjectivization” (Adorno 1995, 174) implies that both the real subjectivization and atomization that occur in capitalist society (as well as the philosophical theory of knowledge) can be derived from the capitalist exchange logic. The exchange logic allows Adorno to claim that “objective experiences” (Adorno 1995, 176) are visible in Kant’s philosophy, namely, in the “antinomy of the bourgeois world” and in the “commodity character of the world, its fixation [Erstarrung]” (Adorno 1995, 175). The subject that works itself off at its object, produces itself and its objects as abstract objects, as these objects disconnect themselves from their living dialectical constitution and turn into fixed and reified structures. Kant’s thinking is, accordingly, just the subjective expression of the objective Verkehrung. As Adorno puts it in a seminar protocol edited by Backhaus, the exchange abstraction “turns that which we exchange into the semblance of a thing-in-itself” (Adorno in Backhaus 2011, 507). What we usually take to be the abstracting activity of the subject comes in truth into being within the real exchange society (Adorno, GS6, 180). What we can see here is that Adorno already opens up the path that I try to extend in this book. Given this, it is important to see why, with rare exceptions, Adorno fails to follow the pathway he opened up with his Kant interpretation.

Critique of Adorno

The main problem in Adorno’s attempt to derive the social schematization of objects through exchange is that his definition of exchange remains too abstract, since he does not go further than claiming that the constitution of things as things is an effect of the reification that occurs in exchange (which I introduced in the last section). In going so far as to claim that monopoly capitalism is characterized by the enjoyment of exchange value and not the use value (Adorno, GS7, 39), Adorno falls back into what some have called “use value fetishism” (Hafner 1993), which is the idea that it is simply the introduction of exchange in our societies that turns everything, including culture, into commodities.[5] This thesis needs to be rejected, however, for two reasons: [1] not all exchange societies are capitalist, and [2] the definition of commodities as the contradiction between use and exchange value remains abstract. Put polemically, it seems as if Adorno simply stopped reading Capital after chapter 1, falling prey to the classical Marxist view of commodities put forward by Engels, who claimed that the higher categorical forms of commodities, such as money and capital, are historical stages that come after use and exchange. For reasons that are not relevant to this book, his position is incorrect.[6] For all we need to see at this point is that the forms under which things appear in capitalism are not simply sensible things (use values) with their social exchange forms; and we need to introduce at least the money form within which commodities become what they are, namely, existing things. Put in Marx’s language, Adorno does not realize that the simple circulation process remains

an abstract sphere of the bourgeois process of production as a whole, which through its own determinations shows itself to be a moment, a mere form of appearance of some deeper process lying behind it, even resulting from it and producing it (MEGA II.2, 68)

The thesis expressed here by Marx in the Urtext of the Capital is that the claim that commodities are circulating in our societies and establishing social relationships between commodity owners is far too simple, as the circulation process itself has a specific form under which this circulation process exists as a circulation process, which is established through the money and capital form. Similarly, as Marx puts it,

[s]o long as money, i.e., exchange value, become independent, merely fixing itself with respect to its opposite, use value as such, it is, in fact, capable only of an abstract being. In its opposite, in its becoming use value, and in the process of the consumption of the use value, it must simultaneously preserve itself and wax as exchange value, i.e., transform the consumption of the use value itself—its active negation as well as its positing—into the reproduction and production of the exchange value itself. (MEGA II.2, 84)

What Marx has in mind here are three points: [1] the exchange value/use value distinction is—as such—abstract (i.e., removed from the frame to which it belongs), [2] exchange value needs to become independent from and external to its possible destruction in consumption (which indeed takes place through the move from exchange value to the money form), and [3] consumption needs to become a moment of the whole reproduction cycle. If we understand by “commodity” simply the relation between use and exchange value, then we end up with an abstract definition of commodities, since this understanding takes commodities out of the circulation and reproduction process that makes them into and allows them to be commodities. This abstract position, however, is precisely the position that Adorno promotes, inasmuch as he claims that the reified object is simply the object of exchange. In a remark on the United States in his Minima Moralia, for example, Adorno interprets the democratic and “business-like” setup of the United States in the following way:

The self-evidence of the maxim that work is no disgrace, the guileless absence of all snobbery concerning the ignominy, in the feudal sense, of market relationships, the democracy of the earnings principle, contribute to the persistence of what is utterly antidemocratic, economic injustice, human degradation. It occurs to nobody that there might be services that are not expressible in terms of exchange value. This is the real pre-condition for the triumph of that subjective reason which is incapable of thinking of truth as intrinsically binding, and perceives it solely as existing for others, as exchangeable. (Adorno, GS4, 222)

The United States as the major representative of capitalism is here, by Adorno, simply reduced to a culture that is based upon the exchange principle, which is to say, Adorno identifies capitalism with the exchange principle. In another remark, describing the attitude of children playing with their toy shop, Adorno points out that by refusing to turn the world into exchange values, the child not only holds fast to a utopian impulse towards the sensual world of use values, but also to the idea that not everything is exchangeable. “Disenchantment with the contemplated world is the sensorium’s reaction to its objective role as a ‘commodity world’” (Adorno, GS4, 260). This simple distinction between the sensual concreteness of the world and the abstractions of exchange is itself an abstraction, for it does not really grasp what is at stake in capitalism. Put differently, the capitalist schema does not simply consist of the exchange principle that takes away the uniqueness of things and turns them into something universal (as Adorno often seems to suggest); rather, the whole distinction of use and exchange is itself the result of capitalist reproduction. Accordingly, the schema that we are in search of cannot be identical with the exchange principle.

Though it is important to see that the object as the thing needs to be established as a social form, as we have argued above, and as independent from change and representation, the real independence of “the” thing cannot be reached without taking the money form into account (which becomes absolute under the capital form).[7] Put in terms of political economy, value, or in this case the thing under capitalism, must establish itself as something independent from the process of production and consumption. The exchange principle establishes the “objective rationality of society” (Adorno, GS8, 296) and leads to the solidification of social life. The schematization, analyzed by Kant, turns, therefore, in Adorno’s eyes, into the objective principle of capitalist society, but—and this is the crucial point—in truth it is the all-encompassing social schematism that rules social synthesis. This schema as abstraction is, as Adorno puts it in his Introduction to Sociology, “both conceptual as well as real” (Adorno 1993, 57) and it is the expression of a “radical capitalization of all social relationships” (Adorno 2008, 107). Though I agree with Adorno on this overall point, I disagree that using the simple exchange mechanism is sufficient to explain what Adorno has in mind. What we need, in other words, is a recovery of political economy as social theory, which is not to be found in Adorno’s later philosophy.

Only if the universal constitution of money as something identical throughout and separate from circulation and consumption occurs, can we argue that it remains as the social “in itself” and, accordingly, as the universal schema through which all entities in capitalism are socially schematized and hence become meaningful. Again, if we stop—like Adorno did—with the exchange principle, then we do not grasp what we want to grasp, namely, the specificity of the capitalist form. Instead, as Adorno and Horkheimer did in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, we fall back onto a general human framework and we fail to demonstrate what we intend to demonstrate: the capitalist schema in its particularity. From the viewpoint of money and capital, the use value of commodities, which Adorno clings to in an overtly romantic fashion, is only important in capitalism insofar as it leads to a new exploitation of labor power. Put differently, the use of commodities in capitalism is no longer the goal of the reproduction process, as the money form established the commodity as something that only counts as a use value formed by money. Accordingly, it is not exchange as such, which, taken simply as exchange, remains abstract, but the exchange as money that determines the commodity as what it is. Put simply, exchange has a form and the form of exchange is itself not exchanged, but establishes itself as the identical throughout all exchanges. Money is therefore something paradoxical, as it needs to be exchanged in order to become itself.

I consider in a later chapter capital as the form that money takes on during a later stage and that which realizes the paradoxical structure of money, as capital is the “fluidity” and flow of money itself, now containing the whole social relation between labor and capital. Money is here the thing that remains independent from the destruction of the commodity in consumption. As a consequence, Adorno’s thesis that it is exchange that establishes everything as something abstract in capitalist societies (Adorno, GS6, 454) should be rejected, as exchange needs to be established itself as something that is external to the circulation and consumption process. Only in this case can we argue that “the” thing, i.e., thinghood, is established as something independent and that it is therefore determining all entities under capitalism. As Marx puts it in the Urtext, the process of circulation and exchange is “pure semblance” and is the expression of a process that takes place “behind the back” of exchange” (MEGAII/2, 64).

As a consequence of their abstractions, such as the concept of exchange, Adorno and Horkheimer also fail to analyze, in their famous culture industry chapter, the industrial character of the production of culture. Though their analysis shows beautifully how a specific ideological and psychic structure, for example, desires, are produced by the culture industry, they do not trace this ideological structure back to the fact that this structure depends upon the structure of production. Put differently, they do not really follow up what they claim to speak about in the title of this chapter, namely, the culture industry. On the one hand, as Bernard Stiegler has recently pointed out, “consumerism transforms everything into needs, that is, into subsistence, and liquidates desire” (Stiegler 2010, 65), and following Adorno and Horkheimer, this destruction is closely connected to a system of frustrations (Stiegler 2010b, 83). What is experienced as need, however, is now controlled by the capitalist system, especially since any desire for something outside of consumption has been taken over by a system of need production: commercials, films, advertisements, entertainment, etc., are all targeted towards the production of needs and desires.

Accordingly, the relation between labor and capital, and between the money form and the capital form, is presupposed for any claim about the “industrial” character of culture and its takeover of our mental apparatus. On the other hand, the overall driving force behind the expansion of capitalism is the industrialization of mental activities and abilities. The externalization of knowledge in the form of memory, according to Stiegler, is an anthropological and evolutionary fact, but the constitution of memory through industry occurred during the nineteenth century, first in the form of machines, and nowadays though digital and bio technologies. In our time we enter what Stiegler calls the “hyperindustrial” period within which cognitive and cultural industries control knowledge, as this knowledge is externalized in the form of digital media, biotechnologies, and, more recently, nanotechnologies. What we can observe, in other words, is that not only life itself, but also the whole range of the mind is turned into technics (i.e., not simply based upon them). According to Stiegler, what happened is that technology not only took over language, i.e., through writing, books, machines, computerization, media, standardizations, etc., but now includes the whole psychic and sensual apparatus of humans: vision, auditory systems, touch, pain, etc. The whole range of the noein, in other words, is in the process of being produced by these industries (more about this can be found in chapter 5).

Consequently, what Adorno and Horkheimer fail to see is that the thesis about the schematization of objects needs to be supported by a theory of social reproduction and the production of subjectivity needed for this reproduction. Given the industrial side of the consciousness industry, it should be clear that Adorno’s claim that it is simply exchange that schematizes object reference in capitalist societies, is insufficient, as this would require a discussion of the establishment of the money form, the independence of the money form from the circulation and the capitalization of this form, which leads to the advancement of technology and the turn of the consuming consciousness into a product. Consequently, we cannot deal with the culture industry without both the money form as well as the production of electronics (nowadays robotics, as well as nano and biotechnologies) through industries, or through what Marx called the “general intellect” (MEW42, 602; G, 706) and the “social brain” (MEW42, 594; G, 694), which is to say, the production of knowledge and science. More precisely put, we cannot reduce the capitalist schema to exchange; for we need to take into account what is implied in the form of exchange. I will come back to this point in the last chapter of this book.

As a next step, I will now move beyond Adorno in order to focus in more detail on the capitalist schema and the form under which everything is encountered within capitalism.

Notes

1.

It should be clear that the same shift is thematized by Hegel in his Phenomenology in the transition between chapter 3 and 4, as Hegel also tries to show how the epistemological view of “objects” contains a contradiction that leads to a social conception of these objects. Hegel, however, does not consider what I am interested in here, namely, the specific capitalist form or schema under which things appear not simply as things.

2.

For a brief overview of Adorno’s understanding of use value in the context of political economy, see Braunstein 2011, 30 4–310); for the relation between money and exchange, see ibid., 314; for Adorno’s attack on anthropology, see his essay on cultural anthropology in GS20/1,13 5–139.

3.

It is surprising how close Adorno’s interpretation of Kant comes to Heidegger’s Kant interpretation; for more details on the relationship between Heidegger and Adorno, see my contribution in Lotz 2012; see also Heidegger 1927, 250.

4.

The majority of Anglo-American scholarship on Adorno fails to see that Adorno remained committed to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. For example, though Moishe Postone deals with economic aspects within Critical Theory in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion, he does not mention Adorno at all. Though some of the contributors to the Adorno companion mention Marx here and there, in general, they dismiss Adorno’s Marxist background and instead deal with Weber and Freud (e.g., see Bernstein in Huhn 2004, 26). In addition, distorted versions of Marx are taken over and repeated. For instance, Bernstein claims that Marx interpreted the whole history as a history of class conflict without noting that Marx gave this position up in his later critique of political economy. Similarly, Bernstein claims that “Marx modeled the critique of ideology on the critique of religion” (ibid., 47), which, in regard to the later Marx, is simply false. Even Jarvis, in his essay on Adorno and Marx, does not get to the core of Adorno’s philosophy, which is the exchange principle of Capital interpreted through the lens of Sohn-Rethel’s theory of the relation between commodity form and thought form. In a letter to Sohn-Rethel, Adorno claims that Sohn-Rethel’s interpretation of the real abstraction was the single most important intellectual experience he had (see footnote 5 in Reichelt 2002, 181). As should become clearer in the next chapter, the meaning of “real abstraction” was missed by Adorno on the same grounds as exchange, as Adorno implicitly universalizes this principle.

5.

For a similar charge, see Vincent 2008, 501.

6.

For the discussion of this misinterpretation, see Postone 1993, Heinrich 1995, Heinrich 2003, Backhaus 1997, Reichelt 2008, and Arthur 2002.

7.

I will come back to this point and clarify the constitution of money in the next chapter.

Chapter 3

Money

The capitalist schema is materialist and social, because it regulates how an individual can be related to things in a capitalist social system. As such, it establishes a horizon of meaningfulness that regulates our access to entities in our world. In addition, this schema establishes itself independent from the will of individuals and the will of groups, as the social synthesis is established prior to individuals and groups that are living within this synthesis. It should be clear by now that I do not argue on the basis of a historical, sociological, or positivist concept of capitalism. It is common in most literature about Marx and capitalism to define the latter as a system, within which the means of production are privately owned. For example, Ann Cudd, though I admire her otherwise illuminating arguments, in the context of a discussion about whether capitalism has helped or hindered feminist liberation, defines capitalism in the following way: “(1) private ownership of capital conditions; (2) free and open, decentralized market condition; (3) free wage labor condition, (4) nondiscrimination constraint” (Cudd/Holmstrom 2011, 21). Even if we assume that these four criteria make sense, in contradistinction to Cudd, I do not think that capitalism is something that we can “define,” as if it is something given, because the term “capitalism” refers to a totality that, as such, can only be reconstructed dialectically, which at this point means that we need to analyze capitalism as a system of categorical determinations.[1] These categorical determinations are determinations of economic objecthood and cannot simply be explicated empirically, as I argued it in the first chapters. This objecthood depends upon the abstract constitution of money as the universal regulator of all social relations, and, though we cannot determine money without labor, money and capital (as the higher money form) are the ultimate ground for Marx’s concept of abstract labor.

Accordingly, I reject so-called substantialist readings of Marx’s concept of value. Value cannot establish itself in capitalism “before” or independent from exchange and money, as money is the form under which labor is no longer concrete labor, but, instead, is abstract.[2] Abstract labor time, however, cannot be measured. Hence my understanding of these issues differs from substantialist readings, as well as reductions of critical social theory to economism.[3] For example, Kliman’s thesis in his otherwise impressive book Reclaiming Marx’s Capital that labor becomes value before exchange (Klimann 2007, 38), does not make any sense on philosophical grounds, as production, consumption, and circulation cannot be analyzed independently from each other. Wealth is something that characterizes a society as a whole, which cannot be reduced to production. The “economistic” understanding of categories turns basic social determinations into empirical phenomena, which should be rejected, as it presupposes and implies a social ontology, as I present it here.[4] As such, we should argue against such reductive positions, given that value is both a historically specific form of wealth and a form of social synthesis and mediation.[5] Even Marxists, such as Michael A. Lebowitz, fall into the same trap. In a recent interview, Lebowitz said the following about the “essence of capitalism”:

Marx grasped the nature of capitalism; and, although capitalism has changed in some of its forms, its essence remains the same. Capitalism is a system based upon the exploitation and deformation of wage laborers for the purpose of profits for those who own the means of production.[6]

Though it is correct to claim that we find in capitalism a conflict between laborers and capitalists, this claim does not lead to a philosophical understanding of the categorical framework that makes (as a whole) the division between laborers and capitalists possible. Value in the form of money, interest, state, etc. are the condition for the possibility of the antagonistic and objective positioning of laborers and capitalists. These conditions are not independent from social agents, but they can also not be reduced to anthropological units. Accordingly, I agree with Arthur’s point (against Lebowitz) that we should also not interpret social totality under capitalism as a two-sided totality that is constituted through labor and capital, insofar as the form of labor under capitalism is from the beginning on labor appropriated by capital as wage labor (for this point see Arthur 2006, 107).

Hence, my approach is philosophical in the sense that the investigation of the categorical framework that I offer is what makes the four definitions that Cudd lists possible. Capitalism is not, as in Cudd’s positivistic concept, something that has four properties; rather, it refers to a system under which every social entity that falls under it is determined by capital understood as that which Marx calls “processing money” (MEW26.3, 134; MEW23, 170) (which is not even mentioned in Cudd’s four points). Capital, put differently, is nothing that we can hold in our hands; rather, it is pure process, relation, fluidity.[7] This processing money can only be processing money because it realizes itself as the form of living labor which is the social substance. Put differently, capitalism is a “unique form of social mediation” (Postone 2013, 365). To be sure, this anti-positivistic position should not lead us to its counterpart, which is the speculative thesis that “totality” means the identity of everything with each other, which could ontologically only be achieved if production and consumption are indeed (speculatively conceived) identical. As Lukacs points out in his later ontology, the Marxian position is neither positivistic nor speculative:

Marx warns against making the irreducible, dialectical and contradictory unity of society, a unity that emerges as the end product of the interaction of innumerable heterogenous processes, into an intrinsically homogenous unity, and impeding adequate knowledge of this unity by inadmissable and simplifying homogenizations of this kind. We may add that whether this homogenization is speculative or positivist, it amounts to the same thing in this respect. (Lukacs 1984, 604; 1978, 60)

The difference between a philosophical and positivistic conception of capitalism is that the latter does not have a conception of what it attempts to understand, as a positivistic starting point misses the whole phenomenon that it tries to reconstruct, insofar as it presupposes that capitalism is “something” that is given independently of the reconstructing method, and that it can therefore be “observed” or analyzed independent from the conception already investigated. This, however, is one of Marx’s main critiques of bourgeois economic thought, as these theories start with something that they do not genetically reconstruct and thereby, they need to posit it as something external to its internal development. Consequently, they fail to understand that capitalism refers to a historic social form rather than something that exists like a thing.[8] Especially if we take into account that capital is a process rather than something “fixed,” we need to see that capitalism does not simply “exist out there,” but that its existence is in itself (a) becoming.

Furthermore, a dialectical conception of capitalism, as it tries to understand the form as a specific form, necessarily needs to take the network of categories as a system, which implies that the categories can be rationally reconstructed and form an organic whole, even if, as in Marx, this totality is itself a process. As we know, postmodern philosophers developed a distaste for concepts such as “totality,” but there is nothing mysterious about it if we understand that every reference to the social reality necessarily implies totality as the basic concept of any social ontology. Given that this concept of totality is dialectical, it is therefore also a critical concept, as it does not allow positing of an element as either given (positivism) or as the ground of everything else (foundationalism). Sadly, the critical aspect of the concept of totality is often overlooked, primarily by postmodern authors, such as Lyotard, especially since these thinkers do not understand that totality as a dialectical concept is contradictory.[9] The concept of totality is also not “totalitarian” or “totalizing,” inasmuch as the dialectical concept of totality contains its own negation, i.e., in this case capitalism already contains its negation. “Dialectical totality” means that every element of the social reality is mediated with the others, which Marx calls an “organic system”:

While in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system. (MEW42, 203; G, 278)

As Marx argues in the introduction to the Grundrisse, the reproduction of social reality through labor is only possible if production, consumption, and circulation hang internally together. Social reality, in other words, is not something in which the “spheres” of production, consumption, and circulation are separated from each other, as if they would form three instead of only one social reality. In this case we would need to assume that we switch realities, so to speak, when we leave our jobs (production), buy food (exchange), and go home to eat (consumption). If, however, we assume that all three constitute “society” as its frame, we already presuppose that they refer to one social reality and not many. As Marx puts it: “the productive relations of every society form a whole” (MEW4, 130). In empirical accounts of capitalist reality its moments are turned into elements that are arbitrarily related to one another.[10] As this complex totality can only be grasped through its internal categorical relations, it transcends simple empiricist accounts of capitalism and, accordingly, needs to be grasped as a schema that regulates really occurring actions and agents, though, as I argue, we do not need to infer that the transcendental schema is—like Heidegger’s enframing—asocial. Instead, we should acknowledge that it constitutes itself through agents without them knowing it. As Lukacs explains:

It is thus quite regular for the results of particular economic acts carried out by men themselves in their practice (and with a practical consciousness of these), to assume the form of appearance of a transcendent ‘destiny’ even for the actors themselves. This is what happens in the case of ‘reification’ already referred to, and it is particularly striking in the case of money. Marx ‘deduced’ the genesis of money, from the dialectic of value, in a rationally legitimate, or one might say, logically rigorous way. Money as it thus necessarily arises as the product of human activity, nevertheless intrudes into human society as something that is not understood, is inimical, and destroys all sacred ties, and it maintained this power, whose secret was not suspected, for thousands of years. (Lukacs 1984, 591)

Marx, therefore, calls his own analysis a “science,” insofar as science here refers to the attempt to “grasp and present [darstellen]” the “inner coherence of the system of capitalist production” (Arndt 2011, 139), or, as Marx has it in a letter to Engels, in a non-dialectical appropriation of the capitalist mode of production, “only the immediate phenomenal form of the relations […] is reflected […] and not their inner connection” (quoted in Bensaid 2009; 240). This systematic character of what we call “capitalism” and, accordingly, its schema, gets lost in economic, sociological, and positivist accounts of capitalism. Moreover, the categorical constitution of the totality itself is presupposed for any talk of “spheres,” “discourses,” or “systems.” As a consequence, the capitalist schema, as I develop it here, is presupposed for any reference to entities that we realize through our individuality or our “identities.” A conception of a capitalist schema, consequently, stands in sharp contrast to recent attempts to dissolve social philosophy into a philosophy of identities and cultural politics.[11] The conception developed here implies that the capitalist schema mediates all actions and power relations objectively (for this see Arndt 2011, 168).

In this chapter we will see how the commodity and money form additionally contains an abstraction that leads to the separation of what synthesizes society and constitutes itself as a schema by social individuals.[12] More specifically, in the following, we will see how this synthesis is established by the commodity and money form of things. As we saw in the last chapter, the introduction of a materialist account of “schema,” is not sufficiently addressed by Adorno, though I follow his lead and his attempt to move from an epistemological point of view to a social point of view. Adorno, as I argued, does not really follow the implications of his claims and, despite his faithfulness to Marx, he thus falls back onto the level of an uncritical classical value theory, which should be rejected from the standpoint of a materialist or critical theory of society.[13] As Patrick Murray nicely puts it,

[…] to conceive of labor and its products in a capitalist society as independent of money is to imagine that labor and wealth can exist without any specific social form. Herein lies the root of the problem with conventional value and price theories: their assumption that value and price are independent variables, respectively, presumes that human needs, wealth and labor can exist without determinate social form. (Murray 2005, 51)

Since Adorno avoids thinking about the social form (and the commodity) without thinking about the money form, he reduces money to a technical problem, and, as a consequence, he is unable to understand the capitalist schema as a schema that determines social life by really abstract social forms. Though, in the Backhaus transcript of one of his last seminars, he underlines that the categories are real determinations of social reality, he lacks the proper conceptual tools, such as the concept of money, for cashing this claim in. Adorno commits the same mistake as Ricardo and Smith who, according to Marx, split off and treat the value form independently from the commodity itself. In this way, they fetishize the commodity and do not understand its social genesis. Social reproduction, in other words, cannot be appropriately grasped if we reduce it to simple exchange, since this exchange has a capitalist form in our times: commodities are only commodities if they are constantly in exchange. This movement, however, is only possible if they take on the money form. Money establishes itself as the Identical and Universal in all exchange (and, as the capitalist mode of production determines social reality, ultimately, for all entities). The form of money makes up its myth: while we die it lives on!

With money on the other hand, its substance, its materiality, is itself its form, in which it represents wealth. If money appears as the general commodity in all places, so also does it in all times. It maintains itself as wealth at all times. Its specific durability. It is the treasure which neither rust nor moths eat up. All commodities are only transitory money; money is the permanent commodity. Money is the omnipresent commodity; the commodity is only local money. (MEW42, 159; G, 231)

This durability, omnipresence and permanence of money can only be infinitely established once capital literally moves money and turns it into a self-feeding circle. As Tony Smith puts it, “unlike previous modes of production, capitalism is not merely a system in which money is used. It is a monetary system […] [M]oney forms the center of the social universe” (Smith 2005, 174), which leads to a universal subordination of (potentially) everything to the money form,[14] which even includes goals, human wants, desires, etc. as that which is supposed to ideally “guide” capitalism (such as freedom, liberty, justice, or human flourishing), according to its past and current non-critical liberal social-political philosophers. Accordingly, we need to go one step beyond Adorno, which will be facilitated in the following way: [1] we will expand the notion of commodity and commodity exchange so that it includes the money form, [2] we will reconsider the topic of real abstraction, and as a consequence, [3] we will expand the social concept of a schema by including social time and temporality, which, when taken together, will lead to a more appropriate account of the capitalist schema. In so doing, we turn Kantian epistemology on its feet.

The Commodity Form and Money

In order to properly understand the role of money for the capitalist schema and its regulating nature for our references to the past, present, and future (chapter 4) as well as the abstractions that it involves (chapter 5), we first need to reconstruct the central role of money and how it is constituted as a universal that establishes itself as independent and as a negation of the exchange process. Only when money constitutes itself as something that is independent from both production and (destruction in) consumption is it possible that virtually everything takes on the money form. After reconstructing the crucial role of money as the center of the capitalist schema (3.1), I will proceed with explaining why the capitalist schema should not be thought of as a transcendental framework that is independent from social agents; rather, we need to explain how the capitalist schema establishes itself as a social schema only in social reality (3.2.), which leads to a reappropriation of the concept of “real abstraction.” Finally, I will make a transition to the next chapter by arguing that the capitalist schema is not only centered in objecthood (money), but also through specific temporal relations that money opens up (3.3).

One could argue that beginning with commodities, as, for example, Marx, Critical Theory, and Lukacs assume, is a non-starter because commodities exist in societies before capitalism, but this argument can be rejected from a conceptual angle, as it remains within a positivistic frame of analyzing social phenomena insofar as it remains on the level of “things” or beings, proceeding to compare different forms of society with the content found in these forms. Rather than doing this, we need to see that the difference between capitalism and pre-capitalist societies lies in their form, i.e., in social relations—the organic whole of society—which is established in capitalism as the commodity form. The important consequence of this is that all entities potentially take on the commodity form, and all social relations turn into commodity relations. Social relations, as Marx puts it, turn into relations between things. Accordingly, and more precisely put, there are no commodities in pre-capitalist societies, as the commodity form was not established as the main form and social synthesis of these societies as a whole. “Only on the basis of capital, of capitalist production,” as Marx underlines, “does the commodity in fact become the general elementary form of wealth” (MEW43, 308).

Similarly, one could argue that money is not decisive and that my argument in this book does not make sense, as we find money throughout the whole course of history and in virtually all societies that engage in the practice of exchange. This is undoubtedly the case, but in those societies money did not exist as the form through which all social relations are mediated (at least potentially), especially since in those societies labor and production was not yet determined by abstract labor as the form of labor that we encounter under capitalism. Abstract labor, however, is only possible in societies where labor has established itself under the universal exchangeability of labor, according to which all labors are mediated with each other, i.e., where value is constituted as the form under which all wealth appears. As Wallerstein points out, capitalism differs from previous social systems because not all elements of the social system had been commodified in pre-capitalist systems (Wallerstein 2011, 15), or as Marx has it:

The secret of the expression of value; namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labor because and in so far as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion. This however becomes possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labor, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities. (MEW23, 74, CI, 152)

This will become clearer in what follows, but it is important to underline this point right at the beginning of our discussion of money, as otherwise we remain tied to a positivist framework, which Marx already rejected as a central insight in his early writings. In this vein, in Poverty of Philosophy he attacks Proudhon for his reified concept of money. Instead of conceiving money as a moment of a society, he takes it to be an isolated moment that can be determined independent from its social function. Against the reifying, i.e., non-dialectical, concept of money, which is prevalent even today in economic theory, Marx claims that “money is not a thing, but a social relation [soziales Verhältnis]” (MEW4, 107), which means that money can only be defined in regard to the whole mode of social reproduction, i.e., as having a historically limited form. Capitalist money is therefore not the same as money used in Ancient times or in the Middle Ages.

Commodities do not exist as single things, since single things are simply things in use, i.e., use-things.[15] What we want to understand, however, is their “social form” (MEW23, 50; CI, 159, 164). A form cannot exist in one thing alone, as a form is that which makes something comparable with other things or entities: “This form of manifestation is exchange-value, and the commodity never has this form when looked at in isolation, but only when it is in a value-relation or an exchange relation with a second commodity of a different kind” (MEW23, 75; CI, 152). As commodities under capitalist relations of production, these commodities are necessarily and under all circumstances constituted by two major aspects: [1] they are related to all other commodities and [2] they never come alone even when we encounter them as single items or things in our everyday life. Next I briefly explicate the beginning of Marx’s Capital, since this is crucial for the point I shall attempt to make at this stage of my main argument.

We need to first abstract from the producer and consumer, as we do not start with individuals; rather, a social-categorical inquiry starts with society, that is, the form under which humans labor and the form under which capitalism and social synthesis is established. Individuals are always distributed within a specific mode of (re)production.[16] The social synthesis under capitalism is established by abstract relations constituted in universal exchange, according to which everything (in principle) is exchangeable with everything. This, as Marx argues, is only possible if the sociality takes on the value form, i.e., if labor as the substance of social reality takes on an abstract form, which is determined, on the one hand, as abstract labor, and, on the other hand, as universal exchangeability. As labor is taken to be the substance of social reality, legal and other social relations need to be taken as secondary over the commodity form. Marx promises right at the very beginning of Capital to investigate the nature of commodities (C), by which he means the contradiction between the singular natural thing that is in use for consumption and the exchange value that establishes the intrinsic relationality of commodities. As one commodity is worth x amount of another commodity, the exchange value is at first the other commodity (e.g., x amount of linen is worth x amount of iron). Consequently, exchange value is not a property of or in a commodity; rather, it is the other commodity as the relationship between commodities. As Marx puts it,

The internal opposition between use-value and value, hidden within the commodity, is therefore represented on the surface by an external opposition, i.e., by a relation between two commodities such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed to be expressed, counts directly only as a use-value, whereas the other commodity, in which that value is to be expressed, counts directly only as exchange-value. (MEW23, 75; CI, 153)

The opposition of the commodities is, however, only possible if the exchange value is itself made possible by a comparability, i.e., in this case the exchangeability of commodities, which is what Marx calls “value,” and which many commentators miss. The quality of the commodity (i.e., exchangeability) is presupposed for the quantity of the exchange. In the sentence “x amount of linen is worth x amount of iron” the “is worth” is prior to the amount itself. Consequently, value—especially in its social expression as money—is primarily a qualitative concept, which expresses the social homogeneity of all things.[17]

The commodity is the simplest form in which the product of labor presents itself (MEW19, 369). Accordingly, the category of labor (as abstract labor) “fixes” the problem of natural properties (use value determinations) and social properties (value), insofar as labor is both natural and social (and, accordingly, historically specific). Commodities, however, cannot be simply empirically observed as commodities directly, as that which makes them commodities is not contained in them; for commodities exist only in and as a relationship. If we take into account that the universal exchangeability is presupposed for a society that takes on the commodity form, then we must conclude that a single commodity presupposes the whole of all social relationships in a capitalist society (which will then lead us to the externalization of this whole in money). In non-capitalist societies this universal constitution is not in place, as sociality is established on different grounds. Let me repeat this point, especially since so many commentators of Marx’s ideas remain fetischistic when they speak of “commodities” instead of the commodity form: the intrinsic relation between exchange value and natural bearer already implies C-C; this is why we began in chapter 1 by considering the constitution of capitalist sociality (MEW23, 76). C-C is therefore not really a capitalist form of exchange, because, as Marx tries to show, C-C already implies C-M-C or (C-C)-M and (C-C-C-C-C….)-M. C-C is an abstraction from that which becomes more concrete in later chapters of his reconstruction of the social totality. Since, with Marx, I am interested in the social form of how entities exist and are therefore taken up and referred to by individuals, it is important to understand the main move here: arguing that it is incorrect to speak of “a” commodity helps us to establish the prior framework needed to refer to entities in capitalism. The social totality presupposed in a philosophical approach to these matters, in addition, helps us to see that ultimately all social relations are contained in the commodity form, since the commodity form is the form of labor insofar as it is the social substance of social reality and, hence, it not only mediates consumption and circulation, but also presupposes capital and wage labor. With the centrality of the commodity form for capitalist societies the immediate relation of producers to their products has been erased from its inception and turned into something abstract, since consumption of the use thing is only possible through value, i.e., in relation to the social whole.[18] More precisely put, we do not refer to “objects” when we talk about “commodities”; rather, we talk about what a (capitalist) social thing is (what is contained in it, etc.).

