Capital Rules Everything Around Me
“Xenoeconomics” is a tremendous coinage, if only for placing xenos and oikos in such proximity: identifying capitalism as the stranger at the hearth, the secret sharer of human agency. It suggests that we should have the courage of our fantasy – that “the economy” is something apart from human social relations, something “out there” that alternately pampers and menaces us – and begin to regard “social relations” as a folk-economic miscognition of capital’s inhuman effectivity in much the same way as Thomas Metzinger regards human selfhood as the “user illusion” of anonymous neurobiological mechanisms.
In my view, xenoeconomics entails seeing capital as an effect not of human consciousness but of the parallel operation of vast numbers of instances of the information processing wetware of which human consciousness is itself an effect. In other words, it’s a question of levels: capital doesn’t exist by virtue of our beliefs (although our miscognition, and the subjectivation and social bond it gives rise to, is a necessary element of its functioning) but of our behaviour. This is not an un-Marxian observation to be making, of course; the real argument to be had, it seem to me, is over Marx’s sense of this “behaviour” as “historical praxis” governed by (recognised or misrecognised, conscious or unconscious) class interests. The inhumanism SplinteringBoneAshes gestures towards requires, at the minimum, an eliminationist revisioning of the Marxist vocabulary of consciousness and praxis, interest and conflict.
October 29th, 2008 at 4:52 am
The major problem with the term is that the Gothic appeal has entirely too long a history: consult the work of the group around the journal *Der Stuermer* for backstory to the term “alien capital”. Seriously. Otherwise, some damfool said five years ago “I would argue that the distinguishing characteristic of late capitalism is the introduction of nonhuman “electors” (that is to say, independent mechanisms, from homeostats to limited-liability corporations, regulating the rhythms of human life). This makes for the possibility of the a social order where from the standpoint of every living human being the social order is imposed in the strict sense.”
That was probably kind of wishful, and I’m not sure the economic consequences of the Ain’t-Nobody-Home model of self-consciousness is sufficient to account for the classic “order of thought/order of reality” dichotomy, but it is certainly possible to attempt to think the discourse of capital as “directly referential”, i.e. not cognitively mediated but brutely present in our thought. In other words, perhaps in a way all uses of tools are blows to the head which are not quite “pure pain” but excruciating learning processes eventuating either in the fabled “microdiscipline” or revolutionary change.
October 29th, 2008 at 7:28 am
That’s the most oblique Godwinning I’ve seen in a while…
October 29th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Oh, I meant it as a bit of fun, but if the Internet is going to be the size of humanity’s hopes and dreams surely there’s room for a bit of Antifa, no? Seriously, there was quite a controversy recently over IG Metall’s calling venture capitalists *Die Aussauger* so I’m not sure the world is ready.
October 29th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
OMG! – Goldman! – Sachs! – how did I not see…?
I admit I get fucking irritated by being accused of crypto-fascism by some of chabert’s dozier hangers-on. Speculative materialism is not about securing a future for white children.
October 29th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I dunno, if Goldmans and Sachses can see themselves there may be a bit more of a problem than meets the eye: but, well, when it comes down to it *Antifa* is a bit of fun itself and I stand by the US Gov’t position of bending over backwards for fascist regimes and their “exports”. Seriously, though, if xenoeconomics is about Aliens that Speak English to Us in Our Dreams and not about “the Real” and its effects on circulation I think that’s a bridge too far.
October 29th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
However, if we want capital to not be an unmediated impact on our thoughts (to have a “singular sense”, rather) we might consider Luhmann’s interpretation of money as a “symbolically generalized communications medium” which interfaces with psychic systems because it is ‘meaningful’ but does not fundamentally consist of thoughts in people’s heads at all, but instead the ‘paper trail’ of transactions, the existing economic order that falls out from those transactions, and the ’steering’ possibilities instruments of credit offer against that backdrop. Perhaps it is a matter of ‘tendency’, where credit derivatives etc. offer possibilities of technical control over the masses which are ‘trending’ away from the ends of man and towards grotty low-level effects: “Battling Seizure Hedge Funds”, so to speak.
October 29th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I think the task of theory here is to carry on up the cyber, to be sure.
October 30th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
happy birthday