Xenoeconomics and Capital Unbound - Alex Williams

A question remains open as to the current state of play with the unfolding trans-global financial deleveraging and subsequent mass-governmental bank buyout: Is this a genuinely unprecedented situation or simply the latest facet of business-as-usual, a crisis in the system, or merely a crisis of the system? The pessimism of the intellect suggests the latter, another arresting of the genuinely alien development of the capital-virus, in favour of the maintaining of a stable form. The optimism of the will though suggests that there might be the basis in the opprobrium that finance capital is now attracting (low level intensity but extremely broad in terms of numbers) for some kind of new proletarian leftist movement. BUT, and crucially, it is difficult to identify either a new and energised ideological/political-philosophical position or any kind of institutional framework (party, movement, mass, guerrilla attack group etc) with which to focus this negativity. There are certainly some limited Socialist Worker/Stop the War associated protests, but these lack both scale and the energy of new ideas. All that is on offer there is warmed over leftism/anticapitalism, without the energy of anywhere but back to go (essentially a conservative-radicalism perhaps). In the bending of all history against that impassable perimeter of the Postmodern terminus even radical leftism is fundamentally a mere shuffling of a pre-existing deck of possibilities, hopeless, haunted, an echo, homeless, nostalgic. It must be feared that for as long as it is thus the left remains incapable of defeating the status quo, or achieving much beyond the establishment of briefly extant semi-autonomous zones, all-too rapidly snuffed out.

Perhaps what this crash offers however is a chink in the armour of late capital, a Badiouian event, evading the usual in-situational structural determinations. In a sense Badiou would not recognise (economic) it really does give an opportunity (as did the crash of 1929) to recalibrate both the state-market relation and the type of economic theory deployed by governments. But this will be merely to retrench, to stabilise, to maintain the present system, in a new form, by whatever means necessary and available. Politically it is less clear, for in order that the potential this event offers to be fully exploited, we need a politics capable of fully evading even the kind of generic humanism Badiou's politics (for example) proffers. For the impasse of the end of history can only be properly surmounted by a final nihilistic overcoming of humanism-- in a sense even Badiou fails this test, his minimal-communist humanism not going far enough. What perhaps this might entail is a rethinking of a revolutionary position, built on the basis of a rethinking of the very notion of value itself.

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In Speculative Realist terms, what is necessary is to think the in-itself of capitalism outside of any correlation to the human. Ray Brassier has already hinted at this in his original Nihil Unbound article on Badiou, Deleuze & Guattari and Capitalism. For surely what all analyses of capitalism have presumed to date is the capitalist for-us (construed in positive or negative terms), whereas capital is ultimately a machine which has almost no relation to humanity whatsoever, it intersects with us, it has us as moving parts, but it ultimately is not of or for-us. Capital properly thought is a vast inhuman form, a genuinely alien life form (in that it is entirely non-organic) of which we know all-too-little. A new investigation of this form must proceed precisely as an anti-anthropomorphic cartography, a study in alien finance, a Xenoeconomics. Brassier himself has shied away in the last few years from a detailed discussion of capitalism, but I believe that the most interesting applications of speculative realist philosophy may well arrive with precisely a re-reading of both Marxs and Deleuze & Guattaris models of capitalism. Marxs labour theory of value fails to think the capitalist in-itself, the ability to create value ex nihilo (ie- credit, and all financial instruments constructed from variations on this theme). For Marx credit, virtual capital and speculation built upon it is the highest form of madness. Instead we ought to think of credit-based virtual capital as the highest form of capital. This is not a mere semantic shift, but rather a revolutionary inversion of the LTV, following Deleuze & Guattari in considering capitalism-as-process, conducted upon pre-existing social forms, disassembling and reassembling them to suit its own nefarious and presently obscure ends. As process rather than concrete thing we must consider its true nature to be contained in its destination, rather than the primitive building blocks from which it originally constituted itself (ie- in the worlds of virtual capital rather than the alienation of human labour, which is surely merely an initial staging post).

Part of what is at stake here is the thinking of capitalism outside of alienation. For if we are to follow Badious stab at an unmitigated inhumanism, a total leap beyond the suffering animal model of godless democratic-materialist bio-linguistic humanism, as surely we must, then a theory of value cannot be predicated upon this original suffering, the voodoo process of soul-theft at the core of the alienation of labour in the commodity form. To build a model of capitalism from a new theory of value is necessary if we are to evade the traps of both democratic materialist commensically corrupt liberalism, and the post modern end of history. The blind acephelous polymorph that is capital must be embraced, but not from the point of view of some nave enthusiasm or sentiment of hope that markets can deliver utopia. Instead, as the way out of the binaries of a leftism which is utterly and irretrievably moribund, and a neo-liberal economics which is ideologically bankrupt, we must bend both together in the face of an inhuman and indefatigable capitalism, to think how we might inculcate a new form of radically inhuman subjectivation. This entails the retrieval of the communist project for a new man, AND the liberation of the neo-liberal quest for a capitalism unbound, from both its subterranean dependence upon the state and the skeletal humanist discursive a priori which animates its ideological forms.

In thinking how to deliver this subjectivation, an unbinding towards the absolute, an absolute adequation of post-human subjectivity to capital, the crucial concept must be that of institutionalisation- agglomerative masses of power (including states, corporations, NGOs, religions, discrete humans) all of which need to be dissolved. In a sense this is a continuation and merging of both Marxist-Leninist Communism and Neo-liberal capitalism, but where there is no need to take over the state, but rather to utilise capitalism as an engine with which to obliterate nation states. However, to merely do this would be entirely insufficient, as the state function within capitalism would simply be taken over by institutional figures such as corporations, which must therefore also be dissolved. But this is merely to think at the scale of large institutional actors, we must also continue this drive

towards dissolution, (to be powered by the pure force of a nihilistic capitalism-unbound) towards what Foucault termed, in a Nietzschean manner in The Order of Things, man (clarified by Deleuze as the man-form the kind of self-conception dependant upon the foldings of the analytic of finitude). The question also needs to be asked of how to recalibrate this alien lifeform towards forms of dissolution which do not immediately restructure with conservative/familial types of subjectivation. Our contention (following Deleuze) is that this is intrinsically bound up with the metabolic rate of capitalism, currently constrained by its symbiotic relationship to the state, which maintains the expansion of capital within a homeostatic formula sufficient to prevent its most destructive potentials from being actualised. What is necessary (breaking with Deleuze) is to utilise the stuctures of capitalism against the state, in an entirely terroristic fashion, so as to transform the very nature of the nightmarish Lovecraftian creature itself. Finally, we might consider that the maxim of the politics which results from such xenoeconomical analyses to run as follows: "capitalism against the human".