Let us go one step further. Exchange value, as Marx clarifies it in his Notes on Adolph Wagner, is the form of appearance of value (the same, the universal, is worth). Put differently, exchange, as I have already argued, presupposes the sameness of what we exchange (=quality), such that in their relationality C and C need to be the same (social substance), which cannot be a natural property of C. Their sameness and exchangeability is the result of the social process and not, as agents may believe about their daily interactions, a property of the thing itself. Commodity fetishism, accordingly, is objectively established through the commodity form and is not a “mental” or “conscious” relationship that individuals have towards things. With the establishment of value we first need to abstract from consumption (which is contained in the use thing), the consequence of which is that we are left with labor (production) as the substance of value. Following Marx, we do not claim, therefore, that labor is the “source” or “cause” of value, since value is the way in which the substance exists and unfolds itself. As we abstract initially from the use value aspect of the commodity, we can no longer assume that concrete labor is the substance of value, given that with the commodity form labor itself takes on a universal exchangeability, which is abstract labor. Only if the substance of value is abstract labor and only if labor constitutes itself as wage labor, is the social reality constituted by abstract relationships and the universal exchange of things through which all individuals are mediated (I will come back to this in section 3.2). As Marx puts it in the first chapter of Capital:

With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labor, the useful character of the kinds of labor embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labor. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labor, human labor in the abstract. (MEW23, 52, CI, 128)

As a consequence of what I have reconstructed so far, we should conclude that that which is social in a commodity is its value, which is its sociality. The goal of the first chapter of Capital should not be seen as a “proof,” i.e., as the proof that labor is the “source” of value; rather, the goal of Capital is to reconstruct dialectically, in the commodity form of the labor product, the specific social form of labor under capitalism, i.e. the specific determinations of social reality and social existence in capitalist sociality.[19] Put differently, the goal is to reconstruct the specific form of sociality under capitalism. Value, as Postone nicely puts it, “expresses the inner nexus of connections of the capitalist social formation” (Postone 1993, 134). Consequently, it only seems to be the case that abstract labor indicates the expenditure of human labor energy; for Marx himself refers to abstract labor as the common “social substance” in the commodity form. It is important to acknowledge that the exchangeability is not an ideal or even a mental construction in individuals’ minds, since to claim this would require us to hold a subjectivist value theory. However, exchangeability must be established in reality, namely, in our daily transactions:

Men do not therefore bring the products of their labor into relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material integuments of homogeneous human labor. The reverse is true: by equating their different products to each other, in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labor as human labor. They do this without being aware of it. (MEW23, 88; CI, 166)

I will come back to this point in the next section. Marx criticizes that bourgeois economists only analyzed the contents (value and magnitude of value) of the value form, but never posed the question of which form this content takes on. Questions about form imply, hence, an investigation of the object of economics, i.e., of social synthesis, which I am laying out as the capitalist schema. This point also often remains vague in discussions about capitalism and what constitutes capitalist societies, given that in a materialist theory of social reality the object of economics is the mode of reproduction of societies, i.e., the mode of labor/production through which societies reproduce themselves. Put in Marx’s words:

The general form of value, C, results from the joint action of the whole world of commodities, and from that alone. A commodity can acquire a universal value-expression [Wertausdruck] only by all other commodities, simultaneously with it, expressing their values in the same equivalent; and every new kind of commodity must follow suit. It thus becomes evident that since the thinglike character of value [Wertgegenständlichkeit] is merely the social reality [Dasein] of these things, as this social reality can be expressed by the totality of their social relationality alone, consequently the value form must be a socially valid form. (MEW23, 80; trans. altered)[20]

Put differently, [1] each C is related to all Cs; [2] the universal relationability must be expressed (in money); [3] the value form is the form of social relations. Sociality itself is therefore the object of economic theory. Value and its universal expression, processing money (capital), is the object of modern economics because value is the form of sociality in capitalist societies. As Marx has it,

As the dominant subject [übergreifendes Subjekt] of this process, which it alternately assumes and loses the form of money and form of commodities, but preserves and expands itself through these changes, value requires above all an independent form by means of which its identity with itself may be asserted. Only in the shape of money does it possess this form. (MEW23, 258; CI, 255; emphasis mine)

Only if the latter point is acknowledged can we avoid the mistake of reducing capitalism to a positivistic concept, or of reducing Marxist philosophy to economism, insofar as the latter reduces value to a quantitative concept without understanding it as a social concept. We have now reached a point from which we can see the role of money for the concept of a capitalist schema. As Arthur remarks,

Value has a purely social reality, and it emerges from commodity relations. Hence the universal aspect of commodities is secure only insofar as they posit it through their common relation to a universal equivalent, namely money. This money form does not represent the presupposed ‘value’ of commodities; rather, it presents it to them as their universal moment. (Arthur 2005, 114)[21]

Put differently, as value is a social relation and this social relation needs to exist in order to regulate real society, it needs a real presentation and real exchange, which is money. Accordingly, money solves the contradiction inherent in the (possible or virtual) exchangeability expressed in the general value form. Money realizes this exchangeability and makes it really exist outside of individual minds and even outside and external to all exchanges in society and therefore outside all social relations. In this way, the commodity is—seen from the social synthesis—only the content for the form, namely, money. Seen from the standpoint of capital, money is the content for the capital form. For example, the money form turns products into real existing equalized entities and establishes the social community as one that exists external to individuals within capitalism. As Marx puts it in Grundrisse:

The social character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the share of individuals in production here appear as something alien and objective, confronting the individuals, not as their relation to one another, but as their subordination to relations which subsist independently of them and which arise out of collisions between mutually indifferent individuals. The general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual—their mutual interconnection here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing. In exchange value, the social connection between persons is transformed into a social relation between things; personal capacity into objective wealth. (MEW42, 94; G, 157)

The social coherence and social membership, in other words, is experienced as something that no longer substantially belongs to the individual; rather, it is established through and only because the money form is in place as a universal social form. It brings together and binds people, their attitudes, their behaviors, and their preferences. Hence, money is the real existing social synthesis; it is its glue, or, as Marx likes to say, the bloodstream of society. In addition, it is, as Chris Arthur, in close connection with the Grundrisse, has it, money is the “transcendentally necessary act of synthesis” (Arthur 2005, 116), and it is not labor as such that establishes society, as, for example, Habermas claimed in his early writings, since labor can appear in many forms and is—abstractly viewed—universal. Societies can only reproduce themselves through labor and, indeed, there is not a single society throughout history that could have existed without labor. Accordingly, Habermas’ thesis that it is simply labor that synthesizes society is wrong, given that it is the form of labor that establishes the unity of the reproduction process.[22] The commodity becomes part of the capital process when the money form turns into the capital form. This occurs when money is used in circulation for the sake of making more money. Circulation, then, no longer appears as the circulation of commodities, since circulation is now determined by money as the universal commodity that must be circulated and exchanged. The exchangeability and the exchange value separates itself from the circulation process and appears to be the thing on a higher level, namely, capital, the consequence of which is that the exchangeability itself turns into a process of valorization.

Similarily, money is not “a” measure of value, insofar as it is the measurability of value (Arthur 2005, 117). From the standpoint of capital, money appears (suddenly) to be both the presupposition and the result of the process of circulation (MEGA II.2, 82). For example, nowadays most of us believe that “without money” one cannot survive, although it would be much more natural to claim that “without food” or “without love” one cannot survive. Here condition and result appear upside down. Although it is correct that in our society we need money in order to buy food, our desire to stay alive appears itself to be the result of the money form. Even on the level of production, production itself appears to be valueless if it is not conceived as a process of capital and valorization, which becomes increasingly more central the more the living labor process itself becomes capitalized. For example, the production in a company such as Volkswagen is so capital-intense (machines, robots, etc.) that virtually no new competition for Volkswagen could emerge from an entrepreneurial newcomer. Producing cars in today’s economy would need to be so capital intense that even the thought of opening up a car production company would need to take capital into account. The commodity is here no longer the presupposition of the money form, but, instead, the commodity appears as the result of the money and capital form.

It exists in the form of thinghood [Gegenständlichkeit], but it is indifferent to whether it is the objectivity of the money or the commodity. It stems from circulation; so presupposes it. But it stems, at the same time, from itself as premise with respect to circulation. (MEGA II.2, 84; trans. altered)

In circulation money equalizes everyone in society and as a member of society. Money, as Marx argues in the Urtext, makes all equal before money, though money is merely its own objectified social nexus” (MEGA II.2, 59). Whereas a simple exchange only presupposes the equality of exchange value, money as the actualization of equality itself can only exist because every commodity receives its status in relation to all others.

The consequence of the foregoing, then, is that the epistemic access to things under capitalism is regulated by two aspects, namely, the aspects of [1] equalization and [2] universal exchangeability. Before we are able to refer to entities in the capitalist world, entities need to be understood as something equalizable. To be sure, the argument is not that this has already universally happened; rather, the claim is that the possibility of this process has been established. The capital process at some point then expands into all-not-yet-capitalized areas of social reality. Accordingly, the dynamics and expansion of the capitalist system can be understood as the unfolding of this framework for the understanding of “entities as such” as commodities:

When we consider generally the social relation of individuals within their economic process, we simply have to keep to the form determinations of the process itself. But there is no other difference in circulation except that between commodity and money, and circulation is equally its ceaseless disappearance. Equality appears here as social product, just as generally exchange value is social being. (MEGA II.2, 59)

Having established the universal framework under which everything is a commodity, I will now move one step further and argue that in addition to the possible dynamics of the capitalist schema, this schema also depends upon the establishment of a real process, i.e., of a geographical, economical, and historical process. The reality of equalization depends upon money, and, as I will argue in the next section, money is the “thing” through which all other entities receive their real form. Money, in other words, is the thinghood of objects that are accessible under capitalism and is the “quasi transcendental force” (MEW42, 81; translation altered) that schematizes what we encounter as accessible in our age.

One could argue against this position by claiming that the range of the commodity form is restricted and limited through forms of exchange that are not based on commodities. For example, within families the major exchange principle is love and not the commodity form. In this vein, Karatani argues that the commodity relation cannot account for family relations that appear to be “noncommercial” or “pre-commercial” relations (Karatani 2003, 204), and that capitalism still depends upon community and family relationships. This claim, though, should be rejected, as Karatani falls back onto positivistic grounds, insofar as he believes that value is somehow limited through something that is not value. However, as I have argued so far, value is not “something”; rather, it is the sociality under capitalism, and, hence potentially the form under which everything, even love and family, are subsumed. Simply put, love and family in capitalism cannot exist without the universality of the money form and therefore they differ from love in non-capitalist societies. Karatani overlooks that even the family in capitalism takes on the potential form of commodity and money, particularly, families can only reproduce their existence through participating in the money form. For example, the classical roles within the standard family certainly depend upon the wage earner (usually the male), unpaid reproductive work (usually the female), and the inaccessibility of the public for the female. In addition, the question of having children and therefore the future of the family depends upon the ability to pay for them. Adopting children costs money and in vitro fertilizations are very expensive. So, though it might be the case that most inner-family exchanges are not directly based on money, the family as a whole is in capitalism unthinkable as having not taken on the money form, a specific legal relationship (which, in turn, is related to private property, which is class related, etc.). Through allowances, toys, clothes, vacations, etc. all relations are destined to be formed by commodity relations. And poor families are as dependent on this as rich families, even if they are determined by the commodity form through the absence of the aforementioned commodified elements.

Similarily, David Graeber argues for the thesis that all societies are based upon what he calls their “communist base,” by which he means ethical relations, such as kindness, sharing, joy, etc. Graeber makes the same mistake as Karatani, however, inasmuch as he not only overlooks that capital has no intrinsic limit, but also falls back onto a position that dismisses social form altogether. In this vein, we should argue against Graeber’s claim that his position is based on similar abstractions that, as such, never existed, since in order to exist ethical relations need to exist in a specific form. A universal base of society can as such never exist, given that there are no existing societies “as such.” For example, what “sharing” is depends upon its social form and how it is mediated within the totality of social relations. Sharing food in capitalism differs from sharing food in the Middle Ages, for instance, insofar as the social determinations of food differ. Graeber’s abstract view becomes especially prominent when he claims that even capitalism is based upon communism. “But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually existing communism” (Graeber 2011, 95). This claim is truly astonishing, as it becomes even clearer that Graeber returns to some sort of pre-Marxian conceptions of communism and socialism, as well as to anarchist conceptions (Graeber 2011, 404). “[M]ost capitalist firms, internally, operate communistically” (Graeber 2011, 96).

As an example for this claim about the intrinsic communism of capitalist firms Graeber discusses Apple. According to Graeber, Apple was, at its inception, based on “little democratic circles of twenty to fourty people with their laptops in each other’s garages” (Graeber 2011, 96). The fact, however, (1) that the laptops that these early “Apple communists” had in their garages on their laps were produced in cheap labor countries by a newly emerged proletarian class for less than 90 cents an hour, (2) that these communists depended upon class divisions and the division between manual and intellectual labor that made their communism possible, or (3) that it implies a specific system of transportation and legal protections, not to mention a distribution of labor, does not seem to be important to Graeber. We can see at this point very clearly why this type of essentialism leads to absurdities. If communism were the truly universal element in all societies, then it can be applied to everything. Whenever we assume an ahistorical (and in some sense a-social) base of social relations we are no longer able to see the conditions under which such an abstraction from social reality is possible. Accordingly, Graeber’s position is ultimately ideological, as it is simply the expression of a universalism that overlooks the perspective from which it reflects upon its basic concepts.

Real Abstraction and Money

In order to expand the notion of social schema, we need to take three aspects into account: the universal framework of money as a social framework and therefore as an abstract framework cannot be conceived as a mere ontological concept (such as “enframing” in Heidegger). Instead, it needs to be established in social reality itself, which leads to a an immanentist conception of social reality, insofar as the agents in this reality need to produce and reproduce the framework, though, as we will claim with Marx and Zizek, this occurs without the intention and control of the agents. and behind their backs, so to speak. As Marx says in the Grundrisse in regard to the constitution of social reality through money and circulation:

the whole of this movement appears as a social process, and as much as the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them. Circulation, because a totality of the social process, is also the first form in which the social relation appears as something independent of the individuals, but not only as, say, in a coin or in exchange value, but extending to the whole of the social movement itself. (MEW42, 127; G, 197)

The abstraction, accordingly, needs to be conceived as a real abstraction that occurs in reality itself and not as something that is established in something external to the framework itself. As labor is not simply the cause of social reality, but its substance, so is the really occurring abstraction establishing the abstract framework within itself. As Lukacs puts it in his Ontology:

The revolutionary quality of Marx’s analysis of value is immediately visible in his treatment of abstraction. The transformation if labor in the context of an ever more intensified development of the relation between use value and exchange value causes the transformation of concrete labor on a specific object into abstract value creating labor. […] If one analyzes this process without idealistic metaphysical bias, one needs to acknowledge that this process of abstraction is a real process within social reality. (Lukacs 1984, 589; my transl.)

If labor and production would be conceived as that which brings about social reality as its cause, then labor would be separated from the reality that it establishes, which would lead to an essentialist conception of social reality. If, however, we take into account that production is immediately reproduction and that labor is a relation instead of an activity alone, then we see that the relational character of labor is both social reality itself and the bringing about of this social reality. Productivity is at the same time reproduction and, hence, already contains former productivity. As we know, though, under the capitalist mode of (re)production it is not simply labor that we need to understand; rather, it is abstract labor and abstract labor time that constitutes the substance of the whole framework. Accordingly, the abstraction is immanent to the capitalist schema and, as I will argue, it is constituted with the establishment of money as the universal social horizon now regulating the totality itself. Consequently, what we need to reconstruct is the complex field of the following concepts [1] a concept of abstraction, as occurring in society and as a social relation, [2] a concept of time connected to the constitution of money as social thinghood, and [3] its relation to abstract labor time, which is occurring in the commodity/value form. Before I proceed with the relation between money and time, I will first proceed with the reflections started in the last section and focus on money itself.

As we already briefly pointed out in section 1.2., already as early as 1844 in his considerations on money in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx says the following:

By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object [der Gegenstand] in the eminent sense. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is therefore regarded as an omnipotent being. Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. (MEW40, 563; trans. altered)

Three aspects are important in this quote: [1] Marx defines money here as the object, [2] it becomes a universal force, and [3] it becomes the universal mediator of social life. How is this related to the question of how epistemological concepts turn into social concepts? With the explicit phrase “the thing [i.e., objecthood, C.L.] in the eminent sense” Marx refers to the Kantian (and Hegelian) background that I introduced in the first two chapters. To repeat the main point briefly, for Kant the conditions for the possibility of representing reality are given through a rational structure that determines every experience and makes it possible for us to have a representation at all. The most abstract structure is that of an object as such. Before we can have any experience at all, our reason projects in advance, so to speak, a “super-concept” of reality, which is the concept of object or objecthood. The categories that Kant determines as the pure part of reason, as I pointed out in the introduction, constitute this objecthood and thereby enable humans to refer to something in the world and to encounter specific objects, such as this table or that house. It is clear that objecthood must be universal in nature and, as such, it is not identical with empirically encountered things in our world; rather, it is what makes any representation of empirical objects possible. If we now go back to Marx, we not only see the roots of his concept of categories, but we also see that Marx thinks about money in a very similar fashion. We can see that Marx thinks of money as something that is, so to speak, the social replacement of the epistemologically defined object, i.e., of objecthood.

In contrast to neoclassical approaches to money, Marx, as we know, argues that money is the necessary result of the exchange process, since otherwise the internal contradictions of the simple value form are unable to be resolved. In brief, money is the result of the universalization of the value form through which products establish their exchangeability. This value form becomes total when all products can be exchanged with all other products. As Marx puts it in Capital, money diminishes all differences as the “radical leveler” (MEW23, 146; CI, 229). As I argued in the last section, value cannot be a property of a single commodity; instead, value has a “purely social reality” (Arthur 2005, 114), it is nothing “intrinsic or absolute” (MEW43, 95), and all products must express their value in the same equivalent, which is itself the social relation of all with all. This sameness is nothing imagined and subjective; rather, it is posited in and as money. Accordingly, money (at first) is nothing else than this sameness and universality of equivalency. Without money the value of commodities could not be related with one another in their totality. Only this fact turns the commodity form and all individuals subjected to it into something that constitutes capitalist sociality as such. This general value form begins really existing as the money form through individuals exchanging their products (to which potentially all entities belong) in real exchange acts. Unconsciously and unknowingly, these individuals reproduce the social relation with each exchange act and they establish this as a real abstraction. Given that money not only functions as a means of making the exchange easier with every exchange act, all individuals establish a relationship with the totality itself and they unknowingly reproduce this totality though each act (see MEW13, 18).

What remains hidden to these agents is the new relationship between the social totality and themselves, which, through the exchange act, turns into an external relationship. Money, in other words, establishes itself as the synthesis and the thing-itself in all of these exchanges, in as much as it remains untouched from the exchange process itself. Moreover, once it takes on the capital form, something paradoxical happens, namely, the faster money goes around, the more independent money itself becomes. We can see here the analogy to the Kantian epistemological problem: as the fleeting reality and the changing sensibility does not allow our reason to establish a stable relationship with the reality/nature, the categorically fixed relation through representation establishes a fixed relation to nature and the thing-itself as independent from the fleeting reality. The “thing” here means thinghood, i.e., what a thing is as a thing. The categorically determined relationship, in other words, makes up thinghood.

Marx transfers this structure of the Kantian First Critique into a materialist framework within which money is determined as thinghood, since it determines the frame under which individuals can establish and refer to entities. As money remains the only independently existing thing in all of these exchanges, it establishes itself as the “transcendental force” (MEW42, 81; G, 146; translation altered) behind everything, even if Marx no longer conceives this as a universal structure of reason, but instead, as a historically determined social form. The money form is here the general schema that controls and frames all relationships and all object references in a social totality. In the Grundrisse, Marx more visibly turns the materialistic turn of the epistemological question into a social framework, writing:

Money thereby directly and simultaneously becomes the real community [Gemeinwesen], since it is the general substance of survival for all, and at the same time the social product of all. But as we have seen, in money the community [Gemeinwesen] is at the same time a mere abstraction, a mere external, accidental thing for the individual, and at the same time merely a means for his satisfaction as an isolated individual. […] In money (exchange value), however, the individual is not objectified in his natural quality, but in a social quality (relation) which is, at the same time, external to him. (MEW42, 152; G, 225/226)[23]

We can see here that the next step in Marx’ considerations about money is to re-inscribe money as the Kantian independent thing and universal objecthood into a materialist framework, by showing that money is itself nothing else than a specific form of social relationship, namely, the form under which individuals are socialized and synthesized as social individuals through something [1] external and [2] thinglike, which transforms these relationships into something [3] abstract. As money is the universal and really existing thing that establishes the social totality, it establishes all social relations as well as the relation that individuals have to this totality as an external relation. This Marxian idea is the material translation of the Kantian concept of thinghood, which also establishes itself as independent from the fleeting reality. Already in The German Ideology, Marx writes:

In big industry and competition the whole mass of conditions of existence, limitations, biases of individuals, are fused together into the two simplest forms: private property and labor. With money every form of intercourse, and intercourse itself, is considered fortuitous for the individuals. Thus money implies that all previous intercourse was only intercourse of individuals under particular conditions, not of individuals as individuals. (MEW3, 66)

What Marx has in mind here by “fortuitous” is the following: with money the relations, transactions, relationships, contacts, etc. are turning into something separated from those individuals, which, in turn, determines the form under which individuality appears under capitalist conditions, namely, as the result of the money form. Money, in other words, remains untouched by the concrete relations and therefore makes up the universal frame through which these relations are formed. The way in which we are individuals under capitalism, in other words, is the result of the money form; for, on the one hand, we separate ourselves from ourselves in the most extreme way, and, on the other hand, this abstract relation is itself the universal relation. Social relations, hence, are accidental to us. As a consequence, individuals now, as Marx puts it as early as in The German Ideology, “become abstract individuals, but who are, however, only by this fact put into a position to enter into relation with one another as individuals” (MEW3, 67). As soon as money begins to establish itself as the externally existing placeholder for every entity, money can no longer be conceived as a means for exchange, given that it is the really existing social form of labor and production. Accordingly, money is here no longer a “fixed” entity; instead, we can here see that money is not a thing (paper, symbols, etc.). Indeed, money is a social form that regulates how individuals can be related to each in the first place. As Elbe remarks, money is neither a natural property of things nor a conventional result for making barter exchange easier; rather, money is “expression of a specific form of sociality [Vergesellschaftung] that is mediated by things and outside of the controls of agents” (Elbe 2010a, 137; my trans.; also see Harvey 2010, 65). In the first version of Capital, the so-called “Urtext,” Marx puts it this way:

The individuals confront each other only as proprietors of exchange values, as individuals who have given themselves reified existence [Dasein] for each other through their product, the commodity. Seen from the standpoint of the social exchange under way in circulation, without this objective mediation, they have no relation to each other. They exist for each other only in reified form [sachlich], something that is further developed in the money relation, through which their community itself appears as an external and hence as an accidental thing for all. (MEGA II.2, 53)

On the one hand, the social synthesis, the association of individuals, and the community is established as something that appears as an independent and external thing and therefore as a universal (i.e., thinghood). As abstract universal, however, it appears as accidental to the individuals. Consequently, although the universal relation remains external to the individuals, it nevertheless constitutes their social coherence and their sociality. This sociality, hence, is itself abstract. As a universal (the first level of which is exchange value), however, it can only exist in a really existing form, which is the money form. Marx proceeds:

That the social synthesis [der gesellschaftliche Zusammenhang] resulting from the collision of independent individuals appears with respect to them simultaneously both as objective necessity and as external bond in effect expresses their independence from each other. Their social existence [Dasein], though a necessity, is no more than a means, and therefore appears to the individuals as something external, and in money, even as a tangible thing. (MEGA II.2, 53)

Money, consequently, changes the whole character and form of how individuals are related to each other under capitalism, as, on the one hand, the dependency increases, and, on the other hand, this dependency appears as something accidental to the individuals. Marx’s dialectical theory of money as a social form, in other words, allows us to conceptually grasp the nature of modern atomism and invidualization.

Though much more could be said about Marx’s materialist transformation of epistemological categories, in what follows I will restrain myself to pointing out a few consequences of the foregoing, as it relates to reading the concept of money through the lens of a social theory. The first consequence concerns the dynamics of space and time, and the second consequence concerns the transformation of money into power. It is clear, then, that this list is by no means exhausted here. The exchange of commodities was always connected to a specific context of space and time; with the establishment of money as the universally existing form of value, however, the relation to space and time becomes itself abstract and independent from local conditions, insofar as the money form can principally take on every content.

Money as world money can function everywhere, i.e., entities in their exchangeability no longer depend on local conditions, norms, individuals, etc.

Money as world money makes every entity, at least potentially, buyable, and therefore exchangeable. Everything can be exchanged with everything. Accordingly, it no longer matters who exchanges what, or when and where exchanges are occurring; and, in addition, the speedier the transactions can be completed, the more dynamic and expanding capitalism becomes.

As a consequence, space and time are themselves becoming abstract and unified. This process that Marx foresaw long ago we can observe today in its consequences: for example, Arabic oil leaders who are still determined by local norms, traditions, etc., buy shares and stocks in Western companies with totally different normative frameworks and local conditions. Russian billionaires buy soccer clubs in Great Britain. Chinese students take online courses at Michigan State University. Accordingly, the more advanced our production process becomes, the more socially dependent we become on money and the more social relationships become part of the production process.

Consequently, abstraction does not mean that social relations disappear, but it does mean that social dependencies increase, insofar as everyone becomes dependent upon everyone else, however, at the same time, they paradoxically decrease, as everyone’s relation with all others appears accidental and constitutes itself as external to them. Money is precisely the expression of the resulting contradiction between dependency and independency. For instance, a strike in a German car company can push thousands of workers into unemployment all over the world, and the failure of big banks can bring the whole system down. The sole reason for why we encounter each other on our streets, in classrooms, and in the workspace is the money form itself. In addition, the externalization of exchange value in money leads to the consequence that products are released from their local, natural or other limits.

Again, we can see now the consequences of Marx’s claim: for example, a simple electronic tool nowadays contains parts, bits, and knowledge from all over the world and it travels throughout the globe before it reaches its consumer. Product and exchange become independent from each other and thereby, everything becomes more dependent upon money and its logic. Again, what we mean when we claim that every product is dependent on the world market is nothing else than observing the total externalization of money to all commodities. The opening up of all national and local markets to the global market has also opened up the total externalization of money itself (which in its capital form itself becomes a process), and, hence, total (global) social externalization. What formally depended upon norms, such as religion, loyalty, mythology, power, families, dependencies, etc., turns, now, into money relations and therefore establishes a new form of dependency: abstract dependencies. Paradoxically put, the more indifferent individuals become towards each other through money transactions, the more dependent they become on each other. Put in Adornian terms, the integration of individuals is about to become total with the establishment of the global community as the global money community.

As soon as the “social synthesis” [Zusammenhang] (MEW42, 89; trans. altered) is constituted by money, money becomes the general social power that individuals have over each other and therefore money has power over them, the thesis of which differentiates Marx from neoclassical approaches to money (see, e.g., Harvey 2006, 241). On the one hand, “[t]he individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket” (MEW42, 90; G, 157); but on the other hand, the more labor division and technologically advanced production we have, the more the power of money increases, given thats the whole production process itself becomes more dependent on money as the externalization of exchange value itself. Accordingly, the individual social power is in truth the power of money over the individuals and their “properties.” As Marx already saw in his early philosophy, all personal features, such as skills, knowledge, excellence, character, morality, and other personal features are turned into one abstract feature, namely, monetary wealth, which as such remains external to those individuals and therefore “individuals are now dominated by abstractions” (MEW42, 97; G, 164; translation altered). Unfortunately, to make matters worse, this abstraction is ultimately only one abstraction, namely, the abstraction established as a real abstraction in exchange through the money form. Accordingly, the exchange process itself becomes abstract and, since we are talking here about social relations, the social relations themselves become abstract, too.

As Marx puts it, the “social connection between persons is transformed into thinglike social relations” (MEW42, 94; G, 157; translation altered). The more social relations take on and the more they are produced by the money form, the more sociality is itself only a form of money. Nowadays, everyone on our globe is virtually connected to everyone else on this planet: in order to produce a laptop, we take the know-how from California, we exploit workers in China, we exploit natural resources in Africa, and we use oil from Arabic countries. All these social relationships and the sociality contained in these are, as such, money relations (or, one step higher, capital relations). Money, in other words, is the form through which society establishes and reproduces itself on a daily basis. Let me just briefly mention two additional consequences of the foregoing: it is not only the case that the commodity and money form are presupposed for the legal form, such that the material relations are the content for the legal form, but also that the legal form itself increasingly turns into and is taken over by the money form. As Marx points out in Capital, money as a form of payment “becomes the universal material of contracts. Rent, taxes and so on are transformed from payments in kind to payments in money” (MEW23, 153; CI, 238). In addition, money establishes itself as the universal “moral currency”: for example, the legal process turns into “deals” between legal parties, and major legal aspects turn into the money form: from bailouts to punishments to legal fees, everything depends upon money and the social relations introduced by money.

We can take up the example that was used before: once we can determine the Atlantic Ocean in monetary terms (and ultimately through capital), the use value of the ocean totally changes its character, as now the ocean is no longer simply used for swimming, but becomes something to which I need to travel (for which I need money), if I want to enjoy it (for which I also need money, once the ocean shore becomes privatized), and which might be dirty (because I already conceive it as an industrialized part of food production). Accordingly, the meaningfulness of the ocean as an object for my enjoyment, though I might not be aware of it, is already structured through the commodity and money form. To repeat this point, it is of course true that not all ocean fronts are privatized, but potentially (as capitalism is a dynamic system that constantly changes and expands) this could happen. People nowadays buy soccer clubs, art works, and Greek Islands. So, it would not be impossible to sell the coast line of Florida to a private investor, and if we would open the coast of Florida up entirely as private property, the only universal determination of the ocean front as an object of enjoyment in fact would be enjoyment in, through, and as money (since it would no longer be the case that an individual could enjoy the waterfront). In this case, the meaningfulness of the ocean water front would be turned into one of money and what I would enjoy is not simply the water itself, given that I would also be enjoying at least indirectly the social power of money, the access conditions (classes, income divisions, social status, etc.), as well as the potential selling of this enjoyment. In short, the universality of the water appearance (as an object of perception) through the commodification has turned into a social object that is schematized, thinkable, and available to me through the money form. I will come back to these aspects of abstract culture in chapter 5.

The topic of “real abstraction” is closely connected to the problem of commodity fetishism and reification. Accordingly, we should briefly reconstruct this connection. As Marx underlines, despite the fact that this is often overlooked, the categorical forms of bourgeois economy are “objective forms of thought”:

The categories of bourgeois economy consist precisely of forms of this kind. They are objective forms of thought that are socially valid, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of production, i.e., commodity production. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds ghostlike [umnebelt] the products of labor on the basis of commodity production, vanishes, therefore, as soon as we come to other forms of production. (MEW23, 90; CI, 169; translation altered)

What could be read as a simple relation between social reality and ideology is thus more complex when we take into account that Marx is referring to objective forms of thought. For what he has in mind here, as Helmut Reichelt reminds us (Reichelt 2002, 145), is not an intersubjectively established form of thinking as the result of the commodity form; rather, the forms of thought themselves exist objectively in the commodity form, i.e., on this level of Marx’s argument, which is the level of exchange and money. There are three aspects that are important here: [1] the categories emerge from an act of abstraction in exchange,[24] [2] this act is universal, and [3] the abstraction itself is objective, i.e., real. As a consequence, the fetishism itself is objective, since in capitalism, value (as a pure and universal abstraction) appears as a natural property of things, which leads to a “conversion” of all social relations. For this, see the following:

In capital—profit, or still better capital—interest, land—rent, labor—wages, in this economic trinity represented as the connection between the component parts of value and wealth in general and its sources, we have the complete mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the conversion of social relations into things, the direct coalescence of the material production relations with their historical and social determination. It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things. (MEW25, 838)[25]

This “topsy-turvy world”[26] can be best described by noting the following eight aspects: [1] reification points to the fact that in exchange societies that are ruled by private production, all social relationships are mediated through what is exchanged, i.e., through commodities, which leads to thing-mediated relations (Elbe 2010, 231); [2] social power relations and dependencies become more objective, insofar as they turn into an object-like character [Versachlichung]”;[27] [3] social relations become separated from traditional personal norms, values, codes, etc.; [4] decisions will be subordinated to the logic of capital, and political power becomes subjected to instrumental rationality; [5] individuals in a capitalist system start to relate to each other in an atomistic fashion, as the commodity form destroys the social character, i.e., the relational character of entities; [6] the nature-like appearance of entities with commodity form as necessary, unchangeable and independent forces in the life of individuals hides the interests of the capitalists, since they are interested in keeping the “semblance” of the commodity alive (MEW25, 839); [7] as Marx had already realized in 1845, social relations become formalized and appear upside down. For example, though we believe that we are free as workers (which is formally correct), in truth, we are really much more dependent on each other, since our labor power is turned into a commodity; and [8] nature becomes a limitless object of exploitation.

At this juncture, I would like to mention a last point: As a consequence of Marx’s analysis, nature turns into something that is no longer something external and can now be expanded limitlessly, as the production process is now no longer limited from the outside and reproduces itself in accordance with internal laws, i.e., the laws of capital.[28] To repeat the point (as it is so often overlooked in the interpretation of the fetishism chapter): Marx’s claim is that the “turned around world” has to do with how value is constituted through capital; namely, not through beliefs and attitudes: “indifference toward the specific content of labor is not only an abstraction made by us; it is also made by capital, and it belongs to its essential character” (MEW 43, 51; McNally 2012, 123). In order to establish the abstractions of the economic process as a real process, we need to assume that the universalization through universal exchangeability also occurs in social reality, and, indeed, that the “mediation” (MEW 42, 77) or “social deed” (MEW 23, 101) establishes this universally existing abstraction through exchange itself. Through the introduction of money, every entity becomes really abstract, “i.e., the exchange value receives a material existence independent from the commodity” (MEW 42, 80). Put differently, the universal exchangeability (through exchange value) of entities now becomes socially real. As Lukacs nicely puts it in relation to a nineteenth century example:

Socially necessary (and therefore ipso facto abstract) labor is also a reality, an aspect of the ontology of social being, an achieved real abstraction in real objects, quite independent of whether this is achieved by consciousness or not. In the nineteenth century, millions of independent artisans experienced the effects of this abstraction of socially necessary labor as their own ruin, i.e., they experienced in practice the concrete consequences, without having any suspicion that what they were facing was an achieved abstraction of the social process; this abstraction has the same ontological rigor of facticity as a car that runs you over. (Lukacs 1984, 590)

Adorno interprets in his article Society that which Marx called “social deed” (MEW23, 101) as the “basic fact of society.” This “basic fact” is the exchange, the realization of which leads to an “objective abstraction” (Adorno, GS8, 13) and constitutes the totality of society as a principle, insofar as it establishes the social coherence, the social synthesis, and the form of social relations. Social antagonisms, accordingly, are reproduced through this principle, which, as such, becomes invisible in capitalist societies. The real abstraction leads coherently to the phenomena that Adorno analyzes in his essays, which include concepts such as universalization, emptiness, reification, lawfulness, etc., all of which are phenomena that emerge out of the logic of capital and its roots in commodity exchange. Instrumental thinking, for example, is the (turned around) subjective expression of the principle of credit introduced by the commodity and money form. “Exchange principle and coldness” are thus one and the same phenomenon (Adorno 2003a, 35) and lead to the following main principle: “The exchange principle of exchange value synthesizes all particular social hierarchy with the domination of the universal over the particular, i.e., the society over its forced members” (Adorno 1993, 61). As a consequence, the singularity and exceptionality of experiences, things and issues become invisible and destroyed through the abstract universal that subsumes all individuals through the functioning of economic categories (Adorno 2003b, 72). This comes close to what Marx says about money in the Grundrisse. Money, for Marx, is not a mere symbol; rather, it is semblance and reality at the same time: “Money is originally the representation of value; in social praxis, however, everything is turned around, and all actual products […] become the representation of money” (MEW 42, 122).

To sum up, money does not symbolize or express something abstract, as if it would be a sign of something other than itself. In contrast to this, his thesis is that money is the universal relationship of the society. Without it, in other words, society in its present form would no longer exist. Money thereby regulates and frames all references possible to entities that fall under this form. As such, it materially functions like Kant’s schematism functions for mental references. As a money possessor, an individual can relate to herself as an abstract person and not to herself as a concrete individual (MEGA II.2, 53, 38). Personhood originally is a legal term, understood as that which is universal in an individual, as the subject of possession (Locke, Hegel). Personhood, however, is not possible without the universal force of money as the thinghood of capitalist social relations, insofar as the universality of legal relations goes along with the universality of social relations, which are constituted by money. Finally, with money in capitalism we can take ourselves as universal human beings that can potentially go everywhere and be everywhere because exchange relations are now universalized and global.

Time and Money

So far, we have developed the following three aspects: [1] money as the existence of exchangeability is the universal mediator of social reality in capitalism (thinghood); [2] it establishes itself as a real abstraction behind the back of and through agents; and [3] it determines what exists in capitalist societies. Nothing can exist socially in capitalism that is not potentially set up by money, even phenomena that we usually like to exclude and therefore like to abstract from the social-material process, such as love, friendship or reflection. In the following I will first establish a connection between money and time in general (section 3.3), after which I shall investigate the temporality of money in more detail (chapter 4). Though I will introduce the issue of temporality with Heidegger’s interpretation of the Kantian schematism, at this point, however, I will only attempt to determine how the establishment of money as the real existing universal in capitalism is necessarily tied to time, especially when everything becomes subsumed by capital as processing money:

With capital the consumption of the commodity is itself not final; it falls within the production process; it itself appears as a moment of production, i.e., of value-positing [Wertsetzen). Capital is now posited, however, as not merely sustaining itself formally, but as realizing itself as value, as value relating to itself as value in every one of the moments of its metamorphosis, in which it appears at one time as money, at another time as commodity, then again as exchange value, then again as use value. (MEW42, 442; G, 536)

What Marx describes here, is the conversion from money to capital, or, put differently, the switch from money as social thinghood to money as the processing of social thinghood. The difference between money in exchange and money as a value process is that the consumption of the product is the final goal for exchange. Put differently, my needs are the final goal of these transactions: for example, I go to the bakery in order to buy bread and eat it, but I do not go to the bakery in order to have more money. Given the capital form, however, this changes, as now the infinite goal of the whole process is money itself—more money.[29] With the introduction of capital, the independent status of money as the “thing-in-itself” changes, given that money itself turns into a process and is therefore, as Marx says, posited through capital as semblance (MEW42, 442). What he means is that money and its circulation is no longer really independent; rather, it is itself just the form in which capital appears. Put differently, the “real thing” is now capital, which is to say, the process of money itself, which is essentially the self-valorization of value.

At this point it is immediately clear that we are not dealing with “things.” Once established, capital posits all moments of the social reproduction process as its moments and time becomes central for the whole process, inasmuch as the essence of process is time: “The substance of money as capital,” we can say with Lazzarato “is time” (Lazzarato 2012, 85).[30] Time is money and money is time! More importantly, seen from the standpoint of capital circulation, time is the measurement of life (MEW43, 48), as living labor is now constituted under capital, i.e., is posited as one of its moments. The connection between money and time allows us to further see how money does not simply schematize social reality, since it not only functions as that which determines what can be something in capitalism, but it also establishes everything in relation to processing money and value. Put differently, the social schematism discloses all social relations as relations of past, present, and future. As a consequence of moving money, i.e., capital, the economy becomes an “[e]conomy of time, to this all economy ultimately dissolves itself” (MEW42, 105; trans. altered). This connection between time and the capitalist schema, in turn, allows us to introduce economic categories, such as debt and credit, in relation to time and as a framework for subjects and their constitution. If the capitalist schema not only establishes itself behind the back of agents, but also through these agents, then it is easy to see that acts, such as expectations, perceptions, memories, etc., are framed by the social schema and regulate the constitution of subjects in their own relations to their future, past, and present, i.e., to their dreams, imaginations, and desires, insofar as the establishment of real abstractions is not simply the exchange act, given that the whole human apparatus is involved (chapter 4). Moreover, if we take into account that we are in the process of turning all human abilities into technologies, which are themselves the result of the valorization process (chapter 5), then we can see how the system reaches its own closure in production.

As Carol C. Gould points out, “for Marx, labor is the origin of time—both of human time-consciousness and of the objective measure of time” (Gould 1978, 41). Though Gould’s point is well taken, as I will argue in what follows, we need to go further by taking into account how the subsumption of living labor under capital (processing money) is the real ground for the centrality of time for social reproduction and, hence, for the schematization of reality. This is especially important for the relation between time and space, since the human living body with the capitalization of living labor is constituted through the money process and, accordingly, time “usurps” space at the level of the living body. As Marx underlines, capital circulation depends upon time and space (MEW42, 440), which is to say that processing money constitutes all basic spatial configurations through time and its temporal horizons.

As we know, under capitalism labor is abstract, since it exists through exchange and the money form. Accordingly, both objective clock time and subjective temporality are constituted through the money form:

time is in fact the active existence of the human being. It is not only the measure of human life. It is the space for its development. And the encroachment of capital over the time of labor is the appropriation of the life, the mental and physical life, of the worker.[31]

What Marx has in mind here is very central for my claim, given that I am arguing that the subjection of living labor and human life under capital leads to the total monetization of all human capacities in their development. This is especially true since with capitalism the body of us as laborers is formed, framed, and subjected to the process of money. As I will develop it in chapter 4, this occurs through the temporality of money and, as I will show in chapter 5, it includes the noetic (mental) life of individuals, primarily through the subjection of knowledge to capital and, in recent decades, through the production of the mental through devices and technology. In order to show how time is indeed central for processing money, I shall briefly reflect on four aspects of this relationship: [1] the role of time for production, [2] the role of time for circulation, [3] the role of time for capital’s overcoming of natural and cultural limits [Schranken], as well as [4] the role of time for the distinction between labor and leisure, which is to say, for social wealth.

Production Time

In one of the chapters in Capital that deal with the role of the labor day in relation to capital and surplus value Marx quotes a factory inspector saying that “[t]ime atoms are the elements of profit” (MEW23, 257; transl. altered). The term time atom [Zeitatom] nicely expresses the revolutionary switch that processing money introduces in the modern world once it appropriated living labor in the form of wage labor, which capital now commands. The idea that time can be divided up into atoms implies a fragmented, segmented, linear time that can be divided up into its elements (and therefore can be rebuilt, combined, and put together in new ways).[32] As money establishes itself as the universal that regulates and establishes the totality of capitalist social relations, so is time now subsumed under money, too, the consequence of which is that capitalist time becomes [1] socially universal, [2] measurable, and [3] the unit that regulates all exchanges in the form of production and circulation time. Time and money are not just time and money; rather, labor under capitalism is constituted as abstract labor and as abstract labor time. With the emergence of surplus value, space and time are fundamentally reconstituted under a different form.

As Marx points out in Capital, surplus value leads to a different relation between the production of commodities in a different organization of the labor process, the consequence of which is that “the object of labor is carried over the same distance in a shorter time” (MEW23, 346; CI, 446). Efficiency, in other words, can be spelled out in time. With the removal of laborers from their former living places and their forced move into the capitalist system the co-operation changes, which allows for a more efficient process within which the object of labor runs through its different production phases in much shorter time spans. This “shorter” time, though, is only possible and can only take on a universal meaning once surplus value is the decisive factor in the production process, and surplus value is only possible once money as the social universal turns into a processing universal, which is capital. As we know, this revolutionary switch is at first visible in the length of the labor day in relation to the labor necessary for the reproduction of the laborer and the surplus labor performed for the capitalist. The distinction, however, between necessary and surplus labor, is posited by capital itself, i.e., it is an effect of the valorization process, which leads to the fragmentation and segmentation of the production process into time atoms that are then related to the re-organization of the labor process and, accordingly, to the labor day itself. The capitalization of labor power, we could say, not only leads to an abstract form of labor, but also to an abstract form of measure.

The abstraction here is the effect of money as the real existing universal, which leads, as we argued in the last sections, to the totalization of all social relations through money and the externalization of society to the individuals. Time and money are reduced to the same essence, namely, measurement, and they no longer are indicators for the concrete labors done in capitalism. Hence, the modern human being, reduced to labor power, becomes a mathematically calculable figure (Sohn-Rethel 1973, 202; MEW23, 366). The time needed for production and the production of surplus value can be carried out in two forms: either it leads to the expansion of the labor day, or it leads to a shrinking of necessary labor time through the introduction of fixed capital and the technological innovations that change the structure of the means of production. In both cases, however, the labor day shows up as the ultimate time limit to which all struggles come back, and, as we soon see, through which the liberation of labor has to go. The labor day is the first limit that the money process needs to constantly overcome by positing it as an internal limit to capital itself.[33] The exploitation rate is thereby determined by the relation between surplus labor time and necessary labor time. Consequently, what the capitalist purchases from the laborer is time. As surplus-value ultimately depends upon the difference between socially necessary time to reproduce a society at any given time and unpaid surplus labor time, capital needs to make sure that the labor day (as life time) gets extended.[34] Seen from the position of capital, merging life time with work time would be the ideal situation (Reitter 2011, 131), though we should add that this would also end surplus value, insofar as surplus value is tied to the difference between socially necessary labor time and unnecessary labor time. For the sake of the overall topic, I will remain silent about this and other internal contradictions of capital.

Time Limits

The importance of the category of time for the capitalist schema is, as we have said thus its universalization. As money is in principle the form under which all entities appear in capitalism, and since capital as processing value is the ever expanding process of this monetization, so is the expression of this expanding process related to time. As a consequence, this process “changes our relation to the surrounding thing world” (Rosa 2012, 191), or, put more properly, it changes our relation to all entities.[35] Again: the expansion is possible because time becomes socially abstract, a universal principle of everything, and in combination with the subsumption of living labor under processing value, it can take on both a spatial form (bodies, movements, geographies, borders, etc.) and temporality (individual life, generations, history, etc.). The latter, as we will see in the next chapter, involves time dimensions introduced by debt, credit, interest, etc. The subsumption of living labor under capital, to repeat this important point, is identical with the monetization of life itself. As Marx puts it,

Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labor-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labor-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital; time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of his body and his mind, even the rest time of Sunday. (MEW23, 279; CI, 375)

What Marx already clearly saw and analyzed, namely, the monetization of one’s whole life, needs to be extended, as in recent decades the system has expanded in ways that Marx could only prophetically foresee but not yet properly analyze. As we know through recent developments in medicine, electronics, genetics, and nanotechnology, the process is about to take on the inside of life, i.e., the totality of our biological roots and virtually every existing bodily organ. Organs, for example, can be replaced by technology, which is deeply connected to capital cycles and their time of production, circulation, and consumption. Marx still assumed that there are absolute limits to capital, most of which have been turned into moments of processing value through the explosion of biological and technological research by now. The self-valorization’s main object of labor power over one’s life span is carried out as a process of overcoming limits that, once taken up by money, turn into limits that the process needs to overcome. These limits that money, now conceived as time, i.e., as a process, must constantly overcome are multifaceted. The main aspects beside the length of the labor day are body, earth, and morality:

But in its blind and measureless drive, its insatiable appetite for surplus labor, capital oversteps not only the moral but even the merely physical limits of the working day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. (MEW23, 279; CI, 375)

With the subsumption of the living body under capital and the establishment of labor power as the center of surplus value and profit, the earth becomes increasingly more of an internal limit of capital, which, through constant negation of this limit, moves on by expansion. With the subsumption of labor power, i.e., “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the form of the living body [Leiblichkeit], the living personality of a human being” (MEW23, 181; trans. altered), two aspects are immediately capital related, namely, on the one hand, the limit of death, and, on the other hand, the limit of nature in its social form, that is, the living body. With this comes the overcoming of organic limits (MEW23, 394), human physical force (MEW23, 398), the difference between young and old (MEW23, 416), natural rhythms such as day and night, the will (MEW23, 425; 762), and the entire traditional and cultural limits still existing. As Marx points out, as processing money and the valorization process is in principle infinite, death is itself posited as in inner limit of capital, which leads to the importance of the next generation(s) as possible bearers of labor power (MEW23, 186). We can see here how money as capitalist thinghood, once it becomes a process, takes on a future dimension. Life needs to go on, not for ethical, religious, or other reasons, but for the possible production of surplus value. This also has the consequence (a point to which I will return in the next chapter) that the future is one form in which social reality is schematized and according to which our imagination, expectations, etc. are framed and are meaningful through money. The living body is the hinge between society and nature, as it regulates the “meatabolism” [Stoffwechsel] (MEW23, 192) between social individuals and nature. Nature is, as Marx famously put it, the “inorganic living body of the human” (MEW40, 516; trans. altered), it is organ of its activity (MEW23, 194). With the subsumption of labor power, the living personality, under processing value the whole metabolism between society and nature, becomes capitalized, too.

And, as I pointed out in the introduction, it can no longer be conceived outside this frame: oceans turn into transportation possibilities for commodities and food production; the cosmos turns into possible tourism targets or is taken to be a garbage dump for nuclear waste; and the planet itself is only conceivable as a gigantic pool of resources to be used up in the production process.[36] Former “natural” limits, such as natural patterns, seasons, ecological systems, brains, and their internal time patterns are turned into limits to be overcome by the infinite hunger of capital. The desire to squeeze surplus value out of every aspect of human life on and with the earth will eventually lead to the technological manipulation of human capacities and organic functions down to our biological and genetic setup. Indeed, once we decipher our genetic code through a scientific system that turns itself into the most important factor of profit production, we will then start to manipulate this code and the most basic “natural” limit will turn into an internally determined limit of capital, that is, one that is determined through time and money. The transformation of all natural limits into human and manipulatable limits is a valorization process whereby capital posits that which was formerly taken to be the external limit of valorization as an internal limit of valorization, which, accordingly, is presented as something that needs to be overcome and torn down. If it would be an external limit, it would turn capital into a finite process.[37] We can already see this in genetic engineering of plants, animals, crops, etc., which makes them grow faster and more independently from natural rhythms, reproduction cycles, etc.

All of these processes are based on making time more productive. Capital turns all natural relationships into money relationships. What is praised by most scientists as a progress of civilization is ultimately simply the celebration of capital and profit, which primarily means that a process that is driven by reducing necessary labor time is seen as positive. Here we can see that the capitalist schema establishes a time horizon that determines everything, which also includes psychic aspects. For example, the capitalist control of attention that the laborer has to pay within certain calculable sequences of labor are determined by time units[38] measured and announced by clocks (and controlled through ethical norms such as punctuality). This, as we all know, is even more important on the side of consumption that is structured through technology, devices, media, advertisement, etc., which in turn determines the desires and needs of individuals (I will come back to this in chapter 5). Time has here the sense of order, regularity, repetition, and continuity. Closely connected to production time is since the event of lean production the capitalization of consumption, which not only consist in a commodification of consumption, but also the time needed for consumption. As Tony Smith points out,

“[f]or the circuit of capital accumulation to proceed smoothly, it is not enough that commodities be produced and purchased within a given time period; the objects purchased must be consumed within a given period as well, so that the consumer can return to the market ready to make the next round of purchases. (Smith 2000, 87)

We can see here that not only production time, but also consumption time, needs to be taken into account, as only then can we understand that money and time are established as the universal factors spanning from production, over circulation, to consumption. As consumption basically means destruction, we could also say that the overall destruction increases.

Circulation Time

Though objective distances do not change, our ability to cross spaces at increasingly faster paces also led to an increased destruction of space, which was accompanied by a quasi “placeless communication” (Rosa 2012, 191). Ultimately, as we can see, this process is a process of valorization, which recent commentators often overlook, as they do not take the abstraction into account that is posited with money. As I have argued, only if we understand the role of money as the thing (i.e., thinghood), then can we understand why time becomes the universal feature of social schematization. The role of communication, transport, and the annihilation of space by time follows money, as first the equalization of all labor and production in the form of abstract labor and labor power (and therefore of all social relations) needs to be constituted. This equalization and the universal exchangeability (value) leads then to the acceleration that recent social theorists have observed as the key concept for modernity.[39] For example, Hartmut Rosa makes a distinction between technological acceleration, social acceleration, and the acceleration of life and biographies, but he fails to bring those empirical tendencies together as one process in a conceptual framework, which is presupposed for claims about acceleration of “the” modernity (though Rosa sees the connection between technology and capital).[40] From a sociological and anti-metaphysical point of view, these theoretical choices are understandable, insofar as empirical researchers are skeptical about a “super subject” that drives everything forward.

As I have argued, however, if we understand value and money as social schematization within a historically specific form, then we distance ourselves from constructing a “world-historical” process. The establishment of money as the social universal and its time (=processing quality) leads to the equalization of labor and production not only in regard to laboring individuals, but also in regard to the overall division of labor in society. “Money itself,” as Marx puts it, “is a form for suspending the unevenness of the times required in different branches of production, to the extent that this obstructs exchange” (MEW42, 441; G, 535), inasmuch as exchange is a monetary process and speeding up the exchange process will lead to surplus value. Social time, overall, then, is the form in which money moves. Every activity with its own intrinsic time becomes the enemy of capital, including democracy (with long debates ideally guided by good arguments), true learning (ideally guided by truth and insight), sleep (ideally guided by thorough relaxation), and laziness (ideally the enjoyment of duration itself). In addition to the above mentioned expansion into the future of social life, the most important aspect of the relationship between time and money in their universal abstract social nature is circulation time, inasmuch as circulation time leads to the spatial and geographical expansion of capital. In Grundrisse Marx deals with the relation between space and time extensively. There he says:

Circulation time […] appears as a barrier to the productivity of labor = an increase in necessary labor time = a decrease in surplus labor time = a decrease in surplus value = an obstruction, a barrier to the self-realization process [Selbstverwertungsprozess] of capital. Thus, while capital must, on one side, strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e., to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives, on the other side, to annihilate this space with time, i.e., to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another. The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time. (MEW42, 445; G, 524)

What Marx here brilliantly lays out leads us to the roots of the global dynamic that we are currently observing, since as it is closely connected to the claim that the development of communication, the central role of language, networks, and technology must be analyzed in their functions for circulation time, as these aspects rapidly decrease the circulation time and thereby increase the turn over time between production and circulation. “The more rapid the circulation, the shorter the circulation time, the more often can the same capital repeat the production process” (MEW42, 527; G, 627).[41] As Marx underlines, the ideal circulation time would be zero, which would mean that space would be truly annihilated:

The expansion and contraction of the circulation time hence acts as a negative limit on the contraction or expansion of the production time, or of the scale on which a capital of a given magnitude can function. The more that the circulation metamorphoses of capital are only ideal, i.e. the closer the circulation time comes to zero, the more the capital functions, and the greater is its productivity and self-valorization. (MEW24, 127; CII, 203)

We know that the ever speedier process of investment, digitalization, the acceleration of time through the internet, and the ever decreasing role of money in material form intellectualizes the whole process: “With the development of the means of transport, the speed of spatial movement is accelerated, and spatial distance is thus shortened in time” (MEW24, 253, CII, 327). Similarly, the flow of communication and information “has become as important as electricity once was in the age of mechanical production” (Marazzi 2011b, 21). However, crises and quick turnaround of capital can also lead to devastated spaces, destroyed fixed capital, de-possession, and violent consequences for individuals, families, and whole countries, which is important to point out, especially as in recent debates, especially in some postoperaist writings, one has the impression that everything becomes increasingly immaterial—but this is only half of the truth. Because time is carried out in spatial terms, negative consequences are always spatial, beginning with living labor, extended to the lives of the laborers, and, moreover, these negative consequences effect geographical areas, too.

When exchange processes become monetized, the two phases of transforming commodities in money and transforming money in commodities falls apart into two independent processes, the consequence of which is that local time and local space fall apart, insofar as exchange no longer must happen at a specific place and time. The selling process is more important for capital (MEW24, 129):

The division of the exchange process into purchase and sale not only destroys locally evolved primitive, traditionally pious and sentimentally absurd obstacles standing in the way of social metabolism, but it also represents the general rupture [Zerreissung] of the associated factors of this process and their constant positioning towards each other [Festsetzung], in short it contains the general possibility of commercial crises, essentially because the contradiction of commodity and money is the abstract and general form of all contradictions inherent in the bourgeois mode of labor. Although circulation of money can occur therefore without crises, crises cannot occur without circulation of money. (MEW 13, 77)

The “rupture” of the whole social metabolism and the introduction of money into this process leads to the overall tension between present and future, as the most basic form of social crises are always monetary crises that occur through the division of buying and selling. What was expected does not turn out as expected and produces a crisis. Consequently, capital strives to minimize the time span between the moment when money enters the reproduction process and when it returns in the form of profits. The possibility of crises, however, may only be overcome if the return time would be zero. Indeed, the temporal gap introduced through the distinction between sale and purchase, which implies the constitution, circulation, and use of money, leads to the capitalist dynamic, especially if we take into account that the distinction between sale and purchase is not simply thought here as a single or historically occurring act; rather, it is thought of as the universal constitution of social reality. As argued before, money in capitalism is the universal form through which all social relations exist and, accordingly, the distinction between sale and purchase leads to a universal upset of relations that are bound to the present. Exchanges that occur in societies other than exchange societies that do not involve money are tied to the really occurring exchange itself, i.e., they are bound to a specific place and a specific time. Capitalist exchange, however, not only overcomes this presence, which is an internal limit, but also establishes the monetary past and the monetary future as social horizons through which all transactions and all social relations are constituted.

Wealth

Finally, processing value establishes the most important distinction in terms of time, namely, the distinction between labor time and free time. As Marx argues in the Grundrisse, a non-capitalist mode of production would be a mode of production that has liberated itself from labor, the thesis of which goes against almost the entire twentieth century “labor class Marxism doctrine,” which advances that liberation has to occur through labor, even though Marx already indicates in The German Ideology that the goal of the communist revolution consists of abolishing labor in its current form (MEW3, 69). As I argued in section 3.1, agreeing with scholars such as Arndt and Postone, value is not a universal historical category, given that it is the historically specific form under which wealth appears in capitalist societies. “The concept of value,” as Marx puts it, “is entirely peculiar to the most modern economy, since it is the most abstract expression of capital itself and of the production resting on it” (MEW42, 667; G, 776). As I have argued, this cannot be spelled out without the schematization of money, which is essentially the regulation and structuring of time. As time is the single most important factor in this context, we need to understand that the value form opens up a distinction that constitutes an important aspect of the schema. This distinction is the distinction between labor time and that which Marx calls in the machine fragment disposable time. The more disposable time we have, the more we can take care of ourselves and our real social individuality. “Wealth is therefore disposable time” (MEW43, 180). As others have dealt with these concepts before, I will limit my comments to central aspects of this distinction that are of importance for the sake of my overall argument. In a central passage that is astonishing in its breadth and prophetic quality, Marx says the following:

As the creation of a large quantity of disposable time apart from necessary labor time for society generally and for each of its members (i.e., room for the development of the individuals’ full productive forces, hence those of society also), this creation of not-labor time appears in the stage of capital, as of all earlier ones, as not-labor time, free time, for a few. What capital adds is that it increases the surplus labor time of the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labor time; since value is directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labor time for the whole society to a diminishing’ minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency is always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labor. If it succeeds too well at first, then it suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labor is interrupted, because no surplus labor can be realized by capital. The more this contradiction develops, the more it becomes evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labor, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labor. Once they have done so—and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence—then, on one side, necessary labor time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labor time, but rather disposable time. (MEW42, 604; G, 708)

The following aspects in this central passage of Grundrisse are important for our topic: [1] in capitalism the distinction between leisure time and labor time depends upon “a few,” i.e., it is class based; [2] through science and the revolution of the means of production capital tries to transform the additional disposable time into surplus value (and thereby paradoxically destroys disposable time again); [3] once the labor class re-appropriates the labor process, the opposition between disposable time and surplus value will vanish and the disposable time will increase for all members of society; [4] once this process takes place, value will no longer be the expression of wealth; rather, wealth will be expressed in the richness of social individuals in their individuality, i.e., in their individual productive, intellectual, and personal capacities, as well as in their needs and satisfaction as social individuals. Regardless of how we should think about the force of Marx’s utopian projection in this passage, the time related argument is very central, insofar as it reduces the monetization of all social relations into a basic “antithetical” conflict of the valorization process, namely, the conflict between the desire to reduce socially necessary labor time to zero percent and at the same time the desire to expand socially necessary labor time to 100 percent. This conflict is, of course, rooted in the organization of the valorization process itself, since from the moment of surplus value realization there should be both: as much labor as possible (as labor is the source of all surplus value) and as little labor as possible (as labor power needs to be more efficient in order to generate surplus value). Psychologically expressed: capital is in a love-hate relationship with labor. True wealth, however, is only achievable where the necessity of production and reproduction can be reduced to a minimum and, hence, the time for the development of social individuals beyond necessary labor can be increased (see MEW26.3, 252). Time, again, is the central concept, and the crucial question is whether money and abstract labor time continue to characterize the nature of social schematization or whether they could be turned into a secondary element.

As I will argue in the next chapter, it is not sufficient to simply reveal the inner logic of money as a time logic, given that we need to take into account the temporalization of money that ultimately determines the framework for individual references to past, present, and future. I therefore do not agree with dual conceptions of time, such as the idea that time is either capitalist, i.e., abstract, or non-capitalist, i.e., concrete.[42] For example, I reject Postone’s concept of abstract time as “uniform, continuous. Homogenous, ‘empty’ time, is independent of events” (Postone 1996, 202). Though Postone is correct in assuming that value depends upon abstract labor as its substance and, accordingly, depends upon abstract time, it can nevertheless be spelled out in its economic schematization and temporal dimensions, which cannot be reduced to two aspects.[43] The thesis that we need to deal with only two forms of time has been predominant in the Marxian tradition. For example, Poulantzas claims that the capitalist state not only normalizes, but also homogenizes time. In this vein, he writes: the question is “how to master time by means of a single, homogenous measure, which only reduces the multiple temporalities (worker’s time and bourgeouise time, the time of the economic, the social, and the political) by encoding the distances between them” (Poulantzas 2000, 110). Similarly, Bensaid has argued that capitalist time is closely tied to money, as “the abstractions of chronometry and money go hand in hand” (Bensaid 2009, 72). On the one hand, this thesis is correct, as with the introduction of clocks labor time was itself unified, segmented and subjected to a time that can be measured.[44] On the other hand, however, I argue here that this duality of abstract vs. concrete time remains insufficient, since it overlooks the complex forms according to which time through money establishes different forms of its temporality, i.e., past, present, and future as social relations.[45] This is closely connected to Marx’s distinction between use-value and exchange value, which was re-interpreted and deciphered as the contradiction between two forms of time, namely, on the one hand, concrete labor time and, on the other hand, abstract labor time. As a consequence, as Bensaid points out, “value emerges as an abstraction of social time” (Bensaid 2009, 75). Again, this position tends to fetishize, as I argued before against Adorno, the use-value component and, as a consequence, it fetishizes concrete labor time, without acknowledging that a non-capitalist time-frame would not emerge by simply abandoning abstract labor time. This “romantic” position is not convincing, especially insofar as it overlooks that, with the possible overcoming of the capitalist framework, the distinction between concrete and abstract time would not collapse; rather, it would be based on a different distribution, which would overcome the universality of abstract labor time.

Having established the relation between money and time, in the next chapter I deal with the aforementioned temporalities in more detail, which will allow me to return in more detail to the social conception of schematization.

Notes

1.

I do not use the term “totality” here in a Hegelian fashion, as it is clear that from the standpoint of social ontology we do need to give up larger metaphysical claims about the “total” reality, which would include nature and logic. As such, I agree with Althusser that we need to make a distinction between whole and totality (Althusser 2011, 220), or, as Marx himself says, organic whole (MEW 42, 34; for this also see Arndt 2011, 147). I also like Poulantzas’ explanation of this term: “The social formation itself constitutes a complex unity in which a certain mode of production dominates the others which compose it. It is a social formation historically determined by a given mode of production: Bismarck's Germany is a capitalist social formation, that is, one dominated by the capitalist mode of production […]. The dominance of one mode of production over the others in a social formation causes the matrix of this mode of production (i.e., the particular reflection of determination. by the economic element in the last instance by which it is specified) to mark the whole of the formation. In this way a historically determined social formation is specified by a particular articulation, (through an index of dominance and overdetermination) of its different economic, political, ideological and theoretical levels or instances. As a general rule, taking account of the dislocations which will be encountered, this articulation is that of the dominant mode of production. For example, in a social formation dominated by the CMP, as a general rule the dominant role is held by the economic. This is merely the effect of the predominance of the capitalist mode in this formation, a mode which is itself characterized, in its ‘purity,’ by the preponderant role held by the economic” (Poulantzas 1978, 15).

2.

For this, also see Bellofiore 2012, 194: “The idea of value […] as a substance whose magnitude may be measured in units of time […] is very problematic. That is why Marx enters into a discussion of the form of value in paragraph 3 of section 1 of chapter 1.”

3.

As Arthur nicely puts it: “Instead of understanding so-called ‘labor values’ as ontologically prior to money prices, the position adopted here is that order and regularity in the inter-relations of units of capitalist production is possible only because there is a form of value, namely money, as a precondition for it. Only once this form of commensurating products obtains is there any meaning to the supposition of a law of value rooted in labor time and appearing as price. The moneyform structures such determinations as socially necessary labor time, deciding to what degree actual labor times are socially validated, or replaced by socially imputed amounts of labor” (Arthur 2005, 123).

4.

Kliman’s position is itself positivistic, as his “economistic” position turns Marxism into an empirical science and, accordingly, ends up giving up [a] its systematic character, and [b] its social-critical character.

5.

For this, see the crystal-clear explanations in Postone 2013, 377.

6.

The interview is available online: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2013/lebowitz210313.html; last accessed: March 26, 2013.

7.

The non-fixable nature of capital is not an invention of philosophical terminology. Schumpeter, for example, noticed it too (for this, see Reichelt 2011, 235).

8.

For this, see Arndt 2011, 228. As Rubin has it, “the social form of things is the echo of a specific social form of organizing labor, i.e., of specific relations of production” (Rubin 2012, 63; my transl.)

9.

For this point, see Postone 2013 who explains the contradictory nature of capital in relation to Marx’s Grundrisse. As Postone argues, the contradiction should not be posited between the productive relations and the productive forces; rather, the nature of capital itself is contradictory, insofar as it posits labor time as something that needs to be overcome. I have dealt with this point in a forthcoming edition of Marx’s so-called “machine fragment” (for this, see Lotz 2014b).

10.

For this, see Backhaus 1997, 345–356. Backhaus beautifully demonstrates how in many standard economic theories money is “smuggled in” as an arbitrary component because these theorists handle agents, exchange, and circulation as independent things, i.e., they overlook that one cannot be thought of or determined without the other.

11.

For a good example of this confusion see Day 2005. Day argues against any form of social totalization in the name of movements, resistance, and identities, which leads to the mystification of agents and the loss of any comprehensive understanding of social reproduction.

12.

Marx gives a nice—ironic—example for how everything hangs together in his 1861/63 manuscripts: “A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as “commodities.” This brings with it augmentation of national wealth, quite apart from the personal enjoyment which—as a competent witness, Professor Roscher, [tells] us (see . . . )—the manuscript of the compendium brings to its originator himself. The criminal moreover produces the whole of the police and of criminal justice, constables, judges, hangmen, juries, etc.; and all these different lines of business, which form just as many categories of the social division of labor, develop different capacities of the human mind, create new needs and new ways of satisfying them. Torture alone has given rise to the most ingenious mechanical inventions, and employed many honourable craftsmen in the production of its instruments. The criminal produces an impression, partly moral and partly tragic, as the case may be, and in this way renders a “service” by arousing the moral and aesthetic feelings of the public. He produces not only compendia on Criminal Law, not only penal codes and along with them legislators in this field, but also art, belles-lettres, novels, and even tragedies, as not only Mullner’s Schuld and Schiller’s Räuber show, but Oedipus and Richard the Third. The criminal breaks the monotony and everyday security of bourgeois life. In this way he keeps it from stagnation, and gives rise to that uneasy tension and agility without which even the spur of competition would get blunted. Thus he gives a stimulus to the productive forces” (MEW 43, 302).

13.

Marx criticizes classical value theorists who think of money as merely instrumental in MEW13, 36.

14.

According to Marx, this process has two main components, namely, labor and earth, both of which are posited by Capital as elements of valorization; for this, also see Murray 1993, 43.

15.

As Marx somewhere remarks, the term “use value” was not his best choice, as he simply meant “things in use” [Gebrauchssache].

16.

As Lukacs explains it in relation to the priority of production over consumption and distribution: “Whatever may be the immediate relations of pure power, the fact remains that the men who represent these or who are subjected to them are men who have to reproduce their own life under definite concrete conditions, who accordingly possess definite aptitudes, skills, abilities, etc., and who can only act and adapt accordingly. So if a new distribution of the population takes place from extraeconomic power relations, then this is never independent of the economic inheritance of the past developments, and a durable settlement of the future economic relations necessarily arises from an interaction between the human groups who are stratified in this way. If Marx attributes the function of the predominant moment in such interrelations to the mode of production, we must avoid understanding this in the sense of an economist practicism or utilitarianism. The mode of action determined by production can even have a destructive character, as Marx shows in his examples of the devastations of the Mongolian hordes in Russia. But even this kind of action refers back to the relations of production, to the pastoralism that above all required large uninhabited expanses” (Lukacs 1984, 608; 1978, 65; transl. altered)

17.

For this see Backhaus 1997, 350.

18.

We might consider a few examples, such as producing one’s food in one’s garden, but as soon as one of these steps is mediated by money, it becomes part of the social whole. For example, even an amateur gardener needs to purchase first property, and amongst other things she needs to buy tools, such as shovels, and most likely seeds as well.

19.

For this, also see MEW13, 22: Marx says that it is a “tautology” to claim that labor is the “source” of value. Every child, as he puts it in a famous letter to Kugelmann, knows that societies would cease to exist if they would stop to labor.

20.

This quote is a good example for the still remarkably poor English translations of Marx’s texts. Almost all philosophically relevant words are distorted in the English translation (the Marxist.org translation stems from Samuel Moore’s and Edward Aveling’s translation, which was edited by Engels).

21.

The same position is held by Heinrich 1995, Heinrich 2003, Backhaus 1997, Reichelt 2008, and Bellofiore 2012, to name just a few of the “Neue Marx-Lektüre” in Europe; for a critique, see Haug 2013.

22.

For a similar point about form and value see Bellofiore 2012, 193; I have also dealt with the concept of form in my critique of Negri’s take on Marx in Lotz 2014a.

23.

Similarly, Marx says: “The externality and the establishment of the independence of the social nexus in money with respect to individuals in their individual relations clearly stand out in gold and silver [B’-5] as world coin (still national as coin). (Here money appears in effect as their [the individuals’] reified community existing external to them.) Indeed, what the early forerunners of political economy in Italy celebrated was precisely this excellent invention which made a general exchange of matter in society possible without any individual contacts.” (MEGA II.2, 26; trans. altered). Money existed before capitalism existed, but it did not express the social totality (for this, also see Reitter 2011, 66). Hegel held similar views in his early Jena philosophy, as he speaks of money as the “real existing universal”; for this, see Reichelt 2011, 243–248.

24.

For an excellent reconstruction of this, see Elbe 2010b, esp. 230–233.

25.

Backhaus interprets this turn as a switch of the subjective and objective: the subject receives an objective character and the commodity receives a subjective character (in the sense of Hegel); money and capital, in other words, are the “subject” of the development (for this, see Backhaus 2004, 82).

26.

For the purpose of this chapter, I am unable to reconstruct the relationship of this term to Hegel’s “verkehrte Welt” as he discusses this in his Phänomenologie des Geistes. However, for the general background of the world turned on its head through the separation of production and commodity, see Reichelt 2002, esp. 167. For Hegel’s anticipation of Marx’s concept of money, see also Reichelt 2011, especially 245–248.

27.

“The division between the personal and the class individual, the accidental nature of the conditions of life for the individual, appears only with the emergence of the class, which is itself a product of the bourgeoisie. This accidental character is only engendered and developed by competition and the struggle of individuals among themselves. Thus, in imagination [Vorstellung], individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are more subjected to factual constraints [sachliche Gewalt]” (Marx, MEW3, 76). The translation of “violence of things” has been altered, as the German term for “factual constraints” is “sachliche Gewalt,” which indicates what he has in mind later in the first volume of Capital, namely, that individuals in capitalist systems are formally free, but are unfree in their thinking and actions, as these are now conceived through the value form.

28.

Marx writes: “Thus, just as production founded on capital creates universal industriousness on one side—i.e., surplus labor, value-creating labor—so does it create on the other side a system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities, a system of general utility, utilizing science itself just as much as all the physical and mental qualities, while there appears nothing higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle of social production and exchange. Thus capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence, the great civilizing influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production. In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces” (MEW42, 323; G, 410).

29.

For making my main point about time and money, the precise dialectical and historical genesis of the capital form is secondary. I therefore skip a detailed reconstruction of the move from money to capital.

30.

For this, also see Bensaid 2002, 72–93.

31.

For this, see URL: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/economic/ch35a.htm [last accessed: Dec 29, 2013]. I was unable to find this quote in the German edition of Marx’/Engels’ works.

32.

This principle, we should add, has been extended to the self under neoliberal conditions, as laborers nowadays are forced to choose, select, be self-responsible, and flexible. Life is turned into a reconfigurable unit. As such, “reaction time” (Ehrenberg quoted in Malabou 2008, 49) of individual laborers becomes increasingly important. As Malabou argues, the changes in our work lives are echoed by psychiatric conditions, such as depression (interestingly, we use the same terms to describe both psychic and social conditions).

33.

I am of course aware that I am ignoring here the other side of this process, namely the class struggle. For the sake of the main argument of this book I decided to “bracket” this aspect. For the relation between surplus value and variable capital, which is posited in terms of time, is the source of social antagonism and classes, as workers depend upon the capitalist because the capitalist provides the only places left where the worker can work.

34.

For the central importance of the labor day, see the excellent explanations in Reitter 2011, 90–96 and 123–126.

35.

Though Rosa does not use the term “schematization,” we can see how neatly his reflections on time and modernity fit with the concept that I argue for.

36.

For a sketch of ecological issues in Marx’ Grundrisse, see Foster 2010, 275–287, and for Marx’s reception of nineteenth century agricultural questions, see Foster 2000, 141–177.

37.

Of course, capital ultimately has an external limit, which is the ecosystem itself, and we are reaching a point where this limit becomes more visible.

38.

For this, see MEW23, 359.

39.

For this, see Rosa 2005 and Rosa 2012 as there are plenty of references to the discourse on time and acceleration in sociology and cultural theory in these works.

40.

Other principles are culture, military, and territorial state (for this, see Rosa 2005, 243–332).

41.

As Moulier-Boutang points out, in some sectors of our society information, transactions, and the communications between laborers, are nowadays carried out in real time (Moulier-Boutang 2011, 65).

42.

Unfortunately I learned too late that Massimiliano Tomba covers similar ground in his analysis of history and time in Marx; for this especially see the appendix to Tomba 2013b.

43.

The relation between abstract labor and money gets totally lost in Stiegler’s account of “tertiary retention,” i.e., the objective past that is established independent from subjective memory. Though Stiegler sees the connection between schematism, equivalency, and money (Stiegler 2011a, 54), he fails to further analyze this connection.

44.

For this, see Marx’s remarks in a letter to Engels on clocks and mills (MEW 30, 321), as well as the remarks on clocks in MEW23, 299 and 362.

45.

Lohmann underlines that the capitalist mode of production presupposes a historically unique unity of past, present and future, and that this unity is already implied in the value form. He misses, however, the difference between abstract time as such and its temporalizations (see next section); for Lohmann’s otherwise impressive reconstruction, see Lohmann 1998, 156–165.

Chapter 4

The Temporality of Money

As we know from Heidegger’s Kant interpretation, the concept of schematization can be reconstructed in relation to the constitution of time. In the following, I propose that we can use his interpretation for a clarification of how money and time are interrelated in and through the capitalist schema. The key word now is temporalization, though, and not time as such, which I connected to money in the last chapter. We need to shift the perspective, however, from a mental (Kant) or phenomenological (Heidegger) conception of time to a social conception of time, which can be reconstructed through the constitution of money as the regulating frame for our access to entities under the capitalist frame. We need to acknowledge, in other words, the temporal horizons that are constituted through money, and that they are thereby framed by subjective references to past, present, and future. One of these temporalizations I already mentioned, namely, the inclusion of unborn generations into the process of valorization. Once labor power becomes posited by capital as an intrinsic moment of value, the future becomes monetized and profit-related. We do not simply already include future generations into our present situation; rather, through financial instruments, such as credit, we establish a specific future horizon that constitutes future generations in a specific form, namely, a monetary form. As we know by now, time plays an important role in political economy in relation to labor time, which is closely connected both to consumption time and to circulation time (of capital), all of which is made possible through the temporal horizon of capital itself. We cannot, in other words, understand the overall role of time for capitalism if we do not understand time as not only constitutive for the schematization of social reality, which is realized in money, but also as the actualizations of its dimensions. The most important aspect for an understanding of the capitalist schema is not sufficiently addressed by pointing out the role of time for the constitution of value and labor, since what is even more important for the capitalist schema is the constitution of a specific temporality that frames possible references to past and future—which is the topic of this chapter.

The difference between time and temporality can be developed with Heidegger.[1] Some authors have argued that the main distinction to be drawn is between empty-abstract time related to value and temporality, and the “full” time of the political aspects of capitalism, such as revolution, class struggle, etc. In most cases, this division can be traced back to Benjamin’s reflections on historical time, which may be found in his Theses on History. In contradistinction to this position, I argue here that the dual concept of, on the one hand, empty homogenous time and, on the other hand, full historical and revolutionary temporality, the “time of rupture” (Badiou), remains too abstract, as it fails to take into account that the capitalist schema realizes itself through its own temporality, through money and processing money (capital), which is not simply empty and homogenous. Though this leads to affirmation and reduces the possibility of possible breaks and ruptures, temporality introduces a permanent state of rupture and instableness, namely, capitalist crises. The main point is that the capitalist schema, now conceived in terms of time and temporality, determines the temporal framework under which the world and, therefore, lives of individuals, become meaningful. As indicated before, the materialist concept of schema contains all dimensions of time. What we need to show in this chapter, accordingly, is that the social temporalization depends upon the temporal schema of “the” thing, which, as we know by now, is money in its specific historical form, which is universal and really abstract. The constitution of the past, present, and future, hence, is not a mental schematization; rather, it is constituted by a social-material framework that regulates mental references to the past, present, and future. Once this is established, with the help of Heidegger, we can then look at some concrete forms of this temporalization, which are credit and debt.

Of course, one could argue that I am exaggerating the role of capital for the constitution of social reality, but let us imagine that we will reach a point where virtually all bodily and mental aspects of human life (which were mentioned in the last section) become valorized, then we will, in fact, be totally determined by the process of capital and become totally dependent on the crises connected to capital. Put differently, we could not abolish capital without risking our lives now fully capitalized (which, in turn, will lead to the impossibility of active resistance). The consequence of this total dependency means that we are no longer able to imagine a future beyond capital because the imagination is itself only possible through it. I think it is safe to assume that we have not yet reached that point and perhaps will never reach that point. But the dystopian logic of the process tends to close itself off despite its internal contradictions related to wealth, labor time, and the ecological limits, which could open up the possibility of a crash at any point. “In fact,” as David Graeber points out,

it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. (Graeber 2011, 382)

As we will see in the last chapter, this becomes even clearer the more we learn to see that recent technologies are about to replace noetic activities, which results in mental acts merging with technologies.

Temporalization is that which makes any linear and abstract functioning of time—the “one after another”—possible, as it is its inner or intrinsic relatedness of the three time dimensions. We can “calculate” with time because it shows up within its horizons that are “far away” or “near.” Here, it is interesting to note that the capitalist schema is not the only way to schematize past and future. For example, religious narratives establish these horizons, too, but in capitalism they do not constitute society as such, despite the fact that imaginations about infinite growth have taken on religious dimensions. The main reason for why much of the Marxist literature on this point remains too abstract is that it overlooks the constitutive role of temporal schematization, inasmuch as it does not take into account that we not only have two forms of time (concrete and abstract); rather, we need to take into account the inner constitution of abstract time, which is neither concrete nor abstract, but is instead the enabling of both. Helpful in this context is Castoriadis’ account of imaginary social time, which—in regard to capitalism—is characterized by infinity:

And, as an imaginary time or a time of signification, typical capitalist time is an ‘infinite’ time represented as a time of indefinite progress, unlimited growth, accumulation, rationalization, time of the conquest of nature, of the always closer approximation of a total, exact knowledge, of the realization of the phantasy of omnipotence. The present state of the planet attests to the fact that these are not just empty words, that these imaginary significations are more 'real' than any reality. (Castoriadis 1998, 207)

The projection of infinite time through the “limitless” nature of capital (MEW23, 253) and the illusion of infinite growth and wealth accumulation is the homogenous frame out of which the temporalizations have to occur. For example, a house loan of thirty years necessarily implies that the lives of individuals and the overall state of society remain the same for the next thirty years. In this way, out of the imagination of infinite growth, a finite frame is established for subjects. This finite frame we call “social horizon.” For the context worked out here it is not centrally important how Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s schematism is related to his overall philosophy or whether it is even a proper take on Kant. For we use Heidegger’s insights here to understand the monetary schematism better, and in order to see the internal relation between time as the social universal (as described in section 2) and the temporalization of this universal, which allows us to introduce the term social horizon as a concept that describes the framework for possible references to past, present, and future for individuals within this framework.

As I argued in the first two chapters, the notion of thinghood [Gegenständlichkeit] is decisive, as it allows us to inquire into the condition for the possibility of what a thing is under capitalism. This Kantian question was also addressed by Heidegger in lecture courses and writings between 1927 and 1936. As Heidegger puts it,

if the idea of ‘object in general’ is not to be gotten through observation of objects but is instead already presupposed in every observation, then this idea must be sought in what precedes every ontic grasping of definite objects. This is to say that ontological knowledge in Kant’s sense aims precisely at this objectness itself. But what do we understand and mean when we speak of objects in general? What do we see this as, that which we call ‘object’? Let us consider Kant’s response to this question: object in general is ‘that which prevents our mode of knowledge from being haphazard or arbitrary, and which determines them a priori in some definite fashion.’ […] ‘Object’ means what offers an advance a priori regulating of all empirical knowledge. (Heidegger 1997b, 250)

What Heidegger has in mind here reminds us of Adorno’s interpretation of Kant’s schematism, especially since the thesis is the same: what makes an object an object (thinghood or objectness) is prior to what we encounter and experience as objects. Kant assumes that reason is based upon two roots or faculties, namely, on the one hand, sensibility, and, on the other hand, rationality. Indeed, the transcendental schematism, based on pure imagination, establishes in advance what can be represented by reason, insofar as the pure imagination projects a horizon as the condition for the possibility of representation. The schematism is that which constitutes the standing-over-against [Gegenstehen] as object [Gegen-stand] (Heidegger 1997a, 217).[2] As Kant is arguing in a representational framework, his argument is that the world needs a stable conceptual and intuitive structure that makes experience of objects possible. This is to say that objectness determines that which can be encountered as object. So far so good, but let us now apply this idea to the social context that we have been discussing so far.

In order to do this we shall now turn Kant on his head and return to our main thesis, namely, that processing money is the “objectness” under capitalism. Since I understand the schematism not as a mental concept but, instead, as a social-material concept, the schematism must be seen as the universal social framework under which things are meaningful in capitalism. This framework is money now determined by abstract labor and abstract labor time. As this framework is universal, i.e., since it determines all social relations, it constitutes the meaningfulness of the capitalist social world. Accordingly, we should understand the schematism and its temporal synthesis as a social-economic concept, i.e., as social-ontological. As such, the material schematism of money enables and makes possible a stable world. As “the” object in Kant makes the representation of one reality possible, so capital makes specific object references possible in capitalism. By at once regulating memory and expectations the social schema renders possible that individuals under capitalism can establish relations with each other, that they can communicate about things in the capitalist world, and that they can stabilize their expectations, since it is clear in advance what establishes a unified horizon and what can “stand over against.” As Marx already saw, in capitalism money is independent from present time, localization, and cultural varieties. Indeed, the abstraction contained in money makes it possible that it can be used everywhere, by everyone, and at any place, the consequence of which is that it makes true universal, i.e., global, communication possible.[3] Everyone can “speak money,” insofar as money is the universal language necessary to make sense of anything. Money is the logic of the capitalist world. It rationally stabilizes what we can expect, what we can hope, and what we believe. Again, this does not mean that it causally determines everything; rather, it only means that it frames everything that is socially constitutive, or, put differently, everything that is constitutive for society as a whole. It is therefore also not necessary for individuals to be explicitly aware of this mechanism in order for it to be operative; for the schematization and society as a totality is established behind their backs, without their acknowledgement.

As Heidegger further argues in his Kant-Interpretation, the schematism is intrinsically tied to the concept of imagination: the essence of the schematism is pure productive imagination that “projects” the abstract form of objects ahead of their concrete experience, and as the productive imagination belongs to the faculty of the senses, it projects a time horizon that makes it possible for objects to be represented by human reason and the mind. An object, say a table, could not be represented for me if it would not have been synthesized in its temporal horizon. Indeed, a stable representation of the table requires some sort of memory, keeping the fleeting sensations in mind, and some sort of anticipation that establishes the possibility of having further representations of the table. In short, the schematism forms [bilden] a temporal horizon with three temporal moments: it is a kind of keeping (re-forming), a kind of anticipation (in-advance forming), and—as a result of the first two moments—a kind of presenting (forming an image). Put differently, having one representation of a table in front of me requires some sort of time synthesis that makes it possible for me to experience the table now. As Heidegger writes:

Thus this productive function of forming must be divided in three ways, corresponding to the modes of time. Thereby we must bear in mind that this productive synthesis protects and conceals in itself the relation to the three stretches of time. Having a clear insight into the crucial time-relatedness of the synthesis of the power of imagination, Kant at once speaks of a forming and re-forming [Nachbilden], that is, of making visible again the nows which have been; of an in-advance forming [Vorbilden], that is, of letting the now which is not yet present be sighted; and of forming an image [Abbilden], which brings the now which is present directly before or in front of us [Vorbilden]. As productive, the power of imagination freely reaches out into the future, into alreadyness (the past), and into the present; and throughout this reaching the power of imagination is originally unifying. (Heidegger 1997a, 282)[4]

Heidegger refers here to three dimensions of the representative synthesis: reason needs to “be ahead” of itself in order to have the coming sensations of the table, to connect this to the present and to already kept sensations. For example, if I look at a table, I have “in my mind” a table that—as an object of reason —is “a thing” that has been there a moment ago, is there now, and will still be there in a moment, i.e., is already “arriving.” This synthesis not only is in place for the table; rather, it is established on the level “object as such.” If this frame would not be in place, having one representation of one reality would not be possible, since already on the sensational level my world would appear like a pointillist painting without object.

We can use what Heidegger explained in relation to Kant for our concept of social schematization. The temporality of money, its process, makes it possible that, once money becomes capital, all possible relations towards the past, present, and future are formed by this process. Capital, as Marx puts it, is the “universally dominating economic force [Macht]” (MEW42, 41; G, 107). The term “force” is not an empirical concept, though, given that it belongs to social ontology; for it is the ground of the being of capitalist society. We need to recall that money is not a “thing,” and that it is instead that which makes social things as “the” thing possible. It is, however, as some commentator believe, not sufficient to simply claim that money and value are social relations, insofar as capital is the totality of processing social relation. More precisely put, it is a process that contains and unfolds the determinations of social existence [Daseinsbestimmungen] (MEW42, 40; G, 106). As was argued in the last chapter, this is only possible because capital takes on living labor and the earth. It makes life and the planet as a whole productive and wealth related. As such, the totality of this process is, ultimately, a process of life (given that labor is the essence of life). The intrinsic relation between labor and capital, then, is an organic totality as a living totality. Thus when Marx argues against the abstractions of bourgeois economists and philosophers, he has in mind that they do not see the intrinsic relations of the object of economics as something organic (MEW42, 23). The term “organic” is not only a methodological concept; rather, it is a methodological concept that refers to society, and refers to the object of that method, since the object is capitalized living labor. Accordingly, we need to remember that although money is not simply an empirical entity, it is also not simply an abstract relation located in the “nowhere,” as the relation needs to exist, and it exists as the ever expanding exploitation of living labor.

The essence of process in general is twofold: [1] on the one hand, it is time, but [2] on the other hand, it is self-relatedness, which is made possible through the self-relatedness of time, which is temporality, understood as the horizons of keeping, anticipating, and presenting. Accordingly, money is the way in which all social relations come about and exist. Abstract monetary time is not simply empty then, since, it needs to instantiate itself in its temporal dimensions and it is this that thereby establishes what phenomenologists call a horizon. As capital is a social concept, the temporalization of money is identical with the formation of a social horizon. The temporality of money keeps what is past related to the present, and it opens up the future horizon of what can fall under the capitalist framework in advance, thereby constituting what is present. For example, as Marx underlines in the Urtext, money appears to us as the “securing of future needs” (MEGA II.2, 28), given that money as the real representation of wealth in capitalist societies is not the representation of specific and concrete needs. Instead, by means of its universal equivalent nature, money represents the possibility of fulfilling needs as they abstractly belong to individuals as members of capitalist society. Our main needs are defined by what we were able to buy (past), what we will buy (future), and therefore what we can buy (present). Need, under capitalism, becomes something that can no longer be understood without its monetary form. Accordingly, our needs turn into money relations along with all the consequences that belong to this shift. Our power to determine the future depends upon how much money we have in our pockets, and as such our needs are thereby constituted by abstract labor, until all that we “need” is money as such. Again, the schematization of future, in this case future needs, is regulated in capitalism through an abstract form. The future, hence, even before it appears as the future of individuals, is regulated by the schema as social future, which means that money is constituted as the universal need of social individuals. Put simply, money is that which everyone is in need of. So, prior to any individual, the society, in this case capitalist totality, determines what is “needed.” As one commentator nicely puts it:

Needs are met even before they arise, so that the commodities themselves create the need, relieving the individual of the burden of having new needs. Human imagination has thus become the imagination of capital. Advertising is our contemporary poetry, speaking directly to the most intimate of our desires. (Tomba 2013a, 61)

It is certainly true that certain groups, such as the upper classes, or institutions and companies, use their power to produce needs in their interest, but even the upper classes are not independent from money relations, since they, too, are a historically specific form of money-relation: the universal horizon of money is established in advance for all classes. Capitalist individuals want money before they can desire anything else. Money is the form under which all desires become possible, and as such it regulates that which individuals desire, how they think about getting their desires fulfilled, and what can count as a “legitimate” desire.[5] Anticipation of the future is money constituted, and what can be consumed is framed by money, as is most visible in the social engineering of desire and experience. As Haiven nicely puts it, money “colonizes the future” (Haiven 2011, 101).[6] Accordingly, we need to reconstruct the role of the gap between present and past, as well as the gap between present and future, as something that is itself constituted through money, since, as I argue, this gap takes on the universal forms of credit and debt. As Zizek has pointed out,

capitalism expands by repeatedly ‘borrowing from the future,’ by referring to some indefinite future moment of ‘full reimbursement’ which is forever deferred, like the constant rescheduling of the debts of Second and Third World countries by the IMF, with the fictional notion (which is operative, although no one believes in it) that, at some future moment, these debts will be repaid. (Zizek 2002, 279)

In recent years, we became used to making a difference between the real economy and the financialization sector. In truth, though, capitalist social relations cannot exist without the fundamental role of credit, debt, interest, fictitious capital, etc. With the role of these concepts as the constituting moments of the temporality of money and its schematization of the social horizon, it also becomes clear that we can now introduce the individual within the schematization process, as debt and credit not only open up and form the past and future social horizons, but also lead to what Lazzarato calls “modes of subjectivation.” Money, as he puts it,

is […] the expression of an asymmetry of forces, a power to prescribe and impose modes of exploitation, domination, and subjection. Money is first of all debt-money, created ex nihilo, which has no material equivalent other than its power to destroy/create social relations and, in particular, modes of subjectivation. (Lazzarato 2012, 34)

Recent developments in our Western economies have made it clearer that new forms of “subjectivations”—of turning individuals into subjects—appear through the intensification of credit and debt within our societies. All functions, places, and activities that are created through the capitalist social relations are now subjected not only to money in general, but also, especially recently, to money in a special temporal sense: credit and debt. With this comes a new form of de-possession, namely, the de-possession of the life of individuals by the “transformation of personal horizons into economic investments” (Haiven 2011, 95). For example, through life-long education credits individuals are forced to treat their own lives as something they have to invest in, which enables capital to take on and to subsume that which does not (yet) exist. One could therefore say that the financial system regulates individuals and their mental capacities in advance through what Stiegler calls “tertiary retentions” (Stiegler 2011a, 36), i.e., through a past produced by industries that escape the individual form of memory. When Marx explains in the Grundrisse that the worker “owes an obligation to capital for the fact that he is alive at all” (Dienst 2011, 149), we can now say that we owe capital an obligation for keeping future life alive. Imagining alternatives, accordingly, is no longer possible. For life becomes financialized and money is not only the form of social relations, but also the “medium through which we come to imagine social relations” (Haiven 2011, 100). As such, consciousness and its mental apparatus becomes subjected to the logic of investment, capital, and processing money. Finally, with the advent of television, consumer electronics, virtual reality, cameras, and new medical devices, the mental apparatus is increasingly the result of production (I will deal with this process in the last chapter).[7]

Monetized Future: Credit

If we would be naïve economic thinkers, or if we would make Engels’ mistake and read the first chapter of Capital as an analysis of barter exchange, then we would imagine a society that would operate on simple commodity exchange alone, i.e., one that would operate without money as the universal and abstract constitutive moment of sociality, and we could then, as many classical economists did, speculate about the introduction of money as a tool to make exchange easier. In this vein, let us imagine a simple exchange between someone who has tomatoes and someone who has shoes. Mental acts would be needed as a base on both sides of the exchange. Both parties need to use their whole mental apparatus in order to make the exchange happen. Primarily they will need to imagine, i.e., to anticipate, the exchange value of their products and how many shoes or how many tomatoes they will get for their own products. This imagination will depend upon what and how much one needs and what one wants. In a simple exchange, needs and wants will tend to be identical, i.e., in such a situation, one does not want more than one needs. In addition, both parties included in the exchange will be in the position of both buyer and seller, as the difference between buyer and seller, that is, where one is only seller and the other only buyer, presupposes the figure of the merchant. If the “simple exchange” is framed by a tradition of these kind of exchanges, both parties will also refer to their reproductive imagination and compare the current exchange with exchanges done in the past. Furthermore, they will need to reflect upon their need involved in the exchange. If the other party knows that the other is in high need of the product the exchange value will go up. By “exchange value” we refer here to the amount of product A that one gets for offering an amount of product B. For example, if ten tomatoes would go for one shoe, then one shoe is (not has) the exchange value of ten tomatoes. Such a simple commodity exchange neither presupposes simple money nor money as a universal; for, as I argued in chapter 3 with Marx, money establishes universal exchangeability under capitalism. In the example of barter we can already see not only how mental faculties, such as imagination, anticipation, and memory are involved, but also how psychological faculties, such as desire and need, are involved in simple exchange. Moreover, now we can see how the faculties involved in this fictitious barter exchange will be replaced once we try to conceptualize exchanges in a capitalist system, within which every exchange is, through value and money, tied to the whole sociability, including production, consumption, and the circulation of money, products, and labor.

With the introduction of money in the capitalist sense, which is to say, as the universal relationality in society, the imaginations and wants needed for simple exchanges in simple markets get replaced by a fixed ratio of expectations and rationalization of the exchanges. This example shows well how a mental capacity becomes replaced by a social schema that frames the individual expectations in advance and starts to replace “subjective” aspects in the constitution of society, insofar as that which is subjective or inter-subjective in barter now becomes externalized by being produced by the objective establishment of sociality. In this case, the monetary schema controls our mental and psychological faculties in advance. Marx had something like this in mind when he reflected upon the “perverse” nature of money in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1844. He writes there:

The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities—the divine power of money—lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind. That which I am unable to do as a human, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not—turns it, that is, into its contrary. If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence—from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, [money] is the truly creative power. No doubt the demand also exists for him who has no money, but his demand is a mere thing of the imagination without effect or existence for me, for a third party, for the [others], and which therefore remains even for me unreal and objectless. (MEW40, 566)

What Marx points out in these still anthropological considerations is the transforming and almost alchemist power of money, inasmuch as money works as a “translator” of something desired into something real and existing, which implies that the desire in the form of a mental imagination of something desired exists outside of someone’s mind and only because of money is it that a person exists as a social individual, i.e., as part of social reality. On the other hand, a person without money, but with the same desires, is thrown back onto herself and her powerless and a-social subjective position. If we take Marx’s strong theory of social recognition into account, we might say that such a person does not exist, as she is unable to be or exist as a (social) subject. Again, this does not mean that she does not exist in a physical sense; the claim rather is, that such a person does not “count” socially, since she is unable to participate in the whole. What is “inside” (as wishes and desires) in this case never appears “outside” (in the real social world). Put differently, the person never becomes established as something effective in social reality, and therefore she remains disconnected from any objective social relationship, and in this way, such a person remains outside of society. Put simply, we are social outcasts without money: do not count, cannot exist, and, from the viewpoint of society, our desires, wishes, and needs do not exist. Consequently, a person with sufficient money in capitalism will have hard times to understand the poor person, as the rich person tends to overlook that desires need to socially exist in order to be socially effective.

Having said this, this picture is, of course, too simple, as we need to take into account that a complex economic system not only produces the wants needed for the reproduction of the system, but also distributes subjects in advance, which establishes possibilities of what to wish for and of what to desire. It would be absurd to claim that an Ancient peasant could have had the desire to become a pilot, or, that a Middle Age serf could have had the desire to buy a package of instant soup or to have a “job” in a company, as those social things did not exist. At this point, however, I want to focus on the simple fact that our subjective faculties are framed by social-economic structures, which brings us back to the topic of temporalization introduced in the last section. For, in what follows we need to tie together the subjective faculties related to the temporalizations with the social horizon, i.e., we need to analyze how social horizons become established through framing and prestructuring the anticipatory functions and, above all, the establishment of what counts as the future in capitalism and for capitalist subjects. In this vein, it is interesting to see that standard economic theory deals with the problem and concept of future in a simple way: it ignores it! Hansjörg Herr explains the standard equilibrium theory in the following way:

The story goes like this: Markets for all goods, including all future markets for all goods at all future times, are opened today and will never open again. All future transactions are contracted today. Bananas and cars, to give an example, are bought and sold today, for tomorrow, for ten years, or 50 years from now—until time ends. The vector of relative prices does not only allocate all goods today, it allocates also all goods at all possible periods of time. The effective exchange of goods is only allowed to take place when a comprehensive inter-temporal equilibrium is found. In this model future is completely fixed by contracts. There is no place for real uncertainty; all economic agents know what can happen at all future periods of time and can take into account possible contingencies. (Herr 2011, 214)

In other words: future does not exist in the standard “rational expectation” modelling of markets and exchanges, and the irony is that not only the modelling itself but the real world tries to actualize this a-historical abstract vision of economies by fixing and stabilizing individuals and whole societies through a strict debt and control system.[8] Put differently, not only do we find a distorted conception of time and temporalization, but we can also see that this distorted conception is put into action in the real world. The capitalist schema is based on a specific way of taking on future time, namely, as we have argued so far, in specific forms of temporalization, which, in turn, establish a specific social horizon out of which individuals can act and make sense of their world. The main economic function that realizes the “absence of future” is the credit system. The capitalist schema thereby distributes and “redirects passions, desires, and action to its own advantage, for credit anticipates a future action whose result cannot be guaranteed in advance” (Lazzarato 2012, 68), although the schema, in fact, establishes this warranty by setting up a framework for what can be desired, what should be done, and what must be done in order to secure repayment. The latter became far more visible in recent neoliberal and global developments, since virtually every individual, city, town, region, and country is in debt and, hence, depends upon the ever expanding financial system and its management of risk, i.e., the future. The system thereby allows capital to move into every part of human life. Especially the fact that whole countries are deeply in debt brings in a logic that turns the future into a monetized gambling table where investment risks are calculated in relation to the future prosperity of countries, which includes reflection upon factors such as weather, national health, and education systems. What was once open to alternatives is now reduced to a harsh discipline in which money and its underlying psychic and economic aspects rule everything. Recent crises in Europe, for example, have demonstrated how whole countries and their entire population can be controlled within a few hours by the managers of the monetized future: bankers, financial ministers, former Goldman & Sachs employees now working as politicians, as well as investment and hedgefund managers. Given the increasing wealth disparities, this process is driven by the few who own everything and the masses who are deprived of their basic human properties and, consequently, turn into “substanceless workers.” How should we conceive of the core of this process?

To help answer this question we should turn to Marx’s remarks on Mill, which deal with the transformation of basic ethical relations into economic relations. In this text, debt and subjectivity plays a remarkable role. Most recently, Maurizio Lazzarato has not only argued that we should understand debt as social control (a thesis I agree with), but also that credit is primarily a “subjective” concept.[9] It is the latter thesis that I oppose here. Lazzarato argues that credit produces the “subjective figure” of an indebted man, the constitution of which cannot be traced back to labor, value, and production, which stands in stark contrast to what I try to argue in this book, insofar as I have tried to show that money implies an objective structure that functions as a quasi a priori framework for subjectivization. When Lazzarato claims that the origin of calculation and abstract measurements “must not be sought in economic exchange or in labor but in debt” (Lazzarato 2012, 43), he ends up making the same mistake that we noted in regard to Adorno, given that he falls back onto a “market” position that posits simple commodity exchange as the central phenomenon, instead of analyzing the genesis of exchange in the couple labor/money.

In addition, as debt is a historical phenomenon and, as some scholars claim, existed even earlier than money (Graeber 2011), Lazzarato also falls back onto an abstract and empty universalism that takes debt to be an anthropological phenomenon. In contrast, if we take into account that capitalism can only exist on the basis of socially universal categories, such as value and money, debt must be dialectially implicated by the capitalist schema. Indeed, it is an effect and not the cause of the system, which also means that the relation of debt and power (Lazzarato 2012, 32) is derived from the social totality in which it takes place. Accordingly, the capitalist schema implies a specific form of rationality and calculation that necessarily involves monetary calculations. My argument is plain: the replacement of money by the “calculation of guarantees of debt payment” (Lazzarato 2012, 43) presupposes the form in which money appears in capitalism, which is a specific temporality of time/money. Moreover, if, as Lazzarato claims, debt is the universal constituent of subjects, it presupposes the totality of society. In addition, it presupposes the establishment of an abstract form of measurement that can make debt a substantial phenomenon.

Finally, Lazzarato overlooks that credit is based on the assumption of future productivity, as the creditor does not simply expect and calculate debt repayments; rather, the creditor must assume that the rate of exploitation and, hence, the productivity of the laboring debtor and the whole society of which the debtor is a member, is in place as long as the credit lasts. Expressed in more fetishistic terms, i.e., in terms that hide the labor genesis; as Moulier-Boutang has it: “[F]inancial operators begin to incorporate into their calculation decisive future elements such as the potential for innovation” (Moulier-Boutang 2011, 32). However, unfortunately Lazzarato, as one commentator remarked, rather poorly relates the issue of debt to capitalism (Wortham 2013, 37). For example, a bank does not simply give a credit to an individual; rather, it calculates the risk alongside social properties of the individual in question (which is nowadays done by computer systems). These social properties, however, imply the society as a whole. Having a job presupposes working for a stable company. Working in a stable labor environment presupposes a stable market. A stable market presupposes the functioning of capital, etc., etc. As Marx and Engels remark in an early article in the Rheinische Zeitung,

Credit depends on the confidence that the exploitation of wage labor by capital, of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, of the petty bourgeois by the big bourgeois, will continue in the traditional manner. Hence any political move of the proletariat, whatever its nature, unless it takes place under the direct command of the bourgeoisie, shakes this trust, impairs credit. (MEW6, 116)

Credit and debt, in other words, are only possible because the profiting classes assume that the labor situation and the economic development will remain the same, and, accordingly, that every crisis will lead to two reactions: [1] the attempt to suppress or ease the class conflict by the upper classes, as well as [2] the expansion of state power, as the state ultimately must act in the interest of capital and capital accumulation. As Marx and Engels already clearly saw, the recovery of social and economic trust requires and can be compensated by a stronger state.[10] For example, the larger the US debt, the stronger the US will appear militarily. As we know, we are currently observing both the destruction of the working class and an expansion of state power, discipline, and control in our neoliberal times. Bonefeld puts this in the following way:

By imposing upon social relations the elementary form of capital, i.e., money, the state is involved in safeguarding the guarantee of money through coercion, binding the present to the future in an attempt to make certain the turnover of monetary claims on the future exploitation of labor. (Bonefeld 1995, 202)

The implication of the whole society, or the implication of the economy at large, is the only reason why credit today is “decided” by computers, as these systems are able to calculate the individual risk in relation to the social and economic risk involved. In other words, the a priori role of the capitalist schema cannot be overturned by arguing that credit is prior to money, even if it would turn out that, historically, credit was prior to money. In any event, once the capitalist schema is in place, the role of credit and debt needs to be reevaluated. So, on this point, I agree with Lazzarato, its central function needs to be analyzed, especially in relation to time and temporality.

The central transference that occurs through fixing the social future horizon through credit in its crystallized form is analyzed by Marx in a brief text written in 1843. Although much of what Marx says here disappears in the later writings, central aspects of his analysis deserve close attention, especially since he was already at this point well aware that the development of money in its different form, such as metal, paper, stocks, and credit, has its inner logic. The more abstract the “real” form of money becomes, the more perfect it will fit within a fully expanded capitalism, since it can then posit itself as the real value of virtually everything, despite that it seems to be otherwise:

Hence paper money and the whole number of paper representatives of money (such as bills of exchange, mandates, promissory notes, etc.) are the more perfect mode of existence of money as money and a necessary factor in the progressive development of the money system. In the credit system, of which banking is the perfect expression, it appears as if the power of the alien, material force were broken, the relationship of self-estrangement abolished and man had once more human relations to man. (MEW40, 448)

The end point of this development, Marx claims, can be seen in credit, as credit is the form of money that takes on the inner essence of humanity itself, namely, its ethical substance. The “organized banking system” (MEW40, 448) is, accordingly, the capitalist organization and structuring of the personal core of humans and their relationships. It is important to note how close this idea is to what I call the establishment of a social horizon through the capitalist schema, as Marx here follows the idea that the real subsumption of the living individual under capital transfers, turns around, and frames what they can be and how they can exist under capital. Consequently, this also includes who they want to be, what they desire, and how they conceptualize their needs. The result of this is quite simple: once capital has taken on the living individual in the form of living labor, virtually all capacities related to want and desire become monetized. As the poor does not exist in social reality, so can subjectivity not exist without money. Money is, as Marx says, “the God” in capitalism. This general turn around can also be observed alongside ethical qualities of humans, and their personalities:

[…] the self-estrangement, the dehumanisation, is all the more infamous and extreme because its element is no longer commodity, metal, paper, but man's moral existence, man's social existence, the innermost depths of his heart, and because under the appearance of man's trust in man it is the height of distrust and complete estrangement. (MEW40, 448)

The existence of individuals in social objects is now something abstract (credit, a promise, a claim, an obligation, etc.) and therefore takes on the “abstract” properties of social individuals, namely, their ethical substance, which Marx identifies with trust. Independent from the question of whether trust is really the center of ethical substance, what he has in mind here with trust is not an explicit act of trusting someone; rather, he has in mind the unspoken and unreflected way of being related to another person as an equal, as recognized and accepted. Trust is here the positive social relation: the substantial tie between social individuals as individuals recognizing each other in their existence. It is undisturbed, and as such not skeptical. As a consequence, credit is based on the opposite of trust, as credit, now taken as a social relation (and not something that one receives or gives), implies [1] distance, [2] judgment, and [3] a negative relation to the other person. The debtor must prove that she is worthy of receiving credit, i.e., it is no longer simply assumed that one is worthy, given that one is forced to establish one’s “worth” in the critical eyes of the creditor. What we can observe, then, is a social shift, that is, a conversion of an ethical relation into a monetary relation, within which what is not countable, not calculable, and not instrumental, turns into a social relation that is determined by counting, calculating, instrumentality, and “checking.” Credit, in other words, introduces a totally new form of social relations that, through their newly received monetary form, also changes all unquestioned “trusted” properties of individuals. It is clear at this point that this shift also contains a shift in the future horizon, insofar as this horizon now becomes schematized through a calculative and instrumental framework. One of these shifts that occur is the shift from “being a good person” to “being a person who is able to pay”:

What constitutes the essence of credit? We leave entirely out of account here the content of credit, which is again money. We leave out of account, therefore, the content of this trust in accordance with which a man recognizes another man by advancing him a certain quantity of value and—at best, namely, when he does not demand payment for the credit, i.e., he is not a usurer showing his trust in his fellow man not being a swindler, but a ‘good’ man. By a ‘good’ man, the one who bestows his trust understands, like Shylock, a man who is ‘able to pay.’ (MEW40, 448)

Goodness as an ethical property of individuals now becomes framed by monetary relations. As a consequence, wealth appears upside down: just because someone is wealthy she appears to be a “good person,” whereas the poor, the unemployed, the “have-nots,” the excluded, the inexistent, show up as “bad,” “immoral,” or in general as someone who does something “wrong.” For example, we tend to refer to Bill Gates as someone who does “good things” for the society and is a “good person” because he gives some of his wealth back to society and supports projects such as those that diminish AIDS or support education, etc. What we implicitly connect, then, is the ability to give money with being good, and, as a consequence, we implicitly exclude people who do not have money, and who are poor, deprived, etc., from being good and being socially recognized. Put differently, if you do not have money, you disappear from the social-ethical landscape, as you cannot really contribute to what defines being good in capitalism, which is the ability to pay. As another example, notice how we celebrate Ellie Broad for his contributions to art museums all around the US while we look down on the homeless because they do not “contribute” to society. For contributions to society, being a member of society, is defined by money; whereas if one is a debtor, all that defines you is your ability to pay back what you owe.[11]

It is clear from the foregoing that credit, taken to be a social relation, and taken as a social relation that not only defines the relation between two persons or groups, but ultimately the whole planet (as all countries are in debt and capital is connected to the world market), introduces a social shift on a scale never seen before. Indeed, “‘morality’ of debt results in the moralization of the unemployed, the ‘assisted,’ the users of public services, as well as of entire populations” (Lazzarato 2012, 30). Similarly, Marx goes on to explain:

Within the credit relationship, it is not the case that money is transcended in man, but that man himself is turned into money, or money is incorporated in him. Human individuality, human morality itself, has become both an object of commerce and the material in which money exists. Instead of money, or paper, it is my own personal existence, my flesh and blood, my social virtue and importance, which constitutes the material, corporeal form of the spirit of money. Credit no longer resolves the value of money into money but into human flesh and the human heart. (MEW40, 449)

This Shakespearean note, though expressed in speculative terms, is remarkable, as we can see here that we should not think about the shift that occurs through global credit as something that remains “virtual,” “symbolic,” “mathematical,” etc.; rather, we should think about this shift as a corporeal process that changes social materiality itself, insofar as credit subjects the living body to its control. As capital subsumes living labor and like a vampire sucks the blood out of the worker, credit does the same on a second-order level. Capital, in the form of credit, however, now sucks the future blood out of the working individual, which contains the worker’s mentality, hopes, and desires. This incorporation is an important aspect of the capitalist schema, particularly since this helps us further understand that the schema is a schema that is objective, i.e., that it is independent from intentions, mental acts, etc., but at the same time that it produces intentions, and mental acts, specifically anticipations, expectations, and imaginations that open up our relation towards the future. We will see later that this production is especially visible in new technologies that embrace the whole living individual. One of these shifts that is future related Marx explicitly points out:

Here it is also glaringly evident that distrust is the basis of economic trust; distrustful calculation [Abwägen] whether credit ought to be given or not; spying into the secrets of the private life, etc., of the one seeking credit; the disclosure of temporary straits in order to overthrow a rival by a sudden shattering of his credit, etc. The whole system of bankruptcy, spurious enterprises, etc. . . . As regards government loans, the state occupies exactly the same place as the man does in the earlier example. . . . In the game with government securities it is seen how the state has become the plaything of businessmen, etc. (MEW40, 450)

The distrust that determines the social relation is a future relation because the creditor turns the future behavior of the debtor into an instrumental deliberation. It is, hence, already presupposed that the future shows up in this case as something that is in need of being calculated and something that can be calculated.[12] The future, then, is no longer simply taken as granted to something that is infinitely open to change, since, the calculative closure of the future turns it into something that can be determined now. Put differently, the future can be dealt with within the present; it is nothing that escapes our rationality. Instead, it can be controlled, which presupposes that the future shows up as something controllable. The controllability and the calculability, however, is something that is presupposed for every concrete act of calculation. The process, then is double-sided: by opening up the future to calculability it becomes closed through calculability. As Stiegler puts it:

As pure calculation, it denies the very possibility of a future, given that the future cannot be calculated because it is essentially indeterminate: a calculable future is no longer a future but just the consequence of the present. The future, as that which breaks with the present, that is, with what exists, is already always projected onto another plane, one which does not exist and which, as such, remains incalculable. (Stiegler 2013a, 68)

In the light of neoliberal developments, Marx’s comments in the quote given earlier about the effect of credit onto spying is truly prophetic. We might ask ourselves here: is it just by chance that we can observe a global extension of the credit system, the astronomical expansion of the financial and banking system in connection with the universal takeover of states by corporations and the establishment of a universal spying and control system by those states?[13]

Be that as it may, we can see here why Lazzarato’s claim that credit is the exploitation of “existence” and that the “material of money is not labor time, but the time of existence” (Lazzarato 2012, 60), mystifies the real relation contained in credit, insofar as the “time of existence” through the capitalist schema turns into one that is structured by the possible, i.e., past and future, productivity of existing laborers and their labor power. Existence, then, cannot simply be separated from labor, as existence under capitalism means “valorized existence.” In this way, Lazzarato’s interpretation does not go far enough, as he does not take into account that the distinction between “existence” and “labor time” remains artificial; for we are ultimately unable to determine the becoming of any existing individuality under capitalism independent from the exploitation of living labor and labor power. The capitalist schema unfolds, distributes, and structures this living labor through capital and, as an effect, determines the temporal horizons of labor and for the laboring individuals. The main control of these horizons are then credit and debt. The incorporation that Marx has in mind here is not the incorporation of money into “existence”; rather, it is the incorporation of money into the productivity of existence. Lazzarato’s position is influenced by the postoperaist assumption that the productivity of humans in late capitalism is established as an independent factor alongside capital. This assumption, however, is doubtful.[14] Similarly, against some standard economic theory assumptions, which claim that rational agents are presupposed for capitalist markets, we can now see how this vision is distorted, and that it should be seen the other way around. Rational agents, i.e., agents that are constantly forced to (instrumentally) turn all relations and all things that they encounter into calculations, are the result of the market process. Put in another way the rationality of agents is the attempt to anticipate the behavior of all other agents in the same market. Second order processes, such as “expected expectations” and “desired desires” (Haug 2012, 62), are the result of the disciplining effect of the closed future horizon that enable those expectations and “call up a calculative subject” (Langley 2008, 100). Stiegler nicely puts it this way:

capitalism is before anything else an age of credit. Insofar as it is credit, capitalism presupposes a belief in the future—a belief in the future that may be anticipated, and therefore a future which can be calculated. […] This is why the current age of capitalism, which is hyper-industrial to the degree that it is hyper-computational, insofar as it is capable of transforming everything into numbers, is encountering its limit and entering into a zone of very great danger. (Stiegler 2011b, 46)

Standpoint theorists have argued that the scope of what individuals can imagine about their lives, their futures, and their societies depends upon their situation and social position. Though I do not want to argue against this theory, in the context developed so far we should take into account that the capitalist schema in some sense universalizes imagination and takes the “situatedness” out of it. Money, in other words, pre-structures what can be imagined and in which framework present experiences are shaped, formed, and limited. Money does not care, we might say, about the position of a social agent and it necessarily integrates every member of the society in the same way (if we leave the consequences of social hierarchies, etc. aside for a moment). There is no outside of society as soon as “capital reigns as the totalizing principle of the social order” (Smith 2006, 189).[15]

We should also see that the displacement of ethical terms and their turn into economic terms implies a new form of social responsibility as well as what it means to be a “functioning” member of capitalist societies. In order to fit into the ever tighter realm of calculability, individuals are forced to develop new virtues and habits that go along with the monetized future of their lives and societies. As Paul Langley has it, laboring individuals are subjected to a “’discipline grounded on a social ethic which has economic rationality, planning and foresight, prudence, and social and moral responsibility among its cardinal virtues’” (Langley 2008, 91). This observation is not new, as sociologists have noticed that more and more individuals must treat their lives in an entrepreneurial fashion, investing into their futures, and that they are forced to take their lives as if these are businesses to lead. The consequence of this process is a “neoliberal individualization of responsibility” (Langley 2008, 91) because the society as a whole or the state no longer functions as a backup or security horizon. With the monetization of the future, this future now shows up as a personal risk. Individuals become “risk managers” (Haug 2012, 111) and entrepreneurs of labor power. Life can go wrong, but not because someone acted badly or simply made bad choices; rather, we constantly need to make the right economic choices understanding that the risk involved is carried on the shoulders of individuals and their personal failures.

De-possession, for example, appears as a personal risk, thereby excluding the whole systemic framework. From 2007 through 2011 more than 10 million homes were foreclosed in the US, which led to a massive (invisible) migration of a large part of the US population. According to Sassen, more than 30 million people in the US were forced to move, and as a result of this massive migration houses were taken away, and families were forced to leave their homes, which are now simply falling apart. In Detroit, for example, more than 140,000 homes were vacated during the financial crisis, but almost all families involved had to take this violence as the result of their individual “bad” economic choices. The paradox, however, is that this was only possible because credit has been extended to what, in a rather surprising move, Marx calls the “socialization of capital” in volume three of Capital; for, as he argues, with the extension of financial capital and credit related operations in society, funds needed to make investments transcend the abilities of single investors, and, hence, profit making capitalists turn into “managers” of money that they do not own. Accordingly, in the form of the financial aristocracy the classical capitalist who lords over labor and fixed capital turns into a parasitic group of people who make money by using money that they themselves do not have. As Marx puts it,

The control over social capital, not the individual capital of his own, gives him control of social labor. The capital itself, which a man really owns or is supposed to own in the opinion of the public, becomes purely a basis for the superstructure of credit. This is particularly true of wholesale commerce, through which the greatest portion of the social product passes. All standards of measurement, all excuses more or less still justified under capitalist production, disappear here. What the speculating wholesale merchant risks is social property, not his own. Equally sordid becomes the phrase relating the origin of capital to savings, for what he demands is that others should save for him. […] Success and failure both lead here to a centralization of capital, and thus to expropriation on the most enormous scale. Expropriation extends here from the direct producers to the smaller and the medium-sized capitalists themselves. It is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production; its accomplishment is the goal of this production. In the last instance, it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals. With the development of social production the means of production cease to be means of private production and products of private production, and can thereafter be only means of production in the hands of associated producers, i.e., the latter’s social property, much as they are their social products. However, this expropriation appears within the capitalist system in a contradictory form, as appropriation of social property by a few; and credit lends the latter more and more the aspect of pure adventurers. Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock-exchange wolves. There is antagonism against the old form in the stock companies, in which social means of production appear as private property; but the conversion to the form of stock still remains ensnared in the trammels of capitalism; hence, instead of overcoming the antithesis between the character of wealth as social and as private wealth, the stock companies merely develop it in a new form. (MEW25, 454)

In this astonishing passage Marx outlines the inner contradictions of the capitalist system since he shows both how capitalism produces a financial elite that receives its entire wealth because it feeds off of socialized labor. In addition, Marx also points out how the extension of credit to the whole society and the whole planet establishes a large scale expropriation of all laboring individuals and their wealth by a few. The social horizon that credit establishes, in other words, at one and the same time is not only the closure of the future and the integration of all individuals into this horizon, but also the theft of real wealth by those who function as representatives of the extended credit system. “De-possession,” to use Harvey’s term, becomes the central and wide-spread phenomenon in and through a monetized productive future. As Marx remarks, the more the financial managers of social wealth, become disconnected from the rest, and the more these groups become “adventurers” and gamblers, the more all others become dependent upon the risks involved for the whole society and, ultimately, for the whole world economy. For the money managers, capital appears as a thing that has totally lost its “downward” social genesis (MEW25, 405), and for the members of society wealth is stolen without them realizing its “upward” social genesis. The fetishistic constitution of capitalist society in which the financial managers of wealth no longer consider themselves as members of society, and the rest of us who no longer consider ourselves as members of society, is now perfected, as society—totally capitalizedturns into something external to everyone. As Marx beautifully puts it,

The thing (money, commodity, value) is now capital even as a mere thing, and capital appears as a mere thing. The result of the entire process of reproduction appears as a property inherent in the thing itself. It depends on the owner of the money, i.e., of the commodity in its continually exchangeable form, whether he wants to spend it as money or loan it out as capital. In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish, self-expanding value, money generating money, are brought out in their pure state and in this form it no longer bears the birth-marks of its origin. The social relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, of money, to itself. Instead of the actual transformation of money into capital, we see here only form without content. (MEW25, 405)

Again, this process is contradictory, as, on the one hand, risk appears to individuals as their personal risk, but, on the other hand, this personal risk is objectively based upon a risk that the upper classes systematically produce by becoming the managers of the entire wealth of societies. Put differently, what is in truth the effect of a financialized future and the effect of socialized risk, is turned into the private risk of individuals. To repeat the point, this is only possible, because money in capitalism is established as a real existing universal and value is established as the form of labor. Accordingly, capital is itself contradictory, insofar as its universal form contains both universal expropriation and universal socialization.[16] The slogan “Privatize profits and socialize risks” fits well with this situation. As Bonefeld points out, “capital’s attempt to suppress the ‘law of value’ by making money out of money rather than exploiting labor, emphasizes that capital lives beyond its means in a desperate attempt to prolong the present into the future” (Bonefeld 1995, 204).

The monetization of the future trough credit also subtly changes the structure of what can be wished for and what individuals desire and want.[17] Getting credit fills individuals with the dream of becoming independent from the society, while turning the truth on its head, insofar as entering the credit system requires, precisely, the opposite, namely, becoming more dependent upon the social whole. For example, though having a mortgage is sold on the basis of the promise to become independent, self-reliable, and “free” in society, the mortgage ties all mortgage owners to the whole market (and its crises), to a shared future, and to the universally extended credit system. As such, choices and the range of actions, reactions, and behavior becomes limited rather than extended. The holiday credit that the bank offers comes with the promise to become free through consumption, but, in truth, it is an act of homogeneity and of making us dependent upon all of us because the holiday credit synthesizes all social individuals and integrates them into one temporal horizon. As value is the true universal form of all productivity in capitalism, credit establishes a future that all necessarily need (and want) to share as one. The fact that we all have the same future is the effect of the synchronization that occurs through the integration of all wants and desires into a monetized future. Not only is it the case that we all belong to the same society now; rather, this sameness and our belonging to it is projected into the future. The effect is clear: our desires, wishes, and hopes become tied to this unified horizon to which we all belong, and the more credit is given for consumption, the more our wishes and desires turn into consumptive wishes and desires. Getting credit is, hence, identical with spending money, which, in turn, is the form that our wishes manifest. However, a future that is totally dependent upon capital in the form of credit, turns into a future that can only be conceived as something that comes about through money. Every wish, every hope, and every action that tries to establish the future as something outside of this horizon will increasingly become excluded, rendered inexistent, or appear meaningless. Whereas retirement becomes a purchase for some, survival becomes a question of money for others. The language used to describe this shift is clear. For example, in a document for workers by the Department of Labor we can read that a successful future “‘requires determination, hard work, a sound savings habit, the right knowledge, and a well-designed financial plan’” (quoted in Langley 2008, 98). Similarly, as we know by now, education becomes an investment, educators take students as customers, and politicians are forced to think about themselves as managers of the society.

Monetized Past: Accumulation

In order to understand how the temporalization of the past is equally important for the synthesis of the capitalist schema, we need to look at very important but often overlooked considerations by Marx about development and genesis. In a central passage from Capital, in the context of his analysis of primitive accumulation [ursprüngliche Akkumulation] Marx introduces the difference between two terms, namely, “origin” and “past,” in which his rejection of metaphysical views of history are visible:

This primitive [ursprüngliche] accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin [Sündenfall] in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin [Ursprung] is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past [Vergangenheit]. Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it comes to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority who, despite all their labor, have up to now nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is everyday preached to us in the defense of property. M. Thiers, for example, still repeats it with all the solemnity of a statesman to the French people, who were once so full of wit and ingenuity. But as soon as the question of property is at stake, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the standpoint of the nursery tale as the one thing fit for all age-groups and all stages of development. In actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part. In the tender annals of political economy, the, idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and ‘labor’ were from the beginning of time the sole means of enrichment, ‘this year’ of course always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic. (MEW23, 741; CI, 873)

What Marx attacks in this passage is the metaphysical separation of something that “falls” from heaven and comes out of the blue, so to speak, and something that comes about. Marx argues here that if the past is posed within a theological and metaphysical framework, it will appear as a separated event, which then determines the essence of that of which it is the origin forever and, accordingly, has itself no history, since as the same thing it fits “for all ages and for all stages of development.” Origin or essence is here abstracted from its development and appears as an external entity to the development itself. “Development,” however remains itself too abstract, as Marx is here not simply interested in historical development; rather, the analysis of primitive accumulation is the reconstruction of what, in the present, we are used to call “capital” and “capitalism.” It is the beginning of capitalism, which cannot be reduced to a cause-effect relation. If we conceive the origin of capitalism as the genesis of capital rather than a separated origin that fell from heaven, then we learn to understand that the past is something that is within and part of the present and within and part of capital. As others, such as David Harvey, have argued, primitive accumulation is something that accompanies capital and the development of capitalism at every stage of its development. Violence, de-possesion, expropriation, enrichment, class struggle, and oppression is, consequently not something that we have somehow left behind as a first stage of what now seems to be capitalism with a human face; rather, it is part of its genesis and therefore part of the daily expansion of capitalism. This important reflection on the status of the term “origin” in Marx becomes even clearer in the following passage:

The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labor; it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-laborers. So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as ‘primitive’ because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital. (MEW23, 742; CI, 875)

Past and history turn here from metaphysical into dialectical concepts. What appears as the a-historical origin and metaphysical rupture is, accordingly, from a historical point of view a process and a development of something, in which through violence and struggle that which is posed as the origin of history comes about and, hence, is the result of the violent process. Put differently, what appears from the ahistorical view of bourgeoise economics as the “natural” state of things and the ahistorical nature of capitalism is, in its truth, the coming about of capitalism (which can also include its expansion and development towards the future). The past is in the first theory (standard economics, theology, metaphysics) conceived as something that is over, a thinglike expression of the past, and lies behind us like a fact. In this sense it is similar to an abstract event that happened in someone’s life. For example, we tend to point to “dates” in our lives, as if our lives came about as a series of events that remain disconnected, including an abstractly conceived first event called “birth.” Birth is like a “thing,” separated and unrelated without any intrinsic relationality. This positivistic vision of life as a series of given dates, we need to argue, remains deeply insufficient, as with this model are are unable to grasp the genesis of this life at any point of its development. This very Heideggerian point of view is something that Marx already had in mind in 1844 when he points out the following in regard to the assumption of an “original position” by economists:

Such a primordial condition explains nothing; it merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance. The economist assumes in the form of a fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce – namely, the necessary relationship between two things – between, for example, division of labor and exchange. Thus the theologian explains the origin of evil by the fall of Man – that is, he assumes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained. (MEW40, 510)[18]

Again, we see here Marx’s important insight into the essence of time and history in relation to its philosophical understanding and dialectical method.[19] History is in the standard economic theory understood from a positivistic point of view. Origin, Ursprung, is in this theory something that has no history, development and becoming, which is to say, it occurs outside of its genesis. Conceived in a Marxian framework, the past is instead something that is related to the present, is still part of it, and needs to be included in the present and its theoretical understanding. Similar to Nietzsche (and Foucault), from a Marxian point of view one might say that the genesis is its origin, in as much as history can only be reconstructed from the present and we need to take into account that which makes up its own development. One can see here the closeness to the social schema that I introduced in the beginning of this section with Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s schematism and time. Whereas the positivist theory does not know of the temporalization of time, i.e., the temporalization of money and capital, as it posits the past as something that occurs objectively in time, the Marxian standpoint helps us understand that the past is itself something that can realize itself only as past, i.e., as a past of a specific present. The past, we might say, is not some neutral event, outside of history; rather, what the past is and means, and how it is conceivable for us requires a standpoint from which the past can be understood as a moment of the present. This position presupposes that there is a unity between past and present, i.e., a temporal unity that establishes the ongoing relation of the becoming of this unity, which is the capitalist schema as processing money. The unity cannot be anything else than capital, processing money, itself. Consequently, the past temporalizes itself through labor, money, debt that establishes the past social horizon in which subjects find themselves. Again, because the social schema of capital is the universal framework and determines all relations, money constitutes the meaningfulness of the capitalist social world as a whole. As such, the material schema of money enables and makes possible the stability of this world as one world. It can only be one and exist as the same, however, if its synthesis is established in a temporal way, which means that the past must (constantly) be established as the past of the synthesis and the future must (constantly) be established as the future of the synthesis, some aspects of which we have analysed in the last section.[20] The present, we might say, carries with it a constant reminder of what brings it about. The absolute social horizon, accordingly, is the accumulation of capital in both directions, past and future, but the past establishes itself as the absolute social horizon out of which all meaning and capital time is constituted because all capital accumulations go ultimately back to the original accumulation the past establishes itself as the absolute social horizon out of which all meaning and capital time is constituted.

The constitution of the past for and within the present is also important in regard to the other side of capital, namely, labor. In an important passage from the Manifest of the Communist Party it reads as follows:

In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In Communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer. In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. (MEW4, 474)

This passage is truly astonishing. Why do Marx and Engels claim here that in capitalism the past dominates the present? In order to understand this further we need to recall that the distinction between what Marx calls “dead labor” and “living labor” is constitutive for the process of capital accumulation and value.[21] This distinction is especially important in regard to the revolutionary appropriation of the means of production by capital and the ex-appropriation of the laborer from the labor process, which turns the living laborer into use value for capital in the form of abstract labor power. We have earlier described the process of how capital takes on the living core, the productivity, of the laboring individual. Important is in this context that the means of production, once the full capital reproduction cycle has been established, appear from the position of capital as “fixed” capital, which, in turn, appears to the living laborer as something external to her and which subsumes the laborer under it as a foreign power. For example, in Capital it reads as follows in regard to factories:

Even the lighting of the labor becomes an instrument of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labor process but also capital’s process of valorization, has this in common, but it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker. However, it is only with the coming of machinery that this inversion first acquires a technical and palpable reality. Owing to its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labor confronts the worker during the labor process in the shape of capital, dead labor, which dominates and soaks up living labor-power. The separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labor, and the transformation of those faculties into powers exercised by capital over labor, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by large-scale industry erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual machine-operator, who has now been deprived of all significance, vanishes to an infinitesimal quantity in the face of the science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of social labor embodied in the system of machinery, which, together with those three forces, constitutes the power of the ‘master.’ (MEW23, 440; CI, 548)

What Marx wants to say here is that the relation of living labor to the “tools” used in the labor process turns upside down because living labor now becomes a “tool” for the machinery that, in turn, is essentially nothing else than fixed capital. Living labor, accordingly becomes subordinated and subjected in toto to capital, and, as a consequence that which should be “alive” appears as dead and that which should be “dead” appears as the living principle. Consequently, when Marx and Engels refer to the relation between past and present in the Manifest they have the same perversion in mind, insofar as in capitalism the means of production—machines, computers, robots as the result of past labor—are more important than the laboring individuals and are the productive source of wealth. Communism, accordingly, refers to a process through which the productivity of individuals is restored as the true source of all sociality and social wealth.

If we tie this result together with what we discovered in the last section in regard to the future horizon of the capitalist schema, we need to come to the conclusion that to some extend the past is established in capitalism as the primary horizon, out of which all other relations emerge, for the future is established as one that already happened through the future monetary expansion. For example, the mortgage that we receive presupposes that the same society will exist for the length of the mortgage. Whenever a country is billions of dollars in debt, it must do everything in its power to make debt payments possible. Everything, in other words, will go on as ever. No substantial change will occur. Nothing will happen. This means that the future is taken as something that cannot really occur as something open and new, since it is established as something that has already happened and already taken place. The past, accordingly, is in this case the primary temporal horizon out of which everything is constituted, although it seems to be the case as if everything we do is so important for the future: dynamics, innovation, creativity, etc. All these things are—because of monetization and the capitalist schema—in truth the closure of the future, as we no longer are able to take the future as something open to something outside of what has already been established. Paradoxically put, the existence of credit and debt freezes future time by memorizing the future.

As we saw above, capital in the form of credit vampire like sucks the future blood already out of living laborers through the credit system. We can observe a similar effect on the side of the temporalization of the past. As Marx mentions in the chapter on primitive accumulation in Capital, with the emergence of national debt an internal system came about that was historically connected to the expansion of capitalism and to new accumulations in formerly undeveloped areas.

Along with the national debt there arose an international credit system, which often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people. Thus the villainies of the Venetian system of robbery formed one of the secret foundations of Holland’s wealth in capital, for Venice in her years of decadence lent large sums of money to Holland. There is a similar relationship between Holland and England. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Holland’s manufactures had been far outstripped. It had ceased to be the nation preponderant in commerce and industry. One of its main lines of business, therefore, from 1701 to 1776, was the lending out of enormous amounts of capital, especially to its great rival England. The same thing is going on today between England and the United States. A great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any birth-certificate, was yesterday, in England, the capitalized blood of children. (MEW23, 783; CI, 920)

What Marx describes here is nothing else than what some interpret as recent developments of neoliberal globalization and the global development of an ever expanding world market. The establishment of national debt, however, necessarily already implies this expansion, as national debt can only be established through system that goes beyond national boundaries and that makes national debt possible, i.e., an international financial and credit system. What appears then magically in one country as the expansion of consumption despite large debt is only possible because workers work in unbearable conditions in countries such as China, Bangladesh, and Katar who do the invisible bloody work that is necessary for capital gains in other countries. Credit, accordingly, establishes the past as something that not only is disconnected from the present but also fixed through the constant reminders of the debtor and his or her obligations. It is a constant reminder of what has been done in the past as the origin of the relation, thereby suppressing the genesis in its result. For example, the decision to buy a house and to get a mortgage becomes “fixed” as a reminder of one’s responsibility and what one has done in one’s past. The indebted person is unable to develop a free relation to her past because the “sin” of indebtedness functions from its emergence as an inscription of memory that determines the person as long as the indebtedness is actual. As such the past is separated, fixed, independent, uncontrollable and without history. “The effects of the power of debt on subjectivity (guilt and responsibility) allow capitalism to bridge the gap between present and future” (Lazzarato 2012, 46). As a consequence, debt ties individuals to their past, reminds them, repeats the original sin and fixes the present condition to a future through control:

Debt controls you. It disciplines your consumption, imposing austerity on you and often reducing you to strategies of survival, but beyond that it even dictates your work rhythms and choices. If you finish university in debt, you must accept the first paid position offered in order to honor your debt. If you bought an apartment with a mortgage, you must be sure not to lose your job or take a vacation or a study leave from work. The effect of debt, like that of the work ethic, is to keep your nose to the grindstone. Whereas the work ethic is born within the subject, debt begins as an external constraint but soon worms its way inside. Debt wields a moral power whose primary weapons are responsibility and guilt, which can quickly become objects of obsession. You are responsible for your debts and guilty for the difficulties they create in your life. (Hardt/Negri 2012, 10)

What we find in the case of credit is also implied in the value form as such. The socially necessary average time and abstract labor leads to a labor time that is itself “abstract” because, as we have argued before, labor in capitalism becomes disconnected from the social interconnectedness and concrete labor. “The capitalist mode of production presupposes its [time, C.L.] unity because its temporary measure [Mass] appears as ‘history free time.’ (Lohmann 1991, 162). The value form, as Lohmann points out, “keeps pasts present” (Lohmann 1998, 165), insofar as it hides its genesis in its fetishist forms. Commodity fetishism is the necessary way social relations appear in capitalism as “thinglike” formations and they can only appear as things because their social genesis becomes invisible on the surface of commodity exchange, capital accumulation, and interest as the ultimate relation of M and M’. The social genesis, the history of money, capital, and interest, disappears in its results and “empties out” or “exstinguishes” (löscht aus, Jameson 2011, 94) the historical processes that led to those results (although critical analysis can reveal those histories and can render them visible again), including violence, suffering, pain, oppression, and struggle. The emptying out of social genesis leads, as we will see in the next chapter, to an overall homogenization of the past and “depersonalized time” (Bifo 2011, 130) through the production of homogeneity through the media and audience industries (Stiegler 2011b, 114).

Monetized Present: Integration

One direct effect of both the temporalization of the future through credit and temporalization of the past through accumulation is that those two horizons become one horizon for one world, which allows us to speak of “capitalism” or “capitalist world.” The capitalist schema, in short, synchronizes all temporalizations to one single time frame in the form of a temporalization of money, and thereby “integrates” every potential reference to something in the capitalist world by establishing “one” world. This is already abstractly constituted through value, as we outlined earlier, but now we can see that this unification comes about through the establishment of a common and shared present; a shared “now.” The effect of this unification is profound, as this monetized time, constituted through the money form and realized in world money and the world market, synchronizes all local and culturally different times, independent from national mentalities, cultural traditions, habits, and other differences. Value “synthesizes all particular social hierarchy with the domination of the universal over the particular, i.e., the society over its forced members” (Adorno 1993, 61). Historically speaking, the development of the world market is the process through which monetization takes on the whole planet. “This integration,” as Negri has it, “came about principally through the deployment of monetary instruments” (Negri 2005, 110). The world market can only because of this homogenization operate as the global horizon, in which all individuals can potentially refer to each other, establish exchanges, and live in “one” moment of an otherwise intersubjectively diverse world.[22] The rythms of credit cycles determine the rhythm of the “global time regiment” (Altvater/Mahnkopf 2007, 98). Ongoing accumulation and credit are the two main forms of capital that “close” these horizons and constitute the same present for everyone, including the control that is necessary for staying within this synchronized world. This closure is that which some have called “blocked futurity” (Jameson 2011, 105) or “deprived time.”

According to Lazzarato, public debt has deprived us from “the future, that is, of time, time as decision making, choice, and possibility” (Lazzarato 2012, 8), which, in turn leads to the affirmation of the present as the status quo: “The system of debt must therefore neutralize time, that is, the risk inherent to it. It must anticipate and ward off every potential ‘deviation’ in the behavior of the debtor the future might hold” (Lazzarato 2012, 45). In regard to recent discussions about the status of Europe and the sellout of Greece, Horvat put it this way: “If our future is sold, then there is no future at all” (Horvat/Zizek 2013, 30). What Horvat has in mind here is the closure that a monetized future produces, as the openenness and unexpectability of future now becomes ahead of itself framed by certain expectations and, as we have seen, controlled. Moreover, as this monetized future is controlled by debt, relations of power and domination are introduced, insofar as the future now belongs to someone else, namely, the upper classes that by now hold almost the entire wealth of the earth and global labor productivity. Credit is the power over the future, and because banks are the main institutions for credit, banks occupy and determine these power relations.[23] It is as if our possibilities are now in the hands of someone else, which is mirrored in the fact that capital centralization increases:

Apart from this, an altogether new force comes into existence with the development of capitalist production: the credit system. In its first stages, this system furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists by invisible threads the money resources, which lie scattered in larger or smaller amounts over the surface of society; but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralization of capitals. (MEW23, 655, CI, 778)

This centralization, then, leads to a more rapid and faster turnaround of capital, which, as we saw before, is directly connected to the capitalist schema. The fact that the three richest individuals have accumulated as much wealth as the forty poorest countries on earth, that the biggest corporation hold more wealth than whole (rich) countries, that 400 US-individuals own more than one-half of the nation’s wealth is the unimaginable sign of the de-possession of whole populations. Their future is enclosed. Even more: it is as if our possibilities are now the others’ possibilities, external to us, foreign, as we are forced to give away our productive possibilities to someone else. We can observe this process not only on the individual level, as the same process takes place at the national and international level. Many development countries and their material riches are, as we know, taken hostage by the primary countries who not only control the exploitation of material resources in those countries, but also make sure that entire countries depend upon them by forcing them into the debt relation of total social control through “international” organization, such as the WTO and the IMF. As Lazzarato has it,

But the relationship between creditor and debtor does not concern only the current population. While not reducing their spending by increasing the tax on high wages and businesses—that is, by reversing the balance of power between the classes that led to his appearance—the modalities of its management compromise the generations to come. Leading governments to promise to honor their debts, capitalism takes hold of the future. It can thus predict, calculate, measure and establish equivalences between current behavior and future behavior, in short, create a bridge between the present and future. Thus, the capitalist system which will be reduced to what is the future and its possibilities to the current power relations. The strange feeling of living in a society without time, without possibility, without rupture as possible—the ‘outraged’ denounce something else?—The debt is one of the major explanations. (Lazzarato 2012, 47)

These recent developments, however, already presuppose that the potential universality of relationships between everyone and everyone is established by money as a synthesis of past and future moments into a synchronous present that is established for everyone who participates in the world market and capital. The capitalist schema is presupposed for all classes. The synchronization not only has a geographical aspect, but also a historical aspect. I have argued above that the establishment of the synthesis of historical time comes about and is reproduced by the ongoing role of the primitive accumulation in the process of capitalism, i.e., the original accumulation “as the driving power of capitalism” (Tomba 2013b). It brings together and unifies and functions as a constant reminder of the transition of non-capitalist social relations into the capitalist mode, and thereby makes the integration into a present that functions as a cage possible. The constant primitive accumulation that is part of every expansion of capital and every subsumption of an entity or a relation under capital leads to the expansion of integration. As a consequence, capitalism appears to standard economic theory and the public mind as a static system that circles around itself and can go on forever. Even most protest movements nowadays do not seem to be based on a positive vision of a society that would be organized on different grounds, with different political institutions, and with new ways of productive relations. The status quo is not really touched. Given the important role of the primitive accumulation and its inclusion of everyone into the same “now,” the role of violence and the role of the state should not be underestimated. With the expansion of the credit system and the expansion of the primitive accumulation violence becomes the driving force and effect of the capitalist schema, even if this violence, due to the capital fetishism, remains hidden behind the surface of commodity exchange and the surface of what most still call “market economy.”

Violence, control and discipline are bodily inscribed through the capitalist schema. As the subjection of whole populations to credit, debt, and expanding accumulation the workforce is subjected to ever more discipline and nations to more control. As we know, weapon markets, narcotics, human trafficking, surveillance and policing technologies are areas that flourish in recent decades. More integration requires more control. We might say that the more extensive the credit system becomes, the more accumulation needs to occur, and the more discipline is necessary to carry the program out. Accordingly, the schematization of past and future on a global scale through money and monetization is, in fact, a process of domination with two aspects: on the one hand, our imaginative capacities are tied to this new horizon, now determined by money, debt, owing, repaying, etc. In other words, we are dominated by what and to whom we pay back. On the other hand, this process of capitalization leads to an increased “take over” of the real existing political systems. Capital, in other words, turns directly into political control (Negri 2005, 105). This results in docile bodies that are flexible take everything as a management task, and are fully integrated into the capitalist schema. As one commentator has it,

capital is integral to the person who possesses it and consists of both physical predispositions and the skills acquired as a result of ‘investment’ in education, training, and improvements in physical capacity. A human being, thus, is deemed a ‘machine-stream ensemble,’ even a ‘capital-ability.’ This actively responsible agent is a subject of the market and is obliged to enhance her quality of life through her own decisions. In this schema, everyone is an expert on herself, responsible for managing her own human capital to maximal effect. A politics of the self emerges wherein we are all induced to “work on ourselves” outside the purview of the social. This biopolitical governmentality produces a subject to represent herself as enough for herself, complete, self-sufficient, without acknowledging the necessary and unavoidable social connections. (Mahmud 2012, 483)

Remark on Dis-integration

Given this integration[24] into one world, how are we to think about possible ruptures? The future “as such” can never be absolutely closed off, despite all dystopian visions and despite the specific control that capitalist monetization introduces. Control and discipline are signs of capital being inherently instable. Nevertheless, as Jameson has it, the

incapacity to integrate a future of time into our analysis of contemporary society accounts for the tendency of bourgeois thought to alternate between images of regression or dystopian collapse, and conceptions of progress which amount to little more than the perfecting of what is there already. (Jameson 2011, 105)

The first consequence of what I have laid out in the last two subsections is that we need to overcome the abstract dualism that goes through recent discussions about capitalism and time. Inherited from Benjamin many scholars make a sharp distinction between abstract time in capitalism and concrete time in the revolutionary break expected to come. For example, Badiou has argued in relation to the constitution of a non-capitalist politics that certain historical moments, riots, can as pre-political phases in history lead to a real rupture with what is. He thereby posits as “time of rupture” abstractly against what “is” under capitalism. As Badiou argues, the question of the political is not a question about classes, movements and other agents; rather, as he argues against Negri, it is a question of how to organize a mass under the heading of an idea to which each militant political individual subjects herself. This idea, according to Badiou, is the communist idea. This position, however, falls back into an empty and abstract determination of a political subject that is stripped of her social position. Accordingly, this Manichean black and white picture that we have inherited from Benjamin should be rejected on dialectical grounds. Instead, we should think about the productive forces in relation to the development of the means of production, which are nowadays knowledge, science, and innovative technologies, as these determine the development of the productive forces, who, in turn, are the foundation for thinking about the political at a given historical point in time. Neither an a-historical universalism a la Ranciere, nor the postmodern pluralism a la Mouffe and Laclau are able to overcome the concept of social form, that is, in this case, the distribution of political agents before they become political agents, and the mediation of social reality through reproduction. Badiou’s individuals constituted as militant subjects through a quasi-Platonic idea of communism is therefore a meaningless abstraction and a fall back onto an instrumentalist view of the established level of reproduction. It is as if in Badiou’s world the masses constitute themselves as “pure” masses through “the” idea and march towards liberty in a non-localizable space.

As we will see in the last chapter, the production of individuals through modern technologies has gone very far and it no longer allows us to think political agents as socially stripped down agents of change. The reduction of “action” to a political concept ends in revolutionary romanticism. The position outlined so far leads to a rather different picture, as it forces us to take on a dialectical position developed by Marx (and defended in recent discussions by Negri), which is to say, a position that assumes that the movement towards a different social order (and therefore to a different social schematization of past and future) can only come out of the existing schema.

There are at least three possibilities of change that we can take from Marx and that I only want to briefly introduce, given that this book does not deal with the overcoming of the capitalist schema. It is clear, however, that the overcoming of the capitalist schema must necessarily involve an overcoming of the central role of primitive accumulation for the constitution of the past and the central role of credit for the constitution of the future. A different future of “taking time”[25] can only come out of the instabilities of credit and primitive accumulation. Given that some scholars have only started after the crisis of 2008 to think about the possible downfall of capitalism, it is truly astonishingly to see that Marx saw these aspects of capitalism already very clearly. As he argues, [1] general crises are connected to the expansion of the credit system, [2] the increasing wealth inequality will turn into a different mode of social production, and [3] political unrest follows from crises of the credit system, as crises of the credit system equal a crisis of the capitalist schema and its control of the future including its related imaginations and expectations itself. In sum,

The two characteristics immanent in the credit system are, on the one hand, to develop the incentive of capitalist production, enrichment through exploitation of the labor of others, to the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling, and to reduce more and more the number of the few who exploit the social wealth; on the other hand, to constitute the form of transition to a new mode of production. (MEW25, 457)

One of the origins of Marx’s concept of crises can be found very early in the first volume of Capital under the heading “money crisis,” which, in short, is based on the “contradiction” between money as a means of circulation and money as the measurement of value. Credit crises are in the end extensions of money crises and do not resolve the contradictions of the commodity form; rather, credit extends these contradictions in times of overproduction or under-consumption. In times of reproduction crises, whatever it sources might be, when, for example, too many commodities flood the market or not enough commodities are consumed, not enough credit is available. When not enough credit is available, money as “hard cash” is suddenly needed and the value of commodities goes down because it becomes more difficult to turn commodities into the needed money. On the other hand, with the loss of value certain commodities as “storage” of value becomes more important and capital moves in gold, oil, or land. Credit crises, accordingly, ultimately lead to a de-valuation of money and the increasing valuation of commodities. In Marx’s words:

Whenever there is a general disturbance of the mechanism, no matter what its cause, money suddenly and immediately changes over from its merely nominal shape, money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the face of their own form of value. The bourgeois, drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of himself, has just declared that money is a purely imaginary creation. ‘Commodities alone are money,’ he said. But now the opposite cry resounds over the markets of the world: only money is a commodity. As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth. In a crisis, the antithesis between commodities and their value-form; money, is raised to the level of an absolute contradiction. Hence money's form of appearance is here also a matter of indifference. The monetary famine remains whether payments have to be made in gold or in credit money such as bank-notes. (MEW23, 152; CI, 236)

These crises, as we have seen in 2008, have a global character, because the sudden de-valuation of huge amounts of credit led the credit system into a global crisis, which is ultimately a crisis of the capitalist schema itself because the controlled and fixed expectations toward the future are becoming instable and the imagination of people so far disciplined through the expectation of an ever growing economy and social wealth is shaken and comes to a sudden halt.

Finally, in the same measure in which the capitalists are compelled, by the movement described above, to exploit the already existing gigantic means of production on an ever-increasing scale, and for this purpose to set in motion all the mainsprings of credit, in the same measure do they increase the industrial earthquakes, in the midst of which the commercial world can preserve itself only by sacrificing a portion of its wealth, its products, and even its forces of production, to the gods of the lower world—in short, the crises increase. They become more frequent and more violent, if for no other reason, than for this alone, that in the same measure in which the mass of products grows, and therefore the needs for extensive markets, in the same measure does the world market shrink ever more, and ever fewer markets remain to be exploited, since every previous crisis has subjected to the commerce of the world a hitherto unconquered or but superficially exploited market. (MEW6, 423)

The neoliberal world that we live in can only react to these crises by exploiting the wages from workers. For example, the stagnation of wages in the US during the last three decades led to an extension of consumer credit in the form of education loans, car loans, or credit cards. The state increases this process through so-called austerity measures, which are ultimately just the attempt to shift public debt onto private shoulders, which, in turn, leads to increasing consumer credit. A credit based consumption became an important factor in the accumulation process. The interest, however, at this is important, has to be paid from wages, which leads to lower wages in the long run and to shifting the wealth upward: de-possession of whole populations and expropriation through accumulation at its best.[26] If we imagine that this circle goes on, the system will become more and more instable, though Marx’s assumption that this will lead automatically to a “disintegration of the old mode of production” (MEW25, 457) and to a new form of social reproduction is certainly problematic, as it is not clear how politically the instability is taken up and whether enough ideas about a different form of social organization “are in the air.” Given that left parties (with clear ideas of how to change the production system) are rare, even in cases of deep crises it is more likely at this point (as it was in 1930) that war will be the result.[27]

Notes

1.

My usage of these terms, accordingly, differs from how some scholars use time and temporality. Postone, for example, uses both terms interchangeably, which, I believe, leads to the disadvantage of no longer being able to make a distinction between time as such and the way in which time realizes itself in its temporal dimensions of present, past, and future, which, in turn, determines mental acts, such as perception, memory, and expectation. As should be clear by now, I try to argue that these mental acts depend upon a social-material schematization of time that determines the framework of these acts.

2.

Put differently, it constitutes first of all the standing over against of what is intuitively encountered. Determinations which endow in advance what is intuitively encountered with such an a priori thinking-toward are not empirical, accidental properties but determinations of the object as object. This thinking-toward enables standing over against something as standing-over-against. This is to say that these a priori representations constitute the objectness of something as object (Heidegger 1997a, 218).

3.

One effect of this is that symbolic exchanges are becoming more abstract. Language “needs to be as formal as possible, it has to be composed by symbols, signs and abstract codes, an absolutely necessary condition if it has to elicit an immediate interpretation by all those who work in the same company without at least hesitation. The abstraction and artificiality of this language make for a work force that is continually moving […] to be able to understand it and use in order to respond to the ‘orders’ communicated by the data” (Marazzi 2011b, 34).

4.

For this, also see Heidegger 1997b, 122.

5.

As Deleuze puts it in an interview with Guattari: “Of course, capitalism was and remains a formidable desiring-machine. The monetary flux, the means of production, of manpower, of new markets, all that is the flow of desire. It’s enough to consider the sum of contingencies at the origin of capitalism to see to what degree it has been a crossroads of desires, and that its infrastructure, even its economy, was inseparable from the phenomena of desire” (Guattari 2009, 43).

6.

This colonization could also be spelled out on political grounds. As Stiegler has underlined, “biopolitics” as the administrative governing of populations is basically a “management of the future” (Stiegler 2010c, 173).

7.

I am taking up a lead from Bernard Stiegler who interprets this process as a merging of consciousness and cinema (Stiegler 2011a).

8.

As Herr further shows in his essay, Keynes rejected the rational expectation model and allowed for a more historical approach that includes political, social, and psychological, i.e., external factors of expectations in economics; for this, see Herr 2011, 219. He also argues that neoliberal deregulation is causing exactly the opposite of what it intends, namely, a total instability through the creation of uncertainty and sudden changes of expectations. This is the case because expectations become self-related, insofar as expectations depend upon expectations (ibid., 221)—even if fictional!

9.

On the important role of Nietzsche in Lazzarato’s fascinating book and its shortcomings, see Wortham 2013. Worham claims that Lazzarato overlooks the role of the past in Nietzsche’s analysis of debt and owing, which fits well with the temporal schema that I have introduced.

10.

For this, see MEW6, 116. As Smithin underlines: “There inevitably must be a high degree of centralization in the monetary system, and it is therefore clear that the state itself, at least a state with a certain type of political and constitutional legitimacy, is well placed to provide this” (Smithin 2011, 77). For a brilliant argument for the connection between neoliberalism and the expansion of the state as the necessary protector of the accumulation of capital, see Smith 2006, 221–234.

11.

As others have pointed out, instead of focusing on the distinction between rich and poor exclusively, we should turn our attention to the distinction between “those who own and those who owe” (Dienst 2011, 63). If we take into account that nowadays whole countries are in debt, only the minority of the new financial upper classes remains.

12.

For the reduction of trust to calculation, also see Stiegler 2011b, 45, 67.

13.

Consider Peter Ludlow’s comments on recent convictions of whistleblowers: “One can’t help but infer that the US Department of Justice has become just another security contractor, working alongside the HBGarys and Stratfors on behalf of corporate bidders, with no sense at all for the justness of their actions; they are working to protect corporations and private security contractors and give them license to engage in disinformation campaigns against ordinary citizens and their advocacy groups. The mere fact that the FBI’s senior cybersecurity advisor has recently moved to Hunton and Williams shows just how incestuous this relationship has become. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is also using its power and force to trample on the rights of citizens like Barrett Brown, who are trying to shed light on these nefarious relationships” (Ludlow 2013).

14.

I have criticized this position in an essay on Negri and Marx; for this, see Lotz 2014a.

15.

For this also see the brilliant overview in Smith 2006, 172–189.

16.

For more on this see my introduction in Lotz 2014b. There I lay out in more detail the contradictory nature of capital in regard to Marx’s so-called “machine fragment” from the Grundrisse.

17.

This future anterieur is visible in the gap between the production of commodities and the circulation and consumption process. Indeed, as Zizek maintains, value is not really value before the process of production has been actualized through its reproduction (i.e., through exchange, circulation, consumption and the production of needs) (Zizek 2006, 52). Production, accordingly, can never be thought of without the whole cycle of reproduction.

18.

For a similar position against Proudhon see MEW13, 616. In Capital the term “Ursprung” is often used, and Marx turns it into a dialectical concept, i.e., the necessity to understand a category of political economy through and not independently from another category. For example, the origin of money is only understandable as a category of the social totality if we understand its genesis and relatedness to the category of commodity.

19.

Usually scholars identify the introduction to the Grundrisse as the text in which Marx discovers important methodological insights, such as the reconstructive position of dialectical analysis. A careful analysis, however, can reveal that Marx already very early on developed this reconstructive position.

20.

We can see here that that the claim that “[d]erivatives […] reflect a profound transformation in the form of money, in which currencies are no longer linked to past labor (embodied in gold), but largely to future labor, to acts of production and exchange that are as yet unperformed” (McNally 2012, 161) is as such not wrong, but imprecise because the financial system presupposes an extended credit system, which, in turn, depends upon accumulation as the absolute social horizon of capitalism.

21.

For this in relation to time also see Jameson 2011, 96.

22.

A similar argument is made by Husserl in his later phenomenology of intersubjectivity. In order to establish an entity as something that several individuals can refer to, this entity needs to be within one time experience, one “now.” Objectivity, for Husserl, is something that becomes established intersubjectively. Here, however, I turn this analysis into a social analysis, which is not to be confused with an analysis of intersubjectivity, insofar as we assume here that the social schema operates independently from consciousness.

23.

For this also see MEW25, 415 where Marx quotes Coquelin: “In this manner an incessant exchange of advances, which combine and intersect in all directions, takes place in industrial relations. The development of credit consists precisely in this multiplication and growth of mutual advances, and therein is the real seat of its power.”

24.

Adorno was one of the first to use the concept of integration in relation to Marx: “The law of value comes into play over the heads of the formally free individuals. They are unfree, according to Marx’s insight, as the involuntary executors of the law—the more throuroughly unfree, the more tank the growth of the social antagonism it took to form the very conception of freedom. The process of evolving individual independence is a function of the exchange society and terminates in the individual’s abolition by integration” (Adorno, GS6, 259).

25.

As Christian Marazzi has argued, thinking about stabilizing the current financial economy implies a different way of dealing with time: “Taking time means giving each other the means if inventing one’s own future, freeing it from the anxiety of immediate profit. It means caring for oneself and the environment in which one lives, it means growing up in a socially responsible way. To overcome this crisis without questioning the meaning of consumption, production, and investment is to reproduce the preconditions of financial capitalism, the violence of its ups and downs, the philosophy according to which ‘time is everything, man is nothing’ For man to be everything, we need to reclaim the time of his existence” (Marazzi 2011a, 96).

26.

For this connection see Lapavitsas 2009.

27.

Marx makes a clear connection between credit crises and revolutionary moments in history, which could be read as an almost perfect anticipation of what was at least at the horizon of social imagination after 2008: “Public credit rests on confidence that the state will allow itself to be exploited by the wolves of finance. But the old state had vanished and the revolution was directed above all against the finance aristocracy. The vibrations of the last European commercial crisis had not yet ceased. Bankruptcy still followed bankruptcy. Private credit was therefore paralyzed, circulation restricted, production at a standstill before the February Revolution broke out. The revolutionary crisis increased the commercial crisis. And if private credit rests on confidence that bourgeois production in the entire scope of its relations—the bourgeois order—will not be touched, will remain inviolate, what effect must a revolution have had which questioned the basis of bourgeois production, the economic slavery of the proletariat, which set up against the Bourse the sphinx of the Luxembourg? The uprising of the proletariat is the abolition of bourgeois credit, for it is the abolition of bourgeois production and its order. Public credit and private credit are the economic thermometer by which the intensity of a revolution can be measured. The more they fall, the more the fervor and generative power of the revolution rises” (MEW7, 23).

Chapter 5

The Abstractions of Money

The concept of abstraction not only has been centrally used by Hegel and Marx, and taken up by Sohn-Rethel as “real abstraction,” but also has been of importance for Adorno’s philosophy as a social-material concept. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer closely relate abstraction to rationality and enlightenment (which they claim originated in Ancient times) and introduce it as an effect of a subject that distances itself from nature in order to dominate itself and that which remains other than itself:

Abstraction, the tool of enlightenment, treats its objects as did fate, the concept of which it eradicates: it liquidates them. Under the leveling domination of abstraction (which makes everything in nature repeatable), and of industry (for which abstraction ordains repetition), the liberated finally came to form that ‘herd’ [Trupp] that Hegel declared to be the result of the Enlightenment. The distance between subject and object, a presupposition of abstraction, is grounded in the distance from the thing itself which the master achieved through the mastered. (Adorno, GS3, 29)

Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s attempt to identify abstraction as a concept of domination, I submit, is not precise enough, as they do not see that as something that structures not only the relation between individuals and nature, but, additionally, regulates the overall relation between society and nature, abstraction comes into play as a social concept once capitalism upsets the “metabolism” between society and nature by the subjection of life to valorization. With the event of capital and value virtually all relations become abstract, as with universal monetization every entity appears as an internal limit of capital itself and appears as a means for accumulation. Adorno and Horkheimer remain in the Dialectic of Enlightenment within an idealist framework because they derive their social-material concepts from human nature, instead of, as proposed here, from social-historical forms. As such, they fall back onto a level that they usually criticize, namely, an abstract view of history, society, and nature.[1] They do not realize, in other words, “the proper ontological character of capitalist abstraction” (Toscano 2008b, 276), i.e., the relation between abstraction and abstract social relations, although Adorno’s work after the Dialectic of Enlightenment is based much on the analyses of social abstractions.[2]

A certain type of abstraction can only occur if the social relations are themselves abstract. As Marx puts it in the introduction to Grundrisse, the bourgeois economists were able to discover the universality of their concepts because they live in a society that is itself based on abstract relations. In addition, nature remains a concept that even in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics is still treated outside of society, i.e., outside of valorization, and, hence, it is not treated as an ecological concept that is part of social wealth and that enters into a specific—abstract—form of domination in capitalism.[3] One sign of Adorno’s abstract treatment of abstraction is indicated by the fact that he never replaces the term “nature” by “earth.” The effect of the capitalist schema is profound, though, insofar as it frames the whole of social relations under capitalism, as well as determines the form of everything that becomes subordinated to capital and its temporal horizons. Closure and integration by way of total affirmation of the status quo and the war against any attempt to overcome this way of social life are the result. The most profound effect is the total externalization of society to its members. As Postone points out, “Marx analyzes the subsumption of individuals under abstract objective structures as a feature of the social form grasped by the category of capital” (Postone 1996, 192). Put differently, from a Marxian point of view, one is forced to argue that abstractions precede thought, insofar as the mechanisms of social integration occur without individual intentions, and insofar the social abstraction occurs beyond the grasp of individuals, despite that they reproduce it with every act.[4]

As Marx has it in the fetishism chapter in Capital, they do it, but they do not know it. Because money establishes itself, as we have seen, on a first level as the true universal of capitalist society that remains identical throughout its processing, circulation, and return, society appears to its members as a thing external to all members, even though it is precisely this structure that allows us to say that capital as sociality “dominates the concrete and particular subjects from the exterior and from on high” (Finelli 2007, 65). In capitalism we are dominated, accordingly, by the form of our very sociality. In capitalism money is the society as the thing. Society here exists as a thing. Accordingly, capital schematizes community as something that remains external to individuals and thing-like because in money the social synthesis itself appears as something established outside of all relations:

The individuals confront each other only as proprietors of exchange values, as such individuals who have given themselves reified being for each other through their product, the commodity. Without this objective mediation, they have no relation to each other from the standpoint of the social exchange of matter under way in circulation. They exist for each other only as things, something that is merely further developed in the money relation, in which their community itself appears as an external and hence a casual thing with respect to all. That the social connection resulting from the collision of independent individuals appears with respect to them simultaneously both as objective necessity and as external bond in effect expresses their independence for which social being, though a necessity, is no more than a means, and therefore appears to the individuals themselves as something external, and in money, even as a tangible thing. They produce in and for the society as social individuals, but at the same time this appears merely as a means for objectifying their individuality. Since, on the one hand, they are not subsumed under any naturally evolved community and, on the other, are not consciously communal individuals subsuming the community under themselves, this community must also exist as an independent, external, casual thing [ein . . . Sachliches] with respect to them as independent subjects. That is precisely the condition for their simultaneously being in some social connection as independent private persons. (MEGA II.2, 53)

Society and production, labor relations, and productive activities, turn upside down because that which holds them together, namely money, appears as something opposite to the members of society, as an alien force, and as something that is “given” like a fact that cannot be changed.[5] Thus the universal exchangeability that value establishes as real existing social relations appears as their opposite, namely, as a-sociality, disconnectedness, selfishness, and instrumentality. Value, as Tony Smith puts it, is a “perverse form of sociality based on the dissociation of private producers” (Smith 2006, 176) and capital as “an alien being subordinates human goals and activities to its end” (Smith 2006, 178). As Marx writes in the Urtext,

It is in money, and in its most abstract and hence most meaningless, incomprehensible form, the form in which all mediation is sublated, that this transformation of social interrelations into a solid, overwhelming, individual-subsuming social relation first appears. And this appearance is all the harder in that it springs from the premise of free, untrammeled, atomistic private persons linked with each other in production only by reciprocal wants. (MEGA II.2, 74; translation amended)

This alienation and externalization of sociability in money[6] is also visible on other levels of capitalist reproduction: the state appears in the same external relationship to society because the state operates increasingly in the interest of capital accumulation and therefore is itself subjected to the externality of money. In addition, the increasing socialization of capital (public investments, funds, etc.) becomes concentrated in ever fewer hands, the effect of which is that the social wealth and social productivity of all social individuals appears upside down, as produced by a few, and separated like something “out of reach.” Marx, again: “Individuals are subsumed under social production; social production exists outside them as their fate; but social production is not subsumed under individuals, manageable by them as their common wealth” (MEW42, 92; G, 158).

The fate of a form of sociality that perverts itself, can be traced back to many phenomena of an alienated cultural, political, and everyday life. Georg Simmel, often forgotten, but immensely important for Lukacs, Heidegger, and first generation critical theorists, already noticed central aspects of the culture of abstraction that money implies.[7] Before I deal with the underlying causes and contemporary discussion of these issues, we should recall some of those signs of an abstract culture: [1] centralization of interests, [2] objectification and measurement of all life contents, [3] the monetization of legal content, [4] economization of moral life, [5] refeudalization, and [6] abstract capacitization. We should briefly discuss those indicators of a monetized culture and destroyed social life before we deal in more detail with recent tendencies that are part of the capitalist schema, namely, the control of past and future through the industrial and technical production of the mental apparatus that ultimately makes the closure of the schema perfect. To do this, we shall return to Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Culture Industry on a higher level.

Abstract Culture

Centralization of Interests

The structure of money is paradoxical, as it transcends individual interests and self-interests beyond the immediate horizon of an individual, insofar as it [1] ties everyone together and [2] it subjects everyone to the same interest, namely, possessing money. Paradoxically put, though money individualizes interests by making it the first and foremost desire of individuals, at the same time it unifies all individual self-interests through a shared abstract goal and end, which is money itself. It thereby brings together all individual interests, and though it seems to be the case that all interests become more diversified and more individualized, in truth all interests turn towards the same underlying end (Simmel 1989, 593). This process is only possible through the abstraction that money introduces in exchange and what we called in chapter 3 “real abstraction.” We could also say that the capitalist schema renders social relations abstract.[8] As a consequence, all moments of life, actions, desires, etc. become a means towards the end of M’. For example, money makes property “fluid” (MEGAII.2, 33), as it releases it from traditions, values, and common possession. Once money is posited as the universal social relation, all property relations turn into something for money. Houses are not only the expression of one’s own or family freedom, but mainly a value that needs to be kept up for possible exchange. Keeping the house up no longer has the character of life quality; rather, the life quality is conceived (and can only be conceived) through money. Making money becomes the absolute fixed center around which all other activities are organized and structured. This process dissociates all individuals by abstractly unifying them until human goals that are not defined through M’ appear to most social members as irrational goals. To decline the power of money, to take it as socially irrelevant, to follow purposes in life that do not follow the logic of a monetized world, excludes individuals from society, which could be conceived of as a liberating process, but because money is necessary for survival and almost all productive forms and reproduction depends upon money, individuals who want to “leave” the system end up on the streets, in ghettos, in therapy, or in prisons. In truth, however, as Max Weber already clearly saw, making money for the sake of making money is the truly irrational aspect of capitalism and historically rather unique, as we know of no human culture that made “making money” the principle of its existence:

In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence. (Weber 2002, 18)

The centralization of interests, in addition, has another important aspect, namely, the fact that self-interests can now be hidden behind the abstractions of money and capital. For example, investments are justified on the basis of general human interests while at the same time truly human interests are turned into specific interests. For example, groups that fight for the environment, for health or against exploitation, are labelled by corporations and their PR machinery as groups that only fight for “specific” interests, although it is clear that most of these social groups fight for universal interests. The universal interest in a capitalist society, however, is capital and the capitalist schema frames everything in terms of money and related interests. Thus, arguments put forward in the name of humanity are turned down or rejected outright as irrational interests, whereas arguments in favor of investments, industries, etc. are taken without critical reflection as rational interests. Accordingly, the wealthy, corporations, and bankers can install and sell themselves as the true agents of universal interests; despite the fact that this abstraction leads to a perverted social reality.

Objectification and Measurement of All Life Contents

As money becomes the central measuring unit for all entities under capitalism, it subjects all personal and individual interests to a quasi-scientific objectivity. i.e., it subjects everything to a quasi-causal coherence. Only money counts. The effect of de-personalization goes along with that which Simmel calls the “characterless nature of money” (Simmel 1989, 595), by which he means that from the standpoint of capital all persons count equally because they only count as labor power for capital and therefore only as use value for capital. As sellers of labor power, laboring individuals subject themselves to the regime of money and capital, and from then on they no longer count as individuals; rather, all exchanges, goals, interests, desires, wishes, and consuming activities de-personalize these acts and behaviors, as a sociality, that is fully determined by the capitalist schema “levels” everything and eradicates individual content, even if the whole advertisement and consumption industry tells us 24/7 that we are individuals with “our own” choices and wishes. This is also the case for the inequalities produced in capitalist societies. Though this formal equivalence and symmetry, as already Marx saw, contains material asymmetry and inequalities, it has nevertheless the effect that in daily transactions who one is no longer counts, since one becomes reduced to whether one can pay or not. Classes are constituted through the capital-labor relationship and therefore necessarily constituted by processing money. Faced with monetary definitions of everything, individuals turn into abstract persons, which is echoed in the modern legal concept of persons as the bearer of contracts.

The Monetization of Legal Content

The monetization of legal relations and the whole justice system is most visible in the US where 95 percent of all law suits end up with plea bargains and only 5 percent of all cases lead to “normal” court procedures. The reason for this number is that except for the very rich, no one can pay the costs involved in court procedures. The effect, then, is that justice as a concept that is supposed to be justice for someone, i.e., justice should be something specific, is turned into “deals,” monetary calculations, and operation costs. Justice exists only for those who can pay and in this way the justice and penal system turns into a system in which everything is based on abstractions. Prison and criminalization before court procedures are the consequence, most visible in the horrendous amount of money required to bail someone out. Risks, punishment, prison times, and the whole contractual language involved, turns into a monetized framework, which leads to abstractions in virtually every legal relationship.

Economization of Intersubjectivity

As we already noted, Marx brilliantly analyzes the displacement of trust and substantial ethical relationships by economic categories in his short essay on Mill in 1843. The monetization of all social relationships leads to an abstraction from personal exchanges and individual responsibilities, which is a negative process. For example, by buying an airline ticket I also buy the security, control of abstract production processes, and legal regulations involved in risky activities such as flying. It relieves me from checking whether the flight really will be safe, whether the airline operates on safe grounds, and whether I can really trust the person behind the ticket counter. Money stabilizes all of these unstable relations and expectations. As everything is resolved in abstract relationships, the de-personalization that is involved in all capitalist market exchanges sets free energy that would otherwise be needed for personal exchanges. This personal energy can now be used for all kinds of productive or non-productive activity. Money relieves us from personal and moral evaluations that would take time and energy that we do not have, given modern time pressures and functional imperatives. As Marx puts it in the Grundrisse,

individuals come into connection with one another only in determined ways. These objective dependency relations also appear, in antithesis to those of personal dependence (the objective dependency relation is nothing more than social relations which have become independent and now enter into opposition to the seemingly independent individuals; i.e., the reciprocal relations of production separated from and autonomous of individuals) in such a way that individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another. (MEW42, 97; G, 164)

Refeudalization

As some sociologists have noted, with the social center of capital the upper classes become more and more disconnected from the rest of society, especially since responsibilities towards the society are less and less acknowledged (Neckel 2010). This social disconnection is the result of social schematization, insofar as the abstractions introduced by capital are hiding egoistic interests, and, hence, can be turned against everyone because of their universality, which is to say, they can be turned against the society as a whole. Many statements of CEOs and managers of banks and important financial institutions show evidence of this turn around, especially when personal interests of hedge fund managers are in the name of abstract necessities, turned against societies as a whole. Privatization of risks and socialization of costs is the perfect formula for this turn around and upsetting of all social order and productivity. As Simmel points out, as long as the upper classes were tied to their wealth in a personally determined horizon, they were unable to totally disconnect from the interests of those upon which their wealth depended (Simmel 1989, 610). In a world, however, in which wealth, “performance,” and responsibility are solely determined in terms of money, the relation between those who hold all wealth and those who produce the wealth becomes abstract. As Zygmunt Bauman points out,

The mobility required by people who invest […] means the […] disconnection of power from obligations: duties towards employees, but also towards the younger and weaker, towards yet unborn generations and towards the self-reproduction of the living conditions of all; in short the freedom from the duty to contribute to daily life and the perpetuation of the community […] Shedding the responsibility for the consequences is the most coveted and cherished gain which the new mobility brings to free floating, locally unbound capital. (Bauman 1998, 9)

This form of abstract culture within which the “movers and shakers” are no longer intentionally tied to their actions became very visible in a recent telling example: “Time to Move,” a program created by France Telecom, was a program, intended to develop its managers to be more dynamic, which was supposed to make them independent from employees, routines, and local customs. The goal of the internal campaign was to detach these managers from all circumstances, as well as from all personal and emotional ties to the place in which they work. This was mainly accomplished by enforced relocation every three years, in order to detangle these managers from their friends, family, language, and location. The result was that forty-one of these rational, abstract, machinic individuals took their lives between 2008 and 2010.[9] Even if we take into account that these cases are rare, they indicate what will happen once we unleash the full power and force of unlimited abstractness based on the total separation of individual and society through the capitalist schema.

Abstract Capacities

The commodification of labor power, i.e., the valorization of living labor and living individuals, leads to an abstract relationship between individuals and their own capacities, creativities, and productivity, as they are no longer able to “measure” their capacities in what they achieve through their concrete labor activities. This is because the achievement of labor power becomes reduced to how much money one makes in wages or salaries, which has the result that all achievements potentially lose their specificity and become abstract. Job performance, satisfaction, social relationships, achievements, and goals are subjected to the abstractions of money and capital, and thereby they turn into something that must be calculated, which, in turn leads to an identification of “how much money one makes” with labor as such. As a consequence, the abstraction contained in this process makes it more difficult for individuals to recognize that labor is the true substance of society and wealth. Instead, they believe that it is money.

Given these cultural developments, I do not think that Marx’s concept of alienation has lost any of its original power and impact. After having provided this initial sketch of abstract culture in more traditional terms, I will turn to more recent aspects of the abstraction that money introduces in capitalist societies, which are prominently treated in the postoperaist tradition, namely, in communication, in affects, and in the general intellect, as well as, finally, in technologies and industries that produce abstract individuals. As Paolo Virno has it, “the concept of general intellect does nothing but advance, excessively, the notion of real abstraction” (Virno 2004, 65) by organizing the life-world “with an operational materiality” (Virno 2007, 6). Science, technology, and knowledge, in other words, are the real expressions of the capitalist schema; they are, as Marx says in the Grundrisse, the proper existence of capital, i.e., the way capital can be most effective. Capital and knowledge develop side by side, and the claim that “the abstract occupies and itself invades the concrete” (Finelli 2007, 66) becomes true on a higher level, and should shed further evidence on our materialist, but Kantian inspired interpretation of the capitalist schema.

Monetized Memory

The abstractions of the capitalist schema and the universal sociality that it introduces is nicely visible in what Zizek has called the “spectral presence” (Zizek 2002, 288) of money, especially the “virtualization” of capital. As long as we needed material bearers, even in the form of paper, capital circulation and turnaround time was limited and slow. However, today when billions of dollars can be moved within milliseconds, when computers calculate even the tiniest deviations in markets millions of times faster than any human mind, the “nowhere and everywhere” nature of processing money becomes transparent and unavoidable. We can no longer escape it. It is fluid, a process, movement.[10] This process is faster than we can think. The question of how capital exists and how it actualizes itself, according to Marx, is not only a problem of circulation time and the material bearers of money; rather, it is closely connected to the development of the means of production as “fixed capital,” its turn into technology and machines, and the subsumption of knowledge and science under the capitalist schema. In what follows, I will briefly present a rereading of the by now famous “machine fragment” of the Grundrisse and the concept of the “general intellect.”[11] I shall argue that Marx’s famous term with which he describes capital in the first volume of Capital, namely, “automatic subject,” can be best understood by relating it to the question of the automaton, i.e., the machine—and not, as often done in the literature—to a Hegelian inspired reading of that term, namely, as the self-moving substance of capitalist society. As I already argued in former chapters, the substance of social reality is labor, whereas capital is its form. In short, the machine or the general intellect as the machine’s essence is the most proper form in which capital actualizes itself and exists socially. The more “virtual” and less spatial the means of production become, the better capital can function:

The development of the means of labor into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labor into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labor, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, insofar as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper. Machinery appears, then, as the most adequate form of fixed capital, and fixed capital, insofar as capital's relations with itself are concerned, appears as the most adequate form of capital as such. (MEW42, 594; G, 694)

Marx gives the connection between machinery and capital an explicitly metaphysical touch, since capital becomes the real force [Macht] of capitalist social reality, i.e., it is the ground to which everything else is based on its existence. The German term “Macht” indicates that something or someone has power over something or someone else, and the history of “force,” “power,” and “authority” have a long history in metaphysics. The machine, considered as force, fulfills exactly the same function as capital, as it goes back to a single source of energy needed that produces all movements of the machine. In Marx’s days this was visible in almost every factory, as all machines on all factory levels were driven by a “single source of power” (MEW42, 590; G, 690), such as the steam engine, which was then distributed throughout the whole factory. Similarly, capital is the “energy” source of capitalist social reality by being distributed throughout all of its relations.[12] The process that Marx describes in regard to the development of machinery and its total subjection of the laboring individual into the labor process is well known. In short, as a consequence of workers’ resistance and physical limits of the working day, capital began to heavily invest in either replacing labor power or making labor power more efficient, the result of which was the replacement of virtually all traditionally known tools by machines that, in a further step, were replaced by a system of machinery that Marx describes with Ure as a “vast automaton, composed of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs operating in concert and without interruption, towards one and the same aim, all these organs being subordinated to a motive force which moves itself” (MEW42, 590; G, 690). The system of machinery, in other words, functions exactly in the same way as capital constitutes sociality. The worker becomes part of the system of machinery as one of its “organs,” and thereby, she becomes a moment of capital and processing money as one of their “organs.” Once we become “human capital,” we count only towards one end, namely, accumulation, M’, and growth. Both are two sides of the same coin: seen from the perspective of labor, individuals and their labor power become subsumed under machinery; seen from the perspective of capital, individuals and machines become subsumed under relative and fixed capital, and as such, they are under the control of capital. The “automatic system of machinery” and the “moving power” turn capitalist individuals into “conscious linkages” (MEW42, 592; G, 692) as “an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such” (MEW42, 593; G, 693). Whereas in pre-capitalist societies the tool appeared as a means of labor, the system of machinery turns this relation upside down, insofar as the worker now appears as a use value for the system of machinery and capital. The term “use value” is used by Marx in the sense of “thing to be used” [Gebrauchsding] or tool. Marx already foresaw the next historical developments: the worker becomes a “supervisor” and “guard” of the machinery while her human capacities become externalized.[13]

Since the essence of machinery can be seen in science and knowledge, these general human capacities appear in the automaton as something that is itself a “thing,” separated from the laborer, which then, in turn, determines and controls the laborer. Science no longer is “in the mind” of the laborer, i.e., in all of us, but instead “acts upon him […] as an alien power” (MEW42, 593; G, 693). Living labor becomes subsumed to dead labor and, with further developments, labor appears less and less as the source of social wealth and the substance of social relations, whereas capital, particularly in the form of machinery, appears more and more as the productive force. At the same time, the sciences and all knowledge production becomes the center of all social productivity and is “pressed into the service of capital,” the consequence of which is that scientific and cultural “invention becomes a business” (MEW42, 595; G, 704). The astonishing actuality of Marx’s machine fragment is most visible in this reconstruction of capital and knowledge production. As indicated above, at this point I do not want to deal with the brilliant analysis of the contradictions that are the result of this subsumption of knowledge under capital,[14] which are related to a new concept of wealth and the reduction of labor time; rather, for the sake of this chapter, it is sufficient to point out that Marx already understood that it is not only the role of specific sciences that are important in this picture, but also, or even more, the role of the overall human creative capacities which are called for on a scale that can no longer be described via exploitive processes that are steered by private enterprises. What we observe in our contemporary capitalism as fights over patents, knowledge, intellectual property and copyrights are good examples of what Marx had in mind here: for capital increasingly tries to take advantage of knowledge and productivity that is socially produced.[15] The more capital subsumes human productivity as such, the less it can be reduced to privatized productivity, since the forces unleashed are so immense that they start to include the whole social production. Moreover, investments are so large that they can no longer be carried out by private enterprises. 60 percent of all investments in the US are public investments, despite a conservative rhetoric that tries to cover up these facts. All of these developments, however, go back to the transformation of knowledge into a productive force. As Marx puts it:

The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. (MEW42, 602; G, 706)

It is not difficult to understand why the machine fragment has stirred up so much discussion and stimulated so much creative work. With knowledge entering fixed capital, it seems as if that which was “fixed” now becomes “fluid,” unstable, and more abstract. As a consequence, communication, especially networked communication, is the new term that expresses most visibly the newly appropriated level of capital and its direct inclusion and production of something that goes beyond “individual” capacities, “individual” performance and “individual” interests. This is what Negri calls the “collective individual” (Negri 2008, 63). As Virno has it,

The ‘general intellect’ comprises formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical inclinations, mentalities and ‘language-games.’ In contemporary labor-processes there are thought and discourses that function as productive machines in their own right, not needing to take on a mechanical body or even an electronic soul. (Virno 2007, 5)[16]

The “social brain” that capital needs in order to increase on a scale never seen before requires “mass intellectuality” (Virno 2007, 6) as the activity of the “Post-Fordist proletariat” or “Soviets of mass intellectuality” (Negri 1996, 221). The factory, then, is no longer the place for social battles and class struggle; instead, it has moved beyond the factory walls and dissipated into the whole society. The new center of society is the educated middle class.

Be that as it may, I do not think that Virno’s and Negri’s analyses are sufficient, especially since their thesis that capital and the general intellect operate in opposition to each other does not make much sense as long as capital is the organizing totality of our societies. More specifically, Virno does not take into account that the “release” of human productivity from capital cannot be separated from money, as he, Negri, and Lazzarato tend to think capital as “power” instead of, thinking capital as the social form of capitalist sociality that schematizes everything as everything through time, which is what I have argued. Accordingly, Virno’s thesis that the general intellect should be conceived as a new form of real abstraction that can no longer be measured by money, should be rejected, as it should be clear (by now) that the function of money as a measurement of value is secondary and presupposes a constitution of sociality by the monetary form of value. As long as we need to buy and sell human productivity, whether in the form of service or in the form of physical things, this will not change. Socially necessary labor time is still needed for social reproduction and, accordingly, Negri’s claim that we are currently observing “the end of all distinction between working life and social life, between social life and individual life, between production and forms of life” and that “[i]n this situation, the political and the economic become two sides of the same coin” (Negri 1996, 222) must also be rejected; for as long as the capitalist schema is in place a difference between socially necessary labor time and unnecessary labor time is needed, since otherwise labor power exploitation, surplus value, growth and M’ would be impossible.

The new fluidity of capital and its accompanying importance of networked communication, however, is important in at least two respects: [1] it not only enables capital to access the human mind and general human capacities directly, but also to produce those capacities, which, again, goes against Negri’s claim that knowledge and communication in post-Fordism become immediately productive[17]; and [2] it leads to what Stiegler has called the “politics of attention” (Stiegler 2010c, 173) and “noopolitics” (Stiegler 2010c, 175). The general intellect is not simply “there;” rather, it only exists in the system of machinery, and, thus, in the industries and institutions that produce the knowledge needed with the system of machinery. This knowledge is produced in digital form, i.e., in software and hardware, with algorithms at its center. As such, this new level of capital should be interpreted as an expansion of the capitalist schema into formerly non-valorized territory, namely, the mind, the biological core, and the brain, the effect of which is a new level of how capital seems to be self-related, insofar as the production of knowledge leads to an invasion of that knowledge itself. The process of valorization depends upon the speed of communication and the exchange process. The faster the exchange process, the faster the communication needs to be. Language, communication, and information, hence, play a central role in the expansion of capitalism and are transformed into commodities and functions of the capitalization process. As communication is itself produced through the computer and electronic industries, it becomes part of the schematization: it is no longer humans who communicate in addition to market functions; rather, the communication is produced in advance through industries that thereby frame all symbolic exchange.[18]

As Stiegler points out, if we take into account that the primary object of the libido and desire is also the primary object of attention, then we can see the connection between the increasing “fluidity” of capital through the dispersion of communication and knowledge and the increased attempt to schematize the human mind and psyche. Put differently, we are in the process of monetizing the libido by “tuning” it towards money itself. The diversity of desires are unified and subjected to one overruling desire (Simmel 1989, 631). The person who is passionately in love with something or someone and devotes all of his or her libido towards one object is the real enemy of an industry that wants us to disperse all attention and redirect it towards valorization. Keeping attention means not only that one gives primacy to the object, but also that one can wait for what the object “will do.” This concentration on the object, however, is precisely the problem of the attention industry, since by producing images, signs, sounds, and communication the attention industry is interested in destroying this concentrated “attentive” connection to the object by re-engineering desire towards monetized consumption.[19] Every object competes with every object, and every attention span is too long for all the others. Capital, accordingly, eliminates attention by externalizing it in industrially produced memory devices: “it tends to replace attention with retentional systems” (Stiegler 2010c, 103). Put differently, presence becomes memory (in its external form). The only real object that ultimately goes through all objects and stands behind them is money as capital itself. Accordingly, by destroying the attentive systems of citizens and consumers to objects independent from monetary objects, the only object that we are now forced to attend to is money, which is posited as the final aim of the monetization of the libido and desire.

Now, with the general intellect and the fluidity of communication, knowledge, and the dispersal of human productivity most of this flow is moving in digital form through computers, servers, networks, and is steered by operating systems, software, and other elements of computer hardware, the consequence of which is that not only can the whole network of attention and communication be captured and channeled by attention industries towards accumulation; but every interaction can be stored, analyzed and then, through a redesign of software and hardware, directly reshaped and produced. In this way, life and capital move closer together, which is most visible in the attempt to channel even infant desire through the production and selling of toys and techniques that suit capital best.

The general intellect and its externalization in the form of vast databases, storage places, and digital memory is already outside of the subject, and therefore no longer needs older forms of consciousness control that Adorno and Horkheimer had in mind. Instead, it can be directly shaped. The phone numbers that we (or our phones) store on these devices most likely never enter our mind and nevertheless these devices allow us to operate with them. The memory is in us as external and therefore it can be directly accessed, channeled, and produced by industries. Another example may be seen in acknowledging that the externalization of memory is the aim of a project entitled “Contextualized Attention Metadata schema,”[20] which was developed by researchers. This program saves the user’s “life on the internet” by storing all clicks, the length of every operation, the time, date, and span of websites visited, the software used, the ip-address (location), session ids, etc., the effect of which is that every move on the side of users is externalized. For example, the system knows how long someone listens to a song, how often she repeats it, when she stops playing it and switches to another song; it can produce patterns and algorithms that determine the behavior and preferences of the user down to every aspect of her relation to music. Whenever the user then uses the software again, “help” will come up from the system and certain choices will be displayed so that ultimately one goal is achieved: the subjective side becomes destroyed in the interest of capital. The following document says this quite clearly:

Based on this repository, we will develop further algorithms to extract knowledge about the user, the context and the content. A simple example is statistical data about the usage of learning documents. Advanced examples of the identification and extraction of patterns of behavior, e.g., though the correlation of activities carried out by one user and related to one context and/or one content. In addition, the clustering of users based on observations about their behavior in certain contexts provides information about the sequences of activities carried out by users. Such clusters would then allow the generation of recommendations of similar users, eventually combing them with the behavioral patterns to more precisely identify next steps. Ultimately, behavioral patterns and similarity measures among users can be used to detect the finalization of user goals and, subsequently, the identification of user aims and goals.[21]

What the official rhetoric calls “user aims and goals,” however, are only interesting to this industry in order to better channel the user towards the meta goal of capital itself, which is its infinite accumulation. Data-mining of the brain and knowing what will happen, i.e., the closure of future and the destruction of the gap between present and future is, accordingly, the ultimate goal of consumer research. The idea of a “quantified self” is one of the ideas (uncritically) discussed in recent computer science and cognitive science research. As one researcher at the meeting of the 2013 Chaos Computer Club enthusiastically describes it:

in recent years, physical activity recognition has become more mainstream. As industry begins to apply advances suggested by activity recognition research, we see more and more commercial products that help people track their physical fitness, from simple step counting […] over sports expertise tracking […] to sleep monitoring. […] This exciting new research field, Cognitive Quantified Self, opens up new opportunities at the intersection of wearable computing, machine learning, psychology, and cognitive science. […] We want to establish long-term tracking of many mental processes suggesting strategies to optimize mental fitness and cognitive well-being. Imagine, educators can get real-time feedback about the attention level and learning progress of their students, giving them a good grasp on already understood and potential difficult concepts. […] Content creators can use the quantified mind logs as a basis for improving their works. In which part of the movie are users most attentive? What feelings are conveyed by a particular paragraph in a book? In case you are a researcher, wouldn’t you like to know at what sentence a reader loses interest in your grant proposal? And we finally can tackle more difficult to analyze lifestyle issues, given a large enough user group and good enough sensing, e.g., How do sleep and eating habits influence our attention and learning?[22]

This system based on the fluidity of capital and the general intellect “knows more” about any user than any user knows about herself because the entire memory becomes industrialized. As a consequence, the subject “simply delegates its attention to automata that then become its captors, meters, gauges, warning signals, alarms, and so on. Attention in this sense is precisely folded back on its automatizable behaviors” (Stiegler 2010c, 101). As a consequence, the abstractness of social relations reaches new heights, as the monetization of our world is entering even the last resorts of the mind, most especially the brain, and areas that were formerly taken to lie outside of economy, society, and capital. When nothing can be forgotten, then everything can be framed by the capitalist schema, i.e., everything can be monetized. Nietzsche’s and Arendt’s vision of a healthy human life based on forgetting would then be a vision of the past, since capital does not forget.

As Bernard Stiegler has underlined in many of his publications, the culture of abstraction that is reached through a mode of production driven by the general intellect focusses, on the “displacement of memory” (Stiegler 2010a, 68), which, again, underlines the claim that the past, if seen in the proper light, is the prior temporal dimension in the capitalist schema. Moreover, the general intellect changes the whole dynamic between the individual and society as something external to the individual, although it is based on what is most internal to individuals, namely, their knowledge, mind, brain, and genes:

Capital has insinuated itself everywhere, and everywhere attempts to acquire the power to coordinate, commandeer and recuperate value. But the raw material on which the very high level of productivity of the socialized worker is based—the only raw material we know of which is suitable for an intellectual and inventive labor force—is science, communication and the communication of knowledge. Capital must, therefore, appropriate communication. It must expropriate the community and superimpose itself on the autonomous capability of managing knowledge, reducing such knowledge to a mere means of every undertaking of the socialized worker. (Negri 2005, 116)

Though we should applaud Negri for his analysis of how capital puts itself in place of community, we should add that it can only do this because we participate as individuals in our society without comprehending the relations of production that are setup and put in place through science, technologies, and knowledge. Once capital appears in scientific clothes, it mystifies itself and the results are new fetishisms. What Marx calls “capital fetish” now appears as “science fetish,” which is most prominently visible in claims that knowledge and science production is something beyond the social. In addition, the more expansively the capitalist schema frames all temporal horizons and memory itself, the more all individuals are integrated into one social reality, i.e., into one society, even though, paradoxically, the subjective effect of this objective existence of society is the separation of individuals from their sociality and “community.” One consequence of this is that the domination of social individuals itself becomes abstract. That which Adorno calls “total socialization” [totale Vergesellschaftung] of a “subjectless subject” (Adorno 2003a, 23) is only possible through the fluidity of capital as existing in the general intellect and its communicability i.e., in every aspect of life.

This dependency leads to a destruction of real individuality because all entities are now determined by a schema that lets them be only insofar as they fit into the abstractions of a monetized world. Put differently, that which is specific to someone or something no longer fits within the abstract world and thus it becomes invisible. As such, desire becomes abstract. With the externalization of memory and the externalization of society, everything counts equally as something to be used for the accumulation of capital. Already Marx speaks of money as the “great leveler” of experiences, cultural differences, and different backgrounds. With the new fluidity of capital all social relations become liquefied: “Each individual is a cell put in constant productive connection with others by the Web, which ensures a deterritorialized, fractal, and fluid sociality” (Bifo 2011, 115), and the main driving force behind this development is the fact that with the entering of science and knowledge on all levels of production, fixed capital becomes less and less “fixed,” insofar as capital can circulate faster and thereby the whole becomes more unstable. Money, then, is nothing static and stable; rather, as Marx puts it in the Grundrisse, it is “the constant drive to go beyond its own limits: infinite process” (MEW42, 196, also see 252; G, 270, translation altered).

Monetized Affects

In the last section we saw how the externalization of memory is the consequence of what Marx calls the “general intellect.” As sociality is a thing, fixed, and independent from individuals, memory also becomes a thing established outside of humans. Both externalizations point to the capitalist schema and its temporalizations. As Stiegler puts it:

Something absolutely new happens when the conditions of memorization, that is, the criteria of effacement, forgetting, anticipation, retention, protention—in a word, temporalization—become concentrated in a technico-industrial machine whose finality is the production of surplus value. In the wake of this development, what hegemonically rules the activity of memory is the imperative to gain time. Just as abstract, capitalizable money is nothing but the credit accorded to the future in advance, so too is memory nothing but the future time of the mass audience. (Stiegler 2010a, 80)

With the externalization and abstraction of sociality everything becomes available not only for manipulation, but also for technological production of that which has been externalized, which in turn will render every aspect of life abstract, or, to give it a Heideggerian touch, “available.” The same abstractness that the monetization and valorization produce can also be observed on the side of properties that commodities have, especially their sensual qualities:

Food commodities, for example—realizing on the level of orality (in the Freudian sense) that which the theoreticians of the Frankfurt school had already perceived and comprehended fifty years ago regarding the loss of the ‘aura’—are becoming ever more tasteless and lacking in quality: like the chickens sold in supermarkets that taste like rubber, like the different species of fish reduced to uniformity more by the chemical food with which they are fed than by Linnaean taxonomy, or like the fruit and vegetables, removed from the alternation of the seasons and assigned to the time-without time of cultivation in greenhouses; in short, like all the commodities destined for mass consumption, whose use is—without taste and sensuous intensity—merely repetitive, essentially replaceable, designed not to secure satisfaction and identity for the people who consume them, but to secure the capitalist wealth which is incorporated in them and is accumulated by means of them. The sphere of consumption, of that zone which once was still defined as private, thus experiences ever more the decline of feeling, of taste, of sensual emotion, giving way to boredom, to insignificance and quantitative indifference. The consumption of those fictions or soap-operas that make up almost all television broadcasts, in their ever-more marked contempt for any principle of reality and of every verisimilar connection of cause and effect—even in their superficial brilliance and their apparent production of meaning—testify well enough to the appearance without content of the world of commodities. (Finelli 2007, 68)

Even if we do not agree with Finelli’s conservative leftism, as one could also argue that the taste variety that Finelli has in mind, was only available for the upper classes in the past, the point that he advances, makes sense, in general, inasmuch as the real abstraction of money necessarily must contain a “levelling” of differences that, even after they are lost, need to be either artificially re-introduced or covered up by a commodity aesthetics that produces the illusion of difference (i.e., branding, styles, packaging, etc.) without really delivering them. It has been noted before that this process adds “affective” qualities to commodities that are produced and sold on contemporary markets. The more central this aspect is, however, the more the relation between emotions and affects are subjected to an overall monetarization. The closing off of future (and the primacy of the past) turns emotions and affects that are related to those temporal horizons into what might be called “monetary affects.” The most important ones are coldness, anxiety, and articificality. Indeed, coldness, a term that Adorno uses very often, is the result of the distancing effect of money, anxiety is produced by the monetary frame of the future and by the externalization of society, and artificiality is the effect of emotions and affect, produced by and needed for commodity exchange.

Coldness and Indifference

As capital potentially opens up all social relations to transactions between everyone with everyone else on earth, at the same time it moves aspects of cultural traditions, specific value preferences, as well as geographically bound cultural patterns into the background, as the objectively calculable nature of money pushes the exchange process forward. In this way we can buy ourselves out of otherwise close human relationships. For example, parents can buy themselves out of their responsibility towards the next generation and their children by giving them money for activities, by buying entertainment gadgets, or by buying the service of nannies and babysitters. Overall, capitalist markets have both a distancing and narrowing cultural effect, but both effects are effects of abstract culture, which, in turn, requires emotional distance. The more the relationship between children and parents, i.e., the social life of families, becomes monetized, the more abstract those relationships become because the externalization that occurs in the whole society occurs on the family level, too, which is to say, families tend to appear as something external to the sociality that it sets up. As such, “family” becomes more and more something artificial that is framed and held together by money, which increases once parents need to save money for their children’s education, buy books for their upbringing, pay for therapies, music schools, and college, etc. These credit relations that determine the future closure of capitalist sociality finally enter the family core itself and, therefore, integrate even the traditionally non-economic nature of family relations into capitalist social horizons. The non-economic core of families traditionally depends on close emotional ties, such as love, friendship and unconditional support. But with the introduction of capital into these relations, unconditionality is subjected to conditions that not only depend upon interpersonal qualities, ethics, and tradition, but also upon monetary features, and, ultimately, on the temporal horizons themselves. The more the capitalist schema determines the core of interpersonal relationships and the more these are determined by capital and M’, the more distance is necessary, since this process forces us into a “cool,” rational, and calculative mindset, which, as many worry, “disaffects us, slowly but ineluctably, from ourselves and others” (Stiegler 2013a, 89).

Affective saturation results from hyper-solicitation of attention, and in particular the attention of children, and aims, through the intermediary of industrial temporal objects, to divert their libido from their spontaneous love objects exclusively towards objects of consumption, thus provoking indifference towards their parents and to everything around them, as well as general apathy, overlaid with a sense of threat. (Stiegler 2013a, 89)

This reification of emotional relationships leads to a distancing from intuitive aspects of moral life, such as empathy, pity, and feeling sorry, which Rousseau already noticed in his Second Discourse, though Rousseau did not think of money and markets, but made rationality responsible for the abstraction that occurs in regard to the emotional closeness of social individuals. Rousseau writes:

Compassion must, in fact, be the stronger, the more the animal beholding any kind of distress identifies himself with the animal that suffers. Now, it is plain that such identification must have been much more perfect in a state of nature than it is in a state of reason. It is reason that engenders amour propre, and reflection that confirms it: it is reason which turns man's mind back upon itself, and divides him from everything that could troubles or afflict him. It is philosophy that isolates him, by means of philosophy he secretly says, at the sight of a suffering man: ‘Perish if you will, I am safe.’ Only dangers that threaten the entire society still disturb the Philosopher’s tranquil slumber, and rouse him from his bed. One of his kind can with impunity be murdered beneath his window; he only has to put his hands over his ears and to argue with himself a little in order to prevent nature, which rebels within him, from letting him identify with the man being assassinated. (Rousseau 1997, 153)

What Rousseau has in mind here, is the distancing nature of reason and rationality, as rationality enables humans to distance themselves from the pressure of emotional presence and compassion, and to instrumentalize the present for future ends.[23] For example, on TV we can watch how people suffer and starve to death because we have thousands of arguments for why we don’t need to be touched or act. The same distancing effect, however, enters social reality through money and capital as universal sociality, insofar as it allows us to hide pretty much every emotional closeness behind the veil of a reified world of abstractly defined social relations.

However, this process does not have to be negative in all cases. As Zizek has pointed out, reified relations also liberate individuals from emotional pressures, direct responsibilities, and close relationships (Zizek 2009, 142), and in this sense, it advances degrees of liberal freedom. The process, however we evaluate it morally, is based on a social abstraction that determines the life of individuals under capitalism. The more money one has, the more one can reach liberal “freedom” and distance. Moreover, money is opposed to action (though it certainly controls action). Finally, as Simmel points out, the reified nature of monetary social relations gives intellectual individuals an advantage over others, as their intellectuality goes along with the power that is gained through money (Simmel 1989, 602). A calculative mind is needed for a culture that is based on investment, credit, virtuous spending, and entrepreneurial lives. Formal legality, intellectuality, and money, as Simmel has it, abstract from personal aspects, and individuals who are able to perform the calculations needed to keep up with the level of social abstraction (thinking ahead, calculating risks, knowing where to look for advantages, education, etc.) are better off than less “abstract individuals.”

This leads to what Adorno called the “empoverishment, hardening, [and] coldness” (Adorno 2003a, 17) of capitalist society, or, as Adorno puts it in Negative Dialectics, “the truly unbearable coldness which spreads everywhere along with the expanding exchange-relationship” (Adorno, GS6, 279).[24] Hardness and cruelty are the major characteristics of our contemporary culture, visible in education, the entertainment industry, video game culture, and the overall neutrality towards the poor, the Third World, and non-human animal suffering. Finally, the real abstractions of money also move deeply into the world of children, which increasingly becomes imageless because the technical nature of toys (airplanes, dollies, cars, etc.) binds them to the existing world of what is there or to a super-fantastic world that in most times is simply the projected exaggeration of what is there (science fiction, superheros, etc.). At the same time, with the externalization of memory, images of a better future, once transported through poetry, songs, stories, and religious narratives, are dying out. Though it seems to be the case that we live in a world with ever more pictures, the real images, i.e., the images that project a content that does not yet exists or has never existed, are disappearing. As Adorno points out, the technical nature of toys ties children to functional operations that those use things prescribe (Adorno 2003b, 63), which, in turn, inscribes technology into the horizon of play and games. Everything is setup by signals, lights, noises, and electronic sounds. Calculative operations are trained from early on. Even if many of those things may advance intelligence, they also enclose the mind within the existing means of production through the production of a certain type of consciousness that is no longer able to imagine a world beyond what already exists. Toys as commodities are like means of production. The electronic construction of toy used in early childhood development leads to a priority of calculation and formal operations, which, in turn, forces children to be in constant distance to their own environment and, accordingly, in distance to their emotions.

Anxiety

The credit system and its temporal schema produces a specific emotional tie to money, as with financial operations that now only require a mouse click, money seems to be disconnected from any real transactions and labor. Investment is the best example for this, as the investor is totally removed from any real activity “on the ground.” It is as if one sends money into a black box to which one has no access, which means that an investor puts all of her hopes, fears, and anxieties into a process that she can no longer control ultimately. Consequently, being related to the future and the past becomes similar to how a gambler depends upon what she cannot control, but what, in turn, controls her entire emotional world in the act of gambling. The excitement of gambling is connected to this “being out of control,” as the gambler experiences her emotions as emotions taken over by a process that has similiarities to the experience of fate. On the one hand, once I win, it is as if God has looked down onto me favorably and I feel “special” and “hyped up”; on the other hand, my luck was fully determined in the moment of winning or losing. Consequently, the emotional world is fully externalized, i.e., abstract, since it now belongs to someone else. This masochism of ups and downs that money introduces leads to a series of paradoxical effects. On the one hand, the more calculative the world becomes and the more exchangeable everything becomes, the more abstract our culture becomes. On the other hand, however, we need to go through more and more irrational effects. As paradoxical as it might sound, the consequence of more rationality is more irrationality. For example, the more abstract monetary relations become (such as in banking and financing), the more we are forced to believe in it. As long as we see our money “working” and as long as it is (somehow) clear where it is and who keeps good care of it, it remains within a horizon that we can oversee. With the global expansion of markets, and the expansion of the social future horizon, and because of further digitization and communication, our attitude towards the whole process becomes based on pure faith. Who really knows what will happen in twenty years? Whenever shaken by crises this faith breaks down and turns in constant anxiety. Anxiety is needed for faith because faith can never be knowledge. Every dollar that someone has now, becomes subjected to the fear of losing it, or the hope of getting it back.

Moreover, the emotional world and social moods become unstable, as this world increasingly depends upon markets, monetary developments, crises, and the “mood swings” of stock markets. “Excessive optimism” is necessary for the extension of the financial and debt system (Couch 2011, 100), but this optimism is constructed on the basis of anxiety, for “‘everyone lives in a state of permanent anxiety about being disconnected, rejected, abandoned on the spot by those who displace themselves.’ This anxiety creates precariousness” (Chiapello/Boltanski quoted in Malabou 2008, 51). This state of anxiety is then coupled with ongoing psychic stimulation through advertisements, symbols, television, film, and sports: “The mental environment is saturated by signs that create a sort of continuous excitation, a permanent electrocution, which leads the individual, as well as the collective mind, to a state of collapse” (Bifo 2011, 94). A good example of this is the global professionalization of sports which produces mass excitement, where the ultimate goal of sport team owners is simply capital and money. The desire to see a great game as an end of itself, i.e., the consumption of everything contained in the game, is ultimately subjected to the aim of gaining money because most professional clubs, such as in soccer or football, are traded on the stock market, own other companies and financial institutions, and need to make money through television, radio, and live events. Emotions, as in the case of mass sports events, are based on massive acts of destruction and consumption that guide desires into one direction and introduce abstractions into happiness, excitement, sadness, etc. Finally, the neoliberal phase, as many commentators have pointed out, led to the monetization of one’s life as an object of investment, control, self-discipline, and entrepreneurship, which is constructed on top of the basic anxiety of laborers who increasingly perceive their lives as an external “thing”: “The continual representation of investment as the principal financial means of acquiring material well-being, security, and freedom only serves to heighten this anxiety and, ultimately, to install a sense of perpetual crisis” (Langley 2008, 107).[25]

Monetized Technology

We have seen how the general intellect is indeed the best concept for further analyzing the abstractions of the capitalist schema as really existing abstractions. In the words of Virno, “more generic attitudes of the mind come to the fore as productive resources; these are the faculty of language, the disposition to learn, memory, the capacity to abstract and relate, and the inclination towards self-reflexivity” (Virno 2007, 6). In this last section of this book, however, we need to go one step further by returning to the main point raised against Adorno and Horkheimer in chapter 2, especially since Virno (and Negri) still conceive of the general intellect as a collection of abstract human capacities and human productivity in general. However, I do not think that this is sufficient, as the problem of knowledge and general human creativity can no longer simply be posited as something given; rather, we need to take into account that these capacities and the creative potentialities of humans themselves are both the result and the product of industries that produce mind, memory, and the human body. This point is especially important for pushing Marxist theorizing one step further into our contemporary world. Though the operaist movement is important, insofar as it is based on the assumption that a form of sociality that would no longer be capitalist can only emerge in capitalism and its contemporary forms of technology and communication, it does not go far enough. Negri’s thesis that human productivity becomes increasingly independent from capital, as capital no longer brings about these human capacities and human creativity, but, instead, can only control them, should be rejected, since he underestimates that general human productivity and general human knowledge can no longer be thought of as being independent of capitalized production. For in our current system all general human capacities depend upon industrially produced and distributed technologies. Capital is not simply parasitic; rather, it brings about that which seems to be appropriated from the outside by new forms of labor and technologies. He writes:

The capture of this innovation, an expression of creative activity, is the result of a growing socialization of production. This in turn means: the enterprise must have the ability to valorize the wealth produced by networks that do not belong to it. (Negri 2008, 64)

The production of knowledge and the appropriation of this productivity through capital, however, is not as absolute as Negri seems to indicate, especially since technologies are not separate from human capacities. Instead of this, what we see happening is a merging of human productivity and technologies as well as the production of human capacities through technological replacements: for example, the heartbeat, the breathing rhythm, and the mental operation is brought about by a new knowledge industry, the consequence of which is that we cannot think of the general intellect as a simple tool or use value that capital subordinates for its own goals. Even Marx seems to be ambivalent about this at times. For example, in Capital we find an extensive discussion of how the capitalization of the agricultural and chemical sciences destroys the earth, but Marx does not see that the sciences turn themselves into a system that takes on industrial character. His claim that the capitalist gets knowledge “for free” (MEW23, 407) seems to be wrong if applied to the current situation, as investments need to be made into the sciences, research labs have to be maintained and operated by personal, etc. Most university hospitals resemble factories, based on intellectual labor power, and even mathematics becomes technological, as some proofs are no longer possible without the help of computers, which, in turn, presuppose the whole computer industry and its development. Even the free development of Linux presupposes the whole (capitalist-controlled) system of hardware production.

Moreover, the wealth produced by networks does not come without new social inequalities. As Saskia Sassen has shown (Sassen 1999), global networks and new creative productivity depend upon social-material developments that lead to new inequalities and exploitation through hardware production, as well as to new financial centers and geographical shifts with new globalized cities that create new forms of power and control. Accordingly, authors who tend to idealize network productivity tend to underplay the fact that the production of scientific knowledge and new forms of cooperative labor are based and depend on an industrial production and means of production within the scientific production of knowledge that contain different social relations in terms of job markets, educational institutions, and social inequalities. Similarly, we need to reject Beradi’s claim that “digital abstractions” “no longer happen in the field of bodies, and material manipulation, but in the field of interoperativity between informational machines. Information takes the place of machines, and the body is cancelled from the field of communication” (Bifo 2013, 104). Though it might be correct to claim that communication passes through the human body less, we need to see that every form of communication is nevertheless still tied to machines that have to be produced, exchanged, and are connected to a large system of research, science, and technology. As a consequence, the culture industry should be rethought on social-material grounds and not, as Adorno and Horkheimer still assume, as techniques of influencing the psyche of consumers, which seems to be the reason for Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s silence about technology in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. For they tend to identify technology with instrumental rationality, which, given what we have discussed in relation to the general intellect, remains unsatisfactory. Instead, Stiegler’s claim that “culture in general is originally industrializable, given that it is supported and constituted by technical substrata and techno-logies” (Stiegler 2011a, 109), is superior to Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s analysis.

Moreover, as Stiegler has pointed out on numerous occasions, there is a tradition in philosophy in general, and in the Marxist tradition in particular, of viewing the issue of technology and production instrumentally. According to this position, technology is the result of the battle between capital and labor, which leads to the production of relative surplus value through the constant revolutionizing of the means of production. According to this view, technology is simply a tool within the production process. This position, however, is not the position that Marx outlined and that we need to extend here. As we pointed out earlier, labor power in the form of the laborer’s life becomes subsumed under the monetary process, universalized, subjected to capital’s time frame and changed. It is not simply the means of production that get revolutionized; rather, it is life itself that gets revolutionized because labor power is now produced by the system, i.e., it is no longer some “natural property” of life. For example, the revolution of digital technologies, such as computers, leads to the revolution of major human intellectual activities, such as writing, calculating, thinking, etc. At this point, we are unable—and with Stiegler I doubt that we ever could—to understand mental capacities independently from their existence and production through and in technologies. As Stiegler points out, often philosophers’ and sociologists’ analyses of television belong to a tradition of philosophy

in which technics and technology are trivialities and, as a result, engage in no analysis of television’s technical dimension – and even less its phenomenological consequences in terms of individuation. The outcome is the pauperization, the impoverishment, the starvation of consciousness. (Stiegler 2011a, 86)

Similiarly, new technologies, such as the internet, are reduced to communication tools and that they are analyzed through their ability to change humanity itself. For example, the internet introduces the universal power of the algorithm on a worldwide scale. In fact, almost all operations, forecasts, anticipations, etc. are first produced by algorithms before they are taken up in some fashion by individual minds. Consequently, the future already appears structured by an algorithm, which is then extended by calculating individual minds. Though I agree with Stiegler that technics and technology have been dismissed as something external to the human mind and need to be seen as industries, I do not agree with Stiegler’s thesis that the culture industry that he identifies with Horkheimer and Adorno as “Hollywood” is the source of social schematization (Stiegler 2011a, 87, 103). Social schematization cannot be reduced to the media industries alone; rather, as I have argued, it needs to be tied back to the overall capitalist relations within which technology need to be grasped. This claim nevertheless permits us to investigate the special status of the “general intellect” industries in the narrower sense, especially as this leads us to see that the Kantian idea of a mental schematism is in truth a social schema, given that we are observing the “industrial exteriorization of the very power to schematize” (Stiegler 2011, 37). This industrialization, however, depends upon the capitalist schema, and therefore mental schematization turns into a social-material schema. As a consequence, “society’s self-enclosure” (Vincent 2006, 494) becomes apparent.

The underlying industries for the culture industries and the underlying technologies that are producing those general human capacities that operaists like Negri cite as a proof for the “socialized worker” are mainly three: [a] brain industries, [b] electronic industries, and [c] chemical industries, all of which are in the process of producing human capacities through technologies and thereby they frame them by a schema that no longer conceives an outside of what is already given (except in the case of certain forms of catastrophisms, which are also based on suppressing the vision of a different form of sociality and social organization). Brain industries are based on the “neuronal modification of the structure of the brain triggered by interaction with information and communication technologies” (Terranova 2013, 53).[26] Electronic industries are based on the replacement of the sensual and noetic apparatuses of the human mind, and mental activities become “politically and economically organized” (Stiegler 2010c, 179). For example, Google glasses and video games replace the human sensual apparatus with virtual environments. Chemical industries, finally, are based on changing the biological organization of organisms either by manipulating genetic information or by changing the organism through medications and drugs, especially by manipulating the central nervous system. All of these industries establish a “psychopower that is progressively deployed by marketing, destroying attention formation as consciousness” (Stiegler 2010c, 176). As Terranova nicely puts it, “attention is the process by which value is produced as inseparable from the technological production of subjectivity” (Terranova 2012, 13). Again, “attention” here means the attention that desire devotes to the primary object of desire.[27] The manipulation of desire and the production of the mind—independent from the cultural ideological field—through the monetization of the mind leads to the installment of a new “super-object” of attention, namely, money (or capital) itself, which allows us to speak once again of money as “capitalist thinghood”:

Today, however, the function of the culture and programming industries is to take control of these processes constituting collective secondary retentions. This control is achieved by replacing inherited pre-individual funds with what the culture and programming industries produce, and through this substitution to cause the adoption of retentional funds conceived according to the needs of marketing—that is to make every bit of collective secondary protention submit to the interests of investment. (Stiegler 2011b, 113)

Brain Industries

One of the most prominent examples of brain industries is the field of neuromarketing, i.e., research that is supposed to lead to technologies that directly access the human brain without detour through the perceptive, emotional, and cognitive system. Imagine that you feel attracted by a certain type of product because certain radio waves that you are unable to perceive stimulated your brain in a way that made you more apt to buy that product. It is certainly true that consumer research always wanted to access the unconscious operations of the mind, but so far this research has been based on empirical research that is difficult to control and prove. The most recent research in this field goes far beyond traditional “pupillography” (a measurement of what is going on in the “black box” through measurements of tiny widening and reactions in eyes when consumers are confronted with choices). The neurosciences can now track specific properties of objects perceived by consumers, such as specific physical properties of music, or the influence of light patterns onto areas of the brain that have been identified as important for consumer choices. Causality, in other words, is supposed to replace influence. This research, accordingly, goes far beyond any traditional attention and psycho-control industries, attention manipulation, and devices that try to steer, distribute and frame attention of citizens and consumers, since the goal is to get rid of the problem of psychological and “subjective” aspects of consumers by not only reaching the consumers’ unconscious, but by directly interfering with the brain of consumers through a causal nexus, thereby making the “symmetry of power between capital and consumers” (Smith 2000, 84) even more visible, as the goal of every capitalist company that sells commodities is that the consumer does not actually chose, but buys his or her product automatically, without thinking.

For example, we can easily imagine that in a supermarket certain colored lights blink with patterns that trigger automatic reactions without even the slightest knowledge of the consumer. Moreover, we see TV commercials, internet ads, and supermarket advertisements directly linked with databases that have saved virtually all the choices consumers made in the past and their preferences, so that the system is able to relate the consumer to products—again without even the slightest knowledge of the consumer or her desires. As another example, a television could send out a signal (instead of an image) that directly penetrates the brain without detour through the psychic system of the viewer. The ultimate goal behind this system of knowledge machinery is, as always, M’. The relatively new field of neuromarketing will play a decisive role in this field of knowledge:

With better comprehension and steadily improving methods, it may be possible to derive new theories for marketing research and to arrive at a higher level of explained variance […]. This may in turn help to improve companies’ actions, for example, marketing responses that are based on a better satisfaction of unconscious emotional consumer needs. (Hubert/Kenning 2008, 274)

This quote from an overview of recent trends in neuromarketing renders visible very well the ideological setup of the positive sciences: researchers assume that “improving” company actions is in any case a good thing, that marketing is about the “satisfaction” of consumers, and that the market responds to “emotional needs.” Sadly a critical view, which would point to the manipulation, control, and production of needs, virtually does not exist in this field of research that is so deeply connected to the capitalist schema and to the principle of accumulation, and, as Tony Smith claims in regard to lean production, this leads “to the systematic neglect of consumer wants and needs that do not fit the commodity form” (Smith 2000, 88). The whole brain power invested by smart researchers is based on the tacit assumption (or, put differently, by religious faith) that the consumer rather than capital is in the center of capitalism. Be that as it may, the applications of neuromarketing as a form of manipulative knowledge and techniques are various. According to some researchers, brain research will even help heal consumers with shopping addiction! If this is true, ultimately brain industries may eventually heal consumers whenever they resist being consumers. Resistance is “systematically undone in the effort to produce a consumer stripped of the ability to be autonomous either morally or cognitively” (Stiegler 2010c, 184).

It is precisely this other side of knowledge production that Negri and his postoperaist friends tend to miss, namely, the fact that the production of knowledge, even socially produced knowledge, is itself a function within the capitalist schema and is produced for keeping the M-C-M’ cycle up and running. Both companies interested in controlling their customers and scientists who want to know how this works are subsumed to capital as processing money, as all research is done towards the commodification of humanity. Research centers, universities, corporations, and market institutions are very difficult to separate and are increasingly growing together into one electronics-industrial complex. For example, many research projects in the neurosciences are initiated by institutions such as the Marketing Science Institute, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, and the World Advertising Research Centre. Questions addressed here are “What are the neural correlates of brand choices?” or “How does the brain react to product attractiveness?” or “How are neural activity and product utility related to each other?” The results are self-fulfilling prophesies that repeat already existing schemas. For example,

[t]he data showed that an advertisement that was rated as attractive led to activation in brain areas associated with the integration of emotions in the decision-making process (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) and the perception of rewards (ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens) showed that beautiful female faces led to the activation of reward-related areas in the brains of heterosexual males. (Hubert/Kenning 2008, 282)

Neuromarketing will especially help companies determine long-term strategies, i.e., to develop strategies that close the present/future gap, as discussed in the last chapter:

With regard to long-term product strategy, consumer neuroscience could be used to determine which consumer segments are reached by advertisement strategies, or whether a future purchase of the brand is probable. Another possible field of application is the determination of the market potential for a new product or for discontinued products. (Hubert/Kenning 2008, 288)

A company that would already know which choices a consumer makes before she has made her choices would give the company a market advantage over other companies. In addition, as a side note, all these examples demonstrate how since the event of marketing, ironically, capitalist companies tend to become planned companies, i.e., companies that know before production what customers will consume. Planning could indeed exist if a company could produce and control the exact needs and wants of the consumers who would then buy the products offered by the company. “Lean production” is in the end based on the same idea: for example, Volkswagen now only builds their cars after orders. The customer can even visit the factory and see how his or her car will be produced. The effect of this is that Volkswagen ideally would no longer be forced to calculate the risk of overproduction.[28]

Electronic Industries

As we have seen, “industrial temporal objects are able to capture, monopolize, and penetrate attention in ways unequalled in history” (Stiegler 2010c, 182). By “industrial temporal objects” Stiegler refers to technological objects that directly take over the temporal constitution of consciousness by replacing it with something externally produced. As the prime example, Stiegler refers to the invention and cultural expansion of film, as film, in contrast to photography, directly manipulates consciousness by replacing the stream of consciousness with the film object itself:

The visible world and the Imaginary (the unconscious) became technologically linked and constantly retooled to create an industrial technologization of the Imaginary that today has become generalized. Moving images, the utilization of which valorizes their media as well as modifies spectators, result in the continuous modification of a collective, variegated operating platform that images the world and its relations in exchange for pleasure, social “know-how,” what-have-you. Thus “the image” creates the techno-social modifications necessary to engineer the adaptive forms of social cooperation that have become the pre-requisites for the preservation of capital and capitalist hierarchy. (Beller 2006)

The capitalist schema, in other words, not only in its financialized version, but also in its technical version, occupies human time and the temporalizations of money. But film is only one example, as we are now confronted with a wave of digital objects that introduces all kinds of electronics and electronic devices in our life-world, such as GPS devices, phones, memory cards, computerized watches and glasses, implanted microchips, digital toys, and self-tracking devices that monitor everything from heartbeat, step frequency, and breathing rhythm, which are accompanied by network and communication tracking tools that, as we said in the last section, know more than anyone could ever have known about anyone in the universe. One effect of the production of noetic acts by electronic objects is the further installment of capital as the mega-goal of all activities, given that the noetic acts are produced within the overall framework of the capitalist schema. Nintendo, for example, is one of the most important companies and manufacturers for games and play consoles that operate with increasing inclusion of movement, body gestures, and advanced technologies in haptics. New devices are in development that let the player feel the weight, pressure, texture, and dimension of the game within a 3D-environment. Soon we will see pain included in this list. Games and virtual environments are increasingly included in the development and application of military training and military operations, in medicine, and in education, and are also increasingly used within the production process itself. Accordingly, it is increasingly difficult to claim that the electronic industries bring about tools for organizing consciousness, subjectivity, and attention (desire); rather, they are becoming identical with it:

Let it be registered then that the media have not just been organizing human attention; they are the practical organization of attention just as factories, agribusiness, the military-industrial complex, and the service sector are the practical organization of labor. Attention is channeled in media pathways that traverse both hardware and wetware. These pathways are themselves the historical compilation of body-machine interfaces […]. Readers here will have internalized the protocols of mass media (shot, countershot; turn on the radio, drive; jack in; check your email) and what to do when they interface. (Beller 2006)

The more we spend our time with computers, screens, keyboards, cell phones, the internet, etc., the more our daily routines, the organization of everyday life, our expectations, memories, behaviors, wishes, and needs are shaped by these technologies. As a consequence, the instrumentalist theory of technology should be rejected, as technology does not simply mediate reality and subjectivity; rather, it structures it through and through:

It is not what is made but how, and by what instruments of labor, that distinguishes different economic epochs. Instruments of labor not only supply a standard of the degree of development which human labor has attained, but they also indicate the social relations within which men work. (MEW23, 195; CI, 286)

Decisive for us, however, is that all technologies today are capitalist, i.e., they are all tied to the capitalist schema, insofar as they are produced through a capitalist system, in which scientific objects, intelligent devices, and algorithms become increasingly important for surplus value production. This vision of technology, which includes phenomenological aspects, is already indicated in Marx’s analysis of the system of machinery in Capital. As he says in a famous footnote (almost like a Heideggerian),

[t]echnology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions [geistigen Vorstellungen] that flow from those relations. (MEW23, 392; CI, 492)

What Marx indicates here is not that technology is somehow a neutral “thing” in between the laborer and the reality; rather, it is the organization of that reality itself, as the form of social relations. If one lesson can be learned from the machine fragment, it is the structuring of social relations by the capitalist schema in the form of technologies that also shape the temporalizations of money, since with the inclusion of the general intellect technologies are the real existence of capital. As Marx says in the quote, technology is the formation of [1] the relation between humans and the earth, [2] the direct reproduction of social life, and [3] the imaginations, conceptions, projections and representations of subjects to their own social reproduction. Accordingly, this implies that technologies are not “outside” the human mind, and are not something towards which we can occupy a neutral position; rather, with Stiegler, we would do well to acknowledge that technologies are the externalized mind and therefore they shape it in the following respects: they regulate and determine ecological relations; they shape and produce possible social relations, hierarchies, and power relations; they determine space and time by placing individuals in specific geographical or historical relations; and they produce the wishes, desires, needs, and thoughts that are required to reproduce these relations.

Since the overall framework is determined by the capitalist mode of production, technologies have a direct ideological function, given that they confirm capitalism on the “meta-level” as absolute affirmation and as that which Althusser calls “absolute guarantee that everything really is so” (Althusser 2008, 55). The case of technology, however, shows the limited vision of Althusser’s theory of ideological state apparatuses, as he nowhere considers the role of the means of production in relation to modern technology as the main driving force and material existence of ideology. He still holds the position that practices reproduce ideology and subjects, and he implicitly remains within an anthropological horizon, insofar as his theory circles around three relations: subject-ideology-practice, whereas, if we consider this more carefully, the “standpoint of reproduction” (Althusser 2008, 10) would require the inclusion of the “system of machinery,” i.e., the general intellect and technology, in a theory of ideology. For Althusser, however, technology is “neutral,” insofar as he does not consider it as something in and though which ideology exists materially. As Althusser argues, if mental conceptions are reproduced in praxis, then we cannot reach a neutral point of view within this praxis, as with every act, ideology is reproduced. Similarly, in the case of technology: if technology is inserted into practices and if it exists only within social reproduction, then it is impossible to conceive it as an “instrument” for goals or ends. Instead, in regard to our contemporary epoch we need to say that the electronic industries and the technologies that they are based on and produce are mental conceptions, since these exist as electronic technologies. That which Marx calls in Capital “system of machinery,” which, today, exists as a vast network of digital relations, is a capitalist structuration of time, space, and consciousness. Technology is, as Marx says in the famous footnote, an active relation, i.e., it is not something that is simply “there,” given, or exists as a social fact. It should be addressed, accordingly, in a dialectical and anti-positivist theory of the social whole.

For example, the introduction of the mechanical machine in the nineteenth century led to a labor process that overcame human power as a limit of the labor process and productivity, which then had certain effects on how bodies were shaped, formed and “normalized” throughout the factory process. Similarly, the relation of the body to its social reproduction is formed and normalized through technologies that require starring at monitors for 10 hours every day, following graphs and signals, or require the input of data through keyboard or microphone. For example, huge parts of labor today are reduced to looking and monitoring. In the form of computer devices intelligent technologies overcome the limitations of the human mind and reshape intelligent relations and social interactions. With the reshaping of these technologies, communication and transportation changes the ways humans travel and coordinate their actions with each other. Gender relations, age relations, and moral relations are equally included here. With the electronic industries, capital gets direct access to the mental world, which has led some scholars to characterize the current phase of capitalism as “cognitive capitalism” (Moulier-Boutang 2011) or “mental capitalism” (Franck 2005). It is as if we are becoming de-possessed from our mental core by media industries, programming industries, advertisement industries, and the computer and electronics industry:

Controlling the temporal flow of mass consciousness allows the culture industries to control behavior, for instance, to guarantee the consumption of products that the process of permanent innovation (the principles underlying industrial production) constantly releases into the global market. (Stiegler 2010a, 76)

This general de-possession of the human is a form of what Stiegler has called “proletarianization” (Stiegler 2013a, 65), which refers to the production and control of the whole belief system, the effect of which is that memory becomes external in technologies and removes individuals from their social substance. The proletarian is a “substanceless subjectivity” (Zizek 2009, 92) and includes the majority of the population. We should underline that all of this not only counts for consumption, since the production of the general intellect and the human mind are themselves based on the same technical processes.

Chemical and Life Science Industries

The chemical industries are important in two respects: capital infiltrates through them the whole human organism as well as the relation between humans and the earth. Capital thereby schematizes, in the way developed here, this relation. The ecological dimension deeply influenced Marx’s analysis of the system of machinery in Capital, as he observed the ongoing destruction of the earth’s soil through agricultural technologies that were based on chemistry and chemical research (Liebig). The chemical industries, and their biotechnological successors, are the most important factor in how the capitalist schema frames the biological organization of organisms from the valorization of genes to the development of drugs to cure mental disorders and psychopathologies, which, ironically, are the result of the capitalist schema and the electronic industries. We simply need to consider the facts: 3.3 million children in the US are diagnosed with attention deficit disorders, and the production of Adderall and Dexedrine, used to treat ADHD, has risen 2,000 percent in nine years (which suggests high numbers of children take those drugs even without being properly diagnosed). The US produces and consumes about 85 percent of the world's production of Ritalin. By now, one out of six US boys takes Ritalin on a regular basis, a drug that works like amphetamines and cocaine. Moreover, one in every ten Americans takes antidepressants on a regular basis, which were the third most common prescription medication taken by Americans in 2005–2008. Indeed, the usage of antidepressant drugs went up by 400 percent during that time frame. Even if the causes are complex and no good scientific theory has been found that explains the increase of those facts, given that the US statistics differ significantly from other countries, one can safely assume that at least a large part of the medicalization of the US population is, in fact, produced by a system that is characterized by monetary processes and pressure on the population. For example, the pressure on students to fit into the iron cage of their society is so high that conservative estimates have it that more than 40 percent of the US student population takes memory enhancing drugs during exam periods. These “cognitive enhancement drugs,” such as Adderall, are often based on Ritalin and similar products. The medicalization (and criminalization) of behavior, as well as the profits of drug companies are at its highest ever. As Foster has it, “capitalism created open, endless dissatisfaction, since the pursuit of exchange value as opposed to use value had no natural or social point of satisfaction, but led to a drive/craving for more” (Foster 2010, 281).

In addition, as long as a health system is framed by the capitalist schema, it necessarily must be interested in as many sick people as possible in order to reproduce itself, and it is, accordingly, misleading to focus only on the consumption aspect. Instead, we also should note that the general intellect is at work in ways that idealizing theories of the general intellect tend to miss. Most drugs are synthetic drugs that emerge in a complex system that operates on the lowest level of organisms and the earth, such as research on plants, materials, molds, bacteria, non-human animals, and minerals. For example, Cortisol, which is used for the treatment of arthritis, was developed with the use of the adrenal glands of sheeps and cows, and presupposes a highly complex system of science, research, development, and an industrialized animal production system. As another example, in 2010 more than 1.1 million animals were used for research; 65,000 dogs alone were used for testing purposes. These numbers do not include animals such as rats, mice, and birds because “these animals are not covered by the Animal Welfare Act. […] [I]t is estimated that approximately 25 million of these animals are used every year.”[29]

These developments and trends should sufficiently demonstrate that the general intellect is not simply “human productivity”; rather, it is an industrially structured system that no longer depends upon steel mills and car factories, but, instead, became a system of knowledge factories in the form of corporate research institutes, universities, development centers, hospitals, drug corporations, government agencies, and labs. Again, we need to return to Marx’s claim that the system of machinery, i.e., science and technology, reveals the complex relations contained in social and ecological reproduction. Insightfully, Marx already clearly saw how chemical research is intrinsically connected to the development of agricultural industries and that it therefore indicates a specific ecological relation between humans and nature: “[l]abour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature” (MEW23, 192; CI, 283). With the valorization of labor power this relation becomes upset: a “rift” (Foster) occurs between society and nature, which, taken more concretely, appears first as earth, i.e., as the land and soil taken as the “inorganic nature of the living individual” (MEW42, 396; G, 474; see also MEW40, 515). It comes then as no surprise that Marx pays especial attention to the revolutions of agriculture through science and technology, driven by capital and framed by value. Marx shows that the agricultural developments no longer depend upon natural conditions encountered within the labor process, but, instead, depend upon an external system of an industry driven by research and valorization, which, in turn, also implies global exploitive relations, such as imported fertilizers and the exploitation of labor in foreign countries.[30] Accordingly, the chemistry sciences that drive this new agricultural industry, contain a totally new network of social and ecological relations. As Foster explains in regard to the historical development of capitalism and in regard to the Grundrisse,

Living labor, which was originally connected to and in community with the land, was now defined by the fact that the earth was the worker’s ‘not-property,’ that is, his (and her) ‘not-landownership … the negation of the situation in which the working individual relates to land and soil, to the earth as his own.’ This prior communal relation to the earth was now ‘historically dissolved’ in its entirety by capitalist relations of production. (Foster 2010, 283)

At this point we are in a position to analyze the brain and chemistry industries in the same fashion, which is indicated by the fact that today the major global life science corporations are the major players in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries. For example, Novartis AG (formerly Sandoz and Ciba-Gigy) financed genomic research at the University of California with a 25 million dollar contract and the option to hold the resulting patents. At the same time, Novartis financed a 24 million dollar contract with the Psychiatric Research Center at the University of Maryland for the “multinational access to the Centre’s brain-tissue bank” (Bowring 2003, 72). Finally, the same corporation cooperated with the Archer Daniels Midland company, which has one of the biggest grain collections (and its primary patent rights). Given the structure of corporations, such as Monsanto, Hoechst, or Novartis AG, one can safely claim that the production of chemical weapons, antidepressants, DNA technologies, toxins, and engendered seeds are essentially the same, have merged, and are run by the same industries. Research and development budgets of these corporations by now top 5 billion dollars annually.[31] This example shows that the general intellect needs to be understood as a system of production. In this vein, we should understand the chemical industries as a system for the use and production of the general intellect, since these industries are part of the rift between the organization of productivity and its natural bases, insofar as they produce a new psychological and brain-related mental apparatus. Our own body, our own organism, and the planet as the extension of ourselves, become subjected to the capitalist schema, and, accordingly, are treated as “not-property.” The privatization of our natural fundaments lead to an expropriation of this basis through chemical and biotechnological industries. For example, the genes and genetic organization of humans, non-human animals, and all other organisms prior to this shift was contained within the metabolic relation to nature. As it was not known before the agricultural revolution that soil can be made more productive, it was not transparent to us that cells, genes, and basic features of life could be made productive in regard both to science and to capital. The material structure of the organism, in other words, was a factor in the labor process just as other factors, but it was still part of the labor process. What we encounter with the valorization of the organism is, consequently, the effect of a real abstraction, as we shift the material structure from being a moment of a process to something that is external to this process. As a consequence of this abstraction, the organism can enter markets and be controlled by market mechanisms, i.e., by the race for more money. The outcome of this abstraction by value is not simply based on the exploitation of the chemical and biological organization of organisms; however, since it returns on a higher level as the production of the material structure of the organisms. For example, we are already able to replace limbs, and hearts, and soon, we will start to replace parts of our genetic structure, as we learn to manipulate features of plants, animals, and other organisms. The consequence of this is that we are not only upsetting the ecological relation; instead, we reify this relation and therefore are no longer able to conceive it as something of our own. In this way, it appears to us thinglike, external, alienated, and uncontrollable because of “market forces.”

As a consequence, our own core, our own natural structure, and our own biological and chemical setup become mere accessories to production (for this, see Foster 2010, 281). The genetic alteration of plants and the development of fertilizers and pesticides goes hand in hand with the developments of drugs and brain alterations through chemical and biological technologies. Accordingly, speaking of “human productivity” in general or “generic attitudes of the mind” (Virno 1996, 6) that can no longer be brought about by capital, as Negri and Virno have it, is a naïve illusion. The genetic alteration of plants and the development of fertilizers and pesticides goes hand in hand with the development of drugs and brain alterations through chemical and biological technologies. We are in the process of industrially producing this human productivity, which is only possible through the valorization of human productivity on all levels, i.e., through money as the capitalist schema. The capitalist schema upsets the whole mental and biological apparatus of humans and is about to force us to be integrated in capitalism and the present, unless it runs into its own absolute ecological limits and the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. As Marx explains this process of separation and production in regard to the historical formation of capitalism,

The original conditions of production […] cannot themselves originally be products—results of production. It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labor and capital. (MEW42, 397; G, 489)

Notes

1.

Sohn-Rethel’s theory falls into the same trap. His reference point is not Marx’s Capital, as it is mine; rather his reference point is historical materialism. Similar to Adorno and Horkheimer, he underestimates the task of understanding the specificity of the capitalist form, instead of coming up with a theory that explains world history, though some of Marx’s early writings certainly point towards that direction. The universal basis of Sohn-Rethel’s is mostly visible in his claim that the law of value is the basic law of historical materialism and, accordingly, of the whole historical process (Sohn-Rethel 1973, 34). This claim, however, does not make any sense, as the so-called “law of value” is precisely not a universal principle, as only under capitalism does wealth appear in the form of value and, as Postone and Arndt have shown, value is a relative concept (Postone 1993 and Arndt 2011).

2.

For this, see Vincent 2006.

3.

For this critique, also see Foster 2013, 13 and 19. On the other hand, we should underline that Adorno remained close to Marx and that many of his writings can be understood as an analysis of social abstractions and its effects, such as violence, aggression, and coldness (for this see Vincent 2006).

4.

For this thesis, also see Toscano 2008a. This thesis, however, does not mean that all abstractions are social. For the role of abstraction in social-materialist philosophy, also see the brilliant contribution by Finelli 1989 and Finelli 2007.

5.

This externality is, accordingly, also connected to general crises: “As long as the social character of labor appears as the money-existence of commodities, and thus as a thing external to actual production, money crises—independent of or as an intensification of actual crises—are inevitable” (MEW25, 532).

6.

One needs to note here that even money itself becomes more abstract (gold, coin, paper, credit card, digital numbers) and the abstracter the money bearer becomes, the more dependent we are on the social whole: “The more abstract money became, the more it became transformed into a sign […], the more became its power to control [Wirkmacht] reality” (Braun 2012, 10).

7.

Simmel’s main approach has two flaws: [1] it is based on a subjective neo-Kantian theory of value, and [2] it reduces money to a cultural function, i.e., he reduces money to a civilizatory tool. As a consequence, he fails to see the specific capitalist function of money and he universalizes the material status of money. Finally, he does not deal with the difference of different forms of money such as commodity money, capital, credit money, finance capital, etc. The as such brilliant cultural speculations lead him to overlook the connection between capital and labor. For example, his analogy between the Herakleitian river and money is as an analogy, not false and comes close to Marx’s metaphor of capital as “absolute subject”; however, it misses the fact that the “absolute movement character of the social world” (Simmel 1989, 714) that, according to Simmel, is present in money, ultimately is nothing else than a set and network of social relations based on what Tony Smith has called the “expression of the creative powers of collective social labor” (Smith 2005, 185).

8.

Murray calls this “practically abstract” (quoted in Toscano 2008a, 59).

9.

For this, see Rosa 2013, 406.

10.

I am not sure whether Crouch was aware of the analogy of (deadly nerve) “gas” and “capital” when he described financial capital in the following words: “Finance capital […] is more like a liquid or gas, capable of changing shape and flowing across jurisdictions and regions” (Crouch 2011, 119). He might have a point though.

11.

For a detailed analysis within contemporary tendencies and the implied contradictions of capital that are connected to the machine fragment, see Lotz 2014b. For the sake of this section, I will not deal with the limits of capital that Marx discusses in the machine fragment.

12.

Another analogy is based on the role the heart and blood play for organism. As Marx points out in the Grundrisse, “blood” and “blood stream” were early on used to describe the role that money plays in society.

13.

How actual Marx’s analysis is, can be seen in how a recent famous author describes our contemporary situation: According to Manuel Castells, our contemporary capitalism “depends on innovation as the source of productivity growth on computer-networked global financial markets, whose criteria for valuation are influenced by information turbulences; on the networking of production and management, both internally and externally, locally and globally; and on labor that is flexible and adaptable. The creators of value have to be self-programmable and able to autonomously process information into specific knowledge. Generic workers, reduced to their role as executants, must be ready to adapt to the needs of the network enterprise, or else face displacement by machines or alternative labor forces” (Castells 2009, 33).

14.

For this, especially see Postone 1993 and Smith 2013.

15.

For an overview of these struggles, see the excellent studies in Nuss 2006.

16.

As I argue below, Virno’s assumption that knowledge exists without a mechanical body should be rejected.

17.

The same can be brought against Virno, who claims that speaking and thinking as general human traits become productive in post-Fordist capitalism. His claim, though, is highly dubious, as all speaking and thinking has a special social form, is mediated through, sociality and depends upon the development of the means of production. As such, it is not “immediately” shared with others; for this, see Virno 2004, 41.

18.

Similiarly, Suarez-Villa speaks of the control of creativity in the sciences and knowledge production, which he calls “experimentation,” as having become universal: “The reality of experimentalism under technocapitalism is defined, in turn, for all of society. Its scale is ‘mega,’ meant to be all encompassing and deeply entwined with corporatism, to serve the latter. Defining reality means that experimentalism increasingly sets the agenda for entire societies” (Suarez-Villa 2009, 16).

19.

As Stiegler has it: “This was followed by the appearance of apparatus capable of producing industrial temporal objects, enabling the reproduction and ‘discretization’ of perceptual time. This in turn, becomes the basis of control technologies, and, in particular, of the control of secondary identification, as ‘available brain time.’ Industrial temporal objects, in other words, enable control of the ‘perception-consciousness system,’ as Freud called it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and, at the same time, enable libidinal energy to be captured and harnessed. It is in this figure that the consumer arises, the body and motor behavior of whom, through which he or she subsists and exists, become a body and behavior of consumption” (Stiegler 2013a, 65).

20.

For an overview of this, see http://www.fit.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/fit/de/documents/01_Tracking-Actual-Usage-the-Attention-Metadata-Approach.pdf, last accessed December 14, 2013.

21.

Ibid.

22.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrARH4KJRro&feature=share&list= PLOcrXzpA0W82rsJJKrme BlY3_MS0uQv3h&index=26> [last accessed: December 27, 2013. What this researcher does not address, however, is the connection of cognitive and computer science research with the attempt to build noetic industries.

23.

For a more contemporary version, see Altvater/Mahnkopf 2007, 108–111.

24.

For this, also see Hörisch 2004, 111.

25.

This can also be observed on the side of consumption: “lean production tends to leave the consumer in a state of perpetually unsatisfied desire and anxiety” (Smith 2000, 87). In addition, we have the feeling that we should constantly run behind developments in society and technology: “Today, panic has become a form of psychopathology: we can speak of panic when we see a conscious organism (individual or social) overwhelmed by the speed of processes in which it is involved, and where it has insufficient time to handle the information generated by those processes” (Bifo 2011, 93).

26.

Catherine Malabou has offered a different version of what brains are and how they function. She believes that the picture of the brain as a central steering unit is false and that, instead, we should think about the brain as a plastic structure that works like a non-hierarchical network structure. She detects in this a new way to think about capitalism and communism, but she does not really take the brain industries into account as the units of production in contemporary capitalism; for this, see Malabou 2008, 40–54.

27.

At one point Stiegler points to Heidegger’s concept of Sorge [care] (Stiegler 2013b, 83), but I doubt that Heidegger’s concept of care can be translated into a psychoanalytically inspired terminology, as care is not really related to objects for Heidegger; rather, it is the way in which Dasein is temporalized as a whole.

28.

To be sure, this picture is far too simple. I only intended to point to some underlying contradictions of the connection between causality and capital.

29.

For these numbers, see http://speakingofresearch.com/facts/statistics/ [Last accessed December 19, 2013].

30.

The destruction of the laborer and the earth through fertilizer production and capitalist agriculture is not a thing of the past; an ARTE documentary film on the Peruvian Guano Island (about which Marx already knew) demonstrates vividly that the same mechanisms are still in place: http://youtu.be/G-c19yv71SE [Last accessed: December 13, 2013].

31.

Most of these developments produce a global rift. For example, 75 percent of all plant based pharmaceutical drugs developed in the North are based on pirated indigenous knowledge found in the South (Bowring 2003, 99). For the sake of the topic of this section, I am unable to go into more details here, but even a few examples show the evil nature of the patenting system based on biopiracy. Bowring mentions a very telling example: in 1997 the US company RiceTec filed for patents for hybridized basmati strains (developed in a long tradition in India and Pakistan), which would have given the corporation permission to take over the whole rice export market of these countries.

Conclusion

One of the themes presented in this book dealt with the closure of capital, particularly the closure that comes about through the extension of valorization so as to include the entire core of human beings, including their biological structure, their psychological faculties and their mental capacities, all of which lead not only to the total integration of all individuals in the social horizons of the capitalist schema, but also to turning individuals into monetized subjects. One could argue against this position by claiming that this view not only is deeply dystopian, but also fails to explain how, despite the ontological force of the capitalist schema, political resistance and anti-capitalist movements can emerge and exist.

Three remarks are in order at this point: [a] I argued that it is not capital that is the substance of social reality; rather, as I underlined, the substance of social reality can only be identified in labor or, more generally put, in the productive and creative capacities of living individuals. Here I agree with scholars such as Tony Smith who like to speak of capital as “nothing.” Indeed, capital as processing money is, speculatively put, “nothing,” insofar as it is only the form of human productivity and, more precisely put, it is simply the processing character of money and abstract labor. Seen from a metaphysical point of view, process is becoming and, in this sense, “is” not. However, having said this, we need to take into account when we speak of capital as “nothing,” that capital is not something independent from labor, since in a capitalist society, human productivity exists in monetized form, the consequence of which is that under a different social form and in a different social reality labor would look differently, since its “categories of existence” [Daseinsbestimmungen] would be different. As I argued against Negri’s dualistic view of capital and labor, as well as against the implicit “use value fetishism” in Adorno, even if we imagine that capital would be abolished, this would not lead to a sudden return of what labor “essentially,” “authentically,” and “humanly” is. As Marx argues in the Grundrisse, to speak of production “as such” is an empty abstraction. Production or labor “as such” cannot exist, since in its concrete reality it only exits socially, i.e., with a determinate form. Consequently, though speculatively interpreted, capital is “nothing” in itself, it can never fall away alone; instead, changing the form is the same as changing its content, which in this case involves the laboring individual. Thus, abolishing capital would necessarily imply abolishing the existing labor structure and the social organization as a whole. This change, however, would not necessarily be a return to some “authentic” social productivity. [b] Though I explicitly bracketed almost all questions related to politics and to political resistance, I do believe that real political shifts, i.e., changes that go beyond riots or protests, will only occur if the proper objective conditions are given for those political shifts. In this regard, I still think that Marx’s claim about the contradiction between productive forces and the relations of production can be saved. Similarly, certain imaginations of what is or should be possible can only occur when the conditions that are required by the capitalist schema become at least substantially unstable, or if the conditions for capitalism break down completely.

These crashes can occur on two levels: either economic crises will be so extreme that these lead to a malfunctioning in the system, or, the system runs into its own ecological limits. For example, how to organize society in a way no longer structured, controlled, and demanded by value alone, could require a situation in which people no longer can use their credit cards or cash machines. We may observe the foreshadowing of such an event by considering the several days during which the government in Cyprus shut down access to cash machines. In response to this, in Greece many people did not simply protest, but they concretely did things differently. One example of this was that they tried to create new workplace organizations and new political associations. People were forced to imagine different ways to be productive together. Economic crises, in other words, must be so extreme that the social horizons schematized by money open up other possibilities. [c] I was careful to speak of the capitalist schema as a schema that is based on a dynamic expansion, which means that its universality is a universality to which potentially everything becomes subjected. Though I see a certain closure at the horizon with the upcoming new technologies that produce the noetic apparatus of humans and subject the biological code to valorization, this process is still a potentiality, as we are not yet at the end of this new stage of capitalism.

Overall, then, insofar as the capitalist schema is the totalizing principle of capitalist socialization, the system needs to be “rolled over” into something else as a whole. As I argued in chapter 3, since totality is a dialectical category, this cannot be achieved by an “event” or by a sudden revolutionary conversion, since such a transformation cannot be reduced to politics alone (as Badiou seems to think), but necessarily needs to be thought of as a social-economic process. Otherwise, we fall back onto a quasi-theological way of thinking about ruptures that save humanity from its downfall. Real politics does not constitute the ground of our social totality or that which we usually call “society.” In this regard, I disagree with most post-Marxist philosophies, such as Ranciere and Laclau/Mouffe, for whom the political is the ground of the social. As Marx has it: “It is wrong to assume that social movement excludes political movement. No political movement exists that, at the same time, would not also be social” (MEW4, 182). However, despite all resistance movements, protests, and critique, these movements can only be real if they appear alongside social movement, i.e., together with really occurring social shifts. Political movements and political shifts that are not at the same time social movements and social shifts lack their objective basis and will either be symbolic or only be able to change power structures. New power structures and even the downfall of certain state apparatuses, however, can only be effective if they are already based upon a different social-economic reality.

We need to return to where we started, namely, to the main idea of this book, which calls for the liberation of the concept of schematism from its epistemological and mentalist contexts by understanding it as a social-material concept. Relatedly, we need to argue that in capitalism the schematism should be identified with money in its historically specific constitution as the existence of value, which, in turn, constitutes the unity and totality of all social relations in capitalism. Because the schematism frames the social totality, it is the condition of the possibility for accessing social facts and social entities in this form of sociality. In contrast to Heidegger’s concept of enframing, which does not allow us to think of (social) development, Marx’s theory of value and money explains and lets us understand the inner dynamics of the social world, insofar as it shows that the unity of that which we call “world” is itself a moving unit, process, and development, the consequences of which we can observe on a daily basis. Given this, we need to reject the idea that money is itself a “social fact,” as, for example, Ganssmann claims. For this thesis is wrongheaded, as it cannot explain that money, to use his language, is both fact and form. Consequently, it is insufficient to theorize that money is that which mediates social relations (Ganssmann 2012, 58); for if money only mediates social relations, then the insight that money has a specific form in capitalism and therefore constitutes capitalist social reality by schematizing it, would be lost. The English translation of “Verhältnis” as “social relation” is misleading anyhow, since the English term indicates a relation between two people, but the German term refers to the whole of how people are related to each other. Accordingly, to claim that money is a social relation does not mean that it is “a” relation; rather it means that money is the way in which concrete social relations between individuals are constituted, i.e., it is the form of sociality (in capitalism). This is indicated in the plural of “Verhältnis,” namely, “Verhältnisse,” which is not translated as “relations,” but more properly, as “conditions,” “situations,” or “circumstances.”

Moreover, the assumption of dialectics, namely, that society can only be understood if we assume that it is a social totality that is as social totality contradictory, i.e., that it contains its own negation, needs to be preserved. In my view, social theory as a philosophical theory can only be preserved as dialectics, since otherwise the categorical structure of what we call “society” gets reduced either to social anthropology or to mental constructivism. The idea of a social-dialectical theory, however, implies that society, although it comes about through agents, exists objectively and independently from the minds of its members. In addition, theory only exists as theory, as Adorno ironically puts it in his 1964 lecture course on philosophy and theory of society, if it goes beyond that which we find in the Baedeker (famous German travel guide), i.e., if it goes beyond what is simply given (Adorno 2008, 39). Social theory, therefore, cannot be reduced to positivism, the analysis of policies, empirical facts, definitions, or abstract arguments. The consequence of this position is that it is the concept of society itself that cannot simply be posited as a given; rather, society is—because it is a totality—something to be reconstructed and can only be understood theoretically. As Marx puts it in the introduction to the Grundrisse, social dialectical philosophy proceeds by appropriating the concrete through reproducing that which is concrete (the whole) through a process of thought that starts with abstract categories. Social totality, accordingly, is non-identical. Indeed, production and consumption are not identical, as Marx underlines; rather they are moments of an organic whole (MEW42, 34) that we need to reconstruct. Consequently, the concrete is that which is not given.

We took the idea of a social-material schematism from Adorno and Horkheimer, who claimed that Hollywood has taken over that which Kant reserved for the human intellect. It was certainly not the goal of this book to destroy this insight; rather, I argued that it should be extended and “backed up” by a meta-theory, so to speak. Finally, then, we have now reached a position from which it is easier to see why Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s otherwise brilliant analysis of the culture industry remains far too undeveloped and is perhaps itself ideological inasmuch as it hides, rather than reveals, the relation between the culture industry and capital, the relation between exchange and money, as well as the system of production that brings about the ideological effects that Adorno and Horkheimer describe in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which has led to a vast reception of the book in the cultural sciences, media studies, and critical theory. Sadly, what has been forgotten most of the time is the analysis of the underlying social totality of which the culture industry is part, though Adorno and Horkheimer do indicate this framework once in their chapter:

The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven. All are in such close contact that the extreme concentration of mental forces allows demarcation lines between different firms and technical branches to be ignored. (Adorno, GS6, 144)

Accordingly, what is needed is a critique of the culture industry through the lens of a Marxian political economy. Thus, the schematizations that Adorno and Horkheimer have in mind should be subjected to that which underlies, frames, and regulates ideology, namely, capital as processing money.[1] As such, this book is hopefully also a contribution to an Adorno-inspired philosophy. As Jean-Marie Vincent has it: “In many respects, Adorno went further than Marx and detected the economism that persisted in Marx’s critique of economism. But he was unable to avoid several dead ends” (Vincent 2006, 501). One task of this book was the development of a rough sketch of how an Adornian-inspired Critical Theory can be reconnected to Marx by arguing that money is the real social-material schema that “filters” out everything that does not “fit” into capitalist totality and its temporal horizons.

Note

1.

To be fair, Adorno seems to realize the role of political economy in his later writings and lectures, as he focusses more and more on the effects of exchange, which is, for example, visible in the introduction to the 1964 lecture course on the philosophical elements of a theory of society.

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Index

A

abstract culture

and capacities, 1.1-1.2

and centralization of interests, 1.1-1.2

and refeudalization, 1.1-1.2

and measurement, 1

and monetization of intersubjectivity, 1.1-1.2

and monetization of legal contents, 1.1-1.2

See also abstraction

abstraction, 1 , 2

culture of, 1 , 2.1-2.2

real, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10

See also abstract culture

accumulation

primitive, 1.1-1.2 , 2

Adorno, Theodor W., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19

and ecological problems, 1

and Kant, 1.1-1.2 , 2

and Marx, 1 , 2

critique of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8

See also culture industry

affects, 1.1-1.2

anxiety, 1.1-1.2 , 2

coldness, 1.1-1.2

Affirmation 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Agamben, Giorgio, 1

Althusser, Louis, 1 , 2 , 3

Altvater, Elmar, 1 , 2

Arndt, Andreas, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Arthur, Chris, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

attention, 1

industries, 1

neuromarketing, 1

B

Backhaus, Hans-Georg, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Bellofiore, Riccardo, 1 , 2 , 3

Bensaid, Daniel, 1

Bifo, Franco Beradi, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Bowring, Finn, 1 , 2

Braun, Christina von, 1

C

Castells, Manuel, 1

Crouch, Colin, 1

D

Day, Richard, 1

debt, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

and control, 1.1-1.2 , 2

and distrust, 1.1-1.2

and morality, 1

See also temporality

Deleuze, Gilles, 1 , 2

death, 1

De-possession, 1.1-1.2

desire, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

dialectics

and categories, 1 , 2

and (organic) whole, 1 , 2 , 3

and totality, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Dienst, Richard, 1 , 2

E

Elbe, Ingo, 1 , 2 , 3

ecology, 1.1-1.2

Engster, Frank, 1

exchange, 1 , 2

and money, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4

and time/space, 1

F

Finelli, Roberto, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

form

and thinghood, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

social-material, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

See also money, as the (real) thing

Foster, Bellarmy, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Franck, Georg, 1

future See temporality

G

Ganssmann, Heiner, 1

general intellect, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2

and brain industries, 1.1-1.2

and electronic industries, 1.1-1.2

and industries in general, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2

and life science industries, 1.1-1.2

Gould, Carol C., 1

Graeber, David, 1 , 2

H

Habermas, Jürgen, 1

Haiven, Max, 1 , 2

Harraway, Donna, 1

Harvey, David, 1 , 2 , 3

Hardt, Michael, 1

Haug, Wolfgang Fritz, 1 , 2 , 3

Heidegger, Martin, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

and enframing, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

and Kant, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

See also time See also temporality

Hegel, G.W.F, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Heinrich, Michael, 1 , 2

Herr, Hansjörg, 1 , 2 , 3

Hörisch, Jochen, 1

Honneth, Axel, 1

Horvat, Srecko, 1

Huhn, Tom, 1

Hubert, Mirja, 1 , 2

Husserl, Edmund, 1

I

imagination. See schema

industries, 1.1-1.2

See also general intellect

individual

abstract, 1 , 2

collective, 1

external, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2

integration, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2

J

Jameson, Frederic, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

K

Kant

and critique of pure reason, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2

and thing(object)hood, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2

interpretation of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

See also Adorno See also Heidegger See also form See also schema

Karatani, Kojin, 1

Klimann, Andrew

critique of, 1 , 2

L

labor

abstract, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12

as labor power, 1 , 2

as substance, 1 , 2

concrete, 1

dead, 1 , 2

living, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

necessary, 1

surplus, 1

labor day. See time

labor power See labor

labor time See time

Laclau, Ernesto, 1

Langley, Paul, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Lapavitsas, Costas, 1

Lazzarato, Maurizio, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8

critique of, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3

Lebowitz, Michael, 1.1-1.2

limits [Schranken], 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2

See also life See also time

life, 1.1-1.2 , 2

Locke, John, 1

Lohmann, Georg, 1 , 2

Lukács, György, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Ludlow, Peter, 1

Lyotard, Jean-François, 1

M

machine fragment, 1

Mahmud, Tayyab, 1

Mahnkopf, Birgit, 1 , 2

Malabou, Catherine, 1 , 2 , 3

Marazzi, Cristian, 1 , 2 , 3

memory

production of, 1.1-1.2

See also money

metabolism, 1 , 2

money

and body, 1 , 2

and memory, 1.1-1.2

and schema, 1 , 2

and social existence, 1 , 2

and space, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4

and technology, 1.1-1.2

and time, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4

and valorization, 1 , 2

as alien force, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

as alienation of properties, 1 , 2

as equalization, 1 , 2

as individual self-interest, 1

as form, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10

as general equivalent, 1

as payment, 1

as processing (capital), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5

as real community, 1

as really existing (universal), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 , 10.1-10.2 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17

as social power, 1 , 2

as social relation, 1 , 2 , 3

as the (real) thing, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18

as value, 1

See also affects

Moulier-Boutang, Yann, 1 , 2 , 3

McNally, David, 1 , 2

Mouffe, Chantal, 1

Murray, Patrick, 1 , 2 , 3

N

Neckel, Sighard, 1

needs, 1

Negri, Antonio, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8

critique of, 1 , 2 , 3

Nuss, Sabine, 1

P

past. See temporality

Postone, Moische, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11

positivism

and capitalism, 1

Poulantzas, Nicos, 1 , 2

present. See temporality

Proudhon, 1

R

Raulet, Gerard, 1

Ranciere, Jacques, 1

refeudalization See abstract culture

Reichelt, Helmut, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Reitter, Karl, 1 , 2

Rosa, Hartmut, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1.1-1.2

Rubin, Isaak, 1

S

Sassen, Saskia, 1

schema, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

general, 1

and imagination, 1 , 2.1-2.2

and schematism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

and schematization of reality, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8

psychological effects of, 1

social-material, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9

See also general intellect See also money

schematism See schema

Simmel, Georg, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Smith, Tony, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10

Smithin, John, 1 , 2

social horizon. See temporality

social schema See schema

society

as collective, 1

as external, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10

as object of economic theory, 1

Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 1 , 2 , 3

space See money

state, 1

Stiegler, Bernard, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22

Suarez-Villa, Luis, 1

subsumption, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

subjectivation, 1

T

technology See money

temporality, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

in Heidegger, 1 , 2.1-2.2

of future, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7

of past, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2

of present, 1 , 2.1-2.2

of social horizon, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

of time (temporalization), 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3

through debt, 1

Terranova, Tiziana, 1

time

and social horizon, 1

depersonalized, 1

disposable, 1.1-1.2

labor, 1

labor day, 1

of circulation, 1.1-1.2

of consumption, 1

of production, 1.1-1.2

See also money See also temporality

Tomba, Massimiliano, 1 , 2 , 3

Toscano, Alberto, 1 , 2 , 3

totality See dialectics

U

use value fetishism

in Adorno, 1

V

value, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

and abstract labor, 1

and wealth, 1.1-1.2 , 2

as exchangeability, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3

as equalization, 1 , 2

as social form, 1.1-1.2

exchange, 1.1-1.2 , 2

reality of, 1

See also money, and valorization See also schema

violence

and money, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Vincent, Jean-Marie, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Virno, Paolo, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

critique of, 1 , 2 , 3

W

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1 , 2

wealth See value

Wortham, Simon Morgan, 1 , 2

Ž

Žižek, Slavoj, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9

About the Author

Christian Lotz is associate professor of philosophy at Michigan State University; he has widely published in Continental Philosophy, including books and co-edited volumes ranging from Husserlian Phenomenology to Critical Theory; his main areas are in Post-Kantian European philosophy, especially Phenomenology, Critical Theory, Marxism, Cultural Theory, and Aesthetics.